Bourne, Randolph S.

BOURNE, RANDOLPH S. (1886–1918). Social critic Randolph Silliman Bourne occupies a unique place in the history of the American Left as a voice of independent radicalism and an icon of intellectual integrity. Bourne’s first essays, collected in Youth and Life (1913), established him as an early interpreter of twentieth-century cultural radicalism. A democrat and a cosmopolitan, Bourne went on to savage both the Arnoldian ideal of high culture and the notion of an American “melting- pot” in the name of a new “transnational” culture that would draw on native, immigrant, and European currents of expression. Bourne is best known for the searing anti-war essays he wrote for the Seven Arts in the years before his tragic death, at age thirty-two, in the influenza epidemic of 1918. Denouncing John Dewey and other pro-war Progressives for their support for US involvement in World War I, Bourne articulated a radical-democratic intellectual stance that went on to influence subsequent generations of thinkers who echoed his critique of technocratic liberalism and the wartime state, notably Dwight Macdonald, Lewis Mumford, Dorothy Day, C. Wright Mills, Noam Chomsky, and Christopher Lasch.

Bourne grew up in Bloomfield, New Jersey, where his disability and the circumstances of his family life bred an early suspicion of his hometown’s official middle-class Protestantism. A forceps delivery permanently disfigured his face; spinal tuberculosis in infancy left him a hunchbacked dwarf. His father’s abandonment of his family, after years of alcoholism and financial problems, further contributed to Bourne’s sense of marginality in Bloomfield. Together, his father’s collapse and his mother’s ineffectual efforts to maintain genteel pretenses in the face of economic catastrophe bred in Bourne a deep hostility to the rhetoric of masculine self-reliance and the Victorian ideal of a feminine domestic culture. Beginning with the essays he wrote as a student at Columbia (1909–1913), Bourne returned time and again to questions of personal identity and friendship. Insisting on the connection between private life and public institutions, and between culture and politics, Bourne attracted an audience of young feminists, artistic modernists, and bohemians who shared his alienation from rugged individualism and the emerging corporate ethic. Bourne’s admirers thrilled to his appeals for “self-fulfillment” through the creation of a more democratic culture and politics—what he called “the good life of personality lived in the environment of the Beloved Community.” This synthesis of personal and political themes made Bourne a leader of the prewar Greenwich Village “Little Renaissance” and helped define the modern intellectual’s vocation as an interpreter of culture, politics, and personal life.

Bourne was as familiar as any member of his generation with Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche, but he also drew deeply from American radical sources in his criticism: the democratic populism of Henry George and Walt Whitman; the pragmatism of William James and John Dewey; the critique of Arnoldian culture mounted by Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, and Thorstein Veblen; and the multiethnic working-class dramatized by the Paterson Strike Pageant of 1913. While at Columbia, Bourne joined the Intercollegiate Socialist Society and imbibed the politics of faculty on the left wing of the Progressive movement, above all Dewey and Charles Beard. Even more important, Bourne came into contact with a circle of second-generation immigrant students whose attempts to negotiate between their parents’ Old War traditions and native American traditions inspired Bourne’s Atlantic essay of 1916, “Trans-national America.” There Bourne attacked the melting-pot ideal as an undemocratic relic of Anglo-Saxon colonization. His alternative was not the cultural pluralism of Horace Kallen, let alone a “decentered” multiculturalism, but a cosmopolitan common culture forged by a radical intelligentsia and the ethnic working class.

In his writing for the New Republic in the mid-teens, and in The Gary Schools (1916) and Education and Living (1917), Bourne embraced pragmatism and Dewey’s proposals for educational reform as resources for a democratic culture that would transcend the antithesis of commercial practice and Victorian moralism in American life. But Dewey’s decision to join the editors of the New Republic in support of Woodrow Wilson’s war policy was a devastating blow that forced Bourne to reconsider his pragmatist and Progressive assumptions. In the penetrating essays he wrote for the Seven Arts during the war, Bourne condemned Dewey and his followers for fostering a cult of technique and power that played to intellectuals’ illusions of mastery and political control. The war clarified Bourne’s position as a democrat and moralist. He insisted that the primary responsibility of radical intellectuals was to stimulate public debate through social criticism and the articulation of moral values, even if that meant forsaking immediate political efficacy. Bourne’s courageous opposition to the war inspired a later generation of anti-war radicals, as student protesters in the 1960s read his denunciation of Dewey as a dress rehearsal for their own attacks on the pro-war liberals who prosecuted the war in Vietnam.

What Bourne’s subsequent admirers may have missed was his open ambivalence about his position as an anti-war radical. On the one hand, he was given to Nietzschean rhetoric about an avant-garde opposition of intellectual “malcontents” contemptuous of the public’s “herd mentality.” On the other, he sought to ground his deepening radicalism in a renewed appreciation for the local loyalties he glimpsed in the American popular imagination. Bourne recognized that modern nation-states need war, but not a politically mobilized public. While his former colleagues within the Progressive intelligentsia rushed to join the Wilson administration’s war effort, Bourne took his stand with the apparently passive Americans who remained “below the battle”: men and women whose indifference to wartime propaganda betrayed a culture of friendship, family ties, and mutual aid that Bourne admired as an alternative to state coercion. Bourne’s posthumously published essay “The State”—with its haunting refrain, “War is the health of the state”—suggests that he was looking at the end of his life to such popular forms of solidarity as the basis for a new radicalism.

Abrahams, Edward. The Lyrical Left: Radical Bourne, Alfred Stieglitz, and the Origins of Cultural Radicalism in America. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1986.

Blake, Casey Nelson. Beloved Community: The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, and Lewis Mumford. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990.

Bourne, Randolph. The Radical Will: Selected Writings, 1911–1918. Edited by Olaf Hansen. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.

Clayton, Bruce. Forgotten Prophet: The Life of Randolph Bourne. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984.

Longmore, Paul K. and Paul Steven Miller. “’A Philosophy of Handicap’: The Origins of Randolph Bourne’s Radicalism,” Radical History Review, Vol. 94 (Winter 2006): 59-83.

Lasch, Christopher. The New Radicalism in America, 1889–1963: The Intellectual as a Social Type. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965.

Vaughan, Leslie J. Randolph Bourne and the Politics of Cultural Radicalism. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997.

Randolph Silliman Bourne Papers. Summary Information. Archival Collections. Columbia University Libraries. https://findingaids.library.columbia.edu/ead/nnc-rb/ldpd_4079396