Walt Whitman: Welcome them all!
Walt Whitman, under a shady tree, responds to President Biden’s State of the Union Address, March, 2024, in agreement.
“America must welcome all--Chinese, Irish, German, pauper or not, criminal or not -- all, all, without exceptions; become an asylum for all who choose to come. we may have drifted away from this principle temporarily but time will bring us back. The tide may rise and rise again and still again and again after that, but at last there is an ebb—the low water comes at last. Think of it—think of it: how little of the land of the United States is cultivated—how much of it is still utterly untilled. When you go West you sometimes travel whole days at lightning speed across vast spaces where not an acre is plowed, not a tree is touched, not a sign of a house is anywhere detected. America is not for special types, for the caste, but for the great mass of people—the vast, surging, hopeful, army of workers. Dare we deny them a home—close the doors in their face—take possession of all and fence it in and then sit down satisfied with our system—convinced that we have solved our problem? I for my part refuse to connect America with such a failure—such a tragedy, for tragedy it would be.
“America has its purpose: it must serve that purpose to the end: I look upon the future as certain: our people will in the end read all these lessons right: Amerlca will stand opposed to everything which means restriction—stand against all policies of exclusion: accept Irish, Chinese—knowing it must not question the logic of its hospitality.
“I look ahead seeing for America a bad day—a dark if not stormy day—in which this policy, this restriction, this attempt to draw a line against free speech, free printing, free assembly, will become a weapon of menace to our future.
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Walt Whitman’s thoughts as collected by Horace Traubel, his American Boswell, and available in Traubel’s nine volume work With Walt Whitman in Camden, or in Brenda Wineapple’s compression of those nine, in Walt Whitman Speaks: His Final Thoughts on Life, Writing, Spirituality, and the Promise of America, (2019), Library of America