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University Microfilms

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A Xerox Education Company 73-1999

GEIGER, Clarence John, 1931- PEACE IN WAR: AMERICAN SOCIAL THOUGHT AND THE FIRST WORLD WAR.

The Ohio State University, Ph.D., 1972 History, modern

University Microfilms. A XEROXCompany , Ann Arbor. Michigan

© 1972

CLARENCE JOHN GEIGER

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED PEACE IN WAR: AMERICAN SOCIAL THOUGHT AND THE FIRST WORLD WAR

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

By

Clarence John Geiger, B.A., M.S.

*****

The Ohio State University 1972

Approved by

Advisor Department of History PLEASE NOTE:

Some pages may have

indistinct print.

Filmed as received.

University Microfilms, A Xerox Education Company For Ruth Ann

ii VITA

November 26, 1931 . . . Born - Chicago, Illinois

1954...... B.A., Columbia College, New York, New York

1956-1957 ...... Teaching Assistant, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin

1957...... M.S., University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin

1957-1959 ...... Research Assistant, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin

1959-1960 ...... Consultant on History, Ohio Historical Society, Columbus, Ohio

1960-1969 ...... Historian, Aeronautical Systems Division, Wright-Patterson Air, Force Base, Ohio

1960-1964 ...... Lecturer in American History (Part time), Miami University in Dayton, Ohio

1962-1963 ...... Lecturer in American History (Part time), Wittenberg University in Dayton, Ohio

1963-1970 ...... Lecturer in American History (Part time), Indiana University in Richmond, Indiana

1965...... Lecturer in American History (Part time), Wright State University, Dayton, Ohio

1965-1972 ...... Lecturer in American and Ohio History (Part time), Wright State University in Piqua, Ohio

1969-1972 ...... Historian, Foreign Technology Division, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio

1972...... Historian, Aeronautical Systems Division, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio PUBLICATIONS

"History of the Air Force Boost-Glide Program, 1945-1963." Aero­ nautical Systems Division, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, 1964.

FIELDS OF STUDY

Major Field: History

Political and Social History of the United States since 1900. Professor Robert H. Bremner

Political and Social History of the United States, 1850-1900. Professor Francis P. Weisenburger

American Foreign Relations. Professor Marvin R. Zahniser

The Middle East. Professor Sydney N. Fisher

Europe Since 1900. Professor Sydney N. Fisher

Political Science. Professor Gene E. Rainey TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page VITA ...... iii

INTRODUCTION ...... 1

Chapter

I. DEWEY'S INSTRUMENT OF W A R ...... 9

II. THE NEW WORLD OF PATTEN AND WEYL...... 28

III. THREE FACES OF CHRIST: GLADDEN, RAUSCHENBUSCH, AND HERRON...... 51

IV. PRAGMATIC MARXISM AND PATRIOTIC SOCIALISM: EASTMAN AND P O O L E ...... 69

V. VEBLEN'S INSTINCT FOR PEACE ...... 89

VI. YOUTH, WAR, AND THE ARTIST...... 114

CONCLUSION: IN MEMORY OF THE LIVING...... 140

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 149

v INTRODUCTION

In the beginning of 1919, Walter Weyl was in Paris, reporting on the peace conference. After seeing the shambles of Europe and hear­ ing the quarrels of the peacemakers, Weyl became disheartened. America had entered the war to make the world safe for democracy and to estab­ lish a new era of peace, but with the end of the war Weyl was unable to see any social improvement. There was still "misunderstanding, greed, nationalism, and imperialism."! At that point, Weyl also must have considered himself a "tired radical."

If the world was still the same, Weyl had changed. In 1912, he had ebulliently proclaimed the beginning of a new internal order in which individualism was being supplanted by a social spirit, with em­ phasis on human life and happiness.^ For Weyl, as for many other

American reformers, the outbreak of war in 1914 represented not a breakdown of social action but a possibility to realize such visions on a grander scale. American intervention in 1917, therefore, only increased the likelihood of a world democracy. This study, by examin­ ing the social thought of a selected group of American intellectuals,

^Walter Weyl, Diary, Mar. 2, 1919, Weyl MSS, Rutgers Library (microfilm).

^Weyl, The New Democracy. An Essay in Certain Political and Economic Tendencies in the United States (New York, 1912), pp. 160-64.

1 2 will investigate several theories of social progress through war.

These ideas involved a faith in man's ability to see the insanity of war and the necessity for social reform.

David Noble, in The Paradox of Progressive Thought, has pre­ viously examined the prewar thought of several of the figures with whom I propose to deal. Noble was struck by the progressive's faith

in the perfectibility of human nature and the inevitability of progress.

According to Noble, by seeking to preserve the purity of their vision, the progressives had placed their thinking beyond the context of his-

•Z tory. War inevitably exposed the unreality of progressive thought.

In contrast to Noble, my study proceeds with a more sympathetic atti­ tude toward progressive thinkers; their objectives have relevance for the present. Although the progressives were disillusioned by the peace, they refused to reject their hopes for a better society. By

examining the nature of liberal disillusionment, my study will also

suggest an explanation for the difficulty of social reformation in

America.

No work on American progressives during the war could leave out

a consideration of John Dewey and Randolph Bourne, whose thoughts have

established the boundaries of this work. Their attitudes toward prog­

ress and war represented the extremes of liberal thinking. Dewey saw

the war as a leading to possible human betterment; Bourne viewed it as destructive of democratic values.

^David Noble, The Paradox of Progressive Thought (Minneapolis, 1957), pp. 247-48. 3

*****

John Dewey (1859-1952) was born in Vermont and completed his undergraduate education in 1879 at the state university. In 1884, he received a doctorate from Johns Hopkins University and then taught philosophy at the Universities of Michigan, Minnesota, and Chicago.

From 1904 through 1930, he was professor of philosophy at Columbia

University. Dewey was responsible for furthering pragmatic philosophic thinking and developing theories which viewed education as preparation for living. He refused to separate thought from action and was engaged often in various projects of social reform. Because his creative life covered over 70 years, his writing was voluminous. Some of his most important works were Democracy and Education; An Introduction to the

Philosophy of Education (1916), Reconstruction of Philosophy (1920),

The Quest for Certainty (1929), Art as Experience (1934), and Liberalism and Social Action (1935). In addition to Dewey and Bourne, I shall deal with the impact of the war on progressive thinkers in economics, religion, and literature.

In this study, it appeared useful to consider Simon Patten and

Walter Weyl in the same chapter. The former was a proponent of new economic thought; the latter, a popularizer of those theories. Patten

(1852-1922), raised in western Illinois, obtained a doctorate in 1879 from the University of Halle in Germany. In 1885, Patten helped or­ ganize the American Economic Association, and, in the same year, he challenged traditional economic concepts of scarcity with The Premises of Political Economy. Three years later, Patten joined the faculty of 4 the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He was the administrative director of that division from 1895 to 1905 and remained with the university until 1917. His most popular work was The New

Basis of Civilization (1907), in which he called for recognition of government responsibility for social welfare.

Walter Weyl (1873-1919), born in Philadelphia, received a doctorate under Patten in 1897. He assisted the United Mine Workers in the coal strike of 1902 and then became a successful contributor to popular magazines, writing mainly about labor and immigration problems.

In 1913, Weyl joined Herbert Croly and Walter Lippmann in establishing

The New Republic. His most important work was The New Democracy, An

Essay in Certain Political and Economic Tendencies in the United States

(1912).

The attitudes of the three leading advocates of the social gos­ pel, Washington Gladden, Walter Rauschenbusch, and George Herron, will also be viewed in this study. Gladden (1836-1918) was b o m in Pennsyl­ vania and obtained his first Congregational pastorate in North Adams,

Massachusetts, where he became interested in the labor struggles and began to press for the application of Christianity to an industrial society. In 1882, Gladden accepted a call to the First Congregational

Church in Columbus, Ohio, where he remained until his death. Gladden wrote numerous works not only on social questions but also on the necessity for a liberalized Christian theology.

Walter Rauschenbusch (1861-1918) was raised in New York and, in

1885, graduated from the Rochester Theological Seminary. He then 5

accepted a pastorate at the Second German Baptist Church in the Hell's

Kitchen area of New York City, where he was abruptly confronted with

the problems of human suffering. As pastor, Rauschenbusch participated

in movements for the political, social betterment of the community.

In 1897, he returned to the Rochester Seminary and, in 1902, became professor of church history. His most important contributions to

Christian social thought were Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907),

Christianizing the Social Order (1912), and A Theology for the Social

Gospel (1917).

George Herron (1862-1925) was born in Indiana. He entered the

Congregational ministry in 1883 and served in pastorates in Ohio,

Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa. In 1893, Herron became professor of

applied Christianity at Iowa College. Because of divorce and remarriage, he was forced from the ministry in 1901 and lived the remainder of his

life in Europe. Herron's significant writings included The Christian

Society (1894), The Christian State (1895), and The Social Meanings of

Religious Experience (1896). In these works, he embraced a more mili­

tant form of Christian socialism than advocated by Gladden and

Rauschenbusch.

In order to examine some aspects of American socialism and

Greenwich Village radicalism, I have chosen to offset Max Eastman

against Ernest Poole. Eastman (1883-1969) was born in New York and,

after graduating from Williams College, began studies on a doctorate

under Dewey at Columbia. He worked briefly for the women's-rights

movement and, in 1912, assumed editorship of The Masses. Under his 6 guidance, this periodical expressed the conscience of radical America.

After the war, he studied the theory and practice of Marxism in Soviet

Russia and the United States. Eastman also attained importance as a literary critic with the publication of The Enjoyment of Poetry (1913) and The Literary Mind (1932). In 1941, Eastman rejected his radical past and, as a roving editor for The Reader's Digest, became an advocate of capitalism.

Ernest Poole (1880-1950) was the only social thinker in this study who was born into a well-to-do family. His father was a success­ ful stock broker. After graduating from Princeton University in 1904, he lived in the University Settlement in New York City and began a writing career. Poole's magazine articles focused on the social prob­

lems of the day such as child labor, slums and tuberculosis, and sweat shops. His most important work was The Harbor, a novel published in

1915. Poole's His Family (1917) was the first novel to win the Pulitzer

Prize. He later wrote over 20 other works, but his popularity and

literary reputation declined.

Thorstein Veblen's (1857-1929) view of the American economic order and his war-time writings have necessitated separate treatment.

Veblen, born in Wisconsin, studied at Carleton College and Johns

Hopkins University. He received a doctorate from Yale University in

1884 and undertook further graduate work at Cornell University. He taught economics at the Universities of Chicago, Stanford, Missouri, and the New School for Social Research. Veblen also was editor for

The Journal of Political Economy and The Dial. His economic thought, 7 exposing the conflictive aspects within societies, led to institutional analyses. Veblen’s most popular work was The Theory of the Leisure

Class (1899), and probably his most significant contribution to social theory was The Instinct of Workmanship and the State of the Industrial

Arts (1911). Veblen died shortly before the onset of the great depres­ sion.

The last figure considered in this study and the protagonist of Dewey is Randolph Bourne (1886-1918). He was born in Bloomfield,

New Jersey, where he went to school and, for a time, worked for a maker of rolls for player pianos. Bourne attended Columbia University from

1909 to 1913 and graduated as winner of the Gilder Fellowship, enabling him to spend a year in Europe. As early as 1911, he contributed to

The Atlantic Monthly. During his creative life, he wrote numerous essays for The New Republic, The Seven Arts, and The Dial. He pub­ lished two sympathetic treatments of Dewey's educational ideas and a collection of essays, Youth and Life (1913). Bourne died a month after the armistice.

Explanations of some of the terms which the reader will come across are necessary. "Social thought" and "ideas" simply refer to the reflections one has about his society and the kind of relations men should have with one another. "Liberalism," "progressivism," and

"radicalism" appear frequently. The figures in this study were repre­ sentative of such thought. The commonality in their social thinking was their desire to supplant material with human values. Finally,

"pragmatism," "philosophical experimentalism," and "instrumentalism" 8 are used interchangeably to refer to Dewey's use of creative intelli­ gence and scientific methodology for social betterment.

A few words of gratitude are in order. Professor Robert H.

Bremner suggested the subject for this study, and his incisive criti­ cism was needed and appreciated. His kindness will never be forgotten.

Ruth Ann, my wife, had a very special part in the making of this dis­ sertation, "for lots of reasons." CHAPTER I

DEWEY'S INSTRUMENT OF WAR

He had fallen forward and lay on the earth as though sleeping. Turning him over one saw that he could not have suffered long; his face had an expression of calm, as though almost glad the end had come.

Erich Maria Remargue All Quiet on the Western Front (Boston, 1929), p. 291

During a brief but laudatory address before a gathering honor­

ing John Dewey's seventieth year, Jane Addams, humanitarian and social reformer, mentioned the one time they had a public disagreement. She

had known that war could not result in human progress.1 Although ten

years had lapsed, the shock of Dewey's endorsement of United States

involvement in the First World War still lingered. Dewey had been

hopeful of the social possibilities of war, reasoning that if nations

could unite for organized killing, they also could combine in a similar,

immense effort to irradicate social ills. For pacifists like Addams

and social critics like Randolph Bourne, war represented not creative

but demented intelligence. War was not only a negation of reason but

of life itself. There was a contradiction in thinking that mass

killing would result in world democracy, a jarring incongruity in the

delusion of peace through war.

ijane Addams, "A Toast to John Dewey," The Survey, LXIII (Nov. 15, 1929), 203-204.

9 10

Dewey took his first step toward recognizing the social con­ tingencies of war in a series of lectures given at the University of

North Carolina in 1915 and published as German Philosophy and Politics.

In these lectures, he held Germany responsible for the war and attri­ buted her uncivilized behavior to the perpetuation of philosophical dualism. Throughout his academic life, Dewey had fought against the separation of thought from experience. According to his view, man had tried to escape the perils of life either by changing his idea of the environment or by turning natural powers to his own use. The first course attempted to achieve security through thought; the other, through action. Dewey maintained that certainty came only through per- fection of methods which united both thought and action.

To Dewey, the import of evolution was that experimentalism could be extended to the living. Man could be examined scientifically not only as a biological but as a social creature. Human life, because it possessed intelligence, was more than an organic adaptation to con­ stant variation and elimination; it demanded a new logic to endow intelligence with social responsibility. Living was interaction be­ tween the individual and the environment, involving constant and simul­ taneous doing and suffering. It was an experiment in effecting events.

Philosophy, therefore, had to be a method of locating and interpreting the problems of life, offering provision for their solutions.^

2john Dewey, The Quest for Certainty: A Study of the Relation of Knowledge and Action (New York, 1960), pp. 3-4, 8.

^Dewey, "The Influence of Darwinism on Philosophy" (1909), American Thought, Civil War to World War I, ed. Perry Miller (New York, 11

Philosophical experimentalism brought the individual into the forefront since he was the creator of thought and action. Although

Dewey denied the existence of predetermined ends, he accepted democracy as the proximate goal of society. A democratic society would encourage equal participation of all and provide for a flexible adjustment of institutions.^ Aware of the authority of nature, Dewey nevertheless endowed man with the capacity for learning and treated education as the principal method of social improvement. Democracy and Education

(1916) outlined his most complete consideration of the constructive aims and methods of education.

For Dewey, Emmanual Kant was the source of errant German thought. In an early essay (1894), Dewey examined the ideas of Kant.

Dewey observed that Kant had severed experience into various static categories, placing each segment into an organic whole. These Kantian categories offered little insight into truth for Dewey because the process of knowing involved relationships between subjects and objects.

For Kant, on the other hand, individuals and things constituted cate­ gories and existed for the synthetic unity of self-consciousness; the material which was to confront reason was already a part of it. The individual, therefore, could not act upon his surroundings. Despite

1965), pp. 220, 223; Dewey, "The Need for the Recovery of Philosophy" (1917), On Experience, Nature, and Freedom, ed. Richard B. Bernstein (New York, 1960), p. 26.

^Dewey, "The Development of American Pragmatism," Studies in the History of Ideas (New York, 1925), II, 375; Dewey, Democracy and Education; An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education (New York, 1916), p. US. 12 reservations, Dewey acknowledged that Kant had suggested a method leading to the union of thought and action.^

Dewey was not as generous in his 1915 lectures on German philosophy.^ Admitting his hesitancy in making Kant a national deter­ minant, Dewey maintained that every idea of Kant was "a gesture to the world.'* Even though Kant bel?eved he had separated thinking from act­ ing, Dewey contended that Kant had turned the direction of the German thought toward world domination.

Dewey exposed the inherent dangers in the German categorization of life. Kantian reason operated in both science and morals, and the laws determining both came from the same source. Kant assumed and decreed that the individual, representing the purpose of humanity, labored obediently under a self-imposed will to transform the sensible world into one appropriate to that of universal reason. Moral commands were imposed by the higher upon the lower empirical self. Freedom and authority were thereby synthesized in a gospel of duty. Dewey objected that when an inner imperative replaced the function of reason intelli­ gence was non-functional. Social authority assumed the appearance of rationality and was not subject to the questioning.

In Dewey's opinion, Kant's concept of an inner moral compulsion readily progressed to endowment of the state with ultimate moral func­ tion. According to Kant, moral placidity was not a gift but the result

^Dewey, "Kant and the Philosophic Method" (1894), The Early Works, 1882-1898 (Carbondale, 1969), pp. 34-47.

^The following summation is taken from Dewey, German Philosophy and Politics (New York, 1942), passim. 13

of the conquest of nature by man's reason. Morality involved trans­

formation of natural desires into determinants of reason, and man had

to concede power to the state to establish social conditions in which

morality would evolve. Later German thought furthered Kant's moral

individualism into ethical socialism where individual freedom was

realized in the functions of the state.

Dewey argued that German philosophy had dictated a union of

idealism and force. The state represented such a combination, and

the military became a part of German moral embodiment. The American

pragmatist considered that the function of war for Germany was "the

final seal of devotion to the extension of the kingdom of the Absolute

on earth." In truth, thought, an undemocratic one, had not been

separated from action.

The historical thinking of another German philosopher, George

Hegel, was only a further demonstration of a logic which led from

idealism to war. For Hegel, the unfolding of history was the realiza­

tion of the consciousness of freedom. The German people gave state

laws the same ends as their own; they appropriated for themselves the

reason found in laws. Since freedom was understood in terms of policy,

Hegel asserted that Germany possessed the greatest freedom yet attained by humanity. The Prussian political organization fully exemplified

the universal, organizing all particular arrangements of social and personal life. Dewey emphasized that a philosophical justification

of war inevitably followed such nationalism. Hegel had assumed a his­ torical development through divine direction and thought only one 14 nation could attain the fullest realization of God. Divine will could be passed from one nation to another, and war was only the visible transfer. In 1915, the mission and destiny of the world rested with the Germans.

For Dewey, recovery of philosophy from German idealism was

essential; the pitfalls of German non-experimental thought were appar­ ent. The war demonstrated the breakdown of a predetermined philosophy.

In 1908, Dewey had first cast his social ideas on an international background. Perhaps he naively assumed that a world state of federated humanity was possible and that establishment of an international society would succeed nation-states.'7

In German Philosophy, Dewey charged Americans with a mission: they could not constrict their intelligence to the a priori interests of the state; thought had to be directed to the ends of action. Arbi­ tration treaties, international judiciaries, and disarmament schemes were inadequate. The world of 1915 demanded radical thinking. He viewed the United States, with its multi-racial composition, as an experiment in international government. The idea of peace was only negative, while the growth of human intercourse was affirmative. Although vague, Dewey insisted there were forces in America which unified human relations. An intelligent philosophy would extend and assure the existence of such powers for the future. Germany had devised a nationalistic philosophy; America would have to formulate its own. The

^Dewey and James H. Tufts, Ethics (New York, 1913), p. 482. 15 ends would be the realization of freedom and the fullness of human companionship rather than objectives of the state.

Having established German guilt for the war, Dewey had to forge appropriate armament for democratic experimentalism. In a brief essay published in 1916, he domesticated the idea of force. Taking for granted that there were several kinds of force, ranging from energy to violence, Dewey asked whether force represented only a perversion of industry or the highest form of human labor. Force was necessary to carry out the accomplishment of anything. Violence was objectionable because it constituted destructive use of force. For Dewey this was a significant statement. War with rational objectives had only force and not violence. He stressed this thought by attacking pacifism which he maintained was unable to conceive of organizing force for great ends.

The peace movement was against everything except peace. If law were to be substituted for war, the first step was a new social organization.

Pacifists had to use an inventive intelligence instead of appeals to emotion or force would become pointless violence. War also would be violence unless it could be demonstrated the most economical means of obtaining desired ends. An international league had an air of reality to Dewey because such an organization would transform force into law.®

During the remainder of 1916, Dewey published Democracy and

Education and a few articles relating to education in wartime. Shortly before America's entry into the war, he essayed the country's uncertainty.

8Dewey, "Force, Violence, and Law" (Jan. 22, 1916), Characters and Events: Popular Essays in Social and Political Philosophy, ed. Joseph Ratner (New York, 1929), II, 636-41. 16

The mood of hesitation was not unusual and was not the consequence of prosperity or sentimental pacificism. A war to save French democracy was not necessarily one to save an American democracy. Even if the nation declared war against Germany, there would still be hesitation until the allies were fighting for a democratic civilization on

American terms.®

After declaration of war by the United States, Dewey sought to disconnect conscience from the pacifist's abhorrence to killing and related the war to his own internationalism. Pacifism possessed an innocence derived from the nation's misconceived moral education. It stressed good will rather than intelligence, personal motives rather than social agencies. America's responsibilities could not be ful­ filled by merely obeying a commandment against murder. Real peace would be founded on specific social arrangements. Conscience had to be associated with a compulsive power for constructing peace.

Dewey emphasized that the pacifists' views had not stopped a peaceful nation from going to war. The world was organized for war, but there was no international agency for a pacifist country to make its voice effective except through military participation. Dewey questioned whether the dominant ideal of Jane Addams* pacifism was reorganization of the world. Abstinence from war denied use of force for that end. All the pacifists could offer was the hollow dictum that if no nation went to war there would be no war. For Dewey the

®Dewey, "The Emergence of a New World" (May, 1917), ibid., pp. 443-46. 17 only future of a real pacifism rested in the establishment of a world government. This war was that opportunity.10

With America's intervention, Dewey speculated on the nature of peace; he was not explicit in his vision of the world that would some­ how be bettered permanently by United States involvement. Americans had entered the war with a serious, business-like attitude. They knew a job had to be accomplished but had to keep in mind the objective of realizing an international government. He cautioned that this aim was neither an immediate actuality nor a gloss over the reality of war.H

In emphasizing the possible social creativity of conflict, Dewey in­ sisted that the American contribution would not be measured by finances or troops but only by the final determinant of peace. He foresaw the danger of patriotic conscription of thought in an intellectually unpre­ pared population. He was concerned that thought would only be directed to the prosecution and not the purpose of the war. If that followed,

America would have missed the occasion for seeing the meaning of its national life reflected in the remaking of the world.*2

Dewey reflected that, no matter how long the suffering, the time after the war would be infinitely longer. He was still having

l°Dewey, "Conscience and Compulsion" (July 14, 1917), ibid., pp. 576-80; Dewey, "The Future of Pacifism" (July 28, 1917), ibid., pp. 581-86.

1^Dewey, "America and the War" (Aug. is, 1917), ibid., pp. 561-65.

12oewey, "Conscription of Thought" (Sept. 1, 1917), ibid., pp. 566-70. 18

difficulty in believing the simultaneity of death and democratic living.

An enduring peace, he thought, would make a catastrophic war tolerable.

