THE DEBATES—DEWEY

In the book German Philosophy and Politics (1915), which Bourne praised as one of the only philosophical contributions made by Americans during the period of U.S. neutrality, Dewey laid out his concerns with a number of specific aspects of German political culture, which (he argued) were shaped by philosophical considerations. He specifically noted nationalism, an authoritarian view of the state, and martial impulses as integrally problematic in German political culture. Further, Dewey made the case that Immanuel Kant's dualism of fact and value underpinned the German wartime effort because it bracketed crucial concerns of transcendent values and ethical commitments in favor of a vision of scientific control that narrowly linked cause to effect.Footnote ¹⁰ According to Dewey, such a philosophy aided wartime Germany's amoral, highly efficient, highly disciplined, Kultur-centered state regime. As Alan Ryan observes, Dewey elaborated this position as direct U.S. intervention in the war became imminent. Dewey identified German philosophy and autocratic government as the root problem of war causation, and American democracy as its solution.

Dewey extended his view of this set of issues toward the end of Democracy and Education (1916). Dewey explained how democracy and moral education could create a society that precluded (or greatly diminished) the possibility of war and conflict. In thinking through the provisional nature of moral education and practice, he concluded that “morals are as broad as acts which concern our relationships with others.” He expanded on this guiding insight, noting, “Certain traits of character have such an obvious connection with our social relationships that we call them ‘moral’ in an emphatic sense—truthfulness, honesty, chastity, amiability, etc.” However, he added an important caveat: “this only means that they are … moral in an emphatic sense not because they are isolated and exclusive, but because they are so intimately connected with thousands of other attitudes which we do not explicitly recognize.”Footnote ¹¹ Dewey made his pragmatic-educative turn more precisely in his 1916 essay “The Schools and Preparedness.” In programmatic terms, one of the implications of this essay, and of Democracy and Education, building on his earlier (1899) School and Society, was to merge principle and praxis—the school was to be an “embryonic” community life and inculcate ideals of service and self-direction—and thereby creating theoretical models for America's wartime education program.

Dewey's educational blueprint centered on a vision of a world community premised on interconnection. “Industry and commerce have interwoven our destinies,” Dewey argued. “To maintain our older state of mind is to cultivate a dangerous illusion.”Footnote ¹² For Dewey, international commerce could very well be a driver of international community, as it held the potential to serve as an adhesive, binding peoples through education and morality across nations. Bourne, by contrast, expressed skepticism about political economy's potential unifying effects; he perceived the role of capitalism as one tending toward generating conflict, rather than ameliorating it.

Still, Bourne and Dewey's philosophies met in the internationalist ideas embodied in this turn, rather than the shift toward wartime preparedness. That is, they shared an ideal of democratic community, pragmatic, praxis-based education, and the interconnection of destinies within, between, and across peoples and nations. Casey Blake depicts their shared vision as “critical discourse and free communication” in a “beloved community,” a collective undertaking that Dewey himself described as a “moral and spiritual association.”Footnote ¹³ To Bourne, however, it seemed that such an association could be revised under the crisis conditions of war such that they might run roughshod over personal liberties and foreclose freedom of expression and assembly, thus making a mockery of the ideal.

As American censorship, the Espionage and Sedition Acts (1917, 1918), and other transgressions of democratic values deepened, Dewey's personal and public writings barely grappled with the specifics of these developments. Thinkers like Bourne were concerned. To them, Dewey had lost his brilliance and could not see, was willfully ignorant, or had sold out to become an accomplice to the excesses and transgressions of wartime nationalism. It seemed the height of hypocrisy for Dewey to remain silent; after all, he had helped to found the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), an organization designed to defend academic freedom and advocate for collective faculty and higher education governance. Yet effectively it took until the Armistice for Dewey to grapple with the underside of his vaunted progressive “plastic juncture.” It was not until late in 1918 that Dewey begin to address the illiberalism that was alienating and had already resulted in the widespread firing and censorship of professors and intellectuals who spoke out or otherwise resisted the war.

The United States’ shift toward a war footing was mirrored in Dewey's writings. His essays of 1916 and early 1917 represented an application of his pragmatic method in Democracy and Education. At first, Bourne had followed Dewey's central philosophical commitment to democratic self-realization and fulfillment, but saw them increasingly cast aside by the statist, autocratic aspects of what Bourne termed the “war technique.”Footnote ¹⁴ By the fall of 1916, it seems clear that Dewey believed that American participation in the war was virtually inevitable. Thus, he endorsed military preparedness (which he had previously staunchly opposed as not grounded in either individual self-interest or anchored in a clear, ethical purpose).

