Democratic Vistas Research Articles

Whitman’s Undemocratic Vistas: Mortal Anxiety, National Glory, White Supremacy

Walt Whitman’s Democratic Vistas (1871) has become a touchstone of democratic theory. Commentators of unusual ideological range uphold the book as politically exemplary. This article demonstrates that recent theoretical celebrations of Democratic Vistas are sanitized and incomplete. I expose the antidemocratic side of Democratic Vistas by analyzing (1) its philosophy of death and (2) its politics of race. Whitman framed his immortalist response to death within an imperialist historical teleology. That teleology entailed violations of Native sovereignty, the political inequality of Black Americans, and the projection of both Black and Native peoples’ evolutionary extinction. Democratic Vistas emerges from this analysis as both necropolitical and white supremacist. If, as Richard Rorty argues, Vistas models a salutary form of reformist “national pride,” then it also illustrates the dangerous susceptibility of such pride to moral innocence and self-deceit.

An Independent Scholar during the Pandemic

An Independent Scholar during the Pandemic

Cather Among the Moderns by Janis P. Stout

Reviewed by: Cather Among the Moderns by Janis P. Stout Richard Millington Janis P. Stout, Cather Among the Moderns. U of Alabama P, 2019. ix + 265 pp. In Cather Among the Moderns, Janis Stout sets out to answer a question that has exercised scholars for decades: how should we see Cather in relation to the group of writers, all her contemporaries, whom we call modernists? Briefly put, Stout answers this question by expanding the kind of attentiveness that we bring to it. She does so by focusing not simply on the expressive strategies that may or may not have affiliated Cather with her innovation-seeking contemporaries but also on the contexts—the communities, the friendships, the antipathies, the affinities—through which Cather encountered the cultural transformations of the earlier twentieth century. In a sense, then, the most important word in Stout's title is among, and the book's prevailing spirit is exploratory, as Stout interrogates the relation between the early twentieth-century worlds in which Cather found herself and the writing that she produced. In taking this contextual approach, Stout joins a scholarly tradition, memorably codified by Daniel Joseph Singal, that she calls "cultural modernism" (xii)—one that thinks of modernism not as a set of artistic practices (though such practices may well be revealing and significant) but as a distinctive historical culture, the successor to the American Victorian culture that preceded it. In doing so, she is less interested in rendering a verdict on Cather as modernist—though she will supply one—than in setting in motion an inquiry that gives us a newly vivid, intellectually compelling sense of Cather's life and work and delivers a welcome jolt of energy and expansiveness to biographical thinking within Cather studies. Once she has established this intellectual orientation, Stout launches her biographical narrative by identifying and unpacking a moment of inception: the 1896 train journey that brought Cather [End Page 386] from Red Cloud, Nebraska to Pittsburgh, where she took up a post at the Home Monthly. Stout begins, this is to say, not with the writing but with the context—with the ingredients, both cultural and personal, that affiliated Cather to the transition from a Victorian America to a modernist one: mobility, urbanization, and the unmooring of the coordinates of identity, especially for young white middle-class women who had access to careers within an expanding consumer economy. Cather's story starts with a young person becoming modern by navigating modernity. In the chapters that follow, a pattern emerges. As in the opening chapter, they start with context, and the organization of Stout's account, though inflected by chronology, is fundamentally locational. In each chapter, Stout places Cather in American modernity's definitive terroirs: Cather is shown inhabiting the Greenwich Village of the 1910s, encountering the gender-role-redefining world of early twentieth-century female friendships, and absorbing the dismantling of hierarchical conceptions of race in the wake of Franz Boas's new anthropology, to take a few examples. In each of these chapters, the contextual work leads to a consideration of the complex relationship between particular contexts and the shaping of Cather's fiction. Thus, chapter 2's evocation of the talkative, experimental culture of Greenwich Village generates a discussion of the emphatic urbanity of "Coming, Aphrodite" and other early stories. Chapter 3's recovery of the world of female friendships that Cather and Edith Lewis together inhabited informs a survey of the strong women who populate Cather's fiction. In chapter 4, an account of the Great War's emergence as a topos of modernist sensibility yields a rich discussion of the reputation-shaping dissonances between One of Ours and the prevailing, mostly male treatments of the war and its attendant disillusionment. Chapter 5, discussed more fully below, hears the echoes of the Taos-based counterculture presided over by Mabel Dodge Luhan in Cather's Southwestern fiction. In "Democratic Vistas," chapter 6, Stout explores the interplay between democratic and elitist elements in Cather's relation to her readers and her conception of artistic authenticity, as Cather advocates for her own novelistic innovation against the dismissals of a critical establishment oblivious to her originality. Perhaps the book's...