With a mental aberrance, he then joined the pacifist and the patriot in

alliance. Both were overwhelmed by the present; both could not envisage

the endless plain of a peaceful future. Dewey reverently invoked the

dictum of pragmatism: paying for misdeeds was among the consequences

which weighed in the calculation of an intelligent program. Force could

alter men's thinking, and a German defeat could reverse her inclination

for political and spiritual domination. Dewey cautioned, almost absurdly, that there was a distinction between a Germany defeated by intelligence

and a Germany defeated by revenge. One involved a consideration of the

future; the other was only a blind lurch into the i n f i n i t e .

Dewey was ready now to Americanize the world. Americans had populated a continent with a surplus of energy, and now war revealed another opportunity. There was already an interdependence of peoples through technology. Dewey offered a paradox: because nations from

every continent were fighting, there would be a deliverance of a new

cooperative world. The United States would have to see that Europe accepted the American ideal of an interracial, federated democracy. The

United States could no longer tolerate the European one of rivalry and hostilities. The new experiment would be heralded with the presence of a planetary federation and the silence of enduring peace. ^

l^Dewey, "Fiat Justitia, Ruat Coelum" (Sept. 29, 1917), ibid., pp. 592-95.

!4oewey, "America and the World" [Mar. 14, 1918), ibid., pp. 642-44. 19

American instrumentalism now offered a new international ethics.

Morality, for Dewey, involved not the speculation on ultimate righteous­ ness but, rather, was the convergence of the social arts to improve man and his environment. The reason for the gulf between the ethics of individuals and nations was the existence or non-existence of a higher associated life. The difference between the moral code of individuals and nations could be measured by the degree of social organization.

Dewey asserted that until nations were bound by legal sociality, there would be no morality. It was no longer a question of making use of the remnant international political machinery; national sovereignty and irresponsibility would only remain. The new league, instead, would have to care for the economic and social needs of all. Dewey boasted that, as the American conception of peace gained acceptance, the war would become a crusade for a new kind of social organization. He had juxtaposed "war" and "morality" and made the conflict one of compelling importance.15

Dewey was not consistent. Unsocial individuality was to be disdained, but, in one essay, the principles of business were upheld.

Dewey stated that President Woodrow Wilson and the United States repre­ sented a new order. America was an associated power to allies who were only concerned with the destruction of war. The idea of association

came from the world of commerce and industry, not from military neces­

sity. The United States had no interest in maintaining the old order;

it was committed to the ethics of industry and exchange. A world

lSpewey, "Morals and the Conduct of States" (Mar. 23, 1918), ibid., pp. 645-49. 20

society like the American one which grew from everyday needs would become indispensable. National conflict would become non-existent.*^

Dewey then endowed his world of business with pragmatic moralism.

Previous ethical systems were based on honor and dignity, with relations of the states revolving around pride and fear. Whether the war would make the world safe for democracy depended on a United States rejection of the old ethics and an assertion, as Dewey insisted, of the moral meaning of industry, exchange, and reciprocal service. An international organization needed the*technical abilities of businessmen to bear on commercial problems. Dewey thought that as businessmen joined the war effort their ideas would influence international relations. There would be a new diplomacy, founded on the principles of commerce and industry and directed toward public welfare. The choice was between a diplomacy derived from feudalistic ideas or one arising from a democratic ordering of life. *-7

Dewey cautioned that a hopeful approach to a league would be toward economic adjustments rather than legalistic considerations. A world organization was more than a surrender of political power; it was the sacrifice of nationalistic economic practices. An enlightened self-interest was the price for the prevention of war; free trade would necessitate the institution of strong administrative commissions. A world state was not beyond possibility; only the same intensity for war

IbDewey, "Approach to a League of Nations" (Nov. 2, 1918), ibid., pp. 602-605.

17oewey, "The League of Nations and the New Diplomacy" (Nov. 16, 1918), ibid., pp. 606-609. 21 was needed for the pursuit of peace. The resources and abilities were 18 present for an international democracy, only the desire was lacking.

Previously, Dewey had directed his discipline to the humaniza­ tion of American living. In 1888, he had written that industrial organi­ zation had to be made a social function. Society would have to assume all economic undertakings. He wanted not necessarily government owner­ ship but an installation of human regard in social relations.^ The internationalization of this hope was expressed in two essays he pub­ lished in the spring of 1918.

In "Internal Social Reorganization after the War," Dewey examined the educative function of war. It had laid bare the social weakness of the nation. As in the past, the pragmatist lamented that the American society was ordered for private and conflicting purposes and not for the common and public end. Society had not provided for the steady and useful employment for its members. There was a degraded and inhuman standard of living for the industrial population. There were problems relating to efficiency in production, distribution, and the utilization of abilities. Dewey was concerned that many were forced to labor mechanically at unrewarding tasks. The war administra­ tion had shown, although inadvertently, that domestic problems could be alleviated through social unity. The nation could not return after the end of the war to social inaction. Human problems obviously were capable

ISpewey, "A League of Nations and Economic Freedom" (Dec. 14, 1918),ibid., pp. 610-14.

l ^ D e w e y , "The Ethics of Democracy," The Early Works, p. 247. 22 of humane solutions. Through intelligence and experience, industrial and economic processes could be controlled socially. The American community would have to realize a better, reorganized, social order.^

In the jarring "What Are We Fighting For?" Dewey hopefully recited all conceivable, beneficial effects of war. Social forces had been freed. There would be a more conscious and extensive use of science for the community. Dewey moralized that the submarine and the airplane, technology, would do more to end wars than all the moralizing.

Paradoxically, the wartime alliances were a step in the political and economic consolidation of the world, but air flight would be the final obliterator of national boundaries. Dewey rejoiced. There would no longer be a perpetuation of intellectual dualism; knowledge and action would be inseparable from social affairs.

Domestic integration was the complement of world organization.

Public control occasioned by the war would not be forgotten but directed to social ends. Production for profit would be subordinated to produc­ tion for use. Property rights would give way to social rights. Dewey reasoned that arbitrary confiscation by the state could not be condoned, but property rights would have to be responsive to social needs.

The socialization of industry, Dewey thought, would be one of the most lasting consequences of the war. Dewey's socialism was one that would enlist voluntary cooperation of associations. The United

States would be a federation of self-governing industries with the government as an arbitrator rather than an owner. His greater vision

20Reprinted as Dewey, "Elements of Social Reorganization" (April, 1918), Characters and Events, II, 745-59. 23 involved a variety of freely experimenting and cooperating self- governing cultural and industrial groups under the charge of a world federation.^!

The treaty had not brought forth a better world. Dewey still held to his distinction between force and violence, but it underwent an intellectual transmutation. The idealist, not Dewey, who looked to the war as a means of realizing peace was understandably disillusioned. The consistent pacifist, Dewey, was vindicated. The idealist could only retreat to the statement that the world would have been worse with a

German victory. But idealism would always be beyond reality if not driven by an intelligent use of force. Dewey explained that the United

States should have insisted on an understanding with the allies before it entered the war. Instead, America's effort had only been tainted with the emotionalism of pacifism. As if turning against his previous position, Dewey insisted that American ideals had been defeated because the nation appended moralistic sentiments to its force. Intelligence implemented at the proper time with the allies would have swept away idealism and the obstacles to peace. The war had to be fought either for democratic or imperialistic ends. He reiterated that American idealism would never prosper until it employed the modern forces of in­ dustry, commerce, finance, scientific inquiry, and social values.^

2lReprinted as Dewey, "The Social Possibilities of War" (June 22, 1918), ibid., pp. 551-60.

22pewey, "Force and Ideals" (Oct. 8, 1919), ibid., pp. 629-35. 24

With the final defeat of the treaty in 1920, Dewey gave his apologia. The reason for the American rejection was revealed in the contrast between profession and deed. Americans had a genuine prefer­ ence for democracy. This principle had never appeared in foreign affairs.

During the war, the Americans thought that democracy could be extended to the world, but the scramble after the armistice went in the old directions. Dewey and the United States were only left in a dilemma.

While American isolation was over, international affairs were conducted in old ways. All the nation could do was to disengage from world affairs until there was assurance democracy could g r o w . 23

Dewey remained loyal to his testimony. In 1923, he still main­ tained that the United States should not consider entering the League of Nations. Without the excuse of wartime enthusiasm, the United

States calmly could repudiate the experiment. Europe would have to tolerate American cooperation on American terms. With a Europe divided against itself, there remained the risk of war. The United States would join at its own peril.^

Dewey now believed that war could no longer annihilate war.

Also, leagues and world tribunals could not maintain peace. He admitted that the unity of the allies "created an illusion of real unity to which many fell victims, myself among the number." It was too easy to believe

23pewey, "Our National Dilemma" (Mar. 24, 1920), ibid., pp. 615-19.

24pewey, "Shall we Join the League?" (Mar. 7, 1923), ibid., pp. 620-28. 25

that an alliance for war could be transformed into an alliance for peace. The conditions of war only blurred the separateness of nations.25

Dewey returned to an old problem, instilling human values in inhuman societies. There was hope. In a series of lectures given in

1918 and revised for publication in 1922, he argued that war originated not from human nature but was the function of social institutions.

Realization of a social equivalent for war had not been made easier by the world conflict. Dewey now knew that war could not be eliminated by agencies which left institutions unchanged. The real issue was the humanization of human impulses.25

In an address before a high school audience in December, 1917,

Dewey had summed up his enthusiasm for the war. He insisted that he had been a "thorough and complete sympathizer" and looked to the "suc­ cessful prosecution" of the war. This position was necessary to "secure the cause of democracy."2? In the years after, Dewey altered his think­ ing on the instrument of war. In 1935, he was emphatic that America should stay out of the growing world conflict.2^ He later reiterated

25oewey, "Why Not Outlaw War?" (Mar. 21, 1923), ibid., pp. 666-68.

25Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct. An Introduction to Social Psychology (New York, 1922), pp. 114-15.

27Dewey, "Democracy and Loyalty in the Schools," The American Teacher, VII (Jan., 1918), 8.

28pewey, "What Will I Do When America Goes to War?" Modern Monthly, IX (June 9, 1935), 200. 26 that war was caused by social conditions which could be altered.If force were again used, "it will be because of outright relapse into barbarism and not as an agency for advancing civilization and culture."30

In the 1935 Page-Barbour lectures given at the University of

Virginia, Dewey elaborated on his new understanding of the relationship between force and progress. He insisted that American economic insti­ tutions had been operating under outmoded ideas and called for a new liberalism to bring forth necessary radical change. Dewey cautioned, however, that progress could not come through violence. The liberal was committed to intel]igent action but not force. Instead, violence and coercion were the very instruments of the institutions that had to be changed. The only creative force worked peacefully through science and technology. The problem of American society was the resolution of conflicting elements to insure the widest contribution for all. Dewey looked to the organized intelligence of democracy. Force was acceptable only when a minority prevented the social will of a democratic majority.

The function of the new liberalism would be to further social legisla­ tion and prepare for the socialization of production. Only then would human energy be freed for the pursuit of higher values.

2^Dewey, "Does Human Nature Change?" The Rotarian, LII (Feb., 1938), 10.

3%ewey, "The Basis for Hope," Commonsense, VI. .Dec. 1939), 9-10.

SlDewey, Liberalism and Social Action [New York, 1935), pp. 56-93. 27

Dewey had dedicated the publication of these lectures to the memory of Jane Addams, but his final concession to her pacifism came

later. In an introduction to a 1945 edition of Addams1 Peace and Bread

in Time of War, Dewey now knew there could be no war to end war. There

could be no peace in war. There was only a hope to have a generation of peace. The pacifist posture of Jane Addams had been correct. Dewey

could only hope for the creation of an international organization to care for all human needs, not one founded on and for the perpetuation of coercion.22

22jane Addams, Peace and Bread in Time of War (Boston, I960), pp. xi, xvii-xviii. CHAPTER II

THE NEW WORLD OF PATTEN AND WEYL

From the Volga a T34 pushed its way up a ravine through piles of corpses, sending fragments of bodies flying to both sides. And the men who stood near were too weary to raise their hands and wipe the bits of flesh from their faces. At a field kitchen that had been set up in the street one man got himself ten portions and lay down and died, and those who had got nothing because of him later broke down on the march and died; but the men who marched on paid no attention either to the one or the other.

Theodor Plivier Stalingrad (New York, 1948), p. 336

In 1908, Simon Patten, Professor of Economics at the University of Pennsylvania, took note of his depressed senation when he returned to Philadelphia from a vacation. With a characteristic literary heavi­ ness, he expressed the difference between the country and city as one between product and climax. For him, the city was rendered habitable and yet uninhabitable. It was as if the individual were separated from life. Primitives, in abundant natural conditions, struggled against scarcity through action, but the machine yielded surplus through in­ action. Early man obtained satisfaction in an economy of pain; modern man experienced pain in the midst of productive opulence. The solution was apparent but apparently insolvable. Attitudes of satisfaction

28 29 from previous economic environments would have to be transmuted into the present unpleasant pleasure economy.-1

The model Patten had formulated in 1896 for a social common­ wealth remained unused. The postulated ideal state was an island where there were no enemies, no severity in climate, and no irregularity in the seasons, Patten's idyl resembled the west Illinois plains of his childhood. In the beginning there were swamps, but, through the efforts of man, a garden appeared. The fields were square; the fur­ rows were deep and straight. But the duality of man was still present: the desire to increase pleasure either for the self or the group. In the social commonwealth, every tendency to seek pleasure would be counteracted by the determinant of the community welfare. The society would not be secured through conscious calculation but through social impulse.^

Patten's New Basis for Civilization, proclaimed in 1907, also had not been realized. Patten stated, as he had first in The Premises of Political Economy (1885), that the presence of a surplus economy made the present distinct from the past. In a deficit economy, society struggled to limit the deficiency. In abundance, society utilized the

iSimon Patten, Product and Climax (New York, 1909), pp. 11, 29, 40-41, 55-56, 61.

^Patten, "The Theory of Social Forces," The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, VII, Supplement (Jan., 1896), 75, 77, 93-94. 30

surplus for the common good. The problem again was that an intellectual revolution had to precede an economic one.^

Patten knew that abundance had faults. There were security

and pleasure, but again only product and not satisfaction. Earlier he

had considered that abundance would bring the paradoxical dominance of

those with weak appetites, those possessing a puritanical restraint,

over those with strong appetites. The laws of consumption in abundance

thus would dictate an adjustment to environment. The high standard of

living was determined not by how much man had to enjoy but how rapidly he tired of any one pleasure. To have prosperity, one enjoyed in­

tensely and then tired quickly.4 Economic analysis and nutritional

counseling were not enough. In 1911, Patten still faced the problem

of bringing forth the social nature of abundance. He called upon the

churches to assume their role in a community of abundance and bring

forth the social nature of man.3

The realization of a pleasure economy was not a finality in

economic thought. Soon after, Patten related that his old categories

of pain and pleasure had been faulty. While the pursuit of pleasure

was a higher manifestation of living than the fear in a pain economy,

the pleasure of action was ahead of the pleasure of consumption. The

latter depleted what the former created. Patten conceived of a third

3Patten, The New Basis of Civilization (New York, 1921), p. 11.

4Patten, The Consumption of Wealth (Philadelphia, 1901), pp. 16-17, 51.

3Patten, The Social Basis of Religion (New York, 1911), pp. 213, 215, 219, 222. 31 stage, a creative economy. Thought had to be formulated as precisely as it had under the deficit economy, but it had to result in coopera­ tive, voluntary, social action.^

Educated at the University of Halle, Patten admitted that he had been too influenced by the German view of the individual as a part of a whole society. In 1912, he vowed to give proper emphasis to the importance of English thought and, consequently, wanted to restate

American economic thinking. He turned to a voluntary socialism only to have the outbreak of the war force him to rediscover the socialism of German thought.7

Patten was sympathetic to the German war cause. Viewing Germany as the aggressor only ignored the forces which made the conflict inevi­ table. That nation represented the new economic internationalism of

Europe, while the allies were only voices for the interests of the smaller states. This nationalism of the allies was a block to social progress. The German concept, on the other hand, involved the union of similar cultures into a super-racial unit. For Patten, Germany was attempting to create a united Europe.®

Patten saw the German abstraction differently from Dewey. For the philosopher, the centralization of thought was stifling; for the

^Patten, "The Reconstruction of Economic Theory" (1912), Essays in Economic Theory, ed. Rexford Guy Tugwell (New York, 1924), pp. 322- 23, 337-40.

7Ibid., p. 273.

®Patten, "Responsibility for the War," The New Republic, Nov. 14, 1914, pp. 21-22. 32 economist, there was only unified social action. In 1916, Patten reasoned that America could give in to prejudice and enter the war against Germany or it could seek an understanding. The only way to grasp German thought was through knowledge of its concepts of living and dying. In his Culture and War, Patten explained the first as growth, concentration, power, and beyond reality. Death was merely the outlasting of utility, an obstruction to progress. While German thought involved a pulsing life, Patten considered English reality one of interpretation of matter and dissipation of motion. English philosophy was one of personal ends in a static world. For Germany, there was cooperative action, a higher unity, and an ever emerging super-reality.

The German concept was social; the English, was personal. It was as though the German attitude approximated that of the social commonwealth.

The world had accepted the presence of democracy, and Patten insisted that it had to accept the cultural socialism of Germany.

Although German thought was heading in new social directions, Patten was still critical. German philosophy was compounded of two antago­ nistic elements. While it was aimed at cultural unity, it also en­ couraged conflict. Patten reiterated his solution. Economic measures were the only way to liberate cultural unity. Physical hardship had to be abolished. A new society would only be concerned with the service to humanity.®

^Patten, Culture and War (New York, 1916), passim. 33

Still, there was the persistent threat of German militarism.

If brotherly love could not be relied upon, then Patten considered that instinctive defense and economic interests would be the present guide for America. The nation would have to enter an alliance with

England. These two countries could defend half of the world without resorting to a militarism which would destroy their liberty and prosperity.10

Progress toward Patten's new world could not be stopped.

Several years before the war, he enlisted imposing forces of psychology and pointed to the function of the mind in the processional adjustment of the organism to its environment. Inquiring nervous currents acquired sensory ideas. More important nerve currents created adapting motion.

These latter motor ideas propelled the individual to take action ensur­

ing survival. The environment was the determinant of the economy.

Pleasure-getting was promoted by material analysis which destroyed the motor reactions of fear and pain. An economic period endured until

conditions promoted new motor reactions.

While a pleasure economy was an inevitability, there was ques­ tion whether the war would be a material setback. The conflict con­ verted productive consumption into unproductive expenditure, leaving

lOpatten, "The Basis of National Security" (1916), Essays, p. 348.

**These concepts were summarized briefly in Patten, The Develop­ ment of English Thought: A Study in the Economic Interpretation of History (New York, 1899), pp. 8-9, 11-13, 50. 34 only the spectre of a painful and suffering economy.If governments at war destroyed economies of pleasure, Patten was not certain as to their necessity in bringing about peaceful societies.

While the prophet of abundance eventually endorsed America's entrance into the war, he continued to emphasize the war's destruction of the economic surplus.Patten relinquished his struggle to alter social thinking but only wanted to preserve the possibility of social change with minor adjustments. He stressed that, while the stated wealth of the United States was $200 billion, the real worth was only half. Because the fixed capital amounted to $50 billion, all enter­ prises depended on the remaining $50 billion for circulating capital.

The annual surplus was $6 billion, and only half of this figure was an increase in value. If the demands of the war government exceeded this real surplus, the problem was how to raise additional sums through savings. Previously, increases in capital had been derived from the surplus and not savings. The surplus could not be augmented easily because it was determined by the effectiveness of industry. Circulat­ ing capital, therefore, could only be raised through a lessening of daily expenditure. The cost of the increase would have to come from

American daily consumption.

This transformation of consumer goods into capital could only occur in two ways. There could either be a voluntary restriction of

12patten, "Economic Fallacies that Favor War," Moody's Magazine, XVIII (Jan. 1915), 13-17.

l^Daniel M. Fox, The Discovery of Abundance: Simon N. Patten and the Transformation of Social Theory (Ithaca, 1967), p. 124. 35

consumption, only an illusory hope, or a change in price level which would force restriction. Patten cautioned that war expenditures were

limited by profits, which were, in turn, curtailed by price levels.

Higher prices meant that the consumer was forced to give his savings to the capitalist, who then loaned it to the government. The consumer was taxed indirectly, paying through curtailed consumption and maturing bonds. These securities were only surplus war profits and a social sur­ plus viewed in another way.

Patten called for a new and impracticable form of taxation which would not place the burden on the workers or a special group of con­ sumers. His proposal was a reflection of a Calvinistic upbringing. An

income tax would provide only large but inadequate funds. Instead, he contrived a tax on the inheritance of character. A special tax on a natural advantage was like one on an unearned increment. He explained that the increase in national effectiveness then would be the main source of taxation.*4

The property rights of society to the economic surplus were embedded with Patten's liturgy. Social surplus was the positive dif­ ference when total cost was subtracted from total utility. It was an estimation of the pleasures versus the pains in production. The surplus resulted from technological advances and consumer adjustments to economic environment. Later, Patten elaborated a concept of social energy. A social surplus was vested in the individual as surplus energy and in

14patten, "Problems of War Finance," The Yale Review, VII (Oct., 1917), 73-89. 36

goods produced by this energy. The fund of social surplus was not

permanent but was continually changing from goods to energy and from

energy to goods. Life was constantly revitalized by this social

surplus.I®

Walter Weyl's The New Democracy offered an urgent prescription

for society to realize the social s u r p l u s . 16 Weyl received his doctor­

ate under Patten and, like him, pursued academic training in Germany.

Both had been unable to find appropriate employment after receiving

their degrees. Patten returned to his father's Illinois farm, taught

high school, and finally obtained a position at the University of

Pennsylvania. Weyl spent some time at a government job and social work.

In 1902, he was attracted by the objectives of the mine workers in their

strike and began writing reform articles. By 1912, a family inheritance

and an income from writing left him financially secure to formulate

social reform.

Weyl expressed the same disenchantment as Patten. America was to be a sanctuary from oppression but only amounted to a showplace for

sensational inequalities of wealth.He questioned how many million­ aires there would be by 2000. He sarcastically asked whether the deter­ mination and efficiency of a Prussian bureaucracy would be better than

ISpatten, The Theory of Prosperity (New York, 1902), pp. 19-20; Patten, The New Basis, p. 26.

16fleyl considered his work a popularization of Patten's, Fox, Discovery of Abundance, p. 155; Weyl, The New Democracy, p. 191n.

l^The following summation is taken from Weyl, The New Democracy, passim. 37 the deception of democratic inalienable rights. Without misgiving, a new insurgent democracy was to be born.

The old democracy was an individualistic one, a by-product of a painful economy. A frontier America had resulted in an individualistic society, but such atomism only turned against itself. Competition ended and a fictitious rivalry began. Material development left psychological growth in the distance. The qualities necessary for continental con­ quest rendered the American incapable of solving national problems. A pioneer society was only a preempted one. There were abundant resources and rampant appropriations, but there was no social utility. For Weyl, it was clear that industrialists also had acted under the same frontier values. A social economy, not social waste, was needed.

Weyl ignored the dilemma of his own making. Abundance and its social surplus had resulted in an unsocial society. A resplendent plutocracy had claimed the surplus. Almost inconceivably, he explained, society had vowed poverty to assure the wealthy and allowed an industrial oligarchy to rule a democratic community. Perpetuation of such social injustice necessitated only the adherence of the population. Weyl rationalized that the existence of a wealthy class, opposed to demo­ cratic change, only created the inevitability of revolt.

