Transnationality
Monism always reduces to a "one"; pluralism is its nemesis. Nonetheless, monism is, as Ben-Gurion saw, more of a posture than anything else: there is no social or political world that doesn't mix diverse ingredients in differing measures, sometimes comfortably, often producing tensions. A democrat's concern is these combinations and tensions. What allows citizens and groups of citizens, indeed a society as a whole, to benefit
from or simply live with them? Might it be impossible to benefit from or to live with them?
Since America's cultural and ethnic features are being contested nowadays, these are urgent matters of political argument. The central issue is broadly called "multiculturalism," yet only this term is new. How could the subject not have been raised in a country so marked by waves of immigration? Indeed, many of today's debates—and aspects of the atmosphere surrounding them—were rehearsed with acuity shortly before the entry of the United States into World War I. "Racial panic," as one historian calls it, emerged then. It was a time of immigration, economic problems, and the possibility of war. Eugenics was revived as a "scientific" framework for discussing the newcomers to the country and the problems they brought (and, of course, as a "realistic" way to discuss blacks). Statistics were deployed to demonstrate how the "immigration problem" had produced vice and crime. (In 1908 New York's police chief, Theodore A. Bingham, had charged that "perhaps half of the criminals" in the city were Jews.)[10]
I summarize from Henry F. May, The End of American Innocence (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 346-350. Bingham is quoted in Arthur A. Goren, New York Jews and the Quest for Community: The Kehillah Experiment, 1908-1922 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), 25.
Culture warriors clashed. Radical intellectuals chastised American puritanism, feminists advocated birth control, and conservatives railed that this all augured the end of American civilization. Not surprisingly, politicians joined the fray. Theodore Roosevelt blustered on behalf of "unhyphenated Americanism" and insisted on a "simple motto" for Americans, irrespective of origins: "AMERICA FOR AMERICANS ." Dual allegiances were akin to "moral treason." (His target was especially "German-Americans.") Woodrow Wilson followed suit in the 1916 presidential campaign, going so far as to abjure publicly the "hyphenate vote."[11]
On Roosevelt and Wilson I summarize from John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 198-199. Also see Roosevelt's earlier "True Americanism," in Mario R. DiNunzio, ed., Theodore Roosevelt, An American Mind: Selected Writings (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), especially 170-171.
Dominant Anglo-America feared that immigrants retained loyalties based on their European origins and thus jeopardized "Americanism."Perhaps the most forceful rebuke to this monistic mood was provided by a young, iconoclastic essayist named Randolph Bourne (himself a WASP). Americanization, this radical intellectual proposed, should take place "by the consent of the governed." Americans had to recognize that "America shall be what the immigrant will have a hand in making it, and not what a ruling descendant of those British stocks which were the first permanent immigrants, decides that America shall be."[12]
Randolph Bourne, "Trans-National America," The Radical Will: Selected Writings, 1911-1918 (New York: Urizen Books, 1977), 249.
So he proposed that Americanism be embodied in something original, not in a replica of European nationalism but in a democratic "Trans-National America," as he entitled his now celebrated article. Whereas the Anglo establishment growled at the emergence of "hyphenated-Americans"—German-Americans, Jewish-Americans, Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, and soforth—Bourne reveled in it. "It bespeaks poverty of imagination," he asserted, "not to be thrilled at the incalculable potentialities of so novel a union of men."[13]
Ibid., 255.
He drew an obvious conclusion: the old stock ought to be called English-Americans.A similar summons to American novelty came from John Dewey. He portrayed the American nation as "complex and compound":
Our national motto, "One from Many," cuts deep and extends far. It denotes a fact which doubtless adds to the difficulty of getting a genuine unity. But it also immensely enriches the possibilities of the result to be attained. No matter how loudly one proclaims his Americanism, if he assumes that any one racial strain, only one component culture, no matter how effective it has proved in its own land, is to furnish a pattern to which all other strains and cultures are to conform, he is a traitor to American nationalism. Our unity cannot be a homogenous thing like that of the separate states of Europe from which our population is drawn; it must be a unity created by drawing out and composing into a harmonious whole the best, the most characteristic which each contributing race and people has to offer.[14]
John Dewey, "Nationalizing Education," in The Middle Works, 1899-1924, vol. 10: Essays on Philosophy and Education, 1916-1917 (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985), 204.
Dewey, like Bourne, had been influenced by Horace Mayer Kallen, a liberal American Jewish philosopher. "Democracy," in Kallen's view, "is anti-assimilationist. It stands for the acknowledgement, the harmony, the organization of group diversities in cooperative expansion of common life, not for assimilation of diversities into sameness."[15]
Horace Mayer Kallen, "Zionism and Liberalism," in Arthur Hertzberg, ed., The Zionist Idea (New York: Atheneum, 1959), 529.
