Whitman’s democracy critique was unsuited to Reagan’s sanitizing ritual

Evidence

Walt Whitman would have been a better fit for King, but Whitman’s Democratic Vistas posed a significant challenge to Reagan’s act of disremembering. “We have frequently printed the word Democracy,” Whitman declared. “Yet I cannot too often repeat that it is a word the real gist of which still sleeps, quite unawakened, notwithstanding the resonance and the many angry tempests out of which its syllables have come, from pen or tongue.” Whittier offered, instead, a template for imagining America’s distinctiveness in its own idiom without the worry about sleepwalkers. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 288

Categorization

Category: Craft and Method