Casey Blake's Beloved Community

...Although Blake would have us believe otherwise, it is not clear from his scrupulously honest narrative that his four critics were ever able to envision a truly heterogeneous public culture...

...Blake's introduction of "republicanism" is at once characteristic of recent self-consciously radical historiography—and problematic...

...Yet in elevating culture over conventional politics, these critics were drawn to consensual and, often, hierarchical forms of collective life...

...Seven Arts is probably best remembered as the magazine that published Randolph Bourne's brilliant, stinging critique of John Dewey, his teacher...

...Yet perhaps I worry too much, for in conclusion Blake does offer a balanced and wise appraisal of the significance of Bourne, Brooks, Frank, and Mumford: Too often, in the criticism of Mumford and the other Young Americans, this generous vision of a democratic culture gave way to a rhetoric of mystical wholeness, prophetic leadership, and organic mutuality that dissolved politics in silent communion and emptied their ideal of community of the voices and aspirations of real people in real communities...

...But by insisting that the fully realized self needs a sense of place—a distinct cultural location—and that a democratic polity can flourish only when embedded in a rich "human ecology" of symbolic form, the Young American critics made a precious contribution to our understanding of the relationship between politics and culture...

...The relation of these intellectuals to a democratic public was never clarified in their writings...

...His decision to treat them as a group, interweaving their lives and works, illuminates the response of intellectuals to the exhaustion of the bourgeois family and its cultural ideals in fin de siecle America...

...Mumford is no doubt the best remembered of the group...

...Yet I am more impressed by Blake the historian than Blake the critic...

...The times gave them no leisure in which to mature, to develop their thought systematically...

...it is itself a work of cultural criticism...

...Dewey never acknowledged the force of Bourne's criticism, but in Experience and Nature (1925), The Public and Its Problems (1927), and Art as Experience (1934), he deepened his thought as if he were incorporating Bourne's perspective into his own...

...In any case, does the republican label fit these critics...

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...If the interrelations of cultural, political, and social democracy are underdeveloped in the work of Blake's group, it is ironic that they were so anxious to attack John Dewey, a critic in whose philosophy cultural, political, and social democracy unambiguously implied each other within a world of diversity...

...Blake is interested in the first half, when Brooks was a powerful critic of the genteel tradition inherited by his generation...

...The other three writers, well known in their time, have not worn well, save, perhaps, for Bourne as a sort of cult figure of those who admire his antiwar essays and his articulation of a cosmopolitan American culture...

...In context Bourne is clearly referring to the making of a pluralistic, cosmopolitan America...

...Unlike Dewey (again), they did not imagine a public in which intellectuals and artists were among the diverse and contending voices that might define a democratic public...

...His America's Coming of Age (1915) as well as other early essays carried the message, as Lionel Trilling put it, "that ideas should be related to the actual life of a people, that the national existence should be of a kind that permitted ideas to affect it...

...Distinctively American but cosmopolitan, modernist in commitment but democratic and constructive in spirit, Seven Arts was, in the phrase of Henry May, the "pure distilled essence" of the bohemian intellectuals of the 1910s...

...Beginning with Christopher Lasch's The New Radicalism in America (1965), historians have tended to be uncomfortable about the intensely personal roots of the cultural criticism of the intellectuals associated with Bourne...

...Historians have been inclined to interpret the shift from the nineteenth-century concern for 594 • DISSENT Books "character," a sense of moral being defined historically and in public terms, to the twentiethcentury obsession with "personality" as a symptom of the emergence of what Philip Reiff has called the "therapeutic" society, a cultural mode tending more toward the quest for material goods in the department store than for moral good in the political sphere...

...Blake stresses their effort to define a cultural politics characterized by antistatism, committed to decentralization and to the nourishment of civil society...

...Blake boldly turns this supposed liability into an asset...

...But his book is more than a history of an important movement in American cultural criticism...

...The preoccupation of these writers with "personality" is presented by Blake as a strength...

...One of the great shortcomings of Lewis Mumford, for example, is the contrast between his democratic professions and his impoverished conception of democratic practice, between the vitality of his rhetoric of public life and the empty and static quality of the public life he proposed, as it was represented, for example, in the film The City (1939...

...Repression of the "full" self always worried them more than class oppression...

...Casey Blake is the first to treat these writers as a group, and he has written sensitive biographical analyses and penetrating criticism...

...More than that—Blake does not make this point—it shows how narrow was the actual critical range of Mumford, Frank, and Brooks...

...The last clause ("the Beloved Community"), which in its romantic communitarianism discomfits me, is the focal point of Blake's interest...

...Waldo Frank is least well remembered, although he does not deserve such obscurity...

...Someone as interested in cultural and political diversity as was Bourne is an unlikely republican...

...If Blake the critic sometimes gets carried away by his enthusiasm for a nostalgic vision of community, Blake the historian clarifies our understanding of this critical quartet...

