commission's ultimate interest . . . was . . . a matter of teaching
order and discipline, and in its operation the commission showed an
almost obsessive concern for the preservation of discipline in all
its forms.
. . .
In its effort to discourage 'good Samaritanism' in all its forms,
the commission adopted the much criticized policy of using paid agents
rather than volunteers for its relief work. . . . The idea that compassion
could accomplish nothing was a profound challenge to prevailing beliefs.
Walt Whitman, a volunteer who believed intensely in the power
of love and pity, expressed a fairly common opinion when he railed
at the Sanitary agents as 'hirelings.' 'As to the Sanitary Commissions
& the like,' Whitman wrote to his mother in June 1863, 'I am sick
of them all . . .-you ought to see the way the men as they lie helpless
in bed turn away their faces from the sight of the Agents, Chaplains
&c (hirelings as Elias Hicks would call them--they seem to me always
a set of foxes & wolves)--they get well paid & are always incompetent
& disagreeable' Whitman, as a thoroughgoing anti-institutionalist,
believed that the spontaneous spirit of benevolence could not survive
formal organization and the professionalization of service. (104;106-107)
