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impulse into the 1840s and 1850s. Trained as an engraver, Walsh had worked in
the 1830s and 1840s as a newspaperman and had served briefly at iht Aurora (then
under the editorship of Walt Whitman). By 1840, Walsh had taken up the cause of
labor reform from within the New York Democratic Party. Walsh’s “Spartan
Association” started as a radical fringe of the party which sought to unseat the
power of Tammany politicians in the name of labor rights and the “Bowery
B’hoys”.^‘After a pilgrimage to Brook Farm in 1844 and an immersion in Fourierist
theory, Walsh began to publish anti-capitalist tracts and exposes which sought to
expose the wretched working conditions in the city’s major industries. By 1843,
Walsh was claiming that “no man can be a good pohtical democrat without he’s a
good social democrat” and when accused of being a “leveler,” Walsh claimed to
“glory in the name.”^-Using the radical reformist Subterranean as his mouth-piece,
Walsh claimed that capital is essentially “that all-grasping power which has been
wrung by fraud, avarice and mahce from the labor of this and all ages past.”^^
Walsh, hke Blatchly before him, saw the new capital-labor paradigm as essentially
a repubhcan economy gone awry and a new form of oppression. For radical
reformers of this ilk, the questions raised by the new industrial order would be
answered not by a gradual “uplift” of labor into its proper position of “body” to
capital, but by a radical reform of the economy which more evenly distributed
wealth according to a labor theory that envisioned the workers as the only legitimate
producing class. According to Walsh in 1845, “nothing but revolution or legislation
can effect the indispensable change.”^"^
Whitman in the Mix
Whitman was not only physically close to working-class issues in New York
in the 1840s and 1850s, but was also intimately influenced by them. In 1823, when
Whitman was four years old, his family relocated from rural West Hills, LongIsland to burgeoning Brooklyn. Between 1823 and 1855 Brooklyn grew from a
rural hamlet to the fourth largest city in America.^^ This growth was due largely to
the influx of workers into the greater New York area. Whitman’s parents symbolized
the divide that would characterize working-class reformers: his father, Walter, was
an avowed Deist and devotee of Paine; his mother, Louisa, was a Quaker who was
fond of taking young Walt to hear the evangelical preacher, Elias Hicks. After
apprenticing as a type-setter. Whitman worked on the Long Island Democrat (1839).
While at the Democrat, Whitman also published a series of editorials later collected
as the Sun Down Papers (1839-1840). These editorials were highly pohtical and
reformist, but tackled the issues of the day with a hodgepodge of both conservative
and radical sentiments. These editorials purveyed conservative issues by speaking
out against the use of alcohol, caffeine and tobacco, but also questioned the certainty
of rehgious truth and those who would claim to know it.^^ These early editorials.