Facing democratic indeterminacy: the consequences of the Dayton Agreement

This article was written to inform the author’s presentation to the SEER Journal online workshop on the Dayton Agreement held on 2 July 2021. Focusing on the issues of de-consolidation and de-democratisation which are inhibiting Bosnia and Herzegovina (among other western Balkan states) from becoming a credible EU accession candidate, the article locates the question of ‘othering’ within the need to rethink international relations given the global issues which are shaping today’s world. Drawing on recently published work in the areas of philosophy and international relations, the author identifies three approaches in the failures of cotransformation and transition, concluding that new democratic vistas may be opened for BiH up by the pursuit of interregional programmes as well as, in response to the climate emergency and its impact on flooding and other natural disasters, within a revitalised bioregional paradigm. None of the maps which arise out of the risks of natural disasters bear any resemblance to the ‘logic’ of the map drawn at Dayton and, in peacetime, may represent a viable way forward although time is required.

Writing and Democracy in the Early United States

Writing and Democracy in the Early United States

The Magician’s Serpent

In this essay, Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. addresses the historical and contemporary failures of American democracy. Using the metaphor of “the magician’s serpent,” Glaude brings Walt Whitman’s views on democracy into the full light of America’s failure to resolve the problem of race. Glaude places Whitman’s Democratic Vistas (1871) in conversation with James Baldwin’s No Name in the Street (1972) in order to construct a different sort of reading practice that can both engage with Whitman’s views on democracy and reckon with what George Hutchinson calls Whitman’s “white imperialist self and ideology” as an indication of the limits of a certain radical democratic imagining.

A "Reconstructed Sociology": Democratic Vistas and the American Social Science Movement

A "Reconstructed Sociology": Democratic Vistas and the American Social Science Movement

Whitman's American Experience and Democracy and Divine Literatus in Democratic Vistas

Whitman's American Experience and Democracy and Divine Literatus in Democratic Vistas

The Democratic Vistas of the Body: Re-Reading the Body in Herman Melville's Typee

Herman Melville's first South Sea novel Typee (1846) is complicit with and subversive of the traditional American concept of the body. By working within the framework of the traditional body narrative (body-soul opposition), Melville aims to introduce the body as a site of political change and democracy. Melville and his narrator, the white American Tom, are always at odds as to the way in which native bodily experience is represented. While Tom struggles with the new experience, finds it hard to see it beyond his American upbringing, and eventually chooses to read it in terms of savage primitivism, the less prejudiced Melville chooses to see it differently, away from the either/or of his culture. Whether in their clothes, dances, bathing scenes, tattooing, or funeral ceremonies, the natives establish a more promising connection between the body and the soul, which, Melville believes, helps to pave the way for a more democratic reading of the body and a more democratic understanding of cultural difference.

