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out of the mind, personal and social, behind it all. To such
curiosity the academic mind remains feebly unresponsive."

Max Lerner has drawn attention to the fact that Randolph Bourne and Thorstein Veblen, alone of their generation, foresaw the danger of totalitarianism in the modern state. "There has been a sharp reaction against that 'social conscience' and spirit of social service which was so prevalent before the war", Bourne writes. "When the society for which you want to sacrifice your individual interests begins to act hot like a reasonable and mal-leable family but like a careering herd on the rampage, you may be pardoned if you wonder whether the integrity of the individual, and the personal as against the institutional, are not the supreme values of life, and plan to act accordingly . . . . In defeating German militarism there must be defeated the entire conception of sacrificing the individual to the interest of the state." And how prophetic were his words contained in his paper -- *The War of the Cultures* -- words almost identical with those voiced to deaf ears by Henry Adams almost a quarter of a century earlier

-- "This twentieth century world contains an unexpected stores of spiritual as well as material energy so terrific as to suggest the danger of the destruction of that world itself." Henry Adams had written: "As things were going then, it needed less than half a century before 'law' would disappear as a theory or a priori principle and give place to force . . . Explosives

would reach cosmic violence. Disintegration would overcome integration."

There is hardly an act that requires of a man greater moral courage than to reverse his judgment at a moment when such a reversal condemns him to obloquy by the majority of his fellow

citizens, and withdraws from him all chance of a safe living and
a brilliant career. Randolph Bourne's entire philosophy of life
had come tumbling back upon him, for it was Dewey's instrumentalism
and James' Pragmatism that had formed the corner stone of his ed-
ucational theories; this was the philosophy that he had been soaking
up with so much credulous ardour, and communicating with so much
contagious enthusiasm. Now, when Professor Dewey, summoning all
the logic of a mind long trained in logic came out for conscription,
it was as if Randolph saw, in a single illuminating flash, the whole
tragic predicament of the young men of his generation, a generation
that in being trained up to adapt means to ends, had, when the
crisis was upon them, lost the power of distinguishing between
the two and could only follow blindly, without vision or direction,
putting one foot in front of the other as the squirrel treads
its revolving cage.

Of especial interest in making clear Randolph's views at
this time is a letter he wrote to Van Wyck Brooks (March 27, 1918)
and how apposite to our own times! This letter has been published
in full in Vol. I of Twice a Year, and I shall quote from it now
only a few relevant paragraphs. "The war has run into the sand
that fine movement for progressive democracy in which so many
of us found hope. It has shown up what was really nearest to
the liberal heart's desire. A change in institutions not as a means
to life but as something pleasing in itself! The political liberal
somehow seems to assume civilization, assume national life, as-
sume the existence of rich personal living. . . . That anxious
speculation which should normally follow the destruction of so
many hopes, the uprooting of our convictions as to the way the

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world was tending, the discovery of the sinister forces still at work in what we had thought was a slowly emancipating era, has been left wholly unattended in this country. No intellectual leader has cared to think. The defection of Dewey is typical. After years of eloquent opposition to military conscription, he accepts it without a quiver or even an explanation of the steps by which his conviction made so momentous a change. The universities made haste to blacken and to drive into limbo anyone who tried to exercise his mind. Labor, which has been a ferment in other countries where intellect could work to constructive purpose in formulating the aims of the masses, divided here into the sheep and the goats. the sheep sat on the right hand of the father, while the goats were relentlessly hunted and proscribed. The socialists divided into fanatical patriots and neutral pacifists. Even the radicals who supported the international program for a democratic peace and warred against profiteering and intolerance at home were in more haste for immediate results than for the long slow campaign of thought and organization necessary to realize the ideals. Nowhere an effort to get down to bedrock of principles, to find out very clearly what was desirable, and use the materials at our disposal to attain it! Nowhere any clear sense of whither we were drifting or how our ideas and slogans squared to the facts. On the contrary an insensate scramble for action, a positive delight in throwing off the responsibility of thought. And nowhere was this more marked than in the intellectual class.

"The result is that the mind that would speculate about what is going on in American life, or what might be done with it, or what one's own relations is to it, is left without any-

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one to think its thoughts for it. The country must be dotted with dissatisfied people who cannot accept any of the guides offered to them. The childishness of the conventional leads is equalled only by the sterility of the intellectualist leads."

Unfortunately Mr. Brooks' side of their correspondence, together with other valuable letters and papers, must have been contained in a trunk of Randolph's that mysteriously evaporated in transit from one station to another during the time of his active opposition to the war. In spite of the most pertinacious efforts of his most influential friends, the pressure they were able to bring on "high places", this trunk never was recovered.

Professor Dewey never wholly forgave the defection of his old pupil. I remember accompanying Randolph to an evening gathering at his home, far up town, at about this time, and the painful dissagitations of the conversation, which seemed perpetually to hang fire -- first Randolph's questions displacing the silence, then Professor Dewey's answers, which I strained both my ears and my intelligence to follow, wavering and lingering and fading out in the tense stillness.

