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WALT WHITMAN and the WOBBLIES a Thesis ONE BIG UNION: WALT WHITMAN AND THE WOBBLIES A Thesis Presented to the faculty of the Department of English California State University, Sacramento Submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS in English (Literature) by Elizabeth Ann Ketelle FALL 2015 © 2015 Elizabeth Ann Ketelle ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ONE BIG UNION: WALT WHITMAN AND THE WOBBLIES A Thesis by Elizabeth Ann Ketelle Approved by: __________________________________, Committee Chair Nancy Sweet __________________________________, Second Reader Susan Wanlass ____________________________ Date iii Student: Elizabeth Ann Ketelle I certify that this student has met the requirements for format contained in the University format manual, and that this thesis is suitable for shelving in the Library and credit is to be awarded for the thesis. __________________________, Graduate Coordinator ___________________ David Toise Date Department of English iv Abstract of ONE BIG UNION: WALT WHITMAN AND THE WOBBLIES by Elizabeth Ann Ketelle In a dynamic interplay with the discourses of socialism, anarchism, humanism, and freethought in early twentieth century America, Walt Whitman’s texts helped to shape those forces while the texts themselves were re-shaped in the discourse. Chapter 1 discusses the process by which the British socialists appropriated Whitman’s poetry as their own. Chapter 2 traces the influence of Whitman’s literary executor, Horace Traubel, who shaped Whitman’s legacy as an American socialist. Chapter 3 explores how leaders of the radical left adapted Whitman’s memes to their own purposes, discussing Robert Ingersoll’s freethinker memes, Clarence Darrow’s humanist memes, Emma Goldman’s anarchist memes, and Eugene V. Debs’ Christian socialist memes. Chapter 4 offers an extensive analysis of Whitman’s memes in the rhetoric and propaganda of the Industrial Workers of the World (the Wobblies). Using cultural criticism and reader response theory, the thesis argues for a new reading of Whitman’s poetry that reflects its appeal to the radical left. _______________________, Committee Chair Nancy Sweet _______________________ Date v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Many thanks to Nancy Sweet for her kindness, intelligence, and invaluable advice. And eternal gratitude and love to my husband David for his patience, support, and encouragement. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Acknowledgements…………………………………………………………………………. vi Chapter 1. THE BRITISH SOCIALISTS… ……………………………………………………….. 1 2. HORACE TRAUBEL AND HIS “HOT LITTLE PROPHETS” .................................... 14 3. THE WHITMAN MEMES ................................................................................................ 27 Robert Ingersoll: The Freethinker Memes………………………………………… 32 Clarence Darrow: The Humanist Memes…………………………………………. 37 Emma Goldman: The Anarchist Memes……………………………………… ….. 42 Eugene V. Debs: The Christian Socialist Memes…………………………………. 48 4. WHITMAN AND THE WOBBLIES ............................................................................... 55 5. WHITMAN AND RADICALISM ................................................................................... 86 Notes……………… ............................................................................................................... 95 Works Cited ............................................................................................................................ 99 vii 1 Chapter 1 The British Socialists The route by which Walt Whitman, celebrant of American democracy, became the enthusiastically proclaimed champion of socialist causes was a circuitous one. Whitman’s working class background gave him what David Reynolds terms “the heritage of artisan labor and the unified stem family” (Walt 308), a vision that he was loath to betray in the face of industrialism as the American economy changed radically during the nineteenth century. Like others of his time, Whitman was troubled by the changing role of the individual in an increasingly de-personalized, mechanized society. Over the course of the early nineteenth century, Americans’ faith in the laissez-faire economy and limited government was shaken by government corruption and business abuses of labor. According to The Companion to American Thought, “Industrialism ultimately forced Americans to consider how the institutions, values, and ways of life of an agricultural society could be harmonized” with urbanism (“Industrialism”). All of these questions had implications for the nature of American liberal democracy, defined by Kenneth Cmiel as popular sovereignty checked by the rule of law (208). Cmiel points out that Whitman maintained “a balancing act on the razor’s edge of liberal democracy” (207), espousing a form of