"A Modern Poet on the Scotch Bard": Walt Whitman's 1875 Essay on Robert Burns

In his 1996 essay hitman on Burns: An Early Essay Recovered, Gary Scharnhorst draws attention to early critical essay on that had hitherto been to scholarship.1 The essay to which he refers, titled A Modern Poet on The Scotch Bard, first appeared in ephemeral newspaper titled Our Land and Time in January 1875 and was subsequently reprinted in the London Academy in February that same year. Whitman later revised the essay for publication- changing the title to Robert as Poet and Person-in the New York Critic (1882), and made minor textual edits for the North American Review in 1886. The North American Review version also appeared three times in 1888 -in November Boughs, Democratic Vistas and Other Papers (London: Walter Scott), and Complete Poems and Prose.Critics of have frequently referenced Robert as Poet and Person when commenting on the possible influence of on Whitman and, more broadly, American literature. Though Scharnhorst drew attention to the discovery of the 1875 early version almost two decades ago, remarkably little has since been written about the essay by scholars of or Whitman. Revisiting Whitman's lost essay is a useful exercise in helping to accentuate and enhance our understanding of his views on Burns. The complete lack of critical engagement with A Modern Poet on The Scotch Bard means that, hitherto, we do not have the fullest possible sense of the American poet's appraisal. I will begin by considering some of the existing commentary regarding Robert as Poet and Person before going on to examine the lost passages of the 1875 essay.Quite often, the more laudatory aspects of Robert as Poet and Person have been strongly emphasized in scholarship, leading to the popular assumption that the American poet admired and praised Burns and identified with the inextricable linkage of American liberty and the common man in Burns's art and thought.2 Perhaps the most commonly quoted, and thus influential, passage from the 1882 and 1886 essays has been W hitman's powerful proclamation that:. . . there are many things in Burns's poems and character that specially endear him to America. He was essentially a Republican-would have been at home in the Western United States, and probably become eminent there. He was average sample of the good-natured, warm-blooded, proud-spirited, amative, alimentive, convivial, young and early-middle-aged man of the decent-born middle classes everywhere and any how. Without the race of which he is a distinct specimen, (and perhaps his poems) America and her powerful Democracy could not exist to-day-could not project with unparallel'd historic sway in the future.3The esteem of Whitman, as well as praise by Ralph Waldo Emerson,4 certainly contributed to becoming an idol of both cultural and literary proportions for the nineteenth-century American reading public.5 However, as Carol McGuirk and Crawford have noted, a fuller reading of W hitman's 1886 essay reveals that the American poet was not entirely complimentary about Burns, despite heralding him as the tenderest, manliest, and (even if contradictory) dearest flesh-and-blood figure in all the streams and clusters of by-gone (NB 64; PW 2:568). In excellent essay, McGuirk suggests that W hitman seems both amazed and rather put off by Burns's emphatic rhyming sound, asserting that the strong influence of Wordsworth may have rendered Burns's verse informal for direct and full imitation by nineteenth-century American poets or too direct.6 Indeed, in Whitman's revised 1886 essay, he describes Burns's versification as idiomatic ear-cuffing restricted by a low and contracted understanding of poetry (NB 63; PW 2:567-568). While praising the raciness and humour of Burns's genuine poetic imagination, Whitman derides the morality in Burns's poetry, rendering it hardly more than parrot talk (NB 60-61; PW 2:563). …

Who signs the “empirical facts”?

One of the most ambitious forms in which literary theory’s aspiration toward a democratic universality was recently manifested followed from the so called cognitive turn induced by discoveries in modern biology. Its declared objective was to root the idea of literature in the unconscious empirical level of its reception, situated below and beyond the conscious hermeneutic level of its understanding. The first such turn toward the deep and constitutive structure of the empirical was undertaken by the Empirische Literaturwissenschaft put forth during the 1980s under the aegis of radical constructivism of the Chilean biologists Maturana and Varela; the second and more “scientific” one, proposed in the first decade of our century, pertains to what has been alternatively called the neuroaesthetics of literature, the biological literary theory, or cognitive literary studies. Both turns emerged in the German academic milieu. Both here and in the Anglophone world arguments rose against the elite bourgeois spirit of hermeneutically-oriented literary studies, by trying to establish a purely empirical frame for the reception of literature in order to introduce a universal intersubjective basis to replace the elevated subjective platform of literary studies. Without neglecting their different shaping of the basic distinction between cognition and experience, I insist that both finally reduce experience to cognition in a manner reminiscent of that which Benjamin has criticized in Kant. In his early Program of the Coming Philosophy Benjamin objects to the subordination, in Critique of Pure Reason, of empirical consciousness to transcendental categories of pure consciousness which ultimately turns experience into a mechanical unity. Though this critique may not exactly hold for Kant, as is testified by more recent readings that depart from his transcendental schemes, I will try to demonstrate that it holds for recent cognitive literary studies. This is why Benjamin’s linguistic structuring of experience, the addressed blind spot of his polemics notwithstanding, remains highly instructive. It mobilizes the concept of human mimetic ability as do the recent cognitive literary studies, to be sure, but dismantling behind the future-oriented democratic intention of the latter the hard-core bourgeois tradition. While Benjamin’s seemingly past-oriented approach to experience revitalizes the “antiquated” concept of similarity, it turns out to be opening much more democratic vistas for literary studies.