Weyl knew that plutocracy was transitory in the realization of a socialized industrial nation. Borrowing from Patten's psychological analysis, Weyl pointed to the inevitability of the new commonwealth.

He repeated that motor reactions proceeded from prior accumulations of nervous energy. Social action was the fulfillment of previous unconscious 38 social strivings. The nation was already moving toward a real democracy.

A new social spirit was evolving from old individualism. The citizen now sought his interest in the common welfare. The presence of an abundant economy offered the opportunity for such a democracy. Increas­ ing social wealth shifted ethical concern from group survival to one of welfare for all members. The question was whether everyone would unite to attain control of industry and government.

Crucial to his later thinking was Weyl’s position on class con­ flict. Patten had condemned the programs of socialistic thinkers as within the conception of economies of scarcities. Weyl held the same opinion. For him, the Marxian ideal of a successful revolution founded on the conflict between the superflously wealthy and the great mass of the miserable was untenable. Hope rested not in the continuation but in the elimination of oppression. Weyl thought that the plutocracy was being opposed by greater numbers and would soon be without influence.

There would be a gradual adjustment, not a complete overturn.

Weyl's program for a new society involved the socialization of industry, the democratization of government, and the civilization of the citizen. The first would be achieved through government regulation and ownership, tax reform, and a strengthening of the industrial weak.

Several democratic reforms would have to be realized; all were directed to give the citizen a greater determining role. Finally, the opportuni­ ties in life would have to be broadened. There would have to be a con­ servation of health, a democratization of education, a socialization of consumption, and an elevation of the lowest elements of society. 39

Weyl was pleased with The New Democracy. He pronounced it

"brilliant... and thoughtful in parts" but vowed to take more time with his next book. This would be about America and the class war, and, stringently, he permitted himself only one year for completion. Weyl's enthusiasm for his projected work was boundless. The book was "going to be big, big, big." If it were criticized, Weyl smugly thought, he would only get on to the next w o r k . 18

Charles B. Forcey, a scholar of progressive liberalism, has maintained that soon after the completion of The New Democracy Weyl had doubts about middle-class reform. He began to question his faith in progressivism and, by the time of his death, believed in salvation through class warfare. The Lawrence, Massachusetts, strike in 1912, the war and the lost peace, and the Bolshevist revolution were the deter­ m i n a n t s . ^ examination of Weyl's diaries, Forcey's main source, would not reveal such a logical development. Random ideas, contradictory thoughts, projected books, and unfulfilled resolutions, interspersed the pages. One could conclude that Weyl had seriously questioned America's capitalism, as he had already in The New Democracy.

In 1912, Weyl had written that the importance of class warfare would decline in the future. There would be wide-ranging conflicts between classes, but there would also be adjustments for common aims.

18weyl, Diary, Jan. 20, Jan. 21, Feb. 7, and Mar. 2, 1912.

19Charles Forcey, "Walter Weyl and the Class War," American Radicals: Some Problems and Personalities, ed. Harvey Goldberg (New York, 1957), pp. 265-76; Forcey, The Crossroads of Liberalism; Croly, Weyl, Lippman, and the Progressives (New York, 1961), pp. 160-63, 295-96. 40

The enormous increase in the social product would permit the necessary compromises. 20 in January, Weyl went to Lawrence to report on the strike led by the Industrial Workers of the World. The labor conflict only increased his bias in favor of the workers, but he regretted the

"blind categorical idealism of the leaders." For Weyl, the strike had raised the question of what the state could do to alleviate the con­ dition of the workers. ^ He was certain that the absolute refusal of labor to compromise and its direct appeal to sabotage would render the strike a failure. In March, the strike still continued, and Weyl had to reevaluate his opinion. The Lawrence experience "shook" him "up mightly." He now felt compelled to test all his t h e o r i e s . 22

Still, Weyl had not given up his faith in a democracy through plenty. He considered the great national problem to be industrial peace. He knew that prosperity meant the absolute necessity of peace and cooperation . 23 Weyl reiterated these thoughts in ^-surviving ___- fragment from his book on class warfare, "The Only Truly Revolutionary

Class." He maintained that the labor problem was one of securing for the wage earners, the material and moral conditions of life.^

20Weyl, The New Democracy, p. 190.

21Weyl, "The Strikers at Lawrence," The Outlook, C (Feb. 10, 1912), 311-12.

22Weyl, Diary, Jan. 29 and Mar. 16, 1912.

23Ibid., Nov. 27, 1912.

24weyl, "The Only Truly Revolutionary Class" (n.d.), Tired Radicals and Other Papers (New York, 1921), pp. 19-30. 41

In 1913, Weyl joined the new nationalist, Herbert Croly, and the young political philosopher, Walter Lippmann, in establishing The

New Republic. With the beginning of the war, the three editors were sympathetic to England and, with the sinking of the Lusitania, were openly hostile to Germany. After the presidential election of 1916, they gradually became convinced that Wilson would take the nation to a position of world leadership and applauded American intervention in 1917.

Weyl contributed little on the war for the journal. Shortly after the outbreak, he observed that the British were unconcerned be­ cause the war brought prosperity. With premonition, he thought real burden would appear with the establishment of peace. ^ In the summer of 1916, he temporarily left the journal to begin his American World

Policies.

In his wartime writings, Weyl appeared unconcerned over the human tragedy of war. Lippmann noted that Weyl could impersonally cal­ culate manpower, casualties, munitions, and diplomatic thrusts. Yet, he was deeply affected by human agony. With the announcement of the armistice, his first thought was ‘’nobody was being killed tonight."26

With the war, Weyl's thinking turned from class antagonism to middle-class reform. In American World Policies, he asserted that the national purpose now would have to be given an international setting.

The protagonists of his previous work came forth; the capitalist of

25weyl, "Prosperous War," The New Republic, II (Mar. 27, 1915), 205-207.

2<>Howard Brubaker, ed., Appreciation (Privately printed, 1922), pp. 91, 126. 42

the old democracy faced the humanitarian new d e m o c r a t . ^7 The one stood for a nationalistic force; the other, for a democratic peace. The choice for Americans was between a world policy of continued imperialism or a new internationalism. The decision would depend on internal evolution.

Accidents, irrationalness, and prejudices were not the causes of war; Weyl instead singled out economic reasons. Materialistic ambi­ tions had to be extracted from diplomatic relations. There had to be alternatives for the resolution of economic differences. The material motive for peace had to be as intense as the desire for war. The en- ligtened self-interest of each nation would work for the welfare of the world.

Believing intrinsically in peace, The United States faced the war. Ironically, Weyl reasoned, the frontier mentality kept the nation aloft from European troubles, but economic interdependence now meant

American involvement. The United States had a definite interest in the post-war arrangement. Dewey had predicated world peace on American demo­ cratic concepts; Weyl insisted that the realization of peace had to begin first in America. It had to build a democratic society based on a thoroughly scientific utilization of resources. The economy had to be ordered to prevent the necessity of going to war for a greater share.

To curb any American imperialistic tendencies, Weyl urged an increase in agricultural production and further development of the domes­ tic market to achieve a balanced economy. Legislation, however, could

27The following summation is taken from Weyl, American World Policies (New York, 1917), passim. 43 not immunize American society from social injustices and imperialistic outbursts. There had to be real social change involving new attitudes.

There had to be new values placed on individual life. A new patriotism had to be resentful of poverty. Weyl intoned that many would prefer war in place of such social change.

Only if America implemented real social development, Weyl in­ sisted, could the nation make a contribution to an ultimate establish­ ment of universal peace. The United States would have to urge the establishment of an international agency. Some form of rudimentary government would have to make an equitable distribution of material things. Weyl was ready to give up America's present understanding with

England and rely on an international league.

Weyl had offered a program for domestic stability, and then he suggested one for the gathering of nations. An alteration in the rules governing maritime warfare, a liberalization of colonial trade, and a reciprocation of industrial advantage, would be steps in the direction of peace. The real foundations, however, rested on industrial arrange­ ments and not on diplomatic and political arrangements. There was already an internationalism of financiers and wage earners, and Weyl hoped for a continuation of economic cooperation. Each nation then would become more interested in the welfare of the other. There would be a new Europe and a new world.

America had to stop, Weyl urged, perpetuating a philosophy of national irresponsibility and assume its burden in the reorganization of the world. The nation could continue its course of isolation, 44 reinaugurate imperialism, or undertake a policy of internationalism.

He was certain that the United States had to assist in establishing economic and military harmony among nations.

Weyl was touring the Far East when the United States entered the war. He confided that "everyone should help now." He briefly worked with the Inquiry, a presidential peace commission, and the War

Department, but his real contribution was his writing. He thought that there was little point in a book on Japan or China. Instead, he would write one on the coming peace and complete it before the conference. 28

In December, 1917, Weyl was finishing The End of the War. His thoughts turned to The New Democracy. He indulged in self-criticism.

Although that book was "vigorous, vivacious and full," it lacked a sense of proportion. It had too much extraneous material. Weyl wanted The

End to be free from the traditional concept of his previous work. He added that the conflict was more complex than one between democracy and autocracy. America had never interfered in European affairs for ideal purposes. He confessed that the menace was not German autocracy. In­ stead, it was the threat of a German dominated Western Europe. The morality of autocracy was not at issue. The only question was whether

German autocracy was safe for American democracy.29

Shortly before the armistice, Weyl completed his second work on

American foreign policy.30 He thought that the struggle for democracy

28Weyl, Diary, Mar. 4, 1917. 29ibid., Dec. 24, 1917.

S^The following summation is taken from Weyl, The End of the War (New York, 1918), passim. 45 and internationalism would not end with the peace treaty. There was a simplicity and inevitability about the war. Weyl ignored his ownpre­ vious warning and wrote that the war was really part of a greater con­ flict between democracy and autocracy. Although a German victory would delay, it would ultimately contribute to the realization of democracy.

Millions of wage earners would see the absurdities of class structure and ultra-nationalism. The liberal and socialistic elements wanted social betterment and a real peace. They were forced into the war be­ cause the old industrial system collapsed. At this point, Weyl wanted to rest his internationalism on the world-laboring groups. The up­ heaval in Russia had proved that the laboring classes were gaining importance. He then raised the question of whether a permanent gain in ideals would compensate for the loss of life and affirmed that there would be a new state where men and nations could exist in peace.

The mechanism of peace, Weyl insisted, had to lessen the desire for aggression. The alliance against Germany was directed toward internationalism. Such a union could be used for peace after the war.

Weyl enthusiastically instructed that socialism had taken decades to evolve from capitalism; it was only reasonable that the integration of the world would take time. At the end of the war, the most that could be accomplished was the creation of machinery, but, after, there had to be a significant change. The social surplus would have to be extricated from the control of the property owners, or imperialism would only resume.

Weyl admitted this could not be achieved without revolutionary changes. 46

The advocate of a new democracy then pressed for a program of reform for the American system. Socialization of the social surplus could be realized through nationalization and taxation. The government would have to extend its power over basic industry; the nation could not export capital until it had fulfilled the needs of its citizens.

All this was contingent on the ability of the people to gain political and social control over the nation. For Weyl, the final war would only begin after the war.

With the armistice, Weyl dismally examined the process of demo­ bilization. There was not even a beginning to the new democracy. With no planning, the United States was discharging thousands of soldiers and industrial workers a day. Sarcastically he commented that things would adjust. The unemployed, if they survived starvation, would eventually find jobs. Britain used a more scientific system. There was a three-week notification of discharge, unemployment compensation, and an adjustment in production. The United States could not undertake, at that time, such an elaborate program, but Weyl suggested some general rules. The government should create a program of buffer employment and use surplus labor in construction programs. If demobilization caused wide-spread unemployment, the government should give furloughs, in this instance a form of unemployment compensation, instead of discharges.31

Patten's thinking about the post-war world involved more moder­ ate proposals. The increased power of expenditure over savings had

SlWeyl, "Planless Demobilization," The New Republic, XVII (Nov. 30, 1918), 125-27. 47

been evident to him before 1914. The war turned this problem into an

economic crisis because of the further increase of national expenditure without a reduction in individual demand. Previously, the industrial

surplus had been placed on the investment market and interest rates declined. At the same time, expenditures for pleasures were augmented,

and the individual stopped saving. Capital was transformed from sav­

ings into industrial profit. This check on the increase of capital

could be met in one of two ways. Either a high interest rate had to be offered to increase savings or prices had to be raised to increase the industrial surplus. Financiers chose the latter, and the high- price policy continued into the war. For Patten, a system which depended on profits to create new capital diverged from a democratic one. The increase of new capital as well as the expense of war had to be paid through high profits or had to be derived in a more equit­

able way. The problem of a democratic finance was to obtain a rate of

interest which would produce new capital.

Patten insisted that a democratic society with no class distinc­ tions could be realized. Greater life expectancy permitted a social attitude toward capital; Americans should look to a thirty-year work­

ing life as they had once to an eight-hour day. Patten’s slogan was that men could save freely during their working life and spend freely during old age. There would be a continuum of destruction and replace­ ment of capital. He argued that there would be a consequent abolition of a privileged leisure class. The choice was deceptively simple: a 48 superfluous class resting on low interest and high prices or a demo­ cratic population based on higher rates.32

Although Weyl could not obtain a membership in the American peace delegation, he still went to Paris and witnessed Wilson's fall.

The new democrat analyzed the reasons for the failure to realize a world democracy. The President had been over-confident. He was ill- prepared and badly informed. He had lost his perception of the pos­ sible. He had acted in fantasy rather than in reality. He had allowed his past success to distort his relations with others. In the end,

Wilson adopted principles which were contradistinctive from his own, and, as a prophet, he failed. Weyl admitted that the President had gotten the league and that organization could correct the treaty. A defeat could have thus been turned into an achievement. Wilson, the politician, also had not been successful. The idealist could have re­ fused the treaty and gained a moral accomplishment, but Wilson thought he could play the European diplomatic game. He achieved little.33

Patten also took a turn at exposing the liberal failure at

Paris. For him, the difficulties were really economic, not the politi­ cal, moral, and emotional considerations of liberal idealism. He knew that the war had only accelerated the previous difficulties. The con­ sumption of Americans had been altered radically. Satisfaction had increased by 30 percent over the previous 20 years. Patten thought

32patten, "The Tomorrow of Finance," Annals, LXXVI (Mar., 1918], 264-71.

33Weyl, "Prophet and Politician" (June 7, 1919), Tired Radicals, pp. 83-101. 49

that the heightened pleasure upset the balance between present and

future desires. The measurement of this disturbance was the rate of

interest. The necessary accumulation of capital could be insured by

offering a higher interest rate. The war created a shortage of materials

amounting to $12 billion. Restoration meant that producers would have to satisfy the consumers' claims, amounting to $10 billion. Capital production could only be attained by a rise in interest or profits, which would enable producers to turn surpluses into capital. Patten

ended by offering the choice of induced savings or increased profits

and property values.^

It was doubtful that Weyl would have led American radicalism in the post-war period beyond the frontier of The New Democracy. In

December, 1917, he had turned his thoughts again to his previous work on the class war. Radical change could not be formulated on the old

Marxist's basis but had to be arranged on an American plan. Later,

Weyl stated that the war had exposed the trend toward socialism. He thought that the coming decade would be one of socialistic reorganiza­ tion. The central concept of The New Democracy returned to his thoughts.

The coming conflict would not be one between the wage earner and the

capitalist but between the plutocracy and the people.35 Weyl visioned a world with more social justice for the workers but had departed little from his position of 1912.

34patten, "Failure of Liberal Idealism," The Freeman, I [July 21, 1920), 444-46.

35Weyl, Diary, Dec. 21, 1917, and May 19, 1918. 50

Patten spent his last few years in a Brown Mills hotel room in

New Jersey. His last testament was prosaically called Mud Hollow. In the fictional Indiana town, Patten returned to the basis of his youth

in west Illinois. The fields had deep and straight furrows. He wrote that the war would affect social thinking. Yet, the force of life still remained in the vague feeling, the social feelings, which transformed the dissimilar into the organic.36 For Patten, there was still hope for a new world.

^Patten, Mud Hollow, From Dust to Soul (Philadelphia, 1922), pp. 11, 229. CHAPTER III

THREE FACES OF CHRIST: GLADDEN, RAUSCHENBUSCH, AND HERRON

Almighty and most merciful Father: we humbly beseech Thee, of Thy great goodness, to restrain these immoderate rains with which we have to con­ tend. Grant us fair weather for Battle. Graciously hearken to us as soldiers who call upon Thee that, armed with Thy power, we may advance from victory to victory, and crush the oppression and wickedness of our enemies, and establish Thy justice among men and nations. Amen.

Ladislas Farago Patton: Ordeal and Triumph (New York, 1963), p. 690

In the beginning of 1914, Washington Gladden resigned his pas­ torate at the First Congregational Church of Columbus, Ohio. For over thirty years in his sermons from that pulpit, he had attempted to transform an industrial society into one of compassion. The rhythm of parish life, uniting the living and solemnizing the dead, now would be gone. There would be occasional sermons and lectures, and much writing.

Yet, it was the war which brought Gladden, near the end of life, to face the profoundest Christian question of life in death, of progress in war.

Like Dewey, Gladden felt compelled to consider the morality of force and found himself attracted to certain qualities of the military.

As if rendering "Onward Christian Soldiers," he thought that both the soldier and the Christian had to endure suffering and had to be capable of self-sacrifice. He hoped that everyone would find this spirit. If the war brought forth such a feeling, it would be the greatest gain.

51 52

He then asked whether men would offer themselves only for war. Those who gave themselves to the spirit of self-sacrifice, not those who gave themselves to battle, could save life from degeneration.^-

Gladden then went through the ceremony of hopeful war liberalism.

The world had always been in a state of progress, and the war was only the last obstacle in the movement for a perfect social order. It was reasonable to look to the time when the law of solidarity would govern.

Technological advances had broken the separation of peoples. There was a world industry, and everyone was working for one another. The war would bring vast destruction, but there would be greater rewards. People would realize not only its horrors but its futility. There would be a revulsion against war. Gladden was convinced that world judgment would convict national leaders of the most stupendous blunder. There was an inevitability of progress in Christian thought, and he saw the nations drawn closer together because of the war.2

Gladden denounced those who held that the imperfectibility of human nature led to conflict. He explained that man also was governed by laws, and there was an uncomplicated reason for war. If treated abnormally, man's nature worsened; if treated normally, the tendency of life was to fulfill the law of its being. Human nature could change,

^Washington Gladden, Is War a Moral Necessity? (Columbus, 1915), p. 2.

2Gladden, Sermon, Mar. 14, 1915, Washington Gladden MSS, The Ohio Historical Society. The following unpublished sermons and lectures are found in this collection. Gladden, "What the War Must Bring," The Great War, Six Sermons (Columbus, 1915), pp. 4-6, 9-11. 53 and the war was an example of its brute aspect. He knew that people would see the idiocy of militarism and would soon end it.^

In one Sunday sermon, Gladden went to the heart of his social reform thought. The Christian meaning of "repent11 was simply to change one's mind and receive new ideas. Gladden, the preacher, reduced the war to a struggle between two contending ways of life. One was centered in the self, and the other was devoted to sharing. One was disintegra­ tion and death; the other was construction and life. There was no doubt that life was stronger; the only question was the duration of the con­ test. Egoism was wrong for the individual and the nation. A war of greed should prepare one's thinking for a new idea. Gladden hoped that the war would end in a commonwealth of man. Such a federation would be established firmly only when everyone learned to make the common good supreme and to be governed under the laws of Christianity.4 Such radicalism would be real repentance.

The Christian was in the midst of all the suffering and could not be separated from calamities. Gladden insisted that war resulted from the rejection of the law of life on the part of nations. There was constancy in the working of the universe, and he knew that from evil came good. He could not believe that God allowed war without making it the beginning of a great emancipation. There would be a new league of peace.®

^Gladden, Sermon, May 30, 1915. ^Gladden, Sermon, Dec. 27, 1914.

^Gladden, Sermon, June 27, 1915; Gladden reiterated his hope for a community of nations on several other occasions; Gladden, "New 54

The purpose of Gladden's pre-war thought had been to awaken the social responsibility of the church. To be Christian had to face so­ cial questions, and the church had to fill society with a kind of life which would facilitate cooperation and good will. Change would be realized through the doctrine of fatherhood and sonship. Everyone had the same holy parentage and was, in fact, brothers. The welfare of each was important to the other. The church was formed to realize the

Kingdom of God in the present. There would have to be a redemption of society, a reconciliation of the races, a pacification of industry, a moralization of business, a purification of politics, and a simpli­ fication of life.^

The war soon forced disheartening thoughts on Gladden. If na­ tions ignored the idea of brotherhood, it would be an absurdity to call them religious. Christianity had to be united in fulfilling the prin­ ciples of Christ, but the churches only stood for division. Gladden altered his faith in continual progress, It was obvious that in eco­ nomics and politics, nations were not Christian. The churches had failed to convince peoples that they were friends and nations were not enemies. The churches should have denounced the nationalistic anti-

Christ; the war was a failure of the church. He brooded that

Internationalism," Lecture, n.d.; Gladden, Sermon, Jan. 9, 1916; Gladden, "Get a New Idea," The Great War, pp. 48-50.

^Gladden, Christianity and Socialism (New York, 1905), pp. 23, 25-26; Gladden, The Church and Modern Life (Boston, 1908), pp. 84, 92, 97, 102, 147, 185-90. 55

Christianity had so little affected life. There had to be a social

trust between men and nations.^

Gladden extended his thoughts on Christian failings in The

Forks of the Road (1916). He mocked that a prophet was not needed to point to the destruction which mankind faced. The churches had not

established the foundations of a true social order. Love was preached but without application to human relations. The purpose of Christian thought was to teach men how to live; the war was evidence of how in­ differently this mission had been carried out.

Human beings were b o m to live in mutual cooperation. The law of life was love and good will. The well-being of each was dependent on the other. Violation of the organic law resulted in the creation of

ill will. Gladden previously had pointed to the industrial and politi­

cal as realms within the kingdom of anti-Christ, but, with the war, the most powerful evil force rested in international relations. The prin­ ciple of reciprocity had not been recognized by nations. The churches had not attempted to establish it; the ministers of the world should have forcefully protested the war.

The peace congress after the war would have to determine whether nations would live in peace or use war as a final arbiter. If Christian faith could not eclipse the rampant tribalism of nations, the war would be the greatest disaster. The churches too had to create new bonds of

^Gladden, "Is Christianity a Failure?" The Great War, pp. 26, 28-31; Gladden, Sermon, Dec. 26, 1915. 56 unity and friendship among nations. There had to be an internation­ alization of the social gospel.®

In an evening lecture, Gladden reiterated the tenets of his world gospel, insisting that nations were not isolated entities but were organically related to one another. The development of civiliza­ tion tended to create closer associations, but nationalism still made every nation a law unto itself. A new internationalism would be founded on a collective sovereignty.9

At times Gladden was uncertain about the inevitability of prog­ ress with war. He was against United States participation. Conflict could never result in anything but disaster. Gains would be offset by losses. Killing was wrong, and war was the height of irrationality.

Peace came through truth and justice, not carnage and destruction. A neutral America would carry the banners of a league of peace; it could not attain peace through arms.19

Before the war, Gladden preached a doctrine of gradual reform.

He insisted on rights for labor, inheritance taxation, and regulation of monopolies. Property rights had to be subordinated to social rights.

He was not an advocate of socialism for it only replaced one materialism

8Gladden, The Forks of the Road (New York, 1916), passim.

^Gladden, "New Internationalism," Lecture, n.d.

