Randolph Bourne on education
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Authors Horsman, Susan Alice, 1937-
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Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/317858 RANDOLPH BOURNE ON EDUCATION
by Susam Horsmam
A Thesis Submitted t© the Faculty of the DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY In Partial Fulfillment of the.Requirements For the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS In the Graduate College THE. UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA
19 6 5 STATEMENT BY AUTHOR
This thesis has been submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for an advanced degree at the University of Arizona and is deposited in the University Library to be made available to borrowers under rules of the Library0 Brief quotations from this, thesis are al lowable without special permission, provided that accurate acknowledgment of source is made. Requests for permission for extended.quotation from or re production of this manuscript in whole or in part may be granted by the head of the major department or the Dean of the Graduate College when in his judgment the proposed use of the material is in the interests of scholarship. In all other instances, however, permission must be obtained from the author.
APPROVAL BY THESIS DIRECTOR This thesis has been approved on the date shown below?
. J. WILSON " Jj'ate Professor of History PREFACE
It is net difficult to select an episode in history that is merely ninteresting1’0 Many of us are sufficiently gossips and meddlers to discover that probing past events and lives is, in many respects, a pleasant diversion» Ran dolph Bourne’s career bore many aspects of martyrdom as well as a touch of Bohemianism, and the study of his life easily becomes seductive and the fine, lucid style of his essays and criticism infectious„ It would be difficult not to sympathize with and admire Bourne, and equally as difficult not to become impatient, in time, with his naivety and petulance» Perhaps Bourne did have the ’’prophetic” destiny he claimed for him self, the enigmatic quality of ’’charisma”o One escape from mere sympathy is to attempt to set Bourne firmly in his historical context, and the most obvious setting is alongside John Dewey, his professor at Columbia, his philosophical mentor, and, at last, his rival for the po sition of intellectual leadership in the editorial offices of
Hew York’s literary publications0 A comparison of Bourne’s and Dewey’s ideas is historically significant, also, because of the frequency of their selections of the same topics for discussion— socialism, democracy, liberalism, military con scription, America’s foreign policy and public education0 Their debates provide perspective oa the problems and proposals that characteristically are compiled to describe the elusive movement called wPr©gressivism1?o Terms, such as localism, middle class, progress and, especially, liberalism, become both more specific and complex with the realization that the ^Progressive^ generation had arrived at no consensus of definitions. Still they considered such concepts, vague as they were, the basic elements of a formula that would as sure a democratic future for America. Bourne and Dewey— and, most likely, Herbert Croly, Charles Beard, Walter Lipp- man, ?an Wyek Brooks and Lewis Mumford— agreed on one essen tial point, that America had not yet achieved democracy. They thought of themselves as advance agents of an evolving reality. To make the world safe for democracy was not, in the thinking of these men, to conserve tradition but to insist on the future. But Bourne fell out of step with Dewey, and with other Progressives, when he tried to envision and describe the promised house of many mansions. The Progressive movement was concerned with Americars democratic mission as a practical so cial problem. Bourne’s Utopianism was of another spirit than the instrumentally-oriented program of his contemporaries for political, economic and social revision. Bourne could net sustain his optimism about America’s promise because he lacked the circumspect attitude which was an integral part of the V
qualified optimigm that made ^Progressivism” a hybrid phil©-
sephy of practical ideals0 I would like to thank the Columbia University Libraries for making readily available the Bourne Manuscript Collection, as well as their other facilities and source ma terial; the University of Arizona Interlibrary Loan depart ment; Professor Russell C 0 Ewing, head of the History Depart ment, and Professor Herman E„ Bateman, for their active interest in my academic efforts, and Professor Ro J= Wilson, for his guidance and encouragemento TABLE OF CONTENTS
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vi ABSTRACT
Randolph Bourne$ a literary and social critic in New York from 1911 until 1918s when he died, achieved most of his notoriety as the result of a series of essays opposing the war and the Progressives<= Early in his career Bourne had been interested in radical political theory as the solution t,o the materialism of middle class America, but he became disillu sioned at the outbreak of war in Europe, when the people in whom he had hoped proved to be an inarticulate mass subject to the manipulation of the ruling classes* As a contributor to The Seven Arts and The Dial magazines, he allied himself, rather, with a new literary philosophy which proposed that the artist assume the responsi bility of inspiring the gregarious masses to a sense of dedi cated individualism, a necessary prerequisite for the evolu tion of America to democracy* Bourne? s pacifist essays blamed the Progressive leadership for abandoning their responsibility and allowing America to drift into the arena of imperialist polities * Bourne himself, however, abandoned his dreams for a revolutionized social order* His final thoughts were that progress toward a rejuvenated America could be measured only in terms of personal integrity* Ic FROM PROPHECY TO RESIGNATION
Even before Randolph Bourne died, his reputation had some of the qualities of a mytho His body was maimed, and to himself and to his friends the physical distortion seemed literally to embody the distortion of the times» Arthur Maemahon, a classmate of Bourne8s at Columbia Uni versity, once told how peasant women in Italy would cross themselves in awe when Bourne visited their village streets, and crowds of children trail in wonder after the young stranger from America0 Bourne appeared as fia bird-like ap parition® to Van Wyck Brooks when he first met Bourne, wrapped in a German student’s cloak«• James Oppenheim, edi tor of The Seven Arts, recalled recoiling in horror when Bourne first introduced himself, seeking a position on the magazine’s editorial board= I shall never forget how I first had to overcome my repugnance when X saw that child’s body, the humped back, the longish, almost medieval face, with a sewed up mouth, and an ear gone awry* But he wore a cape, carried himself with an air, arid then you listened to marvellous speech, often brilliant, holding you, spell-bound, and looked into blue eyes as young as a Spring dawn, ‘ Maemahon, who was also Bourne’s European traveling companion, thought that Bourne’s deformed ear was almost more repulsive than his hunched back. Bourne had a well-formed forehead, mose and eyes- and a powerfuls large jaw* But, according to Macmahon, a receeding chin bothered Bourne more than anything about his appearance*^ Bourners hunched back was a defect almost from birth, but aside from the fact that he was born whole, no one, ap parently, knew for certain the exact circumstances of his dis figurement* Some believed that, as an infant, he fell from a high window; others, that the spinal deformity resulted from tuberculosis which he contracted at the age of four* 2 Just as Bourne never discussed his physical disability, he rarely talked about his father, Charles Bourne, who left his family when Bourne was almost too young to remember him* Charles Bourne, whose ancestors were traditionally ministers, apparently was engaged in business enterprises that failed* Macmahon, reminiscing, ^assumed® that there was a divorce and surmised that "from some ?indeterminate date* the small Bourne family was virtually subsidized*" Randolph Bourne and his sister, Natalie, just two years younger than he, used to
Columbia University Libraries, Randolph Bourne Manuscript Collection, Arthur Macmahon to Louis Filler, un dated; All letters cited hereafter are part of this collec tion; Manuscripts from the collection will be designated, "Bourne MSS;" James Oppenheim, "The Story of the Seven Arts," The American .Mercury* 20 (June, 1930), 163;and Van Wyck Brooks, ed*, The History of a Literary Radical and Other Papers (New York: S* A* Russell, ^Agnes Delima to Dorothy Teall, undated; B* S< Bates, "Randolph Bourne," The Dictionary of American Biographs * eds=, Allen Johnson and Dumas Malone, (new York: Charles Seribner*s Sons, 1937) H , 4$6* visit with their father after the separation, until Charles Bourne withdrew from their lives and became a part of Bourne?s somewhat obscure originso3 His mother, Sara, ”a well-bred person, kindly, genu ine, quite naive,1* and "vaguely ineffectual," brought her two sons and two daughters home with her to Bloomfield, Hew Jer sey, when Bourne, the eldest, was eight years old. Her fami ly was an old and respected pillar of the quiet town, some thirty miles distant from Hew York. Its sons were tradition ally lawyerso The family regularly attended the Presbyterian church and consistently voted Bepubliean 3Agnes DeLima to Dorothy Teall, undated; Macmahon to Filler, undatedo ^Tbido; Carl Besek, ed», War and the Intellectuals, Essays by Bandolph So Bourne„ 1915-1919 (Hew York: Harper Torehbooks, 1964) viiio ^Bourne to Elisabeth So Sargeant, June 9, 1915° 4 Bourne remembered that as a child he always walked to church at the side of his soft and comfortable grandmother, fearful the whole way that they would be lateo They never were, but he always remembered the relief he experienced once they were seated in their pew in time to hear the minister^ voice be gin its droneo He remembered his grandmother’s home as *stif ling The parlor was kept closed except on company occasions, \ and the books, an ordinary collection of the ^classics,® were locked inside glass doors» There was a long, curved banister, but he was forbidden to slide down it— a ruling he made bold, on occasion, to defy. *It was one instance, he wrote, ’’where his fiercely clutching guilt melted away before the thrill of that slideo But as a whole, Bourne recalled, his childhood was like the long, hot summer afternoons on which he was made to sit quietly indoors with his mother and sistersc He was suddenly conscious of time, endlessly flowing and yet somehow dreadfully static0 Nothing was ever going to happen again| he was as if alive in a tomboooo The world was a great vaccum with nothing to experi ence and nothing to do* And somehow this ’’tedium vitae got transmuted,” in his mind, ’’into the colossal ennui of heavens”? Bourne’s ruminations, written when he was a young man, about his childhood experiences were an attempt to de- ^Bourne, ’’Autobiographical Chapter,” The Dial, 60 (January, 192©), 1^21o 7 Ibido 5 scribe the pewer, in an immature, mind, of fear and the desire to conformo These were the instruments of terror used by his elders to mold his character according to traditional reli gious and social standards« He resented, for instance, having to memorize the Westminster catechism, especially the first response, MThe chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forevero11 ,fSomething, obscure, unconscious, re volted in him at the base eommereiality of the transaction0tf As a boy, he spent much guilt on his inability to cultivate a love for G©do His grandfather, the only old man with a long, white beard that he could picture, had always seemed clammy to him. He never objected to giving his Sunday School offering of pennies ^everyone to Jesus,n but at the same time, he never really cared. Sin, he remembered, was #a vague idea.* He would "screw up his muscles* but to no avail*— he was unable to make himself love God. And he was never fully convinced that "the thrill of that slide" down the banister was merely a joy ride to a place he had heard called perdi tion. The older generation with the powerful weapons of fear and ingratiating love at their disposal, he wrote, almost suc ceeded in turning out "a priggish® young man at the age of seventeen, with a built-in and indestructible control mecha nism of guilt.9 ^Bourne, "Autobiographical Chapter 9Bourne, "The History of a Literary Bqdical,"" Yale Beview. S (April, 1919)» 468=484o 6 Bourne described himself at the age of seventeen as "priggishg" but his friend Maemahon thought that Bourne had been merely slow in maturingo He cited as an example the speech that Bourne delivered upon his graduation from Bloom field High School, a speech about "Washington1s Campaigns in Hew Jerseyo" On the same night, June 2 8 , 1903, Maemahon, four years younger than Bourne, delivered a speech on the Battle of Trenton at his own grammar school graduationo Within a year, Maemahon claimed, he was "mortified at so trivial a themeo" Bourne, the high school graduate, however, was vain about his achievements in classical scholarship0 He could read Greek and Latin literature and despaired when he learned that his younger sister was reading a prose translation of the Odysseyo Translations were "implements of deadly sin that boys, used to cheat with," "sneaking entrances into the temple of lighto" At the age of seventeen, Bourne passed all his examinations for entrance to Princeton University, but fi nancial difficulties prohibited him from enrolling= For the next six years, Bloomfield7s prize scholar worked for his livingo He was employed for three years as a secretary, then as an assistant in a pianola factory and finally as an accompanist in a vocal studio o-*-® ^Maemahon to Filler, undated| Van Wyck Brooks, "Randolph Bourne," Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, edo, Eo Bo Ao Seligman (New Yorki The Macmillan Company, 1930), II, 6 5 8 . 7 Bemrne was 23 when he worn a scholarship and entered Columbia University in 1909= Four years later he graduated with a master’s degree in sociology= The years at Columbia were a turning point in Bourne’s life. Teachers and students took second looks at ’’this misshapen gnome o” Enrolled in a ’’History of Philosophy” course* Bourne* along with three other students* was selected by the professor* Frederick Woodbridge* to meet George Santayana at the old Faculty Club where they heard the distinguished philosopher read am unpublished essay on Shelley. Woodbridge recalled that in 1911 he suggested to Bourne that he answer an article which appeared in The Atlan tic Monthly attacking the younger generation for being weak and morally insipid. Bourne’s response* an essay entitled ’’The Two Generations*” was published two years later with other essays in a book* Youth and Life. The essays were a declaration of independence on behalf of the younger genera-- tiom from the authoritarian moral code foisted upon it by its elders* entrenched within established institutions. The es says placed upon the youth the specific obligation of leading American society out of what Bourne thought was its material istic morass* and on the pathway to a life of ’’creativity” and ’’adventure.” Bourne wrote*”We feel social injustice as our father’s felt personal sin.” The essays were inspira tional in form and intent* and earned Bourne the reputation of a prophet, a leader of youth. He had dared to slide down the banister Looking back on his college career* Bourne in 1915 advised a Bloomfield neighbor and Barnard student* Dorothy Teall* that College is* in spite of everything* a place to grow* and you play fast and loose with yourself when you let yourself even speculate about dropping ito It's like stirring up the ground around your rootsall the time o You can’t expect to grow unless you serenely drink up the sunlight and air* and soak yourself in this environment o o o <,I shall leave you with the comfor ting conviction that however much you struggle to mangle your destiny* it will probably get you yeto Bourne’s conviction that he had a destiny, that he had ’’un suspected powers of incompatibility with the real world,” was perhaps the most telling ’’growth” that unfolded during his years at Columbia0 I want to be a prophet, if only a miner one, he wrote ooool can almost see now that my path in life will be on the outside of things* poking holes in the holy, criticizing the established* satirizing the self-respecting and contentedo -The career he envisioned for himself was as a social critic * S 11 Frederick Voodbridge to Blanche Messite, September 5, 1937) Bourne * ’’The Two Generations,” The Atlantic Monthly, 10? (May, 1911)* 590-59$o The article which Bourne answered was by Cornelia A, F, Goner* ”A Letter to the Rising Genera tion o” Dixon Ross, wrote about Bourne’s contributions to The Columbia Monthly, ’’It would be stupid to compare them with any other undergraduate contributions as he was writing with the greatest authority and maturity on the most difficult sub ject— -the meaning of criticism* His ideas and their expres sion were even then,,,quite the equal of those of our foremost professors, Dixon Ross to Blanche Messite* 193$ 0 9 not a mere impotent iconoclast<, A critic ought to hammer out mew moral armor to replace the fortresses of tradition he set out to smash because they hid men from social issues with which they ought to grapple* He thought of criticism as an effort similar to describing the shadings of a landscape to a friend* It was the attempt to express that appreciation, conscious^ however, of its limitations, and indeed its impossi bilities* It is struggling heroically and resolutely up a path to a goal that it knows it will never a- ehieve* And yet somehow that march, predestined as it is to failure, aids countless wayfarers, whose eyes would otherwise be fixed stonily on the ground to see the vision at the goal and be glad* The life of a critic was a dedicated life, as Bourne inter preted it, the life of service and sacrifice he felt called And yet as he concluded his studies at Columbia and took leave of campus life, he confided to a close friend, nI never felt as uninspired as I do now* My graduate work has just about ruined me, I guess, unfitted me for literary labor and not trained me for scientific sociology* ’7 Referring to The Atlantic Monthly as his "good angel," having "poked" topics at him through his college years, he admitted desper ately that he was speechless, bereft of ideas, cut loose and adrift* Bourne’s vocational dilemma was to revolve around 1 O Bourne to Dorothy Teall, July 9$, 1915; to Alyse Gregory, July 24$ 1915; to Prudence Winterrowd, May 8, 1913$ and to Carl Zigrosser, March 16, 1913* 10 his conception that an effective life was divorced from the ivory tower "scholarly labor" of the intellectualso "I get restless over details and indignant with academic attitudes," he wroteo He thought that facts and research were dull and confining and that theorizing or prophecy would be more signi ficant in providing intellectual "control" ever American so= cietyo But he admitted also that he suffered from "shame faced timorousness" and faked "a Captain Kidd swaggero" His imagination, or vision, of the new social order, he complained, was cloudyo "low this is no attitude for a would-be man-of- letters, a would-be man with a message, who wants to be a preacher, and even a prophetd"^3 Bourne was, in fact, a religious man, although he summarily rejected Protestantism as an institutionalization of the guilt mechanism with which the older generation trapped youth0 Guilt was merely the product of playing an individual’s inclination to conform against his fear that he might be unacceptable to his group» Bourne conceived his role as "a prophet of youth" in the form of a disseminator of the gospel of the truly free democratic society which , America promisedo That society would emancipate its people from all the many institutions held together by fear and Bourne to Simon Barr, June, 1913; to Alyse Gregory, June 1, 1913» and to Prudence Winterrowd, February 5> 1913o 11 