Mitchell Santine Gould

Mitchell Santine Gould is the leading authority on Walt Whitman’s mysterious connection to Quakerism, and coined a term to describe this difficult problem — which implicitly occupied the heart of Whitman scholarship for a century: “Walt Whitman’s Quaker Paradox.” For decades, he has dedicated his resources to reconciling the 19th century's most eloquent voice for the right to sexual self-determination with a society that had famously retreated from the “immoral” influence of “the world's people” behind a “fence” of prohibitions against music, art, dancing, and theater.

After revolutionizing our understanding of Whitman’s greatest hero, Elias Hicks, Mitch went on to trace the reception of Inner Light morality by secular American culture. This secularization began during Hicks's final years, when Whitman’s other great hero, Frances Wright, restated Hicks’s position on the fundamental right to make sexual choices and implicitly identified such liberalism as a product of the Inner Light. The radical wing of the Free Love movement later chose Wright’s appeal to “God within” as a plank in their sociopolitical platform. Following Quaker historian Frederick B. Tolles, Mitch has shown that the secularization of Quakerism was boosted when Ralph Waldo Emerson recast Inner Light theology as the psychological-sociological condition of “Self-Reliance.”

Mitch’s work goes deep into the very heart of the Quaker experience. He’s shown that by 1860, Quakers explained their decline in attendance, as owing to the way that “other bodies and societies have taken up the reforms and measures which they endeavored to incorporate in their society… the world has become, in a measure, quakerised, and that, therefore, one may entertain Quaker principles and not belong to the Quaker church.”

Mitch’s peer-reviewed findings were published in Quaker History in 2007, Quaker Theology in 2016, and Quaker History again in 2019. He has also published in Walt Whitman: an Encyclopedia; the Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide; The Friend (in England); and Gay Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Events, edited by Lillian Faderman and Yolanda Retter.

Mitch was the major donor behind our queer Quaker exhibition on Toward a Quaker View of Sex. He also taught workshops on Whitman to groups of Friends and Radical Fairies. In 2006, he performed an hour-long one-man play, “I Call to Mankind,” which dramatized “Song of Myself,” to audiences at Multnomah Friends Meeting, PDX Q Center, and Friends General Conference in Tacoma.

In 2026, Mitch began to publish his trilogy, Kelson of the Creation, which dramatizes Walt Whitman’s role as the spiritual heir of Elias Hicks and the de facto spokesbard for the Sailors, Lovers, and Quakers who made New York not only our greatest seaport, but the foremost exponent of America’s Tolerance. His books, along with a documented historic timeline and links to both his articles and primary sources, can be found at https://kelsonofthecreation.com

(This biographical statement provided by Mitchell Gould.)

Biography Date: July, 2012; revised December, 2025

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