Its status as one of the more important collections of American poetry has meant that over time various groups and movements have used Leaves of Grass, and Whitman's work in general, to advance their own political and social purposes. For example:
- In the first half of the 20th century, the popular Little Blue Book series introduced Whitman's work to a wider audience than ever before. A series that backed socialist and progressive viewpoints, the publication connected the poet's focus on the common man to the empowerment of the working class.
- During World War II, the American government distributed for free much of Whitman's poetry to their soldiers, in the belief that his celebrations of the American Way would inspire the people tasked with protecting it.
- Whitman's work has been claimed in the name of racial equality. In a preface to the 1946 anthology I Hear the People Singing: Selected Poems of Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes wrote that Whitman's "all-embracing words lock arms with workers and farmers, Negroes and whites, Asiatics and Europeans, serfs, and free men, beaming democracy to all."[57]
- Similarly, a 1970 volume of Whitman's poetry published by the United States Information Agency describes Whitman as a man who will "mix indiscriminately" with the people. The volume, which was presented for an international audience, attempted to present Whitman as representative of an America that accepts people of all groups.[57]
Nevertheless, Whitman has been criticized for the nationalism expressed in Leaves of Grass and other works. In a 2009 essay regarding Whitman's nationalism in the first edition, Nathanael O'Reilly claims that "Whitman's imagined America is arrogant, expansionist, hierarchical, racist and exclusive; such an America is unacceptable to Native Americans, African-Americans, immigrants, the disabled, the infertile, and all those who value equal rights."[58]