conformity * What Bciarne called somewhat vaguely the Mg©©d life” ought not to be a "colossal ennui" but a life of indi viduality and absence of fear0 And Bourne always had an easy confidence that America need only throw aside the "monster" that stood in the way<, The monster, he believed, was capi talism and all its social, political and intellectual con comitants o The monster had been enshrined in the churches by a gospel of success and greed, a gospel which taught men to take care for their individual salvation, and, along the way, to reap whatever earthly rewards were in store for them*14 ^Bourne used the term "the good life" to cover a lot of ground * Most often he equated "the good life" with "the American promise*" He also used synonymously such ex pressions as "the life of irony," "a democratic socialized life," and "the great American experiment=" His attempts to describe this "life" were equally vague* It was a life that men must "fell"! it was a "flexible" and "pragmatic" life * Perhaps most specifically, it was "the good life of person ality lived in the environment of the Beloved Oommunityo" Bourne considered Jesiah Boycefs interpretation of Paul’s Biblical "Beloved Community" in the finest tradition of Amer ican thought * Boyce’s ideal man was the "interpreter," the man whose life centered on establishing common faiths and beliefs among members of the community* Loyalty, in Boyce’s writing, was the essential ingredient of a community spirit; it was basically a determination to serve the truly highest interests of mankind at large„ Through the cooperation of such interpreters, or prophets. Bourne thought that American life ought to rise above the "lower than reasonable" or bru tish level on which it was commonly conducted* See, Boyce, The Problem of Christianity* II* "The Beal World and the Christian Ideal," (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1914)$ and Bourne, "The Mystic Turned Radical," The Atlantic Monthly* 109 (February, 1912), 236-233, 12 Yhas religi©n reinforced the selfish3 individualist values of the market place0 Bourne was preoccupied by the fact that each mam was forced to live in a ^closed room® of his owng in which it was almost impossible to ©pen ndoors or even windows to our friends The ®rugged individualism® that had been idolized in the nineteenth century was wronga Bourne thoughts because it fragmented life. Capitalism was wicked as a way of life because it had institutionalized that individualism into a system of exploitation» Unless all men were willing to live the fragmented, isolated life, the life of grabbing bread in the market place and consuming it in. lonely iniquity, capitalism, as an economic system, would collapseo Capitalist mentality, therefore, had to insist that the profit motive was ingrained in human nature= In re ality, Bourne claimed, the profit motive was merely the care fully prepared mortar of the institutions of capitalism, Agnes DeLima to Dorothy Teall, undated, -i / This was not an uncommon critique of capitalism . in the early twentieth century. Van Wyek Brooks (Letters and Leadership (lew York: B. W. Hmebseh, 191S) described the inhabitants of capitalist society as ®a race® with ”no prin ciple of life working in them, three hundred years of effort having bred none of the indwelling spirit of continuity.® Lewis Mumford, who wrote that Bourne was a symbol of the de cade from 1910 to 1920, published his first book, The Story of Utopias (Mew York: Viking Press, 1922), four years after Bourne’s death. The book stated many of the same criticisms of capitalism as did Bourne’s writing, Mumford wrote that those who belittled sociological dreams for the future as ’’Utopian® failed to appreciate that in reality all men lived according to Utopian schemes; that is, men characteristically lived according to prevailing ideas, and if good ideas were 13 Those peripheral groups in America which were not yet com mitted to capitalism— -the youngs the immigrant, the malcon tent in any form, were always being instructed in the ways of capitalistie1fsuccessoM The reward was acceptancei the alternative was to be outcast= Whoever encouraged the for bidden slide down the banister, experimenting with some other system, was labeled blasphemous o Whoever was concerned with the welfare or the failure of the outcast was offered a sop to salve his guilty consciences he might give some of his time to wd©ing good» Bourne spoke often of the struggle he had to loose himself from the guilty conscience his Puritan heritage had imposed upon him* Like the deformity he carried on his back, the fear that his sinful nature would preclude him from the blessings in store for the saved in the life after death not propagated then men would live according to fallacious ones* The.. so-called Utopian dreams were preferable because they were consciously integrated schemes for social life* The fallacious ideas that men lived by were three— the ideas of Coketown, the Country House and the Hatien-State* Coke- town was the idea that work was meant to be merely efficient, regardless of human needs* Industrial towns were bleak and ugly; working conditions were geared to production without mind to the men who made production possible* The Country House idea derived from the Renaissance, when, with the break up of the communal-manorial system, mem of wealth withdrew within the walls of am expansive private dwelling to spend their wealth, they cared not where of how created, on aesthetic pleasures* The idea of the Nation-State was a paper world, a bureaucratic world of red-tape, that sanctioned private property rights "and forced Oeketewm to exist in support of the Country House * *^See Bourne, Youth and Life {Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1913)V especially, "Youth," "The Experimental Life," "For Radicals*" - - - 14 weighed down M s spirit until he was able to perform a saving unburdening of his guilt-ridden soulo^ I feel like a soul doomed always to struggle toward a salvation which is impossible to be realized by the individual because it is socialo Obviously the thing is then to renounce salvation0 <,0 oOur duty is to pull everyone into our luminous pathway, and 1 suppose that I must count it salvation to have seen the pathway, beset as it is still by shadows This attempted transfer of his conscience to society as a whole brought Bourne into the company of Socialists during his college years and in league with social reformers* But if he made forays into the arena of radical po litical and educational reform while he was a student at Columbia, in the course of a year’s tour of Europe he suc ceeded in disentangling himself from current events* The trustees at Columbia awarded Bourne a Gilder Fellowship upon his graduation and with the grant he financed a year of tra vel on the continent and planned to finish his tour by at tending the scheduled International Intercollegiate Socialist Conference in Vienna as a regularly elected delegate from America* He stayed several months in England, about half as long in France and then toured ^taly, Switzerland and Germany, where he and Macmahom witnessed the outbreak of the Great See Vincent L * 'Broderick, ^Randolph Bourne,” (unpublished undergraduate thesis$, Department of History, Princeton University, 1941) $ and Max "termer, ’’Randolph Bourne and the Two Generations,” Twice A Year, 5$ (1939),yfer•simi lar statements* f "^Bourne to Mary Messer, February 7$ 1914> cited in Broderick, ^Randolph Bourne,” 74-75° 15 1far0 In mid-September of 1914s after the Vienna conference was cancelled, the two sailed from Denmark for America0 Maemahon recalled that Bourne turned away revolted from a demonstration by a crowd of marching, cheering German young people which they watched together from the balcony of their hotelo His 1fcomic11' friend, said Maemahon, laughed ironically at all their dreams of TSa rational younger generation0tf VMp one was more innocent than I of the impending horror,^ Bourne wrote in his report to the Columbia trustees upon his return to Amerieao^® The details of political realities, like public mu seums and historic relies, bored Bourne6 He was interested rather in . the qualities and superficial aspects of town and countryside of the chief countries of Europe, felt and sensed by actual living contact, by poking about in villages and all the different quarters of towns which, of course, had to be taken as samples, to be built upon with huge generalizations, but which gave me quite incomparable impressions of the living, breathing social life, such as with all my reading and imagining I could never have obtainedo*l In each country he had attended political meetings, acquainted himself with current social movements, interviewed leading politicians, educators and writers and read newspapers and ■ Bourne, 1}lmpressions of Europe, 1913-1914.» A Re port to the Trustees of Columbia University-,"* Columbia Uni versity Quarterly<, 1? (March, 1915), lQ9=12o; Maemahon to Filler, undated0 Bourne to Edward Murray, December 26, 1913» 16 periodicalso He explained te the Trustees that his t?atti tude of approach” to European culture was unlike that of most other Americans in his concentration on "the tout ensemble”— the French mind, for instance, or the Anglo-Saxon institutional mentalityo Bournevs "impressions” were, in brief, a hier archy of national "minds" distinct one from the othero But the candor of his confessions of reliance upon intuition for his conclusions was perhaps equally as significant as his cultural patchwork Concerned about his future as a writer, Bourne cor responded from Europe with a friend who had recently been given a position in the English department at Columbia, about the possibilities of securing a teaching positiono His friend answered, "It is almost as hard to think of the Eng lish Department offering you a chair as to picture the Roman Catholic Church offering Voltaire a bishoprico The hand does not instinctively feed the mouth that bites itc" ^ As an undergraduate and an editor of The Columbia Monthly, Bourne had taken issue with the manner in which literature was taught in the American universities, and with the men who taught it— "those pernicious high priests of bad morality and bad psychology, the professors of English literature in collegeso" He had come to think that classical literature Bourne, "Impressions of Europe o" 03 Harry Dana to Bourne, March 21, 19140 17 ought to be "lived into and worked ©ufce” Literature was use ful as education only if the student might use it to develop his individual critical abilitieso In an essay9 "The Profes= sor," he had portrayed one of his own literature professors as an intellectually sterile and ridiculous figureo^*- Bournefs friend at Columbia concluded his discouraging letter about Bourne * s hope for employment with the plea that if Bourne would simply make an overture of respect for facts to the scholarly world, if he would concede that he "eared for something beyond mere impressions," he might find a welcome reception at Columbia«> Bourne, however, wished that there might be some "Forum" in America to which he could return and pronounce "some disagreeable truths o" Vocationally, his "unsuspected powers of incompatibility with the real world" were as: much fact as fancy0^5 Bourne grew homesick while he was in Europe for the "glow" of his"erude, naive, genial America," and began to insist on "spiritual differences between ourselves and the Older Worldo" America was the seed bed of "adventurous demo cracy," he thought, although many Americans were losing held of the traditional idealso That was the tragedy<> The ^Bourne to Alyse Gregory, January 5, 1914I Bourne, "The History of a Literary Radical"; Bourne1s essay, "The Professor," first published while he was an undergraduate in The Columbia Monthly, was reprinted in The History of a Literary Radicalo Bourne to Alyse Gregory, July 5, 1914° id European continent was developing a feel for constructive social reform and it was there that the socialist movement was making its most effective inroads0 Socialist leaders there appreciated that the nature of the movement was inter national and proletariano But Bourne still missed what he called the zest for personal relations’^ of his fellow Amer icans o The promise of American democracy, like the goal of the socialist movement, was to free men from the economic and social chains imposed upon them in the old worldo But unlike the socialist program, the ”promise of American life,” a phrase Bourne took from Herbert Croly and bent to his own uses, was not alone for the sake of physical well-being,, ”Absolute equality,” he said, was a prerequisite, but the good life of a democratic society promised freedom for the spirit, as well, to rise above the level of material exis tence Just as he could speak of the career of a critic as doomed to failure, however, just as he saw the pathway to so cial salvation ’’beset by shadows,” Bourne was conscious of the illusive, perhaps even delusive, character of his vision of America’s spiritual rejuvenationo In a reflective moment, Bourne wrote in the midst of his European tour, I am struck by the artificiality of my life and ideaso I wonder if I shall ever be able to get to grips with things and be really effectual0 Writing p A Bourne to Alyse Gregory, July 5, 1914» 19 without the contact of some definite movement, some definite groups must lack real vitality as I feel mine does.*' Bourne never made that contact. Before Columbia* he had thought about entering the ministry, a career which would have pleased his family, but he thought both the Presbyterian and Unitarian churches were too confining as institutions. So cialism in America was too childish, too political a move ment for his tastes. It lacked, indeed flatly rejected, any intellectual leadership with which he could ally himself. He claimed that he was too "desperate* over poor social condi tions to be satisfied with the refined "Fabian* socialism of the English, although he admired the Fabians for their arti culateness. The international socialist movement of the Eu ropean proletariat caught his fancy until he saw the "masses" succumb to the fervor of an imperialist war.2 $ Disillusioned, Bourne returned to America to find the prospects for his employment no brighter than before his departure. In the four years of his life that remained, Bourne was forced by the prophetic vision with which he in sisted on viewing social problems to stand aloof from practi cal issues and reform movements. His myopia prohibited his 27 Bourne to Alyse Gregory, July 5, 1914. Bourne to Prudence Vinterrowd, February 5, 1913s and to Arthur Maemahom, March 1 5 , 1914I See also Bourne, "The Price of Radicalism," The lew Republic. 6 (March 11, 1916), 161. 20 descent to the market place; it kept both his private and public ambitions on a plane seemingly "higher than reasonable He wanted t© address the "Forum"; he never intended to mingle in the press of the crowds. His vision could not be fed on the mere juggling and piecing together of facts. He was rid den by an unspecifiable vision, the result of a mystical in sight that could only be dimmed by the daylight of current affairs, A parasitic life, of course, was just the other side of the coin. He rejected the bourgeois ethic of economic in dependence because his inherited pride in an aristocratic life of intellectual endeavor prohibited a career of toil and trade. In compensation, more or less, he admitted the parasitic nature of the existence he chose and ridiculed the humility of the honest and self-effacing laborer as false pride. We are all parasites, none more than I, and it hurts my feelings to have you despise them,,,,But sometimes a lordly idleness is better than an uncounting job. If your only ideal in life is to be fiercely unpara- sytie, like a lew Hampshire farmer, then b y .all means bury yourself in any old kind of job, perfectly un critical whether it is worthwhile doing, or whether anybody else can do it<> ^ Personally, Bourne?s life was a problem of gleaming suffi cient economic aid and encouragement from well-wishers to provide a reasonably secure base from which he could carry on ^Bourne to Dorothy feall, August 19, 1915° 2 1 M s social criticism. He needed a sanction and physical sustenance for a life which was not only economically non productive but, by intention, a thorn in society’s collective conscience. Similarly, he attributed to capitalistic society a basic problem rooted deep in economic soil— a- problem of providing sustenance to its artists in whose hands alone lay the truly creative means of molding brute force, physical and industrial, into a force for good. Bourne can be thought of as suffering from a social ized Messianic complex— a complex resulting from a yearning for an effective life and from ingrained guilt feelings about his nonconformity.3© The combination gave rise to outlandish dreams in which the younger generation, an army of heroic warriors, inspired by his lyric prose, collectively assumed the stature of Nietzsche’s ’’man overcoming mam." Bourne, when he was as yet secure within Columbia, interpreted Nietzsche’s philosophy as a revolt against the "poison of a levelling democracy" to which the materialism of Marxist- Socialism was headed, and also against the self-sacrificing "slave morality" being preached by institutionalized Chris tianity. The irony of Nietzsche, Bourne thought, was that ^®Max Lerner stated in "Randolph Bourne and the Two Generations" that Bourne’s sociological approach to the prob lem of human relations was typical of his generation. Lerner said the term "sociological" for Bourne "promised to expand the horizons of the human mind instead of cramping life with in filing cases." 2 2 his cry was heeded by men who translated it into materialis tic terms and became the worldvs captains of industryg while the spirit of Nietzsche*s dream became the basis of the social philosophy of men like Bernard Shaw who were most resourceful ly entrenched against the industrialists<> Bourne’s leaders were to be neither manipulators of public opinion with an eye on election returns nor efficiency experts$ merelye The responsibility of leadership was not to lie with the generals of the army but with the creative men, the men whom Nietzsche spoke of as ’’the aware ones” or ’’the fearless ones<>”31 Most likely9 however9 Bourne was not deluded by his grand visionso In his private moments9 the role of courtier suited him as well as that of propheto Even for society9 his grand^vision settled only into lucid and candid prose» His agitation among young people to lead a zestful9 experi mental life acquired a tone of its own when juxtaposed against the rugged life as exemplified by Theodore Roosevelt or John ReedgWho actively joined with the Mexican and Russian revo lutions » Bourne’s summers were spent usually in the country near New York" or Boston as the houseguest of friends o On one occasion he and several friends rented a home in the New Jersey hillso They passed the days reading9 walking9 31 Bourne9 review of Nietzsche* by Paul Elmer More9 Journal of Philosophy* 9 (August 15 9 1912) 9 471~473° 23 eemrersingg writingo Once Bourne traveled on foot from lew York to Martha*s Vineyard in the company of two ladies, hop ping trolleys whenever they were available and attracting a degree of undue attention, to his great satisfaction<>32 in his correspondence, Bourne somewhat smugly repeated an evalu ation of his life made by his friend Brooks« Brooks had de scribed Bourne as Sfone who leads the ideal, free, dignified leisurely life of a true man of letters, making (his) living by (his) pen with no sordid job to hold downo{f33 From time to time Bourne discussed the possibilities of founding a colony for unemployed intellectuals =, In the summer of 1915 he and Brooks ,rdid a lot of enthusiastic talk ing about it,1? Bourne wrote. They planned to rent a house and ten acres in Westchester county, lew York, hire an expensive cook, purchase a community auto and to wadd people in the summer.oo.Only the servant problem and the house remain.w He and Alice A. Ghoron, an acquaintance from Foxboro, Massa chusetts, in 1917 corresponded about starting another Brook Farm as 18a haven of refuge for any who were trying out their ideas of emphasizing spirit rather than institutions and who ^Agnes BeLima to Dorothy Teall, undated; in a letter to Macmahon, Beeember 23, 1913, Bourne wrote, "But my zest for the experimental life— a life lived in conflict with my natu ral constitutional timidity— makes me unable to resist inter esting episodes of all kinds, correspondences with unknown Women among them." Bourne to his mother, October 12, 1918. 