Dwelling on the Superficial

...He advises us to redefine this problem into the question of loming the American Civil Liberties Union Then what ot the reality of human choice7 Was our decision to join or not to join a determined one' The translation of philosophical issues into social ones seems to founder And when Dewey signed his pupils' naturalist manifestoes, one wonders how his enthusiasm for Whitehead's panpsy-chist cosmology fitted into the picture Although biographies usually do not try to recount the memorials and services held for their subjects during the 20 years after their deaths, Dykhuizen's devotes some pages to this He tells especially of the commemoration in Burlington m October 1972, when Dewey's ashes were buried, and where the author spoke on "Dewey and Vermont," with Sidney Hook and the university's president as fellow-speakers The chronicle is as dignified as a church yearbook, but alas, is a distortion of what took place?since the actual occurrence was like the famous reception scene in the Marx brothers' A Night at the Opeia The audience milled around impatiently, waiting for the president to appear After a half-hour, as the remaining speakers were desperately preparing to begin, the president arrived, and cheerfully explained that he had been playing tennis, and had forgotten all about the Dewey meeting The chief speaker got the impression that Dewey now meant very little to the University of Vei-mont The whole situation was symbolic of the status of Dewey's ideas as well as of the new crop of university administrators The ineptness of the Vermont representatives, furthermore, led to a deep injustice Alice Dewey, who was John's wile from 1886-1927, and the moving spirit of the Laboratory School in Chicago, is not buried by his side That place is occupied by his second wife, whom Dewey's children, as the son Frederick once wrote, would have nothing to do with Dykhuizen's genteel narrative omits all such discordant facts And the professor tends to be parsimonious about acknowledgments, conveying the impression that more of his research was the outcome of independent discovery than is actually the case Finally, I should point out that the introduction to Dykhuizen's book, by Harold Taylor, a former president of Sarah Lawrence College, stoops to academic demagogy Taylor writes "The generation of young Americans of the 1960s who began to take their lives and their education into their own hands and to take up the work of educational and social change on their own terms, are the philosophical descendants of John Dewey ' He might talk this over with such students of Dewey in the University Centers for Rational Alternatives as Sidney Hook, Paul Kurtz and Sidney Ratner Evidently Taylor has forgotten what Dewey called the "method of intelligence" It does not add to the integrity of this book that its author acquiesced to such an introduction...

...Dwelling on the Superficial The Life and Mind of John Dewey By George D\khutzen Southern Illinois 429 pp $15 00 Reviewed by Lewis S. Feuer Professor of Sociology, University of Toronto JOHN DEWEY was a Vermonter who rebelled against a New England culture he felt had inflicted an "inward laceration" on him and had likewise eviscerated the intellectual life of his teacher, HAP Torrey To make his career, Dewey went to the Midwest His biographer, George Dykhui-zen, is a Midwesterner who migrated to Burlington, Vermont, where for 40 years he taught undergraduates "The Making of the Modern Mind," and experimented with a course on the social philosophy of American agriculture He became integrated into the community from which Dewey felt estranged, joined its Congregational Church and Republican party, and avoided embroilment in controversial issues With their life motivations so different, a challenge was posed to the biographer's powers of psychological insight and imagination, a challenge that Dykhurzen has failed to meet If this book had been called A Chronicle of the Life and Writings of John Dewey, it would have been well described The author is most comfortable, and makes an important contribution, when he reports from old college catalogues, college magazines, and official correspondence housed in university archives We learn the titles of the lectures Dewey gave at different times, we follow him from his church membership to his decision for unchurchment, we read the names of his friends and colleagues, and are told that he enjoyed attending ice-skating shows That is, the externals of Dewey's life are admirably presented Dykhuizen's work, however, is billed as the "long awaited, definitive biography ot John Dewey," and that it is not Its shortcomings are so deep that comparison with such masterly efforts as Gay Wilson Allen's William James and Justin Kaplan's Mr Clemens and Mark Twain is hardly suitable Products of a vast erudition in social and intellectual history, combmed with a thorough grasp of their subjects' writings and personal documents, the Allen and Kaplan works brought to bear above all an empathetic understanding The breath that infuses life to a recital of events is absent from Dykhuizen's pages, where characters move like interchangeable names, and background too often consists of sparse bits of third-hand information The central problem for a Dewey biographer is to understand the nature of the powerful drive that propelled the philosopher through several stages in his long career?from Congregational orthodoxy to neo-Kantianism to Hegehan idealism to a democratized Hegehanism to a Darwinian expenmentahsm to a sociological pragmatism and an atheistic naturalism Upon what experiences was his animus against Vermont founded...

