Category: History

Walt Whitman Championed Democracy and Fought for Copyright – Part II

(This post was first published as part of Copyright Alliance’s Secret History of Copyright Series)

“This copyright bill is the doing as we would be done by.” — Walt Whitman, 1891—

Upon passage of the international copyright law just about a year before his death, Walt Whitman’s comment (quoted in Part I) included this refrain of the Golden Rule, about which scholar Martin Buinicki, in his 2003 paper writes the following: “The somewhat grumpy pragmatism evident in Whitman’s ‘do unto others’ defense of his views is offset by the revelation that the international copyright law was more than a business matter for Whitman; it was ‘a question of honesty—of morals—of a literature, in fact.’” 

Despite America’s eventual leadership as a mass producer and exporter of creative works by the mid-20th century, the U.S. was remarkably slow to adopt international copyright agreements in contrast to European and other major trading partners.  Walt Whitman’s career coincided almost exactly with the roughly fifty-year interval between early debate on international copyright and ultimate ratification of the law; and in the same spirit in which Whitman answered Emerson’s call for a new—and intrinsically American—voice, he devoted that voice to the cause of copyright as in one editorial, written in 1846 for the Brooklyn Evening Star, which states…

“The writers of America are more miserably paid than their class are in any other part of the world.  And this will continue to be the case so long as we have no international copyright.  At this time there is hardly any encouragement at all for the literary profession in the way of book-writing.  Most of our authors are frittering away their brains for an occasional five dollar bill from the magazine publishers.”

For roughly a half century, while America’s trading partners adopted various international copyright agreements, the U.S. Congress remained persuaded by the independent publishers—this included printers, typefounders, bookbinders, et al—who argued that adoption of international copyright would result in large, eastern firms gaining monopoly control by virtue of their being the only entities with the resources and relationships necessary to obtain licenses for foreign manuscripts.

Thus, Buinicki sees as relevant Whitman’s dual role as both author and “defender of the artisan class.”  “Just as [Whitman] felt that American democracy could foster native authors even as it provided fair treatment for foreign authors, his publishing practices collapsed the kind of printer-author-publisher oppositions that remained at the center of the monopoly dispute,” writes Buinicki.  This refers to the fact that, as a staunch advocate of international copyright, Whitman also remained close to the independent printing industry, in which he had apprenticed years before becoming the author and poet we know today.

When he self-published Leaves of Grass in 1855, Whitman employed a small, independent firm and even helped set type for the first edition.  DIY in both spirit and practice long before that acronym existed, the views of America’s preeminent, democratic poet would offer little support to today’s digital-age pundits, who like to contrast—rather than correlate—the interests of independent artists with the purpose of copyright.

As Buinicki observes in his paper, Whitman’s advocacy of copyright was much broader than his own—or any other author’s—proximate financial needs; it envisioned a mature and holistic culture in which America should not merely strive for a place among the global anthology of creative works, but would be uniquely poised to lead in the production of culture.  He was one of many authors and artists (and not all of these were American), who believed instinctively that the brash, American experiment in republicanism—codifying the freedoms of speech, religion, and the press—implied an unprecedented opportunity for creative expression in Western culture.

It cannot be overstated that when Whitman began his career, the United States was still a stumbling, backwater nation in more ways than one.  The Revolution generation was just dying off, and the next wave, with a median age under 18, were just beginning to imagine how the principles enshrined in the Constitution might actually apply to people other than privileged, white men.  Against this backdrop, Buinicki places Whitman as a critic of America’s timidity in plodding toward adoption of international copyright, suggesting an unwillingness to compete with the more developed nations of the world.  Picking up on Whitman’s sentiments, Buinicki writes …

“The American bard does not thrive by squelching competition but by meeting it openly and generously. Monopoly, on the other hand, suggests selfishness, and its true evil is that, since it is paired with secrecy, it precludes fair and open participation, even if that participation comes in the form of market competition.”

Citing clear examples in both Whitman’s poetry and his correspondences with various publishers, Buinicki demonstrates how the author recognized that the true threat of monopoly lay in the capacity of the predatory entity to act in secret—to exploit without permission.  What mattered to Whitman—as it matters to nearly all creators today—was to be asked, and not exclusively for the purpose of payment.

