Walt Whitman's Election Day Curriculum Guide for Teachers
Updated: Sep 11, 2020
The Walt Whitman Election Day Curriculum Guide for Teachers is a study guide written by Peter Conn, Professor Emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania; Deborah Burnham and Lorene Cary of the University of Pennsylvania; Erik Petersons of the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society; and Beth Feldman Brandt of the Bartol Foundation. The guide offers a lesson plan and resources for teaching Whitman's "Election Day: November, 1884" in the context of the importance of voter registration and civic participation.
Please note, while the guide has not been aligned with PA Education Department Standards, we invite Philadelphia educators to use it as a template for their teachings, and to edit and improve upon it.
You can read a copy of “Election Day: November, 1884" here.
Discussion questions and writing Prompts:
Whitman’s Election Day—and Ours
The partners of the program hope that youth will write poems in response to Whitman, or in dialogue with his Election Day poem, post them on their social media, and tag #VoteThatJawn. That way we can post and share them, too. And please check out the September 17th event, hosted by the Kelly Writers House, featuring Philadelphia Youth Poets Laureate responding, just as you will do, to a poem about another complicated American election.
Some of the following Questions for Discussion can also be used as prompts for writing. That’s because a poem that explores your own mind and heart at work on an idea or feeling can invite your reader to do the same. Whitman’s free verse and personal voice surprised and often offended his more formal contemporaries—and influenced American poets who came after him.
As Whitman has done, please focus on the election itself, the right to vote—its history and present, your experience, participation, or thoughts and feelings about voting—not candidates. As a non-partisan organization, we will not re-post poems endorsing specific candidates or parties.
Words, lines, syllables…
Using Whitman's poem, find words that stand out to you. Make a list of them and try to see a common theme or story. From these words, you’ll create a found poem. This may be all the instruction some students will need. Some might prefer to share their list with a partner and let someone else say whether this collection of words speaks to them, thematically, or in some partial bit of a story. Then write a poem using those words. Want to learn more? Here’s more instruction from FacingHistory.org.
Kwansaba poetry is a form that former Philadelphia Poet Laureate Yolanda Wisher uses with students—and for herself. It’s a uniquely African-American poetry form of praise, associated with Kwanzaa. Seven lines. Seven words per line. No word with more than seven letters. Write your own praise poem to elections, voting, the Voting Rights Act, the people who worked to get it passed.
Livestream your mind! Pick from Whitman’s poem a short phrase that captures your attention. Write for five minutes about all the things this makes you think of. Then, use these ideas to create a poem, free verse or specific form, such as haiku.
Images and Metaphors
If you wrote a poem about people voting all over Philadelphia, you probably wouldn’t write about mountains and geysers. What would you write about instead?
The poem ends with these two lines:
"These stormy gusts and winds waft precious ships,
"Swell'd Washington's, Jefferson's, Lincoln's sails."
Why do you think Whitman chose to end the poem with a seafaring image?
Whitman and American Politics
In the Preface to his great volume of poetry, Leaves of Grass (1855), Walt Whitman wrote:
“The genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges or churches or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors … but always most in the common people.”
“Election Day, November, 1884” was written in the midst of what Mark Twain called the Gilded Age: the decades following the Civil War. These were years of unprecedented graft, public scandal, private fraud, of the Ku Klux Klan, and the Tweed Ring, of the systematic oppression of African Americans in both the North and the South. “The present era of incredible rottenness,” Twain wrote, “is not Democratic, it is not Republican, it is national.”
In his book Democratic Vistas (1871), Whitman was vehement in attacking the rampant betrayal of decency and the common good. “Never was there, perhaps, more hollowness at heart than at present, and here in the United States. Genuine belief seems to have left us.”
In short, though he has often been presented to readers as “The Good Grey Poet,” benevolent and cheerful, he was fully aware of the evils that infected the politics of post-war America, and he savagely assailed them. This awareness can be inferred from “Election Day,” where the emphasis is on the act of choosing, not the chosen.
If I should need to name, O Western World, your powerfulest scene and show,
[...]
I'd name—the still small voice vibrating—America's choosing day,
(The heart of it not in the chosen—the act itself the main, the quadriennial choosing)
**********
Former U.S. poet laureate and professor of creative writing at Boston University Robert Pinsky’s commentary and reading of the poem are both valuable.
United States Presidential Election of 1884
In the American presidential election held on Nov. 4, 1884, Democrat Grover Cleveland defeated Republican James G. Blaine. The election was marked by bitter mudslinging and scandalous accusations that overshadowed substantive issues such as civil service reform. Cleveland won New York, his home state, by just 1,100 votes out of more than one million cast.
