ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture

A THREATENED AGRARIAN FUTURE: EUGENICS TO THE RESCUE

In the decade before Leaves of Grass' initial publication, Whitman grappled with the social, economic, and political shortcomings of a nation that was far from agrarian—that was, in his eyes, unsustainable. As journalist and editor for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Whitman supported the Free-Soil movement, which sought to prevent slavery's expansion into recently acquired Mexican territories. Particularly from 1846 to early 1848, his journalism promoted principles of independent landowning and democratic citizenship, reiterating Jefferson's narrative of New World demographic exceptionalism—that the US nation represented the inverse of the overpopulated Old World. Yet national political events prevented Whitman's Jeffersonian vision from coming to fruition. In 1848, Congress voted to allow slavery in the new territories. During these years, Whitman also became engrossed in phrenological writings, reviewing them positively in the Eagle as essential works that advanced health and social reform. For Whitman, phrenology's proto-eugenic ideas offered a potential solution to the challenges of a proslavery political landscape and the nation's looming unsustainability. Drawing on these ideas, Whitman's early writings reshape agrarianism from a largely political discourse—one that stressed preserving the free working class' economic status—to a racial and reproductive one.

Whitman's Free-Soil journalism envisions a sustainable utopia in an expanding western US landscape. Written in 1846, nearly two years before the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed, Whitman's articles frequently celebrate the annexation of Mexican territory as the providential destiny of a burgeoning American agrarian empire.¹³ In Whitman's characterization, the Mexican-American [End Page 697] War reflects a preordained progression toward an idyllic farming society: "Will not the future effect of even this war … hasten the advent of that holy era when all swords shall be beat into plough shares and spears into pruning-hooks?" (J, 150). Here, Whitman's imperialist zeal appears rooted in his commitment to independent agricultural labor and citizenship.

Bolstering this expansionist logic, Whitman's articles during this time often invoke Jefferson's notion of the United States as an agricultural and demographic "safety valve" for Europe.¹⁴ Published in September 1846, an article entitled "Old World Poor" recounts the "vast array of human beings" who "[plunge] into … poverty, and degradation," largely due to the sorry "state of [their country's] agriculture" (J, 64). A similar article, printed a few months earlier, attributes this poverty to "the excess of population" and "the grossly partial nature of the laws and the distribution of property."¹⁵ In Europe, Whitman contends, "there is too much mankind and too little earth" (G, 16). In contrast, the United States represents a regenerative and fertile home for Europe's impoverished masses, ripe for the development of an agricultural society: "And then look here at America…. Millions on millions of uncultivated acres of land … trees and verdure making from year to year their heavy deposits on the remains of the trees and verdure that have decayed before them" (G, 17). Such an "interminable" and "boundless" landscape of "unrivalled productiveness and fertility" seems "capable of sustaining nations like the greatest in Europe," feeding and reinvigorating the Old World's "pale children" and "dying women and infants" (G, 16–17, 26; C, 133). Whitman's journalism thus affirms the Jeffersonian notion of an American agrarian utopia—an abundant terrain that can support an "excess of population."¹⁶

The institution of slavery, however, overshadowed Whit-man's projections of a "safety valve" America, threatening to extend into newly acquired western territories, prevent the [End Page 698] establishment of a utopia of independent laborers, and render the nation unsustainable. Keenly aware of this threat, Whitman wrote a series of passionate editorials supporting the Wilmot Proviso, which promised to prevent the spread of slavery into new US lands, including those acquired from Mexico.¹⁷ In Congress, Free-Soil politicians supported this proviso by invoking slavery's propensity for agricultural decline and hostility to population growth.¹⁸ In an 1847 speech defending his proposal, Congressman David Wilmot himself argued that slavery was economically wasteful, environmentally destructive, and unsustainable: "Slave labor exhausts and makes barren the fields it cultivates…. Crop follows crop, until the fertility of the soil is exhausted, when the old fields are abandoned, new and virgin soil sought out, to be exhausted in the same manner, and in its turn likewise abandoned. Thus, sir, sterility follows its path."¹⁹ Extending this argument, proponents of the Wilmot Proviso advocated for an agrarian utopian future on the grounds that free labor fostered sustainable land use.

Whitman, too, associated slavery with barrenness, but he did so by focusing on economic inequality rather than soil exhaustion. For him the Wilmot Proviso did not represent a moral stance against enslaved blacks' continued subjugation. Rather, it sought to prevent the free white laborer's socioeconomic marginalization. Whitman outlined slavery's damaging economic impact in an 1847 article entitled "American Workingmen, versus Slavery": "Slavery is … destructive to the dignity and independence of all who work, and to labor itself. An honest poor mechanic, in a slave State, is put on par with the negro slave mechanic—there being many of the latter, who are hired out by their owners" (G, 209).²⁰ Whitman saw the Wilmot Proviso as a preventive measure against this degradation of free laborers, a fundamentally "Jeffersonian proviso" that would protect the nation's sustainability (J, 348).²¹ [End Page 699]