For Whitman, who articulated, and insisted upon, a metaphysical connection linking himself, his work, and his readers, copyright was an extension of that nexus rather than a barrier to it.  While the modern copyright skeptic seeks to limit originality in the author by over-emphasizing the commons of creative consciousness, Whitman synthesized these forces in his poetry and his copyright advocacy.  “Whitman exploited all means available, including the legal means offered through copyright, to make each copy of the book embody the personal exchange he called for in his poetry,” Buinicki writes.

The passage of the international copyright law did not result in publishing monopolies, a reduction in authorship, or outsized costs to consumers. To the contrary, by ending the piratical American trade in foreign manuscripts, international copyright law had the predicted effect of stimulating investment in American authors, thus opening the door to the US not only out-producing most countries in creative authorship, but also to making creative work one of the nation’s most lucrative and most salutary exports.  Hence, Buinicki’s conclusion says it best …

“Whitman’s support for the passage of an international copyright law in the US … was more than a matter of simply protecting his business interests: it was inextricably linked to his idea of an equal, open, and connected democracy.”

Walt Whitman Championed Democracy and Fought for Copyright – Part I

(This post was first published as part of Copyright Alliance’s Secret History of Copyright Series)

“Publishers move without concert, harmony, or agreement. There is no law to regulate their rights, and they have none (which are respected) by courtesy.  They print the same book, and the spirit of competition is such as to destroy all correctness, all taste, and all chance of profit.  The result is, that the author gets nothing, the publisher is subjected to losses, and the public are never satisfied.  An international copyright law would remove these evils.”

 — Nahum Capen, 1844 —

This excerpt from a Memorial written by a notable Boston author, editor, and publisher fairly well sums up the state of book publishing—and most creative work—in the embryonic America of the mid-19th century. It is not mere coincidence that the evolution of an American artistic voice parallels the development of U.S. copyright law; and the passage of an international copyright statute in 1891 was a key milestone—culturally, economically, creatively, and politically—in the nation’s progress toward global maturity.  One important advocate of that law also happened to be one of the nation’s first truly domestic creative voices—the poet Walt Whitman, who viewed the adoption of international copyright as a matter of democratic principle even more than a matter of economic purpose.

Creativity today is entirely democratic.  We understand that works of great genius and value might come from anywhere.  But many of America’s most influential authors and thinkers, during the years between the Revolution and the Civil War, believed that literature should remain tethered to classical, elitist traditions.  Thus, while American copyright law evolved throughout the 19th century, charting a course distinct from the antecedents of English common law, a new American creative voice was emerging at the same time.  Indeed, there was a conscious, creative/political movement that may be roughly bracketed between an 1837 speech by Ralph Waldo Emerson and the literary apotheosis expressed in Whitman’s Leaves of Grassin 1855.

It was August 31, 1837, when Emerson spoke to the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard University in which he called upon young, domestic authors to write the narrative of the new nation rather than to continue to “feed on the sere remains of foreign harvests.”  Emerson’s address helped galvanize a broad, cultural shift that was just percolating among the first post-Revolution, literary figures in the nation, and among these was Whitman, who published his first short stories in a new periodical founded on the principles of this movement—the United States Magazine and Democratic Review.

Whitman was a colleague of the Young Americans—they were contemporaries of other literary- nationalist movements in Europe—who had intentionally set out to democratize literary work as an essential ingredient to democratizing America itself.  Although the policy views of these young Democrats are too myriad, factional, and contradictory to synthesize in this short essay, the one consistent belief of the Young Americans was that culture and literature should not be authored solely by the nation’s aristocratic, Anglo conservatives.  Whitman was, therefore, a key figure in America’s first clash of generations, with younger authors insisting that the American voice must become far more diverse than works steeped in European traditions and flowing from Puritan epicenters like Harvard and Yale.

Capen’s observations about the state of publishing was contemporaneous with early debates on international copyright, which the independent American book publishers successfully opposed for decades, primarily by asserting that the law would give the larger printing firms monopoly control over all publishing.  In truth, most American publishers of all sizes were accustomed to the trade in copies of European—mostly English—books without license, and Capen’s Memorial also notes that that these volumes tended to be cheaply made products with flawed pages and weak bindings (i.e. disposable).  Hence, American rejection of international copyright throughout most of its first century had the twin effect of disenfranchising foreign authors from the American market while simultaneously retarding investment in domestic authors and a domestic publishing industry.