24 get into trouble so #eing0w34 Bourne3 of course, was physically not fit for rough riding or war correspondence<, But, in spite of his defenses of the crude art of Theodore Dreiser and his sympathy with striking laborers in Colorado, Bourne’s preferences for his personal life leaned to the eourtly— the company of intelli gent women, good conversation, and good whisky to ameliorate the long, lonely evenings— ’’Mon Dieu, the evenings I No won der the human race invented alcohol as an antidote to even ings <>”3 5 These aristocratic tastes, superimposed on his ideas of a truly democratic society, were a source of theoretic discomfort for Bourne0 Consequently, he talked himself a- round the seeming contradiction of his social theory and pri vate activities0 He declared that the economically secure and socially accepted professors and writers were merely one more branch of America’s ’’significant® or ’’ruling” class and he denounced their contemplative lives of inactiono He de scribed the new leadership in which he wanted to take part as ’’middle class” and dedicated to public service 0 The new leadership was allied with the exploited working class be cause both groups were malcontents of American society* But the role of the new social order’s working intellectuals would have to be set apart from the laboring classes* In a somewhat •^Bourne to Agnes DeMma, August 6 , 1914» and from Alice A* Chorea to Bourne, June IQ, 1917= •^Bourne to Alyse Gregory, December, 1915* 25 superior maaaer, he named, his group of malcontents ”America’s tribe of talentoM Charles Beard, a member of Columbiafs faculty of political science, used his influence in 1914 with Herbert Croly, editor of The Hew Republic„ to secure Bourne a posi tion as contributor to the magazine for at least $1 , 0 0 0 a year*36 Hot long after Bourne’s return from Europe, the edi tors suggested that he travel to Gary, Indiana, where Super intendent William Wirt’s progressive school system was at tracting national attention = Grumbling about his ’’disgust at feeling so very much out of the circle around The Hew Re public o” and ’’yearning for a wider horizon,” Bourne set out for a few months’ tour of the midwest in the spring of 1 9 1 5 $ his first trip west of Pittsburgh<> The trip was a pleasant interlude and he returned enthusiastic about Wirt’s school and ’’all for the West, barring the inferno named Chicagoo” The personal and intimate dimension of his childhood in the small, still rural, community of Bloomfield predisposed Bourne against Hew York in which he struggled arduously to make his presence felto Bourne wrote often that life in Greenwich Village made him ’’despondent” and that it had ’’poi sonous” effects even on the ’’super-villagers” like himself 0 The midwest took his fancy because of the ’’naivety” and ’’geniality” of the people« 36 Charles A,, Beard to Herbert Croly, May 15$ 1914° Do yon know this midwest innocence?o = dt goes t© my head like wine, for I can feel so relatively sophisticated and realistic. This should have been the soil in which I was raised,3' By summer, Bourne had begun to suspect that he was a false prophet. He both relinquished his hold on the banner of youth and confessed that his Siadventurousne:ssM was being ^called out to sea,” His spirit was restless, he said, only "because it does so awfully want an abiding place," Youth and Life is a good deal of a fraud if it is taken as me instead of what I would like to be, or to have been. This last year has so unsettled me that some of it isn’t even what I find % could pos sibly be. The great problem now is, as Lippman says in his great book Drift and Mastery,,,to know what to do with your emancipation after you have got it,3© Bourne spent the summer of 1915 in the hot, dirty city be cause Croly suggested "dimly” that he attend,editorial con ferences once a week. But a month later Bourne was aware that he was no more than "a very insignificant retainer on its staff," He hung on to this status through another year when he commented that his "job" was "trembling,"39 Croly began to turn down Bourne’s work, and Bourne blamed, again, his "impressionistic" style, "Is it really ^Bourne to Alyse Gregory, July 24$ 19151 to Prudence Winterrowd, April 9$ 1915$ and to Alyse Gregory, undated, ^Bourne to Dorothy Teall, July 14$ 1915$ and to Es ther Cornell, undated, ^^Bourne to Elizabeth 5, Sargeant, June 25$ 1915$ September 20, 1916, and November 15$ 1916, 27 possible to combine facts and figures and the tone that you feel the thing in?tf he wondered« Houghton-Mifflin had con tracted to publish a book about the Gary schoolss but he found himself 1?fl©und,ering most dreadfully and getting,, = „ surrounded by a mass of loosely connected notes and reflec tions at$ The Gary Schools, nevertheless, was published in 1916, and Education and Living, essentially essays reprinted from The New Republic,the following year,, The Gary brand of pro gressive education enjoyed a considerable popularity in New York* Public-spirited citizens prevailed upon Bourne to join their ranks in petitioning the city's Board of Education for reform. H o o f and patronizing, he retreated that fall to the quiet of the country and "missed the Gary epic, Wirt's trial before the Board of Education, withcothe claque in the gallery," He thought that,he would be "a precarious aid" in the "Napo leonic campajigno" "I usually get my facts wrong and put my foot in ito"40 Bourne’s education essays did, however, serve to de velop his friendship with Van Wyck Brooks, then an editor for Scribner's, which had published a few of Bourne’s Gary arti cles, Under Brooks' influence Bourne's critical talents were directed toward literatureOf all his friends, Bourne "liked and admired" Brooks the most, an opinion which ^Bourne to Elizabeth So Sargeant, June 25, 1915< September 23, 1915s, and October .10, 1915® ^Bourne to Van Wyck Brooks, November 12, 1915® 2# crystallized in 1918 after Brooks? polemic for the neglected artist in America, Letters and Leadershipo Brooks, whose book was in large part a critique of America’s pragmatists and their claim to national leadership, thought that pragma tism and the "liberals” and efficiency experts who claimed the philosophy as their own, were too intellectual in their approach to the problems of American society» The intellec tuals failed to sympathize or to attempt to identify with the common desires of the American public for a common nation al culture, for a real sense of unity» Brooks’ idea of na tional culture was of a literary expression, primarily of. the common American experience which he thought would reveal that self-interest and rugged individualism had nothing to do with the real basic needs and aspirations of Americans0 The poet, by rights, ought to assume the role of America’s "awakeners = ”42 Bourne, concurring with Brooks, thought that Intellectualism is this "liberal curse, the habit of moving in concepts rather than in a warm area of prag matic lifeo 0 0»Instead of politics taking its place in the many-sided interests of a modern mind, it had the dominant position which it occupied in the pages of the "New Republic” 0 Never satisfied except to tackle the problem of evil on a so cial scale, he, at last, believed that evil was not a matter to be dealt with by changing environment or by political con cepts o The stain of evil seeped out from men’s instinctive nature at the level where it was a common nature„ It was ^Brooks, Letters and Leadership* passim0 29 a common natureo It was truly common9 or original, sin, and its treatment must be introspective soul-searching. Bourne's last efforts at social criticism were psychological analyses of human development and of the body politic— introspective studies of social and personal relations which were peculiar ly apathetic to current political and social movements.43 In fact, even Bourne’s pacifism led him only into a battle of printed words. He and Brooks joined ranks with the poet James Oppemheim, Waldo Prank and Paul Bosenfeld in 1917 to.publish The Seven Arts magazine, whose editorial policy was openly pacifist. At the same time, significantly, its prime concern was with literary criticism. A circular pre ceding its first issue stated that It is our faith and the faith of many that we are living in the first days of a renascent period, a time which means for America the coming of that na tional self-consciousness which is the beginning of greatness. In all such epochs the arts cease to be private mattersj they become not only the expression of the national life but a means to its enhance ment. . . .In short, The Seven Arts is not a magazine for artists, but an expression of artists for the community. Oppemheim, the editor-in-chief, claimed that Bourne was the ’’real leader of what brains and creativeness we had at the time.” He thought that without Bourne the magazine would not have enjoyed the short flash of brilliance that it did, but he also knew that Bourne’s unpopular pacifism was the cause ^Series of letters, Bourne to Brooks, March, 1918: also, ’’Twilight of Idols,” The Seven Arts. 2 (October, 1917/ 688-702. , of the magazine7s early death, before it had reached its first anniversary.^44 Bournej who blamed Americans participation in the war on the combined efforts of the intellectuals of the liberal camp and "the Eastern ruling class," thought that 1fa craving for action," an intellectual impatience with uncertainty, had evoked the intellectuals? "rationalization of the common emo tional driveo" The real enemy was war and not Imperial Ger many « The thing to fear was "the premature crystallization" of the "intellectual waters, 11 it nation in the state of war, Bourne thought, was like a prison whose iron bars made a mockery of mastery= His brand was an "apathetic" pacifism: Suppose I really believe that world peace will most likely come exactly by not doing something».„.Is the skeptical mind not thrown back to a choice of resis tance or apathy? Gan one do more than wait and hope for wisdom when the world becomes pragmatic and flex ible again?ocolt may not be noble to concentrate on your own integrity, but it is perhaps better than to be a hypocrite or a martyr0 45 Bourne’s short lifetime was, in fact, little more than a concentration on his own "integrityIf he spoke in general terms of spiritual rejuvenation, personal tastes and interests belied the evangelical overtones of his messages= In effect the last two years of Bourne’s life took the form of a retreat into the realm of literature for the expression ^Oppenheim, "The Story of the Seven Arts o" Bourne, "The War and the Intellectuals," The Seven Arts, 2 (June, 1917), 133-146,"and "GonseienGe and^Intelligence in the War,” The Dial, 63 (September, 1917), 193"195o 31 of his vision of social reordering* In contrast to his early essays about education, cultural reform and the new philoso phy, his later writing was predominantly literary criticism and unpublished social criticisms of am experimental nature— "The State,% "Old Tyrannies,t? and two autobiographical chap ters* The new editorial policy of The Dial, pronounced in June of 191$, claimed Bourne as a part of a post-war avant- garde literary movement which the magazine fostered* Scho field Thayer, who assumed the position of a chief editor along with James Watson, early in 1919, had intended to make The Dial something of a quasi-official organ for Bourne’s criti cism* In fact, in 1917, when The Seven Arts was forced to stop publication, the editors of The Dial announced that their magazine would attempt to service the subscribers of the deceased publication* In June 1918 the magazine announced that John Dewey would be a member of its new editorial board and that Bourne had been given the position of subordinate editor* By October, Bourne wrote in a letter to his mother, he had been relieved of his editorial duties because of his ’’radical” views but continued in the same salary* Apparently he and Dewey were finding it difficult to work together, but Thayer, siding with Bourne, was waiting until he should as sume his managerial position to rectify the slight of Bourne * Max Eastman described the contributers to The Dial as ”a new bunch of Utopians*” Outcasts of Bdezi, they sought to establish a repub lic of letters which might convey to the nation at large their new vision of Whitman?s order» Their subject was apaealypse; their aim-was to dispel il= , lusion but to salvage myth; their instrument was art,4-® Bournej of course, posturing first as a prophet and later as one of the earth's ''disinherited,® heeded Thayer’s and Brooks’ talk of poetic leadership with a mind to the so lution of his own career dilemma, A republic of letters would sanction a social hierarchy in which non-productive members would be sustained and revered, if not by divine right: at least bedause of their naturally inherited sensitivity to the origins and destiny of the American democratic dream. If Bourne could reason that all men were born equal, that is helpless, his experience was that social conditioning, prag matically something "given® or "irreducible,® created men unequal. To level out the social hierarchy was to disregard the "given® fertility of artistic temperment. Environmental differences endowed men with varied degrees of perception, and, therefore, potential creative power,47 Bourne knew that his own life had been subjected ^ See, William Sasserstrom, The Time of The Dial (Syracuse University Press, 1963), 15° Sasserstrom labeled the literary philosophy which The Dial professed "organicism,® Thayer and Watson stated as a part of the magazine’s policy, "If criticism is needed it is because criticism can share al most equally with creative writing the privilege of revealing us to ourselves,® Wasserstrom thought that Bourne was the "avatar" of those who studied "only organic process in art and culture in order that they might root the idea of Utopia in some fertile native ground,” 2 5 ° "Old Tyrannies,® Typescript, Bourne 33 irrevocably to ,f01d Tyrannieso” He never was able to absolve his old guilt feelings 9 although he claimed he had shaken loose his inherited Puritan moralityo He succeeded, he thought, in freeing himself from the stifling influence of his Victo rian familyo He wore the cloak of a pagan to disguise his physical deformity, but he could not hide the socially inflic ted hump that distorted his personalityo He was able to rid himself of the ^clutching fear” of family disapproval by con vincing himself that his uniqueness, his creative desires, were not whispers from the devil but merely human impulses0 He never, however, ceased to long for acceptance® That he was not innocent, unscarred, he knew® He thought, neverthe less, that others were similarly scarred, and that the soars were almost defects from birth® All men, he wrote, were handicapped and salvation depended on men’s recognizing their community of handicap® If only he could make explicit this common bond, he might throw off his cloak and become proud, not of humility, but of his affliction® Hopefully the sight would evoke ter ror and pity— fear of the brutish level of human existence and sympathy for man’s common lot® He thought that at best he might play the role of a here in a tragedy® He wrote, with unsuspected powers of compatibility, to a friend in mourning, I stretch out my hand to you begging you not to de spair® The world is drinking its cup; it passes 34 from nene of us 0 The common lot is easier to bear , than the lightning bolt* You do not weep a l o n e c48 The myths of loneliness and poverty surrounding Bourne’s death in December of 1918 were undoubtedly spurred by the irony of the fact that he was a victim of a social diseaseg an influenza epidemic that crowded city hospitals that wintero Oppenheim stated that Bourne, whose pacifism had called down public wrath upon him, was like na lone, grieving wolf,e that last winter0 At his deathbed, Oppenheim pronounced, #He seemed to mean all that had been stoppedo® Oppenheim thought of Bourne’s death as symbolic of the end of a great revolutionary era. But Bourne, although he had cried that the war ’’slammed the door® on creative thought and that it would not be opened ’’for another thousand years,” had dis cretely exchanged his pretentious cloak of leadership for the serene conviction that his destiny, socially thwarted as it was, was comprised more of human than prophetic elements= Ac tually, Bourne died not lonely but surrounded by close friends, and he was far from destituteo He had money in the bank and money in his pocket= His last words were an aesthetic appre ciation of the color and texture of a cup of eggnogo49 Bourne to Beulah Amidon, June, 1918. ^Oppenheim, ’’The Story of the Seven Arts” ; and Agnes DeLima to Dorothy Teall, undated, and Macmahon to Filler, undatedo ,11c m m OF A NEW FAITH Wien Bourne described his younger sister as a "passionate vulgarian," he no doubt was indulging in criti cism which would have been offensive to him had he heard it from someone else* Similarly when Bourne, whose heritage was middle class, criticized the middle class as the epitome of all the evils of a capitalis society, his remarks were partially introspective o His loyalties molded his proposals for an ending to "the day of the middle classo" The middle class was to bring about its own salvation while it still had a soul to saveo In the upper reaches of society, it was al ready too late 5 the ruling or "significant" class in capi talist America had already sold its soulo-*- This not uncommon estimate of American society at the turn of the century took on varied shadings and most of ten served Bourne as a starting point or vehicle for political 2-See Bourne, "The Social Order in an American Town," The Atlantic Monthly, 3 (February, 1913), 227-236* Bourne described the "incorrigible un-soeialmindedness of the ruling class <>" "The most thoroughly American of all," he wrote $ they seemed "to have no sentiment for their community as a communityo" See also Bourne, "The Price of Radicalism,". The lew Republic, 6 (March 11, 1916), 161, a review of Seymour Beming, The Pillar of Fire (Boston: Small, Maynard and Company, 1915)o To be radical, Bourne wrote, it was not necessary to keep company with "the meek and lowly*" Rather the radical movements in America needed a new, intellectual middle class radicalism to provide the labor movement with a philosophy* 35 36 or social discussion rather than for a systematic analysis Bourne saw the middle class primarily as a rootless, transient class of people, rummaging for the financial solvency which would bring it social status» This had been his own experience0 As a youth in Bloomfield where his mother*s family was well- established in the social hierarchy, Bourne uncritically swal lowed all its standards of ^culture11, and ^refinement»R In Bloomfield’s pre-commuter era, the Bourne family and other olds respected families, usually professional people, formed a sort of elite„ But as rural Bloomfield became industrialized and suburbanized, the old families were outnumbered, and the new families in many cases were more wealthy. After his graduation from high school, Bourne’s own horizons broadened to include ambitions of scholarly achieve ment that local institutions were unable to satisfy. Opportu nity called him too away from home to the city and the strug gle for solvency and significance as one more wayfaring mem ber of the middle class. Bourne’s belief that the middle class search for status was the meanest of existences was not so much, a rational conclusion as a personal emotion,3 ^Daniel Aaron, in Writers on the Left (Hew York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc,, 1961}, placed Bourne in leage with Lewis Mumford, Waldo Frank, James Oppenheim, Paul Bosem- feld, and . "marginally’’ Walter Lippman as the leaders of the "Apostolic Student Movement,” It was characteristically, Aaron thought, "eastern, academic and middle class,1’ 3 B o u r n e , t’A study of the Suburbanization of a Town," (unpublished Master’s thesis, Faculty of Political Science* . Columbia University, 1913)* His dreams and aspirations for a more rational so cial orderj in which he and his friends would form a corps of leaders to free their people from bondage, were also essen tially personal„ Most of Bournef s ^scientific" sociology was thought out for the sake of this dream« The depths of despond ency into which Bourne plunged in 1914 when the European war shattered his hopes of "a rational younger generation" can be accounted for by the private stock he held in that dream„ In this sense, he applied his Columbia sociology in the pages of The Atlantic Monthly and The Mew Eenublio to justify the fact that the middle class threatened to level America’s democra tic society into a mass mediocrity0 He could net deny the fact, but he could successfully side-step personal guilt by speaking impersonally of classes and social forces. And then, as if on cue, he might step back into the awesome picture, taking on heroic proportions, in the garb of leadership. The cult of leadership, as it was envisioned by Bourne and Brooks and the men with whom they kept company in the offices of The Seven Arts and The Dial, was by intent ir rational and in-effect heady. The heralding of Bourne by his contemporaries as "prophetfcM, in his enthusiasm for the role of salvation to be fulfilled by the younger generation was symptomatic of a mood of heroism in the years before America’s involvement in the World War.4 Brooks made the words of ^Lewis Mumford, in "The Image of Randolph Bourne," .. The Mew Republic . 