Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,162

This is the grave of Randolph Bourne.

Born in 1886 in Bloomfield, New Jersey, Bourne was disabled at birth. His mother had a very difficult birth and the doctor really screwed up by using the forceps in a way that severely injured the baby. His umbilical cord was also wrapped around his ear anyway, which permanently damaged it. The child was disabled in an era where people did nothing for disabled kids. Worse, at the age of 4, he contracted Pott’s disease, more popularly known as tuberculosis of the spine. That led to him having a hunched back and being very short. Rough stuff.

And yet, our young Bourne was a brilliant kid with an insatiable passion for justice. This remarkable person would gain a scholarship to Columbia. He would write about his disability at a time when few would broach these topics. His 1911 essay, “The Handicapped-By One of Them,” published in the Atlantic, is considered a foundational text in the field of Disability Studies. He became editor of the Columbia Review. He then became an expert on the American education system, writing several books on the topic in the 1910s. Youth and Life came out in 1913, The Gary Schools in 1916, and Education and Living in 1917.

Bourne was also an early theorist of a multicultural America. This is really kind of remarkable. He completely rejected the idea of assimilation as an actively bad thing that erased much about the humanity of Americans for a set of values that did not represent the best about either Americans or immigrants. This was at a time when many leftist Americans, including many radicals, supported assimilation as the only way for America to move ahead. Americanization programs were the order of the day. Bourne thought that deeply wrong-headed. The metaphor of the “melting pot” was already in use in the 1910s and Bourne spoke out against this term directly. He quite specifically rejected the idea of America being an Anglo-Saxon country and that those were values that should be embraced and encouraged. He wanted Jewish and Polish and even Chinese Americans recognized as Americans on their own terms.

Bourne had absolutely no tolerance for American entry into World War I. He was a genuine pacifist. This was a really divisive question on the America left, as war often is. Was the Germans a big enough threat for liberals and the left to support American militarism? As has often been the case–Vietnam and Iraq being the two most prominent examples–many liberals were enamored with ideas of showing their Americanness through a display of patriotism and also with protecting their positions within an intolerant American framework. So people such as Jane Addams, Samuel Gompers, and many others supported the war. Bourne did not and in that atmosphere, that was was a severe threat to life and limb, as radicals such as Frank Little would find out. Bourne thought that Woodrow Wilson and his supporters had entered the war to defend capitalism. There was nothing about Wilson’s actions that suggested that this analysis was incorrect. Moreover, the way that Wilson cracked down on radicals for opposing his war is something that Donald Trump could only dream of implementing today against his opponents.

Attacking the war and attacking assimilation meant that even radicals sidelined Bourne. He was just too radical at a moment when radicals were running scared. He was furious that other radicals supported the war, especially his friend John Dewey. Bourne lost all respect for Dewey over this. One of Bourne’s insights is that the U.S. becoming a military power would take this decentered nation with great differences from city to city and center power and influence in Washington, to the detriment of democracy generally. There’s absolutely no question that Bourne was correct about that, not quite in the Wilson years, as the war did not last very long and the American return to the worst kind of isolationism and parochialism ensured the impacts of the war were fairly short. But it’s clearly what has happened with the rise of the military-industrial complex of the Beltway. Notably, I don’t think Bourne would have supported said isolationism either. His version of America was as this beautiful space where people should be able to live out their dreams in an atmosphere of tolerance–racial, for the disabled, immigrant–not the Ku Klux Klan dominated of the 1920s that rejected immigration entirely.

So sure, maybe Bourne was a dreamer, but he believed in what America could be while also being firmly on the left on nearly issue of the day. It’s hard to overemphasize how much other leftists were impressed by Bourne’s thinking. Here’s Max Eastman describing him:

“A hunchback with twisted face and ears, a bulblike body on spindly legs, and yet hands with which he could play Brahms melodies on the piano with such delicacy as brought tears both of joy and pity to one’s eyes. He had a powerful mind, philosophic erudition, a commanding prose style, and the courage of a giant.”

Bornne also despised being treated differently because of his disability. Said Floyd Dell of this:

“Randolph Bourne’s friends were used to his appearance, and forgot about it, thinking of his beautiful mind; but at first sight he was very startling. He had been born dreadfully misshapen, with a crooked back and a grotesque face, out of which only his eyes shone with the beauty of his soul. He forgot this outward aspect, or succeeded in pretending to himself that it did not exist; he hated to be treated as any other than a wholly robust and ordinary person, and if anyone took his arm in going across the street, the touch would be shaken off fiercely.”

Bourne had major health problems of course due to his disability. But it was the flu epidemic that killed him in 1918. He was 32 years old.

Bourne’s death is a real shame for so many reasons. I really wonder what an older Bourne would have looked like. He of course would have been horrified at the closure of America to immigrants in 1924, though probably not surprised. But he was a pretty independent thinker for the rise of the Communist Party on the left and I wonder how he would have responded to that in the 1930s.

Randolph Bourne is buried in Bloomfield Cemetery, Bloomfield, New Jersey.

If you would like this series to visit other radicals of the World War I era, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Anna Strunsky is in Indianapolis and Bertram Wolfe is in Palo Alto, California. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.