Kallen, anticipating Greenberg's argument on plural loyalties, asserted that hyphenation "permeates all levels of life." One is a spouse, a sibling, a friend, a student, a citizen, a church congregant and a member of a nation all at once—and any of these may outweigh in importance the others at a given moment, leading perhaps to various conflicts. But, he also contended, the hyphen unites as much if not more than it divides.[16]Horace Mayer Kallen, "A Meaning of Americanism," in Culture and Democracy in the United States (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1924), 62-63.
Consequently, America should not be a "melting pot"—the term comes from the title of Israel Zangwill's 1908 play—but a land of "cultural pluralism."Bourne, Dewey, and Kallen were celebrants of perpetual motion in Americanism. "America" for them was something unfinished, but with democracy, not teleology, working within. In a similar spirit Michael Walzer, who has retrieved Kallen as a precursor of an intelligent multiculturalism, suggests that "America has no singular national destiny—and to be 'American' is, finally, to know that and to be more or less content with it."[17]
Michael Walzer, "What Does It Mean to Be an American?" in What It Means to Be an American: Essays on the American Experience (New York: Marsilio, 1992), 48-49.
Another way of saying this is that America will be what Americans make of it; they will be what, through democracy, they make of themselves.Kallen's metaphor for a culturally plural America was an orchestra. Each instrument has its own sound, timbre, and notes; all play in a larger composition
that at the same time links them to one another. Such an "American civilization" would be "an orchestration of humanity," but
with this difference: a musical symphony is written before it is played: in the symphony of civilization the playing is the writing, so that there is nothing so fixed or inevitable about its progressions as in music, so that within the limits set by nature and luck they may vary at will, and the range and the variety of the harmonies may become wider and richer and more beautiful—or the reverse.[18]
Horace Mayer Kallen, "Democracy versus the Melting Pot," in Culture and Democracy in the United States, 124-125.
Dewey, in a letter to Kallen, expressed agreement "with your orchestra idea," but he was concerned that "we really get a symphony and not a lot of different instruments playing simultaneously."[19]
Dewey's letter is cited in Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 213.
An orchestra, after all, is not simply a collection. Something makes it a whole, and in America, for Kallen, this was to be liberal democracy. Each citizen would be equally a member of the polity and assimilated into it, while cultural particularities, like the differences between a violinist and a clarinetist, would remain. And the symphony depends on the vitality of the hyphens: they link individuals to the whole and to each other, while allowing them—and needing them—to retain their particular characters. "The hyphen works," observes Walzer, "when it is working like a plus sign."[20]Walzer, "What Does It Mean...," 44.
Bourne's "Trans-National America" was similar to Kallen's orchestra, though one senses in Kallen a little more concern to preserve and in Bourne more urge to invent. Still, they both wanted an America whose diverse components, in Bourne's words, "merge but … [do] not fuse." Bourne wanted nothing to do with the "thinly disguised panic which calls itself 'patriotism.'"[21]
Bourne, "Trans-National America," 255, 258-260.
He asked "What shall we do with our America?" but provided no totalistic—no monistic—answer. Rather, he spoke the language of shaatnez (without using the term, of course). The America he envisioned was constituted by a "weaving back and forth with other lands, of many threads of all sizes and colors. Any movement which attempts to thwart this weaving, or to dye the fabric any one color, or disentangle the threads of the strands, is false to this cosmopolitan vision."[22]Ibid., 262-263.
Bourne developed these themes further in a lecture to Harvard's Jewish student association in 1916. He went so far as to call "trans-nationalism" a "Jewish idea." (He confessed to stealing the term "from a Jewish college mate of mine who, I suspect, is now a member of your Menorah Society here.")[23]
Randolph Bourne, "The Jew and Trans-National America," in War and the Intellectuals: Collected Essays, 1915-1919 (New York and Evanston, Ill.: Harper Torchbooks, 1964), 128. It appeared originally in Menorah Journal, December 1916.
Bourne defined his goal as an "ideal of cooperative Americanism" that allowed the "vigor of cultural self-consciousness without paying the price of terrible likemindedness."[24]Ibid., 126.
But while assimilation was nothing to celebrate, neither was a federation of atavistic groups," a queerconglomeration of the prejudices of past generations, miraculously preserved here."[25]
Ibid., 131.
Transnationalism was a vision of mediation, creating something new and modern. Thus it required innovative political thinking along with cultural vision. Any identification of a state entirely with a single culture or of political with cultural allegiance was to be rejected. The alternative was "a freely mingling society of peoples of very different racial and cultural antecedents with a common political allegiance and common social ends but with free and distinctive cultural allegiances which may be placed anywhere in the world that they like."[26]Ibid., 130.