64 (September 24, 1930) , 151-152, wrote - England?s leading socialist* William Morris, the touchstone of his call to arms to yommg American artists: W 1 know by my own feelings and desires what these men want„% Febling was a far cry from reason and the new leaders were to be neither efficiency experts nor professors* No true social revolution will ever be possible in America till a race of artists, profound and sincere, has brought us face to face with our own experience and set working in that experience the leaven of the highest culture * ***The really effective approach to life is the poetic approach, the approach that Goethe summed up in his phrase, nfrom within outward* tf5 Brooks addressed his generation through some two hundred pages in such phrases, and Bourne answered him: There is a certain superb youthful arrogance in your implication that it is we and our friends who are to be the masters» Your coming book is a pretty compre hensive demolition of the claims of any type or class of American, past or present, to hold this mastership for us* You leave nobody, so that it must be we fear less ones— and self-conscious ones— who are to hold it * Perhaps you will think that you mean that you are to be only the herald of the dawn, the John the Bap tist, and would violently disavow any thought of as piring to leadership yourself* But away with such , timidities* This is no time to shy at priggishness*° This exchange between Brooks and Bourne took place in March of 191$, less than a year before Bourne?s death, and Bourne’s sentiments are problematic when compared with that Bourne had occupied a l$curiously central place1* in the 11 stirring thoughte11 which inspired The Seven Arts and The Dial* and that Bourne was ^precious to us because of what he was, rather than because of what he had actually written* 11 5 • ' Brooks, Letters and Leadership* 102-103 = ^Bourne, to Brooks, March 191$* 39 unfinished manuscripts feimd among his papers. In a psyche- logical treatise, "Old Tyrannies,n Bourne had written that the individual, being born helpless, "entirely desititute," was of no more significance than a drop of water in the ocean*? The discrepancy in attitudes is resolved somewhat with the realization that Brooks and Bourne were speaking of culture and not politics* Bourne $ the prophet of youth, had forsaken his dreams of "the next revolution," which would usher in a rational social order, but, tenaciously, he hoped to save his own middle class mind from submerging into insignificance* His discussion of a corps of young leaders to blaze the way in the development of a truly American culture was but a rem nant of his early prophecy of the evolution of a "truly dem ocratic society" in America* The new society was to have been a spiritually rejuvenated America and the younger gener ation was to have been the vehicle for diffusing the spirit of creativity and adventure it would require* He learned, however, that classes and social forces, and especially the middle class, resisted "spirit" administered in generalized doses* Bourne said that the war had "slammed the door" on creative thought* He blamed Dewey and The New Republic for "this ’liberal1 curse of intellectualism" that provided Pres ident Wilson with a rational basis for entering the European War* After 1917 he announced that he would do "exactly ?"01d Tyrannies," Bourne MSS* 40 nothing” in the interest of a nation involved in mass destruc tion of civilisation, in spite of its avowed purpose of has tening the day of international peacec Bourne said that he could, in all honesty, do nothing but concentrate on his own integrityo Actually his quarrel with Dewey and ”the liberals” was fabricated in order to preserve the "superb youthful ar rogance” of his vision of a grassroots revolution in ethicso Bourne had spoken more accurately when he confided to a friend in 1 9 1 5 that, ”my sense of control suffers a steady diminuendo from breakfast-timeIt was not the war that had slammed doors for Bourne, but his hope for potential control of soci ety that suffered a steady diminuendo from the time of his release from the halls of Golumbia0 His quarrel with Dewey had really begun during his undergraduate years when he attempted an impossible reconcili ation of instrumentalism with Bergsonian intuition» We are all instrumentalists here at Columbia0 Thought is a practical organ of adaptation to environment; knowledge is a tool to encompass this adaptation, ra ther than a picture of reality. Bergson carries this a step further and says we can only know that reality through the feelings, through appreciation, through observing the world rather as a work of art than a sci entific logical s c h e m a . 9 Instrumentalism, Dewey had written in 1902, was an attempt to solve ”a really serious practical problem— that of interaction,” & Bourne to Alyse Gregory, December, 1915° ^Bourne to Prudence WInterrowd, May 1 $, 1913o See also Max Berner, "Randolph Bourne arid the Two Generations Berner wrote that-scholars at Columbia in Bourne’s day were "seeking to reconcile Bergson with Socialism.” 41 and any effort to establish the primacy of individual or s©~ ciety in the process ^transformed it into an unreal and hence insoluble, theoretic problemo”1^ Bourne, however, was a the oretician at heart, impatient with facts and research and an xious to take Bergson’s step beyond to the realm of visions and convictionso Mastery or leadership, required an almost occult familiarity with a goal— a purpose which could be pos tulated as more than the favorable balance of probabilities It wasn’t that Bourne and Dewey disagreed about the essential problem in American society at the turn of the cen tury* Dewey, in establishing his laboratory school in Chi cago in 1396, was testing his hypothesis that the only virtue of pragmatic value was social understanding* . He concluded that, ' The evils of the present industrial and political situation, on the ethical side, are not due so much to actual perverseness on the part of individuals concerned, nor in mere ignorance of what constitutes the ordinary virtues (such as honesty, industry, pu rity, etc*) as to inability to appreciate the social environment in which we live* 1 2 Progressive educators for the past decade had been engaged in a battle over the proper emphasis in public educa tion* Dewey himself had for a time supported those who argued ■^John Dewey, "The Child and the Curriculum," pamphlet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1902), passim* 1-*-Bourne to Prudence Winterrowd, February 5$ 1913 = -L^Dewey, "The Ethical Principles Underlying Eduea^ tien," National Herbart Society, Third Year Book (lS97)? 7-34° 42 ■O . that the proper conditioning* through meaningful curriculum* was of first importance,, But by 1896 he, doubted the effec tiveness of imposing morality* democratic* Christian* or otherwise* on individuals still in a formative stage. Making his stand explicit* he asserted that his school was experi mental* not exemplary. He was examining the manners in which his sixteen pupils came to awareness of the value of coopera tive living. Curriculum or environment was controlled only in the interest of observing its varied effects on the pupils. And in turn* his only hope for them was that they too might appreciate that human excellence consisted in this experimen tal mode of thinking* observing empirical evidence and draw ing immediate conclusions or making practical judgments. Im plicit in the experimental mode of thinking* of course* was the fact that it depended on cooperation or interaction be tween individuals and environment ,13 Bourne never appreciated the dispassionate nature of social understanding as Dewey defined it. Bourne spoke rather in terms of social salvation which implied that there not only were ethical evils in capitalistic society, but that the evils were not merely the result of historical process but the result of the perversion of the natural order. And this natural order was the world as a work of art which had to be felt or intuited. Bourne was able to come to an 3-3charles B, Strickland* MThe Child* the Community* and Culture-Ep©chs,tT (unpublished paper* Emory University* Atlanta* 1965)o 43 appreciation of his own social environment„ but the judgments that he made concerning it were neither practical nor utilitar ian but morale Handicapped physically and financially, he was compelled, by his environment, to rely on his wits to com pete for the social position of significance which he desired« Capitalist society, which caught up in its web of self-seeking all of the helpless, was immoral, but Bourne retained enough of his religious training to believe that salvation awaited those who willed it; that is, that perfectibility was built into the natural order in the form of sentiment*-^ Bourne simply purified his desire for significance by elevating it* He. wanted to be a prophet, the inspiration of a crusade a- gainst materialistic, middle class mentality. The crusade was personally defensive and socially aggressive* Bourne’s early essays into the arena of social criti cism fell in line with current radical political theory, Charles Beard’s economic interpretation of American history confirmed his fears that.inevitable social forces were both ^Bourne to Prudence Winterrowd, April 10, 1913 = ’’But by being a philosopher you can be contented with tenta tive certainties, with intuitions, and by a judicious mixture of reason and faith based on what seems the balance of proba bilities and on the effective workableness of your principles, ,=,you can extract a surprising amount of satisfaction out of the boundless puzzling world; you can live it and feel it with imaginative sympathy, and thus ’’understand” it, even if you feel you don’t really ’’know” it, ’’Bourne Letters,” Twice A Tear, 7, 79-9S, Bourne to Mary Messer, December 28, 1913• Bourne wrote of his new philosophy of ’’adventurous comprehending personalism, which is to be based on taste and not on morality, on appreciation and responses instead of. compulsions and re straints,” 44 eamse and effect of the materialistic morass into which American society had fallen. Bourne, concluding that socio logy was the one valid educational discipline, submitted a master’s thesis in 1 9 1 3 which focused on the commuting middle class as the element of capitalism which would provide the final impetus to ’’the next revolution.” The thesis, a socio logical study of the suburbanization of his hometown, Bloom field, deplored the transient, colorless no-man’s land that this class of up-and-coming capitalists were making of what once had been a unified community0^5 Emerging at the start of the twentieth century as a class of commuters, the middle class divided its time between the town where the members slept and the city (or the manufac turing fingers of the city) where they earned their .liveli hood = They belonged wholly to neither place. In the city, they spent thpir creative efforts to increase their share of the. nation’s wealth. At home they consumed what they had earned. At work they tended to the business of economic gain; in suburbia, they withdrew each within his own four walls. The public life of the city meant nothing to them because they were there merely to harvest what they could. They sowed no seeds in suburbia-because what they called home was merely a resting place on their way to something better. The plight of the middle class was to be ever mid-way between a life of ]_K Bourne, ”A Study of the Suburbanization of a Town.” 45 getting and a life of spending**^ its suspended state, how ever, was its hope as well as its harden0 In its semi-eom- mitted condition, not yet seduced by established interests in a capitalist economy, the middle class might precipitate the social revolution that would replace societyf s materialistic value system with the communal spirit of service that was the birthright of their kind. The uprooted middle class, he said, must create t?new soil in which to grow, ”17 Bourne, in searching for this new soil, became a so cialist 0 He thought only a radical reordering of capitalist society in America could put an end to the fragmented life of the middle class man. In the "Socialist Industrial Democracy" he advocated for a time, a man might escape the narrow strug gle to make financial ends meet, A socialist, by his defini tion, was one who accepted three propositions: "the economic interpretation of history, the class-struggle, and the exploi tation of the workers by capitalistic private ownership of means of production,"^ But more than that, Bourne said that his socialism was "practically that of Kropotkin," His ideal was an unstable synthesis of socialism and anarchy— a social philosophy "infused with the ideal of free individuality, 16 Bourne, "A Study of the Suburbanization of a Town," and "The Social Order in an American Town," Bourne, "The Art of Theodore Dreiser," The Dial, 6 2 (June.14, 1917J, 507-509. - - > -^Bourne, "The Next Revolution," The Columbia Monthly Ilf (May, 1913), 217-22#, ... 46 developed through a spontaneous social lifeen-^9 Kropotkin and other philosophic anarchists at the turn of the century were preaching a faith in human nature so great that it remained for leaders of men merely to change the social order to one of pure equality in order to break the chains that bound men to lives of economic gain0 The anar chists believed that morality evolved parallel to the evolu tion of economic patterns and that the impetus of a bomb or of an inspirational wave of brotherly love would be needed njust to wash the earth clean, to sweep away the shards and refuse accumulated by centuries of slavery and oppressionet? They would replace the institutions of capitalism-— the author itarian state, the church and their accompanying gospels of greed and success— with the institutions of free associationo lot laws but social habits, Kropotkin thought, would bind men together in the communal-anarehist society. All men would be required to work, according to their capacities, because there would be no division of consuming and laboring classes, and men would work together because they would realize the utility of such association^ With the irreleyencies of material ex istence reduced thus to the simplest state, time and energy would be released for the development of human relations, the art of livings2 0 •^Bourne to Alyse Gregory, September S, 1913» ^Peter Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread (lew York: Vanguard Press, 1906), passim* 47 In a capitalist society, exploitation was the pri mary relation between its members, an impersonal and irration al relationship that might better be termed a force or compml- sion<> Bourne thought that exploitation was not the fault of specific persons but a fault inherent in a short-sighted, non- analytical economic system. It was something a man had to ex perience in order to understand. .A skilled worker who made ■ . ■ - - perforated rolls for player pianos and earned, by the piece,, one-third of the net price realized by the owner of the mac hinery understood the meaning of the term. The owner was free to compose music, while the worker produced the saleable commodity. /When the owner, in his own interest, reduced the wages of the worker, the worker, who was unfit for other crafts and without economic resources to purchase his own ma chinery, had no choice but to accept the reduction in wages and, as business improved for the owner, to recommend to a friend that he join him in the employ of the musician. The employer, entrenched in an economic system that sanctified property rights by the arm of the law, was in an unassailable position. People who trusted wrights,n instead of ^power, 11 those who recognized only "individuals," instead of "classes," Bourne wrote, would think of exploitation as something merely "personally brutal" until they should encounter the "invisible threat of elass-foree."