Manhattan's Communist Daily Worker seized the occasion of the 132nd anniversary of Walt Whitman's birth to claim him as its very own. "How," cried the Worker, "could the Philistine rulers of capitalist culture stomach an artist who took the side of the people and who dared, despite the heavy penalties of poverty, censorship, and the deprivation of a wide audience, to tell the truth about the organized thievery that passes for the Two-Party System?"
Cheered on by his royal father, Prince Knud, brother of Denmark's King Frederik and heir apparent to the crown, eleven-year-old...