In other words: political (and, I'd add, social) democracy with multicultural leavening.Zionism, Bourne proposed, could be an inspired transnationalism. It offered the opportunity to transcend "petrifying outworn expressions" of nationalism by designing "a non-military, a non-chauvinistic state." This "national centre" would serve the religious and cultural needs of Jews and also be a refuge from oppression. It would not pretend to be the political homeland of all Jewry, for this, Bourne reckoned, might jeopardize Jews elsewhere. Instead, "cultural allegiance and political allegiance" needed to be balanced so that "a Jew might remain a complete Jew and at the same time be a complete citizen of any modern state where he happened to live and where his work and interests lay." (Dewey expressed similar sentiments on Zionism.)[27]
Ibid., 129-131. Dewey's views are in an article published in 1917 in the same Menorah Journal that earlier printed Bourne's lecture. He wrote:
If I do not mistake, the cause of Zionism has great claims upon those who are interested in the future organization of the peaceful intercourse of nations, because it not only guarantees freedom of cultural development in that particular spot in which the new nation is formed, but because it gives leverage for procuring and developing cultural nationality in all the other countries which harbor within themselves large numbers of the Jewish folk. Moreover, the Zionistic state would stand forth to the world as an inspiring symbol of victory against great odds, against seemingly insuperable odds, of the rights of nationality to be itself. From this point of view I feel that the Zionistic movement is one that has a right to appeal to the interest and sympathy of statesmen and of all who care for the future of the world's peaceful organization.
John Dewey, "The Principle of Nationality," in The Middle Works, 10:291.
The Zionism Bourne lauded, it should be noted, was that of Kallen and Louis Brandeis (the latter was then helping to obtain American backing for the Balfour Declaration). One imagines that Bourne would have especially appreciated Greenberg who, though devoted to the creation of a Jewish state, also warned sternly against "idolaters of the state," those who consider "the state as the object of absolute loyalty, to which all other loyalties must be subordinated at all times and under any circumstances."[28]
Greenberg, "Patriotism and Plural Loyalties," 173.
Of course Bourne knew not Jabotinsky; surely he would have regarded him as a Zionist version of what he wanted to avoid in Americanism.[29]Bourne would surely have had difficulties with the "statism" (mamlakhtiyut) advocated by the mature Ben-Gurion as well. See above, this chapter, note 4.
What attracted Bourne to Zionism was the possibility of "a union between the noble old Law and the most enlightened spirit of modern welfare…. An ancient spirit of justice and sobriety, expressed with all the technique of modern science and sense of social welfare—what could more perfectly symbolize the nationalism which will keep our old earth rich, sweet and varied?"[30]Bourne, "The Jew and Trans-National America," 131-132.
Bourne's passion for variation and American multiplicity—for an American multi-shaatnez —reflected, he believed, an important trend in the modern world, namely, an increased dispersal and intermixing of peoples. "The age-old problems of Jewish nationalism," he proposed, "have
become the burning problems of other dispersed nationalities."[31]
Ibid., 127.
Bourne, like Kallen, underestimated the strength of monistic nationalism in the world and indeed of assimilationism in America, which never became quite the federation of nationalities they envisaged. Nonetheless, the issues they raised and, as important, the spirit in which they approached them eight decades ago remain vital at the dawn of the twenty-first century. For we live too in a time of intermixing; thanks to revolutions in technology and communications and the reshaping of national and state boundaries, no people can live alone or afford to try to do so. It is a time in which America and its Jews will have to reinvent themselves yet again. "The political ideas of the future will have to be adjusted to a shifting world-population, to the mobility of labor, to all kinds of new temporary mixings of widely diverse peoples, as well as to their permanent mixings."[32]Ibid.
The point is as fresh as when Bourne penned it (although it is capital that is especially mobile nowadays, to the dramatic disadvantage of labor).At the same time there is in fact an American melting pot and the fire stoking it remains steady. It is fed as much by America's past self-image as by the desires of many of today's immigrants. In the intellectual world the melting pot has been defended anew and multiculturalism attacked vigorously from a mainstream liberal perspective by one of our most distinguished historians. In The Disuniting of America Arthur Schlesinger Jr. is as concerned with what constitutes the "newness" of America as Bourne was in the 1910s. But while Bourne, like Kallen and Dewey, reacted against nativist definitions of "Americanism," Schlesinger reacts against recent scholarship done in the name of multiculturalism and corresponding demands by multiculturalists for a radically pluralist politics. He finds much of the scholarship spurious (with good reason) and he fears (again with reason) that much of the politics could dissolve all cohesion in America's polity.