...Yet in The Golden Day (1926) Mumford repeated Bourne's critique of 1917...

...But if so, their vision of how to effect a social transformation is exceedingly difficult to locate...

...Van Wyck Brooks's career falls into two phases...

...A brilliant writer, Bourne was a leader of the young prewar intellectuals, but his career was prematurely cut off when he died in the influenza epidemic of 1918...

...12.95 paper...

...In fact, when the quest for community expresses itself most strongly in these four critics—whether in Frank's dream of mystical union or in Mumford's decentralized cities—one notices a disregard (except in the case of Bourne) of America's pluralist promise and, often, the democratic public...

...Bourne claimed that Dewey's philosophy lacked poetic imagination and that it left the relation of values to ends unresolved...

...Perhaps the Socialist party and other working-class political movements might have been expected to do the work of social and economic—as opposed to cultural—criticism...

...Although Blake seeks to portray a linear pattern of growth and clearer conviction in the work of Bourne, Brooks, and Frank during the 1910s, his account rather impresses upon one how young they were and how unstable was their thought...

...They mainly sought to make America safe for creative people, for intellectuals...

...Pocock in The Machiavellian Moment (1975), apparently is in its use as an anticapitalist counter to liberalism...

...I fear that Blake's celebration of these critics may well lead us back to the nostalgic and moralistic communitarianism of Robert Bellah's Habits of the Heart (1985), a book commended by Blake...

...Blake offers a novel perspective on these critics...

...Although Blake grounds his account in the disordered family life of the bourgeoisie, the dream of a "beloved community" derived as well, according to him, from the romantic critique of industrialism and from what he calls a "radicalized version of civic republicanism...

...the last, a generation younger but terribly precocious, read the magazine, especially Bourne, and formed himself as an intellectual in its image...

...But what is anticapitalist is not always deserving of our faith...

...While the broad outlines of their positions are clear, they never crystallize—and only in part because they were anxious to avoid the trap of "premature crystallization...

...But this argument was never made by the four critics themselves...

...To his credit, Blake acknowledges the peculiarity of this relentless—and seemingly uninformed—attack on Dewey...

...Although Beloved Community does not make the Seven Arts magazine its centerpiece, it could have, for the book is about a mode of cultural criticism first given form in that magazine Casey Blake's subject, as his subtitle indicates, is "the cultural criticism of Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, and Lewis Mumford...

...It may even be true that their resistance to industrial culture constituted a form of political radicalism...

...Insofar as Blake is championing a tradition of radical criticism, such an untheorized division of labor is a serious defect...

...His attack on Dewey's "pragmatic" support of American participation in World War I resulted in the withdrawal of the magazine's patron, thus ending its career...

...While the republican ideal of participation and public spiritedness is appealing, these virtues are closely associated with more troubling tendencies, including a bias toward social homogeneity and an exclusion of economic issues and gender politics from the public realm...

...As a practical politics, which is not Blake's story, such a claim might be developed...

...Blake is right to recognize this part of Bourne, but it is not clear that this rhetoric enhances Bourne's claim as a major critic...

...One might argue that the narrowness of their perspective could be excused because of the FALL • 1991 • 595 presence of a significant socialist movement...

...Bourne, Brooks, Frank, and Mumford offered moving critiques of industrial culture without much advancing understanding of industrial society...

...At its best his criticism (as in Our America [19191) matched that of the other three, though he could drift off into mysticism...

...Even those drawn to their work have treated the psychological needs that impelled these intellectuals as at least partially disabling...

...The appeal of this tradition, delineated for historians by J.G.A...

...The development of personality and a loving community may have implied, as Blake insists, a reconstructed society...

...Always honest and insightful enough to point out the liabilities of his four critics, Blake remarks that "culturalism ran the risk of sacrificing the civic culture of democracy to the authority of a mobilized intelligentsia...

...The radicalism of the four critics devoted strikingly little attention to the Marxist and liberal concerns for social justice...

...34.95 hardcover...

...Blake, however, argues that the impulse toward personal fulfillment can fuel radical critique as well as accommodationist consumerism...

...The first three wrote for Seven Arts...

...Yet Blake chooses to emphasize personality and community to the near exclusion of that theme...

...Where other recent critics, including myself, have been impressed by the cosmopolitan ideal articulated by Bourne, Blake emphasizes a different aspect of Bourne's thought, exemplified in the following sentence from "Trans-National America" (1916): "All our idealisms must be those of future social goals in which all can participate, the good life of personality lived in the environment of the Beloved Community...

...He insists that we ought to take more seriously the constructive, even radical, possibilities inherent in the modernist shift toward heightened awareness of the inner self...

...While not uncritical of Bourne, Brooks, Frank, and Mumford, Blake identifies strongly with their cultural critique...

...Though it lasted only sixteen months, the magazine Seven Arts (1916-17) defined an important cultural moment in the United States...

...Bourne's brilliant attack on Dewey's support of the war is easy enough to grasp and appreciate...