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Networks of Modernism
Reorganizing American Narrative
By Wesley Beal University of Iowa Press
Copyright © 2015 University of Iowa Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60938-352-7
CHAPTER 1
In Lieu of a Manifesto
Randolph Bourne's "Trans-National America" as an Origin of Network Aesthetics
As he was preparing to return from his Grand Tour, just after having observed nationalist demonstrations in Dresden on the day Austria declared war on Serbia, Randolph Bourne wrote to his friend Alyse Gregory: "there is an interesting prospect in the way of a new radical paper dangling tantalizingly before my eyes. My intransigent reputation, though, is going to damage, I think, my chances of getting any very permanent position." Indeed, his tenure with the New Republic would prove to be rocky and short — just as it would with the Atlantic and Seven Arts throughout the middle and late 1910s. Whether for a congenital intransigence or an ingrained will to dissent, Bourne's inability to sustain good relations with editorial staffs for long fits a broader narrative of his experience on the margins. He broke with his former teacher John Dewey over the perversion of pragmatism to support the war effort. His interests in culture and aesthetics led him to the bohemian scene of Greenwich Village, but, as Christine Stansell details in American Moderns (2000): "he was too much of an unknown for the likes of Mabel Dodge or the Hapgoods" and instead circulated in the lesser known Patchin Place salon (216). Above all, his radical critique of the Great War, its preparedness campaigns, and its anti- German fervor set Bourne at odds with the American mainstream so much that writing assignments were increasingly hard to come by. Hunchbacked from the age of four by a case of spinal tuberculosis and bearing the facial deformities of what he would later describe as a "terribly messy birth," he carried the modern tropes of alienation and the grotesque in his very body. A tragic pariah, at 32 a casualty of the 1918 influenza pandemic, Bourne would be mythologized by later moderns such as John Dos Passos.
Bourne's lack of a social network — or more specifically, his lack of steady affiliation with one of the informal cadres that dotted the modern landscape — left him alienated not only from his peers but also from his legacy in the scholarship of American modernism. Unlike other intellectuals of the period, Bourne is perceived not to have an immediate association with any of the signal projects of modernism, not even the pageant theater or "sociological" fiction that so interested him. Throughout the middle 1910s, Bourne secured a reputation as a public intellectual through his writing on Deweyan education and the generational identity of youth — a reputation that declined in inverse proportion to his increasingly passionate dissent from the Great War and that continues to define the scholarship on Bourne today. But while other public intellectuals, such as Du Bois or Freud, offer readymade inputs to a discussion of modernist innovations such as the New Negro or stream of consciousness, Bourne's influence has proven elusive to scholars of modernisms.
This treatment of Bourne's legacy devalues his signal intervention into the cultural logic of modernism. Although there is no overt statement of "networkism" among the myriad manifestos of the period — no program to rival F. T. Marinetti's 1909 declaration of futurism, the announcement of vorticism in BLAST in 1914, Mina Loy's "Feminist Manifesto" of 1914, and so on — Bourne does this work by proxy. His article "Trans-National America," published in the Atlantic in July 1916, celebrates a distributed understanding of national space to negotiate the diasporic effects of immigration and the homogenizing discourses of Americanism and preparedness, as well as the uniformity of a massified culture. He situates the network as a utopian political model for managing these prewar ruptures in national identity. Whereas Stein's Three Lives (1909), discussed in the introduction, poses an even earlier register of modernist networks, the overt nature of Bourne's expository writing charts a more systematic or codified methodology of distributed thinking. Although "Trans-National America" does not directly invoke the term "network," its adoption of unanimisme, the theory of a networked milieu that Bourne adapted from the French poet and essayist Jules Romains, demonstrates the importance of distributed models to Bourne's essay. This is most prevalent in his vision of a "federated" conception of national space, which would be adopted by his friend and fellow student of Romains, Waldo Frank. Inspired by a poet, Bourne's political thesis would eventually take its place as a surrogate manifesto of network aesthetics, influencing subsequent American moderns' aesthetic experiments both directly and indirectly.
Alongside Bourne's profound marginalization, he maintained an investment throughout his writing in the "Beloved Community" — a term that he adapted from the philosopher Josiah Royce and that would later become a central feature of Martin Luther King Jr.'s politics — marking the cultural logic of modernism not as an abstract dialectical tension but as an experience that Bourne lived perhaps to a greater extent than any other modern American. Bourne's call for a new, networked national identity is at the same time a refashioning of community in this pursuit. As the mass public emerged and began to disrupt conservative assumptions of the knowable community, and as the United States weighed the merits of an identity that lay in a homogenous past or one set in a diasporic future, Bourne recognized that community would have to take a new shape. Although others looked back wistfully to a mythical, preindustrial social whole, Bourne proposed the "federated" space of transnationalism as a flattened, utopian community that would sustain the nation and the globe through the crises of the early century.
