The Revolt Against the Masses. Fred Siegel
to demarcate the levels of taste in American life, was the first American to write a book on Wells. “Without doubt,” wrote Brooks, “Wells has altered the air we breathe and made a conscious fact in many minds the excellence that resides in certain kinds of men and modes of living and odiousness that resides in others.” Hope for the Wellsian future, Brooks argued, was to found in “the rudiments of a socialist state,” which he located “in the Rockefeller Institute, the Carnegie and Russell Sage Foundations, the endowed universities and bureaus of research, and in the type of men they breed.”
Village rebel Floyd Dell similarly found Wells to be a spiritual and political guide to the future. For Dell, Wells was a revelation:
And suddenly there came into our minds the magnificent and well-nigh incredible conception of Change. … gigantic, miraculous change, an overwhelming of the old in ruin and an emergence of the new. Into our eternal and changeless world came H.G. Wells prophesying its ending, and the kingdom of heaven come on earth; the heavens shall be rolled up like a scroll, and all the familiar things of earth pass away utterly—so he seemed to cry out to our astounded ears.
Alongside Wells there arose Randolph Bourne, the first prophet of what in the 1960s would be called youth culture. Bourne came of age in the Greenwich Village of the pre-WWI years when the lyrical left was besotted with utopian ideas of a new revolutionary culture that would break down the barriers between art and politics. Bourne’s “political discussions were actually lit by a spiritual viewpoint,” explained his friend and fellow mystic Waldo Frank. “They took into account the content of the human soul, the individual souls, the values of being.”
Bourne’s premature death in 1918 from influenza at age thirty-two came as he reached the height of his fame. His scathing attacks on “Mr. Wilson’s War” had already secured his political immortality. Bourne’s anti-war writing would be repeatedly revived, first in the late 1930s and early 1940s, and again with tremendous force in the Vietnam War era; most recently he’s been recast in the light of Foucault and postmodernism as an intellectual pioneer who introduced Nietzschean themes into American intellectual life. But unlike the Bourne of legend, the real man was never persecuted for his anti-war views and in fact was not anti-war as such; rather, in WWI he was anti-American and culturally philo-German. It was Bourne who pioneered the use of moral equivalence when, in a defense of Germany, he emphasized the parity between “the horrors of capitalistic peace at home” with the “horrors of war in Belgium.”
Bourne, said his friend and biographer Van Wyck Brooks, wanted to “think emotions” and “feel ideas.” The young prophet of multiculturalism established a number of conceptual tropes that took an unrelenting hold among liberals. They found in his writings their own irresolvable tensions and anomalies raised to a literary level.
Bourne was the ideologist of Youth, always with the capital Y, as source of wisdom. He asserted, by way of Nietzsche, that the older generation’s puritanical calls for service and selflessness were in fact either empty rhetoric or a veiled version of selfishness in which good deeds were merely the basis for boasting and “the will to power.” In his collection of essay published in 1913 as Youth and Life, he electrified his contemporaries by presenting Youth as an alternative to the Christian virtues. “The world has nothing to lose but its chains—and its own soul to gain,” he wrote. “Youth…has no right to be humble. The ideals it forms will be the highest it will ever have, the insight the clearest, the ideas the most stimulating. . . . Youth’s attitude is really the scientific attitude. . . . Our times give no check to the Radical tendencies of Youth.” The goal of “my religion,” he explained, was “the bringing of a fuller, richer life to more people on this earth. “Perpetual youth” would be “salvation.”
Bourne wanted to enlist “a vast army of young men and women who felt a fluttering in their souls that call them to some great impersonal adventure.” He envisioned a modernized version of the Catholic priest, “a new type of teacher-engineer-community worker,” who could aestheticize society and redeem slovenly America. “I begin to wonder whether there aren’t advantages in having administration of the State taken care of by a scientific body of men with a social sense, or perhaps an aesthetic-scientific idea of a desirable urban life,” he wrote. “There really may be something in the German claim that this liberates energies for real freedom of thought.”
His other cat’s-paw was what he saw as the pre-modern energies of the new immigrants from southern and eastern Europe not yet corrupted by capitalist modernity. He called for them to create a “Trans-National America”—in effect, to practice multiculturalism avant la lettre in order to free the country from the shackles of puritanical Protestant culture. In its place, he hoped for a “beloved community” in which the young would replace bourgeois individualism with an organic culture that encouraged people to flourish as individuals and yet absorbed them into a loving whole. Bourne would be read on some of the communes of the 1960s as the prophet of their founding.
Randolph Bourne, the pioneer of generational politics and an aestheticized society, was born in 1866 to a genteel middle-class Presbyterian family of Bloomfield, New Jersey, descended from Protestant ministers and lawyers. He entered the world in literally the worst manner possible, suffering from what he once described as a “terribly messy birth.” Tuberculosis of the spine turned him into a dwarfed hunchback. His face was contorted, his ear misshapen, his breathing difficult and audible.
Yet he made his mark as a student at Columbia, where he studied with John Dewey, Franz Boas, and Charles Beard and was seen by his fellow students as already the equal of these giants. As an undergraduate, he published in The Atlantic and would soon become a staff writer at Croly’s New Republic. He shared Croly’s hopes for improving America’s tastes by reshaping individual Americans in the collective image created by a great national project. Writing in a utopian vein similar to Croly’s, Bourne explained:
What the primitive man had easily, through the compactness of his society, and what every compact groups gets easily—the exaltation of the individual by concerted social expression of the common desires, ideas and ideals—we are reaching out for with great pain and striving . . . we are feeling for a complete social consciousness which must eventually raise the whole world to a kingdom of Heaven.
But while the Kingdom of Heaven was within reach, its prophets were mired in the muck of America, a land of “appalling slovenliness” and “ignorance.” The urban masses, as Bourne saw them, were “without taste, without standards but those of the mob.” The recent immigrants, once exposed to their new country’s commercial culture, became, Bourne argued, “the flotsam and jetsam of American life, the downward undertow of our civilization with its leering cheapness and falseness of taste and spiritual outlook, the absence of mind and sincere feeling we see in our slovenly towns, our vapid moving pictures, our popular novels, and in the vacuous faces of crowds on the city street.”
Bourne, his ideas already well developed, was an important part of New York’s bohemian cultural and literary scene and a spokesman for youth when he won a fellowship in 1913 to tour Europe. Traveling in continental Europe on the eve of World War I, Bourne was awed by “the joyous masses” that have “evolved a folk-culture.” His first stop was England, which “was always exasperating me and shocking my instincts,” he wrote to a friend. With few exceptions, such as the suffragettes and the writings and personality of George Bernard Shaw, England’s commonsense politics repelled him. Already alienated from the middle class of his native Bloomfield, he found in Britain the “hard inhumanity” and “crusted hypocrisy” he associated with Anglophile America.
France and Germany were another matter. Most Americans thought of Europe as old and decadent and America as holding out youthful promise; Bourne reversed those assumptions. “To cross the seas,” he wrote, “and come upon my own enthusiasms and ideals vibrating with so intense a glow seemed an amazing fortune.” He was drawn to unanimisme, a literary movement devoted to unearthing the French folk-consciousness that had been buried in France’s cities. He admired the “group mind” that had been forged in French peasant culture and that resisted American-style modernity. Describing Paris, he said, “I soon felt an intellectual vivacity, a sincerity and candor, a tendency to think emotions and feel ideas that wiped