...Curiously, the Burlington of Dewey's youth was the Gomorrah of northern New England From a documentary survey not used in Dykhuizen's book, we know that a phenomenal number of prostitutes were active in this lumber transport center, and that Burlington's religious leaders felt the evil affected nearly every household ) Dewey's boyhood companion, John Wright Buckham, thought his friend always resented the fact that Burlington's elite looked down upon his family because his father ran a meat and grocery store At any rate, Dewey had little affection for his home community and associa-tions Rarely, and then simply for ceremonial occasions, did he revisit it He never understood why his colleagues and former students liked to set up their summer dachas in Vermont, and he began to speak warmly of his native state only in his advanced old age All his life Dewey sought sustenance from flamboyant, domineering, emotionally expressive personalities Somehow they helped him to surmount "dualism," to mitigate the thinness, the schematic, abstract character of his own responses A long series of individuals filled this role—his first wife Alice, the educators Ella Flagg Young and Colonel Francis Parker, the Australian actor and free-wheeling therapist F Matthias Alexander, the would-be social prophets, the brothers Francis and Corydon Ford, the millionaire A C Barnes, the inventor of Argyrol, who might have stepped from the pages of Wells' Tono Bungay, the East Side Jewish novelist Anzia Yezierska, with whom Dewey was evidently involved for a time in a romantic relationship, the Italian anarchist Carlo Tresca, the witty and spontaneous Max Eastman, and the brilliant young Jews at Columbia Umversity who became his favorite pupils Several of these friendships came to grief Dewey concluded that Francis Ford was a scoundrel He eventually weaned of Anzia Ye-zierska's high-strung temperament As for Alexander, his therapy led his patient into misadventures When Dewey tried going without his glasses, he kept bumping into the furniture of his apartment I asked Lucy Brandauer, Dewey's youngest daughter, whether Alexander's treatments ever worked with her father She replied that they did, so long as Alexander himself was in the room One wishes that a few of these experiences had been related by Dykhuizen, but some of the people cited are not even mentioned in his chronicle In addition, the characters and incidents that are included in Dykhuizen's book are denied the trans-forming touch of individualizing detail Thomas Davidson makes a brief appearance as "a scholar and writer of note, a close friend of William James," with nothing said of his greatest achievement, guiding the circle of young East Siders that embraced figures hke Morns Raphael Cohen and Louis Dublin in its intellectual and moral self-education —the one successful expenment of its kind in Amencan educational annals Dewey's role in founding the Amencan Association of University Professors in 1913 is reconstructed from official accounts and is therefore missing such personal anecdotes as the one told by Arthur Lovejoy, in his last blind years, of how he went one morning with Dewey to the bank, where Dewey withdrew the money to send Love-joy to Utah for the first AAUP investigation into an "academic freedom" case The formidable personality of G Stanley Hall, Dewey's teacher in psychology at Johns Hopkins, is left shadowy Dykhuizen provides no description of Hall's journey from theology to experimental psychology, interrupted by an interval of Marxist socialism Hall apparently disliked Dewey, and kept him from winning a fellowship He also prevented Dewey from being appointed to the Johns Hopkins faculty on the grounds of lack of competence Unfortunately, a book that has explored these matters is not cited by Dykhuizen Similarly, several works have examined Maxim Gorky's calamitous sojourn in the United States in 1906, which helped rum the chance to rally Amencan public and official opimon in support of Russian freedom, but these have not found their way into Dykhuizen's documentation Consequently, the importance of Dewey's personal involvement in the episode is blurred, Gorky in later years still spoke warmly of Dewey, though he developed a hatred for America Perhaps most revealing is Dykhuizen's bare recording of the Dew-eys' adoption of Sabmo, a small Italian boy Having heard both Lucy Brandauer and Sabino Dewey tell of the events leading to the Deweys' choice of this poor, sick child, standing m an Italian square, one feels that the most beautiful story in the hfe of Alice and John Dewey has been omitted The two years Dewey spent in China are treated inadequately as