Presenters
Abstract
John Greenleaf Whittier’s 1845 “Songs of Labor” were seen as the first “high culture” celebration of working class life, prefiguring Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” by a decade. Whittier’s portrayal of “mechanic” life and culture, long seen as a simple paean to the importance of labor in a republican nation, can also be read as a celebration of the whiteness of the working class. In fact, Whittier, a rare poet who was an active politician, drew ideas from radical Jacksonian Democrats that infused his work with racialized definitions of labor. Even some contemporaries perceived and implicitly noted the whiteness of “Songs of Labor.”
This paper uses textual analysis of the six poems that constitute “Songs of Labor” to show the connections between Whittier’s poetry and Jacksonian conceptions of a white working class and particular labor ideologies current in the 1830s and 1840s. It also draws upon Whittier’s correspondence to show his interest and personal connections to some of labor radicals, such as Orestes Brownson, who supplied some of his ideas. Finally, it surveys contemporary reviews of “Songs of Labor” to reveal that the racially marked ideas of class Whittier employed were read as such in his own time.