But as he engaged in Free-Soil politics, Whitman came to understand the limitations of agrarianism as a predominantly political and economic discourse of democratic egalitarianism, agricultural abundance, and landowning rights. When Congress rejected the Wilmot Proviso, Whitman published a series of articles attacking the decision and invoking the memory of Jefferson, "the calm-browed one, and the noblest democrat of them all" (J, 349).²² By early 1850, despite Whitman's and others' efforts, it appeared that Northern Democrats in Congress would negotiate on the slavery issue.²³ Whitman responded to this development with poetry expressing deep political disappointment. His "Song for Certain Congressmen" (1850) condemns politicians for their willingness to compromise, calling them "docile dough faces" that easily succumb to pressure.²⁴ Published a few months later, a poem entitled "The House of Friends" (1850) describes these same "Doughfaces" as "Crawlers, Lice of Humanity" and "Muck-worms."²⁵ These poems anticipate Leaves of Grass not only because they share its rebellious spirit, as David S. Reynolds notes, but also because they foretell Whitman's dramatically shifting approach to agrarian rhetoric as he recognized its ineffcacy on the national political stage.²⁶

Whitman's disillusionment with Free-Soil efforts in Congress inspired him to rely increasingly on phrenological discourse to reconceptualize agrarianism through a reproductive lens. In so doing, he began to develop a eugenic notion of sustainability. Based on the ideas that each section of the brain served a particular function and that phrenologists could identify the strength of these functions through skull measurements, phrenology became increasingly popular in the United States during the 1840s. Yet popular phrenology's function was not merely to interpret individual brain structures but also "to improve the human race."²⁷ Leading US phrenologists and brothers Lorenzo and Orson Fowler declared in an 1849 issue of the American Phrenological [End Page 700] Journal that they hoped to "Phrenologize Our Nation" and "Perfect Our Republic"—to "Mould" the "Now Forming Character" of the United States.²⁸ To Whitman and many others, phrenology offered potential social and physical improvement through "parentage," a combination of heredity and upbringing.²⁹ And unlike the Free-Soil movement, phrenology appeared unthreatened by the evils of unethical political compromises.

Emerging from a long-running tradition of racial classification, phrenology propagated biologically determinist and hierarchical understandings of racial difference.³⁰ Yet phrenologists' belief in white European superiority enabled them to be selectively optimistic about the possibility of individual and intergenerational improvement.³¹ Referring to the "frontal and coronal portions of the brain" as "the seat of the intellectual" and "moral … organs," the Fowlers contended that "the European race (including their descendants in America) possess a much larger endowment of these organs, and also of their corresponding faculties, than any other portion of the human species. Hence, their intellectual and moral superiority over all other races of men."³² The pseudoscience became popular in the United States, largely because it offered hope for individual, intergenerational, and, ultimately, racial betterment.³³ Predicting a future of "millennial glory," the Fowlers envisioned "a new order of beings peopl[ing] the earth—a race endowed by nature with all that is noble, great, and good in man, all that is virtuous, lovely, and exquisitely perfect in woman, marred with few defects, enfeebled by few if any diseases, defaced by few moral blemishes, and corrupted by no vices."³⁴ Premised upon the possibility of white racial improvement, this utopian vision also began to infiltrate Whitman's sustainability rhetoric, as he defended a free laboring race against increasing threats to the agrarian dream.³⁵ [End Page 701]

The Fowlers cultivated this discourse of white racial improvement by emphasizing selective breeding and heredity. Publishing books on marriage, parenting, and sex education, they stressed using one's phrenological profile in spousal selection, which could ensure future generations' physical and moral health.³⁶ Their work as marriage counselors and sex educators formed part of a broader enterprise of teaching future parents "to endow their children, by nature, with a strong and healthy physical, a high mental, and a powerful intellectual constitution."³⁷ Deriving his understanding of "parentage" from Jean-Baptiste Lamarck's theory of the inheritability of acquired characteristics, Orson suggested in Love and Parentage (1844) that "children inherit some, and if some, therefore all, the physical and mental nature and constitution of parents, thus becoming almost their fac similes."³⁸ Orson's best-known work on parentage, Hereditary Descent (1847), promoted an early form of eugenics; it sought "to aid prospective parents in making choice of such partners as shall secure a healthy, talented, virtuous progeny" and stressed that indigent parents should refrain from procreating to avoid "over-population."³⁹

Particularly in the latter half of the 1840s, during the heyday of his Free-Soil journalism, Whitman began drawing on the Fowlers' eugenic rhetoric and participating in the phrenological craze, even seeking a reading of his skull at the Fowlers' Brooklyn headquarters. In an 1846 review of phrenologist Johann Gaspar Spurzheim's work, Whitman announced that "phrenology, it must now be confessed by all men who have open eyes, has at last gained a position, and a firm one, among the sciences"—a sentiment he would reiterate in an 1847 article entitled "Something about Physiology and Phrenology" (J, 120, 219). In July 1849, a year when Whitman was planning a series of lectures on health and physiology, he asked Lorenzo to analyze his head contours. He discovered from his phrenological report [End Page 702] that he had a "large sized brain" and a "good command of language."⁴⁰ With such a positive review, it is perhaps no wonder that phrenology influenced Whitman so much.