^- 2&Bourne, "What Is Exploitation?" The New Republic, 9 (November 4> 1916), 12-14. ‘ ' % 43 Just as the anarchists thought that a bomb or some other catastrophic ©eeuranee would be necessary before the evolutionary dJaft of economic determinism might be trans formed into revolution, Bourne also could not think of the next revolution in terms of gradual inevitabilityo In this sense, Dewey was more of a fatalist than Bourne« Bourne ap preciated his instrumentalism as a way of thinking that ..en abled the thinker to draw new conclusions from his experience= Dewey proposed that body and mind were not two separate real ities, but were one, tfbody-mind»n It was not for man to explain observed phenomena in support of preconceived notions, but to describe, to conduct a running narrative, of his observations« That is, he simply brought his experience to a level of con sciousness, by which process he would bring himself into con trol of them* The purpose for, or the end, of his observation, conscious control, would in turn become Mmeanstl to extended observation and experienceBourne thought Dewey’s analysis of the thinking process was important because it bared the me chanics of creative thought= Perhaps more significant was the fact that, by establishing only practical ends, instrumental ism sanctioned the evolution of time-honored institutional and and social opinion to keep pace with changing experience <, It Bourne, "The Life of Irony," "The Excitement Of Friendship," "The Experimental Life," Youth and Life (Boston and Hew York? Houghton Mifflin- Company, 19137T Also Bourne, John Dewey’s Philosophy," The Hew He pub lie, .2 (March 13, 1915), 154-156, 49 was the sanction Bourne needed for defying the authority of the nineteenth century institutions that governed the middle class* He thought of Dewey’s instrumentalism as the answer to the problem of social renewal* But where Dewey attempted to describe a process, Bourne insisted on giving the process a point of termination, however Utopian that final ^end*1 might be* This "point" would provide the third dimension, or quality, that instrumen talism lacked* It was Bergson’s ’’step further,’’ beyond a con cern with merely better living to a planned progress toward the good life* Bourne was impatient with anything that was not a thinking progress— progress implying one grand and all- encompassing end, not necessarily "in view," as Dewey would have had lt*23 In his own words, Bourne was "to© desperate" over social conditions to observe evolutionary drift or to await the determinist’s revolution* He labeled, scornfully, as "do-gooders” people like Jane Mdams and those who worked with her in ameliorative social projects* I am frankly much more interested in waking people up to see that the social conditions under which sin and misery are. produced are the things to be changed* We weep entirely too many tears over the repenting and en joy too much the luxury of "doing good," to see the stern, hard task of organisation and education ahead**4 .Bourne', "Twilight of Idols," "War and the Intellec tuals," and "Conscience and Intelligence in the War *" ^Bourne to Prudence Winterrowd, March 25, 1914♦ Knowingly or mot, he referred also to Dewey who actively sup ported Hull House programs while he was in Chicagoo People, Bourne thought, should begin to ^really hate ugliness and po verty and disease, instead of merely pitying the poor and sicko” He considered reform measures inadequate for the so cial reordering necessary, and advocated something resembling "an earthquake in the prevailing order He admitted that his ideas were Utopian and knew that as such they would be objects of popular se©rn0 By "Utopian" he meant a concentration on unlimited possibility and a rejection of any sort of dogma0 To "believe" theologi cal principles, moral codes or ideologies was wrong because the very act of belief forbade further questioning« In fact, belief was no* different from prejudice» But he had no objec tion to "faith," if the term implied am "emotional core of desire driving toward some ideal— an illumined end towards which our hopes and endeavors convergeo" Such faith could not be insitutionalized or hardened into a system» Utopianism, or what Bourne sometimes called idealism, was the only suitable faith in a world in which there were no unchanging principles or rights, but only "moving tendencies," flexing forces to which men must adjust Bourne to Carl Engrosser, November 16, 1913« 2&"The Uses of Infallibility," Typescript, Bourne MSS first published in Tan Wyek Brooks, edo, The History of a Lit erary Radicalo In a letter to Dorothy Teall (undated), Agnes 51 Bourne8s recognition of and emphasis upon “desire” or emotional impulse was the crux of his quarrel with what. he called the intellectualism of D e w e y * 2? ]-n ^he area of po litical theory, especially, Bourne’s insistence that social forces were the coagulation of individual wills into impersonal and irrational institutions, left behind to “thrash around” irrelevantly in a real world of change, caused a major dis cordance with Dewey’s idea of a state forever emerging, in constant need of being discovered. Culture, Dewey thought, was not an aesthetic expression, but “the sum of ways by which men organize and interpret experience, including social struct ture itselfo” Social forces, in Dewey’s philosophy, had no innate compulsion which required social control* They were simply an evolving, empirical reality to which adjustment was a prerequisite to partial control*^ Bourne’s idealism was simply an optimistic leap into a realm in which creative ma nipulation of the forces was a possibility* But if, as Bourne said, the “liberal curse” was in tellectualism, “the habit of moving in concepts rather than in a warm area of pragmatic life,” his own curse was an obses sion with translating individual experiences and problems into DeLima wrote that Ellery Sedgewiek at The Atlantic Monthly re turned the article to Bourne in 1917 because of the controversy that had arisen over his Seven Arts articles* ^Bourne, “Twilight of Idols*” ^ “The Disillusionment,” Bourne MSS; Dewey, The School and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1$99) s> especially Chapters I, II, and III* 52 social terminologyo While in Paris in 1914, he wrote am extremely revealing letter home t The world universal seems to begin to take form as social; your spiritual man is my social man, vibra ting in camaraderie with the beloved society, given new powers, lifted out of himself, transformed through the enriching stimulations of his fellows,— the communion of saints,— into a new being, spiri tual because no longer individual „»„ o This malady that v;-> we are feeling today is an exhaustless social hunger, thwarted and unsatisfied by the chaos of a society split up into separate mutually uncomprehending groups o o 0 tilfhat the primitive man had easily, through the compactness of his society, and what every com pact group gets easily,the exaltation of the indi vidual by concerted social expression of the common desires, ideas and ideals,— we are reaching out for with great pain and striving0 =»=1 never see clearly the process by which this spiritual is to be dis covered and cultivated o But translate this 1fspir itual9 as social, and everything becomes clear to me* I see the social movement with all its manifestations o o oslowly linking the chains of social consciousness, and thus transforming the individual persons, the individual group, lifting them to a higher level, . giving them a more abundant sense of sympathy and unanimity0^9 Bourne said he had been 1frereading9 Rousseau, and his letter was evidence of the facto Rousseau’s ,fgeneral will,n which he believed was the beneficent and saving ingre dient of the ideal republic, differed only in terminology from Bourne’s anticipation that the ’’chains of social con sciousness9 might fuse individuals into an integrated soci ety o Reading Rousseau, he wrote, was a sort of moral bath; it cleared up for:me a whole new democratic morality, and put the last 29”Bourne Letters,”' Twice A Tear, Bourne to Mary Messer, February 7, 1914* .* 53 touch upon the old English way of looking at the world, in which I was brought up, and which I had a struggle to get rid ofo30 Bourne equated "democracy” with hope or promise and the "moral bath" that he experienced from Rousseau and France was a re charge of faith in the possibility of perfectibility* Rous seau had written that man’s distinctive quality was an abil ity to perfect himself and that in order for the ability to become operative it needed merely to be nurtured and educated in accordance with natural laws* Bourne was most pleased by Rousseau’s belief that man, by nature, could adjust to his so cial surroundings and, if left unfettered by artificial codes of morality, would think the thoughts and perform the works needed for his own, and necessarily, society’s well-being* Rousseau’s educational theory fostered self-reliance and vi tality, personality traits that would be required before a man could interpret and control his natural desire for goodo^l By contrast, "the English way" of life, which Bourne rejected, was the conservative reverence for established in stitutions* He considered the sanctification of property rights, for instance, as nothing more than a ruse manufactured by the ruling class to perpetuate their financial monopoly in Bourne to Alyse Gregory, January 5, 1914; Bourne, "Drift," Autographed Manuscript, Bourne MSS* Bourne commented that Rousseau had objected to the property rights base of ci vilization* "Despite economic interpretations of history, we are driven along by a sentiment, and by no considerations of economics*" 3-®-Bourne to Prudence Winterrowd, November 13, 1913» 54 a capitalist society» If men could be made to believe that survival was not dependent upon— wass in fact, independent of— the individual’s personal fight for property, then men would give up the exploitive system. They would collectively grap ple with the social problems of universal survival. In real ity, society was driven by social forces and not regulated by traditional ’’rights" or "principles." Therefore, standards for human behaviour ought to be adaptive and far-sighted, ra ther than conservative or institutional, as English society so notably was. . English conservatism, which compartmented life into economic, political and religious institutions in order to control human behaviour'and to continue timeworn so cial habits, sapped personalities of their potential creativity.^ Dewey, too, of course, was concerned with creative intelligence and had read Bousseau. Dewey’s educational theory was based on the idea that men learned by doing, that education was grounded in experience, and that value judgments reflected economic necessity. But almost twenty years before Bourne enrolled at Columbia, Dewey had rejected the idea that children could be civilized by instruction or leadership or by a controlled environment. Bourne had come to the conclusion that the establishment of socialism, according to his idea of 3^Bourne to Carl Engrosser, November 3, 1913o Bourne wrote, "The whole country (England)^seems very weary as if the demands.of the twentieth century were proving entirely too much for its powers, and it was waiting half cynically and apa thetically for some great cataclysm." 55 individuality springing from a spontaneous social life, would depend on the creation of *aew institutions11 but that they would differ from the old institutions by their primary pur pose of fostering creativity or individuality rather than of conserving ^traditional11 customsCreativity, Dewey thought, was a matter of personal adjustment to environment„ Morality, even democratic morality, if anything, was a matter of prag matic values or consequences and could not be inspiredc Bourne’s talk of social salvation, as well as Rousseau1s gener al will, were a step outside his comprehension0 Bourne, writing in 1915 and 1916 about the progres sive program of education being administered at Gary, Indiana, said that it exemplified what he thought the common goal of a democratic society ought to be— the education of all people by means of % wisely directed growth o11 His portrayal of the Gary schools was in part an explanation of his conception of the ideal society» The new social order would be organized around individual, local communities already in existence* Like the Bourne to Alyse Gregory, September B, 1913» Bourne wrote that he"wondered what perverse fate had imposed on me a philosophy so cross-grained, so desperately impractical as mine of scorn for institutions, combined with a belief in their reform*11 In a letter to Alyse Gregory in November, 1913, he wrote that in appreciating "the enormous powers of institu tions" and "how little the quality of the individual character counts in them," he had become a Socialist and wanted "brand new institutions*" He.thought "the.Webbs and the Fabians with their approval of the Liberal programmes are a bit behind the times, and not using their enormous knowledge and ability in the best direction*" Gary schools, community life would be ®publie in the same broad sense that the streets and parks are publico,$34 Superintendent Wirt had adopted two Deweyan slogans in establishing the school system at Gary— the education of 1$the whole child” and the organization of 1fthe complete schoolo” Education of the whole child meant to Bourne an effort to imitate the ^natural education” afforded the child born into a rural community0 The farmer's son in innumerable ways learned of the world, his vocation, and his neighbors as he accompanied his father to the fieldso The life of a city boy, on the other hand, was divided between 1firksome child • labor” and "degenerating child idlenesso” The Gary schools were complete in the sense that all grades were housed within each school building» A system of working cooperation and apprenticeship put an end to "age snobbery,” eliminated artificial breaking points in subject matter and allowed, greater freedom in the selection of courses of study. Adult education was provided for in the evenings*^ Bourne, however, was not satisfied to write an iso lated discussion of the institutions of education in his books He wanted communities, not just schools, in which "education would never be finished <>”36 temporarily aligned himself •^Bourne, "Education and Living,” The Hew Hepublic, B (Hugust 5, 1916;, 10-12; and The Gary Schools~TBoston and Hew York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1916), passim. ^Bourne, The. Gary Schools, passim. 36IMdo, p. S5o 57 with the progressive education movement because it seemed to be the most adaptable vehicle for realizing his goals= He seized upon Dewey?s progressive philosophy of education and molded it into a faith„ Christianity had been preempted and hopelessly ossified by religious institutions. The public school as an institution, on the other hand, was still in a formative stage. The school, grounded in a community from which it would derive its life and purpose, resembled that "warm area of pragmatic life" within which its members would be able to feel and appreciate the larger purposes of nature, that is, the world as a work of art.57 Bourne?s socialist society, because of the channels it provided for the individual’s transcendence of particular, pragmatic experience to a true relationship with the universal reality, could be compared, he said, with the Catholic Church. Education, he thought, might be termed "the Socialist sacra- memto" The. universal and mystical Church harbored the "seed of spiritual democracy and brotherhood and social democracy." Unlike the Protestants, the Catholics were concerned with ex tending the Kingdom of Heaven in the world by harmonizing and 37 Edgar Dawson to Bourne, December 16, 1914• Dawson, chairman of the Committee on Admissions of Hunter College, Mew York, wrote, "We in Mew York have not yet accepted public edu cation. This a charity, a charity it is true that is splen didly supported, as a charity but as an educational system stinted, dwarfed, and then left to the politician or the amateur reformers." Bourne, in his master’s thesis, noted that corporal punishment, for instance, had been used in Bloomfield schools as late as 1900. See also Strickland, "The Child, the Community and Culture-Epochs,""for'a discussion of the early reception and reaction to radical German educational theory in the late nineteenth and early twentieth.centuries. socializing the spiritual life of men* The Catholic ideal considered Protestant salvation of individual souls as in ferior to the mystical communion it administered through its sacramentso Similarly, socialism, Bourne thought, would min ister to the economic life of mam. Through education each member of the community is partaker in the heri tage and treasure of knowledge and well-being, and is rendered potent to radiate an influence to his fellow- citizens and ehildreno3® Bourne, like Rousseau, floundered in the deep waters of eitizenshipo Rousseau had planned to educate his hypo thetical pupil, Emile, in isolation until he had achieved the age of reason, or maturity, at which stage he would be capable of recognizing that his private good and the public good were the same. Once Emile was able to recognize the common good, his properly nurtured will would naturally love it. He would be ready to become what was better than a whole man— a citi zen. Rousseau realized, however, that to teach citizenship on a practical scale, in a school room, for instance, was a different proposition and required methods of authoritarian indoctrination. Bourne also considered citizenship, which he expressed in spiritual language as ^the communion of saints,1’ as the highest order of human existence. Having published numerous diatribes against authoritarianism in all its forms, however, he could not formulate the ’’Socialist sacrament” in -^Bourne, ’’Socialism and the Catholic Ideal,” The Columbia Monthly. 10 (November, 1912), 10-19o - 59 terms of a national education policy=,39 With his theoretic back to the wall, in self-defense, Bourne postulated th§ man of vision, the radical, as the Amer ican her© and aligned himself with Brooksf band of leaderso The radical, he said, was one who kept his sight on some point on the horizon and used it as a pole star to guide his actionso He was a man who could see well beyond the accepted values and institutions of his day* The best radicals, however, did not seize on a mere abstraction but had a sense of the world as a work of .-art; intuitively, they grasped a natural "push of our temperments towards perfection*" Left to its own devices, un chained to dogmas, this "push" would make progress possible Self-conscious and fearless at the insolent ring of his he roic words. Bourne feinted and dodged the anticipated attack* He concluded his important letter to Brooks, Ours would be a pious hope, a youthful insolence that looked for future accomplishments0 It might even be a "vital myth"* Never certainly could it be weighed tangibly* Never could the influence of this peculiar kind of leadership be estimated* It could not point to things done* It could only be a ferment or a goad* You would not expect it to be anything else, and you would never be found pointing complacently to tangible results* Their leadership, he said, would lose all aspects of 39»Drift," Bourne MSS* Bourne suggested that college ought to be a "breeding place for a natural aristocracy*" "The State cannot progress unless, as in Nature, a certain ad vantage of honor accrues to those individuals who are themselves governed by reason, with the privilege of imposing their will- upon those who from the rational point of view, are inferior to them*" ^Bourne, "The Mystic Turned Radical*" 1fsnobberyn because it would be merely the cooperation of "the aware ones" in "clearing up our spiritual mi s t e"41 Dewey and "the Liberalss" however, had no need to resort to such extravagances to defend their pre-war optimism,. Bourne wrote truthfully that Dewey, "after years of eloquent opposition to military conscripti©n0=0accepts it without a quiver or even an explanation of the steps by which his convic tion made so momentous a change»“42 Dewey had given up theoretic discussions of social salvation in favor of the "really serious practical problem of interaction," and, in fact, so had Bourneo At least since his discovery by Oppen- heim and The Seven Arts, Bourne readily retreated from the area of social criticism to literary criticism. His pacifist essays, although self-righteous in tone, were, in effect, a public announcement that he too was enjoying a moral holiday, "Gan one do more than wait and hope for wisdom when the world becomes pragmatic and flexible again?" he wondered,43 In unpublished solitude, Bourne began to piece to gether a sociological analysis of "The State," He blamed the ruling or "significant" class in the United States for the country’s participation in the war. He arrived at his conclu sion by differentiating between the concepts of "nation" and ^Bourne to Brooks, March, 191$, 42Ibid, ^Bourne, "The War and the Intellectuals," 61 "states" The nation was a cultural reality of a people who share a common land| it was "that great collectivity of all of uso" It was a working relationship that resisted division into classes because of the complex system of social ties which made the nation*s people interdependent* The state, on the other hand, was a "mystical conception" by which the rul ing class united and manipulated a people* The state, Bourne claimed, was no more sacred than the weather, but then primi tive men had always worshipped the sun and moon* It was an idea that fed on a people’s unconscious gregarious impulse for its force* It. existed merely to galvanize this irrational inclination into a manageable power to hurl against other peoples, united within another state * The state was always lumbering, inertially, toward war, because, in fact, its purpose was war*^ Bourne’s argument took the form of an historical criticism of the ruling class which exploited the power in herent in the uneducated mass* The interest of the dominant class had always been to keep the people uneducated, out of politics, and to let those steer the course of the nation’s history who also stood to lose their significance with the evolution of a truly democratic society* This class, Bourne said, following Beard’s lead, descended, from the fathers of the Constitution, who assumed the responsibility of governing 44t?5he State," Typescript, Bourne MSS; published in Carl Resek, ed*, The War and the Intellectuals* 62 the new nation and then betrayed the Agrarian Revelation,^ which had given it birth, by locking the farmers out of the Philadelphia Convention6 Bourne claimed that this authori tarian class, in essence, was no different from the Bourbons of France or the Junkers in Prussia<, In a second chapter, Bourne began to trace the si multaneous emergence of the two-party system with the removal of property qualifications on the right to vote. The elec torate, in spite of universal suffrage, became a mere nratifier of slates.", It could make no frontal attack on the government.... The party system was thus the means...of giving to the ruling classes the hidden but genuine permanence of control which the Constitution had tried openly to give them.45 There Bourne laid down his pen, as if, with an acknowledgment of historical process, his sense of control reached the low point of its diminuendo. Bourne, to the last, was convinced that reality was made up of social forces, herd instincts and inertial evolu tion, but "The State." lacked all the optimistic spirit with which he left Columbia. The pathway to social salvation, which he saw beset with shadows in 1914, had vaporized. Once he had idolized the radical as a mystic whose introspective gaze had been turned outward to prophecy. Mow his concentra tion had not only been trained on his own integrity but with a backward, glance he had assumed an historical perspective. 