19Gladden, "A Communication, A Pacifist's Apology," The New Republic, V (Nov. 23, 1915), 75-76; Gladden, "A Plea for Pacifism," The Nation, CIII, Supplement (Aug. 3, 1916), 1-2, 11-13. 57

with another. Real socialism was the realization of a social life. The

creation of social machinery was unnecessary; individuals had only to be made socially conscious.1*

Walter Rauschenbusch, professor of church history at the

Rochester Theological Seminary and a contemporary of Gladden, was more

insistent on a socialistic reformation. He resented that man was re­ garded as a mere producer of things. He deplored that industrial estab­

lishments were directed toward the creation of dividends and not for the betterment of human life. There had been a demoralization of society.

The first generation of Christian churches were not gatherings for group worship but communities for common life. The social efficiency of

Christianity had been neutralized in modern life. The churches would have to aid those social forces which were to bring about a life of com­ munism. Rauschenbusch asked whether there was a group which would lead the movement for economic cooperation. For him, the working class possessed the idea of fellowship. Socialism would not divide society

into two opposing classes but would unite it under one. He pronounced that the highest type of socialism would combine the economic and political force of socialism with the character and faith of Christianity.1^

^Henry F. May, Protestant Churches and Industrial America (New York, 1949), pp. 174-75; Gladden, Christianity and Socialism, pp. 51, 148, 185.

l2Walter Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis (New York, 1907), pp. 119, 139, 369-72, 398-99, 402-03; Rauschenbusch, Christianizing the Social Order ( N e w York, 1912), p. 404. 58

Rauschenbusch was hesitant about the use of force to bring about social change. It was not always wrong to stand against oppression with force, but it was usually the farthest, not the shortest, way to a social utopia. The long periods of reaction against violence lessened popular support for revolutionary change. Rauschenbusch thought that socialism possessed the most complete body of radical thought, and it had drifted from a faith in suddenness to a philosophy of patience. He warned opponents of change that a gradualism must be allowed to continue, or rebellion would result. Instead of force, the saved elements had to persuade and convert the obstinate.

Regarding the war, Rauschenbusch was reluctant to air his views and wrote little on the subject. In one article, he made a plea to be fair to Germany. Since America would soon be a spokesman for peace, it was the moral obligation of the nation to attain an open-mindedness.

Rauschenbusch admitted that the danger of partiality toward the allies was overwhelming, but he would attempt to present the case of Germany

and Austria. War, not the Germans, was responsible for killing the

innocent. What looked like aggressive German militarism was only self- defense. Finally, the Anglo-German conflict was only an imperialistic

clash. Germany’s only real aggression was the incursion on markets which England had considered unimportant.^

13Rauschenbusch, Christianizing the Social Order, pp. 408-411.

^^Rauschenbusch, "Be Fair to Germany," The Congregationalist and the Christian World, XCIX (Oct. 15, 1914), 486-87. 59

In an address before a pacifist organization, Rauschenbusch

took a stand against war. The conflict was an education. It demon­

strated that war was a reversal of the Christian social order. The basis of such a society was a respect for life and a feeling of human

solidarity. In war, the state perpetrated actions which were a sociali­

zation of evil. Reaction against the forces of sinfulness was the measure of Christianity. The great aim had to be the establishment of good will.

From 1885 through 1897, Rauschenbusch served at the Second

German Baptist Church on the fringes of Hell's Kitchen, New York. There he witnessed the human effects of the American economic order and asked how he could eliminate the separation between religion and life. The

answer simply rested in the phrase that God's will would be done on

earth as it was in H e a v e n . 15 By 1917, the iniquities of the economic

system were no longer the only great social problem. The church had to

face the question of war.

Rauschenbusch refined his thoughts in A Theology for the Social

Gospel. The sociality of Christianity had not always been unknown. To the disciples, it meant hope for a Christian social order on earth. This was a central concept in the thinking of Rauschenbusch. The Kingdom of

God meant the assumption of the Diety over human life; there was a divine purpose for life. It had been incompletely realized because of the action

lSDores Robinson Sharpe, Walter Rauschenbusch (New York, 1942), pp. 380-82.

l^Rauschenbusch, "The Kingdom of God," The Social Gospel in America, 1870-1920, ed. Robert T. Handy (New York, 1966), pp. 264-67. 60 of free will. The Kingdom involved the whole organization of human society in obedience to the will of God. It was an institutionaliza­ tion of life for brotherhood. It was a divine democracy, a commonwealth of cooperative labor, with opportunities for education and enjoyment.

The world had to be as one family.

Rauschenbusch considered Wilson's declaration of war as a reve­ lation of sinful super-powers. Parasitic governments represented evil on the grandest scale. Like Gladden, Rauschenbusch thought that a down­ fall or regeneration of oppressive governments would render the war worth the cost. If individual salvation meant acceptance of the attitude of love, the salvation of super-powers was the central problem. The answer was still accessible. States had to come under the law of Christ.

Governments had to come out from the Kingdom of Evil to the democratic one of God. The church was a social fact and would bear social forces on evil.

The eschatological aspect of Christianity was its vision of the future of mankind. There had to be a concept of the second coming, but the Baptist theologian warned that the approach of the Kingdom would not be peaceful. It would be signaled by a conflict with Evil. The war was the apocalypse. The sins of modem civilization would be brought to its own ending. Subsequent social repentance of the nations would be the beginning.^

^Sharpe, Rauschenbusch, pp. 224-26; Rauschenbusch, A Theology for the Social Gospel (New York, 1918), pp. 4, 24-25, 54-55, 74-77, 87, 90, 95-99, 117, 119, 145, 208, 210, 226-27, 239. 61

One of Rauschenbusch's early social essays examined the ethics of the accumulation of wealth. With irony, he pointed out that the amount of wealth was only important as it affected one's relation with

God and his fellow m e n . 18 George Herron had assumed a more vengeful attitude on this question. As pastor of the Congregational Church at

Lake City, Minnesota, he gave his first social sermon, "Message of Jesus to Men of Wealth," in 1890. He denounced a society based on self- interest. It was powerless to realize social justice. A capitalistic society was only enslaved by materialism. To the men of wealth, if they listened, it must have been amusing to hear the minister tell them to become disciples. God sent Christ into the world to sacrifice him­ self for man; Christ sent the corporation manager to be a living sacri­ fice for man. Men of wealth were to be the saviours of others.1®

Like his companions of the social gospel, Herron offered no detailed blueprint of his Christian state. He thought that the only

Christian social order was democracy, and that only democracy could be achieved through the social forces of Christianity. The common will would have to be surrendered to the righteousness of Christ.2® The church itself would first have to be saved. Only a purified and

18vernon Parker Bodein, The Social Gospel of Walter Rauschenbusch and Its Relation to Religious Education (New Haven, 1944), p. 31.

i^George Herron, The Christian Society (New York, 1969), pp. 103- 104,114-15.

20nerron, The Christian State. A Political Vision of Christ (New York, 1968), pp. 63, 74-75. 62 crucified church could do the work of social redemption. The hope of social democracy was a religious one. The church had to perform penance and sever its connections with materialism.2*

In the 1890's, Herron led the Kingdom movement, which attempted to realize Christianity in life, into one of religious-political reform.

No longer content with identifying social evils, Herron renounced his society. The economic system could not be fixed, and the only real religion was socialism.22 His divorce and remarriage in 1901 to the daughter of his benefactor, a widow of a wealthy lumberman, led to his expulsion from the Congregational church. Until the First World War,

Herron lived in comfort in Florence, Italy, content in his socialistic beliefs.

The ferocity of redemption was moderated by the graciousness of

European living. He was attracted by the domestic programs of Wilson, and, during the war became a quasi-diplomat for Wilson to the allies and the central powers. Herron began to vision Wilson as the political com­ ing of Christ. The President was not a materialist, for his advocacy of world democracy would be a spiritual realization of collectivity.

Wilson looked to a concordant world society. The war was only the apolcalyptic force which would create a brotherhood of nations.

2lHerron, Social Meanings of Religious Experience (New York, 1896), pp. 81-82.

^Robert Theodore Handy, "George D. Herron and the Social Gospel in American Protestantism, 1890-1901," (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, The Divinity School, University of Chicago, 1949), pp. 146-48. 63

Herron knew that the United States could not escape the conflict.

It was obligated to bring the war to a righteous conclusion. Wilson's meditation efforts in 1916 demonstrated that Germany was the enemy.

That nation had no other purpose than prolonging the war. The President placed his faith in the democratic principles of Britain and France.

They could not be equated with the autocratic ones of central empires.

The world leaders never had such an opportunity to realize redemption.

The allies had to gather spiritual strength and destroy the Prussian system. Only on such ruins could an international community be estab­ lished, The war was a crusade for a democratic, federated world. For

Herron, Wilson would herald the return of Christ.23

In the 1890's, Herron had turned his gospel against the evils of a materialistic society and a church which had failed to realize the earthly kingdom. In 1917, Germany was the transgressor. Capitalism was contradistinct from brotherhood and Germany from the Christian state.

Only in Prussia was the conception of the state absolute. It was beyond right and wrong and caused distrust and disruption. There could be no era of peace until this system was destroyed.

In spite of his wrath, Herron admitted that Germany had indus­ trially surpassed other nations. He admired the social programs of that nation and thought that only there did social organization exist at all.

France and England were unorganized socially; America was only an hetero­ geneous mass. But German efficiency was only spiritual atrophy. The

23Herron, Woodrow Wilson and the World's Peace (New York, 1917), passim. 64 perfect autocracy was only a social paralysis. Germany was Rauschen­ busch' s Kingdom of Evil. This state was not concerned with human well­ being. German finality was materialization of the spiritual, not spiritualization of the material. German socialism was only a false

Christ and only the first step in world domination.

Aside from Germany, Herron pointed to two other forces of evil, the munition manufacturers and the Roman Catholic Church. The munition makers wanted the war stopped before the destruction of German and

European militarism. If Germany could still remain armed, the rest of the world would have to do the same. The Christian radical concluded that it was understandable for American capitalists to change allegiance to Germany. Like autocratic Germany, Catholicism rested on the sub­ jection of peoples. Herron thought that there was an understanding between the Vatican and the central powers; the defeat of Italy would mean restoration of complete papal power. Although unaware, the allies were fighting against Germanism, war-profiteers, and Catholicism, for the universal realization of Christ.^4

With American intervention, Herron's view of the United States changed. Non-spiritual ends were now not the most important to American life. Materialism could be transformed into socialism. The visible kingdom had always been the American expectation. The United States was going to war for humanity and democratic living. The Germans would have to restore Belgium and occupied France. The European map would have to

^ H e r r o n , The Menace of Peace ( L o n d o n , 1917), passim. 65 be redrawn in accord with the wishes of the peoples. All international questions would have to be submitted to the coming peace conference.25

At first, Gladden also gave hopeful support to the American war effort. The nation was at a turning point. The decision for war could lead to disaster or be an opportunity for a great service. Wilson had tried to find a better way to end the war. He had raised issues above revenge. Gladden had no doubt that Germany had to repent for crimes such as the sinking of the Lusitania; that nation had brought war to

America. The loyal citizen had to accept this. The United States had no dispute with Germany but had enlisted to put an end to wars. It would make the world safe for democracy and realize, for the first time, a family of nations. The several warring countries had ignored funda­ mental social facts and were now suffering retribution. A family rela­ tionship was the norm of life. As soon as America and the allies fulfilled their pledge for a democratic world, the main objective of the brotherhood of nations could then be realized.26

Gladden turned to the consequence of war on living. He was concerned over the loss of life. There would be families without fathers; there would be women who would have to live without the hope of marriage. He wondered whether governments could not offer more to

25nerron, Germanism and the American Crusade (New York, 1918), passim.

26dadden, Sermons, April 29, 1917, and Sept. 23, 1917. f

66 people than a closing of human opportunity. The family would only have security when war was eliminated through a religion of l o v e . ^ 7

The war also would have a detrimental impact on education. Mil­ lions were taken from productive work to war. The art and science of militarism were not conducive to a reverence of life. Education before the war had contributed to the propensity for war. Education after the war had to be a rejection of past ideals; it had to teach the gospel of brotherhood.28

The congregational minister returned to his theme of the failure of organized Christianity. If men wanted an enduring peace, they would need a new kind of religion. War existed because it was present in men's minds. Churches had accepted nationalism. The law of God was binding on nations as well as individuals. Before the Kingdom would come, there had to be a reconstruction of religious life.2®

Both Gladden and Rauschenbusch died before the war ended. Both expressed their remorse for the war. The Congregationalist could view his stone church and still have doubts. He wrote that war was a failing 30 of religion. The Baptist hoped that from all the suffering would come the downfall of autocracy. A German victory would have been a calamity, but an allied one would not have brought forth the Kingdom. The evil

^Gladden, "The Family After the War," Lecture, n.d.

^ G l a d d e n , "Education After the War," Lecture, n.d.

29Gladden, "Religion After the War," Lecture, n.d.

30Gladden, "Do We Believe in God?" The Independent, XCV (July 20, 1918), 87. 67

of imperialism would still have been present. Rauschenbusch hoped that

the war was really a form of repentance. It was America's opportunity to help in the achievement of international order and peace.

Herron lived beyond the war and wrote two volumes condemning

Wilson and the treaty. For the Christian radical, Versailles was only proof that the war had not been one of redemption. The peace resulted

in more of a derangement than the war. It established a military and predatory government of the world. Wilson had been defeated by the financiers. Yet, Herron felt that everyone still wanted a community of man.

Herron was insistent; Germany still had to repent. This nation had sinned through its materialism and attempted world domination.

Germany was still a destructive and not a creative force. America had to carry the burden, destroy oppression, and join England in forming a world of free and cooperative nations.^

With the end of the war, another anti-Christ appeared, Bolshevism.

Like other evils, it attempted to bring an order through force. It was the opposite of democracy, the antithesis of socialism, and an inversion of Prussianism. A defeated Germany had commissioned Bolshevism to

establish a German world. There would first be destruction to the capitalistic and then the democratic worlds.

31Sharpe, Rauschenbusch, pp. 286-87.

32Herron, The Defeat in Victory (Boston, 1924), pp. ix, 2-3, 6-7, 32, 39, 93, 147, 156. 68

Herron returned to his attacks on American materialism. Democ­

racy had never been practiced in the United States. There had been a

failure because the political and economic had not been bound to the

spiritual life. The total exercise of social power had to be democ­ ratized. Everyone had to submit to the democratic experiment or retri­ bution would again be experienced. He thought that the employer and profiteer would have to be replaced by the social administrator. The organization and leadership of each part of collective life would be guided by experts and fulfill a social n e e d . 33

The three views were only reflections of the same image. Hesi­ tantly and reluctantly, Gladden and Rauschenbusch looked on the war as

leading to a betterment. For Herron, it was only evidence of a world

in the process of redemption. All three had offered their fair-weather prayers for battle.

^Herron, The Greater War (New York, 1919), pp. 83-86, 89-90, 92, 94. The Christian radical continued his quixotic struggle against super-capitalists and Bolshevists in his The Revival of Italy (London, 1922), pp. 122-28. CHAPTER IV

PRAGMATIC MARXISM AND PATRIOTIC SOCIALISM: EASTMAN AND POOLE

They made a wide detour around the Russian emplacement,... They started climbing again, and this time the ascent seemed to go on forever.... For a few seconds they stared at the sky without understanding. Then they all saw it.... For brief moments the outline of the hill stood out, clearly visible against the rainy darkness; then it seemed to fuse with the darkness again.... At irregular intervals the same phenomenon was repeated.... The whole of the eastern horizon stood in the spectral illumination of white flares. The men fought in vain against the emo­ tion that tightened their throats and filled their eyes with moisture .... They began to swallow and rub their hands over their damp faces.

"The front,"... [one] whispered almost reverently.

Willi Heinrich The Cross of Iron (Indianapolis, 1956), pp. 165-66

Young Max Eastman characteristically fell in and out of love.

There were two enduring affairs. One was with the Russian Eliena, whom he married in 1922. She was with Eastman until her death in 1956. The other, just as passionate but not as long, was with the revolutionary

Russia of Lenin and Trotsky. Stalin's unquestioned authority led to

Eastman's disenchantment by the end of the 1930's and left only bitter memories. But Eastman was really in love with life.

In 1907, at the age of 24, Eastman became an associate of John

Dewey at Columbia University, and he was greatly influenced by the

American philosopher's ideas. In his first book, The Enjoyment of

Poetry (1913), the pragmatic influence was apparent; Eastman protested

69 70

the separation of poetic expression from the enterprise of enjoyment of

life. He viewed his art as an experience to increase his awareness of

living. The poet was interested in the quality of things and in ex­

periencing life and the world. Poetry was nothing more than the search

for intensified experience.*

There was also Eastman the realistic reformer who was concerned with specific ends. During his Columbia years, he had taken part in

the woman suffrage movement but humorously admitted he felt more at ease before a male audience. He had hated class distinctions and yearned

toward a kind of pastoral utopia. People would be more equal searching

for truth instead of money-getting. While admitting that he had not read much Marx, he probably exaggerated his conversion during a conver­

sation with Ida, soon to become his first wife. He explained that his

impulse toward an extreme social ideal and his obstructing sense of hard facts of human nature were reconciled by the Marxian concept of

class struggle.2

By the end of 1912, Eastman was running a pseudo-cooperative

enterprise, The Masses. He soon turned a previously extreme right

periodical to one with a socialistic viewpoint. Eastman now announced

the tenets of his pragmatic radicalism. He was a revolutionary and not

a reformist; he was an experimental scientist and not a Marxian deter- minist. Eastman and The Masses wanted free social investigation in

*Eastman, Enjoyment of Poetry (New York, 1921), pp. 5-6; see also Eastman, The Literary Mind, Its Place in an Age of Science (New York, 1935), p. 194.

2Eastman, Enjoyment of Living (New York, 1948), pp. 353-55. 71 order to realize a radical demoralization of industry and society and an economic and social revolution. This revolution would be achieved through a conquest of power by the subjected classes.3

With the outbreak of war, Eastman labeled the conflict a gam­ bler's one. It was only a war for war's sake, and the underlying causes were economic. Germany had assumed the posture of the aggressor, not because of any national characteristic but because of a class trait.

Nevertheless, Eastman dully but confidently stated that the war would only mean progress. The struggle of the labor class would continue, and Germany would become a democracy. There would be industrial and true liberty.^

For the poet, war could also be an experience. The greatest event in all history was taking place, and young Eastman explained that he had to see it. He had cast aside a lesser principle and accepted an assignment for a commercial magazine. Once in Europe, Eastman felt disappointment. None of the horrors made an impression. He had earlier written that the worst thought that crossed his mind was the coming flood of war books. He pleaded that a clause should be written into the peace terms. Each nation could contribute only one book with a maximum thickness of ten feet.^

The only writing which Eastman indulged concerning the physical destruction of war was a poem, "In A Red Cross Hospital," which depicted

5Ibid., pp. 401, 418. ^The Masses, Sept. 1914, pp. 5-6.

5The Masses, April 1915, p. 5. 72 a face that was only a "beak." A doctor poured water through a "rubber down a hole he made in that black bag of horny blood." The doctor com­ mented that he hoped to "find the man a tongue to tell with, what he used to be."®

It was an uninteresting war in which it was difficult to rivet attention on a few yards gained or lost.^ There was only a continuation of nothing lost or gained. When thousands of youths were maimed and killed each day, there were no longer heroes. There was just the common fighting stuff of human nature. This war was not one of people struggl­ ing for liberty; it was a defense of nationalism against a nationalistic invasion. Again, Eastman saw the inevitability of a democratic triumph.

A German victory would only delay the inevitable revolution. Yet, he thought that there would probably be no absolute decision. The common people of Russia, France, and England had no real enthusiasm for such a war. There would be only a draw. Eastman nonchalantly confessed that he had little interest in the war.

These thoughts and several other essays Eastman published in a book entitled, Understanding Germany. He began by stating his purpose was to withdraw from the current flurry of newspaper comments on the war and offer some sensible comments on Germany. He reasoned that he felt no patriotism toward any nation. His sense of allegiance was to

^Eastman, Colors of Life: Poems and Songs and Sonnets (New York, 1918), p. SS.

?The following summation is takenfrom Eastman, Understanding Germany. The Only Way to End the War and Other Essays (New York, 1916), passim. 73

the human race. It was only a betrayal of the ideals of intelligence

for a man to let the accident of his birth affect his judgment. The man without a country was the only one capable of clear thought.

Instead of an economic interpretation, Eastman now attributed the cause of the war to megalomanias of both Germany and England. He thought that the patriotic identification of the individual with his nation was the ultimate reason and considered that Americans were developing a patriotic hatred for Germany. Eastman, however, admitted that there was one German characteristic that could not be talked away.

The German state was the union of absolute feudal aristocracy with a high development of industry and social reform. The only argument that

Eastman could present for the defeat of Germany was destruction of its absolutism. With German defeat or victory would come radical change.

Eastman thought that revolutionary things could be accomplished more quickly if the terrible force of patriotism could be destroyed.

Some aspects of German society were attractive to Eastman. The

Germans had already demonstrated their superiority for united social action. They knew the value of popular welfare measures undertaken by a centralized government. The German policy of caring for the worker could soon become the common heritage of the world. With a similar advance in welfare measures, Americans could realize freedom. Eastman added that a combining of German state socialism with the individualism of English capitalism was necessary for the United States.

Eastman took an excursion into the economics of war. It was expensive and a luxury but also profitable. When an entire community 74

went to war, there was a rapid consumption o£ goods. War, viewed as a

wholesale consumption of luxuries, increased the income of the wealthy

and stimulated the entire enterprise of a nation. Destruction of

capital was counterbalanced by new economic techniques.

Sarcastically, Eastman mused that the only loss the capitalist

suffered was the price of labor that was killed or permanently disabled.

He had echoed the point of a John Sloan drawing in the September, 1914, issue of The Masses. A bloated capitalist told a half-destroyed crawl­

ing solider that he had fought well and now it was time to go back to work.

Some day, Eastman lamented, a miracle would happen. There would be a greater purpose in life than the defense of nationalism. He deter­ mined that science had to be used to make war more unnatural. Scientists agreed that the disposition to identify with a social group was an un­ changing characteristic of man. Eastman reasoned that nature produced some peaceable types, and the reformer was an example. The real hope, however, rested in the international socialist. His patriotism was to the working class of all nations, rather than all classes in one nation.

Selective breeding and culture suppression were not answers; there had to be an alteration of the external mechanism which caused war. Iden­ tification to a large group had to be offered. International union would appeal to all social forces. To change the nature of man was utopian; to offer the internationalization of social forces was only practical. 75

As a first step in his antimilitary propaganda, Eastman suggested that

support should be given to the middle-class movement for an inter­ national federation.

With irony, Eastman pointed to the wrong reasons people were willing to go to war. A struggle for national honor was a righteous war, but a class war against exploitation and for liberty was only an inglorious affair. Eastman vowed that if men were going to admire mur­ der, men should admire murders that were directed to some intelligent end.

Eastman had had some acquaintance with Woodrow Wilson before his presidency, having once attended a political science class taught by Wilson at Princeton University. Young Eastman wanted to be impressed but found the professor’s diction too full of fluent abstraction.8

Later, both Eastman and Wilson spoke before the Syracuse Chamber of

Commerce during the 1912 presidential campaign. In 1916, Eastman and others of The Masses visited the White House.

The young editor reported that the President was sincerely an antimilitarist and hated his own armament policies. Wilson knew that preparedness was a betrayal of civilized progress, but he hoped that this program would lead ultimately to world federation and the inter­ national enforcement of peace. Eastman announced that the President had boldly pointed the way from the dilemma of intense nationalism.9

^Eastman, Enjoyment of Living, p. 125.