This report shaped the presentation, structure, and predominant themes of Leaves of Grass' first three editions, where Whitman experimented with combining agrarian and phrenological language. The poet published his phrenological chart in these editions—perhaps as "the proof of a poet" using his unique endowments—and interpreted this data for his readership in a self-review (CP, 26). Originally published in the Brooklyn Daily Times, the review presents Whitman's physical purity and health as evidence of his literary originality: "Of pure American breed,… never once using medicine,… hair like hay after it has been mowed in the field … his physiology corroborating a rugged phrenology …—there you have Walt Whitman, the begetter of a new offspring of literature."⁴¹ Inspired by encouraging phrenological data, this self-review certifies Whitman's bardic status based on physical characteristics: the poet is "pure," "rugged," and, ultimately, poetically fertile. It is perhaps no coincidence that the preface to Leaves describes the American poet as having "the ultimate brain," the ideal phrenological profile (CP, 9).⁴² Most notably, this self-review subtly integrates agrarianism into the phrenological and proto-eugenic discourses that influenced Whitman: the poet's "American breed" not only enjoys a healthy and "rugged" physique but also has hair like mowed "hay," reminiscent of rural labor.

While the Fowlers were particularly influential on these early editions of Leaves, the language of physique, fertility, and racial difference inflect Whitman's Free-Soil writings even before he prioritizes his poetry. These early political writings articulate agrarian ideals in racial and reproductive terms. In "American Workingmen," for instance, "free" connotes "white": a "grand body of white working men, the millions of mechanics, farmers, and operatives of our country" [End Page 703] (G, 208). Moreover, the essay presents a physical ideal that stresses independent labor, production, and cultivation: a "stalwart mass of respectable working men … whose sinews are their own" (G, 208, 210; emphasis added). This laboring "mass" produces sustenance and raises vigorous future generations, fostering a "heritage of getting bread by the sweat of the brow, which we must leave to our children" (G, 210). Indeed, "American Workingmen" synthesizes rugged, tanned whiteness (not the pale, "dough-face[d]" kind), muscularity, and sustaining, future-oriented labor into a racialized ideal of the Jeffersonian working class: "the farmers, the workers of the land—that prolific brood of brown faced fathers and sons who swarm over the free States, and form the bulwark of our republic" (CP, 1309; G, 211). Drawing on phrenology's proto-eugenic ideas and integrating reproductive, nationalist, and agricultural language—"prolific brood," "our republic, "workers of the land"—the essay idealizes a race of robust and fertile farmers as the backbone of the Free-Soil cause and, ultimately, of American sustainability.⁴³

While Whitman's Free-Soil journalism begins to describe free laborers in physical and reproductive terms, "The Eighteenth Presidency!" demonstrates the importance of phrenological concepts such as population improvement to Whitman's version of agrarianism. Prophesying the white working class' political empowerment, the essay seeks a reenergized agrarian vision because the Free-Soil movement has failed. It opens with a classically Jeffersonian claim: "Before the American era, the programme of the classes of a nation read thus, first the king, second the noblemen and gentry, third the great mass of mechanics, farmers … and all laboring persons…. The likes of the class rated third on the old programme were intended to be, and are in fact … the American nation, the people" (CP, 1307). "The Eighteenth Presidency!" invigorates this democratic ideal by predicting total demographic renewal: the extinction of [End Page 704] degenerate politicians, slaveowners, and city-dwellers, and the proliferation of an ever-improving white working class. Condemning compromising politicians as "the running sores of the great cities," extolling the free working class as a "different superior race," "The Eighteenth Presidency!" generates a physical basis for the nation's agrarian future (CP, 1313, 1314). The essay anticipates a "counteraction of a new race of young men … soon to confront the Presidents, Congresses and parties" and exterminate the "breed[s] upon breed[s]" of enfeebled bureaucrats (CP, 1312, 1309). Adapting popular phrenological notions of white superiority and intergenerational improvement, "The Eighteenth Presidency!" celebrates a "heroic" race of "sturdy American freemen … from thrifty farms," whose fecundity protects the nation against "serpentine" types (CP, 1308, 1312, 1314). In this regard, the essay imaginatively transcends the "dough-face[d]" politics of Whitman's time to restore the agrarian dream (CP, 1309). In "The Eighteenth Presidency!," this dream is biological, preordained, and no politician can prevent it.

Whitman's Free-Soil journalism and "The Eighteenth Presidency!" begin to transform the agrarian ideal; what once seemed like an exclusively economic ideal of free, independent, and largely agricultural labor becomes a physical one of brawn and fertility. As his writings draw on proto-eugenic principles, they identify the democratic citizen through biological and seemingly inherited features. Using assessments of physical vigor and health that echo Whitman's interpretation of his own phrenological report, they certify the predestined dominance of a white working class. Just as the Fowlers championed judicious spousal selection as a mode of improving the race, so too does "The Eighteenth Presidency!" promote replacing sickly, "pimpled" politicians and businessmen with a hearty, muscular, democratic population (CP, 1313). Frustrated by the Free-Soil movement's political struggles and enthusiastic about [End Page 705] phrenology, Whitman began to imagine an innately fecund, free laboring class that politicians could not thwart with compromise. At a time when the nation seemed far from sustainable, far from its Jeffersonian ideals of small farming and free labor, "The Eighteenth Presidency!" imaginatively reempowers the white working class and inaugurates an era of eugenic optimism infusing Whitman's writing.