well, with no attempt to explain his unusual attraction to that country The May Fourth movement in 1919, which much affected him, is rendered by Dykhuizen in secre-tanal fashion "Students at the National University in Peking staged a demonstration against the pro-Japan government" What really happened was that the demonstrators got hold of the Chinese minister to Japan Then, as one of them descnbed it, "Once he was thrown down, we beat him, kicked him, and stamped on him Soon his face and body were covered with blood, and his clothes were nearly stripped off him When we felt sure he was dead, we took to our heels " Dykhuizen's version is more genteel, but it excises actuality China was also the scene of a meeting between Bertrand Russell and John Dewey, and while Dykhuizen narrates the external facts of the encounter, he fails either to comment on or to explain Dewey's sharp dislike for Russell Elsewhere in the volume, Dewey's hostess at a Moscow banquet in 1928 is descnbed as "Mme Kamenoff Trotsky's sister " Not only does Dykhuizen misspell hei name, but he neglects perhaps the more important biographical item, that she was the wife of Lev Ka-menev, one of the troika who ruled the Soviet Union from 1923-25 Nor does he note Dewey's appearance in the Soviet movie The Road to Life, probably the most successful Soviet propaganda film of the early '30s Dewey participated in numerous social and political activities, committees, and interventions throughout his career, and these are summarized in part by Dykhuizen Yet recalling the judgment of Franklin D Roosevelt—not recorded m this biography—that Dewey was "the worst of the intellectuals,' one would have hoped for more than a mere summary Indeed, there is no mention in the book that nght through the New Deal years, Dewey persisted in voting against Roosevelt, supporting instead the Presidential candidacy of the Socialist Norman Thomas Dykhuizen's account of Dewey's years at Columbia is no better, despite the fact that the penod was a nch experience for his subject It offered Dewey a chance to drop his previous preoccupation with education and teaching methods, and to turn to political and economic problems His role as a contnbuting editor to the New Republic gave him great satisfaction With Wesley Mitchell he attended the Armory Show in 1913, that epoch-making event in the history of Amencan art (unrecorded in Dykhuizen's chronicle) By contrast, Dewey's participation in the New School was much less than one would gather from Dykhuizen's descnp-tion At first, it was thought that Dewey might join the founders, Charles Beard, James Harvey Robinson, Alvin Johnson, Thorstein Veblen But when Columbia's President Nicholas Murray Butler proposed to raise Dewey's salary greatly, Dewey felt that in fairness to his family he should remain at the university At this time Randolph Bourne, an intense, hunchbacked thinker who felt a vocation for leading youth, had begun a cnticism of Dewey that Lewis Mumford and Waldo Frank were to elaborate As a result, Dewey did not tully regain his place among American intellectuals until he wrote his series ot articles on the Soviet Union in 1928, a landmark in the history of American fellow-travelensm, today, the pieces read like case studies in the contravention ot scientific method Dykhuizen's book is altogether bland on these issues, and there is no account of Dewey s important controversy with Mumford Dykhuizen s writing, never distinguished occasionally becomes embarrassing, or worse He calls Dewey an "apologist" for American pragmatism (an observation worthy of the Soviet Philosophic Encyclopaedia), and he depicts Dewey during his religious years as praying "as though he really meant business " Dykhuizen concludes that Dewey was a philosophical genius' Yet his summaries of Dewey's writing scarcely confirm this view Dewey's significance was rather that he served as a kind of father-figure for a succession of movements and circles that needed the reassurance of linkage with the American tradition, to have as an ally, John Dewey?morally earnest, with no evident animus against tradition as such?was almost like having Ralph Waldo Emerson himself on your side Thus Dewey is more of a phenomenon in social-intellectual history than in the history of scientific or philosophical advance While James' pages on religious experience, for instance, continue to be read, vibrant as they are with their concern for ultimate issues, Dewey's A Common Faith, with its attempt to repress these questions by means of a busy do-goodism...

...has grown tedious One never knows what Dewey's philosophical views really were Did he believe in free will or determinism...