Category: American history

On loafers

Did Walt Whitman attend Reverend William Patton’s 9 March 1852 lecture on loafers at the Broadway Tabernacle in New York? The somewhat derogatory term had been in circulation for at least a decade, and Whitman, not yet the poet of Leaves of Grass, had already used it in his journalism. But Patton put a torque on the word that would probably have stuck in Whitman’s mind, if he had been in attendance.

Patton gave a conventional etymology and definition. The word loafer “was supposed to be derived from the German laufen (to run). . . . A feature of the loafer’s character is unwillingness to work; he loves idleness.” But when Patton elaborated his idea of the loafer, he prefigured some of Whitman’s imagery. The loafer, he said,

would wonderfully enjoy Eden, where fruits grew without cultivation, and he would have nothing to do but enjoy himself. The probability is, if he could have directed his own creation, he would have had himself made a vegetable, not an animal, and that he should be planted in a deep soil.

In his 1855 poem, Whitman would write

I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease . . . . observing a spear of summer grass.

The poem’s narrator goes on to consider the spiritual meanings of grass, again and again, until at last he seems to become one with it:

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your bootsoles.

Patton told his audience that the loafer was “a poetical, transcendental philosopher, believing in the beauty of life per se.” Such a belief was expected to sound ridiculous; at lecture’s end, Patton reminded his listeners that idleness was the devil’s plaything and exhorted them to “Be a street sweeper, be a scavenger, if need be, but do not be a loafer.” But a poet might have listened with a contrary and selective ear, and taken the mockery as a compliment.

Patton seems to have devoted the bulk of his speech to a catalog of the

various characters of loafers—the youthful and adult vulgar loafer; the musical loafer, who is generally a brawny Swiss or Italian; the fashionable loafer, a very exquisite and highly finished variety; the wealthy and retired loafer; the military and naval loafer, . . . ; the political loafer . . . ; the aristocratic loafer . . . [and] the “ecclesiastical loafer.”

According to Patton’s complaint, the loafer is everywhere, because he “adapts himself to the most contradictory circumstances of wealth and poverty, ignorance and education.” In Whitman’s hands, of course, the range of identities available to the loafer-poet would become a boast:

In all people I see myself, none more and not one a barleycorn less,
And the good or bad I say of myself I say of them.

Leander visits Columbia, 1786

Columbia University is celebrating its 250th anniversary, in honor of which, here’s how the college looked to a visitor on Wednesday, 16 August 1786, when it was just thirty-two. (The visitor was a graduate of Nassau Hall, today known as Princeton, and the comparisons of Columbia to his alma mater are a little invidious.)

. . . Went to view the bathing-houses — like them exceedingly & propose to go in tomorrow if the day is suitable —— from thence took a direction for the college & after passing thro some stragling [sic] ill-built streets came to it — It stands on a very elevated situation & makes a good appearance — I wished to see the inside but having no acquaintance with any of the professors I was somewhat at a loss — at length concluded to enquire for Mr Schuyler (son to the General) upon the strength of my acquaintance with his brother John — The building has four doors & (I think) sixteen windows in width — I enter’d the first door which lead [sic] to one of the professor’s appartments [sic] & was directed to the second to enquire for Mr Scuyler’s [sic] room — I found the College was like many New York houses, more in appearance than reality — it was very ill-contrived & but one room & two studies deep — very narrow passages & shabby staircases — & upon the whole nothing to compare to Nassau Hall either in airiness or convenience — when I entered the second door some blowsy headed man who was very much like the picture of Peter the Wild Boy, an usher I supposed, came out into the entry — he pointed for me to go up stairs & dodged in again — I went up, & a desolate castle it appeared to be for I peep’d into the third story without seeing or hearing a creature — In the third story I rattled at a study door which was locked when a sudden voice bawl’d out “who’s there” — I answerd [sic] “a friend” & rattled again before it was opened, when a trio of blades were discovered who seemd [sic] to drop their ears all at once on seeing a sort of person whom they so little expected — They were however very civil chums & showed me into the next room for Mr Schuyler’s while one of them went down to call him — he was not to be found but his room-mate (I took him to be) appeared — an awkward gangling young man about twenty — I told him I wanted to see the college & had called on Mr Schuyler for that purpose — Whether it was thro’ indolence or confusion or that things really were as he described them I cannot tell, but he gave such a woeful account of things that my curiosity was quite satisfied — that their apparatus was broken, their library destroyed, that there were no good rooms, & in short that there was nothing in it worth a stranger’s notice — How different thought I is this from the emulation of Nassau, & gave him a hint of it which did not seem to touch his pride much, so after enquiring the number of students (of whom he said there were thirty) & a few more questions I left my compliments for Mr. S & bid him good morning — the chums at the door (of whom a party had gathered in the mean time) all making their obeisance to me as I passed —I returned by the Oswego market & made a bargain with a fruit woman for some temptingly fine large plums . . .

The description is from pages 97 to 99 of the first volume of the diary of Leander, a.k.a. John Fishbourne Mifflin, discussed in chapter 1 of my book, American Sympathy.