¹ The term was first used in 1924 by Horace Kallen.

² To be sure, the question of American identity has always been inseparably related to questions if its ethnic origins. Depending partly on when one dates its founding, America's national identity is determined either to be ethnically pure, a mixed amalgam of different races and nationalities, or a mixed and fundamentally unmeltable entity. See, for instance, Omi, Michael and Winant, Howard, Racial Formation in the United States (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986), Ch. 1Google Scholar. Indeed, as Norman Jacobson has argued, the question of American identity and the meaning of America itself is complicated further by the fact that the “idea of America” preceded its discovery by European settlers. As early as 1519, European intellectuals began to refer to America as a once and future idea, partly fantasy and partly reality. A possession of the European imagination, and a term over which the European mind battled in its efforts to come to terms with its own failures and disappointments, America became a repository of European expectations and illusions. It symbolized at once the absence of European culture and an emblem of what could be, the potentiality and testing ground of their noblest ideals. Even today, the word “America” is ambiguous, denoting the name of an entire hemisphere, and connoting at the same time a place, unspecified and indefinite.

³ Bourne, Randolph S., “Trans-national America,” Atlantic Monthly, 118 (07 1916), 86–97Google Scholar, and reprinted in Resek, Carl (ed.), War and the Intellectuals, Essays by Randolph S. Bourne, 1915–1919 (New York: Harper, 1964), 123Google Scholar. All citations are from the reprinted edition.

⁴ The etymology of “culture” falls into three traditions. The first views culture as the intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development of a civilization. It focusses on the ideal of “cultivation” as the standard of a nation's progress. The second defines culture as a way of life of a people or group, or a form of life peculiar to a specific period of time. This tradition begins with Herder (and implicitly with Hegel) and informs Thomas Jefferson's and de Tocqueville's studies of American political culture, and influences as well Charles Beard and Franz Boaz in the 1910s. The third refers to the works and practices of intellectual and artistic production. This conception focusses on the aesthetic processes, relations and artifacts that constitute a nation's ideational identity. The first and third senses of the term are closely related, and in the case of Matthew Arnold virtually identical. Bourne's conception of culture and “national culture” in particular falls in the second tradition primarily, as did the cultural nationalism of the writers on the Seven Arts. But he also wrote of culture in the third sense, in terms of the literature and art of a people. This hybrid sense of culture, the convergence of the second and third definitions, finds its contemporary expression in the works of the Manchester school, among them Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson, who understand culture to be a collective creation; not a fixed symbol system but a continuously constituted structure of meanings, created by family, community and work. In the following, the hybrid sense of culture will be assumed.

⁵ The phrase is May, Henry's The End of American Innocence (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1959). 333.Google Scholar

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⁷ Fernandez, Ronald, “Getting Germans to Fight Germans: The Americanizers of World War I,” Journal of Ethnic Studies, 9 (Summer, 1981), 52–56.Google Scholar

⁸ Pozzetta, George E., “The Italian Immigrant Press of New York City: The Early Years 1880–1915,” Journal of Ethnic Studies, 1 (Fall, 1983), 3Google Scholar. For insider views of the urban immigrant experience, see also Herscher, Uri D., “The Metropolis of Ghettos,” Journal of Ethnic Studies, 4 (Summer, 1976) 2, 33–47.Google Scholar

⁹ Nativism is well entrenched in American political history, its cultural theories and immigration policies, beginning as early as 1609. See Bernard, William S., “Immigration: History of U.S. Policy,” Thernstrom, Stephan, Orlov, Ann and Handlin, Oscar (eds.), Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 486–95Google Scholar. For the definitive history of nativism at the turn of the century, see Higham, John, Strangers in the Land (New York: Atheneum, 1959).Google Scholar

¹⁰ Rogin, ibid.

¹¹ Roosevelt, Theodore, quoted in Kazin, Michael, “The New Historians,” New York Times Book Review (2 07 1989), 18.Google Scholar

¹² Wilson, Woodrow, quoted in Kennedy, David M., Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 24, 87.Google Scholar

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¹⁴ For the shift from classical liberalism, focussing on the rights of the individual, to corporate liberalism, see Lustig, R. Jeffrey, Corporate Liberalism: The Origins of American Political Theory, 1890–1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).Google Scholar

¹⁵ John Higham has usefully sorted out the competing theories of American national identity and its ethnic origins that came to prominence between 1880 and 1920 in “Immigration and the Redefinition of America in the Early Twentieth Century,” a speech delivered at the New York Public Library, 1 July 1986. He suggested that in the nineteenth century Anglo-conformity and the melting pot theses frequently overlapped in an often unrecognized and built-in contradiction, but by the twentieth century the split became apparent. He suggests the divergence was due to a generational change in the intellectual community, as those of the genteel tradition were replaced by the “young intellectuals” of progressive and pragmatist inclinations. My emphasis is on the role of preparedness imperatives, as they affected both generations, creating a schism not only between generations but within them as well. Bourne, in particular, differed from his progressive and pragmatist counterparts on issues of military participation, nationalism, social reform, etc.

