Waterworks editorials in the Brooklyn Daily Times

Whitman's journalistic writings are vast and almost exclusively without an authorial byline. In order to help the reader orient themselves within this material we have identified a series of themes that appear frequently in the journalistic writings, a selection of which can be accessed via the "Subject" filter. This curated exhibit of editorials is not meant to be representative of all of Whitman's writing or thinking on a given topic but rather to provide readers with one possible avenue of entering into this vast and complex set of materials.

Whitman's journalism on the Brooklyn Waterworks constitutes one of his longest sets of texts published between the second (1856) and third (1860-61) editions of Leaves of Grass, totaling a little over 46,000 words across more than 80 articles. It spans three different newspapers and over two years of lead editorials, brief comments, updates, and on-site reporting. The bulk of this effort was published in the Brooklyn Daily Times, Whitman's primary employer in the latter half of the 1850s.

Previous editorial efforts have acknowledged Whitman's interest in the issue, yet the decidedly mundane, prosaic argument that dominated his Waterworks journalism resulted in the reprinting of only very limited selections. Emory Holloway and Vernolian Schwartz, in their 1932 edition of Brooklyn Daily Times editorials, note that Whitman "fought for a good system of waterworks for the city" (22), yet they only attributed a handful of relevant editorials to him. William White's 1969 bibliography of Whitman's journalism largely replicates this decision. Biographers since have overlooked or sidelined Whitman's Waterworks writings, despite manuscript evidence and the poet-journalist's own recollections. An exception is Karen Karbiener's 2015 essay that urged a reconsideration of the extent of Whitman's writings for the Brooklyn Daily Times.

In a letter from 1885, Whitman recalled covering "the question of the new Water Works (magnificently outlined by McAlpine, and duly carried out and improved by Kirkwood, first-class engineers both,)" and noted that he was allowed to bend "the whole weight of the [Brooklyn Daily Times] steadily in favor of the McAlpine plan, as against a flimsy, cheap and temporary series of works that would have long since broken down, and disgraced the city." He concluded that this journalistic effort constituted one of the "feathers in [his] wings" that he "wish[ed] to preserve." Still, Whitman's advocacy for the Waterworks received little to no scholarly attention prior to its publication on the Whitman Archive in 2024.

The Brooklyn Daily Times, owned and edited by George C. Bennett, was a small, Republican paper and embraced local improvement in its political platform. Whitman, who was by then slowly drifting away from Democratic politics, fit well into this environment. By the mid-1850s, he had spent decades advocating for upgrades to public water infrastructure and his contemporary fitness guide, "Manly Health and Training," embraced bathing, public pools, and water drinking in its self-care regimen. Additionally, Whitman's favorite brother, Thomas Jefferson "Jeff" Whitman (on whom Whitman relied for financial support), was an engineer for the Works, assisting project lead James P. Kirkwood. Later, Jeff would follow Kirkwood to St. Louis for a long career in public works.

Whitman's writings specific to the Waterworks started appearing in early 1857 and ran past the opening of the Works in April of 1859. Whitman's tone was largely technical and detail-oriented, though he occasionally lapsed into more colorful and impassioned arguments, when public backlash to the project required it. In 1858, for instance, as the city council debated a revision to the ongoing construction, the project engineers relied on the poet-journalist to help lobby for a more sturdy, though costly, addition. Blalock, McMullen, Schöberlein, and Stacy argue that his role in this process was "twofold: to appeal to the readers on behalf of the engineers, and to allow the engineers to maintain an aura of disinterested expertise outside of the contested public arena" (248).

During this particular debate, Whitman attended a number of excursions to a reservoir pond east of Williamsburg (at today's Baisley Pond Park), where brother Jeff and his fellow engineers were quartered in a farm house to oversee pump construction. Whitman covered these trips not only for the Brooklyn Daily Times (some clippings of which he kept in his files) but, as Amy Kapp has discovered, also in a highly Whitmanesque, albeit anonymous, editorial for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle—his one-time employer and rival of the Brooklyn Daily Times. Additionally, Whitman sent a letter to the editor of the New York Times, where it appeared in the voice of a concerned citizen (signed "CIVIS"). A draft for this piece is extant in Whitman's hand.

Whitman's voice in the Brooklyn Daily Times has been characterized as decidedly "conservative" and disclosing an "attitude toward the people and toward the polity [which] became more cautious, at times even crotchety" (Greenspan 184–85). This tenor persists in Whitman's defense of independent boards of engineers and sanitation experts as well as his critiques of elected officials as beholden to the whims of a fickle electorate. Yet it also suggests a careful tailoring of Whitman's lobbying efforts to the paper's conservative core audience, living in the rural eastern district of the "City of Churches."

Whitman's Waterworks editorials fill a gap in his biography and suggest that while the late 1850s may have been a period of struggle for Whitman the poet they were also a time of intense productivity for Whitman the journalist. Blalock, McMullen, Schöberlein, and Stacy additionally note the relevance of this corpus to other fields, suggesting that "Whitman's multipaper, multigenre, multiyear propaganda campaign to manufacture popular consent for the Brooklyn Waterworks" constituted "an important chapter in the history of U.S. public works" and the role that local journalism played in the advocacy for such projects (256).