Walt Whitman, free trader.(Flashback)

To know nothing of what happened before you were born is to remain ever a child--Cicero

Before Walt Whitman, poet, there was Waiter Whitman, editor of the New York Aurora and the Brooklyn Eagle and author of vehement, if sometimes prolix, observations on the political scene of the 1830s and 1840s.

Whitman was a partisan of the Loco Focos, the radical libertarian wing of the Democratic Party. Setting out his beau ideal in a state, Whitman waxed minimalist: "The true government is much simpler than is supposed, and abstains from much more. Nine tenths of the laws passed every winter at the Federal Capitol, and all the State Capitols, are not only unneeded laws, but positive nuisances, jobs got up for the service of special classes of persons."

"Legislation," wrote Whitman, "is always inclined to be too meddlesome and be perpetually multiplying ordinances and regulations." No mealy-mouthed gradualist, Whitman declared: "I recommend the abolition of the entire system of licenses or special permits for any business, no matter what.... Every man and woman has the right, free of any special taxes or license, to engage in any avocation or business whatever."

He was a "free-trader by instinct," Whitman confessed, and it was on the question of free trade vs. protection that he expended much of his ink and his passion. Tariffs, he believed, were an outstanding example of "the evils of legislatures attempting to meddle with the great laws of trade, which are really involved in the great laws of Nature."

The Loco Focos were no apologists for corporations. Trade was a moral issue to Whitman. As the poet would explain late in life, "I object to the tariff primarily because it is not humanitarian--because it is a damnable imposition upon the masses."

Walt Whitman, the lyrical embracer of all mankind, was seldom on display in Walter Whitman's sometimes ascerbic newspaper editorials. He dismissed tariff men as "cliques of selfish manufacturers, joined with a few sap head simpletons" who "push ahead measures for their own interest."