“I say we had best look our times and lands
searchingly in the face, like a physician diagnosing some deep disease. Never
was there, perhaps, more hollowness at heart than at present, and here in the
United States. Genuine belief seems to have left us. The underlying principles
of the States are not honestly believ'd in, (for all this hectic glow, and
these melodramatic screamings,) nor is humanity itself believ'd in. What
penetrating eye does not everywhere see through the mask? The spectacle is
appaling. We live in an atmosphere of hypocrisy throughout. The men believe not
in the women, nor the women in the men. A scornful superciliousness rules in
literature. The aim of all the littérateurs is to find something to make fun
of. A lot of churches, sects, &c., the most dismal phantasms I know, usurp
the name of religion. Conversation is a mass of badinage. From deceit in the
spirit, the mother of all false deeds, the offspring is already incalculable.
An acute and candid person, in the revenue department in Washington, who is led
by the course of his employment to regularly visit the cities, north, south and
west, to investigate frauds, has talk'd much with me about his discoveries. The
depravity of the business classes of our country is not less than has been supposed,
but infinitely greater. The official services of America, national, state, and
municipal, in all their branches and departments, except the judiciary, are
saturated in corruption, bribery, falsehood, mal-administration; and the
judiciary is tainted. The great cities reek with respectable as much as
non-respectable robbery and scoundrelism. In fashionable life, flippancy, tepid
amours, weak infidelism, small aims, or no aims at all, only to kill time. In
business, (this all-devouring modern word, business,) the one sole object is,
by any means, pecuniary gain. The magician's serpent in the fable ate up all
the other serpents; and money-making is our magician's serpent, remaining
to-day sole master of the field.” —American poet-editor Walt Whitman (1819–1892),
Democratic Vistas (1871)
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