45«The State," Bourne MSS. In a sense, he had started again at a new beginning which was destined, according to Dewey’s way of thinking, to result in more significant or meaningful conclusions. Dewey thought that the key to successful analysis was to understand that na psy chological statement of experience follows its actual growth; it is historic e”46 Dewey, The School and Society. ■HI. WITHOUT HONOR As late as 1915? while he was immersed in prodmcing magazine articles about the Gary school system, Bourne called his former professor, John Dewey, one of America’s greatest thinkers and the progressive education movement "the biggest thing in the countryBourne and Dewey shared a faith in the "creative possibilities" of human intelligence if only it could derive its initiative or driving force from the satis faction of real human needs and desires. The hopeful aspect of the body-mind theory of creative intelligence was that it was democratic. It presumed that all men were born equal, in the sense that in spite of unequal physical and social endow ments, the learning or growing process was a pragmatic matter of individual relationship to particular circumstances, and that the inevitable reward of a satisfactory relationship was a sense of personal control. The sobering limitation of such a philosophy, however,. was its dependence, or grounding, in experience. Creative thought was not day-dreaming but inter pretation of experienced reality. If American children were 1 Bourne to Elizabeth S. Bargeant, June 2 5 , 1915° Bourne wrote in "John Dewey’s Philosophy,n in 1915, that Dewey was "the most significant thinker in America" since the death of William James. 64 65 to become something more than self-seeking exploiters, they would have to experience common needs and desires» Their sympathy with the common lot would be a personal appreciation, but just because it was a personal sentiment or desire it would become pragmatic means toward a social end Bourne and Dewey alike thought that if living were to be an art, it would have to be a growing or learning or cre ative processo Dewey coined the phrase ^education as develop ment ," and Bourne echoed ^education and livingo,? They agreed that the greatest social evil in capitalist America was the institutionalization of the profit system in the public schoolso The schools were teaching a catechism of Puritan ethics, Vic torian morals and laissez-faire economies0 They were turning out parrots of a non-analytical, social system of exploitation, intellects stunted by useless catalogues of facts, unfit to face the social realities of their rapidly expanding countryo •,rThe world is no static thing to which we must adjust,n Bourne thought, but a world of change or ^moving tendencies# which needed human direction or control« The feeling of being in control was the key to the lost art of livingo^ The Gary school system in Indiana, like Dewey’s la boratory school in Chicago, concentrated primarily on providing its pupils with ^meaningful, experiences*# Avoiding authori tarian teaching methods in any form, it hoped to foster an ap preciation of cooperative living among its pupils only as a ^Bourne to Prudence Winterrowd, November 3, 1913o 66 by-product of their public school experience» Specifically, the school program attempted to solve two recent problems of Gary’s community life-=the problems of integrating an immi grant population and preparing the young people for industrial vocationso Gary was a town that had been built by Lake Michi gan shortly after the turn of the century by the U 0 So Steel - corporation as an industrial center for a series of new plantse Superintendent Wirt, who had studied under Dewey in Chicago, had been hired by the city in 1908 to administer a school system which would help to orient Gary’s population of forty thousand working-class people, mostly uprooted, to their new life in the boom town0 Within eight years the school system had grown from one building constructed to accomodate three hundred and fifty pupils to a complex of five buildings and five thousand pupils03 The unifying theme of Bourne’s book and articles about Gary, aside from mechanical explanations of the practi cal application of the progressive educational theory, was the meaning and potential of a genuinely public schoolo The goal of the Gary schools was education of all the children of all the peoplee Wirt’s idea of a public school was, in Bourne’s words, a sort of embryonic community life in which the child would gradually become familiar not only with the knowledge that he will need in adult life but also 3Bourne, ’’The Gary Public Schools,” Scribner’s Magazine. 60 (July 1916), 371-379= 67 with the occupations and the organization of the society into which he will enter0 The foreign-born pupils were not instructed in the ways of American citizenship but participated in what Wirt believed was a democratic way of life0 Each child selected his own course of study and progressed at his own rate of speedG Vocational shops were supervised by skilled workers from the town and the pupils assumed the role of apprentices. All cultural resources of the community were utilized within the school system— the library, museum and recreational facilities, Wirtfs idea, Bourne explained, was that the public school would become $tan extension of the home,” supplementing constructive activity for the delinquency encouraged by too much "street and alley time,”4 In attempting to integrate the school community with the community of Gary, however, Wirt did not intend the pro gram of vocational education as mere apprenticeship. In the belief that education was a social and economic problem as well as a pedagogical problem, the Gary system introduced its pupils to the elemental machinery of an industrial community. Chem istry laboratories helped to test the eityfs milk supply a- gainst pure food standards. Boys were charged with the duty of maintaining the school’s physical plant. Home economics classes planned, prepared and served school lunches. Bourne explained that Bourne, "The Gary'Publia Schools,” 374° the aim is to have nothing done in any department . of the school which does not in some way add to the life of the school or in some way to a practical knowledge of the community and society in which the children live e All this "richness" of experience, he wrote, was possible be cause the schools were managed as "a public utility"The school is the place where the people come who want to use its equipmentotf Even on Saturday mornings, he reported, the school laboratories, workshops and libraries were filled with students engrossed in the process of learningo^ The apparent success of Wirt * s experiment was as much encouragement as Bourne and Dewey needed to keep their faith buoyant in the promise of democratic America0 The promise was that effective or creative individuality would be derived from an experience of communal living« Bourne, of course, hoped higher than Dewey in desiring a general revolution of American life to a socialist economic basiso Dewey contented himself with less ambitious measures to correct the evils of capital-= 1st society, believing that some pragmatic, or creative, value could be derived from social experience, regardless of its economic natureo In the long run, Dewey?s faith was more buoyanto Even the war as an experience of cooperative endeavor could have constructive resuitsBourne, who insisted on ^Bourne, "The Gary Public Schools," 372, 379o ^Dewey, "What Are We Fighting For?" The Independent 94 (June 22, 191#), 470, 4#0-4#3» •- ...... 69 'envisioning large purposes, ©a looking forward to the mille- nium, had no choice but to interpret the war as disaster» Rhapsodizing about the success at Gary, Bourne was unable to accept it as a bird in hand but impetuously expanded its sig nificance as symbolic of the coming order. In composing his articles about the Gary schools, which had been one of few aspects of American life to inspire him in his post-Columbia years, Bourne considered it as important to convey nthe tone" in which he felt the experience as to record the mere fact of Wirt?s accomplishment. "In such a community and such a school education would never be finished," he wrote.? Philosophically, Bourne and Dewey gave the same sig nificance to "shared experience," but, personally, the value of such interdependence was a more vital proposition to Bourne. In this sense, Bourne outplayed the master at his own game— he was an instrumentalist, body and soul. If Bourne confused "soul® and "mind® in his interpretation of instrumentalism it was because of his own dependency on his friends to keep his vulnerable spirits buoyant = Amy Dowell, the New England poet ess, remarked once to James Oppenheim that Randolph Bourne wrote like a cripple. Oppenheim answered, "Aren*t we all crip ples?®^ The question went directly to the heart of Bournets ^Bourne, The Gary Schools. 8 5 . ^Oppenheim, "The Story of the Seven Arts;® Oppenheim wrote that Amy Dowell "surveyed her monstrous girth and said simply: *Yes, I fm as much a cripple as he. Dook at this. I ’m a disease*." 70 conception of the human conditione The thinking processs said the instrumentalistsj was a process of translating physi cal experience into mental experience and back again» A crip ples physical experience would certainly differ from those of a person with a normal body, and, so, also, would his mental experienceso At the same time, however, Bourne thought that any person who limited his physical and mental experience to those that he alone could have was handicappedo The handicap was perfectly apparent in the case of a person with a visible physical deformity, say a hunched back, whose appearance tended to repulse others0 Such a person was dependent on others to break the chains that confined his thoughts to introspection by allowing him to erect lines of eommunication0 In this way he could add normal thoughts to his own crippled ones, Tn the ease of the physically handicapped person, the dependence on shared experience was not difficult to appreciate« But the same dependence was shared by physically whole persons who wanted to expand their horizons beyond the limits of their single selveso^ Bourne*8 conception of his distorted lot in life as symbolic of the human condition was a fortunate rationaliza tion which saved his thought from cynicism, but it was also a barrier in his thinking process between his actions and the instrumentalism which he thought he embodied» Theoretically, o BOurne, 1fThe Handicapped,tf The Atlantic Monthly, 108 (September, 1911), 346-347° - Bomrne understood instrumentalism almost better than he could express itc But in the practical application of instrumental ism there was no provision for symbolism. Pragmatically % Bourne? s sacrifice of his literary career by his assumption of a pacifist stance was as ineffective in stopping the war as was his pose as a prophet in blazing the pathway to social re volution. But in respect to the wreally serious practical problem,” that of ”interaction”, Bourne and Dewey thought a- like, and in its application to cultural, rather than politi cal or economic matters, the two men spoke the same language. Significantly, in the last few months of Bourne?s life, they found themselves co-workers on the editorial board of The Dial.10 The Dial had announced in June of 191# that, in moving its editorial offices from Chicago to Sew York, it had revamped both its editorial board and its editorial policy. Its pages would include discussions of internationalism and proposals for reworking the countryfs industrial and educa tional systems in the interest of fostering a spirit of intel lectual curiosity and constructive criticism. But, signifi cantly, it emphasized that its concern was with ^principles and fundamental readjustments rather than in evanescent po= . litical issues.” The magazine was not to be a political or gan but a vehicle for giving voice to the best of the 10”Announcement,” The Dial, 6 4 (June, 191#)= 72 country’s creative thought0 Necessarily, if the inclusion of both Dewey and Bourne on its editorial staff was an indication of its philosophical orientation, the criticism it published would reflect serious consideration of public affairs0 Crea tivity implied utility or meaningfulness to the editors of The Dial, and true art was an expression of a desire for pub lic service. Dewey’s espousal of the magazine’s editorial policy was merely an amplification of his progressive educational theory. Art was, to Dewey’s way of thinking, not merely the manifestation of aesthetic appreciation, but a creative pro= cess, and true art was the most successful of experimental ac tivities. In this sense, to live effectually or pragmatically was the greatest art. A living art, moreover, could not ab stract itself from physical reality. Just as human desires and needs were an integral part of thinking, so they were the basis of all creative expression. Dewey believed that these basic human drives were social in nature and thought that the fallacy of prevailing political and educational theory derived from its assumption of the myth that man is by nature non-so cial, and society artificial. Docility, desire for direction, love for protective control are stronger original traits of human nature than is subordination or originality...^Routine is so easy as to be ’’natural”, and initiative is so dif ficult as to require the severe discipline of art. Consequently, the overriding consideration of progressive ^ ’’Announcement,” The Dial. 73 education was to stimulate and nourish initiative and crea tivity o The energy for creative intelligence was the result of extension of sympathy to common interests and its subse quent direction in the form of a sense of social responsibility to experimental endeavors» "The particular kind of social di rection fitted to a democratic society" was to be derived "only by experimental and personal participation in the conduct of common a f f a i r s Bourne’s alliance with literary critics as a subor dinate editor of The Dial coincided with what he thought of as the "evaporation" of "a program for social reconstruction" with the disintegration of the international socialist movement into national and parliamentary factions, and with his own withdraw! from political life o -*-3 Translated into literary expression rather than expanded to fit social requirements, his ideas set tled into psychological analysis of human experience« And, in this form, Bourne’s concerns, like Dewey’s, were for the ed ucation of the gregarious masses into socially conscious indi viduals o Bourne’s work on "The State" was an expression of this belief that civilization ought to be experimental and creative and, at the same time, an example of the application © f a newly-discovered instinct psychology to social maladies» ^Dewey, "Education and Social Direction," The Dial 6 4 (April 11, 1918), 333-335= - ■^Bourne to Brooks, March, 1918= 74 As a student at Columbia, Bourne had studied Go Stanley Hall’s theory ©f recapitulationThe theory stated that,.uncon sciously, the human mind lived through all the stages of the history of man, just as the body recapitulated the history of evolution in its embryonic state» Man learned, in the process, all of the lessens his myriad ancestors had learned and trans mitted through the ’’soul of the race.* At the age of self- consciousness, which varied in each person, the individual be gan to break away from his primitive inheritance and to create his own personal lifeo Sigmund Freud, whose influence in Amer ican intellectual circles dated from 1 9 0 9 when he was invited to participate in a psychological congress at Clark University by its president, Hall, reinforced Hall’s race-instinct theory* Freud thought that nineteenth century moral and ethical stan dards suppressed natural communal drives and were the cause of neurotic behaviour; that is, when any natural drive was thwar ted, it was pushed far back into the unconscious realms of the mind, until it erupted into a man’s conscious life in a distorted form, causing neurotic behaviour=15 "^Bourne MSS, notations, ’’Some General {References for Philosophy 121-22, 1912=” -^Bourne to Harry Elsasser, from London, undated* Bourne wrote about Stanley M* Bligh, an English sociologist with whom he had visited, he ’’seems to know nothing of the new doctrines, which show that it-is exactly this repression of unwelcome and shameful ideas and aspects of life that cause all sorts of spiritual havoc 5 that the great need is that life shall become conscious and all its aspects ’sublimated’ into the main body of the personality* Henry F* .May, The End of 75 In Freudian termss Bourne wrote that "The State" was a collective neurosis or dream distortion of mam's natural herd instinct«> Capitalist society, which denied man's social nature and insisted that society would evolve most successfully on the basis of individual competition, engendered the "mysti cal conception" of the State as a power-drunk "safety valve" for the collective instinct of the mass of peopleo Psychologists recognize the gregarious impulse as one of the strongest primitive pulls which keeps together the herds of the different species of higher animals» Mankind is no exception*.coin civilized man, the gre garious impulse acts not only to produce concerted ac tion for defense, but also to produce identity of opin ion* SiBce thought is a form of behaviour, the gre garious impulse floods up into its realms and demands that sense of uniform thought which wartime produces so successfully. And, it is in this flooding of the conscious life of society that gregariousness works its havoc o-*-° Of course, Freud's psychology offered no final cures for neuroses; it simply recommended therapy which would result in an awareness of the cause of the neurosis and a measure of control. The contributors to The Dial thought of art as social therapy and the artists or radical individuals, still sensitive to the communal origins of humanity, as interpreters of these desires and needs into a conscious devotion to the herd, "that great collectivity of all of us*" Bourne and Brooks called American Innocence, A Study of the First Years of Our Own Time. 1912-1917 (Chicago: Cjuadhangle Books, 1959), 232-2JE7 wrote that the American Freudian movement by 1915 was "militant and articulate though small." l6"The State," Bourne MSS. these interpreters the "aware ones," to be found among eapi= talist America’s socially neurotic "malcontentedon Bourne thought that there was a tradition in America of such peculiarly dedicated art* He detected a "distinctive- ly American spirit" in the literature of Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman and William James, a heroic spirit of the "pioneere" The pioneer spirit connoted to Bourne, not simply daring and bravery, but "a zest for the experimental life 0 "3-7 This Amer ican "genius," which he also called a feeling for "adventurous democracy," had been dissipated by an undue reverence for the country’s Anglo-Saxon heritage and the imposition of Anglo- Saxon culture on the minds of the rapidly increasing minority groupso America’s "only hope and promise," he thought, was to become a trans-nationality of all the nations, to develop spiritually "a life of being in, yet not quite of, this seeth ing and embroiled European worldo" He wanted a "higher cosmo politan ideal" to replace the popular idea of America as a "melting poto" Just in so far as our American genius has expressed this pioneer spirit, the adventurous, forward-looking drive of a colonial empire, is it representative of that whole America of the many races and peoples, and not of any partial or traditional enthusiasm0 = „oWe must perpetuate the paradox that our American cultural tradition lies in the future =, It will be what we all together make out of this incomparable opportunity of attacking the future with a new key0^° ^Bourne to Harry Elsasser, October 10, 1913° Bourne, "Trans-Mational America," The Atlantic Monthly. 