^Eastman, ’’The Masses at the White House” (July, 1916), Echoes of Revolt: The Masses, 1911-1917, ed. by William L. O'Neill (Chicago, 1966), pp. 281-82. 76

Shortly before America's entry into the war, Eastman gave fur­ ther support to Wilson's league of internationalism. Eastman considered that Wilson was achieving progress through reform. Although these pro­ grams had no affect on what Eastman termed caste and class rule, many were helping the working man. One of the most important reforms would be an international union to eliminate war. Wilson had dramatically used his power to bring the idea of a league to the attention of every­ one. For Eastman, the establishment of a federal union would be the most momentous event in the evolution of a capitalistic civilization.

He added that it was also the only hope of preserving the possibility of a new civilization based on social revolution. Such a supra-national government would attract the loyalty of all peoples. It would be the only way to eliminate patriotic quarrels.

By the summer of 1917, Eastman had lost his enthusiasm for war.

He thought that nothing could be more calamitous than for patriotism to become the established religion of the nation. He hated war not so much for the bloodshed but the decay of clear thinking. He pointed to the policies of The New Republic. Eastman thought that Herbert Croly, Walter

Lippmann, and Walter Weyl had been seized with a highly intellectualized desire for war. The New Republic stood for victory without peace.^

lOEastman, "Revolutionary Progress" (April, 1917), ibid., pp. 284-86.

^Eastman, "Revolutionary Progress, War Creed," The Masses, Oct., 1917, p. 13; Eastman, "The Religion of Patriotism" (July, 1917), Echoes, pp. 289-90. 77

The editor of The Masses defended the socialists who had left their party because of its advocacy of war. He attacked Upon Sinclair, novelist and social reformer, for his plea to defeat Germany without asking whether it would better world conditions. Eastman thought that a decisive victory over Germany was impossible. Even if Germany were defeated, there was no assurance that a democratic nation would emerge.12

These remarks of Eastman might well have been directed to another patriotic socialist, Ernest Poole. For Poole, whatever the causes, the war was a struggle between the liberal people of the world and the forces dedicated to crushing liberty.

Poole’s literary reputation had been made overnight with the publication of The Harbor in 1915. This novel was a summation of his social perspective and was indispensable for an understanding of his later thoughts. During his years at Princeton, he became interested in social trends and later realized that the subject of tenement life was an untouched literary field. After college, he became a social worker at the University Settlement in New York City. His first successful writing was a series on organized labor in Chicago. He traveled to

Russia and wrote several articles on the 1905 revolutionary movement.

By the time he joined the Socialist party in 1908, he was an established journalist. His commitment to socialism was just as nonchalant as

Eastman's. Poole explained that he had been hesitant; he wanted no creeds. During a long talk with one of the socialist leaders, he

^Eastman, "The Pro-War Socialists" (Sept., 1917), Echoes, pp. 252-55 78

admitted his objections were swept away. The purposes of the party

were broad and liberal.In The Harbor, he narrated this same develop­

ment of social awareness.

Poole explained that, while living in the "heat and rush and

roar" of New York, the harbor "kept calling me down to its big cool

ships and long sea roads."14 in the beginning of Poole's novel, Bill,

the main character, often heard his father refer to the harbor as a

haven, but, for the young boy, it was something strange and terrible.

The novelist employed the harbor to symbolize growth, change, and modernity. Bill remained detached from the problems of life. Poole

enforced this separateness by having the house of Bill's father high

above the harbor with a garden covering the roof of a warehouse. But harbor life had a way of intruding into Bill's life. One day a docker's dirty face appeared through an open lid in the garden; thereafter, the

lid was kept spiked down. The boy, however, had a fascination for the mysterious region below his home. The harbor was not a safe place but the beginning of adventure.

While the harbor was no refuge, Bill was at first influenced by the world of his mother, which offered a kind of sanctuary. It was con­

structed of all that was beautiful and human in past and present. Bill knew that his mother placed all the ugly things in life down in the harbor and everything fine above in the home.

^Ernest Poole, The Bridge; My Own Story (New York, 1940), pp. 194-95.

l^ibid., p. 200; the following summation is taken from Poole, The Harbor (New York, 1957), passim. 79

After four years in college, Bill went to Paris to further his efforts at writing. It seemed that the harbor was gone at last. Bill had arrived in his "beautiful city of grays." The harbor had given the wrong meaning; the earth was filled with life. Here were free and tolerant artists; they were emancipated from the past and the present.

The arts were to reign supreme. But Bill was shocked back to everyday reality. His mother had died.

After this loss, he began a series of articles on the harbor of his father, one of echoes of the mysteries and romance of old Yankee sailors, but this harbor lay in the past. It was no longer a time of human adventure for young men. It was the day of mammoth corporations.

The harbor was not one of tall ships and white sails; it was only clouded with smoke and soot.

Bill got to know the harbor better with the help of Eleanore

Dillon, whom he later married. Her father, with big businessmen behind him, was examining the harbor with the view of transforming it into the finest integrated transportation network in the world. Dillon believed that development of the new Seagate could only be realized through business principles. The reformer could have little effect. If Bill were going to help in bringing about this new world, he would have to write the story of the harbor. While Bill was confronted with the sin­ cerity of the business organizer, he was equally faced with another truth.

Throughout the novel, Poole used the character of Joe Kramer as a social conscience for the hero. Bill first "found" Kramer in his college years, and Poole described Joe as a pioneer in a swiftly changing 80 world. He became Bill's unwanted tie to the modern world. In Paris,

Joe appeared and criticized Bill because he had escaped from the present.

While Bill was concerned about the romance of his father's disappearing harbor, Joe was only interested in the wages, hours, and living condi­ tions of those who lived on the harbor. Kramer went to Russia and wrote about revolution, oppression, and tyranny, and Bill undertook a series of great men in America. Bill realized that he was now operating in a world of immorality. Still he had no disdain because immorality meant efficiency. Things got done. Joe came back and turned to the labor movement as an instrument of social change. Bill was not stirred but admitted that he had an undeniable affection for Joe.

At one point, Kramer explained the reason for stirring the millions of "ignorant men." Kramer wanted to pull down what was on top. Business, industry, and finance, as they were conducted, had to be stopped. When the dock strike erupted, Bill witnessed a miracle; a crude order among the workers appeared. A central committee and a rough parliament sprang up overnight. Here was an awakening of mass thought and passion. Unlike his vision at Paris, Bill had witnessed a reality. A weary world had been set free. Here, poverty and pain would be swept away.

In the midst of the strike, the death of Bill's father symbolized the final passing of nineteenth century individualism. No longer would a sailor face a despotic captain; there were only nameless stokers and endless shovels of coal. This was Dillon's world of big business and 81 the "one man in a million." The big men claimed they would take engi­ neers and scientists and wipe out poverty. Business faced the worker.

Eleanore and Bill moved to the tenement, and he began his novel on the harbor. Poole had concluded his work with Kramer starting a journey across the nation to spread his message of social change, but the war came before publication.15 Instead, Joe set out into the world with his ideas of a new order, and Bill knew that change would take place.

In the fall of 1914, Poole was able to obtain an assignment for the Saturday Evening Post covering the German front. The war had jolted

Poole just as Kramer’s strike had jolted Bill. Although he looked upon war as the deadliest enemy of man, Poole was determined to describe and see it close.*6

In one of his articles from Germany, Poole related that he had not been prepared for what the sight of war would do to him. It was difficult to look beyond the war to the future of the world. He related the stupidity and impersonality of war's long, crooked, trench-lines of mud. In the hospitals, there were the head-shot cases, paralyzed men staring blindly through glazed eyes. Poole still found hope. War was youth. If the armies were filled with middle-aged men, then the vitality of war would be gone. Youth was ready to be offered for the sake of an idea. Strip war of youth, and one was left with broken treaties,

iSTrumen Frederick Keefer, Ernest Poole (New York, 1966), p. 45; Poole, The Bridge, p. 216.

l^Poole, The Bridge, p. 216. 82

well-greased guns and dead bodies. Change would come. In peace, youth

was unorganized, but war endowed youth with a mysterious vital strength.^

Poole's socialistic convictions and his exposure to the suffer­

ing of war made it difficult to accept readily American intervention.

In the summer of 1917, he offered an extended testimonial to his war

liberalism and explained his conversion from pacifism. He had known

that good could come from force; he had seen the masses unite for a

social purpose. War only slaughtered with little avail to some common

good. Poole had been for revolution but against war. During his visit

to the European front, he witnessed a comradeship of men in arms. He

saw the spirit of cooperation and new social visions forced upon England

and France. He became convinced that, to set others free, the German

system would have to be destroyed. With the coming of the Russian revolution, radical change and war were joined. The conflict was a rising of liberal peoples. From agony and death would come an advance of democracy and international accord. He was against the principle of war, but at the same time he was for this war to end autocracies and wars.l® Poole joined George Creel's Committee on Public Information.

His first assignment had been to clarify for the enlisted what the war was about.

Poole thought that Wilson wanted to demonstrate American friend­

ship to the emerging Russian nation. The new member of the Creel

l^Poole, "The Face of My Enemy," Everybody's Magazine, XXXII (May, 1915), 530-33, 536, 542; Poole, The Bridge, pp. 250-51.

ISpoole, "Why I am No Longer a Pacifist," McClure's, XLIX (Aug., 1917), 19, 67. 83

Committee decided to do a series depicting the Russians to Americans.

His articles were later compiled in The Dark People and The Village.

In Russia, Poole saw the same democratic masses as he had once described on Kramer's harbor. Democracy would triumph in Russia on a vast proportion. There was something far greater in Russia than men, factories, theories, and plans. There would be a new nation, and America had to help Russia. The revolutionary situation would not stabilize for years, and the United States could not allow the nation to be turned over to the thousands of agents who were working their way from Berlin.

The peace of a liberal Europe depended on the emergence of a democractic

Russia. The working men in the rest of Europe would follow this example.

Poole rested his faith in the masses. The most potent force in

Russia was the "dark people," those who lived in the villages. They made the Russian nation and determined its future. Poole expressed his hatred of cities; the power rested in the silent masses of the plains.

The new nation would come from them and not the Russian radicals.^

In November, 1917, Poole headed the Foreign Press Bureau of the

Public Information Committee, and, with the armistice, he urged the con­ tinuation of this work. The news media had to be used to keep the official picture of the United States before the world.21 It was the

19Poole, The Bridge, p. 268.

20poole, "The Dark People," Russia's Crisis (New York, 1918), pp. 28, 60-62, 93-94, 160-61. Poole, The Village; Russian Impressions (New York, 1918), pp. 104-05. 21 James R. Mock and Cedric Larson, Words that Won the War; The Story of the Committee on Public Information, 1917-1919 (Princeton, 1939), p. 331. 84 peace treaty, however, that threatened Poole's hopes for a world made safe for democracy. The allies had gone victory mad. Poole expressed his disillusionment in his confessional, Blind.^2

This work began with the sound of a typewriter in a dark

Connecticut farmhouse. There was no necessity for light because Larry had been blinded by a splinter of German steel in the war. In an effort of psychotherapy to cure his affliction, the main character was writing his life story. It was soon apparent that the blindness was also spiritual and symbolic of his society. Larry had been a successful playwright, and he recalled a beggar standing in a Broadway crowd and calling for help. For Larry, this scene was indicative of the soul of humanity. For Poole, as related through Larry's narration, America on the eve of the war was a restless, straining mass. While few of the untold millions achieved happiness, most only strove for material gain.

When wealth was obtained, it was only thrown away. People were oblivious to real happiness; they had been blind to their discarded past and un­ concerned about their rapidly looming future.

Social solutions of the past century were no longer applicable.

Larry's foster mother had been raised in the ideals of a democratic individualism. Her solution was to clear the cities and put everyone on the prairies and farms. But the West was gone, and Aunt Amelia's youth was left far behind.

22*rhe following summation is taken from Poole, Blind; A Story of These Times (New York, 1920), passim. 85

Larry became a reporter and wrote a series of articles on New

York's lung block. For two months he exposed the shame of poverty and tuberculosis. He later recalled that he felt he had done his part but admitted he had been more engrossed in himself than any social problems.

Influenced by his father, a successful foundry owner, Larry became a supporter of the progressive Theodore Roosevelt. The President had been a gentleman and a reformer, but Larry was forced to admit that the

Progressive Party came to nothing.

The central character then set out to reform the world with a labor play. Revolution was Americanized into strikes and the capitalist into the boss. The production became too conventional; critics con­ demned it as preachy. Still, Larry could not place his faith with the

"big man" of vision as Steve, his surgeon friend. The efforts of

Larry's father to give improved working conditions were no better.

Larry found an indication to an answer when he visited Ellis Island.

Here, he felt a tremendous passion on the part of the immigrant for a free new world.

With the war, Larry became a correspondent on the German front.

He saw battle crush the mind and body of men. He also covered the beginning phase of the Russian revolution but was not sure of any bene­ fits derived from the Bolsheviks. Change would have been realized without them. With the entrance of the United States, Larry joined the army. He simply explained that, if Germany won, it would be the end of democracy, peace, and progress. He wanted to make this the last war and create a league of peace. 86

In 1919, the blind Larry regretted that the powers at Versailles had been allowed to dissolve this idea. Everyone would now go back to his own pointless life. A new world could not be easily established.

The great plans of the league could not be fulfilled by such little men.

Through Larry, Poole expressed that he still had faith in what time would bring. The war would only accelerate what it had interrupted.

It had brought the peoples of the world together. Larry recalled the

Russian peasants proceeding in an immense procession to their crude parliament. Larry and Poole knew the masses of the world would make their way toward democracy.

Eastman skirmished on a different battlefield than Poole. The editor of The Masses feared, with the outbreak of war, that the animal instinct of man would be let loose.23 in July, 1917, the Postmaster of New York City informed the editors of the magazine that the August issue could not go through the mails. Four cartoons and four passages were deemed detrimental to the conduct of the war under the Espionage

Act. In defense of The Masses, Eastman explained that it was the product of writers and artists who published whatever they thought. The only policy of the magazine was complete freedom of expression. It was dis­ heartening to know, he lamented, that while thousands were dying on the front for liberty, the Department of Justice was persecuting upright

American citizens.24 The government was unsuccessful in its prosecution, but Eastman disbanded the magazine and started The Liberator.

23gastman, Understanding Germany, p. 130.

24pioyd Dell, "The Story of the Trial," The Liberator, June, 1918, pp. 9-10. 87

In the summer of 1918, Eastman was still advocating fulfillment of Wilson's war aims. By the end of the year, he had changed his opinion. He sarcastically said that the league would bring order for the benefit of the owners of wealth. It was only good business. It was an expression in the political sphere of the unity that already had occurred in the economic one. The war had been so destructive of national capitalism that objections to an international business organi­ zation, such as the league, were removed. Wilson's league would only be an international trust. ^

Previously, during the days of The Masses, Eastman set out to define a scientific method of progress. Science investigated orderly change, and it was incumbent for the scientific men to define and explain social processes. Science had to formulate a method for change.

Marxist thought amounted to a scientific socialism, but it had to be recomposed in the light of the true conceptions of science. The prob­ lem was not drawing a social prospectus, but one of controlling social change.^6

Wilson had failed to bring forth such a method. He had not been a scientist. He only had the point of view of a moralist. The

President thought he could turn a nationalistic war into one for peace and democracy by using diplomatic evangelism. For Eastman, the only

25The Liberator, July, 1918, pp. 5-6, and Dec., 1918, p. 7.

^Eastman, "Towards Liberty, The Method of Progress," The Masses, Sept., 1916, pp. 28-30. 88

result was noble emotion in private conferences. 27 By 1940, Lenin,

Eastman's last hero, also fell. Eastman wrote that the engineering of

a revolution was only in conflict with itself. The assumption of power

led to a totalitarian state. Marxism had been an unscience and Lenin's political system a sham. Ownership by the lower classes had been only

a dream.

27Eastman, "Wilson's Failure," The Liberator, May, 1919, pp. 5-6.

28Eastman, Reflections on the Failure of Socialism (New York, 1955), pp. 17-19. CHAPTER V

VEBLEN'S INSTINCT FOR PEACE

It affords me the greatest pleasure to place before the conference the facts as to what has been called cinematic amputation... [making] pos­ sible the direct transmission of voluntary movement from the stump to the artificial limb.... This is obtained by the formation on the stump of artificial points of attachment...to which one fastened the cords or extensors destined to transmit the movement to the artificial limb.... From what I have said, it will be evident that the application of cine- matization entails essentially a radical upheaval of all preconceived notions as to the ordinary methods of amputation.

Vittorio Putti "The Utilization of the Muscles of a Stump to Actuate Artificial Limbs; Cinematic Amputation," International Conference on Rehabilitation [New York, 1919), pp. 1-2.

For Thorstein Veblen, a place in Herbert Hoover's wartime Food

Administration seemed an unlikely sanctuary. While academic life appeared more suitable for Veblen's ranging intellect, he had successive difficulties at the Universities of Chicago, Stanford, and Missouri. If his analysis of the American economic order was to assume a kind of reality, special investigation for the administration was not inappro­ priate. Like Dewey, Veblen became captivated by the power and possi­ bilities of a war government.

During Veblen's brief tenure from February to July, 1918, he, with the assistance of Isador Lubin, wrote several characteristically unorthodox papers which, in retrospect, must have appeared amusing.

89 90

Veblen had humorously and logically assumed that the patriotic duty was to win the war and save the country, not to win the war and save all vestiges of an archaic business institution. His first exposition of this thesis dealt with a pending shortage of agricultural labor.

Farmers had warned that the draft would decrease the labor supply and hinder food production. Veblen and Lubin undertook a field investi­ gation through Missouri, Iowa, Illinois, Minnesota, and the Dakotas.

During this trip, Veblen sent an interim report. He warned that the situation of the North Dakota farmers was critical. Crop failures necessitated government assistance. He reasonably suggested that the

Food Administration distribute seed and then added that prosecutions against the radical Industrial Workers of the World (I. W. W.) should be stopped. From their ranks could come an ample supply of labor.*

In Minneapolis, Veblen became sick and returned to his home in

Columbia, Missouri. He revised the material sent by Lubin and further elaborated on the I. W. W. as a reputable source of farm labor. There had been improper cultivation of the nation's agricultural lands before the war, and the present industrial and military demands only made the situation more difficult. Veblen insisted that the revolutionary workers would have to be used. Several terms had to be fulfilled, however, before they would cooperate with the administration. There had to be freedom from judicial restraint, adequate room and board, a ten-hour day, a minimum standard wage, and free transportation. Veblen pointed

l"Letter from Thorstein Veblen," The American Economic Review, XXIII (Sept., 1933), pp. 478-79. 91 out that the growers would not object to the employment of the I. W. W.

Most farmers were members of the radical Non-partisan League, and this organization opposed the commercial clubs and big business. Like the I, W, W., the Non-partisan League worked to seize political control from business interests.

Veblen insisted that cultivation and harvesting demanded all available labor. The Food Administration had to establish official relations with the migratory workers. Federal indictments had to be concluded leniently. Under the direction of their own officers, the workmen could be enrolled in a collective, mobile, labor force and employed at the discretion of the administration.^

In another memorandum Veblen considered a schedule for the price of staples. For him, the only practical way of regulating the supply was through price controls. The purpose of such coercive measures was the effective prosecution of the war and the sufficient supply of food for the allies. Controls would be placed on wheat because of de­ mand and on pork because of lower cost and ease of handling. Other commodities would be placed on the free market to permit an appropriate adjustment of the controlled prices. He then suggested a price ratio based on the years 1911 through 1914.

In addition, Veblen insisted that other measures had to be taken to insure adequate production. Farmers had to be relieved of the cost of livestock and crop losses. Such risks could be nationalized

^Thorstein Veblen, "Farm Labor and the I. W. W.," Essay in Our Changing Order, ed. Leon Ardzrooni (New York, 1934), pp. 319-36. 92 through an insurance program. The details of a schedule of guaranteed farm income was a matter for those who would administer the program.^

Veblen exhibited great contempt for the American institution of the country town. In a memorandum to the Food Administration, he sur­ veyed the bucolic communities for additional farm labor. Emphatically, he pointed to the decreasing labor supply and the growing demand for food. He announced that the American people had not been willing to disrupt private interests and make the war a joint enterprise. The battle could be won only at the cost of the derangement of vested interests.

Veblen depicted the country town as an organization of business concerns engaged in transactions between the farmer and the central markets. The remainder of the town's economy depended on this business.

He computed that the country town could lose seven-ninths of its working force without disturbing useful marketing and distribution. Further scrutinization disclosed that much of the retail trade serving the com­ munity was superfluous. Veblen mused that to free the labor presently employed in duplication would disrupt the business traffic. Retail concerns would close; the larger the liquidation, the greater would be the available labor supply. The government only had to restrict profits through interference and regulation. As an emergency measure, the Food

Administration would assume control over marketing and distribution.

The middleman had conducted this function for profit, and any traffic

^Veblen, "A Memorandum on a Schedule of Prices for the Staple Foodstuffs," ibid., pp. 347-54. 93 conducted on business principles was subject to retardation. If the government administered on a non-profit basis, the nation would benefit through the increased efficiency.

Some aspects of business enterprise appealed to Veblen. He called for the administration to use a combination of methods employed in parcel post, chain stores, and mail-order houses. He recommended that the government should establish a non-profit system of farm mar­ keting and retail distribution under the parcel-post division of the

United States Post Office. The subsidiaries would operate on the plan of chain stores. The government should also nationalize the mail-order houses. To Veblen, local bankers should be placed under the same con­ tingencies as the country town merchants. Superfluous banks were no more useful than unnecessary buyers and sellers. The implications were greater, because the food-processing industries also would have to come under the control of the government. As the retailers vanished, Veblen reasoned that their existing stocks would be taken over by the chain- store system. He detailed that these branches would be housed in the same building as the post office. Since traveling salesmen constituted the main business, Veblen chanted that even the hotels would suffer a marked decline. With only the United States Post Office standing,

Veblen proclaimed that the devastation of the country town would mark the passing of a system of wasteful duplication, unearned income, and the collusive division of profits. He added that such measures would 94 only be for the duration of the war and expected that "superfluous townsmen will put up with it all in a cheerful spirit of patriotic sacrifice for the common good."^

Before his departure from the Food Administration, Veblen offered a final proposal. The exigencies of war had eroded the "invidi­ ous distinctions of privilege" in Britain and France; such amenities persisted in America. Governmental policy was directed toward perpetuat­ ing competitive gain and spending. While large aggregates of workers were employed in the production of "superfluities of deliberate waste," labor was urgently required for the war industries. He then leveled his attack on the employment of domestic servants.

Where coercion was unwanted, Veblen agreed that the usual expedient was recourse to a form of taxation. He proposed "a steeply progressive tax" on those who employed a staff of "unproductive domestics to uphold their own personal prestige." Such a capitation tax on menial servants, paid by their employers, would progressively increase with every additional domestic. Every household of five persons would be permitted one tax-free servant provided that the household included two children under five years. The tax rate on additional servants would successively increase by one hundred percent.