BEDS OF SOIL AND BREEDING GROUNDS

Whitman's early political writings prefigure the explicitly eugenic fantasies of breeding an agrarian race that surface in Leaves of Grass. Yet in Whitman's Free-Soil journalism, and in "The Eighteenth Presidency!" more specifically, the process of propagating these "fierce and turbulent races" remains unclear (CP, 1349). Likely written around the same time, "This Compost" (1856) functions as an agricultural companion piece to "The Eighteenth Presidency!," depicting this lack of reproductive clarity as ecologically disturbing because it emphasizes the soil's mysterious absorption of sickly corpses. First published in Leaves' second edition, "A Woman Waits for Me" clarifies this reproductive process. Describing eugenic breeding, the speaker selects a rugged rural female partner for conceiving vigorous laborers. Presenting eugenics as a national sustainability project, a cultivation of productive citizens, "A Woman Waits" depicts procreative sex as the transmission of agrarian traits that encourage agricultural and population improvement. Indeed, these poems together grapple with the question of how to achieve sustainability—how to breed a fertile population that can cultivate an equally fertile soil.

As it focuses on working-class men, "The Eighteenth Presidency!" anticipates a reproductive future without describing reproduction itself.⁴⁴ At most, the essay gestures toward an intergenerational improvement that purifies the [End Page 706] nation of decaying politicians: "A pretty time for two dead corpses to go walking up and down the earth, to guide by feebleness and ashes a proud, young, friendly, fresh heroic nation of thirty millions of live and electric men!" (CP, 1349). Describing politicians as "corpses" that haunt the "fresh" generation, this passage implicitly promotes population improvement. Yet it elides the process that supposedly proliferates this vigorous race, leaving a critical gap in its regeneration narrative. "This Compost" elaborates on this narrative in markedly ecological terms, imagining decaying, corrupt "corpses" as the breeding ground for new life.

Originally entitled "Poem of Wonder at the Resurrection of Wheat," "This Compost" depicts a process of agricultural renewal that begins with contaminated soil—one that, especially when read alongside "The Eighteenth Presidency!," doubles as a fantasy of reproductive improvement. The poem opens by expressing a "proto-toxic consciousness," as Paul Outka calls it—with a speaker shocked by corpses infecting the earth: "O how can it be that the ground itself does not sicken?," the speaker asks, referring to the "distemper'd corpses" embedded within it (CP, 495).⁴⁵ Harboring material and moral impurities, the carcasses of "drunkards and gluttons of so many generations" threaten to transform the food supply into "foul liquid and meat" (CP, 495). The speaker cultivates the land with "plough" and "space," observing the heroic emergence of healthy crops from toxic soil:

The bean bursts noiselessly through the mould    in the garden,The delicate spear of the onion pierces upward.

(CP, 495–96)⁴⁶

Contrasting these regenerating crops with the polluted soil, "This Compost" presents an agricultural allegory of "The Eighteenth Presidency!" in which crops signify laborers [End Page 707] and corpses signify degenerate politicians' bodies. The conversion of "endless successions of diseas'd corpses" into "prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops" reflects the purifying proliferation of "healthy-bodied" workers (CP, 496–97, 1332). Triumphantly "burst[ing]" and "pierc[ing] upward," the crops enact what "The Eighteenth Presidency!" prophesies: a burgeoning working class that infuses healthy democracy into a poisoned nation, cleansing it of compromise, greed, and excess (CP, 495–96). Taken together, "The Eighteenth Presidency!" and "This Compost" articulate the nation's demographic regeneration in agricultural terms—a superior "[crop]" emerging from a foul soil.⁴⁷

Ultimately, these images of contaminated soil and rejuvenated crops prove more unsettling than hopeful, suggesting that population improvement might require a more controlled reproductive process. Even as it celebrates an agricultural "resurrection," "This Compost" betrays an anxiety regarding the polluted source of supposedly pure and healthy sustenance. This anxiety accompanies what ecocritics have described as the speaker's heightened environmental awareness: a "dramatic recognition of difference," a "respect [for] nature's mystery," a "confront[ation]" of its "otherness."⁴⁸ Amid this recognition of the earth's unknowability, the speaker fixates on the crops' impure origins, rendering their emergence as troubling as it is triumphant. In the penultimate stanza, even as the speaker confirms "that all is clean forever and ever," he repeatedly raises the possibility of "infectious" air, oceanic "fevers," and "poison[ed]" fruits—of "catching a disease" from a "spear of grass" (CP, 496). Naming these possibilities, the speaker makes conscious the possible contaminants lurking in the environment, questioning the crops' purity and imagining a milieu not unlike the corpse-ridden one in "The Eighteenth Presidency!" By the final stanza, the speaker is "terrified at the Earth"—not just because it "grows such sweet things out of such corruptions" but also because he cannot [End Page 708] unthink their source (CP, 496). Since the speaker dwells so extensively on the crops' corrupted origins, they never become cleansed in "This Compost." Instead, they indicate the despoiled lineage of a hearty working class.