As the nation mobilized after April 1917, Dewey published a series of essays in the New Republic and elsewhere—including “Conscience and Compulsion” (July), “The Future of Pacifism” (July), “What America Will Fight For” (August), and “Conscription of Thought” (September)—which made the case that the nation should become entangled. (He later recanted that point very publically in rejecting the League of Nations.)Footnote ¹⁵ Dewey argued that he wanted peace, but not at any cost; his higher ideal and value was to enhance progressive democratic conditions, and to advance those principles both at home in the United States and around the world. Given what he deemed the near inevitability of entering the conflict, Dewey saw it as possible that the war could be used to engineer a more transcendent outcome than simply defeating Germany. That is, he bought into the Wilsonian project of advancing world democracy and believed that wartime centralization would enhance progressive reform at home.

As Ryan has observed, Dewey's wartime project reflected his effort to treat the war in accordance with his philosophy of democracy and education. Because he advocated placing experience at the center of democratic practice and education, he reframed the war effort “as something that had to be made the most of—that is, that the nation must find the experience of war educative rather than diseducative.”Footnote ¹⁶ In Democracy and Education, Dewey argued against taking morals too narrowly and applying them unthinkingly. People had to see the educative elements of a pragmatic entry into the public sphere—or by extension into the Great War—in the context of their provisional moral commitments. In mediating between the “social” and the “moral” through education, he wanted to avoid “giving [morals], on one side, a sentimental goody-goody turn without reference to effective ability to do what is socially needed, and, on the other side, overemphasizing convention and tradition so as to limit morals to a list of definitely stated acts.”Footnote ¹⁷ This balance extended to his wartime program.

THE DEBATES—BOURNE

Some scholars argue that by disputing Dewey openly, Bourne disavowed the mainstream American left. Often, as Robert Westbrook notes, historians have considered his attack on Dewey's pro-war principles to be a “break with Dewey's philosophical pragmatism, which [Bourne] had once enthusiastically shared.” Yet, Bourne's original critique reflected neither a full break with Dewey nor a leap from the ranks of the left. Rather, his efforts as a self-conscious critic were modeled on his broader effort to stay true to principles of pragmatism, as he saw them, situated within what Westbrook aptly terms the “framework for ethical deliberation,” which he had learned from Dewey at Columbia.Footnote ¹⁸

Attempting to separate Dewey's defense of liberal education from his pro-war writings, Bourne entered into a series of confrontations with his former liberal comrades, most notably culminating in a classic dispute over the pragmatic rationale for joining the war. The stresses of the wartime years sapped Bourne's minimal physical strength, while emboldening and giving force to his writing. In the context of World War I, he developed a powerful brand of anti-war isolationist pluralism that remains influential in American anti-interventionist thought today.Footnote ¹⁹

As Dewey and fellow liberals began to slide into arguing for wartime preparedness, Bourne praised neutrality. He responded forcefully that one need not be subject to bellicose instincts nor blind to the ways in which war undermines civil liberties and ultimately serves as an indicator of what he later termed “the health of the state.” Adapting William James's concept of a “moral of equivalent of war”—James's effort to redirect the human instinct of bellicosity into peaceful service—Bourne published “A Moral Equivalent for Universal Military Service” in the New Republic in July 1916, just a month after the appearance of his breakthrough essay “Trans-National America.” Addressing liberal intellectuals like Dewey, Bourne acknowledged, “The best will in America at the present time seems to crave some kind of national service.” He stressed, “Until we satisfy that craving, we shall run at half-power, and suffer all the dissatisfaction and self-despising that comes from repressed energy.” Building on this Freudian psychological model, Bourne insisted that this yearning “veers off from military service,” and outlined what an army of dedicated youth might do if properly educated and possessed of true “talents” and cosmopolitan “energies.” As an alternative to military service, he proposed a Peace Corps of an American exceptionalist sort, envisioning a “host of eager young missionaries swarming all over the land, spreading the health knowledge, the knowledge of domestic science, of gardening, of tastefulness, that they have learned in school.”Footnote ²⁰ Such a corps would be “warring against nature and not against men, finding in drudgery and toil and danger the values that war and preparation for war had given.”Footnote ²¹ As we will see, the damaging nature of war played a large part in Bourne's pragmatic calculus for measuring the relationship between democratic means and ends in foreign policy.