From Rifle Club to Reading Room: Sydney's Democratic Vistas, 1848-1856

The history of Chartism outside Britain remains one of the most neglected aspects of scholarship devoted to the movement. This article explores the story of two loosely connected organizations in Sydney, New South Wales, that were established by former radicals and Chartists and inspired by ideas and aspirations best understood under the rubric ‘Chartism and Something More’. Sydney's democrats, like many others throughout the Anglophone world, helped to make Chartism one of Britain's most successful, if unheralded, exports.

Buinicki, Martin T. Walt Whitman's Reconstruction: Poetry and Publishing between Memory and History [review

Martin T. Buinicki. Walt Whitman's Reconstruction: Poetry and Publishing between Memory and History. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2011. xiv + 174 pp.In his poem a Historian, published in 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass but titled so pointedly only in 1867, Whitman chided his subject for treating man as a creature of . . . aggregates. It is no mystery why historical writing proved so troubling for poet who marked eternity through his self-celebrating book: historians, working in aggregates and seeing by epistemological necessity men and women as dreams and dots, transformed people into creatures of externalities and contexts-subject to world, rather than heroic agents who, by being themselves a kosmos, made it. historian, a chronicler of creatures, threatened Whitman's own melding of nation and individual, Many in One. When John William Draper published his History of American Civil War in 1867 and promised to handle our species in masses, war lay behind him, there to analyze. Whitman's war, conversely, resided within him, there for communion. His 1867 title a Historian sounded opening salvo against rival recorders of past.This struggle with history and dilemmas posed by memory are subjects of Martin Buinicki's welcome new book. As Buinicki notes, many scholars have argued that American Civil War and Whitman's experience both during and after conflict ruptured life of Leaves of Grass. Luke Mancuso, in The Strange Sad War Revolving: Walt Whitman Reconstruction, and Emergence of Black Citizenship, 1865-1876, explores Whitman's evolving writings on black emancipation, while M. Wynn Thomas, in Lunar Light of Whitman's Poetry, offers a subtle reading of ways in which Whitman became the prophet of past. For Buinicki, however, these critics sometimes overlook poet's struggle with transience of living memory, especially when, for Whitman, viscerally charged recollections proved to be real stuffof war. To preserve and record this living history became goal of poet's backward glances and defining feature of his revisions of Leaves of Grass after 1865.Taking a cue from critics like Amanda Gailey, Buinicki notes that growth in periodical subscriptions after war gave Whitman a forum to transform his prose persona from journalist, whose voice, though personified as an eye-witness to events, nevertheless spoke from anonymity of newspaper article, to essayist, who appeared authoritatively under a byline. In this regard, Whitman's well-known work as a nurse in Washington D.C.'s hospitals, popularized by William Douglas O'Connor's The Good Gray in 1866, made him something of a known character of war years and offered him opportunity to revise his poetic and prose personae in periodicals like Harper's Monthly Magazine, Atlantic, and David G. Croly's New York Daily Graphic where, as an author of works on noncontroversial themes, like his Song of Redwood-Tree and Prayer of Columbus, Whitman appealed to growing population of middlebrow consumers of print. During this same period, Graphic published Whitman's A Biographical Sketch-An American Poet Graduating from a Printer's Case and some portions of what became Memoranda During War. Other postwar writings also reflected this self-domestication. Buinicki reminds us of disappearance of enraged slave of Lucifer poem in 1881 edition of Leaves, a change first explored, as Buinicki notes, by Ed Folsom and Kenneth M. Price, as well as deletion of a passage against protective tarifffrom Democratic Vistas when reproduced in Specimen Days and Collect. But postwar additions to Leaves proved more profound than deletions. In tandem with his growing acceptance as a popular American poet whose recollections of war proved compelling to a readership contending with war's memory, Whitman sought to incorporate conflict into his revisions of Leaves of Grass in ways that preserved immediacy of conflict and integrity of book. …

