Trans-National America

Research Paper 1 on Randolph Bourne

Trans-National America

1916

Randolph Bourne was an American intellectual, an author and a pacifist who established a name himself as a sharp critic of social pretences. He was born in 1886 in Bloomfield, New Jersey, a small town on the East Coast. Bourne was disfigured at birth by the attending physician’s forceps, and an attack of spinal tuberculosis at age four left him stunted and hunchbacked. Bourne always lived in a sort of emotional isolation and therefore seldom appeared in public, but devoted himself to writing and study.

He held a variety of odd jobs before winning a scholarship to Columbia University at the age of 23, from which he received a Master’s Degree in 1913. At Columbia College in the early 1910s he met John Dewey and Charles Beard, intellectuals like himself and during that time he started publishing essays in journals such as the Atlantic Monthly and the Dial.

After finishing his Master’s Degree at Columbia University, Randolph Bourne traveled to Paris and during this time he experienced the European culture and gained European influence which also had lots of impact on his writing. After a year in Europe, resulting in 1914 in ‘Impressions in Europe: 1913-1914,’ he turned his attention to the progressive education theories of the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey. The outcome was two books called ‘The Gary Schools’ (1916) and ‘Education and Living’ (1917). In 1918, he died of influenza epidemic that spread throughout the country after the close of the war. Randolph Bourne was only 32 years old at that time.

The most important aspect about Bourne’s life is definitely the fact that he opposed US entry into World War I. Bourne had different views toward America’s entrance into the First World War and it was because of that that him and his mentor, John Dewey got involved into serious arguments, which led to the break of this relationship. Bourne opposed the US entry into World War I because of the failure of the melting-pot. ‘He saw no logic of those who had to change their principles in order to justify joining the national call to arms.’

The text ‘Trans-National America’ was revolutionary for the time that Bourne wrote it because nobody was actually talking against the traditional understanding what American patriotism is. In this particular text, Bourne writes about anti-Anglosaxonism and discusses the failure of the melting-pot. Furthermore, he discusses the fact how in 1916, a lot of Americans were actually supporting their own cultures and their own traditions from their home countries rather than the ‘American’ one. Many Americans found this shocking at that time because they were supposed to have already been ‘nationalized’ to the US, which was their new home. This whole new behavior contradicts with the American ‘patriotism’ and Randolph Bourne believed this ideology to be misled.

Randolph Bourne envisioned a nation of immigrants who could retain that distinctiveness of their native cultures and therefore be more valuable and interesting to each other for being different. Bourne saw that America’s cosmopolitanism and its ‘trans-nationalist’ environment is what makes America richer and what makes it stronger. Furthermore, Bourne wrote that America is the first international nation which makes it so distinctive from other nations and that for the first time in history, the peaceful living side by side has been achieved. At the end of the text ‘Trans-National America’, he urges the younger generations to accept this cosmopolitanism and to carry it along with self-conscious and fruitful