Police 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.

Walt Whitman is rarely associated with policing. This is due largely to a relative dearth of extant writings on the topic and how infrequently it features in his poetry. Although Whitman had "covered the police station and the coroner's office" when working for the New York Sun in 1842 (Reynolds 83), it wasn't until the 1850s that policing begins to more prominently feature in his writings. By then, Glenn Hendler notes, Whitman had begun "encountering cops in a wider range of contexts" and there "is evidence he befriended some of the officers he met; [as such] they were no longer to him an abstract force, but working-class individuals" (322–23). Traces of these encounters are extant in a notebook Whitman kept during the latter half of the 1850s, which include references to men on the force, both in Brooklyn and Manhattan.

Around 1857, Whitman frequently met and took note of policemen like "Bob Frazer," "Jim," the sympathetic "Jack," and "John Stoothoof," among many others. Additionally, the poet-journalist visited police stations and interviewed officers as well as potential victims or perpetrators. As early as 1857, Whitman also regularly mingled with the bohemian crowd at Pfaff's Beer Cellar near Bond Street in downtown Manhattan (Cronin 57), where he struck up a friendship with the policeman and author George McWatters that lasted well into the 1870s (Hendler 335–36).

Besides this association with "literary policeman" McWatters, the theme of policing has been marginal in Whitman biography and scholarship, until the Whitman Archive republished, in 2024, a trove of Whitman-authored police reporting from the Brooklyn Daily Times, written between 1857 and 1859. These articles include both editorials and on-site reporting, which the Daily Times attributed to "Our Own Reporter" (a moniker Whitman also used in his reporting about the Brooklyn Waterworks). Additionally, a key piece of reporting in this series has been conclusively tied to Whitman's reporting notebook from the period.

The Brooklyn Daily Times served as Whitman's primary, though not exclusive, employer between the second (1856) and third (1860-61) editions of Leaves of Grass. The Republican evening paper was published in the rural, eastern district of Brooklyn and, for most of its existence, struggled to compete with the more successful Democratic paper in town, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle (which Whitman had edited in the 1840s). As was typical at the time, the Brooklyn Daily Times operated with a small staff and without clear delineation between editors, journalists, and other staff. A writer like Whitman would contribute to every section of the paper, from lead editorials to reporting, as well as clippings and news updates.

Whitman's writings on policing for the Brooklyn Daily Times come at a crucial moment in the history of American policing and reflect his growing frustration with Democratic establishment politics. In this period, the New York State government attempted to wrestle policing away from direct control by the various mayors of the state—who ran so-called "Municipal" police forces—to form its new force, the "Metropolitan" police, a politically independent, professional force. While this transition was relatively smooth in Brooklyn, it led to outright rioting in New York City, when the Metropolitans attempted to arrest Democratic Mayor Fernando Wood for corruption and street fights broke out between the competing police forces. Whitman covered these events on the ground, witnessing the fighting as well as the surrender of the Municipals and reporting on the events for his evening paper.

Whitman's police reporting forms a coherent and consistent critique of urban policing as mismanaged, ineffective, and corrupt. His scathing attacks on "King Fernando" mirror his growing discontent with Democratic politics and overlap with his editorializing on the famous Burdell murder case. For the Brooklyn Daily Times, Whitman advocates for modern, evidence-based policing and the abolishment of inherited systems he deems feudal and foreign (for instance, the coroner's office). His arguments for independent police boards and against political meddling echo his reporting on the Waterworks as well as his growing conservatism with regard to democratic control of institutions, an attitude scholars have called "cautious, at times even crotchety" (Greenspan 184–85).