The New Negro and the National-Popular: Randolph Bourne and Alain Locke

This essay argues that “New Negro” and “Young American” writings from the early twentieth century reward rereading in concert with Antonio Gramsci’s concept of a “national-popular” and as instances of theoretical production in themselves. Focusing on the work of Randolph Bourne (1886–1918) and Alain Locke (1889–1954), the essay returns to “New Negro” and “Young American” writings not only to identify the interplay among them but also to recast key terms from those corpora, especially the “trans-national” (Bourne) and the “American temperament” (Locke), as literary-theoretic vehicles for reckoning with patterns of racist social formation. Considered alongside Gramsci’s theorization of a “national-popular,” Bourne and Locke emerge as critics whose practices pivoted on the reading of existing national tendencies and the engendering of alternative conceptualizations of “Americanism.”

The Beginning of the End of Something

World War I, with its attendant music and noise, was followed immediately by an influenza epidemic (the “Spanish flu”) that was met by a resounding silence. To meet the epidemic, theatres closed and gatherings were prohibited; Western culture itself paused until the danger passed. Realistic portrayals and responses through music were rare (in contrast to the war), but they may be detectable in works by artists as diverse as Charles Tomlinson Griffes and Blind Willie Johnson. The nationalism of the conflict yielded to a new transnationalism, neither peaceful nor stable, described most memorably by Randolph Bourne, himself a victim of the disease.

From the Old New Republic to a Great Community: Insights and Contradictions in John Dewey’s Public Pedagogy

This article draws from John Dewey’s philosophy of education, ideas about democracy and pragmatist assumptions to explain how his articles for <em>The New Republic</em> functioned pedagogically. Taking media as a mode of public pedagogy, and drawing extensively from Dewey’s <em>Democracy and Education</em>, as well as from his book <em>The Public and its Problems</em>, the article explores the relationships between communication, education and democracy using the expanded conceptions of all the aforementioned advanced by Dewey. Borrowing insights from Randolph Bourne, who used Dewey’s own ideas to criticize his mentor’s influence on intellectuals who supported US involvement in World War I, the analysis explores the contradictions within Dewey’s public pedagogy. The article suggests Dewey’s relevance as a public intellectual in the liberal-progressive press, his view of the State and some of his related presuppositions produced a tension in his thought, delimiting democratic possibilities while simultaneously pointing toward greater democratic potentials. The essay concludes by suggesting that learning from both Dewey and Bourne prompts us to get beyond the former’s public/private dualism to realize what he called the “Great Community” by communicating and practicing the Commons.

EDUCATION, EXPEDIENCY, AND DEMOCRATIC DILEMMAS IN WAR TIME: INSIDE THE DEWEY-BOURNE DEBATE

In one of the most significant debates in U.S. intellectual history, John Dewey and Randolph Bourne attempted to redefine the relationship between democracy and war in the midst of World War I. This essay argues that the Dewey-Bourne debate is not just a vital dispute over the United States’ role in the war and the world, but that it also must be seen as a crucial moment for understanding fractures in progressive politics and debates over projects that presume to cultivate an educated citizenry. Focusing on Dewey and Bourne's developing ideas from 1914 through 1918, with an emphasis on concepts evolving in and from Dewey's Democracy and Education and Bourne's cultural criticism, the essay explores their core disagreements about the relationship between education and progressive reform, the role of intellectuals in the state, the consequences of intervention in the war and the use of force, and democratic citizenship in national and international contexts. This essay provides insights into the boundaries and pitfalls of liberal politics in the early twentieth century; it argues that this debate reveals a central ambiguity in Dewey's thought, and shows how wartime expediency and potential for progressive influence derailed aspects of the Deweyan project of democratic education.

The Progressive Seedbed

This chapter discusses conceptions of America's political community advanced by Progressive-era thinkers and activists that proved especially significant in American political development. These are the white middle-class reformist nationalism of Herbert Croly and Theodore Roosevelt; the varied and more radical efforts to blend democracy with cultural pluralism advanced by John Dewey, Randolph Bourne, Horace Kallen, and W. E. B. Du Bois; and the visions of economic democracy urged by Walter Weyl, Florence Kelley, and the National Consumers League. Although all have since remained politically important, their relative political prominence and their places on the prevailing American political spectrum have shifted over time. The chapter discusses these shifts and how they have remained central to the nation's politics.