Who Will Defend Feds? How About Walt Whitman?

Several years ago, I wrote a column about Walt Whitman's work as a federal employee during and after the Civil War. He served as a part-time copyist in the Army Paymaster's Office, a full-time clerk at the Interior Department's Bureau of Indian Affairs (where he was fired for lacking "moral character" after officials saw a copy of Leaves of Grass on his desk), and later in the office of Attorney General James Speed.

Now comes word (via Michael Ruane at the Washington Post) that Kenneth Price, a Whitman expert at the University of Nebraska, has uncovered thousands of documents at the National Archives in the poet's handwriting.

While Whitman didn't write many of the documents (his job was to serve as a copyist, transcribing official papers), Price says they do shed light on Whitman's literary work -- and also on his attitude toward the federal government and the people who work in it. As the Post's Ruane reports:

Some scholars have suggested that Whitman was a lazy federal worker who "sauntered in to work when he wanted to, put in a few hours and then left when he felt like it," Price said.

On the contrary, he said: Whitman "worked steadily and produced a prodigious amount of material." He said Whitman's superiors valued the clarity of his handwriting and his intellect and often used him as more than just a clerk.

"Honesty is the prevailing atmosphere," Whitman, in previously discovered documents, said of his colleagues in the bureaucracy.

"I do not refer to swell officials, the men who wear the decorations, get fat salaries," he said. "I refer to the average clerks, the obscure crowd, who, after all, run the government. They are on the square."