Reassessing Whitman's Hegelian Affinities

From the 1920s until the 1960s, as millie D. Jensen demonstrates in her 1964 essay, and Hegel: Curious Triplicate Process, the quiet controversy about when Whitman first became aware of the philosopher spurred some advances into the question before its appeal seemed to disappear for a time.1 facts are suggestive but do not allow a precise answer. Two anthologies which came into print around the same time as the poem that would eventually be known as song of myself, frederic H. Hedge's Prose Writers of Germany (1847) and Joseph gostick's German Literature (1854), were likely the main sources of exposure to the thought of Hegel before 1879, but it is unclear when he read them. aside from his references to the philosopher in Democratic Vistas, there is nothing to suggest that during this period he sought more knowledge about him from the groups of american devotees which began to congregate in the second half of the century. among notes a short series of entries titled The sunday evening lectures discusses Hegel and german-language philosophy, and, though it is generally agreed that these notes were written some time in the late 1860s, there is no firm evidence for a date. it is clear, however, that engagement with Hegelian thought has two phases, the first coming between 1868 and 1871 when he was at work on Democratic Vistas and the second ten years later, when he met in st. louis with the Hegelian William Torrey Harris.In addition to determining what Whitman learned about Hegel and when, interpreting their relation also often involves recognizing thatWhit- man from the outset wanted to use Hegel to frame and project the legacy of a poetics which was already a decade old. in this respect even Whit- man's own account of his Hegelianism in these years ought to be read as a proleptic rather than retrospective description, since he was turning to Hegel not for an explanation of the power of his poetry's emergence but to explain its role in the social life and future of america. With the claim that Hegel is fit for america, Whitman pretty clearly asks the philosopher to stand in for himself when his poetics are pressed to a new level of involvement with politics.2This connection betweenWhitman and hegel-politically focused- take to be the widely accepted one at the time of this writing. as Kath- ryne V. Lindberg pointed out in her powerful 1991 critique, Whitman's 'Convertible Terms,' the range of problems emerging from pretense to a widely representative selfhood have only come under scru- tiny since theory has developed terms with which to attack the hegelian affinities Whitman claimed. Lindberg puts it most concisely this way:With successive self-presentations, from the representative i to a me/myself that encloses all the questions and answers of the philosophers and priests of the past, the Whitmanesque self loses its historical specificity in order to become transcendent or, like the hegelian world historical spirit, translatable-yet Whitman also insists on being untranslatable. Just so, mergers of chauvinism and egotism into what Quentin ander- son has termed the imperial self [1971] were already apparent in the 1855 preface.3For the lines of contemporary theory most concerned to articulate the importance of differences, problematic self-conception can be traced to 1855 but only dismantled once he begins to make explicitly political and philosophical claims-as, in Lindberg's view, when he brings together in Democratic Vistas his ideal of the highest poetry as speaking for all with a rough notion of the dialectic in order to claim the impor- tance of hegel for recognizing how americans must improve on their undemocratic inheritance of english literature. so Lindberg's critique of hegelianism culminates in a deconstruction of the poem which she understands his later prose to explicate:The typical personality of poetic and critical corpus is wide, amorphous, if not aleatory. …

Democratic Vistas: Frederick Law Olmsted’s Parks as Spatial Mediation of Urban Diversity

This article examines how Frederick Law Olmsted’s parks, especially Prospect Park in Brooklyn, can be thought of as spatial technologies that mediate between individuals and their urban environment to foster an open, creative, and democratic relationship with the differences of their fellow city dwellers. The park accomplishes this spatially by encouraging citizens to journey through distinct geographies that enable associational styles Olmsted calls the “neighborly” and the “gregarious.” Through alternating between environments conducive to intimate, reassuring neighborly groupings and exciting, superficial, gregarious interaction, the park user encounters others within distinct spatial and temporal qualities that allow them to appreciate otherness without being overwhelmed by it. The spatial techniques derived from Olmsted’s work challenge accounts in political theory and urban planning that contend free movement through cities encourages tolerance and fluid identities and instead contends that structured, mediating spatial structures might be necessary to facilitate the cultivation of such characteristics.

The Politics of Survival: Peirce, Affectivity, and Social Criticism By Lara Trout