Focused on the messy ecological images of corpses, soil, and renewal, "This Compost" and "The Eighteenth Presidency!" are reproductively unsettling because they lack a direct, conscious, sexual selection process. "A Woman Waits" begins to solve this problem, depicting the speaker's sexual experience as a nation-building process of propagating American laborers. The speaker prefaces the sexual act by choosing an appropriate female partner, the passive recipient of his "pent-up rivers" (CP, 260). As "the robust husband," he seeks "worthy" women waiting for "the moisture of the right man":

They are tann'd in the face by shining suns and    blowing winds,Their flesh has the old divine suppleness and    strength,………………………………………………            they arecalm, clear, well-possess'd of themselves.

(CP, 258–59)⁴⁹

The speaker assesses sexual fitness based on rural vigor and working-class fortitude, which characterize "women fit for conception" throughout Leaves (CP, 232).⁵⁰ A meticulously selected repository for the speaker's sperm, this female body guarantees that reproductive origins are uncorrupted. "A Woman Waits" thus enacts a national eugenic fantasy that ensures pure origins, well-selected sperm, and a "worthy" womb.

"Unfolded out of the Folds" (1856) elaborates the role of the female body in breeding ideal laboring citizens. Using phrenological and physiological language, the poem [End Page 709] describes the female body as the reproductive origin of ever-improving men:

Unfolded only out of the superbest woman of the    earth is to come the superbest man of the earth,………………………………………………Unfolded only out of the perfect body of a woman    can a man be form'd of perfect body,………………………………………………Unfolded by brawny embraces from the well    muscled woman I love, only thence come the    brawny embraces of the man,Unfolded out of the folds of the woman's brain    come all the folds of the man's brain, duly    obedient[.]

(CP, 515–16)

Like "A Woman Waits," the poem depicts the female body as a mere receptacle, as the speaker's use of passive voice suggests (CP, 516).Yet the poem also idealizes these "perfect" female bodies as instruments of phrenological formation and direct, hereditary transmission, their "superbest" vaginal folds delivering "the superbest man of the earth," their brain "folds" delivering "the folds of the man's brain." Insofar as phrenology claims that the brain's folds indicate the strength of one's moral and intellectual character, the poem celebrates reproduction as a controllable, direct process, its outcome improving through the fertilization of "superbest" female bodies. Using vocabulary similar to Whitman's political writings, where the "grand body of white workingmen" becomes a racial ideal, "Unfolded" and "A Woman Waits" describe the "perfect" female breeder as "well-muscled," "brawny," and "tann'd in the face" (G, 208; CP, 515, 516, 259). Moreover, both poems assess the female body's reproductive capacity based on phrenological composition, a well-molded "brain in its folds inside the skull frame" (CP, 258). Elucidated in "Unfolded," [End Page 710] this treatment of the female body in "A Woman Waits" integrates eugenic breeding into an otherwise miraculous narrative of racial improvement.

Indeed, "A Woman Waits" presents a triumphant, singular vision of eugenic sustainability. The poem intermingles the language of sperm and sex with that of agricultural renewal, merging themes of reproductive futurism and earthly sustenance so that they appear inextricably intertwined:

In you I wrap a thousand onward years,On you I graft the grafts of the best-beloved      of me and America,………………………………………………The babes I beget upon you are to beget babes     in their turn,I shall demand perfect men and women out     of my love-spendings,I shall expect them to interpenetrate with     others, as I and you interpenetrate now,I shall count on the fruits of the gushing showers     of them, as I count on the fruits of the gushingshowers I give now,I shall look for loving crops from the birth, life,     death, immortality, I plant so lovingly now.

(CP, 260)

As these final lines show, human and agricultural fertility become synonymous in the poem. The speaker describes himself as a farmer and horticulturalist, a planter of carefully selected seeds, a "graft[er]" of his "best-beloved" spermatic matter. He characterizes his female partner as a bed of soil (not to be confused with the putrid kind in "This Compost").⁵¹ Drawing on the theory that semen contains spermatic, preformed homunculi, the speaker conflates his "love-spendings" with the seeds of future citizens: "I pour the stuff to start sons and daughters fit for these States" (CP, 260, 259).⁵² [End Page 711]

The speaker also gestures toward the "fruits" of the next generation's labor, the agricultural improvement that these selectively "plant[ed]" offspring will beget. Just as the speaker "grow[s]" "crops" of children, so too will those children grow literal "crops" that feed a productive population. This process swells with reproductive futurity: "a thousand onward years" in which "babes … beget babes in their turn," ensuring the speaker's "immortality" through his equally fertile "fruits" and "crops." Having chosen an athletic, salubrious, yet passive mate, the speaker in "A Woman Waits" is the hero in his own nation-building process: his preformed "sons and daughters" will continue to carry out the nation's Jeffersonian destiny of agricultural plenty. In this context, national sustainability signifies the cultivation of farmers that continue to feed and breed a "perfect" American population (CP, 260). Despite the seemingly impending unsustainability of Whitman's time—brought on by slavery, agricultural decline, and a generally corrupt, degenerating population—sustainability in this poem appears biologically preordained and invincible. Selective breeding, it seems, will ensure a utopian agrarian future.