Results of the American presidential election, 1884
Sources: Electoral and popular vote totals based on data from the United States Office of the Federal Register and Congressional Quarterly's Guide to U.S. Elections, 4th ed. (2001). Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Should Walt Whitman Be #Canceled?
Black America talks back to "The Good Gray Poet" at 200.
In 2013, Timothy McNair, a black, gay graduate student in music at Northwestern University, refused to perform Howard Hanson’s “Song of Democracy,” a musical piece with lyrics derived from Walt Whitman’s legendary poetry collection Leaves of Grass. In his writing beyond Leaves of Grass, McNair discovered racist comments in which Whitman refers to black people as “baboons” and “wild brutes” and questions their inclusion in the American body politic. As McNair said then, “I’m so tired of being forced to promote the myth of white supremacy by performing works by old white men like Whitman who said blacks were stupid, shouldn’t be allowed to vote, and didn’t have a place in the future of America.” The performance of “Song of Democracy” was part of a course requirement and McNair’s professor gave him a failing grade, jeopardizing his graduation. (He did eventually graduate after the controversy blew over.)
The charge of racism was particularly fraught because it was levied against Walt Whitman, the poet who in Leaves of Grass sang of American democracy as a project of radical inclusion, the poet who wrote about tending to the runaway slave, the poet who looked upon the enslaved person on the auction block and saw in them their generations of descendants, the poet who declared that the enslaved were the equal of those who enslaved them.
Shortly after the McNair controversy, poet CAConrad wrote “From Whitman to Walmart,” an essay dedicated to McNair that explains how much Whitman meant to them as a white working-class queer poet, and how Whitman’s racist comments forced them to reconsider, and reject, that admiration.
As for the substance of Whitman’s racism, George Hutchinson and David Drews, in an essay on Whitman’s “Racial Attitudes” reprinted at The Walt Whitman Archive, provide a helpful examination of Whitman’s thoughts on race later in his life. Like many white intellectuals, Whitman seems to have been seduced by the proliferation of racist pseudo-science in the post-Civil War era, a body of thought largely produced in reaction to black emancipation and the prospects of black citizenship rights as voters and office-holders. Whitman’s racism was not limited to black people, but also extended to Native Americans, Hispanics, and Asians. These comments force us to reconsider all those lovely passages in Leaves of Grass where Whitman the poet celebrates the “aboriginal” heritage of America. Whitman, the man, actually hoped that white Americans would absorb the naturalistic traits of Native Americans, but discard the actual people, much in the same way that contemporary sports fans now cling to their Native American mascots while dismissing living Native Americans who have repeatedly told them how these degrading, offensive caricatures contribute to ongoing Native oppression and disenfranchisement.
So, what do we do with old Uncle Walt now? May 31, 2019, marks the 200th anniversary of his birth and there will be numerous conferences, exhibits, readings, and celebrations of the poet and his work. I submit that this is not a moment for uncritical celebration of the Poet of Democracy. But there is no better place to look for nuanced critical engagement with Whitman’s complicated legacy than in the work of black intellectuals who have talked back to Whitman. As Whitman scholar Ed Folsom writes, “the temptation to talk back to Walt Whitman has always been great, and poets over the years have made something of a tradition of it. There’s nothing quite like it anywhere else in English or American poetry—a sustained tradition, a century old, of directly invoking or addressing another poet.” And in that tradition of talking back to Whitman one finds names like Langston Hughes, June Jordan, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Natasha Trethewey.
The recent volume Whitman Noir: Black America and the Good Gray Poet (2014) is an important collection of thinking about Whitman and race that shows an ongoing engagement with Whitman by black intellectuals, and a recognition of the limits of his vision of democracy. Christopher Freeburg writes in Whitman Noir, “whether Whitman was an actual racist, ignored racial difference, or thought carefully about racial politics while revising his work, it is important to think broadly about how racial difference figures in Whitman’s notion of US postbellum progress.” An earlier piece of criticism cited in Whitman Noir that shows just how long scholars (of various backgrounds) have been wrestling with Whitman and race, is an insightful 1946 essay by Charles Glicksberg from the W.E.B. Du Bois-founded journal Phylon. Glicksberg sharply confronts Whitman by saying that:
Whitman the humanitarian was so drunk with the vision of limitless progress and faith in the perfectibility [sic] of man (the Negro was not specifically included in his calculations), that the Negro problem did not loom large; it was not a matter over which he could afford to become a fanatic like [John Greenleaf] Whittier. Hence he failed to see that it was precisely the Negro who symbolized in the nineteenth century, as he symbolizes today, the essential promise of democracy.
