As he does in Democratic Vistas (1870), in this newly uncovered series Whitman puts forth what Harold Aspiz has called "a sexual-eugenic program for an America whose youth lacked the 'magnetism of sex,' were 'puny, impudent, foppish, prematurely ripe, and characterized by an abnormal libidinousness.'" (75) Whitman's program in "Manly Health and Training," however, is much more explicit.

Take, for instance, Professor Oguazor's libidinousness in The Interpreters.

Rockefeller was like another Dartmouth graduate, Daniel Webster, who, says Smith, ''spent a lifetime running after the presidency and, between elections, behaving in ways that put the White House effectively beyond his grasp.'' Promiscuous in his liberalism and his libidinousness, it was not that, as a friend said, ''he would rather be Nelson Rockefeller than president,'' but that, as Smith writes, he saw ''no reason to choose.''