"Even by 19th-century standards, James Harlan was a prude. As Secretary of the Interior, he searched the desks of his clerks at night, looking for signs of inappropriate behavior. One night he found a book of poetry. Harlan flipped through it, shocked by the poems and by what the clerk had written in the margins. Harlan fired the clerk the next day, declaring such “filth” had no place in government.
The clerk was Walt Whitman. The book was Leaves of Grass, which Whitman was revising. Whitman got another job, Harlan became a footnote in literary history."
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