Reviewed by: The Politics of Survival: Peirce, Affectivity, and Social Criticism David A. Dilworth Lara Trout . The Politics of Survival: Peirce, Affectivity, and Social Criticism. New York: Fordham University Press, 2010. 362 pp. with Index. In this book Lara Trout provides provocative but problematic food for thought. She crafts an exegesis of Peirce's concepts of evolutionary agapism and critical commonsensism as resources for a theory of social justice aligned with contemporary race and gender theories. Conforming Peirce's tenets to her own agenda, she develops a radical politics of societal inclusiveness by way of analyzing and critiquing putative "nonconscious biases" in the "background" beliefs of broad segments of the contemporary populace. Unfortunately, this steers Peirce's ship on an unrecognizable course. Trout's strategic word, straight out of the Foucaultian-Frankfurtian play-book, is "hegemonic," which she repeatedly applies to "white males," "heterosexuals," "able-bodied people," "stable wage earners," and like targets of leftist criticism. She contrasts such "hegemonic viewpoints that are circumscribed by whiteness, maleness, economic security, heterosexuality, and so on" with those of "oppressed groups, such as the poor, GLBTQs, people of color, and women." (The capitalized letters refer to persons who do not consider themselves heterosexual, such as "those who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, queer, or questioning.") Through this problematically mixed polarization of societal groups—a kind of Nietzschean theory in reverse drive—she both coopts Peirce's philosophy for her communitarian concept of social justice and critically contests it—pointedly, as I will indicate below, by proposing a concept of "everyday science" or "communal science" in lieu of Peirce's concept of "real science." Needless to say, such a politicized "consensus" theory collides head-on with Peirce's objective realism—his sense of truth and reality that is independent of you, me, or any group or epoch of persons. By itself, Trout's polarization of social groups is an ingenious blame game. The accompanying problem is that her political solution seems logically to entail a system of social engineering not only over nurture but also over nature—shades of the flattened-out, dumbed-down populace of Kurt Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron. [End Page 524] For his part, Peirce's career followed in the wake of such leading 19th-century proponents of democratic social theory as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman. Though never directly framing a theory of the State, Peirce's Pragmatism (later Pragmaticism) wrote the so-to-speak epistemology of democracy in its essential logic of free inquiry and accomplishment in a merit-based society. (Continuing this heritage of the American cultural symbolic, James and Dewey, though arguably in more attenuated versions, wrote democratic scripts to the same effect.) Whitman's magnificently inclusive "Song of Myself " and Democratic Vistas followed in the lead of Emerson's "Politics" of 1844. In the latter Emerson inscribed his two laws of identity and metamorphosis, which in turn grounded his twin political principles of equality and property.1 The first of these principles Peirce generalized into his broad-banded Pragmatist sense (fallibilist, self-corrective, open-ended, cooperative, inter-national, inter-cultural, inter-generational) of equality of opportunity in the domain of conceptual activity. Any dedicated, competent person can cast a vote, so to speak, in the open-ended arena of the pursuit of truth—as inscribed in his guiding maxim of keeping open the road of rational inquiry. And for Peirce (as for Emerson and Whitman) differential property did not reduce to material gain—to the contrary, all three American thinkers inveighed against the Greed Gospel of their own century—but rather referred to the freedom of productive invention and achievement, and thus to the intellectual and moral property an individual person, or group of persons, or even nations and epochs can contribute to the progress of civilization. By and large, passages of Trout's book range competently over Peirce's social semiosis, and her overall vision of societal inclusiveness is preciously endearing. But her superimposed "biological survival model" crimps Peirce's more balanced pluralistic episteme of spontaneous orientations and creative achievements as ideal ends of nature and society. Trout's vision is transparently agenda-d. Adopting a contemporary "pragmatist-feminist" perspective, she goes so...

Leaves of Grassroots Politics: Whitman, Carlyle, and the Imagination of Democratic Vistas

Leaves of Grassroots Politics: Whitman, Carlyle, and the Imagination of Democratic Vistas

The Ontology of Public Space

The “new governance” envisions a network of so-called actors—sometimes organizations, sometimes individuals—which collaborate with each other to accomplish policy goals. But the ontology of this model has been largely unexplored. When examined, its objectivist assumptions obscure network dynamics and render mysterious whatever collaboration manages to occur. These assumptions, it is argued, are not logically or empirically necessary. An alternative ontology, grounded in phenomenology, opens democratic vistas that comport as well or better with empirical reality and provide much stronger support for democratic governance.

