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n Walt Whitman's America, then, there existed a tension between what is and what should be, between an emphasis on individualism and an emphasis on a balance of the individual and the community. This opposition, though, is not Whitman's. For him, a "menace to democracy [. . .] is the danger of democratic societies disintegrating as individual citizens pursue their own selfish interests at the expense of the collectivity," and indeed Whitman saw the Jeffersonian concept of aristocratic community leadership as threatening to individual freedom; but democracy is not thus a flawed ideal (Adolph 77). Whitman scholars, in fact, continually note the poet's solid commitment to American democracy. Writing about "Song of Myself" in 1955, Richard Volney Chase claims that Whitman's world "is a fantastic world in which it is presumed that the self can become identical with all other selves in the universe, regardless of time and space. [. . .] Both politically and by nature man has ‘identity,’ in two senses of the word: on the one hand, he is integral in himself, unique, and separate; on the other hand, he is equal to, or even the same as, everyone else" (892-893). Whitman, as a nineteenth-century American, understood the way in which the concepts of individualism and community were antithetical, but he hoped to create a true democracy by emphasizing the relationships—rather than the oppositions—between the self and the many. He, as Sherry Southard notes, "realized that there was a problem reconciling democracy and individualism; yet he believed that eventually the two would merge and form something even greater than either alone