Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

the entire world. Thus, workers, slaves, Native Americans, and financierssuffered or enjoyed contrasting fates in a single century which changed thefact of the North American continent.Yet in the middle of the nineteenth century one individual—a poet,nurse, philosopher and sage—gathered his thoughts and essays on“Democracy and the Individual,” which he had been working on since1862 when he left his post as newspaper editor in New York to visit hiswounded brother on a Virginia battlefield. He had undergone a maturingprocess while working as a nurse in the war hospitals in Washington, D.C.,comforting young soldiers, carrying sweets, and paper, writing letters, orassisting in operations. During these years, Walt Whitman (1819–1892) unitedhimself with his country’s tragedy and watched daily as President Lincolnrode into Washington on his horse on the way to the war cabinet, wearingon his face the signs and impressions of a war pitting North against theSouth, slave-owners against abolitionists, industrialists against agrarians,and brothers against brothers at the cost of millions of lives. After the war,in 1871, Whitman took a very hard look at America and wrote about it inhis “Democratic Vistas”: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 the present, and here in theUnited States. Genuine belief seems to have left us. The underlyingprinciples of the States are not honestly believed in, nor is humanityitself believed in. What penetrating eye can not see through themask? 4Behind this mask, Whitman perceived three stages in the democraticexperiment of the American people. The first stage was the establishmentof political foundations upon which the rights of millions of people rested,embodied in the Declaration of Independence, the Federal Constitution,and the state governments, all constructed for universal man and not forthe classes.The second stage related to material prosperity, wealth, produce, laborsavingmachines, iron, cotton, local state and continental railways,intercommunication and trade with all lands, steamship, mining,general employment, organization of great cities, cheap appliancesfor comfort, numberless technical schools, books, newspapers, acurrency for money circulation, etc. … 5309