11B (July,-1916), $6-97° 77 The ideas, for instance, of William James, whom he considered the greatest American writer since Emerson, were of 0 fluid, interpenetrating, creative things, of a dynamic world flowing and creating like Time and Life themselvesoi? James, he ad mitted, never wrote about ethics and spoke rarely about Social ism, but his writing was **infused with the ideal of free indi viduality, developed through a spontaneous social life = James’s psychology and pragmatism articulated, Bourne thought, the conditions of the ”experimental life 0” James was attempting to outline factual grounds for postulating a free dom of the willo James asserted the existence of a world of objects, and, also, of man’s responsive mental structure which enabled him to experience these objects = He named the world ’’environment, ” and the nervous system ’’consciousnesso” The nature of consciousness was to desire to be in harmonious re lationship with its environmento Man was not entirely de pendent on training or inheritance for the manner in which his consciousness reacted to environment0 Bather he was struc tured so that he might adjust to a changing environment„ His encounter with the external world was a two-way transaction0 Environment instructed his consciousness, but at the same time his awareness could enlarge or alter the world it experienced„ James’s pragmatism recognized, therefore, only individuated truths as being effective in the development of consciousness0 "^Bourne to Prudence Winterrowd, February 5, 1913o 7® His ideas of the interdependence of environment and will, at last,, could postulate only a limited freedom of the will* Consciousness was never free of environment, but it could work with it to create a larger real world»^ Bourne’s head was turned by any genuine champion of individuality0 He thought Thoreau’s experiment at Walden Pond was ’’heroic” and that Emerson was ’’pre-eminent” among America’s writersEmerson’s idealistic philosophy set each individual the task of imitating the ideal world, of which par ticular men were particular instances 0 The ’’American Scholar” ought not to be a bookish person but ’’Man Thinking0” A man’s goal ought not to be to write poetry but to be a Poet* Emer son ’s protege, Thereau, measuring himself against Apollo, sim ply was his mentor’s ”Peet0” Transcendentalism, the movement which Emerson and Thereau dominated, was a revolt against the sterile religious philosophy of Unitarian!sm0 Transcendentalism was a partie- ularist approach to life. Thoreau and Emerson, in search of a personally meaningful theology, thought of an individual man as a symbol of the ideal or divine personality; that is, man 2© ’’Some General Beferences. o o,” Bourne MSS. Bourne lists William James, Principles of Psychology, ’’especially the chapter on ’’The Self.” In a letter to Prudence Winterrowd, February 5, 1913, he suggested that she read James’s ’’The Will to Believe, ” ’’The Varieties of Beligious Experience, ” - ’’Talks to Teachers, ” - ’’Memories and Studies,” and "Pragmatism.” ^Bourne to Harry Elsasser, October 10, 1913, and to Prudence Winterrowd, February 5, 1913° 79 was, fey aaalegy, the same as God, or he could fee and ought to fee o They related individual men to the spiritual or ideal world fey saying that men were microcosms, as were all natural phenomena, of the cosmic reality= The Transeendentalists re volted against the Unitarian Church because it had depersonal ized fey means of dogma the likeness of a God once revealed to man* Emersonfs and Thoreaufs view of nature as symbolic or mi- eroeosmic forced them to accept only individual spiritual ex perience as meaningfulo Catechisms and religious rituals were irrelevant, they thought = Their symbolic man was a particular and visible instance of a general and indefinable reality, and his value, as such, was pragmatic0 He was the means to reve lation, and nature was his book* The second half of Emerson’s and Thoreau!s idealism, however, gave evidence of a coming to terms with reality or environment, similar to James’s limitation of the free will and prophetic of Bourne’s own final cry that, in fact, the in dividual was from birth subjected to ’’Old Tyrannies 0 ” For all his deification of the individual soul or will, Emerson real ized that men were bound, or handicapped, by their ability to reason and communicate only through the veil of symbolismo Good-naturedly, he at last proclaimed,.’’Let us build altars to the Beautiful necessity*” But Emerson side-stepped fatal istic despair fey a pragmatic conclusion0 ’’Every solid in the universe is ready to become fluid on the approach of the mind, and the power to flux it is the measure of the mind<, ” Thoreau, having sat out an ice-bound winter at Walden Pond, worshipped the Spring thaw as a time of flux when the melting sand of the pond took on imaginary forms within the human mindo Emerson and Thoreau both realized that the only escape from the demands of the materialistic society in which they lived was within the consciousness of the individual, a consciousness to which there were no perceivable boundso This effectual grappling with untamed environment, about which Emerson spoke in spiritual terms, Thoreau, in po etic, or symbolic language, and William James, philosophically, was what Bourne thought of as t?the American geniuso,f Whitman, who thought that America's presidents ought to be poets, was also a part of this American traditione The poet who visited the sleeping mass of Americans and made their dreams a part of his consciousness could sing them into awareness of the bro therhood of men and. inspire them to communal service» Whitman foiled the enervating materialism of society, not by protes ting against it, but by pragmatically loving it: Thrive, cities»«e/Expand,»../Met you anymore shall be able to foil us, or withhold yourselves from us/ We use you, and do not east you aside— we plant you permanently within us,/ We fathom you not— we love you— ^3 22 Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Fate/' Selections from Ealoh Wald® Emerson, An Organic Anthologya Stephen Ihieher, ed 0 .(Boston: Houghton Mifflin Gompany, 1957), 330-352; Henry David Thoreau, The Variorum Walden, Walter Harding, ei. (Mew York: Washington Square Press, Inco), g 0 1962, "Spring," 232-2330 ^Wa l t Whitman, Complete Poetry and Selected Prose, James Eo Miller, Jr0, edo (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. 1959), "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," 116-120. 81 In the first decades of the twentieth century, chi=- tics and artists no longer thought in terms of religion or as pired to found new religious movementse They used a psycho logical vocabulary and directed their criticism to educational theory and literary movements, areas in which they could hope their ideas would be effectives Neither could critics of an industrialized society retreat to private wildernesses or use ■"nature1* symbolically with any hope of striking responsive chordsa Like the New Yorker Whitman, they wrote about cities and ferry boats« The symbol of the frontier as wild, innocent environment was no longer meaningful, and the focus of art shifted to the discovery that a manfs subconscious life of de sire was comparable to a howling wilderness024 But the lit erary movement that The Dial proposed to promote was pioneering and experimental in the same sense that Bourne thought Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman and William James were pioneers„ According to the instrumentalist view, experimental implied a control of environment by means of constructive thoughte Both the pi oneer and the scientist dealt with hard, cold facts and by means of ingenuity turned them into useable instruments for civilization,, This ^genius" required personality traits of 24igasserstrom, The Time of the Dial. In explaining the ^organic process" in art, which became full blown as a literary movement in the. 1920!s, he said that Freud’s Totem and Taboo, published in 1912, was a major influences Freud said that fear of nature’s force drove men to civilization, according to Wasserstrom, and that "ideas about law, order, religion and art he attributed to oedipal struggles within the primitive tribal hordee" S2 self-reliance and vitality which? Bourne thought, must be cul tivated if they were not acquired naturally. In a whimsical frame of mind. Bourne wrote an essay about a six-year-old orphan, Ernest, whose strong-willed per sonality epitomized the American pioneering spirit. Certainly the boy’s nape, if not the incident of Bourne’s encounter with him, was fictional. Bourne took Ernest into his apartment for a twenty-four hour period to settle an argument about raising children in which he and some friends who worked with an adop tion agency had been involved. ,At the day’s end, Bourne wrote, he and Ernest had parted without remorse or reluctance. Ernest, whom Bourne described'as ’’intellectually robust,” naturally creative and fighting an endless battle to keep the world re duced to his size, trudged off without a backward glance. Why did I not rush after him down the street? The heart fails, and the vast and incalculable sea of re sponsibility drowns one in doubt. I let him go with no more real hesitation than that with which he went. Much later, he learned that Ernest, having been placed for adoption with a family, had been sent back, as an unmanage able, to the adoption agency. Bourne mused whether he and the independent boy were not ’’affinities”. He liked to think that he had given a spur to the beginnings of Ernest’s struggle to be master of his own life. ’’He would not rest adopted until he was satisfied.” In his imaginings, it pleased Bourne to leave such an unspoiled child as a public w a r d . ^ 5 ^Bourne, "Ernest^ or Parent for a Day,” The.Atlantic Monthly. 119 (June, 1917), 773-786. Free of obligation or responsibility, free of preor dained ties of allegiance to institutions— indeed absolved of the guilt feelings manufactured by capitalist institutions— Ernest bore resemblance to a pioneer carving out a new life for himself from the wilds of industrialized society* The bur den of proof of his worthiness lay solely in his innocent hands* Spared society1s puritanical lessons of stifling self-control and self-denial of the ^rich, sensuous, expressive” creative instincts, the waif, left to his own devices, might work out his own balance of the impulses that drove him.^ He could mold his own character* ^nnocent and pagan, he was potentially the traditional American ”Adamic” hero* Bourne’s essay, entitled "Ernest, or Parent for a Bay,” was possibly intended as a chapter of the novel Bourne often dreamed of writing, or as an attempt to create a charac ter around which the novel would revolve*^7 Conspicuous by its absence was a setting and a plot within which Bourne could examine Ernest’s reactions* And the missing ingredient was the source of Bourne’s uncertainty about both his literary ca reer and the artificiality of his personal life* On this sub ject, Bourne had written enviously about Whitman, If one could keep permanently that wonderful mood of serene democratic wisdom, that integration and ^Bourne, 1?The Puritan’s Will to P o w e r The Seven Arts* 1 (April, 1917), 631-637. - 27 Bourne to Alyse Gregory, Summer, 1910° Bourne wrote that he was trying to write his autobiographical novel* understandings X'think everything ©ne did would be beautiful and all righto But it is this wanting to do beyond one's power to do or opportunity to do, or courage to try to do, that makes all the troubleo Perhaps he didn't attain his pois till after the strug gle 0 He didn't write till he was 33s did he? And perhaps he longed to write and couldn't until he had worked out his life and gotten a firm footingo2° The "serene mood of democratic wisdom" required not only an adventurous spirit but the "firm footing" of an idealism that recognised and grew out of the limitations and handicaps of the human conditions Bourne's last testimonial to "the common lot," startling when compared to his early ambitions to be able as a social critic to help others "to see the vision at the goal and be glad," was left unpublished among his papers when he died at the age of 32, one year short of Whitman's coming of age0 Bourne’s post-war mood of "cultural desperation" was nowhere as explicit as in this unpublished essay, "Old Tyran nies o" Social tyrannies were as old in each individual's life, he thought, as the number of days he had livedo Even if a man were innately equipped to assail the prison bars of social in stitutions that stifled freedom of expression, he would fight a losing battle against them. Social reordering, he believed, was imperative for any general emancipation from the tyranny of industrialized society, especially because in the twentieth century there was no longer any form of frontier to which men could escape. But society's inhabitants were so ill-equipped Bourne to Alyse Gregory, June 14, 19X3° 85 with the perceptive qualities required for bringing it about as not even to deserve the classification of individuals* "The normal^ or the common^ relation between society and the individual in any society that we know of is that the indivi dual scarcely.existsAnd the evil of an authoritarian so ciety was compounded by the individual?s insidious committment to the very institutions that imprisoned him before he reached the years of discretiono Ifhen you come as an inhabitant to this world, you do not have the pleasure of choosing your dwelling, or your career o o o <, The last indignity perhaps is being born unconscious, like a drugged girl who wakes up naked on a bed not knowing how she got there=29 Believing, as an instrumentalist, that consciousness was the product of interaction between the self and environ ment, he wrote in this essay that environment would win out in any assault upon it by the self= He and Brooks agreed, in this sense, that ^self-assertion^ against society was an impos sibility^ They shifted their emphasis from altering society to satisfy individual demands, to self-fulfillment,*1 by which they meant an active integration of self and society* Accordingly, they interpreted creativity as thought springing from basic, common, or original human desires, but lifted into conscious self-awareness* Art began with insight, or self- analysis; the art of living was merely a personal struggle for individuality within a deterministic environment 29ttQid Tyrannies,” Bourne MSS* -^Brooks, in Letters and Leadership, wrote in a We all enter as individuals into an organized whole in which we are as insignificant as a drop of water in the ocean, and against which we can about as much, prevailo Whether we shall act in the interest of our selves or society, is, therefore, an entirely academic questiono^^ In such a world, therefore, Ernest, if he were to be the hero of an American novel, would be a poet, like Whitman, perhaps; the lord of a microeosmie, symbolic Walden, or one of the new century’s ’’aware ones,” merely, who, through a concentration on his own integrity, had become successfully psychoanalyzedc He would be a tragic her© 0 In the spring of 1918, Bourne and Dewey had a final altercation in the pages of The Hew Republic. Bourne reviewed Man’s Supreme Inheritance by F a Matthias Alexander0 Alexander had discovered by observation of certain experimental schools in England and Australia that distorted human mental attitudes and unhealthy physical habits of civilized men were closely relatedo He proposed, optimistically, that American schools adopt an intensified program of physical education as an inte gral part of their curricula, forseeing the resultant evolu tion, over a series of generations, of a higher level of human intelligence® Man’s supreme inheritance, Alexander thought, chapter, ’’Our Awakeners,” ”Social efficiency is the ideal po sited by Professor Dewey® - But an ideal is an end, and social efficiency is not an end; it is a means towards the realiza tion of human values® = = oDoes not pragmatism therefore turn the natural order of things inside out when it accepts the intel ligence instead of the imagination as the value-creating entity ^ ’’O l d Tyrannies,” Bourne MSS 87 was the potentials as yet unrealized because of the lack of unity and balance of the body, for conscious control of en vironment o Bourne thought that ^Professor Dewey’s instrumen talism” which also arrived at such conclusions was na dan gerous quicksando” But do we any longer think of evolution as a road a- long which mankind moves abreast in solid phalanx on ward and upward forever?o0ols an era of world-war, in which statesmen are proving as blind and as helpless as the manipulated masses, quite the most convincing time, for so far-flung a philosophy of conscious con trol? Of desire, will, revolt— yes; but not the anti cipation that we begin a new era of human intelligence«,32 Dewey, who had written a preface to Alexander’s book, responded to Bourne’s cynical comments on the book the follow ing week* Bourne’s ’’cleverness,” he said, in turning Alexan der’s empirical conclusions into wishful theorizing was not i ”a cleverness which X envy®” Dewey thought Alexander’s ob servations were too valuable to be clouded by Bourne’s pessi mism® Bourne, too, had recognized, in his review, the value of the "empiric idea and practice," but he had long ago for saken any dreams of ”a rational younger generation®” Dewey thought Bourne was changing ”a really serious practical prob lem” of "interaction” into "an unreal and hence insoluble” theoretic dispute0 Dewey, still the professor, had lost patience with Bourne’s bad temper®33 32Bourne, "Making Over the Body,” The New Republic, 15 (May 4, 1918)$ 28-29, a review of F® Matthias Alexander, Man’s Supreme Inheritance (New York: 1 ® P® Dutton and Company, 1918)® -^Dewey, "An Open Letter®” The New Republic„ 15 (May 11, 1918), 55, — — — _ 88 In an abstracted discussion of ncreative intelligence” Dewey would have appreciated the argument of Brooks and Bourne that the desired end could not be separated from the means for its fulfillmentg that an integration of instinctive desires was the only formula for making over the irrational force of com mon senses into creativity or powero Human beings had no other materials to build with except these life forces, Dewey also thought that this integration was a personal endeavor, Butg outside of literature, Dewey was not concerned with creating heroes, just as he never dreamed of social salvation. He was enthusiastic about the conclusions derived from his laboratory school experiment and pleased that the Gary school system seemed to prove the validity of instrumen talism, He had no visions, however, or aspirations that his philosophy might become the inspiration for carving a utopian, controlled environment out of an evolving reality. His labor atory school, he said was not "exemplary” but "experimental”; the significance of Wirt’s success in Gary was not symbolic but practical. Instrumentalism was never intended as a magical cure for a sick society but as means for observing its symp toms, Hopefully the observation would work like psychoanaly sis; the consequence of understanding the symptoms would be control,34- The one magical aspect of instrumentalism, the faith -^Dewey, The School and Society; in Dewey’s words, ”a psychological statement of experience follows its actual growth; it is historic,” it encompasseds was that its premise of the possibility of creative intelligence was within the natural order of the real world and needed no artificially contrived social order? no bomb or “general strike” 9 to give it a push»35 The human con dition, which he also thought was one of necessary submission to a tyrannical environment, was not a tragedy, but just life® And life, or