O Bureaucrat!

This spring, a group known as Washington Friends of Walt Whitman announced a citywide festival celebrating the 150th anniversary of the publication of the first edition of the poet's masterpiece, Leaves of Grass. The D.C. setting is appropriate for such a celebration, the group noted, because Whitman lived and worked in Washington from 1863 to 1873, producing, among other works, his elegies to Abraham Lincoln, "O Captain! My Captain!" and "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd."

Those works were presumably produced largely on his lunch hours or in the evening. Because during the day, Whitman was a bureaucrat. And therein lies a tale worth contemplating in this era, when the very form and function of the civil service is up for intense debate.

Whitman arrived in Washington during the Civil War, searching for his brother, who had been slightly wounded in battle. His quest ultimately took him to Fredericksburg, Va., according to a biography of the poet published by the online Walt Whitman Archive. By the time Whitman returned to Washington, his federal service had begun, albeit on a volunteer basis: He was put in charge of transporting a trainload of wounded soldiers to Washington-area hospitals. (There were many such facilities; several federal buildings, including the headquarters of the Patent Office, were temporarily converted into hospitals during the Civil War.)

Whitman's work with the wounded became a vocation he would follow until the war was over. He comforted soldiers, wrote letters home for them, and bought them books, tobacco and candy. But to support his volunteer work, Whitman needed a job. Then, as now, the federal government provided an opportunity for steady work. And luckily for Whitman, the civil service as we know it today had yet to come into existence-the Pendleton Act, which laid its foundations, was still two decades away. So the process of getting a federal job was less about what you knew than who you knew.

Whitman pulled every string he could to land a federal job: He got letters of introduction to top Washington officials from Ralph Waldo Emerson, and then, with the help of Charles Eldridge, who had published the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass, landed a position as a part-time copyist in the Army Paymaster's Office. The job provided him ample time to continue his hospital work, but little in the way of pay.

So Whitman continued to work his connections to get a better position. By the beginning of 1865, his efforts paid off when his friend William Douglas O'Connor, then a clerk at the Treasury Department, helped him land a full-time clerkship at the Interior Department's Bureau of Indian Affairs.

The benefits of Whitman's federal jobs went far beyond the paycheck. His burst of creativity during the war was largely a result of his government service. Not only was he inspired by his day-to-day contact with wounded soldiers, he came into contact with diverse groups of people-from the newly formed regiments of black troops to whom he delivered paychecks to the delegations of tribes visiting Indian Affairs-who figured into his later work.

Soon, though, Whitman would experience the downside of the 19th century federal employment system. In 1865, incoming Interior Secretary James Harlan issued a sweeping order to eliminate nonessential positions at the department and to fire employees deemed to be lacking in "moral character." When Harlan saw a working copy of the controversial Leaves of Grass on Whitman's desk, the poet was summarily dismissed.

Despite Harlan's efforts to blackball him from employment at any federal agency, Whitman quickly used his connections again to land a job in the office of Attorney General James Speed. He worked there until suffering a stroke in 1873.

The lessons of Whitman's experience are mixed. He was, after all, both a beneficiary and a victim of a system with precious few rules and regulations.

In today's government, his work as a teacher, journalist and poet would hardly have qualified him for the positions he landed. Still, if he did manage to get a federal job, he would've had some protection against arbitrarily being fired.

Cases like Whitman's are why we have a civil service system today-encrusted though it may be with decades' worth of regulatory complexity. Maintaining its merit principles, while providing agencies more freedom to hire, fire, promote and demote employees, will be far from an easy task.