Americanism, Cultural Pluralism, Transnationalism
Bourne concludes "Trans-National America" with a call to action that would likely have struck readers as something of a commonplace during the preparedness campaigns. Of his proposed transnationalism, he writes: "Here is an enterprise of integration into which we can all pour ourselves, of a spiritual welding which should make us, if the final menace ever came, not weaker, but infinitely strong" (123). The rather stale preparedness rhetoric of these last lines, however, should not dampen Bourne's major intervention for both the politics and the aesthetics of the modern period. Indeed, "Trans-National America" is an indispensable text for modernist studies because its argument rests on the usefulness of networks in negotiating the period's tensions between fragmentation and totality as they manifested in two political discourses of the prewar years. Americanism and cultural pluralism sought to stabilize a nation in flux, beset by unprecedented rates of immigration into the United States as well as the stressors of the beckoning war in Europe. Behind these tensions, Bourne also addresses the emergence of a massified public that was fundamentally altering conventional understandings of group organization. These prewar discourses were still grappling with the major demographic changes in immigration into the United States, which around 1890 was shifting from the largely British, German, and Nordic populations to new groups — predominantly Slavs, Italians, and eastern European Jews. As David Goldberg demonstrates in Discontented America (1999), by 1910 an increasing number of immigrants came from eastern Europe and the Mediterranean, with the foreign-born constituting some 13 percent of the total United States population and representing as much as 50 percent of some northern cities (141). The arrival of these immigrants heightened xenophobia throughout the preparedness campaigns and the Great War, culminating in the 1924 National Origins Act, which set hardened quotas favoring the more "desirable" nationalities of the pre-1890 immigrants.
To understand the fullness of Bourne's intervention, one must first survey the prevailing discourses of the prewar years. One response to the influx of new peoples was a blanket reassertion of the nation's homogeneity under the aegis of Americanism. Theodore Roosevelt toured the country in 1915 and 1916, advocating war preparedness and national unity with the nativist slogan "100 Percent Americanism." Likewise, Woodrow Wilson invoked the dangers of "hyphenate" voters, particularly German-Americans, during his 1916 reelection campaign (Goldberg 148). Closely attending the nexus of Americanism and preparedness was a renewed investment in Americanization. Frances Kellor, whose Straight America (1916) Bourne reviewed for the New Republic, was a major figure in this movement. She writes: "Preparedness means something more than a larger army and navy. It means also having a united America back of that army and navy" (Kellor 154). Kellor's Americanism emphasizes fusion in service of preparedness but otherwise departs from Roosevelt's nativist and xenophobic brand in calling for progressive projects such as the erasure of illiteracy and the extension of "one American standard of living" to all immigrants (188). "It means," Kellor writes, "putting the American flag above all others, abolishing dual citizenship, and pledging open allegiance to America" (185). Drawing heavily on Kellor, Royal Dixon's Americanization (1916) espouses a beneficent, liberal sort of politics. For example, Dixon advocates the "English only" platform to provide the immigrant better access to civil institutions and to protect him from labor exploitation. "The greatest protection that the schemer and slanderer, the rioter, the blackmailer, and the usurer can have," Dixon explains, "is the ignorance of his opponent" (22). Dixon's vision for America, although largely eschewing xenophobic "hyphenate" language, still posits the nation as a unified, homogenous body to which an immigrant could be inducted through English education, Kellor's "Americanization Day" celebrations, and so on.
Bourne never wrote about Dixon, though his papers list Americanization among the books he read in 1916. His review of Kellor, however, serves as a response to both writers' shared vision of a homogeneous Americanism. Although he applauds Kellor's avoidance of nativism, Bourne remains concerned that any Americanism program "is almost necessarily nativistic in its implications. It is notorious that the conception of national unity which includes military preparedness, industrial mobilization, universal military service, belligerent defense of American rights, is one held largely by the stanchly nativistic element" ("Americanism" 197). Indeed, it seems that "national unity" is for Bourne itself a shibboleth to be suspicious of. Rather, Bourne writes that the "America and its ideal of the future are still in the making, and that a premature cohesion on a basis of belligerent self-protection would defeat that slow learning to live together which a wise and modern Americanism involves" (197). Bourne's refusal of Anglo-Saxon homogeneity as a "premature cohesion" lies at the heart of his rendering of national space in "Trans-National America."