"THE COMMON FARMER" AS ETHNOLOGICAL TYPE

While "A Woman Waits" depicts the cultivation of agrarian bodies, "I Sing the Body Electric" represents these bodies in the linked images of the "common farmer" and the enslaved laborer on the auction block (CP, 252). Here the nation's sustainability relies not just on the process of eugenic breeding but also its products. As the reproductive sequel to "A Woman Waits," the poem redefines the agrarian subject based on physique and fertility rather than property ownership or free and independent status; enslaved and free laborers are not economic competitors but rather physical [End Page 712] equals. Displaying a marked shift in agrarian rhetoric, the poem reflects Whitman's preoccupation during these years with developing a physically robust race of laborers—one that, in his eyes, could protect the nation against looming dysgenic threats to its sustainability.

"I Sing the Body Electric" depicts "a common farmer" as the ideal product of agrarian breeding: an ethnological type, or what Whitman himself might call a "[healthy] specimen of country life" (CP, 963).⁵³

I knew a man, a common farmer, the father of    five sons,And in them the fathers of sons, and in them the    fathers of sons.This man was of wonderful vigor, calmness, beauty    of person,The shape of his head, the pale yellow and white    of his hair…,………………………………………………He was six feet tall, he was over eighty years old,    his sons were massive, clean, bearded, tan-    faced, handsome,………………………………………………He drank water only, the blood show'd like scarlet    through the clear-brown skin of his face,………………………………………………When he went with his five sons and many grand-    sons to hunt or fish, you would pick him out    as the most beautiful and vigorous of the gang[.]

(CP, 252)

This description of "the common farmer" fundamentally recasts what it means to be agrarian. The language of rural "vigor," multigenerational fertility, and "clear-brown skin" pervade this passage, recalling Whitman's Free-Soil journalism and his idealization of "farmers" as a "prolific brood of brown faced fathers and sons" (G, 211). The phrase [End Page 713] "the shape of his head" functions as a racial index, evoking the phrenological correlation between head shape, skull shape, and race, as well as moral and intellectual fortitude. In lines that suggest purity, we learn that the farmer has a "complexion showing the best blood," his body invigorated and cleansed by his consumption of "water only" (CP, 963). Given Orson Fowler's emphasis on water as "essential to life" and Whitman's own recommendation that men drink "simple cool water," this description implies that, although this farmer may be old, his country-leathered face exudes vitality ("MH," 249).⁵⁴ Through this portrait, the "common farmer" transforms into a physiological and phrenological paradigm—one defined not by economic status or property ownership but rather by fertility and healthy physique.

A product of agrarian breeding, outdoor exercise, and a generally healthy lifestyle, the common farmer demonstrates the benefits of "Manly Health and Training" (1858)—the subject of Whitman's lesser-known self-help series, pseudonymously published in the New York Atlas. Discovered by Zachary Turpin and republished in 2016, these columns confirm the extent to which phrenology and eugenics shaped Whitman's thinking, particularly in the decade before the Civil War.⁵⁵ While the essays discuss climatological as well as hereditary factors, they prioritize training—regular exercise, a wholesome diet, and sexual temperance—as the primary path to physical perfection and, by extension, to strong moral character. Like "The Eighteenth Presidency!" and "A Woman Waits for Me," "Manly Health" promotes "the development of a superb race of men, large-bodied, clean-blooded, and with all the attributes of the best material humanity" ("MH," 196). But although this text praises the "active out-door occupations" of "carpenters, masons, farmers, [and] laborers" as particularly conducive to this training, it makes clear that even city-dwellers, clerks, and politicians can, with enough practice, become "healthy specimens" ("MH," 208, 300).⁵⁶ [End Page 714]

Despite this focus on training, "Manly Health" exhibits the same anxiety about dysgenic threats that characterizes "The Eighteenth Presidency!"; men like the common farmer, with their "brawny muscles" and "virile power," work to extinguish these threats and ensure national sustainability ("MH," 196, 277). Lamenting what he observes as widespread "physical inferiority" caused by "feeble maternity and paternity" and sexual excess, Whitman tells American men that "so long as you … allow yourself to be a victim to all these pestiferous little gratifications that are offered to you in the city, so long will you present a marked contrast to the noble physique of the lumberman and hunter" ("MH," 209, 210, 252, 289). Wherever these threats to the laboring population's health and fertility emerge in Whitman's writing, the subject of "Breeding Superb Men" is not far behind, even in a text on training: "Much of a man's … body and mind … depends on causes that exist and operate, in full activity, before his birth" ("MH," 227). Indeed, as a corrective to the population's "tainted blood" and "enfeebled offspring," "Manly Health" promotes "the sublime science of breeding a nation of … clean-fleshed men" ("MH," 279, 275). It thus forms part of Whitman's antebellum sustainability rhetoric, working to ensure that the laboring population "will not die out," as Turpin puts it.⁵⁷ The "common farmer," moreover, epitomizes this population's physical and procreative features (CP, 252).