When Charles Dickens toured America in 1842 and advocated that the U.S. adopt international copyright, he was scorned by many, including in several editorials that forecast today’s digital-age critics of copyright.  In fact, it was the founding editor of the Democratic Review, John O’Sullivan, who broke rank with his literary colleagues by opposing international copyright in an 1843 editorial, in which he said of Dickens, “He has certainly been richly enough paid at home, in pecuniary rewards as well as in public honor, for what he has done, to leave him but slender ground on which to ask a return of mere volunteer generosity on our part for the pleasure his admirable writings have afforded us.”

O’Sullivan acknowledged the same article that his opposition to an international copyright law was contrary to the beliefs of his fellow authors, and this included Whitman, who had earlier written a defense of Dickens (nicknamed Boz) in the Evening Tattler.   Although critical of Dickens’s alleged (and it turns out inaccurately reported) haughty tone toward the Americans, Whitman wrote, “Let Boz—ungrateful as he has proved himself—let him be treated fairly.  He no doubt came over here with the main purpose of effecting an international copyright:  we are among those who believe that a law to that effect would be wise and righteous.”

Whitman self-published Leaves of Grassin 1855, carving a new, egalitarian, domestic verse out of a long walk through New York City, filled with industry, sweat, agony, pathos, and sex.  Literally and metaphorically a response to Emerson’s call to “sing” the song of the young nation, it begins with the democratic vow …

I celebrate myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

One might think the symbiotic relationship between author and reader inherent to those words—and indeed evident throughout Whitman’s poetry—would be anathema to a passionate defense of copyright.  But in fact, Whitman promoted the cause of international copyright throughout his career—his first article supporting the law was published more than a decade before he published Leaves of Grass—viewing the principle primarily as an expression of moral and democratic values and, therefore, consistent with the literary aspirations of Young America. He just barely lived to witness the law’s passage in 1891, about which he wrote…

“We have our international copyright at last—the bill is signed today. The United States, which should have been the first to pass the thing, is the last. Now all civilized nations have it. It is a question of honesty—of morals—of a literature, in fact. I know it will be said by some—Here, now, how is it that you, Walt Whitman, author of ‘Leaves of Grass,’ are in favor of such a thing? Ought the world not to own the world in common? Well, when others do, we will, too. This copyright bill is the doing as we would be done by.”

American Literature Professor Martin Buinicki of Valparaiso University, in an article published in 2003, seeks to harmonize Whitman’s democratic ideals, his writing, his relationship to the independent publishers of the period, and his advocacy of copyright. “Taken at face value,” Buinicki writes, “Whitman’s careful tending of his copyrights appears not only to contradict his democratic declarations but also to trouble his bold assertions of artistic independence:  by scrupulously protecting his copyrights …”

In Part II of this post, I’ll expand on why that “face value” assumption is incorrect and why Whitman, therefore, serves as a foil to many assumptions made by copyright critics about the motives of authors.

American Identity is in the Music

My generation was raised on Schoolhouse Rock!. As such, we were not only told that America is a Melting Pot but were reminded of this on a regular basis in a song from that animated series, the melody of which is now ringing in the heads of any fellow Gen-Xers reading this post. Of course, the more mature truth is that America is not really a melting pot so much as it is a seething cauldron of incompatible ingredients that only manage to blend into something palatable after considerable simmer time. When The Great American Melting Pot episode first aired in May of 1976, it was just three months after violent race riots had broken out at a Florida high school over symbols celebrating the South in the Civil War.

In response to last weekend’s tragic events in Charlottesville, friends posted a number of comments and memes on Facebook contrasting the offense taken to NFL player Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling during the national anthem against the apparent dearth of outrage directed at Americans carrying Nazi flags in the streets. Granted, it’s hard to know the degree to which this particular hypocrisy really exists—I’d like to believe that most Americans across the political spectrum still denounce the waving of Nazi and Confederate flags in a violence-inciting, race-bating rally—but these allusions to the “Star Spangled Banner” resonate in context to the brewing clashes over nationalism and cultural identity. Kaepernick, who has now been joined by Michael Bennett of the Seattle Seahawks, has chosen an apt symbol of protest because the anthem is about as good an example as any of the distinction between American myth and American reality.

In 1991, playwright Tony Kushner sharply articulated America’s unique brand of hypocrisy in his AIDS-inspired play Angels in America when the gay, black character Belize says, “The white cracker who wrote the national anthem knew what he was doing. He set the word ‘free’ to a note so high nobody can reach it. That was deliberate.”

It’s a brilliant line.

