The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne: A Usable Past for Multicultural America?

Canadian Review ot American Studies/Revue canadtenne d'etudes americames Volume 27, Number 2, 1997, pp. 1-22 The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne: A Usable Past for Multicultural America? Andrew Walzer With the advent of the global economy and the rise of multiculturalism, the nation is increasingly being displaced as the central locus of political, economic , and cultural life (see Hall 1991, 22; Bhabha, 1994). 1 As a result, latetwentieth century U.S. intellectual and cultural historians such as David Hollinger (1995), Christopher Lasch (1977), and Casey Nelson Blake (1990) are searching for a viable metaphor of the nation. Still affirming the centrality of the nation, they nevertheless distance themselves from the cultural nationalism that has so clearly fallen out of favour in the post-World War II era (Noble 1985). Instead, these historians are attempting to define what can loosely be termed "political" or "civic" nationalism (see Hutchinson 1994, 122; Ro gin 1996, 53 ). This quest has led to the recuperation of the cultural criticism of Randolph Bourne, an independent intellectual writing at the turn of the century (Blake 1990; Lasch 1977; Hollinger 1995; Bender 1987). Hollinger and Lasch, for example, identify in Bourne's essay "Transnational America," a metaphor for the nation which combined a recognition of cultural diversity while still maintaining the ideal of the nation as a coherent unitied landscape. Bourne's pluralistic nationalism offered the promise of different cultures coming together and forming a richer "cosmopolitan" culture . Lasch takes pains to distinguish this ideal both from that of the "melting pot" as well as from recent theories of multiculturalism: 2 Canadian Review of American Studies Revue canadzenne d'etudes americames Transnational America (as the term makes clear) implied not the ideal of a melting pot but rather a federation of cultures which would eventually result in a culture beyond nationalism of every kind; not the ethnic pluralism advocated by recent spokesmen of the "ethnic revival" but a culture beyond ethnicity; not a glorification of ethnic consciousness in its existing state of parochialism but a genuine cosmopolitanism. (1977, 11) Bourne's vision, I suggest, is caught in powerful crosscurrents that continue to shape the conversation about U.S. nation-ness. On the one hand, Bourne, along with Horace Kallen and John Dewey, did oppose the popular metaphor of the "melting pot" as well as the nativism that fuelled the exclusionary 1924 immigration bill. Bourne also sought to distinguish his nationalism from the European nationalism that he believed lay at the root of World War I. However, an examination of the aesthetic structure of his cultural criticism (including essays that have been overlooked by intellectual historians ) provides, I believe, a different picture of Bourne. Indeed, Bourne continued to be committed to the metaphor of the nation as a "deep fraternity ," that is, to the ideal of a national culture that expressed the vitality and organic unity of "the people." Benedict Anderson suggests that this vision of "deep horizontal comradeship 11 of male citizens is the central element of modern nationalism. The members of a nation imagine themselves, accordmg to Anderson, as acting simultaneously with one another in "homogenous empty time": all reading the same newspapers and thus experiencing the same events at the same time (Anderson [1983] 1991, 22-23). 2 In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century United States, this metaphor of "deep fraternity" was construed literally: Euro-American middle-class men envisioned themselves as constituting this deep fraternity of the nation. Public life and culture were seen as the exclusive province of Euro-American men. Native Americans, African Americans, Mexican Americans, as well as middle-class white women were excluded from this literal fraternity. But by the turn of the century this "imagined community" of the nation was under siege; Euro-American male-cultural elites (writers, artists, cultural critics, and reformers) had increasing difficulty imagining themselves at the centre of a Andrew Walzer I 3 homogeneous and unified national culture. This anxiety was embodied in the widespread complaint that America had become corrupt and effeminate. Bourne, along with other cultural critics, blamed capitalism. They associated capitalism with the rise of leisure and consumerism, which were seen as effeminate and passive. Capitalism, therefore, undermined the autonomy and...