Glicksberg nails Whitman for being the corny and maudlin celebrant that he could be, and argues that his poetry’s Panglossian all-to-the-good attitude was inadequate in the face of violent anti-blackness.
One of the standouts in Whitman Noir is a re-published 1980 essay by June Jordan, “For the Sake of People’s Poetry: Walt Whitman and the Rest of Us.” Jordan’s essay is particularly worth revisiting in this bicentennial moment, precisely because she reminds us of Whitman’s own tenuous relationship to the American canon by calling attention to Whitman’s outsider status, as queer, working class, uneducated, as a renegade writer who rejected traditional poetic forms. She reminds us that the respectable men of letters in his own time found his work insufficiently literary, obscene, and perverse, and only later was he provisionally included in the American literary tradition. This bicentennial celebration of Whitman also happens to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots that began on June 28, 1969, and this Stonewall anniversary reminds us that Whitman’s America is also the same America that blackmailed and persecuted queers, that tried to electroshock the gay away, that drove them to alcoholism and suicide, forced them into sham marriages, excommunicated them from families, fired them from jobs.
Like many readers of Whitman, June Jordan was taken with Whitman’s radically empathetic depiction of the slave auction in Leaves of Grass. Whitman imagines that the person up on the auction block is also the father and mother of generations to come, and that the cosmos itself belongs as much to him and her, as it does to the auctioneer.
For him the globe lay preparing quintillions of years without one animal or plant, For him the revolving cycles truly and steadily rolled.
In that head the allbaffling brain, In it and below it the making of the attributes of heroes…
This is not only one man… he is the father of those who shall be fathers in their turns, In him the start of populous states and rich republics, Of him countless immortal lives with countless embodiments and enjoyments.
In the essay Jordan explores race and genealogy in American literature, writing in the first lines:
In America, the father is white; it is he who inaugurated the experiment of this republic. It is he who sailed his way into slave ownership and who availed himself of my mother—that African woman whose function was miserable—defined by his desirings, or his rage.
She provocatively uses genealogy as a concept throughout the essay, as reference to the brutal history of rape under enslavement, an allusion to the taboo intimacies of interracial desire despite the nation’s claims of segregation, and as a metaphor for literary influence. Jordan insists that Whitman, because of his queer outsider status, is “the one white father who shares the systematic disadvantages of his heterogenous offspring trapped inside a closet that is, in reality, as huge as the continental spread of North and South America.” By drawing out this distinction between Whitman and the other white fathers of American literature, Jordan clears a space for her own pleasure in Whitman’s work, and also refuses to allow an easy co-optation of Whitman by white Western canon-makers who rejected him in the first place.
June Jordan’s comments also bring to mind James Baldwin’s idea of bastardy as emblematic of the black American condition, that the black intellectual must find a way to use whatever material that she has been given, even the work of imperfect and problematic white fathers. In Notes of a Native Son, Baldwin writes, “I know, in any case, that the most crucial time in my own development came when I was forced to recognize that I was a kind of bastard of the West… I would have to appropriate these white centuries. I would have to make them mine—I would have to accept my special attitude, my special place in this scheme—otherwise I would have no place in any scheme.”
Like June Jordan, I was also drawn to the queer outsider Whitman.
In the only known recording of Whitman’s voice, a 36-second wax cylinder recording dated around 1889-90, believed to have been conducted by fellow New Jersey resident Thomas A. Edison, Walt Whitman reads an excerpt from his poem “America,” which describes the nation as “center of equal daughters and equal sons.” In these two white centuries since his birth in 1819, America’s bastard daughters and sons have contributed their own verses to the powerful play, and have tested the validity of America’s democratic promise.
As a New York City tour guide I fell for Whitman the flâneur, the man of the street, the one who saw value in this strange ballet of urban life, and who in poems like “To a Stranger” relished the sparks of intimacy that can happen on the crowded streets. (“Passing stranger! You do not know how longingly I look upon you.”) As a professor, I’ve taught Whitman in American Literature classes. I’ve taken my students on walks from our dingy building on Jay Street in downtown Brooklyn over to Brooklyn Bridge Park, where the old Fulton Ferry terminal once stood, where we read “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” with the East River flowing beside us and the present day ferries docking and departing. I’ve always felt that Whitman predicted the explosion of hip-hop out of the streets of NYC when in the preface to Leaves of Grass he wrote about “the gangs of kosmos and prophets,” a new order of poets that “shall arise in America and be responded to from the remainder of the earth.” Who better fulfills that prophecy than American bards like Biggie, Jay-Z, and Nas? When I see lines from Whitman like, “I know perfectly well my own egotism/ And know my omniverous words, and cannot say any less,” I hear the swagger and braggadocio of Kanye West who once said that “If you’re a Kanye West fan, you’re not a fan of me, you’re a fan of yourself.” (Speaking of problematic artists who needed to be “cancelled.”)