Bourne's related proposals—and vision—stemmed from his transnational mission of reshaping not just American society, but also the world community. To avoid the nationalistic path to war he had observed in Europe, Bourne advocated that the United States discard the “melting pot” concept, which he regarded as an illusion and a danger. It was wrongheaded and futile, he argued, to promote homogenizing identities that inevitably stifled individuals and groups. He urged the country, across all walks of life, to see the limits of assimilationism. Instead, Bourne sought a widespread democratic educational project to embrace a more inclusive and tolerant vision of a “transnational America.” “Surely we cannot be certain of our spiritual democracy,” remarked Bourne, “when, claiming to melt the nations within us to a comprehension of our free and democratic institutions, we fly into panic at the first sign of their own will and tendency.” He declared:

Thus, Bourne developed his transnational vision as an alternative to wartime Americanization. Indeed, he argued that “No reverberatory effect of the great war has caused American public opinion more solicitude than the failure of the ‘melting pot.’” Indeed, “[t]he discovery of diverse nationalistic feelings among our great alien population has come to most people as an intense shock.” To avoid violence, the country, Bourne declared, needed a new framework for social relations.Footnote ²³

Bourne's multifaceted definition of “transnational America” implied more than a mere blurring of national boundaries. Bourne framed it as a “higher ideal,” or a “cooperative Americanism,” modeled in part on Zionism. Comprised “of a freely mingling society of peoples of very different racial and cultural antecedents,” Bourne's transnationals would share “a common political allegiance and common social ends but with free and distinctive cultural allegiances which may be placed anywhere in the world they like.”Footnote ²⁴ In contrast to the compromises later championed by Dewey to support the wartime state, Bourne's transnational conception was radically open, designed to enhance and embrace heterogeneity of peoples and perspectives.

Transnationalism was, in short, Bourne's attempt to imagine a cosmopolitan and peaceful new society for the United States—a model of social relations that it might then extend around the world. It was at once a domestic and foreign policy ideal. As such, the concept creatively incorporated his views about cultural pluralism into the longer intellectual tradition of the United States’ “steering clear” of foreign entanglements in the form of European-style power politics or wars. Bourne conceived of the United States as needing to safeguard itself from the anti-democratic, homogenizing exigencies of belligerent nationalism, which participation in the war would bring. Unlike Dewey, he advocated an anti-interventionist, anti-war isolationism. His position was built on a particular vision of the nation's foundational democratic principles of creative civic engagement embodied abroad by seeking peace, such as via a policy of neutrality, and avoiding military preparedness and conscription.Footnote ²⁵

This anti-war position made Bourne a pariah in many of the intellectual circles that had embraced him just a few years before. Even stalwart peace activists such as settlement house pioneer Jane Addams, for example, broke off to support the wartime state. Only a small group of pacifists and members of the socialist left remained to oppose the American war effort publicly after the U.S. war declaration in April 1917. Alongside fellow travelers Van Wyck Brooks, Max and Crystal Eastman, Emma Goldman, and Eugene Debs, Bourne developed an alternative language for American anti-war thought, which formed an essential element for a new definition of democratic citizenry.Footnote ²⁶

Bourne described the “defection of [John] Dewey” as “typical.” After “years of eloquent opposition to military conscription,” Dewey accepted it, wrote Bourne, “without a quiver or even an explanation of the steps by which his conviction made so momentous a change.” Bourne decried the universities that alienated dissenters, the ranks of organized labor joining the war effort, socialists who became “fanatical patriots and neutral pacifists,” and even radicals who became enamored of immediate results over long-term goals. Analyzing all these factors, Bourne diagnosed the crux of the wartime drift: a shift not just of peoples and groups, but also of ideas.Footnote ²⁷

As the country's entry into the war approached and the nation ramped up wartime mobilization, Bourne objected more vehemently to Dewey's use of pragmatism. Underlying Dewey's vision of global interdependence, Bourne identified an accommodationist, homogenizing bellicosity. In his article, “Twilight of the Idols” [1917], Bourne grappled with the demise of an intellectual set able to counter the fires of pro-war nationalism and patriotism. The central axiom of war in human history, he found, is that it is an uncontrollable phenomenon. War cannot be directed easily, he warned. Nor can its result be predicted accurately. Bourne could not fathom how Woodrow Wilson and Secretary of State Robert Lansing could miss this reality. Thus Bourne disparaged the very heart of Dewey's case because, at best, it was not realistic enough to meet the standards of Dewey's own purportedly pragmatic method.