At first glance, this particularly physical depiction of the "common farmer" has an ostensibly democratizing effect in "I Sing the Body Electric." In section 7, the speaker describes a "man's body at auction," implicitly linking the enslaved laborer to the free and independent farmer through their shared physiological, phrenological, and reproductive features. Just as the farmer embodies phrenological excellence—"the shape of his head" reflecting "the richness and breadth of his manners"—so too does the enslaved man's "head" contain an "all-baffing brain" (CP, 252, 255). [End Page 715]

Just as the farmer signifies an infinite reproductive futurity as "the father of five sons, / And in them the fathers of sons," so too does the enslaved man signify "the start of populous states and rich republics,/… countless immortal lives," and "offspring through the centuries" (CP, 252, 256). Similarly, section 8 describes the "woman's body at auction" as "the teeming mother of mothers" (CP, 256). This comparison seems like a democratizing gesture that highlights the "sacred" character of both laboring bodies and the enslaved peoples' "same red-running blood": "Do you think," the speaker asks, that "water runs and vegetation sprouts, / For you only, and not for him or her?" (CP, 256, 255). Invoking the "uniform hieroglyphic" of grass from "Song of Myself" (1855), the undifferentiating entity that "grow[s] among black folks as among white," the speaker celebrates free and enslaved laborers, united in phrenology and fertility (CP, 193).⁵⁸

However, as the description of the "man's body at auction" suggests, the speaker's emphasis on physique and fertility has economic undertones that complicate his democratizing gestures (CP, 255). Though the enslaved laborer shares the same physique as the farmer, the speaker details his figure in a market inventory style that highlights his unfree status; his "limbs" are "stript" for prospective buyers, revealing profitable features: "flakes of breast-muscle, pliant backbone and neck, flesh not flabby, good-sized arms and legs" (CP, 255, 256). Here, the auction block's dehumanizing quality undercuts the speaker's claims for equality.⁵⁹ The slave's status as salable commodity, moreover, reveals that the poem's emphasis on brawn and fertility functions as an assessment of economic value: the speaker evaluates both free and enslaved laborer based on their abilities to perform agricultural labor, reproduce more laborers, and thereby contribute to the ongoing project of national sustainability. Rather than equalize the independent farmer and the enslaved man, the speaker [End Page 716] assesses their agricultural and reproductive productivity using similar criteria but in jarringly inequitable contexts.

"I Sing the Body Electric" revises Whitman's argument from his Free-Soil writings. In his journalism, Whitman emphasized the economic difference between the free and enslaved laborer, fearing that the white laborer would become marginalized within a slave-based economy. Prioritizing physical and reproductive characteristics, this poem diverges from Free-Soil rhetoric by highlighting the commonalities between independent farmer and enslaved laborer. Yet this redefined agrarianism neither fully humanizes nor elevates the enslaved subject, as the auction-block highlights the salable status of the "man's body" (CP, 255). Instead, this description serves an important rhetorical function in Whitman's writing, distinguishing this markedly eugenic agrarianism from its earlier, Free-Soil version, which pitted enslaved and free laborer against one another. While these physiological and phrenological descriptions still manifest economic and racial difference, "I Sing the Body Electric" exhibits a larger trend across Whitman's antebellum writings: to invent a new agrarianism that persists despite the Free-Soil movement's failure. In these writings, American sustainability begins to appear much more plausible, if not guaranteed, because it relies on controlled breeding and physical perfectibility rather than corrupt politics.

________

After Emancipation, Whitman seemed less worried about the nation's sustainability. He shifted his focus from the conscious work of selective breeding to the seeming certitude of evolution to support his physiological version of agrarianism. And unlike the enslaved laborer of "I Sing the Body Electric," freed blacks were not included, even for rhetorical purposes, in this "superber race" of laborers (CP, 352).⁶⁰ Like US scientists in the years following the [End Page 717] Civil War, Whitman was influenced by Herbert Spencer's notion of "survival of the fittest" and Frances Galton's theory of the supremacy of a master race (concepts that likely confirmed the phrenology-based racial hierarchies he had studied before the war).⁶¹ With slavery abolished and evolutionary theories of racial progress circulating, America's agrarian future appeared far less threatened than it did in the decade before the Civil War, at least according to Whitman's writings. In fact, in postbellum poems such as "Pioneers! O Pioneers!" (1865) and "Song of the Redwood-Tree" (1874), the inevitability of racial progress guarantees the laboring population's fertility and, by extension, the land's abundance. These poems rely on evolutionary certainty to imaginatively expunge the "swarms" of lesser races from Whitman's vision of a robust, agrarian race (CP, 373).⁶² Indeed, after the war Whitman seemed much less focused on how to breed and develop a "vigorous" race of "white working men"; in his postbellum writings, self-assured predictions of nonwhite extinction seem to eclipse the anxious eugenic sustainability rhetoric that characterizes his antebellum writings (G, 208; MH, 190).⁶³

