Bureaucrat of the Day: Walt Whitman

Whitman was a clerk in DC during part of the Civil War (his day job--more famously he visited the wounded in hospitals). He was a copyist, or bureaucrat, a human copying machine and some of his output has now been discovered according to this Post piece.  The article ends:

“Honesty is the prevailing atmosphere,” Whitman, in previously discovered documents, said of his colleagues in the bureaucracy.
“I do not refer to swell officials, the men who wear the decorations, get fat salaries,” he said. “I refer to the average clerks, the obscure crowd, who, after all, run the government. They are on the square.”