Churlishness and Clannishness

About This Item

Title: Churlishness and Clannishness
Date: 12 February 1859
Creator(s): Walt Whitman
Whitman Archive ID: per.01383
Source: Brooklyn Daily Times, 12 February 1859: 2. Our transcription is based on a digital image of a microfilm scan of the original issue. Microfilm of original issue held at Pennsylvania State University Libraries. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of the journalism, see our statement of editorial policy.
Editorial note: This piece is unsigned, as was the case for most of Whitman's journalism. However, this editorial is part of a series of texts that deal with a coherent theme that has been identified by the Whitman Archive journalism team as likely authored by Whitman. This decision is based on a combination of historical and (auto)biographical accounts, similarity to contemporary Whitman writings, a history of scholarly attribution, extant clippings retained by Whitman, computational stylometric analysis, and, in some cases, manuscript evidence in Whitman’s hand.
Contributors to digital file: Thara Michaelis Kaylen Michaelis Tara Ballard Stephanie Blalock Karie Cobb
Cite this page: Whitman, Walt. "Churlishness and Clannishness." The Walt Whitman Archive. Gen. ed. Matt Cohen, Ed Folsom, & Kenneth M. Price. Accessed 17 July 2024. <http://www.whitmanarchive.org>.
Source File: per.01383.xml (TEI)

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CHURLISHNESS AND CLANNISHNESS.

We like a cosmopolitan spirit, and abhor to see any person limiting his ideas, his hopes, his fears, his attachments and his influence, within the narrow boundary of a particular class, party, set, sect, coterie, or society. To do so warps the individual's judgment restricts his mental vision, and debars him from the promotion of more than one object, and that perhaps not a good one.

Of all kinds of individuals, young men are the last who should nourish this spirit of exclusiveness. Old men and women may be pardoned for hobnobbing constantly together, to remind each other of the incidents of their youth; but young men who restrict their associations and limit their influence to one small set of companions, are not doing justice either to themselves or to society.

For years past Literary and Chrisitian Associations of young men have been forming in all directions, which were calculated to bring young men together, rub off their angularities of disposition and crudeness of idea, and confer mutual benefit upon the members from the contribution of the influence of each to the improvement of all. But latterly, we regret to see, these liberalising and improving societies have caught the wrangling, Pharisaic, exclusive spirit which infects so many departments of society, and are splitting into infinitesimal isolated fragments. Instead of one comprehensive association of the religious young men of New York, we have now a variety of contemptible little associations, each assuming the name of its favorite preacher. And the same spirit is extending to this district. Instead of having one popular association, embracing the young men of all the churches here, and enabling them by mutual intercourse to one down the one-sidedness and narrowness of view necessarily inhaled from associating with a single denomination, we find the young men of each church busy making little petty associations, restricted in their membership by the narrow boundaries of their particular pastor's flock. Thus they fritter away the moral power and useful influence which a comprehensive, catholic association of the evangelical churchman in the district might exert, at the same time that they wrap themselves in fresh folds of a garment of bigoty and exclusiveness. Cannot they realise the fact that union is strength, and they by carrying their miserable sectarianism into all their associations and schemes of recreation and mental improvement, they are doing for themselves what, on the old principle of "divide and conquer" their opponents would aim to do for them.