THE HEART OF THE MATTER

The Dewey-Bourne conflict centered on three main points of disagreement (and many more modest ones). First, they could not find a common ground for how to define and employ pragmatism—the free functioning of “creative intelligence”—as a means of evaluating possible options for domestic and foreign policy. Second, they did not agree on how best to produce the conditions to achieve progressive domestic reform, particularly regarding the role of the intellectual, or in education. Third, they disagreed on the obligations of a democratic citizenry to the world community.

Earlier in the war, Bourne's writings dominated this debate. It took Dewey some time to find and develop his pro-war arguments for the wider public. He did not develop a vision of a pluralistic, international democracy in depth until part way through 1917. His writing on the war and pacifism in 1917 epitomizes the position he came to—Dewey emphasized practical circumstances. He argued that for any thoughtful pacifist, or isolationist for that matter, “failure to recognize the immense impetus to reorganization afforded by this war; failure to recognize the closeness and extent of true international combinations which it necessitates, is a stupidity equaled only by the miltarist's conception of war as a noble blessing in disguise.”Footnote ²⁸ Dewey concluded, “In a world organized for war there are as yet no political mechanisms which enable a nation with warm sympathies to make them effective, save through military participation.” But whereas Dewey viewed himself as an “intelligent pacifist,” Bourne only saw “narcotic” belligerence.Footnote ²⁹

Bourne responded to Dewey with an attack against liberals who “claim a realistic and pragmatic attitude in politics” but did not “turn their philosophy on themselves, [so that] they might have seen how thinly disguised a rationalization this was of their emotional undertow.”Footnote ³⁰ In an August 1917 essay entitled “The Collapse of American Strategy,” Bourne claimed instead that “American liberals who urged the nation to war are … suffering the humiliation of seeing their liberal strategy for peace transformed into a strategy for a prolonged war.”Footnote ³¹ The war would have likely burned itself out more rapidly—and a peace could have been led by a neutral United States as mediator—according to Bourne, if only America's liberals had not been so misguided as to support the war effort.Footnote ³²

Most of the “intelligent pacifists” like Dewey, Herbert Croly, Walter Lippmann, George Creel, and a host of others, considered it probable that the war could be won only with direct American involvement. More to the point, as James Livingston has argued, Dewey was clear-eyed about his alliance with the self-styled “progressive” Wilson and the forces of Americanism; he firmly believed that being on the side of the victors would help the nation dictate the terms of peace, placing in positions of power those progressive intellectuals who were involved in the war.Footnote ³³ Possessing these posts could lead to enacting meaningful progressive reforms, such as those advocated by W. E. B. Du Bois and Jane Addams. In this way, progressive education reform and meaningful social justice might be extended. Du Bois, for example, followed this logic. He suggested that full citizenship rights for African Americans could be earned through supporting what Bourne derided as the “war technique” and through “technical organization,” because in a time of crisis, loyalty to the state would be rewarded.Footnote ³⁴

Bourne, however, challenged Dewey's claim (shared by Lippmann and Croly, and, to a lesser extent by Du Bois and Addams) that justifications and motivations for wartime technical organizational would be a boon for post-war educational and progressive reform.Footnote ³⁵ As Bourne combed Dewey's writings in vain for clarity regarding how “democratic desires” might be worked out nationally or internationally in practical, political terms, he noted that this premise seemed more hopeful than analytical. Dewey's pro-war stance was remarkably vague on this crucial point.

Bourne deployed this argument in his first major attack on Dewey and his pro-war claims after the United States entered the conflict. Bourne centered his critique on what he called the “uncontrollable” nature of war. As Charles F. Howlett and Audrey Cohan have argued, in the spring and summer of 1917, Dewey lost a vital intellectual opportunity to counter such criticism; he remained remarkably un-programmatic about how war might be directed toward a both just and constructive end. “Dewey's emphasis on utility,” they observe, “accorded him no specific program to counteract the predominant trend of ‘vagueness’ and ‘impracticality’ (that he had diagnosed).”Footnote ³⁶ As he eviscerated Dewey's pragmatic, ends-oriented claims, Bourne perceived a problematic shift toward idealism (which he might well have described as Kantian). What he did not observe was what he expected to find: a pragmatic testing of values. This argument led Bourne to conclude that “it is perhaps better to be a martyr than a hypocrite. And if pragmatists like Mr. Dewey are going to accept ‘inevitables,’ you at least have an equal right to choose what shall seem inevitable to you.”Footnote ³⁷

