Among the ongoing themes of the famous poet Walt Whitman (1819-1892) is are truth, the self, nature, the universe, and the arts. Less well-known is his actual and public advocacy for a water- and sewer-system in Brooklyn. Stephanie M. Blalock, Kevin McMullen, Stefan Schöberlein, and Jason Stacy tell the story in “‘One of the Grand Works of the World’: Walt Whitman’s Advocacy for the Brooklyn Waterworks, 1856–59” (Technology and Culture, 65: 1, January 2024, pp. 237-263). They write in the abstract:
When the Brooklyn Waterworks opened in 1859, it was one of America’s most advanced water and sewer systems. Yet after Brooklyn was annexed by New York City, the waterworks’ history slipped into obscurity, despite having a now-famous champion: the “poet of America,” Walt Whitman, whose brother worked on the project. This article shows the Brooklyn poet’s fierce, multiyear lobbying effort for the waterworks in various newspapers and introduces a wealth of newly recovered Whitman writings on the issue. As a journalist, Whitman exemplifies the nineteenth-century press as an intermediary between expert engineers and popular readers. The poet brought precise expertise, translated engineers’ technical arguments into everyday language for his readers, and fought the resulting day-to-day political battles over construction in print. Whitman, then, is an underappreciated case study of the confluence of technology, public health, and local journalism.
The authors describe the opening day of Brooklyn’s water system, and the role played by Whitman. In an ironic twist, there was to be a commemorative poem for the day, but a rival newspaper managed to avoid having Whitman write it:
The opening of Brooklyn’s new waterworks on April 28, 1859, was a red-letter day for the then-independent city. Eager citizens lined the streets, cannons boomed in the distance, and brass music echoed through crowded thoroughfares. Prominent guests gathered around the mayor to watch a festive procession of firefighters, police, soldiers, fraternal orders, benevolent societies, and schoolchildren, heralding a feat of engineering that placed Brooklyn among the great cities of world history … The governor was there, as were mayors and city council members from as far away as Philadelphia, Boston, and Buffalo. … Some 300,000 people reportedly attended the event—one with perhaps a degree of “acerbity” in his heart: the poet Walt Whitman, then an editor and reporter for the Brooklyn Daily Times.
Four years earlier, the Long Island–born Whitman had published the first iteration of his unorthodox book of poems, Leaves of Grass, a collection with little overt rhyme or rhythm. At the waterworks ceremony, however, the innovative poet had to indulge the performance of a more mundane kind of verse—a celebratory “Ode,” which included the refrain, “Then water for me, pure, gushing and free, / For water’s the emblem of true liberty.” The singsong piece almost certainly bothered Whitman, but being sidelined as a poet was probably even more galling. The “poetic effusions” read on the occasion were supposed to have been chosen by the editors of Brooklyn’s three daily newspapers: the Evening Star, the Eagle, and the Times. However, in a master class of backroom dealing, the Star’s editor announced and printed his poem (attributed to “a Lady”) as the one “selected by the committee,” thereby short-circuiting the contest’s rules. The Brooklyn Daily Times was outraged. And Whitman, whose journalism in that paper had firmly associated him with the waterworks, faced gentle mocking from rivals at the Brooklyn Daily Eagle: “Walt Whitman . . . applied for authority to write the Ode. When
informed that it was expected to be done gratis, he disappeared.” …Indeed, while Whitman might have lost the contest over the “Water Ode,” he had for years used the partisan press and its penchant for anonymity to help make the waterworks a reality in the first place. Under Whitman’s guidance, the Brooklyn Daily Times became the local paper most dedicated to covering and supporting the project. He wrote more than seventy-five editorials celebrating the project as the beginning of a bright future for Brooklyn, defending the workers against greedy contractors and stingy politicians, and weighing in on specific engineering issues during construction. In sheer volume, Whitman’s writing on the waterworks surpassed his first edition of Leaves of Grass (43,000 words).
One part of this episode, for example, involved a question of whether to amend the original engineering plans so that a certain canal would be covered, rather than uncovered. Whitman rallied support for the covered version, and encouraged a wave of Brooklynites to lobby the New York state legislature, successfully, for the needed funds. Blalock, McMullen, Schöberlein, and Stacy quote from Leaves of Grass to note:
[I]n Whitman’s words, the “Brooklyn Water Works . . . is evidently one of the grand works of the world, having no superior anywhere [with] everything on a scale fit for the people of one of the principal and most populous cities of America.” While some historians have, then, identified the Brooklyn Waterworks as a key moment in the development of large-scale urban engineering projects, it was the popular press in general—and Whitman in particular—that sold the public on the effort and enabled its construction. … Between roughly 1856 and 1865, there was no real categorical difference between celebrating “the beautiful city! the city of hurried and sparkling waters!” in verse and meticulously advocating for a 7.5-mile covered brick conduit in the Long Island hinterlands.
