Walt Whitman: “A Feather in My Wings”

WALT WHITMAN (1819–1892), the great American poet, was also a public health activist. We have presented excerpts from several of his notable early articles on water. Whitman began his career as a journalist, writing frequently on public health issues ranging from cholera to bathing to clean air.¹ From 1846 to early 1848, he served as editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and used his columns in that paper and others to argue for public health reforms, especially the provision of clean water for Brooklyn, New York, which was by 1850—at a population of nearly 140000 people—one of the largest urban areas in the United States.

Whitman, or “Walt,” had long been interested in problems of municipal water supply, but when his younger brother, Thomas Jefferson Whitman, or “Jeff,” became a sanitary engineer, his advocacy became all the more informed.² At the age of 23 years, Jeff worked under the celebrated engineer James P. Kirkwood on the location and construction of the Brooklyn waterworks.¹ The water works were planned by William Jarvis McAlpine, the civil engineer who also designed and built the Albany, New York, waterworks in 1850 and 1851, and the Chicago, Illinois, waterworks from 1851 to 1854. Toward the end of his life, Walt related his enthusiastic support of the Brooklyn waterworks as “a feather in my wings”—an accomplishment of which he was especially proud.² As he wrote to fellow journalist Charles M. Skinner, “I bent the whole weight of the paper steadily in favor of the McAlpine plan [for the new waterworks], as against a flimsy, cheap and temporary series of works that would have long since broken down, and disgraced the city.”³ The Brooklyn waterworks were completed in 1858.

The following years saw the paths and experiences of the Whitman brothers diverge considerably, even while they remained close as brothers. In 1860, Jeff became an assistant engineer in the sewer departments of Brooklyn and New York City. In 1863, while Jeff became chief assistant engineer under Moses Lane of the Consolidated Sewer and Water Departments of Brooklyn, Walt traveled to Washington, DC, in search of their other brother, George, whose name the Whitman family saw listed on a newspaper casualty roster from the battlefield at Fredericksburg, Virginia. After searching for George in nearly 40 Washington hospitals, Walt traveled to Fredericksburg to find George's unit. There, he found George alive and having suffered a superficial facial wound. However, Walt's personal relief quickly turned to horror as he witnessed the human costs of battle. “I notice a heap of amputated feet, legs, arms, hands, &c.,” he wrote in his wartime journal, “a full load for a one-horse cart.”⁴ Here, Walt believed, the future of US democracy was being amputated and killed. The experience of this tragedy loomed large in his mind as he devoted himself not only to visiting Washington's hospitals and nursing wounded soldiers, but also concerning himself through his writing with the health and well-being of the American public divided by war.