experience, if properly particularized, was the source of creativity» Shortly after Bourne’s death, Dewey wrote an article about localism in America for The Dial,, an article which was specifically intended as literary criticism® Dewey criti cized the popular and financially successful “national” maga zines, fashioned expressly for “an immense population constant ly in transit,” as “thin” literature0 Having eliminated all local significance, they expressed neither quality nor depth but only “movement”, and their permanence as literature could be determined from the overflowing baskets of waste paper col lected daily by train and bus conductors® We are discovering that the locality is the only uni versal® Even the suns and stars have their own times as well as their own places®®®0We have been too an xious to get away from home® The beginning of the ex ploring spirit is in the awakening of criticism and of sympathy® Heaven knows there is enough to criticize ® The desired art is not likely to linger long, for the •^“The Disillusionment,” Bourne MSB® Bourne wrote that he had “relied on the working classes of Europe to tie the hands of those who would menace world-peace®®®.Materialism would be impotent in the grip of this world-shaking interna tional brotherhood® ® ® = The general strike would beat the warring governments to their knees® sympathy will come as soon as we stay at home for a- whileo And in spite of the motor car, moving about is getting difficult„ Things are getting filled up== and anyway we only move to another locality« The literary ^localism” about which Dewey spoke was another way of expressing that sympathy Bourne meant by moving in $ta warm area of pragmatic life 01T It was the American ^zest for personal relations^ that he missed while he was in Europe, and it was the feeling of geniality and naivety that he sa vored while he was in the midwest=36 Some five years earlier, in his great disillusionment over the war, Bourne had paid a similar tribute to nlocalismtf; it was a testimonial that seemed to indicate that, although his conscious ambitions lay with Brooksf fearless leaders, his heart was with Dewey» Bourne wrote that nsuch a thing as automatic progress’* was a "ridiculous theory," and that "where the world improves,ooit improves in spots,»»,Progress is al ways local, empiricalo "37 Bourne lacked the courage to leave the familiar faces and landmarks of New York, The "new soil" in which he actually did grow was neither the truly democratic society about which he dreamed nor a more genial and flexible locality than the highly competitive literary circles of lew York, Dewey would have considered it significant that the virgin soil in which Bourne rooted and flourished was none • “ Dewey, "Americanism and Localism," The Dial, 6 8 (June, 1920), 684-688, 3?"The Disillusionment," Bourne MSS, other than that tfgiven” and ^irreducible” environment against whose tyranny he protestedo But just because of the vehemence of his protest he broke its bonds and expanded his conscious worldo In a theoretic sense Dewey might have considered Bourne’s life as symbolic3 but that was not its significanceo Ho GONOLUSIOR Taken at face value 3 the break between Bournef s practical idealism and Dewey’s instrumentalism was caused by Bourne’s inability to accept the war as instrumentalg in any way 5, in bringing into being an anticipated rational social ordero How could men who were unable to keep the world’s na tions out of a global holocaust; Bourne asked; hope to design and build a league for international peace? And if Dewey’s theory of creative intelligence rested on adventurous or ex perimental thoughts how could he reconcile his faith in its development with war-time national policies that censored anti- patriotic literature?! Theoretically, of course, Dewey would have had to yield to Bourne’s arguments => But Dewey believed that milita ristic Germany had to be defeated in order to safe-guard a relatively flexible international situation, and that by 1 9 1 7 it was high time America forsake her ’’unreal” symbolic stance of ”being in the world, but not of it®” If America had any hope at all, Dewey thought, of leading the world of nations, she would have to stoop to conquerc2 Bourne, ’’The War and the Intellectuals, ” and ’’Twi light of Idolso” ^Bewey, ’’What Are We Fighting For?” 92 Bourne’s and Dewey’s disagreement over the issue of the war serves to clarify the shadings of their thoughts which were alike in many premises» Actually, however, in taking sides over the issue of the war, the two created a break in their ideas that in reality did not existo For instance, Bourne supposedly never accepted the necessity or even the fact of America’s participation in the war* And yet he wrote, realistic to the point almost of being opportunistic, that if the artist were a person with suffieient sensitivity to see war as merely the height of irrationality and with the drive to express his feelings for public consumption, then ’’his apathy is something the shrewd militarist will fairly beg for.* In the interest of militaristic morale, nations ought not ”to let the artistic temperment get anywhere near the trenches <>”3 In a mere theoretical vein, Bourne attempted to make a distinction between Dewey’s idea of ’’creative intelligence” and the conclusion at which he and Brooks arrived— that Amer ica needed to concentrate instead on ’’the creative desire Dewey appreciated as well asBourne that the prime object of progressive,education was to stimulate and cultivate inborn creative instincts0 But Bourne’s great adeptness was in the area of semanticso Dewey wrote that it was not a ’’cleverness” which he envied® ^Bourne, ”Our Enemy Speaks,” The Dial, 6 4 (May 23, 1913), 486-437= • - ' 94 The real differences between Dewey and Bourne were personalo They were members of different generations and they had diverse visions of their professional roles in society* Bourne had not yet reached the age of irserene democratic wis dom1* and dreamed of his literary career in evangelical tones* Dewey, whose excellence was in the realm of abstract thought, wrote as if he were a scientist in a laboratory* In spite of the fact that a person such as Jane Addams, to whom Bourne had referred with derision as f*Lady Bountiful1*, could write ad miringly to him about his outspoken stand against the war, Bourne was adamant in his denunciation of nineteenth century social reformerso^- Before 1914$ Bourne had supported with en thusiasm the I*¥*Wo agitation for "the general strike" as a more realistic, more effectual, more modern means of social renewal* And when agitation for the strike evaporated, unreal ized, he washed his hands of any proposals for international social revolution, including plans for a peaceful League of Hations*5 Just barely past his twenties, he preferred re maining "disillusioned1* to reconciling himself to more conser vative methods of reform* Bourne * s youthful interpretation of "progress1* as a value, that is, his idea that progress implied a moral goal or ^Jane Addams to Bourne, June 13, 1917o 5irThe Disillusionment,1* Bourne MSS, and Bourne,"The War and the Intellectuals*" - t 95 purpose ? was symptomatic of the optimism of the pre-war era 0 This progresss or ?fpush of our temperments towards perfeetiomgw was the major value that the younger generation before the war recognizedo And they recognized it for no other reason than because they believed such progress toward perfection8 guided by integrated and rational human beings, was possible, ac cording to the natural order0 Dewey, on the other hand, would talk only of "ends-in-view* because no final end or purpose or vision was pragmatica Progress was not just a value but an empirical fact, just as the war was neither glorious nor dis astrous, but realityo And events could not be judged tran- scende.ntally good or bad, but only effective or practical» Progress was merely the interpretation of the natural processes for the solution of human problems» But this interpretation of progress in terms of in evitability was also symptomatic of the pre-war optimism* And Bourne, in perhaps his most mature statement of his oppo sition to the war, came close to echoing the orientation of Dewey’s most pragmatic opinions* In an unpublished article, "The Disillusionment," composed after his return from Europe and before America’s entrance into the war, he wrote that the war in Europe might serve as a lesson to Americans that the dawn of the. twentieth century had not ushered in a new era of rationality* But this instrumental observation of Europe’s dark hours was not to be thought of as justifying the war* This is not a world where things are justifiedo But such reflections may serve to lighten a little these hours of disillusionment and permit us to meet with faith and hope whatever darker hours are yet to come06 Bourne ? in the depths of his despair hoped beyond hope0 Dewey avoided either extreme = Pragmatically, the ef fects of both attitudes were the same. Both men found refuge and sympathy in the practical problem of education, Dewey*s theory of progressive education was as yet in a sufficiently formative stage to allow for both experimentation and hypothe sis, The resolution of their dispute into agreement on the necessity for new generations of problem-solvers, or creative thinkers, satisfied both Dewey’s fascination with unexplored areas for research and Bourne’s search for a new faith. ^”The Disillusionment,” Bourne MSS, BIBLIOGRAPHY Manuscripts Randolph Bourne Manuscript Collectiono Columbia University Librarieso The collection was started in the 1930’s when Dorothy Teall Norman attempted to write a bio graphy about Bourne who had been her neighbor in Bloomfieldo It includes letters to and from Bourne9 as well as miscellaneous correspondence among his friends and acquaintances about him* The manuscript selections include "The State," "Old Tyrannies," "The Disillusionment," "Drift," and various other untitled essays and poems» Bourne, Randolph So "A Study of the Suburbanization of a Town, and the Effects of the Process Upon Its Social Life." Unpublished master’s thesis, Columbia Univer sity, -1913 «> Broderick, Vincent L. "Randolph Bourneo" Unpublished under graduate thesis, Princeton University, 1941= Strickland, Charles S. "The Child, the Community, and the Culture-EpoehSof Unpublished paper, Emory University, Atlanta, 1965= . Books by Bourne Youth and Life. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin 0o=, 1913= Essays included in this work are: Youth, The Virtues of the Seasons of Life, The Life of Irony, The Excitement of Friendship, The Adventure of Life, Some Thoughts on Religion, The Mystic Turned Radical, Seeing, We See Not, The Experimental Life, The Dodging of Pressures, For Radicals, The College: An Inner View, A Philosophy of Handicap. (ed.) Arbitration and International Politics. New York: American Association for International Conciliation, 1913$ no. 70o (ed.) The Tradition of War. New York: American Association for International Conciliation, 1914, no. 79= 97 9i (edo) Towards am Indmring Peace, A Symposium of Peace Pro posals, 191AS19l0o New York: American Association for International Conciliation$ 1916e The, Gary Schoolso Introduction by William Wirte Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1916. Education and Living. Addresses, Essays, Lectures, reprinted from The New Republic, New York: The Century Com pany, 1 9 1 7 O Untimely Papers. Foreword by James Oppenheim. New York: Bo Wo Huebsch, 1919» The book contains the following essays: Old Tyrannies, The War and the'Intellectuals, Below the Battle, The Collapse of American Strategy, A War Diary, Twilight of Idols, Unfinished Fragment of The State. The History of a Literary Radical and Other Papers. Introdue- duction by Van Wyek Brooks. New fork: S. A. Russell, . 1 9 5 6 0 The essays which appear in this volume are: The History of a Literary Radical, Mon Amie, Fergus, The Professor; One of Our Conquerors, Impressions of Europe, Ernest, or Parent for a Bay, The Art of Theo dore Dreiser, The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, In the World of Maxim Gorky, Our Unplanned Cities, The Undergraduate, Medievalism in Our Colleges, The Uses of Infallibility, What Is Exploitation"?, Those Columbia Trustees, A Moral Equivalent for Universal Service, Conscience and Intelligence in War,qThe War and the Intellectuals, A War Diary, Twilight of Idols, Trans-National America, A Mirror of the Middle West, This Older Generation. The War and The Intellectuals« Essays by Randolph S. Bourne, 1915-1919. Introduction by Carl Resek. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1964» The collection includes:: The War and The Intellectuals, Below the Battle, The Collapse of American Strategy, A War Diary, American Use for German Ideals, Twilight of Idols, The State, Trans-National America, The Jew and Trans-National America, What Is Exploitation?, The Price of Radical ism, A Moral Equivalent for Universal Service, Educa tion as Living, The Idea of a University, The Puritan * s Will To Power, H. L. Mencken, Paul Elmer More, The Heart of the Beople, Soeiologie Fiction, Traps for the Unwary, The History of a Literary Radical. 99 Articles by Bourne The Two GenerationsgM The Atlantic Monthly, 107 (May, 1911) 9 590-593. — — -- "The HandicappedThe Atlantic Monthly, 103 (Septembers 1911)s 346-347. "The Mystic Turned Radical," The Atlantic Monthly, 109 (Febru ary, 1912), 236-238o--- — ------"Youth," The Atlantic Monthly, 109 (April, 1912), 433-441. A review of Nietzsche« by Paul Elmer More (Boston: Houghton Mifflin and Company, 1911), Journal of Philosophy, 9 (August 15, 1912), 471-473o "Socialism and the Catholic Ideal," The Columbia Monthly, 10 (November, 1912), 10-19= "The Excitement of Friendship," The Atlantic Monthly, 110 (December, 1912), 795-800* "The Social Order in an American Town," The Atlantic Monthly, 3 (February, 1913), 227-236= "The Life of Irony," The Atlantic Monthly, 111 (March, 1913), 357-367. "The Next Revolution," The Columbia Monthly, 11 (May, 1913)® 217-228= "Impressions of Europe, 1913-1914, a report to the Trustees of Columbia University," Columbia University Quarter ly, 17 (March, 1915), 109-126. "John Dewey7s Philosophy," The New Republic, 2 (March 13, 1915) 145-156= "The Heart of the People," The New Republic, 3 (July 3, 1915), 233. "American Use for German Ideals," The New Republic, 4 (Septem ber 4, 1915), 117-H9. "This Older Generation," The Atlantic Monthly, 116 (September, 1915), 335-391. "The Price of Radicalism," The New Republic, 6 (March 11, 1916) l6lo A review of Seymour Deming, The Pillar of Fire (Boston: Small, Maynard and Company, 1915)® 100 "Paul Elmer Morey" The New Republic, 6 (April 1, 1916), 245- 247* A review of P 0 E 0 More„ Aristocracy and Justice (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1916). !,A Moral Equivalent for Universal Military Service," The New Republic« 7 (July 1, 1916), 217-219* — "The Gary Public Schools," Scribner?s Magazine. 60 (July, 1916), 371-379* " " “ "Trans-National America,R The Atlantic MonthlyQ 11$ (July, 1916), $6-97* "Education as Living," The New Republic, $ (August 5* 1916), •10-12. "What Is Exploitation?" The New Republic. 11 (November 4> 1916), 12 - 14 * "The Jew and Trans-National America," The Menorah Journal, 2 . (December, 1916), 277-2$4* "The Puritants Will to Power," The Seven Arts, 1 (April, 1917), 631-637* "The Art of Theodore Dreiser," The Dial, 62 (June 14, 1917), 597-599- — "The Immanence, of Dostoevsky," The Dial, 62 (June 2$, 1917), 24* "Ernest, or Parent for a Day," The Atlantic Monthly, 119 (June, 1917), 77$-7$6* “ “ . "The War and the Intellectuals," The Seven Arts, 2 (June, 1917), 133-146o ■ — "Below the Battle," The Seven Arts, 2 (July, 1917), 270-277* "The Collapse of American Strategy," The Seven Arts, 2 (August, 1917), 409-424* "Conscience and Intelligence in the War, The Dial, 63 (Septem ber, 1917), 193-195* "A War Diary," The Seven Arts, 2 (September, 1917), 535-537= "Sociologic Fiction," The New Republic, 12 (October 27, 1917), 359-360o A review of Upton Sinclair, King Coal (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1917)* 101 tfTwilight of Idolsj," The Severn Arts, 2 (Octoberj 1917)« 6S8«= 702. wHo L. Mencken9^ The New Republic. 13 (November 24, 1917), 102-103 o A review of H. L. Mencken. A Book of Pre faces (New Yorks A. A. Knopf, 1917)° "Making Over the Body," The New Republic„ 15 (May 4, 1918), 28-29o A review of F. Matthias Alexander, Man!s areme Inheritance (New York: E. Pi Dutton and Companyj "Our Enemy Speaks," The Dial, 64 (May 23, 1918), 28-29° A re view of Andreas Latzko, Men in War, translated by Adele Seltzer (Boni and Liveright). "The History of a-Literary Radical,n Yale Review, 8 (April, 1919), 468-484° "Autobiographical Chapter," The Dial, 68 (January, 1920), 1-21° "Bourne Letters," Twice A Year, 5 (1939), 79-98. Other Books and Articles Aaron, Daniel. Writers on the Left. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., 1961. Bates, E. S. "Randolph Bourne," Dictionary of American Bio graphy. Allen Johnson and Dumas Malone, eds. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1937° II, 486. Beringouse, A. F-»- "The Double Martyrdom of Randolph Bourne," The Journal of the History of Ideas, 18 (October, - 1957), 594-603° — Brooks, Van Wyek. America’s Coming of Age. New York:. B. W° Huebsch, 1915° ™~~ ' Emerson and Others. New York: E= P. Dutton and Company,. 1927° Letters and Leadership. New York: B. W. Huebsch. "Randolph Bourne," Encyclopedia of the Social Sci ences. E. R. A. Seligman, ed° New York: The Mac millan Company, 1930= II, 6 5 8 . 102 Dell, Floydo ^Sketch.,11 The New Republic, 17 (January 4, 1919) g 276o Dewey, John* ®Americanism and Localism,” The Dial, 68 (June, 1920), 684-688, ----- ______0 "American Education and Culture,” The New Republic, 7 (July 1 8 1916), 215-217. — — . o "The Child and the Curriculum,pamphlet, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1902, ______o "Education and Social Direction,” The Dial, 6 4 (April 11, 1918), 333-335o ” “ o "The Ethical Principles Underlying Education,” National Herbert Society Third Year Book (1897;s 7-34° ° ”An Open Letter,” The New Republic, 15 (May 11, 1918), 55 = The School and Society* Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1899° "Universal Service as Education,” The New Republic, 6 (April 22, 1916), 309-310* “ ”lhat Are We Fighting For?” The Independent, 94 (June 22, 1918), 474, 480-484° Dewey, John and Dewey, Evelyn° Schools of Tomorrow° New York: Eo P° Dutton and Company, 1915° Feuer, Lewis 8° "Dewey and the Back to the People Movement,” The Journal of the History of Ideas, 20 (October to December, 1959), 545-5* Filler, Louis° Randolph Bourne ° Introduction by Max Lerner0 Washington, D° C°: American Council on Public Affairs, 1943 = Kaplan, S° "Social Engineers as Saviours: Effects of World. War:I on Some American Liberals,” The Journal of the History of Xdeas, 17 (June, 195&), 347-369° Kropotkin, Peter° The Conquest of Bread = New York: Vanguard Press, 1906° Lerner, Max* "Randolph Bourne and the Two Generations,” Twice A Year, 5 (1939), 54-78° . * 103 May-, Henry F 0 The End of American Innocence „ A Study of the First tears of Our"Own Time„ 1912=1917. Chicago: Quadrangle Books. 1959. Mumfordj Lewis. "The Image of Randolph Bourne sn The Hew Re public , 64 (September 24$, 1930) s 151-152. . The Story, of Utopias. . Hew York: Viking Press $ 1922. Hietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. Translated by Helen Zimmern. Hew lork: The Macmillan Companys 1924® Hoble$ David W. The Paradox of Progressive Thought. Minnea polis: Univesity o/Minnesota Press, 1958. Oppenheim, James. "The Story of the Seven Arts," The American Mercury, 20 (June, 1930), 163° Parry, Albert. Garrets and Pretenders. A History of Bohemianism in America, lew York: Dover Publications, I960. Parsons, Elsie 0. "A Pacifist Patriot," The Dial, 6B (March, 1920), 367=370. Rosenfeld. Paul. "Randolph Bourne," The Dial, 75 (December, 1923), 545- ™— Royce, Josiah. The Problem of Christianity, II, "The Real World and The Christian Ideal." Hew York: The Mac millan Company, 1914® Thomas, Herman. The Conscientious Objector. Introduction by Robert M. LaFollette. Hew York: B. W. Huebseh, 1923 Wasserstrom, William, The Time of The Dial. Syracuse Univer sity Press, 1 W ° ------_ ---