Of course, the “white cracker” Francis Scott Key wrote the word free 34 years after the English composer John Stafford Smith wrote the high G to which Kushner refers. In 1780, the note corresponded with the lyric Venus in the song “To Anacreon in Heaven,” which was the official club song of the Anacreontic Society of London, a fraternity of mostly amateur musicians who would gather to enjoy concerts, drink, gossip, and drink more. As every American school kid is told, Key was moved to write the poem “Defence of Fort McHenry” upon seeing the flag still flying at dawn after heavy, overnight bombardment of the fort. Sung to the tune of “Anacreon in Heaven,” Key’s words would become the “Star Spangled Banner” but would not be adopted as the national anthem until 1931.

That the words of our anthem are American and the tune English—and the fact that they were paired during a war that is sometimes called the second revolution—reflects the fledgling creative voice of a new nation still writing its identity and still finding its place in the world. As the copyright critics love to say, “America is a pirate nation,” by which they usually refer to the fact that the book printers, shortly after independence, made a habit of pirating English books rather than pay to publish domestic authors. This is true. And had America remained a pirate nation rather than invest in its own creative capacity, the character of our society—and most likely our democracy itself—would be the worse for it. Because the voice that emerged, and which took nearly all of the nation’s first century to come into its own, is unambiguously multicultural, no matter what the bigots think. There is no such thing as “white male Christian” America, and there never was. Just listen to the music.

In fact, before “The Star Spangled Banner” became the official anthem by an act of Congress in 1931, the unofficial national song for many citizens and leaders was “America the Beautiful,” the lyrics of which are a poem written in 1893 by Katherine Lee Bates, a 19th century feminist who might have been gay. Conservative factions have occasionally lobbied for “God Bless America” as the national anthem because it places God in the center of the action, but this would provide little comfort to the kind of “conservative” on display in Charlottesville, since that song was written by a Russian immigrant jew named Israel (Irving) Berlin. (On a side note, Berlin also wrote “White Christmas,” and believe me, American Christmas celebrants would have precious little music to enjoy without Jewish songwriters.) Ironically enough, even though proposals from liberal groups to make the national song “This Land is Your Land” would be a non-starter, Woody Guthrie’s music is arguably the most American sound in the bunch. Though it is admittedly a bit jaunty for any kind of solemn occasion.

As students of the Enlightenment, the Founding Fathers understood that we would never get a seat at the grown-ups’ table of nations without fostering cultural and scientific enterprise, which was a pretty ambitious dream for a war-weary population of some three million farmers spread across an area of about 340,000 square miles. But what the hell? They had just won a revolution that should not have worked by any sane analysis and then sat down to write a user’s manual (a.k.a. the Constitution) for operating a society unlike any that had ever existed. Why not hope for great invention and art while they were at it? John Adams, in a letter to his wife Abigail dated May 12, 1780, expressed his hope for the country to attain intellectual and artistic stature thus:

“I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.”

Adams’s implication that America’s progress toward maturity would be reflected in its capacity for increasingly refined creative and cultural enterprise was prophetic, except for his references to European classicism. He could not have imagined the extent to which our major contributions would be unequivocally modern, technological, and culturally diverse—that the American voice would be defined not by statuary, tapestry, and porcelain so much as by movies, theater, TV, and sound recordings that would blow the church doors off their hinges, making new messiahs out of rock stars and rock stars out of inventors.

In this sense, I think “The Star Spangled Banner” became truly American when Jimi Hendrix played his electric guitar solo version at Woodstock in 1969. Simultaneously patriotic and revolutionary, Hendrix’s tortured virtuoso (significantly instrumental and electric) synthesized the aristocratic and tight-assed “To Anacreon in Heaven” with the sins of racism, the self-betrayal of the Vietnam War, and the psychedelic explosion of counter-culture into a performance that told a much deeper, more painful, and more complex truth in the American-born language of rock-and-roll. This sound, which would not exist without the American slave diaspora, traveled back across the Atlantic, helped bring the children of WWII out of the rubble, and was even returned to its own roots by a new “English invasion” of the United States. This produced an artist like Freddie Mercury, who died of AIDS, and whose recording of “We Will Rock You” has been the unofficial anthem of every NFL game for years.

In a 2016 documentary about world-famous photographer Harry Benson, called Harry Benson: Shoot First, the artist discusses a photograph he took in Vietnam depicting a pair of wheelchair-bound veterans shaking hands—one American the other Vietnamese. Benson tells us that the Vietcong vet said to his former enemy, “We used to sneak up on your positions in the dark, not to kill you, but to listen to your music.” If that doesn’t say something about where our better angels live, I’m not sure what does.