The effect of such a tax program, Veblen related, would be two­ fold. It would release a number of persons for productive occupations; it would provide an appreciable revenue. For Veblen, those who felt

^Veblen, "Farm Labor for the Period of the War," ibid., pp. 283- 302, 307, 310-11, 315-18. 95 constrained to have a staff of servants also would be "favorably in­ clined to contribute...for the prosecution of the war." The only obstacle was the reluctance of any legislature "to equalise the condi-

C tions of life" between the "servant-keeping class...and the common man."J

Use of the syndicalistic I. W. W. in the war effort, destruction of the wholesale trade of the country towns, and increasing the cost of capricious consumption: all probably appeared outlandish to the Food

Administration. Veblen's proposals were received in silence; he and

Lubin resigned. In comparison to other governmental measures, Veblen's recommendations, however, were not too bizarre. For instance, Hoover's

Grain Corporation could control both the distribution and price of wheat, and his Sugar Equalization Board had commensurate authority. A graver example of internal disruption was the assumption of control by the government of the nation's railroad transportation. The Railroad

Administration operated 532 properties, 2.4 million freight cars, 66 thousand locomotives, 56 thousand passenger cars and assumed ownership of $532 million of materials and $300.3 million of working capital.®

Five months at the Food Administration was the duration of

Veblen's enlistment. It was a brief interlude for him to expose the insincerity of patriotism; the war was fought not to save the nation but the national business system. As in Veblen's previous writing, the

^Veblen, "Menial Servants During the Period of the War," ibid., pp. 267-68.

6U. S. Railroad Administration, Report of the Director General of the Railroad, 1924, House Doc. 75, 68th Cong. 2d Sess., 1925, pp. 1-2. 96 same conflict between an impersonal, efficient machine technology and a predatory business enterprise was apparent. The war, however, had brought forth another adversary for Veblen, the dynastic state.

Soon after the beginning of the European conflict, Veblen com­ pleted Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution (19153 in which he attributed the cause of the First World War to the incorporation of

English machine technology by the German territorial state. Veblen, typically, began with an anthropological discussion of the institution of borrowing. Hybrid peoples, such as the North Europeans, possessed the trait of unremitting borrowing of foreign technologies. Lower cultures had encumbered their technology with a scheme of unscientific conventions which retarded efficiency. The significance of the process of borrowing was that these immaterial hindrances were not transferred, only the technology.

Veblen pointed out that the early North Europeans had a demo­ cratic political system. Such a pastoral democracy lasted as long as technology remained within local boundaries. The impact of cumulative technological change broke the old order; however, a dynastic authority assumed control. Instead of a qualified anarchy of insubordination, there was submissive allegiance to a prince who commanded the wealth of a territorial state. In the beginning of the nineteenth century,

Germany was still in a dynastic state when it received the technological basis for a modern industrial system from England.

?The following summation is taken from Veblen, Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution (New York, 1954), passim. 97

In contrast, autocracy had disappeared in England when it entered the modem period; the state was only an administration for public peace and equity. Yet, the English industrial entity had reached the point where the modern industrial process was controlled by business enter­ prises. Pecuniary gain and not industrial efficiency was their objective.

Referring to the theme of his celebrated The Theory of the Leisure Class

(1899), Veblen considered the function of such an economy to be the accumulation of wealth by a class whose purpose was the avoidance of work and ostentatious consumption. The technology attained by the com­ munity only served the personal ends, by right of ownership, of the businessman.

In a satirical passage, Veblen turned to the businesslike abuses perpetrated on hired labor in England. He asserted that competitive practices resulted in a depauperate population of workmen. Veblen cautioned that such an adjective was employed only in a technical sense without criticism "for the businesslike management that so led to the establishment of a generation of 'depauperate' Englishmen." Such a population was caused by abnormal living conditions and resulted in physical deformities. Veblen then sarcastically turned his sympathies to others and stated that depauperation could arise also from excessive food, shelter, and indulgences such as practiced by the wealthy classes.

The epitome of the conventions of English consumption was the institution of gentility. Veblen humourously characterized this as a staple production of the English pecuniary culture. The volume of gentlemanly output was as great as the traffic would permit. The 98 expense per unit was derived from the margin of production. The cost of British gentility could be ascertained by the schedules of incomes and would be equivalent to the total amount of conspicuous consumption.

Veblen considered such waste a sufficient economic encumbrance. The gravest consequence of a pecuniary society, however, was its influence on popular taste. The population became preoccupied with sportsmanlike endeavors and other emulative interests which distracted it from the logic of modern technology.

While business enterprise controlled the usufruct of the English community, dynastic authorities directed Germany for their own ends.

In England, the individualistic, non-competitive spirit, the animus of

"live and let live," led to the disintegration of the dynastic order; in Germany, the perpetuation of war led to its conservation. The drift of the modern period, however, was toward democratic living. Under the impact of industrial habits, anarchistical democracy arose in England only after two hundred years; Germany only recently joined the industrial states.

Veblen considered the advantage of a belated introduction to machine technology. The new German captains of industry had not matricu­ lated from such business schools as those of the American country town and were consequently uninterested in "making good as prehensile con­ servatives in a distribution of pecuniary flotsam." Unlike United

States Steel Corporation, the German nation was not committed to anti­ quated industrial sites, obsolete equipment, and out-of-date processes.

The aim in financing was not "to get something for nothing" but to find 99 the means for the production of marketable goods and services. The

German business leaders were tested for fitness in the aggressive conduct of industrial enterprise.

This modern industrial state, Veblen lamented, would soon become bound by business methods. At first, business management appeared to be in the service of industrial enterprise, but the inevitable outcome was the use of machine technology for financial strategy. Foreign competi­ tion and increased factory and financing costs narrowed the margin between cost and price. The demands of the subject classes for an ex­ penditure on living would further decrease the margin. Wasteful con­ sumption would become mandatory on the part of the wealthier classes.

Germany would soon become a mature industrial nation. Veblen found it incredible that an intelligent population would allow such a profitless business program. Subservience was only a question of habit. He raised the hope that the common man could alter his political institutions in accord with modern technology.

Had there been no imperial Germany, Veblen was certain that international conflict would still have occurred. Given the presence of Germany, there was no doubt. It was the nature of the dynastic state to seek dominion. The pursuit of this imperial policy led

Christendom into an unexampled war. The distinctive gains made by this civilization had been by way of peace and industry. Personal dominion was incongruous with the logic and perspective of modern culture. The consequences of war, however, could only be a retardation to western civilization. 100

For Veblen, the German threat was only temporary. The Prussian imperial system rested on modem science and technology. The fullest use of technology was necessary for the modern warlike state. Yet the discipline incident to machine industry would unavoidably disintegrate the institutional foundations of the dynastic state. The imperial state would be unable to survive without machine industry and, in the long run, would be unable to go along with it. The cause for which Germany was fighting could only mean a temporary arrest of modern civilization.

Veblen offered a similar analysis for the hybrid population of

Japan. With the medieval spirit of old Japan, these peoples had united the occidental state of the industrial arts. It was only a question of time before the pecuniary faults became part of the structure of the new economic order. The interval represented Japan's opportunity for attaining the industrial domination of Asia. Japanese technological progress could be measured in the wide margin between the cost of pro­ duction and the output of military force; Japan was a formidable imperial contender with western competitors.®

Early in 1917, Veblen completed his An Inquiry into the Nature of Peace and the Terms of Its Perpetuation.^ He broadened his focus from the struggles between the English business order and the German dynastic state to the requisites of an enduring peace. Veblen knew

®Ibid., p. 23; Veblen, "The Opportunity of Japan" (July, 1915), Changing Order, pp. 248-65.

Q The following discussion is taken from Veblen, An Inquiry into the Nature of Peace and the Terms of Its Perpetuation (New York, 1945), 101 that there could be only an armistice under present political arrange­ ments. All governments were still founded on feudal principles and were, consequently, irresponsible and predatory. Their degree of modernity was measured by the departure from this pattern. While the

Germans still possessed a dynastic state, the French and English had a

"democratic commonwealth of ungraded citizens." Yet, in both examples, the state was sovereign, and the citizen was only a subject.

Veblen emphasized that the unimpeachable powers of government were a matter of habit and were not inevitable characteristics. He pointed to the Commonwealth of Iceland which existed from the tenth to the thirteenth century. The founders had no sense of the necessity of a coercive government; subjection to personal rule was not part of the experience of citizenship. This commonwealth was established on pre- feudal habits. This republic of insubordinate citizens, however, fell, as the one of the early North Europeans, because of the accumulation of wealth.

For Veblen, patriotism, a sense of partisan solidarity, func­ tioned in the same way as the spirit of pecuniary emulation. It was not derived from any constructive instinct but stemmed from the acquired habit of sportsmanship. This enterprise was bent on invidious success with the purpose of defeat and humiliation of some competitor. Patriotism worked in conjunction with the institution of ownership. As material interests assumed importance, community interests fell away. The only bond of solidarity was collective prestige, which worked for the bene­ fit of the wealthy and the ruling. But the force of the industrial arts 102 was too complex to be confined within national frontiers except at the cost of retardation. Patriotism was like sand in bearings and was at cross purposes with modem life.

Veblen estimated the chances for peace under the state system.

The weak nations presented few problems. They followed non-aggressive policies but would defend themselves in honor of some national preten­ sion. Great powers, like Germany and Japan, would spontaneously assume the offensive; others, like France and England, would fight only on provocation. Peace, even without the presence of the two dynastic states, was still unlikely. The two democratic nations were for peace but only with honor. Given the warlike abandonment of Germany and

Japan, peace was possible only through their elimination or submission to their dominion.

From the viewpoint of the common man, Veblen looked into the conditions of a peace without honor and sarcastically offered several reasons why submission would not be reprehensible. There would be no additional economic burdens sustained by the populations. There would be no foreign threats and little need for military expense. Even though costs for maintaining a court would increase, the bureaucratic

expense of a centralized authority would be a savings. Further advan­ tages would accrue to the common man because his nation would no longer be driven by the pecuniary interests of the businessman.

Under the business system of law and order, Veblen reasoned, the common man had few privileges. The pecuniary interests of the owners ruled in all aspects of life that related to the material fortunes of the 103

community. Public policy was guided only by considerations of business

expediency. It was unavoidable that the material interests of the

community and those of the businessman diverged. For Veblen, there was

little difference in whether common man was guided by native business­ men or alien officials.

The outlook for a quick settlement through submission to the

dynastic states, however, was questionable. While the common man had

nothing to lose, he chose his material means through the realization of

some idealistic aspiration. Veblen thought that this expression was a matter of habit. It was improbable that democratic populations would

give up their prejudices against the autocratic countries. Change in

the dynastic states also was dependent on the common man. It was from

this group that disaffection arose, and, to a degree, the dynastic

states were dependent on popular sentiment.

Real peace could neither be achieved through nineteenth century methods of defensive armaments nor the balance of powers. These policies

would not be compatible with the modern industrial arts. Furthermore,

technology had thrown the advantage in military affairs to the offensive

force. The German nation had become redoubtable. It had acquired the

use of modern industrial techniques, in the highest state of efficiency,

and, at the same time, retained fanatical loyalty to feudal barbarism.

Yet, peace was not impossible; only negative action was required. The

kinds of human relationships which led to international conflict had to be neutralized. All national pretensions had to be destroyed in order to establish a league of pacific nations. The dynastic powers had to 104 assume the semblance of democratic commonwealths. The chances for a successful league depended on the degree in which the common man assumed the direction of belligerent nations. Veblen believed that the longer the war, the more likely a chance toward neutral temperaments.

It was difficult for men, whose actions were in the form of habits, to alter their conditions. Veblen knew that change would come through technological growth. It was mandatory for warlike nations to become proficient in the modem industrial arts; adherence to such an industrial scheme would only result in the decay of militant nationalism.

A lasting peace, however, would not be the immediate result. While the technology was the joint heritage of the community, industry was managed on the basis of private gain. Veblen considered that the rights of ownership and the price system also would be curtailed. With the estab­ lishment of a peace which eliminated international dissension, a division of classes would emerge: those who insisted on the right of exploitation and those who were unwilling to submit. For Veblen, it was only a question of time when the discrepancy between the industrial arts and the price system would reach a critical point. Peace would hasten the change.

No longer were Veblen's thoughts marked by purposeful opaqueness, asserted detachment, or sardonic indirection. There was the widest disparity between social possibilities of machine technology and the self-seeking business enterprisers. Veblen had expressed a faith in the people to overturn their absurd economic system and cleanse their institutions of unsocial values. 105

In September, 1917, President Wilson established the Inquiry, a commission to help formulate policies for world peace. Although not a member, Veblen offered some suggestions which must have been disconcert­ ing. His propositions for international peace amounted to a reformation of the American system. For example, he thought that, if the United

States were to become a part of a federation of democratic nations, it would have to keep a domestic peace. He hopefully reasoned, based on the apparent inclination of Wilson's administration, that the Inquiry would be logically forced to assure domestic peace even at the expense of derangement of established rights.^

Veblen vented his internationalism in an article for The Dial.

Radical change could only be stopped by persistent reaction. The war revealed that social institutions were not competent and that nationalism had outlived its usefulness. The question was whether the old scheme could be rehabilitated. The new order was the modern industrial system which was worldwide. Technology had no boundaries. Restraint was only retardation. The implication of Veblen's thinking was destruction of national frontiers.H

In an address before the Institute of Social Sciences in 1918,

Veblen outlined the ideas which he later elaborated in two series for

The Dial and then published as Vested Interests and Engineers and the

l^Veblen, "Suggestions Touching the Working Programs of an Inquiry into the Prospective Terms of Peace" (1917), Essays in Our Changing Order, pp. 355-60.

^Veblen, "The Passing of National Frontiers" (April 25, 1915), ibid., pp. 383-90. 106

Price System. He stated that the real meaning of reconstruction meant a revision of private rights for the common welfare. Business manage­ ment worked against the needs of the community. Veblen hinted that

central control should be exercised by an authority without pecuniary

interest in the enterprise. Industry should be managed with the view

of its fullest use. He hoped that the nation would not allow the per­ petuation of the old order. With an inverted Wilsonianism, he announced that "America had to be made safe for the common man."12

In The Dial essays, Veblen opposed his new order against the modern point of view, the eighteenth-century scheme of individualism.13

The unsettling experience of the workday discipline made this modem viewpoint as obsolescent as some of United States Steel’s subsidiaries.

Both national ambition and vested rights sounded dissonance to the new

order. The facts of industry and science had overrun law and custom.

The modern point of view had to be adjusted to the material scheme.

The change was dependent on the degree to which the war had altered

the thinking of the common man.

Veblen’s central point was the high productivity of modem

industry. When not controlled for individual profit, industry would

yield a net return of output over cost so large that the expense of

production was inconsiderable. Productivity of the new order was so

12veblen, "A Policy of Reconstruction" (April 13, 1918), ibid., pp. 391-99.

l^The following summation is taken from Veblen, The Vested Interests and the State of the Industrial Arts (New York, 1919), passim. 107

great that it was excessively turning out far more than business would

tolerate. Veblen had a variant to Patten's and Weyl's social surplus.

The difference between what the machine could produce and what it was

allowed to produce was free income. It was derived from the intangible

business relationships rather than from productivity. It was obtained

from salesmanship rather than work. Before the war, industrial produc­

tion, under business management, was far short of capacity; under

patriotic compulsion, Veblen mused that production approached 50 percent

efficiency.

Veblen refined his thinking on the cause of war. Conflict was

no longer the result of dynastic ambitions but stemmed from the irrecon-

cilibility of the modem point of view with the demands of modem industry.

The belligerents practiced their industrial arts on eighteenth-century

principles of self-help, and the conflict was a technological one. The

war had vindicated the productivity of modem industry but not the

modem point of view.

Veblen's prescription for peace was the rule of "live and let

live." It meant the discarding of national and class pretensions and

the destruction of vested interests. Production for patriotism had

demonstrated the social potentiality, but the vested interests were

preparing for business as usual. There would be the usual restriction

of production, labor wars, and waste. The diplomats were reestablishing

a peace based on the national pretensions which had caused the war. The

farmers and the workers were still unaware that only the vested interests

stood in the way; change would come through their own realization.

Veblen placed his hope in those "untidy creatures of the new order." 108

In the subsequent Dial essays, he outlined more essentials of the new order.One characteristic would be the non-existence of absentee ownership. According to the eighteenth century, modem view, income was in receipt of productive work. The function of business management was to hold the economic system in check, to make it less productive. Financiers, absentee owners, were addicted to evaluate everything in terms of profits and were unable to appreciate mechanical performance. The advance of the industrial system toward a mechanical balance of interlocking processes was becoming too critical to be con­ trolled by businessmen. Inadvertently, the investment bankers became engrossed in a comprehensive bureaucratic routine, and the industrial experts drifted to responsible technical positions. The solution was apparent: administration of the productive complex would be entrusted to the engineers. The industrial system was a mechanically organized structure of technical processes designed, installed, and conducted by the engineers. The material welfare of the community was bound to the system and to its technical control.

Veblen momentarily turned away from a class consciousness of the farmers and workers to that of engineers. Continued control of industry by the financiers was at the sufferance of these industrial experts. Hopefully, Veblen thought the engineers were taking an inven­ tory of business mismanagement. They knew their responsibility for community welfare. Yet, an overturn was not really possible. Business

i^The following summation is taken from Veblen, The Engineers and the Price System (New York, 1921), passim. 109 interests only had to keep Americans in an agreeable state by employing a patient ambiguity. There was no revolutionary organization to success­ fully take and administer industry. The American Federation of Labor was only a vested interest; the Industrial Workers of the World was only industrial flotsam. Also, there was no guild of engineers. Candidates for the soviet of technicians were only content with the rewards given by the vested interests.

In spite of Veblen's pessimism, he outlined a concerted plan of action, as if to demonstrate the impossibility. The function of an in­ coming engineering directorate would be to alleviate the points where the old order had failed. There would have to be full employment, avoidance of waste, and an allocation of resources. There would be a council of technicians comprised of resource, transportation, and distri­ bution engineers. There would be adjunct groups of production engineers and economists. Those trained for business were to be excluded from positions of responsibility.

If there were a chance for success, there would have to be pre­ paration. An inquiry of economic conditions would have to discover all kinds of waste and devise efficiency charts for the use of resources.

Veblen was still impressed with the operation of chain stores and mail­ order houses. He suggested them as examples of efficiency. The engineers then would organize and disrupt efficiency. A general strike of tech­ nicians would bring the industrial system to a stop. A tolerant consent of the working class was necessary, and the technicians would have to 110 publicize the overturn to the underlying population. But the engineers were unorganized. The workers were unsympathetic, and the population was uninformed.

In 1919, Veblen left The Dialand found another resting place in the New School for Social Research in New York City. He began this last extended study, Absentee Ownership and Business Enterprise in Recent

Times; the Case of America. Sections of Imperial Germany had been en­ titled the case of Germany and England; now there was the case of

America. This nation had become the leading dynastic state. He lamented that mankind was still divided against itself in a "predatory scramble to get something for nothing." The authorities for the democratic commonwealths were still seeking commercial dominion. This international obstruction coincided with the rise of the absentee owners to dominance.

The democratic institutions were directed only to the security of the free income.*5

Even in this, his most bitter writing, Veblen still attested to his faith in the common man. His reverence was derived from his concep­ tion of the nature of man. Institutions, customs, canons of conduct, principles of property ownership were transmitted relatively unchanged and were against man's instincts. He separated three closely related natural bents. Although obviously important, the parental instinct required little discussion. It involved the rearing of offspring and perpetuation of the race. But, the adversary of the habit of

15Veblen, Absentee Ownership and Business Enterprise in Recent Times, the Case of America (New York, 1923), pp. 28-29, 31-35, 38. Ill businesslike management was the instinct of workmanship. Engineers and technicians were the embodiment of this bent. It involved the achieve­ ment of efficiency and the technological mastery of facts.

The spirit of workmanship pervaded the idyllic and, ironically, the period of savagery. Individuals and groups were economically inde­ pendent but used a common technology to obtain a living. The pastoral democratic economy disappeared with the appearance of the institution of private property, a new determinant of industrial organization. Owner­ ship was a possession of the predatory, barbaric culture. The workman­ like instinct would contaminate itself with ideals of self-aggrandizement and canons of invidious emulation. Amusingly, a synonym for the business enterpriser was barbarian. The barbaric culture was tempered with con­ cepts of status and differentials in classes and occupations. The predatory and the modern pecuniary cultures were similar in having the same self-regarding impulses.

Inseparable from workmanship was idle curiosity. This last in­ stinct accelerated technological advance. The most important character­ istic of modern civilization was the ability of matter-of-fact insight into material facts. The greatest expression was in the technology of the machine. Idle curiosity formulated response not in terms of personal conduct but in the sequence of observed phenomena. This instinct accel­ erated the growth of material information that would be used by workman­ ship. The results of these two drives were real achievements.16 During

16Veblen, The Instinct of Workmanship and the State of the Arts (New York, 1964), pp. 18, 26-27, 33-34, 49-50, 54, 87-88, 146-47, 160, 112

the war, Veblen reiterated the importance of idle curiosity in his

Higher Learning in America, A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Businessmen.17

After publication of Absentee Ownership in 1923, the only writing

Veblen completed was a brief essay, "Economic Theory in the Calculable

Future" (1925). In his earlier "Why is Economics not an Evolutionary

Science?" (1898), he optimistically thought that the economic discipline had to provide a theory of cultural growth.!® It was apparent now that economists had not followed Veblen's guidance. He bitterly thought

that, while the current of facts would rapidly change, the mentality of the economist would be "conditioned by the inveterate tenacity of human preconceptions." As material conditions of economic life became more

pronounced, economics exhibited only a drift toward precise and objective measurements. Such monographic work would only contribute to the common

stock of beliefs of the time. The economic process had bifurcated into

the Veblenian business enterprise and modern industry. The economist

had only been studying business enterprise and absentee ownership. The

economic science was only a "science of business traffic, imbued with

a spirit of devotion."!®

172, 217; Veblen, "The Place of Science in Modem Civilization" (March, 1906), The Place of Science in Modern Civilization and Other Essays (New York, 1919), pp. 1, 7.

!?Veblen, The Higher Learning in America, A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Businessmen (Stanford, 1954), pp. 1, 8.

18Veblen, The Place of Science, p. 77.

19Veblen, Essays in Our Changing Order, pp. 5-12. 113

There were no indications of radical change in America, and

Veblen began to show signs of losing interest in life.20 He translated an Islandic saga depicting the end of the Viking period and the advent of the Christian era. The extent of his despair was revealed later by a brief testament. He wished his remains to be cremated and his "ashes thrown loose into the sea." There was not to be a biography nor any kind of monument in his memory.2-*-

20Veblen, The Portable Veblen, ed. Max Lerner (New York, 1948), p. 18.

21Veblen, Essays in Our Changing Order, p. v. CHAPTER VI

YOUTH, WAR, AND THE ARTIST

He did not feel the shot. He only saw grass suddenly in front of him, a plant, close before his eyes, half trodden down with a cluster of reddish stalks and delicate, narrow leaves that grew larger, he had seen this before, but he no longer knew when. The plant wavered and then stood alone against the narrowed horizon of his sinking head, silent, self-evident, with the solace of the tidiness of tiny things and with all its peace; it grew larger and larger until it filled the whole sky, and his eyes closed.

Erich Maria Remarque A Time to Love and a Time to Die (New York, 1960), p. 288

Randolph Bourne began with a scarred face and a deformed back.

He attributed his fate to having been "cruelly blasted by the powers."

