In this “Conversation with Authors,” we spoke with APSR author Jack Turner about his open access article “Whitman’s Undemocratic Vistas: Mortal Anxiety, National Glory, White Supremacy.”

APSR: What are the aims of your paper, and where did the idea for it come from? More specifically, has the common misinterpretation of Vistas always been of concern to you, or is this something you noticed upon revisiting the work?

Jack Turner: The idea for this paper came from many years of studying Democratic Vistas, from examining contradictions of the text, and immersing myself in the context to figure out what these contradictions reveal and what strategies they disclose. Vistas is a work I’ve been reading and re-reading for the past 25 years. I read this for the first time as a junior in college and immediately was taken by it. I knew this kind of writing – work that merged literature and political theory—was what I wanted to spend my time studying. I ended up writing my senior essay on Whitman.

As I’ve revisited it over the years, I’ve come to see more and more contradictions in the text. Its position on suffrage, for example, became increasingly puzzling. One the one hand, it praises suffrage in general. but on the other hand, it seemingly goes out of the way to avoid the mention of Black people’s suffrage. This is notable, because at this time Whitman, in his other works, is voicing a great deal of hostility toward the extension of suffrage to Black folks. As I kept researching Whitman and doing a deeper dive on the context of his work, I came to realize there’s a reason why he’s engaging in this particular rhetorical strategy: He’s praising suffrage in general to satisfy his abolitionist audience while avoiding specific mention of Black suffrage in order to appeal and engage with a Southern, white audience who has so recently rejoined the Union. It became very clear that he’s engaging in this reconciliationist literary strategy, which helps explain not only his peculiar position on Black suffrage but also many of the imperial references in his works. What my years of study revealed was a very undemocratic subtext which is reflective of America’s own ambivalent relationship with democracy.

APSR: What did you find most difficult in researching or writing about this topic, especially after having spent so many years studying this particular text?

Jack Turner: The most difficult aspect of writing this particular piece was learning how to make sense of silence. This is a notoriously difficult issue in literary criticism and interpretive political theory. On the one hand, when you encounter a text that’s silent on a particular topic it could mean something quite ordinary; it could simply mean that the silent subject is not their focus even if I, as the reader, might think it’s obvious to focus on that subject in that context. But then there are some silences that are so conspicuous and so strange. Whitman wrote Democratic Vistas between 1867 and 1870. This is a time when the 14th and 15^th amendments are being debated in Congress. It’s also a time when Northern intellectuals, including many in Whitman’s own circle, are debating the merits of Black suffrage and the ways in which it could further the reintegration of the South into the Union. This is also occurring in Washington, D.C., where the Black population has more than doubled since the beginning of the Civil War. Taking all this into account, the fact that there are no Black people mentioned in Democratic Vistas is peculiar, especially for a writer who decided that the everyday life of Americans was going to be his subject. He’s surrounded by Black people in Washington, D.C. everyday yet makes no mention of them in Vistas at all. How do we make sense of this silence?

When you look at Whitman’s mentions of Black Americans in other works of the time, you see he had real doubts about Black suffrage. When you put these two things side-by-side you begin to notice the subtextual references to Black folks in Vistas. I triangulate Whitman on this topic by comparing this work to Ulysses S. Grant on Black suffrage and to John Stuart Mill on benevolent despotism at that time. I then get to see the same type of discursive moves, the carving out of the exception that Black people should be members of the Union but deemed not yet ready for self-government.

APSR: Has the challenge of making sense of silence hindered other scholars from recognizing the white supremacist undertones in Whitman’s work?

Jack Turner: The challenge of Democratic Vistas is not only that there is silence, but also that, to fully appreciate the piece, you must be ambivalent about it. It is a revolutionary text in democratic theory. I can think of no other text in the 19^th century that does as good a job theorizing the democracy of everyday life. Furthermore, it’s a profound statement of what democracy means in its existential dimensions, such as how democracy entails both a new conceptualization and a new affirmation of human identity, and an equal dignity among citizens. Vistas is quite pathbreaking in those respects.

However, this coexists alongside an implicit commitment to racial inequality. I think people struggle to hold both realities within their own mind, so they focus on one aspect or the other when examining the piece. What I’m saying is we can tell a story about this piece keeping both realities in view.

APSR:  What was one aspect or one theme that surprised you the most when researching and writing this article?

Jack Turner: The settler-colonial angle was something that emerged fairly late, after I started making sense of Whitman’s imperial references. Nineteenth-century American prose is filled with imperial references, and a lot of times it’s merely rhetorical flourish. I could see in Vistas, though, that it was more than that. Whitman’s references reveal an actual commitment to westward movement, which he knew would result in the displacement and death of Native Americans. Westward movement would be the ground for reconciliation between North and South and the emergence of the United States as an imperial nation.

In some ways, Whitman wants to frame American Empire as being merely about ideas, about example. On the other hand, he has all sorts of evidence at his disposal that this expansion will be a violent and bloody process. We know for a fact that when America does emerge as an imperial power in the Pacific, nearly 40 years after Vistas is published, it entails the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Filipinos, for example. This is not, of course, something Whitman could have planned or that he expressly affirmed. It is, however, a consequence he should have anticipated. He had the means to acknowledge the realities of American empire and, in some ways, much of his rhetoric authorizes these realities.

As Jeanne Morefield has taught us, so much of American Empire is about deflection. It’s about paying tribute to the ways in which American Empire will produce good influence in world affairs without owning up at all to the death and dismemberment that will result from such expansion. Those who promote empire have no excuse for not knowing the realities of empire.

APSR:  We often ask authors to relate their work to contemporary debates in American society. How do you see this piece relating to the current discussions of white supremacy and institutional racism in the United States? Or perhaps the rigorous debate over CRT?

Jack Turner: There are certainly parallels. What I hope an article like this can do is overcome some of the need to say either America is an incorrigibly racist society or that America has been a resource for democracy at large. I think this piece shows that the US has contributed to the world’s democratic project, but it has also, at the same time, been a world example of white supremacy and settler colonialism. These two things coexist within the US experience. I take exception to some democratic theorists who say that democracy and white supremacy are joined at the hip, conceptually. I don’t think this is true. I think they are fundamentally contradictory logics that just happen to coexist in practice. No doubt it is extremely difficult to disentangle them, historically and in practice, but I don’t want to say that democracy is fated to always be white supremacist or fated to always be settler colonialist. I do think there can be anti-racist and anti-imperialist forms of democracy. Analyzing a figure like Whitman gives us the capacity to hold that ambivalence about the American experience, identifying both the resources it offers and the cautionary tales it offers.

APSR:  You have a book on Whitman in the works. Is this article part of that book project? What would you like readers to know about this book and line of work moving forward?

Jack Turner: This article is a part of a larger Whitman book project that I hope to complete within the year. I think this book shows Whitman at his best: a profound philosopher of democracy and death. He’s a philosopher who believes that democracy can help us learn how to die our own deaths, how to embrace our own limitation and mortality, and how to feel gratitude in the face of these limitations rather than resentment. The book also shows that sometimes philosophers’ own mortal anxieties about death, status, and legacy get the best of them. In Whitman’s case, his own anxiety about his status as a democratic writer and as someone who believed he had something to teach future generations went so deep that he felt he needed to identify with an imperial and immortal nation. He thought America would be that imperial, immortal nation. So this is a book about the way in which philosophers’ mortal anxiety gets the best of them and even betrays their best philosophy.

– Jack Turner, The University of Washington