When _the Seven Arts_ ceased publication because of disagreements on the editorial staff, there was only the _Liberator_, which was unable to pay its contributors more than a nominal fee, and _The Dial_ left, for which Professor Dewey was one of the chief contributors. To his mother Randolph wrote (October 12, 1918) "I have been relieved of my editorial duties on _The Dial_, but I am to be paid my salary just the same and continue to write . . . The rich young man who put up the money to back _The Dial_ this year is a very good friend of mine"

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(Scofield Thayer) and we are both in the same boat. He has strong
tastes and I have strong convictions, and the man who runs the
paper is very much afraid of us both, afraid we will have too
much to say about the policy." And again on November 4th --
"I have been classified as totally and permanently, mentally and
physically unfit for military service, and when this friend re-
turns (presumably Paul Rosenfeld) it will mean that every one
of my friends is exempt from the service in some form or other,
either as criminals out on bail, or married men or psychopaths,
or weaklings" (with what characteristically ironical satisfaction
these words must have been written). . . "On The Dial there has
been some fuss about my being an editor, owing to my radical
views, but I am paid just the same as if I was one, and only have
to write two articles a month. I seem to be in very strong with
the young man who is giving/the money to back The Dial this year,
and he was very angry at their not wanting me as a regular as-
sociate editor. He says he gave his $25,000 largely on the strength
of my contributions, and that So I do not need to worry ap-
parently, as long as the money lasts."

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name would stand always for what was most unenslaved in American life. The services were conducted by the Rev. Norman Thomas, then a famous pacifist, and Randolph was buried in the family plot in Bloomfield, N.J. The date of his death was December 22nd, and it was just six weeks after the signing of the armistice.

His mother was in California at the time of his death, and he had been insistent that her visit to her younger son should not be made anxious by news of his illness. On November 21st he had written to her, "There has been great rejoicing over the peace, in fact, two celebrations owing to a false alarm, and the second was so gay with drunken sailors that no girl was safe on the streets in the evening . . . . Now that the war is over people can speak freely again and we can dare to think. It's like coming out of a nightmare." Not to have been at the bedside of this son in his last illness was to Mrs. Bourne a tragedy from which she never fully recovered. She was a woman who had borne misfortune as the willow yields to a harsh wind. It could toss and bend her, but it could not alter the inherent gentleness of her disposition. To Agnes and Esther she wrote after Randolph's death: "He was so brave that I want to be worthy of him. I often told him that I believed he could do anything. I can't understand how I came to have such a gifted son . . . I like to remember that all the best that came to him came through his own efforts and determination to win out in spite of weakness . . . He has been such a good son and my best times have come through his generosity."

The legend of Randolph Bourne half starving, dependent upon

charity, cut by his friends, a fugitive from justice, has persisted. He had, at the time of his death, eight hundred dollars in the bank, enough ready cash in his pockets to pay all current expenses, and payments due to him for his French translations. He was also receiving a steady, if precarious, income from *The Dial*. This does not however mean that he was not haunted by the spectre of poverty, but rather the reverse. To have, by so many self-denials, such anxious and unremitting industry application, been able to put aside this small margin against destitution, is proof of the extent to which this spectre was never far from him. But it disposes, of the rumour that he had to live on the charity of friends.

As for his friends deserting him, the few that mattered held more closely to him than ever, and he attracted new ones by his bold leadership. It was certainly bitter to have estranged so many of his admirers in the academic world, and to/cut on the street by glassy eyed "patriots", who had once gone out of their way to claim his acquaintance, but courage, as he wrote, "demands exposure to assault", and how prophetic were the words in one of his early essays, and how little had he then foreseen the extent to which, in his own case, they were to be put to the test! "The youth feels a savage pride in the thought that circumstandes can never rob him of his integrity or bring his best self to be dependent on mere change of fortune".

What did most wear upon his spirit was the necessity he was under of continuing to write with no assured outlet for his work. I recall his saying to me with a kind of assumed bravado

-- or was it an irony that masked irresolution? -- that he was
going to throw politics overboard. Miss de Lima discovered his
masterly fragment on the state in the scrap basket after his
death, and his unfinished novel shoved carelessly among some
papers. His gifts had never been more ripe, but he was driven
in at every turn.

With the death of Randolph Bourne the light for many of us
flickered and went out. He was the hope and pride of our tra-
duced and bewildered age. He had kindled the ardour and focussed
the aims of an entire generation of young people. He gave
them the reasons for what their hearts counseled them was
right. His clear vision, his unyielding valor -- but no, it
was something different, something intangible which the word
charm touches but cannot cover. He had the power of perpet-
ually surprising, he conquered in the manner of a Chinese sage,
by humility and wisdom, and by a gallantry that moved our hearts
while it fortified our courage. He woke us up and kept us
awake. His winged darts struck home and punctured holes in
the shams and fanaticisms of men whose follies were sweeping
us forward to what we knew not, and know not where.

Bibliographical Note

Books by Randolph Bourne have been long out of print. He published *Youth and Life* (New York 1913), *The Gary Schools* (New York 1916), and *Education and Living* (New York 1917). Two collections of his essays were published posthumously, *Untimely Papers* (New York 1919) and *The History of a Literary Radical* (New York 1920). His essays and book reviews are voluminous and are to be found in the newspapers and periodicals of his day.

As long ago as 1930 Mr. Lewis Mumford, in an article published in the *New Republic*, made an appeal that a selection of Bourne's writings, "which should hold the quintessence of his spirit" be published. "It was the good fortune of American society to have produced this man. We must not toss that luck away." It is to be hoped that someone will undertake this long neglected task.