With his cape and a hat, pulled well down, this "odd little apparition" performed his life of contradictions. Asserting an ample endowment of desire, his disfigurement rendered him undesirable. Possessing a fas­ tidious idealism, his social conscience could not survive in the

American sea of impersonality. A Presbyterian upbringing offered not assurance and salvation but uncertainty and doubt. He sought companion­ ship but knew he was doomed to isolation. He yearned for family life but was convinced it would be dull and uncreative. Still, his separate­ ness was the genius of his art. It permitted a discerning view of an

114 115 insensitive society. When Bourne died in 1918 at the age of 32, he remained an unnaturalized American. He had been in the world but not of it.*

There was so much to explain, Bourne wrote. He had to envisage himself, people, and things more personally. He had to assert his own reactions and impressions. If he had lived in a time when personal writ­ ing was more acceptable, he would have remorselessly revealed himself, more even than he had in The Atlantic Monthly articles.^ These essays were compiled in Youth and Life before Bourne graduated from Columbia

College in 1913. The most provocative was "Philosophy of Handicap."

In this writing, Bourne gave a sensitive statement of his emotional difficulties and his dedication to social reconstruction.

Life was more complicated for a marked youth, Bourne explained.

Facing the same emotional difficulties as the unhandicapped, this youth was hurt easily. He knew that success came not from ability but from a strong will. He needed strength and confidence, but self-respect was difficult. He was apprehensive of the impression he made. Friendship was difficult and yet so important. He needed others to help him dis­ cover and express himself. Such sensitivity ruled out a life in

1Randolph Bourne, History of a Literary Radical and other Essays by Randolph Bourne, ed. by Van Wyck Brooks (New York, 1920), p. xii; Beulah Amidon to Alyse Gregory, Oct. 4, 1948, Randolph Bourne MSS, Columbia University Library (microfilm). The following correspondence and unpublished manuscripts cited are found in this collection. Bourne to Gregory, Jan. 19, 1914; Bourne to Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, Dec. 23, 1915.

^Bourne to Gregory, Jan. 5, 1914, and Jan. 19, 1914. 116

American business; the youth had even failed to get a chance to fail.

The handicapped faced a painful adjustment.

Bourne, the handicapped, declared his compassion for the

"despised and ignored." A philosophy gained through disability and failure was as significant as the "cheap optimism of the professional."

The handicapped understood the "feelings of all the horde of the unpre­ sentable and the unemployable, the incompetent and the ugly." There had to be a social thought to explain human misery. Life previously had been conducted irrationally, but now social progress was the perma­ nent interest of every intelligent person. For Bourne, life was void of meaning unless he could contribute to social betterment. Everyone had to possess a "truly religious belief in human progress and a thorough social consciousness."

The appeal of Bourne's testimony lay in its candidness. He knew his life was one of "failure and deficit" but not one of "suffering and sacrifice." He would not look upon it as an "eternal making of the best of a bad bargain." He occupied the "far richer kingdom of mental effort and artistic appreciation" than the realm of material satisfaction.

Bourne had voiced brave words for he admitted he was not "sufficiently out of the wilderness." He was hopelessly dependent on friends and on his surroundings.

Bourne pleaded with the young intellectual to achieve an under­ standing of social alienation and formulate a philosophy of handicap.

Throughout his essay, Bourne had simultaneously used the two opposite meanings of "handicap." The disadvantaged, those to whom success was 117 most difficult, was really the superior contestant in a race and had been given an artificial handicap. The real disadvantaged were those who were unconscious to others’ distress and incapable of understanding human suffering.3

Uncertain about the sincerity of his revolutionary views, Bourne noted the middle-class characteristics of his life and his lack of knowledge of the American worker.4 Before he entered Columbia College in 1909, Bourne had his only experience in the subjugation of the factory system. He flamboyantly stated that this one instance "fixed the terms upon which he interpreted the world."

While the owner provided the paper, the music, and electric,

Bourne labored on a machine, cutting music rolls. Because he was on a piece-work basis, his affluence appeared related only to his skill and industry. Yet, Bourne sensed a vague injustice: the owner received fifteen cents and paid him only five cents for every roll. Consequently, the youth became "dangerously clever" and increased his output and earnings beyond the "sum proper for a young person of eighteen." The owner, therefore, reduced the piece-rate to four and a half cents.

Bourne blazed rebellion: after becoming a skilled music-roll cutter, his wages were decreased. The owner proclaimed the youth's freedom not to perforate rolls. The outside now became filled with uncertainties,

^Bourne, "A Philosophy of Handicap," Youth and Life (Boston, 1913), pp. 337-65. Christopher Lasch, The New Radicalism in America, 1889-1963, The Intellectual as a Social Type (New York, 1967), p. 100, by only interpreting a handicap as resulting in a struggle against one's limitations missed the full meaning of Bourne's article.

^Bourne to Gregory, Jan. 5, 1914. 118 and Bourne returned to his bench. The employer, flushed with capitalis­ tic ardor, bought another machine and hired another worker. Bourne knew that the factory was not a charitable institution, but he could not ignore the feeling that he was being exploited. He innocently resolved that the threat of a class war would force the capitalists into an awareness of the inequities of the industrial world.5

In an impassioned outburst, the gnome-like Bourne poured forth the virtues of youth. Thorstein Veblen had juxtaposed machine tech­ nology against the price system; Bourne, youth and age. Bourne's dichotomy appeared in other permutations such as new and old, ideals and formulas, reason and tradition, enthusiasms and prudence, and living and dying. The cleavage which separated youth from age and even set it against itself was the "undying spirit of youth that seems to be fed by an unquenchable fire."

At twenty-five, Bourne was consumed by the "wildest radicalism," while his friends had only "achieved babies and responsibilities." With the passing of childhood, life became a process of seeking, and youth was the embodiment of scientific attitude. In the "tearings and the grindings and wrenchings," youth became a radical or poet. He battled to a "sort of rationalization," not a repetition of past delusions but a foundation for the future. Such youthful radicalism became orthodoxy in thirty years.

^Bourne, "What is Exploitation?" (Nov., 1916), War and the Intel­ lectuals, ed. Carl Resek (New York, 1964), pp. 134-38. 119

Youth expressed itself by falling in love. Whether art, a girl, socialism, or religion, youth was carried on a flood of love. Devotion to a girl or a cause were consonant commitments. "The secret of life is then," Bourne insisted, "that this fine youthful spirit should never be lost.He knew it would be difficult for people to reconcile the exhuberant statement of "Youth" by such an unyouthful self, but he con­ fessed he had expressed various aspects of himself.^

For the young intellect, the older generation represented the comfortable American middle class. Enthroned in the city and the small town, like Bourne's Bloomfield, New Jersey, and surrounded by its in­ stitutions of church and family, this older generation announced its social philosophy. Its sermons were exhortations to good conducts, which altered not the routine of the middle class: faithfulness to duty, ambition in business, family obligations, and kindness. Bourne thought that all this "moral and religious and social trying" only lacerated youth; one had to be the "very best, most expressive, most controlling self." The older generation never recognized social prob­ lems of race barriers and economic inequalities. It never attempted to destroy privilege or provide opportunity. While the American town was transformed into an industrial center, the older generation went through its listless motions. Its social solution was charity. Bourne objected

^Bourne, "Youth," Youth and Life, pp/3-27; Bourne, "Virtues and Seasons of Life," ibid., p. 75.

^Bourne to Carl Zigrosser, April 12, 1912; Bourne to Prudence Winterrowd, Mar. 2, 1913. 120 that the personal virtues of sacrifice and service were salvations for the individual, not for society. Old ideas were still used for new problems.®

A variant of youth was irony. For Bourne, it once meant the metallic hardening of the soul, but he lost tolerance for such view.

Irony, instead, was a way of life. The ironist possessed an inborn sense of contrast which was expressed in a critical attitude toward life. Such a temperament constantly forced the comprehension of experi­ ence. The "shocks of comparison and contrast" traced the inner life of the ironist. Things were not compared to standards but to each other, and the values which emerged were continually refined. The ironist tested ideals by their social validity and their interchangeability among all peoples. He assumed another's point of view and made it his own. He was the "great intellectual democrat" who believed "all ideas and attitudes stand equal." The ironist had the "conviction of the significance of all life" and the "truest sympathy." The world was exposed to his judgment. Bourne then isolated the litmus for his life of irony: "a shrinkage of his environment, a running dry of experience."

His fears welled up: to be cut off from others. For Bourne, the "flow and swirl of things" were his compelling interest,^

Life was precarious; anything was likely to happen. Shocking accidents, sufferings, and maladjustments were everyday occurrences. It

®Bourne, "This Older Generation," (Sept., 1915), History of a Literary Radical, pp. 107-27.

^Bourne, "The Life of Irony," Youth and Life, pp. 101-31. 121

was incredible to Bourne that one should be taken from the world to which

one was so perfectly adapted. He thought that, "we can easier imagine

the time before our birth, when we were not, than the time after our death." Bourne could overcome finality. He was enthralled with the

"incalculability of consciousness" and absorbed with "personality of things." Death would be transcended by "interpreting everything in terms of life."*0

While life was most precious, Bourne was willing to risk it.

He thought that a planned life turned only into a mockery. The experi­ ment of living could not take place under controlled conditions. A perfect life was an illusion. One was torn between social conformity and human impulses. Resolution could be achieved by approaching living with the mind of a scientist and using a process of testing to discover truth. If Bourne's prototype was the sample, an experimental life was only compounded of his inability and unwillingness to live as a middle class American.^

Sometimes, clinical living was not entirely satisfactory. In

1916, at the age of 30 years, Bourne proclaimed that he had led the ex­ perimental life and had "sifted and sorted." He painfully revealed that he knew what he wanted, but it was all far away. He admitted that love, fame, and joy of work would give him both freedom and a home. All his

iOBoume, "The Adventure of Life," ibid., pp. 156, 158, 174, 182, 187.

^Bourne, "The Experimental Life," ibid., pp. 227-46. 122 problems were interwoven. He knew that the "key to all of them is love" and would give "anything in the world for an opportunity to test the theory."12

Before the war, Bourne had devoted some thought to the question of world peace. In a 1913 essay, he reasoned that international con­ troversies stemmed from disputed claims or agreements and rivalries of prestige. For the peace movement, the resolution of the latter was the most significant problem. Continued peace was not an impossibility.

Diplomats were beginning to realize that war was wasteful and peace an economic necessity. Industrial techniques created economic inter­ dependence among nations. Bourne quipped that capital possessed no prejudices of nationality. There also was the psychological argument that war was becoming radically suicidal. Conflict annihilated both the unfit and fit. He concluded that force was disappearing from international relations; diplomacy and arbitration were the replacements for war.

In another article, Bourne urged that the arguments for war were irrational. Militarists argued that armaments were an imperative need and the only insurance against dishonor. With the processes of nationalization and industrialization, Bourne insisted that war became only an anomaly and militarism only a tradition. With the strengthening

12Boume to Alyse Gregory, Nov. 19, 1916.

l3Boume, "Arbitration and International Politics," International Conciliation, No. 70, Sept., 1913, pp. 3, 12, 13. 123 of the machinery for international conciliation, the rationality for war no longer existed. It was for the advocates of the peace movement to persist in exposing the absurdity of military fanaticism.

In the summer of 1913, Bourne had left for Europe on a fellow­ ship, the terms of which were "delightfully free and easy." He had felt as though he were receiving a pension instead of a commission for intellectual efforts. At the eve of the war, he was still "immersed in the whirl of impressions." His letters revealed a growing apprehension of his later concern of the effect of war on intellectual life. He was afraid that those "belligerent Germans" would start a conflict that could be disastrous for the world. He would probably not go back to

Germany.He was depressed to see crowds of youths parading for their country and war. After his return, Bourne commented that the European civilization was so t o m he would not think of that continent until the war was over and "life is running again."16

Bourne felt obligated to report to the Columbia University trustees on his European impressions. He related his innocence of the impending devastation. The preparedness for war appeared less defined at close range, and he had thought there would be an armed peace. Guns

l^Boume, "The Tradition of War," ibid., No. 79, June, 1914, pp. 11-13. He also compiled Towards an Enduring Peace, A Symposium of Proposals and Programs, 1914-1916 (New York, 1916].

ISfioume to Sarah Bourne, July 28, 1914.

lbfioume to Alyse Gregory, July 30, 1914, and Aug. 25, 1914. 124 were only "frozen symbols" of national prestige. With the outbreak of the war, Bourne was concerned over the halt of efforts to social reform.

Unlike John Dewey and Thorstein Veblen, Bourne wrote favorably of the domestic aspects of Germany. ^ Regarding the English, he was only impressed by their disinterest in social issues.*8 He thought that the French newspapers offered an education in the contemporary society.

Rome fascinated Bourne; it was not a city but a world. It was the only place to study western civilization. He turned to Germany and its municipalities. Undemocratic in political form, they were ultra-demo­ cratic in spirit and provided more for the people than the United States.

Bourne sensed, for the first time, a nation with a "profound and subtle sympathy" for the masses.^

After his return to Bloomfield, Bourne was disturbed about the

"shabbiness in which America clothes so much of its community life."

He admired his architectural friends who could walk the American streets with "unperturbed serenity."20 He wanted to explain "our hideous... poverty." He insisted that if the German approach to town planning produced such a superior civilization he was willing to renounce

l^From Europe, he had written that Germany still had traces of materialistic and barbaric taste. He also thought France and Italy were ahead of Germany in progressing from a Christian to a socialistic civili­ zation. Bourne to Zigrosser May 20, 1914; Bourne to Gregory, July 30, 1914.

l^Later, Bourne admitted his sense of English decadence was more intuitive than documented. Bourne, "The War of Cultures" (1916), un­ published ms.

l^Bourne, "Impressions of Europe, 1913-1914," History of a Literary Radical, pp. 230-32, 235, 240, 246-47, 252, 2ET.

^Bourne, "A Little Things of Brunelieschi's," n.d., unpublished ms. 125 individualistic freedom. Then, like all Americans, Bourne relearned to

"pass through the streets and cities without seeing anything."21

Americans described themselves as practical, but Bourne thought their interest rested only in the practice and not the achievement. The world was a "gigantic playroom," and Americans refused to view social conditions as acceptable products. They only invested in enterprises which intensified, accelerated, or improved the practice. They devised means to reduce social friction rather than improve society.22

The artist was a scientist because he also was concerned with the final result. Bourne thought that only a collective life could realize an intense social consciousness. Industrialization had yielded the cohesion for social solidarity. A new spirit comprised both in­ stincts of the group and democracy. Modem life demanded a new mass awareness. In the cities Bourne sensed this movement; a new, purified, and socialized civilization had to emerge. An industrializing and socializing poetry had to "idealize our factories and our railroads, our aeroplanes and our electric wires."23

While Bourne was attracted to German collectivism, he thought that Americans were not impressed with such organization. They in­ tuitively sensed that German ideals were alien to their own, but Bourne insisted that whatever the outcome of the war, all nations would be

2lBoume to Gregory, Sept., 28, 1914.

^Bourne, "Practice vs. Product," n.d., unpublished ms.

23Boume, "A Sociological Poet" (M. Jules Romains), n.d., unpub­ lished ms. 126 forced to adopt the German way. If America continued its rejection of moderate, progressive collectivism and continued its opposition to

Germany, it would have to offer more worthy ideas. This new cause would have to be as social as Germany's but more just. He affirmed intelligent experimentation of pragmatism as the way to socialized democracy.^4

Bourne was hopeful that the twentieth century civilization would survive the war. He even asserted that a Germanized Europe would result in a modernization of England and France, The longer the war, he thought, the more eager would people be for a social welfare state. All suffer­ ing would not have been useless.25 He rejoiced that the war had destroyed the shallowness of American life. He marveled that the world possessed spiritual and material energy so great as to pose the danger of self- destruction. The United States would have to "learn to live intensely and deeply" as a nation in the modern world. ^

The creation of a trans-national America, Bourne insisted, would be his country's contribution. The European war revealed the failure of

America to assimilate the diverse nationalism into an Anglo-Saxon nation. For Bourne, the persistence of alien loyalties indicated not a failure of democracy but only an improper definition of Americanism.

The immigrant had to become a determining factor in the nation. The contributions of new peoples were needed to overcome Anglo-American

24fiourne, "American Use for German Ideals," The New Republic, IV (Sept. 14, 1915), 117-19.

25uoume, "The Disillusionment" (1916), unpublished ms.

26Boume, "The War of Cultures." 127 conservatism and to push social advance. The nation possessed no integrating force and democratic experimentation remained in the future.

The United States was already a federation of national cultures, a small-scale world federation, The nation had to develop an intellectual internationalism which permitted diverse cultural expressions. To realize such an objective, Americans would have to recognize international citi­ zenship and readily allow passage for the immigrant between the United

States and his native land. From a chaotic land would emerge a trans­ national America. Such a nation would utilize the creative abilities of all. There would be a new spiritual citizenship. He urged the youthful intellect to undertake this enterprise of integration.^7

Bourne considered the debate on preparedness and discussions on

Americanism a useless effort. Americans should be concerned about en­ hancing the nation's life. William James' conception of an army of youths warring against nature and not men appealed to Bourne. Enthusi­ asm for the war no longer made universal service appear unattainable.

In 1916, some had referred to military service as education and not preparation for war. Bourne pointed out that the public school system provided machinery for a national service for education. The new service would enlist all youths and would be directed toward individual develop­ ment. It would not clash with the industrial system but would accomplish constructive things for the community. Young missionaries would spread knowledge of improved living. Factory inspection, organized relief, care of dependents, and nursing would be fields for the educational

27Boume, "Trans-National America" (July, 1916), War and the Intellectuals, pp. 107-23. 128 service. The new army could even be organized into "flying squadrons" to facilitate far-reaching duty. He emphasized that the need was to learn to live not to die.28

Bourne turned to implications for the United States of the proposals for a league to enforce the peace. Such a league would be an alliance, and this nation could be compelled to enter a war in which it had no concern. If the Entente, with American economic assistance, could not defeat the central powers, Bourne concluded that Germany would have no need to fear such a proposed league. The real foundation for any league had to be a gathering of neutrals which had adjusted their conflicting nationalistic policies. Bourne warned that, if the United

States joined a belligerent league, all democratic and radical movements would be discouraged. Conscription would be intellectual as well as military.29

The American war declaration discharged liberal reform from

Bourne's mind. The government, once the edifice for salvation, was only an arsenal for destruction. One winter evening in 1918 at a Green­ wich Village cafe, he revealed his disappointment. Technological ad­ vances were opening the door "into promise." He lamented, "now comes the irrelevance of war." Bourne believed that the war would end with

28Boume, "A Moral Equivalent for Universal Military Service" (July 1, 1916), ibid., pp. 142-47.

29Boume, "Doubts about Enforcing Peace," n.d., unpublished ms. 129 victorious headlines, but "men stupid enough to resort to war are too stupid to make peace."30 He turned to the creative temperament of the poet.

In an unpublished dialogue, Bourne expressed his feelings about the duty of the artist in wartime. One April afternoon, the narrator chatted with Clement who wanted to make writing as respectable as bank­ ing. The war had not diverted Clement, and the narrator mused that art possibly amounted to only a heap of paper. During their walk, the two meet Sebert. The narrator noticed that Sebert could never be mistaken for a businessman. He possessed a "languor about his movements that betrays a slower tempo of the soul." He wore "the air of freedom."

Sebert had thought considerably about the relation of the artist to the war and pronounced it was nonexistent. "If you are interested in cre­ ating and expressing," he insisted, "in what others create and express, you can't be very much allured by the wholesale business of destruction."

He remained suspended, waiting for the world to stop raging and become interested in life. Sebert used to have a social consciousness; he used to have a concern for others. The war revealed that society was not a

"slowly repenting sinner, but an hysterical mob." Sebert rejected his society whose institutions perpetuated misery and turned within himself in a celebration of life and beauty. As if facing the reader, the narrator sarcastically now asked whether anything would be safe if all agreed with Sebert.

30/\midon to Gregory, Oct. 4, 1948.

3lBoume, "The Artist in Wartime" (1917), unpublished ms. 130

During his European trip, Bourne had written that during his last year at Columbia he also felt that acting was more important than know­ ing. Universities had produced mediocre scholars and not intellectual leaders, but Columbia was different. It was in "more vital touch with the world" than any other American university."^2

John Dewey's courses had impressed Bourne. Dewey was concerned with the product and not the practice. ^ His ideas expressed the demo­ cratic strivings of the social movement, new educational ideas, and freer ethics. His philosophy represented all aspects of the modem, restless, personal, and social life. He had called for the application of science in the achievement of social ends.34

But Dewey had been a false product. He preached death and destruction, not salvation and eternity. In a series of wartime articles, Bourne excommunicated the once saint.

To realize the internationalization of democracy, Dewey and the intellectuals used the non-intellectual war technique. While the il­ liberal and undemocratic had fought for war, Bourne thought that the intellectuals should have directed a neutral America in the attainment of a democratic world. A neutral intellectual class could have invoked peace, but the American liberal was only a businessman. The injustices of the capitalistic peace had not stirred him, but the horrors of the

32Boume to Prudence Winterrowd, Mar. 11, 1914.

^ B o u r n e , Practice vs. Product."

34eoume, "John Dewey's Philosophy," The New Republic, II (Mar. 13, 1915), 154-56. 131 war in Belgium shocked him. He never felt a responsibility for labor

struggles, oppressed masses, and excluded races. The liberal had an

emotional surplus to invest in the management of the war. If there were still intellectuals against the war, they had to construct new

ideals.^5

In "Below the Battle," Bourne assumed the viewpoint of a youth.

He had been b o m to a generation which was offered in battle, He dis­

liked his fate; there was not the remotest relationship to his aspira­ tions, impulses, or desires. The drill ground, the trench, the battle­ field nauseated him. He resented those who clamped him onto the war pattern. The world differed from what he had visioned. He lacked the imagination "to see a healed world-order built out of the rotten materials of armament, diplomacy and 'liberal' statesmanship." His life had been uninteresting but war was not release. Bourne emphasized: the attitude of youth indicated that the slogans of capitalism and war had not destroyed social idealism. The real significance of the war was the non-mobilization of the young intellectuals. Bourne warned that the

annihilation of war would crush the "only genuinely precious thing in

a nation:" the idealism of its youth.36

In the enthusiasm for war, Bourne forced the point that the logic of American participation had been forgotten. Intellectuals argued that

^ B o u r n e , "The War and the Intellectuals" (June, 1917), War and the Intellectuals, pp. 3-14.

^Bourne, "Below the Battle" (July, 1917), Untimely Papers by Randolph Bourne, ed. James Oppenheim (New York, 1919), pp. 47-60. 132 the outcome would be an international order. While the United States had been neutral, he insisted it could have worked for a negotiated settlement and assumed leadership in world peace. England had endured the submarine challenge without American military assistance. The liberals had been mistaken about the collapse of the British. With the

American declaration, defeat of Germany became the primary objective; the strategy for an international order disappeared. Victory, not peace, was the objective. ^

Bourne observed that the government conducted the war not with the cooperation but only with the acquiescence of the people. Americans had submitted to an imperfect private enterprise; resistance to war was unlikely. Patriotism was unnecessary for perpetuation of war. Only the enlistment of financial and industrial establishments was required.

Assurance that these interests would retain their strategic world posi­ tion was the only constant, not a conviction. The unpatriotic, Bourne concluded, should not be concerned over his conscience.

Dewey and the intellectuals were a disappointment. They were fighting for rejuvenating social purposes while denying other belligerents an equally just cause. The pragmatists refused to accept absolutes, yet they could not recognize war as an absolute. They were engulfed by the inexorable, only to claim ability to turn it to their own direction.