Look, “cancel culture” is not really a thing. The idea of “cancelling” someone is mostly a Twitter joke about checking certain problematic and powerful men who we know damn well aren’t going anywhere. That said, these conversations can be valuable if they lead us toward honest reckoning with the past, and honest reckoning with our culpability in the atrocities of the present. Reading the works of black intellectuals on Whitman shows that confronting Whitman’s racism is not about erasing Whitman. In fact, by talking back to Whitman, Timothy McNair was engaging in the very practice of communication across time and space that the poet himself encouraged in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” though maybe he didn’t imagine the conversation would get so testy.
Black artists like June Jordan talk back to Whitman and talk back to America because they believe that America can choose a better self. As we celebrate the 200th anniversary of Whitman, I hope that we can celebrate him while also telling the truth about his flaws—and America’s flaws. As June Jordan says, “I too am a descendant of Walt Whitman. And I am not by myself struggling to tell the truth about this history of so much land and so much blood, of so much that should be sacred and so much that has been desecrated and annihilated boastfully.”
**********
Resources
Whitman and the Black Poet: Kelly Miller's Speech to the Walt Whitman Fellowship
By: George B. Hutchinson
American Literature, Vol. 61, No. 1 (Mar., 1989), pp. 46-58
Duke University Press
On Whitman, Civil War Memory, and My South
By: NATASHA TRETHEWEY
The Virginia Quarterly Review, Vol. 81, No. 2 (SPRING 2005), pp. 50-65
University of Virginia
By: Charles I. Glicksberg
Phylon (1940-1956), Vol. 9, No. 4 (4th Qtr., 1948), pp. 326-331
Clark Atlanta University
Whitman and Race ("He's Queer, He's Unclear, Get Used to It")
By: Paul H. Outka
Journal of American Studies, Vol. 36, No. 2, Language, Literature and Meaning (Aug., 2002), pp. 293-318
Cambridge University Press on behalf of the British Association for American Studies
Questions for Discussion: Whitman’s Election Day—and Ours
The questions below provide a way into Walt Whitman’s poem, “Election Day: November, 1884.”
We begin with what confused you. This can be anything from a word you do not know (quadrennial, dross, wafts?), to phrasing that seems to wrap back on itself, to images that pile up, one on top of another. And we end with a mini-essay on poetic choices. Please chew on these questions and the poem. Your mind, like Whitman’s, is making connections all the time, like lightning bolts. Before you worry about understanding exactly what the poem “means,” take time to surf the words.
Are there parts of the poem that you find confusing?
Are there parts of the poem that make you feel as if Whitman might be talking to you?
This is a poem about people voting. Why do you think he talks about geography—mountains, waterfalls, lakes, geysers? And all the names of states?
If you wrote a poem about people voting all over Philadelphia, you probably wouldn’t write about mountains and geysers. What would you write about instead?
Whitman talks about ballots showering down like “countless snow-flakes.” Why do you think he chose this way to describe them? After all, paper ballots were usually put into boxes.
Can you describe in your own words what you see when you read the words “the final ballot-shower from East to West”?
What would the 2020 “ballot shower” look like?
Whitman could have ended the poem with the ballot-shower. But he went on to talk about the result of the election: the “peaceful choice of all.’ (It’s important to know here that the American presidential election of 1884 was not peaceful, and not fair.) He talks about people—good and bad—and about how they welcome the darker odds, (the chance that things might go very badly) and the “dross”, an old word which meant junk, or trash. He talks about wine that could be very bad—it’s foamy and sour—but it can “purify." He talks about really bad weather—stormy gusts that help precious ships to sail. And he ends by reminding his readers of three presidents that, in Whitman’s time, were considered great and heroic. And they became president through the election process that he writes about in this poem. How does this speak to you, to us, today?
Finally, to picture the places Whitman references, see here for National Geographic's "The Quadrennial Choosing," for great photos as well as historical context of Whitman's poem.