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In 1915, former President Theodore Roosevelt criss-crossed the country as a champion of what he called “Americanism.” The concept was becoming commonplace in American discourse, marking a stand against what he referred to as “hyphenated Americanism.” The persistence of such identities—German American, Italian American, Jewish American—was for Roosevelt “the one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin,” creating a “tangle of squabbling nationalities.” “The foreign-born population of this country,” Roosevelt said, “must be an Americanized population—no other kind can fight the battles of America either in war or peace.”
In 1916, the writer Randolph S. Bourne offered a rejoinder in The Atlantic. In his essay, “Trans-national America,” Bourne wondered: If Americanization on the terms that Roosevelt and others had defined failed, what of it? Should immigrants not shape their own lives as they see fit? Should they deny their own cultures and identities? To be open to this sort of cultural diversity was not, Bourne wrote, “to admit the failure of Americanization. It is not to fear the failure of democracy. It is rather to urge us to an investigation of what Americanism may rightly mean.”
Bourne’s investigation came in the form of this essay, which is often glossed as a rejection of the “melting pot” ideal and an early statement on multiculturalism—long before that term was in circulation. But in its immediate context, “Trans-national America” was something more urgent. During a moment of rising xenophobia and growing war fever, it was a direct challenge to the orthodoxy that there was only one way to be an American.
The alarm about immigrants and their incomplete assimilation into American life was not new to the mid-1910s. The wave of arrivals that began in the last decades of the 19th century sparked a range of nativist and exclusionary movements—particularly against East Asians—and considerable anxiety about those deemed too alien to integrate into the culture. The prospect of American intervention in the First World War after 1914 turned alarm into panic about immigrants’ supposedly divided loyalties. Calling on Congress for defense appropriations at the end of 1915, President Woodrow Wilson lashed out at those immigrants “who have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life.” “Such creatures of passion, disloyalty, and anarchy,” he said, “must be crushed out.”
For Bourne, the mood was eerily redolent of what he’d seen in Germany when the First World War broke out in the summer of 1914. As he scrambled to leave the country at the end of a post-college European tour, he saw how quickly militarism could coalesce into conformity—and how easily people could forget their principles in the process. At home in 1916, Bourne watched as calls for military “preparedness” merged with hardening definitions of loyalty and belonging.
Bourne tendered “Trans-national America” to The Atlantic (which had published his early work) to persuade Americans that they were asking the wrong questions about identity and belonging. If the melting pot had failed and the hyphenated Americans remained hyphenated, this was so much the better in Bourne’s view. Stripping new arrivals of their cultures and identities and forcing them into an Anglo-Saxon mold that didn’t fit them couldn’t be called freedom. It wasn’t even terribly American, considering so much of what passed for Anglo-Saxon culture in the United States was rooted in what Bourne saw as cowering fealty to English practice and precedent.
“Trans-national America” offered what Bourne called “a higher ideal.” America represented, in his telling, “a unique sociological fabric” as a gathering of the world’s peoples. The country’s dynamism lay not in its uniformity but in its diversity. A capacious America could avoid the fate of an Old World embroiled in a brutal military conflict. “Living here in mutual toleration, freed from the age-long tangles of races, creeds, and dynasties,” Americans could work out what Bourne called “a federated ideal” in which people were “mingled, yet not homogeneous”—in which “they merge, but they do not fuse.” This was Bourne’s concept of “trans-nationality”: a cosmopolitan American identity that embraced the world, and America itself, rather than emulating what had come before. Why, Bourne wondered, would anyone reject such a vital national formation? The alternative—“the weary old nationalism,—belligerent, exclusive, inbreeding”—was on display in a Europe at war.
Although Bourne was not an immigrant himself, he knew what it was to be an outsider in a world that was wary of them. During his birth, an obstetrician’s forceps had deformed his face; when he was a young child, spinal tuberculosis had stunted his growth and curved his spine. Bourne moved through the world keenly aware of both his disability and his difference—to which he testified with incisive clarity in a September 1911 Atlantic essay. As an undergraduate at Columbia, Bourne came to feel at home and first glimpsed the possibility of his “higher ideal” in lively intellectual exchange. To argue, debate, and ultimately understand was the foundation of what Bourne called a “Beloved Community” rooted in respect for people’s ideas and individuality. The model of the college could be expanded to the country at large, a nation built on “intellectual sympathy” for “different cultural expressions.” Such a community, Bourne said, “will make understanding and not indignation its end. Such a sympathy will unite and not divide.”
But Bourne’s essay and ideas could not stem a tide that was becoming a torrent. The continued drift toward war would only further amplify the panic over immigration. Bourne called for national educational service as a means of advancing his vision of a beloved community on a national scale; others welcomed American intervention abroad, and the conscripted military service it would require, as the best means to “yank the hyphen” out of immigrants with supposedly split loyalties. The immediate future did not belong to Bourne but to those he wrote against. Bourne’s more strident anti-war writings after “Trans-national America” would get him blackballed from most mainstream publications. The broader xenophobia of the time was built into a series of laws restricting immigration, increased suppression of dissent, and the rise of a national Ku Klux Klan that appropriated “100 percent Americanism” as its slogan.
Mercifully, perhaps, Bourne was not around to see it. He died in 1918, a victim of the flu pandemic. Although never quite forgotten, Bourne’s ideas gained new currency in the 1960s; a reflection and anthology of his work was published in 1965—the same year the Immigration and Nationality Act reversed the restrictions that had been in place since the 1920s. At least for a little while, people were able to see, as Bourne did, that “it bespeaks poverty of imagination not to be thrilled at the incalculable potentialities of so novel a union of men.”