War determined its own ends, and the government crushed any deflecting force. There were, Bourne pointed out, youths, real pragmatists, who

^Bourne, "The Collapse of American Strategy" (Aug., 1917), ibid., pp. 61-69. 133 opposed such causes as war. They recognized no absolutes and realized that the obstacle to peace was the absence of a mediating neutral. The war would only spiritually impoverish the nation. For the youthful intellectuals, the only choice was internal reform or war.38

Bourne’s most critical attack against the war advocates was the

’’Twilight of the Idols." Dewey and his followers were more alarmed with the pacifists than the excesses of militarism. They had ignored the sinister forces of war. Dewey assumed that the war technique could be used without resulting in fanaticisms and injustices. Instrumentalism had been useful in a peaceful society. The application of the scientific method to living left a clue to institutional change. It was the philosophy of social uplift, but its success depended on rationality and the desire for progress. Bourne insisted that America's educational institutions were more accessible to intelligent change. Dewey and the intellectuals should have made education a national enterprise, not war.

There was no program for the realization of democratic reconstruction after the war. Bourne asked whether the nation was fighting for the

"political democracy of a plutocratic America" or "social democracy of a new Russia." If the war advocates had presented a democracy program, they would not have been confronted by opposition of the conscientious and the impossibilists. Without the formulation of democratic ideals,

IQ the war-technique only defeated the intellectuals.

38Bourne, "A War Diary" (Sept., 1917), ibid., pp. 90-113.

39uoume, "Twilight of the Idols” (Oct., 1917), ibid., pp. 114-32. 134

Progressive reform was over. The philosophy of intelligent con­ trol had been deficient. For an explanation, Bourne turned to his literary friend, Van Wyck Brooks. When Brooks moved from New York to

California, Bourne wrote, "I shall miss him tremendously." He thought that of "all my men friends, I like and admire him the most." He joked that Brooks could envy him. Bourne could lead "the ideal, free, digni­ fied, leisurely life of a true man of letters," while Brooks was tied to a publishing house, "a sordid job."40

In three essays written between 1908 and 1918, Brooks analyzed that the American instincts of acquisition and enterprise had not been associated with higher ends. There were no intellectual or spiritual aspirations in American life. As long as society was anti-social,

Brooks reasoned, there could not be an expression of personality. Its

literature could only be a reflection of its stagnation. Its social thought was only a commercial rendering. Social ideals had to offer a moral program for the individuals, "a way of looking at life." If the state were to destroy the incentives for private gain, Brooks insisted that the intellectuals had to replace them with personal imperatives.

Socialism was the inevitable resolution.

For Brooks, the pragmatists had defaulted. Because of the in­

significance of America's poetical tradition, they attempted leadership, but they were an integral part of the social order. The burden of

establishing a higher organized life, Brooks announced, rested on the

40Boume to Sarah Bourne, Nov. 4, 1918. 135 poets. There would be no social revolution until the artists confronted

Americans with their own spiritual paralysis. The poets looked to another

America where there would be the "free development of personality.

New ideals, new values, Bourne affirmed, could only come from the malcontents. They were too entangled in the possibilities of

American life to yield. A small-town psychology, an artless commercial­ ism, and an uncertain nationalism impeded the creativity of the mal­ contents. American youths were wondering to what neutral country they could escape after the war. They were discontented because they were incapable of expressing themselves in the approved forms of business and war. The new generation was going to ask what their fathers left them for realizing their lives. It would rebel when it discovered it was supposed to live in the same civilization that its fathers threw up in the rush for wealth.^2

Bourne agreed with Brooks that a new literary leadership was a necessity. Allegiance to such a group was the only cause which could retrieve "anything of value from the engulfing blackness." Bourne re­ lated to Brooks that there was a "certain superb youthful arrogance" that they were going to be the new leaders. Unlike the middle-aged advocates of a futile war, Bourne and his followers offered a "youthful insolence that looked for future accomplishment." The difficulty of a

41Van Wyck Brooks, Three Essays on America (New York, 1934), pp. 24-25, 33-34, 40-41, 93-94, 99-100, 110-11, 169-70, 178-79, 183-89.

^Bourne, "Twilight of the Idols," Untimely Papers, pp. 134-38; Bourne, "That Spirit of Malcontentedness" (1918), unpublished ms. 136 liberal was that he could be a patriot and still frown on violence. He gave moral and intellectual support to the military and could not be acquitted of the results of the war. Instead of social reconstruction, there was only a vague scheme of an international organization. The war had devastated American democracy more than the enemy; it had deprived the nation of intellectual leadership. With poetic vision, the mal­ contents had to seek a new gospel.43

When Dewey had analyzed the German mind, he concluded that the

German collective ideal of national duty was incompatible with the

American conception of individual democracy.44 in an unfinished and disjointed fragment on the nature of the state, Bourne's point was that

American wartime society was indistinguishable from the German ideal.

War revealed, Bourne insisted, the true function of the state.

The ultimate ideal of the unit was the exercise of its power upon all its members. In peacetime, the state vainly struggled to realize the authority it so easily achieved during war. Welded for military action, the state became the determinant of individual life. War released forces coercing uniformity. War created a hierarchy of values with the state at the apex. Artistic creation, education, and the enhancement of life, were sacrificed.

In wartime, the state provided a convenient protection of the significant classes: they could continue to direct industry and the

43uourne to Van Wyck Brooks, May 27, 1918.

44pewey, "The Mind of Germany" (Feb., 1916), Characters and Events, I, 142-43. 137 state for their predatory ends. The working classes could not withdraw.

They had been drilled by the industrial regime and, docilely, went to war for the state. Without enthusiasm, they entered the military. With a Veblenistic touch, Bourne condemned war as an upper-class sport.

The state system was only an outgrowth of warring dynastic units.

Nations organized for internal administration and as federations of free communities could not perpetuate war. Armed conflict could not exist without a military establishment dependent on a state organization. The state system had to be changed before war could be abolished. With the destruction of the state, Bourne reasoned, the life-giving forces of a nation could be released.45

Bourne was relieved when the war ended. "People can speak freely again," he wrote, "and we can dare to think." He thought that "it is like coming out of a nightmare."46 But the old tyrannies revived, and

Bourne was soon overcome. One came to earth without choice, he com­ plained, a helpless victim of one's "parents' coming together." One was not conceived and was not raised up as a human work of art. Even to be b o m unconscious was an outrage, and, by the time one perceived the "buzz and the darting lights," it was all too late. One was in­ extricably entangled in one's surroundings. One could not affect the world but could only submit. Obligation was a myth; there had never

45uoume, "Unfinished Fragment on the State" (1918), Untimely Papers, pp. 129-230.

46eoume to Sarah Bourne, Nov. 21, 1918. 138

been enough freedom to possess responsibility. One thought he had great

things to achieve, "but Time laughs his ironical laugh and rolls you in

the dust."47

With awkward dignity, Bourne had persevered. It would be prosaic

to list him as a casualty of the war; he was only a social victim. The

significance of this thought was not that it spotlighted problems of

childhood, youth, education, and "sex above all."48 Bourne had, instead,

voiced a personal expression of abhorrence to the businesslike determinant

in America and the urgency of realizing human values. He had looked to

the state as the source of the coming reformation but found it only a

dealership in oppression and destruction. The liberals had not been

leaders to social promise but only perpetrators of old injustices. What humanity remained rested in the soul of the poet. The handicap had to be passed to the artist in society, for art was the meaningful and noble

expression of human experience. The life of the artist was dedicated to the living of others. Hope for future human relations based on human values had to be entrusted to the poet.

Bourne's first definition of "irony" had been closer to the truth. The war had pierced him with the futility of life; his soul hardened. He had only acted out a lonely life. He once wrote that "it was terrifying to plunge out alone," but the evenings, as only the lonely knew, were the "real horror," In the winter of 1918, Bourne

47Boume, "Old Tyrannies," (191.8), ibid., pp. 11-21.

48christopher Lasch, The New Radicalism in America, pp. 69, 90, disagreed. 139 died in Greenwich Village. After services at Bloomfield's Spring Street

Presbyterian Church, he was buried in a nearby cemetery. One of his

friends shivered at the thought "of his lying out alone in that desolate place,"49

49Agnes De Lima to Gregory, Feb. 28, 1948. CONCLUSION: IN MEMORY OF THE LIVING

A few months before his death in 1919, Walter Weyl examined the

status of progressivism in his epitaphic "Tired Radicals." Although

Walter Lippmann considered the essay directed against him, it was probably a bitter assessment of all war liberals, including its author.*

Weyl realized that time and war had dealt harshly with the American reformer. He cast his thoughts back and now understood that the basis

for reform had been a contempt for the comfortable and the conformist.

The difficulty was that the same emotion could be turned from domestic to foreign problems, and the radical found himself working with those whom he had previously opposed. With the armistice, the liberal was older and more concerned with the material aspects of living. There was little point in attempting to change what past generation had

failed to alter. The tired liberal could not see that he was no longer radical. But Weyl had not given up hope. A human society still had to be established. True radicalism rested in the youth who would be 2 guided by a few old reformers, still young in spirit.

In 1939, John Dewey looked back and insisted that the hopes and objectives of war liberalism should not be condemned as only illusions.

*Weyl, Diary, July 19, 1919.

^Weyl, "Tired Radicals" (July, 1919), Tired Radicals, pp. 11-15.

140 141

A profit system still rendered it impossible for people to follow socially productive work. Unless social reorganization was carried out, the same criticism could be made of liberalism twenty years in the future.3

Stanley Kubrick's recent cinematographic representation of 2001, A Space

Odyssey is testimony to the existence of the same materialism which Dewey and other progressives during the First World War had stood against.

Their proposals still have validity for the present.^

The central figure in Kubrick's epic was a hueristically pro­ grammed, algorithm computer, Hal. This technological creation was capable of reproducing most of the activities of human thought with greater speed and reliability. This sophisticate of man's technology was even able to speak idiomatic English. In 2001, Hal was installed in the spaceship symbolically named Discovery. Like the liberals of the

First World War, the astronauts were on journey in search of man's spirituality.

Discovery was a delicate vehicle. It had been constructed in space and was too fragile for any atmosphere such as Earth's. Behind the circular hull were fuel tanks, followed by a gothic-like network of heat dissipation pipes. When the craft flew by Jupiter, it bounced from the gravitational field of the planet and gained momentum. Jupiter lost

3Dewey, "The Economic Basis of the New Society" (1939), Dewey, Intelligence in the Modem World: John Dewey's Philosophy, ed. Joseph Ratner (New York, 1939), pp. 416, 422-23.

4The following summation is taken from Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick, 2001, A Space Odyssey (Cleveland, 1968), pp. 26, 96- 106, 156-57. 142

exactly the same amount, but, because the planet was tremendously

greater in size, the loss was undetected. Man and his technology still

had little effect on the universe.

The war liberals were abundantly impressed with technological

progress. Their reform proposals were founded on material development.

Patten's central point was that there was more than enough for everyone.

Change would follow after this realization. Veblen relied on impersonal, matter-of-fact investigation and unencumbered machine production. All knew the world was united through technology. Political and social

integration would be next.

In 2001, existence in the spaceship was lifeless. Only the in­ human Hal was capable of experiencing the range of human emotions. The

computer revolted and attempted destruction of his human companions.

The First World War could also be viewed as a technological rebellion

against man. With hesitancy, the astronaut disconnected Hal and took the crippled Discovery to Saturn. He severed the communication links with Earth. The astronaut plunged through the stargate into infinity and became part of the unearthly yet universal intelligence. The

liberals attempted to establish a democratic world but were unable to bring about the necessary social reformation.

The Space Odyssey was a protest against the same unsocial values which the progressives opposed. It was like an inversion of an earlier progressive novel by Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888).

The unreality of Bellamy's social utopia of 2000 was still an unreality. 143

The inhumanity of Bellamy's 1888 was still a reality in Kubrick's 1968.

Man had mastered his material development but was still in search of his spiritual nature.

Liberalism embraced more than a modified capitalism because it had called for the conversion of an inhuman society into one with human values. Dewey wanted the reign of a pluralistic experimental intelligence.

Patten asked for an awareness of abundance to bring about social conver­ sion. A new democracy with a socialistic economy and a real political participation was the objective of Weyl, There was little difference between these social projections and the social gospelers' Kingdom of

God. Christian values would be instilled in a modem society. Veblen's position was a refinement of Patten's concept of abundance. With faith in a machine technology and in the common man, a perverted society would become one involving honest human behavior instead of acquired habits. For Bourne, apostolic succession went to the person with a youthful wonderment and the sensitivity of the artist. Up to 1914, such radicalisms were only catchwords. The progressives had tried to convert through the educative function of their disciplines. There had not been an apparent degree of success.

The war was an opportunity. It was not a question of democratic progress through the organized killing of others. Rather, war liberalism was a demonstration of faith in the rationality of the common man. Now, everyone would see the insanity of war. The fact that the American govern­ ment went far toward socialism in the name of patriotism was only a 144 demonstration that it could do the same for human welfare. Such an ad­ vance could be made secure from future destruction through an inter­ national congress.

For those who strongly supported the war effort, there was a vehement dislike for Germany. Dewey determined that Germany's guilt stemmed from its non-experimental philosophy. That nation, without admitting it, united predetermined thought to the wrong action. An absolute idealism would only invest a nation with a mission of world dominion. The case against Germany was one against a non-advocate of

Dewey's philosophy. For Weyl, the abundance of the American scene rewarded the acquisitive spirit and led to a society preempted by a plutocracy. Focus on this domestic evil could easily be turned to a world opponent of a new democracy, the German autocracy. Like Dewey,

Weyl cautioned that a resplendent democracy would have to be unfolded before the world menace of autocracy could be destroyed. For Herron,

Germany, along with Catholicism and Bolshevism,was part of the Kingdom of Evil and would have to be purged from the world. Veblen's analysis was as much an attack against the United States as Germany. The latter possessed the power of machine technology under the domination of a barbaric political system. The former had the semblance of a democracy under the control of a barbaric economic system. Both would have to be altered.

For those who lacked enthusiasm for American participation, there was a different attitude toward Germany. Bourne, Eastman, and Patten wrote with high regard toward that nation. Germany had moved toward a 145

society with social values. Patten emphasized its cultural unity.

Eastman and Bourne praised its social legislation. Germany demonstrated that a social democracy was possible.

Dewey and Weyl offered a world government which would have alle­ viated conditions leading to economic clashes and imperialism. Dewey's internationalism involved the extension of principles of business reciprocity; Weyl wanted the league to abolish the economic reasons leading to war. Aside from such international accouterments of a league as freedom of maritime trade, Veblen suggested something fundamental, an internationalization of his principle of "live and let live." The societies of the world would be divested of the acquisitive character­ istics. It was deceptively easy. All that was necessary was for people simply to neglect their habits of a business enterprise society.

With the realization that the war and the peace eradicated none of the inhumanities, there was disillusionment, but it was a disillusion­ ment, if only momentarily, in one's faith in the perfectibility of man.

Dewey admitted he had been self-deceived into thinking that patriotic efforts could be turned into those directed toward the welfare of humanity. He continued, however, his work toward the establishment of a democratic pluralism through intelligent action. Weyl's attack against the idealism of Wilson was one against his own, but he still looked toward a new democracy. Eastman's war experience only confirmed his earlier belief in salvation through class struggle. For both Gladden and Rauschenbusch, there was faith in one's religion but doubt in their church. The social gospel was still at the beginning. Herron had been 146 doctrinaire in his Messianic conception of the war and his vision of

Wilson as a betrayer. For Veblen, the peace brought a final realiza­ tion that his faith in the "untidy creatures" of the workaday world had been misplaced. Their thoughts had already been purchased, and their values firmly appended to the commercialism of business enterprise.

Bourne was disillusioned not with a lost peace but with war liberalism itself. He had not given up his faith in the youthful spirit, but objected to what Dewey had done to it. The philosopher had criticized Kant's idealism as leading to a German absolutism. To

Bourne, this was exactly what Dewey had accomplished in America. In the name of democracy, Dewey's system had led to a government which destroyed dissent and sent youths to their fate on the battlefield. Yet, like

Dewey, Bourne would not relinquish hope. The experimental inquisitive­ ness of youth became embodied in the soul of the artist. There was still faith in the possibility of change.

Resolution between the intellectual extremes of Bourne and Dewey came long after the war. If Bourne had separated art from action, as one critic maintained, Dewey again united the two in his Art as Experi­ ence (1935).5 The philosopher instilled his biological creation, capable of an experimental intelligence, with an artistic soul. Instead of a division of thought and action, he protested that there was a separation of art from experience. An inner harmony was achieved only when man came to terms with his environment. For Dewey, this was the

^Henry F. May, The End of American Innocence. A Study of the First Years of Our Own Time, 1912-1917 (Chicago, 1964), p. 395. 147 very process of living and involved artistic endeavor. Art began with experience. The modem world had an immense amount of organization, but it was only an external kind of organization and not one of order­ ing a growing experience toward a fulfilling conclusion. In the degree which art exercised its office, it was a remaking of the experience of the community. The material of art was an expression of the relation between the human and the environment. The artistic experience was, therefore, a human one. Art was a celebration of life and a means of promoting its development. It was also the ultimate judgment on the quality of living.^ Dewey also had passed the handicap to the artist.

An elegy for war liberalism should touch its real failing. It was not the common criticism, one which Bourne had made, that the war liberals were deluded into thinking they could control events. It was not that they had become the attorneys for the war leaders. The fault, rather, rested in a misreading of the degree in which American life was commercialized. Near the end, Veblen had seen this but had not gone far enough in his thinking. He had not completed his dilemma. The grand programs of the liberals were part of the same American bargain and had to be sloganized into a "new democracy" or a "new order." Harold

Steams, the post-war critic, was correct on one point. The reformers themselves were converts of the American gospel of accomplishment.?

^Dewey, Art as Experience (New York, 1958), pp. 8-10, 17, 19, 81, 326.

?Harold Edward Stearns, America and the Young Intellectual CNew York, 1921), pp. 49-51. 148

The lasting strength of the liberals was their isolation of the only real source of revolutionary change. One had to have a social awareness of one's fellow man and of life itself. A sympathetic critic described it as almost a Christianization of society.® David Noble had been incorrect; the liberals had not projected this reformation in a context outside of historical development.® They were objecting rather to an inhuman historical development. Their references to a time of primitive Christianity or a period of savagery were not longings for an idyllic past but only reminders that present injustices were man-made.

They could be altered then by men. Those who disagreed were still mes­ merized by a talking computer which man had created. Those who objected were still engaged in a dialogue with Hal and still wandering in search of oneself.

O °Daniel Aaron, Men of Good Hope. A Story of American Progressives (New York, 1951), p. 306.

^Noble, The Paradox of Progressive Thought, pp. v-viii. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Manuscript Collections

Randolph Bourne Papers. Columbia University Library, New York, (microfilm).

Washington Gladden Papers. Ohio Historical Society, Columbus.

Walter Weyl Diaries. Rutgers Library, New Jersey, (microfilm).

Articles and Periodicals

Addams, Jane. "A Toast to John Dewey." The Survey, LXIII (November IS, 1929), 203-204.

Bourne, Randolph, "American Use for German Ideals." The New Republic, IV (September 14, 1915), 117-119.

"Arbitration and International Policies." International Conciliation, No. 70 (September, 1913), 3-13.

"John Dewey's Philosophy." The New Republic, II (March 13, 1915), 154-156.

------. "The Tradition of War." International Conciliation, No. 79 (June, 1914), 11-13.

Dell, Floyd. "The Story of the Trial." The Liberator, June, 1918, pp. 7-18.

Dewey, John. "The Basis for Hope." Commonsense, VIII (December, 1939), xii + 9-10.

"Democracy and Loyalty in Schools." The American Teacher, VII (January, 1918), 8-10.

------. "The Development of American Pragmatism." Studies in the History of Ideas, II (1925), 351-377.

------, "Does Human Nature Change?" The Rotarian, LII (February, 1938), ii + 8-10, 58-59.

149 150

Dewey, John. MWhat Will I Do When America Goes to War?" Modern Monthly, IX (June 9, 1935), 200.

Eastman, Max. "Towards Liberty, The Method of Progress." The Masses, September, 1917, pp. 28-30.

"Wilson's Failure." The Liberator, May, 1919, pp. 5-6.

Gladden, Washington. "A Communication, A Pacifist's Apology." The New Republic, V (November 23, 1915), 75-76.

------. "Do We Believe in God?" The Independent, XCV (July 20, 1918), 87.

------. "A Plea for Pacifism." The Nation, ClII, Supplement (August 3, 1916), 2.

The Liberator, 1918-1919.

The Masses, 1914-1917.

Patten, Simon. "Economic Fallacies that Favor War." Moody's Magazine, XVIII (January, 1915), 13-17.

"Failure of Liberal Idealism." The Freeman, I (July 14 and July 21, 1920), 419-421, 444-446.

------. "Problems of War Finance." The Yale Review, VII (October, 1917), 73-89.

"Responsibility for the War." The New Republic, November 14, 1914, pp. 21-22.

"The Theory of Social Forces." The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, VII, Supplement (January, 1896), 1-151.

------, "The Tomorrow of Finance." The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, LXXVI (March, 1918), 257-271.

Poole, Ernest. "The Face of My Enemy." Everybody's Magazine, XXXII (May, 1915), 530-533, 542.

"Why I am No Longer a Pacifist." McClure's, XLIX (August, 1917), 19, 67.

Rauschenbusch, Walter. "Be Fair to Germany." The Congregationalist and The Christian World. XCIX (October 15, 1914), 486-487. 151

Veblen, Thorstein. "Letter from Thorstein Veblen." The American Economic Review, XXIII (September, 1933), 478-479.

Weyl, Walter. "Planless Demobilization." The New Republic, XVII (November 30, 1918), 125-127.

- . "Prosperous War." The New Republic, II (March 27, 1915), 205-207.

- . "The Strikers at Lawrence." The Outlook, C (February 10, 1912), 309-312.

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Bourne, Randolph. History of a Literary Radical and other Essays by Randolph Bourne. Edited by Van Wyck Brooks. New York: B. W, Huebsch, 1920.

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Brooks, Van Wyck. Three Essays on America. New York: E. P. Dulton and Company, Inc., 1934.

Brubaker, Howard, ed. Appreciation. Privately printed, 1922.

Clarke, Arthur C. and Kubrick, Stanley. 2001, A Space Odyssey. Cleve­ land: The New American Library, 1968, 152

Curti, Merle. The Social Ideas of American Educators. Patterson: Littlefield, Adams and Company, 1959.

Dewey, John. Art As Experience. New York: Capricorn Books, 1958.

------. Characters and Events; Popular Essays in Social and Political Philosophy. Edited by Joseph Ratner. 2 volumes. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1929.

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------The Early Works, 1882-1898. Vol. I. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969.

------and Tufts, James H. Ethics. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1913.

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------Human Nature and Conduct. An Introduction to Social Psychology. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1922.

------Intelligence in the Modern World: John Dewey's Philosophy. Edited by Joseph Ratner. New York: Random House, 1939.

------Liberalism and Social Action. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1935.

------On Experience, Nature, and Freedom; Representative Selections. Edited by Richard J. Berstein. New York: The Liberal Arts Press, 1960.

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Dorn, Jacob Henry. Washington Gladden; Prophet of the Social Gospel. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 1966.

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Eastman, Max. The Literary Mind; Its Place in An Age of Science. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1935.

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Farago, Ladislas. Patton: Ordeal and Triumph. New York: Ivan Obolensky, 1963.

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Gladden, Washington. Christianity and Socialism. New York: Eaton and Mains, 1905.

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Goldberg, Harvey, ed. American Radicals: Some Problems and Personali­ ties . New York: Monthly Review Press, 1957.

Handy, Robert Theodore. "George D. Herron and the Social Gospel in American Protestantism, 1890-1901." Unpublished Ph.D. disserta­ tion, The Divinity School, University of Chicago, 1949.

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Rauschenbusch, Walter. Christianity and the Social Crisis. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1907.

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