Democracy and Its Discontents in Oregon Political History

ROBERT D. JOHNSTON Democracy and Its Discontents in Oregon Political History We are the political and social descendants and heirs of pioneers who had a passionate belief in the common man and inhis ability to organize a society inwhich he could livea lifefreefromrestraintand intolerance,and enrichedby all thathis predecessors had found good. ?Cornelia Marvin Pierce, 1927 ONE OF THE MOST distinctive ? and tomy mind, attractive ? quali ties of Oregon politics historically has been the robust belief in the virtues of the common citizenry. Alas, the history of Oregon's unique strain of hyper-democracy inmany ways remains to be written. Fortunately, the contributors to the sesquicentennial series in this Fall issue of theQuarterly present a vivid and complex set of explorations of the fate of democracy (roughly defined as rule of the government by thewhole people) in twentieth-century Oregon. Cheryl Gunselman takes on the life and politics of Cornelia Marvin Pierce, helping to show how the author of the forceful quotation above often, but by no means always, lived up to the best tendencies in her democratic ideology. The not-uncritical story that Gunselman tells is of a remarkable woman who, despite her frequently imperious character, played a significant role in defining and extending Oregon's democratic culture. Yet, ifGunselman's articles makes us feel at all self-congratulatory about such democratic vistas, Kimberly Jensen, in the first general scholarly exploration ofwomen and citizenship inOregon history, asks us to think about themany limits to democratic participation the state'swomen have experienced, and the halting nature of democratic advance along the gender line. In turn,Robert R.McCoy comes down in the OHQ vol. no, no. 3 ? 2009 Oregon Historical Society middle. In his analysis of the politics ofWalter Pierce ? one of the state's most important political figures ? McCoy argues that individuals who are impressively democratic at one moment can, without real contradiction in their own philosophies, be exclusionary and anti-democratic the next. All three authors demonstrate that the democratic impulse, and pro gressive democratic rhetoric, can sometimes serve as a false ? and even dangerous ? mask behind which lies the face of racism, xenophobia, and even tyranny.Arguably, this continuous tension between democracy and equality, between inclusion and exclusion, while hardly unique to the state, is the special Burden of Oregon History.1 SERENDIPITY PLACES CORNELIA Marvin Pierce'sbirthplace in Monti cello, Iowa. She was, in tellingways, quite like the famous eighteenth-century Virginian Thomas Jefferson, who named his home Monticello. Both were very sure of themselves and of thewisdom of the people. Both believed pas sionately in expanding public education for the common people in order to produce amore enlightened citizenry; Jeffersonfounded theUniversity ofVirginia, and Marvin Pierce was the architect ofOregon's public library system and aswell as an important crusader forhigher education. They both considered themselves modern, scientific, and enlightened ? and believed that enlightened, scientific,modern life could best be served by democracy. At the same time, both had fundamental flaws in their democratic visions ? Jefferson's,of course, was slavery, and Marvin Pierce's the eugenic idea of better breeding of humans in order to eliminate weak creatures from the populace. There was also at least one major difference between Jeffersonand Pierce: gender. The egalitarian political culture that Jeffersonplayed such a crucial role inunleashing during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries offered almost no formal political roles forwomen. Yet, throughout thenineteenth century, various radical women seized on the rhetoric in theDeclaration of Independence to expand political oppor tunities for them and their sisters.Despite Marvin Pierce's own difficult-to explain ambivalence about woman suffrage, shewas asmuch a beneficiary of this other revolutionary tradition as shewas of the Jeffersonian legacy.A proud Midwesterner who forged her professional and political philosophies in the crucible of progressive Wisconsin's "laboratory of democracy," Corne liaMarvin came toOregon as a self-conscious pioneer and missionary. She signed on to build Oregon's public library system and then spent the next two decades literally creating the state'smodern constellation of libraries. Following custom ? and constraint ? she resigned her high-profile posi tion on hermarriage to Walter Pierce. She then accepted an appointment to Johnston, Democracy and ItsDiscontents inOregon Political...

Walt Whitman's "Higher Progress" and Shorter Work Hours

Analyzes Democratic Vistas and other writings to demonstrate that part of Whitman’s conception of “higher progress” involved the attainment of freedom beyond basic necessities in order to gain “liberty’s ultimate challenge”—for “citizens to fill the purest of freedoms with activities that were complete in themselves”; goes on to track Whitman’s involvement in the movement to reduce working hours, increase leisure, and develop “labor-saving machines,” all of which formed “the obvious practical link between increasing material wealth and ‘higher progress’”; concludes by considering the influence of Whitman’s “higher progress” on John Maynard Keynes and on economists and historians of labor over the past fifty years.