republicanism in which artisan labor – a group, according to Bryan Garman, that consisted of “skilled, white workingmen” (Race 8) – “held their manly independence sacred but recognized that if they were to maintain … a state of equality, they must sometimes subordinate their own interests to those of the community” (Race 19). Thus Whitman was able to define America, as Mila Tupper Maynard wrote in 1903, as “the embodiment of sacred mass made up of sacred, vital 2 units” (114). For his entire life, Whitman strove to maintain this democratic balance between the necessity of the group and the liberty of the individual. Reynolds points out Whitman’s mid-nineteenth century devotion “to nature, to the past, to artisan labor, and to the construction of an ideal nation” (Walt 359) – a construct that left little room for a Marxist gloss on economics. Defining the term “socialism” in 1902, Leonard Abbott states that it “proposes the public ownership and administration of the means of life in the world,” asserting that socialism “is simply the democratic thought carried into the field of industry” (180). Abbott posits, as did socialists generally, that socialism was the product of “industrial evolution” (180) that would end, as M.V. Ball stated in 1898, with “the great army of the dispossessed… assum[ing] ownership” of the means of production and “operat[ing] them for the general good” (161). As American socialist Newton Arvin asserts in his 1938 study of Whitman, “If in his ‘politics’ he remained for the most part an old-fashioned individualist, in his freer thought – and in his work – he moved well beyond” his old- fashioned paradigm of artisanal republicanism (268). It was in his display of “freer thought” that Whitman had great appeal to the anti-monarchy, socialist sentiment fomenting in Europe during his lifetime.1 American socialist Eugene V. Debs points out in 1908 that socialism is “a continuation of the old fight against monarchy and in favor of democracy, which was begun in 1776 and which has since been growing into an enlarged world-demand” (“Socialist” 1). Historian B.O. Flower, writing in 1914, expresses a common vision with which Whitman was in complete accord – the nineteenth century as a “great revolutionary epoch, culminating in the advent of 3 democracy…[that] seemed to inaugurate an era dominated by freedom, fraternity, and justice” (37). As Michael Robertson points out in Worshipping Walt: The Whitman Disciples, “Middle class socialists’ eagerness for nonviolent democratic alternatives to the current brutalities of capitalist repression and the potential violence of Marxist revolution” explains why Whitman was so appealing to them (263). Thus, a shared concept of the evolution of a perfect social system blurred the line between Whitman’s democratic vision and the “industrial evolution” of socialism. In the late nineteenth century, Whitman’s poetry, with its “violently subversive kind of language” (Reynolds, Walt 321), espousal of comradeship across class lines, and advocacy of utopian democracy, caught the attention of the British Ethical Socialists,2 a movement that Mark Bevir explains “typically defined socialism in terms of an inner spirituality and a sense of brotherhood, more than a set of economic relationships or institutional arrangements,” leading its members to “insist… on the importance of an inner change as a prerequisite for the realisation of socialism” (52). Ethical Socialists, who believed that “the sense of brotherhood is itself the central feature of socialism” (Bevir 52), would have been especially attracted to the way that, in Arvin’s assessment, Leaves of Grass “abounds in the imagery of participation, how robust it is in its evocations of common work, common play, of common struggles, of common aspirations” (279). Aware of both Whitman’s celebration of the individual and his “conception of free and wholesome communality” (Arvin 279), British Ethical Socialists took up his banner. Kirsten Harris shows that as “Whitman’s democratic vision was removed from its American context and reconstructed so that it was 4 applicable to Britain and the socialist cause,” democracy and socialism became synonymous (115). In his book The Selfish Gene, scientist Richard Dawkins has posited the concept of the “meme” – “a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation” which “propagate[s] [itself] in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain” (192). Geneticist Jacques Monod proposes that like genes, ideas can “fuse, recombine, segregate their content, [and] evolve” (qtd. in Gleick). Writing in Smithsonian Magazine, James Gleick notes that memes can take the form of ideas, tunes, catchphrases, and images, and that rhyme and rhythm are especially helpful in ingraining memes into human consciousness. Whitman’s poetic interpretation of democracy
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