THE BAD OLD DAYS

By LANCE MORROW

The San Francisco city government became so corrupt that a citizens' Vigilance Committee took over, violently. The year was 1856. Across the U.S. in Brooklyn, New York, Walt Whitman watched with approval. He wrote in his notebook, "These [United] States need one grand national Vigilance Committee, composed of the body of the people," to overthrow the government in Washington. Walt Whitman!

America is, after all, not a movie that started an hour ago. The ragged threads go back to the beginning, the violent underweave of the story. Visit 1886, say, during the birth of American organized labor: Chicago, Haymarket Square, riots, a bomb, seven cops dead. There is such a thing as a continuum of small apocalypses, a kind of tradition.

Some have interpreted Oklahoma City as a kind of Reichstag fire, the rube militias being the embryos of an American Nazism. That is overheated; anyway, why go abroad for bad news? The real precedents are homegrown. Years ago, D.H. Lawrence, making his way through American literature, fell upon Fenimore Cooper's Natty Bumppo and pronounced, "The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer." A fancy line, but true only of a certain whip-mean conscienceless strain in the American character. It is not a bad description of the Oklahoma City suspect's eyes.

The sight of dead children opens an abyss in the mind, of course. The wound may heal better if we not only sift through rubble and the mystery of evil, but also look out at the horizon. A helpful exercise is to study Oklahoma City and the 1990s through the prism of a new book called Walt Whitman's America (Knopf). Here, David S. Reynolds, professor of American Literature and American Studies at New York City's Baruch College, splendidly examines the culture that formed the greatest American poet and the greatest American poem, Leaves of Grass, which was first published in 1855. Although Reynolds does not dwell on them, the similarities between the 1850s and the 1990s are spooky sometimes, the preoccupations of the two periods almost interchangeable.

Violence. In 1854 the New York Atlas reported, "Horrible murders, stabbings, and shootings, are now looked for, in the morning papers, with as much regularity as we look for our breakfast ... Scarcely a day passes that we do not hear of the most outrageous assault with a deadly weapon."

Immigration. We are not us anymore. Americans of earlier arrival looked back nostalgically, bitterly, to a virtuous Edenic America, now lost and overrun. Whitman, the bard of democracy, harbored some of the Know-Nothings' nativist bigotries. He referred to a "coarse, unshaven, filthy Irish rabble."

Hype and Spiritual Fads. Mesmerism, spiritualism, Harmonialism, phrenology, rappings, chair movings and other enthusiasms were part of the first age of mass overstimulation and moralism that saw the burgeoning of the sensationalist penny press and Barnumism and freak shows-all the moral equivalents of daytime talk television.

Class Differences. Whitman wrote, "I see an aristocrat/ I see a smoucher grabbing the good dishes exclusively to himself and grinning at the starvation of others as if it were funny,/ I gaze on the greedy hog." By the time of the Civil War, the poorest half of Americans owned just 1% of all assets.

Politics. Corrupt and dispiriting, a procession of mediocre Presidents (Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan), spineless on slavery, men whom Whitman called "our topmost warning and shame."

Race. The issue at the center of it all, of course, was slavery, the terrible crack in the American design.

What is learned? Even from one century to the next, America deploys familiar themes and fanaticisms and dilemmas; it might be a good idea not to be panicked. At the same time, 1995 may be comforted by dissimilarities. The racial divide in America may be painful, for example, but one distinction between 1855 and 1995 is the difference between slaves and a rising African-American middle class.

Is Oklahoma City an inevitable descent into violence of the American culture wars? Does it mean that critical mass has been reached in the struggle between Newly Feminized America (as represented by Bill Clinton and his Administration) and the Nut-Case Phallocrats (Newt Gingrich, the National Rifle Association and rant radio in unholy collusion)?

The suggestion is idiotic and, among other things, an insult to the free, peaceful, democratic elections of last November. The 1850s needed nothing less than a Civil War to settle the slavery and union argument, which was so utterly central and intractable it had to turn violent. The very meaning of American civilization was at issue. The blast in Oklahoma City, though horrific and indelible, may have been very much in the American grain, but it occurred entirely outside the civilization's pale, at the delusional margins.