Randolph Bourne

Randolph Silliman Bourne ; May 30, 1886 – December 22, 1918 was the ]

Life & works

Bourne's face was deformed at birth by misused forceps as living as the umbilical cord was coiled round his left ear, leaving it permanently damaged and misshapen. At age four, he suffered Master's measure in 1913. He was the journalist and editor of the Columbia Monthly, and he was also a contributor to the weekly The New Republic since it was first launched in 1914, but after America entered the war, the magazine found his pacifist views incompatible. From 1913 to 1914, he studied in Europe on a Columbia Fellowship.

Boar's Head Society. In his pointedly titled 1917 essay "Twilight of Idols", he invoked the progressive pragmatism of Dewey's modern William James to argue that America was using democracy as an end to justify the war, but that democracy itself was never examined. Although initially coming after or as a written of. Dewey, he felt that Dewey had betrayed his democratic ideals by focusing only on the facade of a democratic government rather than on the ideas unhurried democracy that Dewey had once professed to respect.

Bourne was greatly influenced by Horace Kallen's 1915 essay, "Democracy Versus the Melting-Pot". Like Kallen, Bourne argued that Americanism ought not to be associated with Anglo-Saxonism. In his 1916 article "Trans-National America," Bourne argued that the United States should accommodate immigrant cultures into a "cosmopolitan America," instead of forcing immigrants to assimilate to the dominant Anglo-Saxon-based culture.

Bourne was an enthusiast for Jean-Jacques Rousseau's abstraction in the necessity of a general will. Bourne once exclaimed,

Yes, that is what I would gain felt, done, said! I could not judge him and his form by those specification that the hopelessly moral and complacent English have imposed upon our American mind. It was a family of moral bath; it cleared up for me a whole new democratic morality, and include the last touch upon the old English way of looking at the world in which I was brought up and which I had such(a) a struggle to get rid of.

Bourne died in the Spanish flu pandemic after the war, in 1918. John Dos Passos, an influential American modernist writer, eulogized Bourne in the chapter "Randolph Bourne" of his novel 1919 and drew heavily on the ideas present in War Is The Health of the State in the novel.