A Race of Singers: Whitman's Working-Class Hero from Guthrie to Springsteen (review)

Bryan Garman traces the cultural links of white, working-class, leftist heroes who claim they operate from the tradition of Whitman’s hero to show “how the politics of this tradition and of class in general are inextricably enmeshed in constructions of race, gender, and particularly sexuality” (3). Garman delineates Whitman’s concept of the hero and indicates how the twentieth century appropriates that legacy.

Whitman’s socialist friend Horace Traubel, who recorded years of conversations with Whitman in his multivolume With Walt Whitman in Camden, connects Whitman to the Socialist tradition of Eugene Debs and his twentieth-century Socialist Party. The Oklahoma folksinger Woody Guthrie embodies this working-class heroism, tying it to labor unions and the Communist Party. Within this “Race of Singers,” Guthrie takes Whitman’s place as the “heroic spiritual grandfather” of a new generation of radicals that includes Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, and Bruce Springsteen.

Nineteenth-century skilled workers and artisans organized craft guilds and labor unions to protect themselves against the competition of unskilled immigrant labor. Before psychologists identified and characterized homosexuality as a pathology at the beginning of the twentieth century, these skilled workers and artisans created a “largely homosocial, if not homoerotic, leisure culture” (21). Twentieth-century homophobia, explains Garman, forced Whitman’s followers to redefine his adhesiveness not in terms of its homoeroticism but in terms of its cooperativeness and the equity of individuals, whether male or female. Whitman himself only characterizes women as mothers and lovers—he never argues for gender equality. The Communist Party later regarded heterosexuality as a distraction from the class struggle, but it identified homosexuality with class decadence and expelled homosexuals. In reconstructing this social history, Garman also classifies the various political agendas of twentieth-century Whitman biographers, as each sought to promulgate their own identity politics in the identities they constructed for Whitman in their biographies.

Garman demonstrates that Bob Dylan creates himself in Whitman’s working-class hero tradition from his reading of Woody Guthrie’s Bound for Glory. Dylan has no working-class roots, he never was a worker, and he steps out of such a role after his break with Joan Baez. Bruce Springsteen, however, does have working-class roots in Whitman’s own New Jersey. While Springsteen, Garman argues, initially presents himself as a sex symbol, many regard his masculinity as heterosexual, never homosexual—although it often is the latter. When President Reagan identified Springsteen’s politics with his own conservative agenda, Springsteen recast himself in the role of a working-class hero more clearly than he ever had since his success as a rock star and sex symbol propelled him into the upper class. In the tradition of Whitman, Springsteen remarks: “[A]lthough the tenets on which the Republic were founded were unarguably virtuous, a moral crisis had caused things to go terribly awry” (198). Garman’s implication is that the rock ‘n’ roll of the working-class, hero singer has the potential to save us all.