But even in Whitman's imagination, racial-extinction theory does not entirely secure the nation's agrarian future. In fact, his eugenic sustainability rhetoric rears its head in Democratic Vistas (1871), an essay that confronts imagined postbellum threats to the nation's demographic stability. Urging readers to examine the nation "like a physician diagnosing some deep disease," Democratic Vistas echoes "The Eighteenth Presidency!" in its critiques of the nation's biological and political shortcomings, some of which persist despite Emancipation (CP, 937). Depicting New York City's population gruesomely, the essay laments the broader prevalence of "cities, crowded with petty grotesques" (CP, 939). These cities represent a "dry and flat Sahara," their inhabitants displaying various deformities, sexual excess, [End Page 718] racial darkness, and impurity: "malformations," "puny" youth, "an abnormal libidinousness, unhealthy forms … muddy complexions, bad blood, the capacity for good motherhood deceasing or deceas'd" (CP, 939). As a cure, Whitman seeks to empower the "millions of sturdy farmers and mechanics" and promotes "a more universal ownership of property, general homesteads, general comfort—a vast intertwining reticulation of wealth" (CP, 953, 950). But to realize this Jeffersonian vision and finally overcome "feudalism," the "average" population must follow a eugenic program (CP, 930, 954).

As an alternative to these degenerate forms that imperil the nation's sustainability, Democratic Vistas presents "a democratic ethnology of the future," describing an ideal "specimen of the species," "a clear-blooded, strong-fibred physique;… well-begotten…, fresh, ardent…, the complexion showing the best blood" (CP, 963). To produce this "specimen," Whitman argues, American citizens must "prepare the canvas beforehand": "Parentage must consider itself in advance. (Will the time hasten when fatherhood and motherhood shall become a science—and the noblest science?)" (CP, 963). Evoking the phrenological rhetoric stressing spousal selection, Democratic Vistas advocates the "rais[ing] up and supply[ing] [of] … a copious race of superb American men and women" (CP, 961). Like "A Woman Waits," moreover, the text employs agricultural metaphors to envision "crops of fine youths," "the traits of America … grafted on newer, hardier, purely native stock" (CP, 939, 952). The path to realizing Jefferson's agrarian vision, it seems, is ultimately eugenic and paved with ideologies of white racial improvement.

Although Whitman became increasingly focused on reproduction, physiology, and racial science throughout his career, he never lost sight of this agrarian dream, even as he grew old. Interestingly, "Notes Left Over" (1882), a [End Page 719] collection of Whitman's prose, concludes with a distinctly Jeffersonian prophecy:

The final culmination of this vast and varied Republic will be the … establishment of millions of comfortable city homesteads and moderate-sized-farms, healthy and independent, single separate ownership, fee simple, life in them complete but cheap, within reach of all…. There is a subtle something in the common earth, crops, cattle, air, trees … that forms the only purifying and perennial element for individuals and for society. I must confess I want to see the agricultural occupation of America at first hand permanently broaden'd. Its gains are the only ones on which God seems to smile.

(CP, 1074)

Across his writings, Whitman sought to "contain multitudes"—to celebrate a range of peoples and contexts in his writings (CP, 87). But ultimately, as this passage suggests, his vision of the nation's future depended most crucially on small farming and the environmental stewardship and economic egalitarianism that attend it. Moreover, the close of Whitman's late-career autobiographical work, Specimen Days (1882), affirms that rural simplicity is crucial for sustaining the nation's "grand races" of laborers: "American Democracy … must either be fibred, vitalized, by regular contact with … farm-scenes … or it will certainly dwindle and pale" (CP, 925–26). Attempting to maintain that contact, particularly when this Jeffersonian "Democracy" seemed threatened, Whitman's writing entangles agricultural and reproductive language, infusing eugenic and racial thought into agrarian discourse.

In its nostalgia for an innocent, Jeffersonian past, today's neo-agrarian sustainability discourse typically elides this [End Page 720] entanglement. But Whitman's writings examined here reveal a knot in the all-too-neat line from early American agrarianism to contemporary sustainability discourses—particularly those that lament how industrial society threatens Jefferson's agrarian dream. For Whitman, in the decade before the Civil War, the agrarian dream also appeared in jeopardy: slavery threatened to expand into western territories, disempowering free white laborers, perpetuating inequality, and exhausting the soil's fertility. Whitman responded by developing his own nineteenth-century sustainability rhetoric. As he attempted to imaginatively rescue the agrarian dream from various agricultural and reproductive threats, he found the discourses of racial science and eugenics appealing. For him, controlled breeding safeguarded this dream and thus the nation's agricultural and demographic sustainability. Moreover, while Whitman's eugenic sustainability rhetoric is unique, it reveals how the seemingly separate discourses of agrarianism, reproduction, and racial science can furtively fuse and overlap in powerful, dangerous, and violent ways.⁶⁴ And in our current moment of neo-agrarian revival, as scholars and popular writers increasingly look to Jefferson's proud eco-legacy, Whitman's rhetoric demands that we be mindful about how racial and reproductive politics inform the sustainability solutions we propose.