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The Critic Who Refuted Trumps World View in 1916
The most sweeping rebuke to the Trump Administration’s ethnonationalist world view can be found in the July issue of The Atlantic. That it’s the July, 1916, issue is a testament to how retrograde that world view is, and also to the prophetic insight of the essay’s author, Randolph Bourne, a young critic whose insights are more essential to American hopes now than when he articulated them a century ago.
Bourne, who was born in New Jersey, in 1886, built his reputation in the nineteen-tens writing essays that exhorted men and women of his generation to cast off stale traditions. The recently launched New Republic published his book reviews and his reports on the progressive education system of his mentor, John Dewey. But in his piece for The Atlantic, which he wrote when he was twenty-nine, the writer stretched beyond anything he had yet attempted: to meet the challenge of a national crisis. In his time, as in ours, America was undergoing rapid demographic change. Immigration levels in the first decades of the twentieth century neared all-time highs, thanks to the millions who arrived from Italy, Poland, and other countries in Southern and Eastern Europe. A hit play of 1908 supplied a metaphor for what was supposed to happen next: “America is God’s Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming!”
Bourne, who was born in New Jersey, in 1886, built his reputation in the nineteen-tens writing essays that exhorted men and women of his generation to cast off stale traditions. The recently launched New Republic published his book reviews and his reports on the progressive education system of his mentor, John Dewey. But in his piece for The Atlantic, which he wrote when he was twenty-nine, the writer stretched beyond anything he had yet attempted: to meet the challenge of a national crisis. In his time, as in ours, America was undergoing rapid demographic change. Immigration levels in the first decades of the twentieth century neared all-time highs, thanks to the millions who arrived from Italy, Poland, and other countries in Southern and Eastern Europe. A hit play of 1908 supplied a metaphor for what was supposed to happen next: “America is God’s Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming!”
https://www.newyorker.com/books/second-read/the-critic-who-refuted-trumps-world-view-in-1916?mbid=social_twitter
For those who can't afford to subscribe to the New Yorker and have used up all the 'free' views, here is a link to Randolph S. Bourne's essay Trans-National America in PDF form:
http://www.unz.org/Pub/AtlanticMonthly-1916jul-00086