¹⁶ Sollors, Werner, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), passimGoogle Scholar; see his acceptance of consent adaptations that are indistinct from assimilation.

¹⁷ Ross, Edward A., quoted in Clayton, Bruce, Forgotten Prophet: The Life of Randolph Bourne (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984), 190–91.Google Scholar

¹⁸ de Crevecoeur, Hector St. John, Letters from an American Farmer (1782; New York: Fox, Duffield Co., 1904), 54–55.Google Scholar

¹⁹ An excellent study of the melting pot thesis is Gleason, Philip's “The Melting Pot: Symbol of Fusion or Confusion?” American Quarterly, 16 (1964), 20–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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²² Kallen, Horace Meyer, “Democracy versus the Melting Pot,” Nation, 100 (02 18–25, 1915), 190–94, 217–20Google Scholar. See also Kallen, , “Zionism and the Struggle Towards Democracy,” Nation, 101 (23 09 1915), 379–80Google Scholar, and Kallen, , The Structure of Lasting Peace (1918)Google Scholar, quoted in Sollors, , 151Google Scholar. For informative analyses of Kallen's thought and its influences on Bourne, see Sollors, , 97, 99, 151, 181–83, 186Google Scholar and ibid., 204–11, 213, 220.

²³ James, William's idea of a pluralistic universe was fleshed out in A Pluralistic Universe (1909)Google Scholar, but its initial outline was hinted at in The Will to Believe (1897).Google Scholar

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²⁶ Potok, Chaim, in Shepard, Richard F., “Chaim Potok, Man of Contrasts,” New York Times (2 11 1986), 71.Google Scholar

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²⁸ Veblen, Thorstein, “The Intellectual Pre-eminence of Jews in Western Europe” (1919)Google Scholar, reprinted in Lerner, Max (ed.), The Portable Veblen (New York: Viking Press, 1948), 467–79Google Scholar. Veblen's significant essay regarding Jewish “exceptionalism” was written three years after Bourne's study of Zionism, and they are both of the same spirit.

²⁹ The benefits of a double citizenship applied equally to Afro-Americans, although Bourne did not explicitly address the issue of race. Bois, W. E. B. Du, whose Souls of Black Folk (1902)Google Scholar Bourne had read, told of his own struggles to reconcile his racial and national identities, “two warring ideals in one dark body.” “Am I an American or am I a Negro?,” he asked in another book. “Can I be both? Or is it my duty to cease to be a Negro as soon as possible and be an American?” Du Bois understood that assimilation would have to take place within the terms of an Anglo-Saxon hegemony, requiring a sacrifice of one part of his self. It was a price he was not willing to pay.

³⁰ Bourne, ibid.

³¹ For the importance of cosmopolitanism for American intellectuals, see Hollinger, David A., “Ethnic Diversity, Cosmopolitanism, and the Emergence of the American Liberal Intelligentsia,” American Quarterly, 27 (05, 1975), 133–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Cooney, Terry A., The Rise of the New York Intellectuals: Partisan Review and Its Circle, 1934–1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), Ch. 1Google Scholar. For the decline of cosmopolitanism, see Higham, , Strangers in the Land, 250–54.Google Scholar

³² Bourne, , “The Jews and Trans-national America,” 130–131Google Scholar, emphasis added. For the dangers of an atrophied cultural identity see, for instance, Kingston, Maxine Hong, Tripster Monkey: His Fake Book (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989).Google Scholar

³³ See Peiss, Kathy, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn of the Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986).Google Scholar

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³⁵ Roederer, George F. Jr., “What have Modernists Looked At? Experiential Roots of Twentieth-Century American Painting,” American Quarterly, 39 (Spring, 1987), 56–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Corn, Wanda, “The Artist's New York,” typescript (unpublished)Google Scholar. The entire issue of American Quarterly (Spring, 1987) is devoted to “Modernist Culture in America.”Google Scholar

³⁶ Bourne, Randolph, “A Sociological Poet,”Google Scholar (n.d.), ibid., 521–22. See Singal, Daniel Joseph's careful attention to the contradictions in American modernism, “Towards a Definition of American Modernism,” American Quarterly, 39 (Spring, 1987), 7–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see David A. Hollinger, “The Knower and the Artificer,” ibid., 37–55.

³⁷ Morris, Aldon D., The Origins of the Civil Rights Movements: Black Communities Organising for Change (New York: Free Press, 1984), 139–173Google Scholar. I am grateful to Don Culverson for this reference and for discussions on the nature and possibilities of prefigurative politics.

³⁸ Breines, Winnie, Community and Organization in the New Left, 1962–1968 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989).Google Scholar

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