It was 1871. Lincoln had been gone for six years. The Civil War was over, killing 550,000 Americans, but the long fight to determine who won had begun. Sometimes it feels ongoing.

Ulysses S. Grant is president and will be reelected. The newly formed Justice Department addresses voter suppression. Grant signs the Ku Klux Klan Act in April. Tammany Hall political influence peddling is rife in New York City, whose residents are fed up. Chicago burns in October. John D. Rockefeller was asserting control over the new petroleum industry. The NRA was founded in New York. And the National Baseball League is formally inaugurated. This is Reconstruction.

And Walt Whitman wrote a long essay titled “Democratic Vistas.” The author of “Leaves of Grass” (1855), whose poems are still found in every anthology of American poetry, felt moved to address the moment. It’s a refresher for our moment.

Whitman catalogs American society, what set it apart from prior European models and its contemporary promise and peril. Whitman was concerned about the soul of the American experiment transitioning from the feudalism and oligarchy of eons, back when books were our intellectual hardware and software and readers were required to assimilate the new ideas inventing America.

The moment has come again. This elder of American letters reminds us of our revolutionary political promise and intellectual potential, recalling our collective bonds and individual genius. The pandemic may have frayed those bonds, but the genius eked out a speedy vaccine to recover. Will our democratic systems recover from the ancient stresses being revived here in 2024?

Whitman identifies two criteria for social progress: “a large variety of character and full play for human nature to expand itself in numberless and even conflicting directions,” i.e., diversity and free thought. However, the new variant of the American anti-intellectual virus seems to need a booster shot of Whitman vaccine to safeguard democratic vistas.

He bemoaned corruption. “I have noticed,” he wrote, “how the millions of sturdy farmers and mechanics are … the helpless supple-jacks of comparatively few politicians. And I have noticed more and more, the alarming spectacle of parties usurping the government, and openly and shamelessly wielding it for party purposes.” Ahem.

It gets worse. “The depravity of the business classes of our country is not less than has been supposed, but infinitely greater,” Whitman writes. “The official services of America, national, state, and municipal, in all their branches and departments, except the judiciary, are saturated in corruption, bribery, falsehood, maladministration.”

The great promise in the American experiment was wrestling with a counterfeit notion of its meaning. The nation needed to restore its founding spiritual principles. “Books are to be call’d for and supplied,” he wrote, “on the assumption that the process of reading is … an exercise, a gymnast’s struggle … to make a nation of supple and athletic minds, well-train’d, intuitive.” To Whitman, the highest ideal was “individuality” – the personal intellect operating unfettered and free. He eschewed “a certain highly deceptive superficial popular intellectuality.” I think I know what he would say about legislating against the teaching of anything but a party line.

What lay just ahead for Whitman and his beloved United States? Voter suppression. Black lives most certainly did not yet matter and their access to voting threatened white power and the Democratic Party of the time.

In the years ahead, a challenge loomed that will feel familiar. Southern Democrats riled up over Black votes tipping the presidential election of 1876 to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, would seek to prevent governmental protection of Black voters through restrictive appropriations bills. They were fighting for free elections, shrugging off the federal control of states’ rights, and invoking Confederate values of self-determination, they argued. It was an attack on government.

The lesson about their extremism, and election loss in 1879, forced the Democrats to change. They did.

What is today’s Republican Party all about? Suppressing Black voting, intellectual rigor and freedom of speech and study; acknowledgment of climate change; the need for taxation proportionate to wealth; and using legislatures and the judiciary to revise history and freedom of intellect. Govs. DeSantis of Florida and Abbott of Texas are restricting your very access to ideas other than “patriot education” as they define it. Books are a threat.

Is what lies ahead the restoration of lost causes? No. “I hear America singing,” Whitman wrote in a famous poem, and I think it sounds like Patti Smith: “People got the power.” Walt would approve, with caution about the cost of failure to defend our promise. Again.