Whereas proponents of "100 Percent Americanism" and even advocates of a progressive model of Americanization located national identity in a mythic, homogenous past, cultural pluralism emerged during the prewar period to argue for a diverse, even diasporic concept of national space. Horace Kallen would coin the term "cultural pluralism" in 1924, but his 1915 essay for the Nation, "Democracy Versus the Melting-Pot," lays out the groundwork of the discourse. Kallen surveys the national space as a striated landscape of disparate cultural centers:
when we consider that portion of our population which has taken root, we see that it has not stippled the country in small units of diverse ethnic groups. It forms rather a series of stripes or layers of varying sizes, moving east to west along the central axis of settlement, where towns are thickest; i.e., from New York and Philadelphia, through Chicago and St. Louis, to San Francisco and Seattle. Stippling is absent even in the towns, where the variety of population is generally greater. Probably 90 percent of that population is either foreign-born or of foreign stock; yet even so, the towns are aggregations, not units. (192)
For Kallen, this ethnic striation spatializes national identity. He points to Scandinavian, German, Irish, and Jewish enclaves as demonstrations of cultural autonomy practiced in the upper Midwest and throughout urban New England (218). And as further proof of the legitimacy of this pluralist national identity, he locates it within the very Anglo-Saxon tradition that "old stock" Americans venerated as an ideal of homogeneity: "England is a state of four nationalities — the English, Welsh, Scotch, and Irish (if one considers the Empire, of many more), and while English history is not unmarred by attempts at unison, both the home policy and the imperial policy have, since the Boer War, been realized more and more upon the voluntary and autonomous cooperation of the component nationalities" (219–20). Kallen's America flatly rejects the smooth homogeneity of Roosevelt's Americanism, instead locating the nation's strength in its perceived weakness, in its fragmentation.
Bourne intervenes with a truly unique innovation, mediating the two polarities — the homogeneous Americanism of Kellor, Dixon, and Roosevelt and the dispersal of Kallen's cultural pluralism — with a vision of the United States as a networked space. Bourne's "Trans-National America" opens with a cavalier dismissal of mythic homogeneity, holding that of the Great War's many outrages for the American public, chief among them was its achieving the demise of the melting pot metaphor of national identity. To recognize the failure of the melting pot, Bourne writes, "is not, however, to admit the failure of Americanization. It is not to fear the failure of democracy. It is rather to urge us to an investigation of what Americanism may rightly mean" (108). The crises of prewar America, he suggests, called for a new understanding of social coherence and a recalibration of the projects of Americanism and Americanization. "America is a transplanted Europe," Bourne writes, "but a Europe that has not been disintegrated and scattered in the transplanting as in some Dispersion. Its colonies live here inextricably mingled, yet not homogeneous. They merge but they do not fuse" (114). Mingled but not homogeneous, balancing dispersion and fusion, Bourne's understanding of American social space clearly hails — and denies — the discourses advanced by Kellor and Kallen. Rather than shoehorn these diverse populations into an idealized fusion, Bourne proposes "a clear and general readjustment of our attitude and our ideal" so that it better aligns with the real, lived space of prewar America (108).
I want to pause to reflect on this phrase — "they merge but they do not fuse" — because it highlights the intervention of Bourne's transnationalism. Of course, on one plane this program negotiates Americanism's demand for unity and cultural pluralism's insistence on the preservation of traditional identity categories. Whereas Kallen's cultural pluralism asserts the virtues of fragmentation, Bourne's "readjustment" instead posits a truly radical rearticulation of community, American space, and of the experience of modernity. This "readjustment" rejects the outdated models of fusion and identity and instead operates on the principles of a distributed network. He acknowledges the entrenchment of "clusters" of immigrants, but instead of merely following Kallen's thesis of striated ethnic enclaves, Bourne casts these clusters as nodes that are the fundamental units of a distributed — not an atomistic — landscape (108). The distributed logic of transnationalism is such that this first, domestic plane opens onto a second, global plane: the first renders a constellation of ethnic traditions within the United States; the second renders a constellar relation between the United States and the globe. Indeed, these two planes are interdependent and often intersectional in Bourne's transnationalism thesis.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Networks of Modernism by Wesley Beal. Copyright © 2015 University of Iowa Press. Excerpted by permission of University of Iowa Press.
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