Walt Whitman, Plagiarist?
By: John Thorn
Tags: Ken Burns, Baseball, Brooklyn Eagle, New York Atlas, Walt Whitman

And I followed, focusing on The Park … and then came the thunderclap, which I noted with a flurry of asterisks:

Deatil of ball players in 1855 litho by McSpedon & Baker

Games of bat and ball were played in The Park (in front of City Hall) in the 1820s. Baseball appears to be played in City Hall Park in a lithograph entitled “The Park, 1827,” published as the frontispiece to Valentine’s Manual of the Corporation of the City of New York, 1855. This 1855 litho was pretty clearly based upon a contemporary (1820s) watercolor by Alexander Jackson Davis:

Watercolor of City Hall Park by Alexander Jackson Davis, 1827

***Further — and perhaps more importantly — certain lines in the 1845 Atlas note were *also* used by Whitman in his now-famous “sun-down perambulations of late” [passage in the Eagle] of July 23, 1846!!***

ATLAS: “Let us go forth awhile, and get better air in our lungs. Let us leave our close rooms, and the dust and corruption of stagnant places, and taste some of the good things Providence has scattered around so liberally.” ALSO: “We would that all the young fellows about town were daily in the habit of spending an hour or two in some out-door game or recreation. The body and mind would both be benefitted by it. There would be fewer attenuated forms and shrunken limbs and pallid faces in our streets. The game of ball, especially its best game, cricket, is glorious — that of quoits is invigorating — so is leaping, running, wrestling, &c. &c.”

EAGLE: “Let us go forth awhile, and get better air in our lungs. Let us leave our close rooms, and the dust and corruption of stagnant places, and taste some of the good things Providence has scattered around so liberally.” ALSO: “The game of ball is glorious — that of quoits is invigorating — so are leaping, running, wrestling, &c. &c.”

“Was Whitman the author of the 1845 Atlas note?” I wrote to the 19th Century Baseball listserv. “Did he later plagiarize himself, or an anonymous other? This is to me of some consequence.”

I sent these observations to my friend Ed Folsom, the great scholar who co-edits The Walt Whitman Archive (whitmanarchive.org). He replied:

Whitman the dandy; ca. 1848 daguerreotype by John Plumbe, Jr.

Both scenarios are possibilities, since Whitman often plagiarized passages in both his poetry and his journalism. As the databases of nineteenth-century periodicals continues to grow, we continue to find more and more cases. On the other hand, Whitman had a long relationship with the owners of the New York Atlas, Anson Herrick and John Ropes (Herrick remained associated with the paper from its beginnings through the 1850s).

Whitman had edited the Aurora in 1842, which was also owned by Herrick and Ropes, who famously declared Whitman as “the laziest fellow who ever undertook to edit a city paper.” They fired him from that position. But that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t have published writings of his in the Atlas, and, indeed, Whitman’s recently rediscovered journalistic series, “Manly Health and Training” (which also mentions baseball), appeared in the Atlas in 1858. Here’s a good summary of the situation: https://whitmanarchive.org/published/periodical/journalism/tei/per.00594.html

“Manly Health and Training,” by Mose Velsor (Whitman’s mother’s maiden name)

Here is the Atlas passage of June 15, 1845, with Whitman’s later republication (July 23, 1846) rendered in — aptly — boldface. Note that The Park of 1845 has been replaced by “the outer parts of Brooklyn” and Manhattan’s mid-day exchanged for sundown across the East River.

No longer the dandy of Aurora days, Whitman in the 1850s dressed as a vagabondo; daguerreotype possibly by Gabriel Harrison

Public Baths and Grounds for Athletic Exercises. — [Whitman, 1846: “Brooklyn Young Men. — Athletic exercises. — In our sun-down perambulations, of late, through the outer parts of Brooklyn, we have observed several parties of youngsters playing ‘base,’ a certain game of ball.”] During many of the pleasant days we have had the past spring, persons walking by the Park, between noon and an hour later, must have observed several parties of youngsters playing “base,” a certain game of ball. We wish such sights were more common among us. In the practice of athletic and manly sports, the young men of New York are very deficient–perhaps more so than those of any other large city that could be mentioned. Clerks are shut up from early morning till nine or ten o’clock at night–apprentices, after their days’ works, either go to bed or lounge about in places where they benefit neither body or mind–and all classes seem to act as though there were no commendable objects of pursuit in the world except making money, and tenaciously sticking to one’s trade or occupation.

“Now, as the fault is so generally of this kind, we can do little harm in hinting to people that, after all, there may be no necessity for such a drudge system among men. Let us enjoy life a little. Has God made this beautiful earth–the sun to shine–all the sweet influences of nature to operate–and planted in man a wish for their delights–and all for nothing? Let us go forth awhile, and get better air in our lungs. Let us leave our close rooms, and the dust and corruption of stagnant places, and taste some of the good things Providence has scattered around so liberally.

“We would that all the young fellows about town were daily in the habit of spending an hour or two in some out-door game or recreation. The body and mind would both be benefitted by it. There would be fewer attenuated forms and shrunken limbs and pallid faces in our streets. The game of ball, especially its best game, cricket, [Whitman in 1846 omitted this reference to cricket] is glorious–that of quoits is invigorating–so is leaping, running, wrestling, &c. &c.” [To the Atlas passage Whitman appended: “To any person having the least knowledge of physiology, it were superfluous to enter into any argument to prove the use and benefit of exercise. We have far too little of it in this country, among the ‘genteel’ classes. Both women and men, particularly the younger ones, should be careful to pass no day of their lives without a portion of out-door exercise.”

***

So … was Whitman a boldfaced plagiarist, or did he copy himself? Let’s examine his whereabouts in the 1840s before he landed at the Eagle in March 1846. Born in Brooklyn in 1819, he lived in Manhattan from 1835 to 1836 and again from 1841 to 1845. On March 28, 1842 — one month after its founding by Anson Herrick and John F. Ropes of the Atlas, with which it shared quarters at 162 Nassau Street, Whitman was announced as the editor of the Aurora, replacing Thomas L. Nichols. A Democratic newspaper opposed to Tammany Hall, the Aurora advocated for workingmen’s rights and attracted the pen of Mike Walsh and his Spartan set.