Schlesinger envisages an America of individual citizens alone, rejecting subnational, that is, group, identities on behalf of an unadulterated Americanism. This type of Americanism, he maintains, perhaps with an echo of Theodore Roosevelt, is what made the United States something new. In this country "a brilliant solution for the inherent fragility of a multiethnic society" was fashioned: "the creation of a brand-new national identity, carried forward by individuals who, in forsaking old loyalties and joining to make new lives, melted away ethnic differences." At the same time Schlesinger insists that we acknowledge that the solvent was Anglo-Saxon, that the ideas underlying the best in American democracy, ranging from individual liberty to cultural freedom, are European in origin. "It may be
too bad that dead White European males have played so large a role in shaping our culture," he states, "but that's the way it is." This is just "humdrum historical reality, not conspiratorial teaching."[33]
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Disuniting of America (New York: Norton, 1992), 13, 122.
Schlesinger's view of American novelty is encapsulated in the claim that the melting pot is unique. In fact, this isn't entirely so. Nationalism and national identities are themselves modern phenomena, products of the late eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. In most cases European nationalists sought a basic cultural and political uniformity—the assimilation of populations into a monistic identity—over a territory. America's incorporation of immigrants may be remarkable and singular in various ways, but it also parallels the efforts by emerging European national states to incorporate diverse regional populations, many with their own vernaculars who were previously distinct and territorially separate. Creating a new national identity out of populations with antecedent loyalties is thus not an American invention. In contrast, it seems to me that a vision of transnational America, of shaatnez America, has true originality. Bourne, it should be recalled, conceived it in opposition to European forms of nationalism, whose chief characteristic was precisely the transformation of old, mostly local and religious loyalties into a monistic identity. It is the identity (or identities) and richness that might come of a transnational America that would be a novelty.
There is a parallel problem in Schlesinger's discussion of the European origins of what is best in American democratic culture. The difficulty, of course, is not ideas like individual liberty or the rule of law. Nor is it the fact that such ideas came to America from Europe. They are very good ideas and they did come here with Europeans, though, pace some friends and some foes of multiculturalism, how they arrived does not determine their validity. Yet slavery, racial segregation, and the extermination of Native Americans are no less Anglo-American then the political ideas Schlesinger acclaims. And as the late John Plamenatz, a formidable scholar of political thought to whom anti-Western multiculturalist sentiments cannot be ascribed, pointed out long ago, today's vocabulary of freedom may come from Europe, but that doesn't make the idea of freedom "peculiarly, or originally, European." Moreover, liberty of conscience, which, he argued, is of specifically European lineage, came about as a consequence of brutal and bloody religious wars in the sixteenth century.[34]
John Plamenatz, Man and Society (London and New York: Longman, 1963), 1:45. Plamenatz's chapter "Liberty of Conscience" provides a trenchant overview of the evolution of this idea.
One cannot define the West's legacy selectively, lauding freedom of religion as central while making, say, the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre (or the Holocaust) secondary. To inform university students that John Locke provided theoretical justification for expropriating land from the Indians
and that among America's founders were men who proclaimed inalienable human liberties while owning other human beings is also not a conspiracy to destroy the West and America. Nor is there a conspiracy when a new generation of historians—they are not all charlatans—seeks to rectify past failures to give proper due in history books to minorities and women.
What Schlesinger does not address adequately in his book—here he is like many foes of multiculturalism—are broader questions concerning the place of cultural tolerance within political democracy and the weight of the protest by Bourne, a dead white American male, against Americanization without consent of the governed. Schlesinger, as a liberal, wants to speak of Unfinished America, and rightly so—but then he reifies what he calls humdrum historical facts. It seems to me that Dewey provided an alterative liberal approach when he wrote that
the American is himself Pole-German-English-French-Spanish-Italian-Greek-Irish-Scandinavian-Bohemian-J ewish and so on. The point is to see to it that the hyphen connects instead of separates. And this means at least that our public schools should teach each factor to respect each other, and shall take pains to enlighten all as to the great past contributions of every strain in our composite make-up. I wish our teaching of American history in the schools would take more account of the great waves of immigration by which our land for over three centuries has been continuously built-up, and make every pupil conscious of the rich breadth of our national make-up.[35]
Dewey, "Nationalizing Education," 206.
Supplement Dewey's list with some more recent immigrant groups and some descendants of older inhabitants who did not come to these shores as immigrants, and here is an educational prescription—call it cultural pluralist, multicultural, transnational, or one of shaatnez —for an America that appreciates as much as it accepts heterogeneity.