Whitman, Walt, 1819-1892. Supplementary Prose, from Complete Prose Works (1892)
Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library

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WHENCE THEN DO THESE NOMINATING DICTATORS OF
AMERICA YEAR AFTER YEAR START OUT?


   From lawyers' offices, secret lodges, back-yards, bed-houses, and bar-rooms; from out of the custom-houses, marshals' offices, post-offices, and gambling hells; from the President's house, the jail, the venereal hospital, the station-house; from unnamed by-places where devilish disunion is hatched at midnight; from political hearses, and from the coffins inside, and from the shrouds inside of the coffins; from the tumors and abscesses of the land; from the skeletons and skulls in the vaults of the federal almshouses; from the running sores of the great cities; thence to the national, state, city, and district nominating conventions of These States, come the most numerous and controlling delegates.