War and the Intellectuals:
Bourne, Dewey, and the Fate of Pragmatism

James Livingston
Rutgers University

My purpose here, apart from convincing you that John Dewey was quite possibly right about American entry into World War I, is to address the repression and mutilation of pragmatism by left-wing intellectuals in the twentieth century. These would seem to be very different purposes, but in fact they are the same. If we are to understand how pragmatism acquired its unsavory reputation among leftists everywhere, we must go back to 1917, when Randolph Bourne denounced not only Dewey's decision in favor of American entry but also pragmatism itself as the source of that decision. These almost ancient denunciations would not matter very much, except that they are repeated in every subsequent account of the American Left in World War I, and are recalled if not reiterated in every subsequent critique of pragmatism—they still determine our thinking about Dewey, about pragmatism, and about the war.  Revisiting this primal scene allows us to ask why.  It allows us to convert the following statement, which still serves as a left-wing credential, into a question: Dewey's support for American entry into the Great War demonstrates that pragmatism is a philosophy of acquiescence to "the existing fact," a philosophy that must validate capitalism, accept imperialism, and repudiate socialism.	1
I begin in the confessional mode because I used to take this very statement for granted.  Many years ago, I finished an M.A. in Russian history and switched to U.S. history for the Ph.D.  My original and enduring guide to the historical contours of American culture—my chosen object of study—was Lewis Mumford, whose books of the 1920s and early 30s became sacred texts for me. I went out and found hardback editions of The Golden Day (1926), Herman Melville (1929), and Technics and Civilization (1934). I copied and memorized passages; I modeled my life and work and prose on his, even to the point of using colons instead of periods in endless paragraphs of speculation about American civilization. And so I accepted without question his judgments about pragmatism, which he asserted most emphatically in The Golden Day. It was, he claimed, the "attitude of compromise" perfected by the bewildered "children of industrialism": William James was merely "warming over the hash of everyday experience during the Gilded Age." By the same token, I accredited the antecedents of these judgments in the arguments of Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, Harold Stearns, and their distant echoes in the more recent arguments of C. Wright Mills, Christopher Lasch, and Jeffrey Lustig. Like Mumford and Lasch, I simply took it for granted that Bourne was right to denounce Dewey for supporting American entry into the Great War—that abstention from or opposition to this "War of Steel and Gold" was the only productive political position one could have taken. Like Mumford and Lasch, I also took it for granted that Bourne was right to trace the intellectual origins of Dewey's ideological idiocy to the erudite expedience of pragmatism.1	2
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