Debate Continues Over NEA Grants

More than 100 years ago, Walt Whitman, arguably America’s greatest poet, became the victim of the kind of narrow-mindedness that Sen. Jesse Helms and the NEA now seek to impose upon us.

Samuel Sillen in his “Walt Whitman, Poet of American Democracy” noted that: “A few months before Lincoln’s death, Whitman had been appointed to a clerkship in the Department of the Interior. One day, the bigoted secretary of the department, James Harlan, snooped around in the clerk’s desk, found a copy of ‘Leaves of Grass,’ threw up his hands in horror, and fired the author of ‘an indecent book.’ ”

Sillen added that “Leaves of Grass” received more national attention than it would have received without this act of intolerance. In those days, apparently, not everyone in the Administration felt compelled to clone each other politically. Whitman moved from the Interior Department to the attorney general’s office, enabling him to live and continue writing.

BERNARD BURTON

Camarillo