By 1918, Dewey addressed Bourne's criticism relatively head-on, by suggesting that he had correctly forecast the conflict's impact: working-class political participation increased as a result of the war. Around the world, he opined, a new world order was rising in “the power of the wage-earning classes” across the warring countries, including Bolshevik Russia. In a lecture at Clark University in March 1918—published later as “Internal Social Reorganization After the War”—Dewey emphasized this point, predicting that “a period of very great unrest, disorder, drifting, strife” would follow the war. Though he did not go so far as to anticipate “actual civil war,” he warned that the world would either experience “all kinds of irregular strife and disorder,” or “a movement to install the principle of self-government within industries.” In some ways, this prognosis projected the role that he saw intellectuals playing in the post-war world (and indicated to statesmen and business- leaders as well as educators that they would still need his services and those of fellow intellectual elites when the war ended).Footnote ³⁸

Bourne noted the “absurdity” of this position. If the war empowered the wage-earning classes, and if entering the conflict was a means to enhance democracy, then how could it also leave the structures of “industrial and economic autocracy practically untouched” and result in strikes and strife? Dewey asserted that post-war strife would demonstrate the necessity of renewal. According to Bourne, either the war for political democracy would facilitate these ends or it would not, and the means were what might well matter most. When those means included censorship, oppression, and curtailment of civil liberties across the board, in addition to wartime death and destruction, the cost was far too high and the likelihood of achieving those ends too precarious to justify such enormous sacrifices.Footnote ³⁹

Ultimately, Dewey's support for American intervention rested more on “blind hope” than pragmatic reason, as Robert Westbrook has explained.Footnote ⁴⁰ In partial contrast, Bourne was more pragmatic than hopeful. He looked inward for ways the nation could eventually turn outward to fulfill America's unique transnational possibilities. Bourne simply could not conceive of the Deweyan approach as rational, much less as an apt application of anything resembling the pragmatic method. After all, in James's articulation, the pragmatic method determined that the best measure of an idea or action lies with the conduct that it dictates.Footnote ⁴¹ The means of perpetrating violence (abroad and at home) in pursuit of vague democratic ends seemed to fail that test. Bourne, increasingly censored and unable to find venues to publish his work in 1917 and 1918, continued to be genuinely perplexed that his brilliant former intellectual mentors—themselves leading liberal lights in American political life—could be so wrongheaded. That they and their peers also would seek to exclude, or simply permit, the rejection of democratic deliberation and dissenting opinion reinforced Bourne's views that no pragmatic grounds existed for joining Europe's war.

In their second main point of contention, Bourne was on the outside looking in. Most progressive intellectuals who were involved in the war effort believed that when the nation achieved the position of helping to dictate the terms of peace, they would be placed in positions of power—or in the very least see their ends accomplished—during the peacemaking process and in the post-war order. The vast majority of the “intelligent pacifists,” like Dewey, felt that they did not need to answer the fringe anti-war liberals directly. Bourne, however, anticipated catastrophic risks posed to intellectual inquiry (and intellectual dissent, in particular) if the majority of intellectuals were integrated into the state's apparatus. His potential intellectual allies in the transnational project did, in fact, become his enemies, just as he had feared. The New Republic’s support of the war, combined with Lippmann's participation as assistant secretary of war and his role in helping to write Wilson's vaunted “Fourteen Points” (January 1918), epitomized what Bourne termed acts of intellectual self-annihilation—a “suicide,” of sorts.Footnote ⁴²

In a perceptive diagnosis of why these intellectuals continued to drift into the pro-war camp in those crucial months when winter turned into spring in 1917, Bourne maintained that what really motivated the liberal intelligentsia was a desire for immediate influence. Aiming his fire especially at Lippmann and Croly, he wrote that being “supported by the collective herd” gave them a “will to power, the nourishment of which the organism so constantly demands.”Footnote ⁴³ Building on Nietzschean philosophical insights, Bourne believed that the ideal stance for the “willful” intellectual ought to be one of psychic isolation from the herd mentality and profound involvement with the world. Intellectuals, however, were all too human.Footnote ⁴⁴ They were too tempted to sacrifice their autonomy in a self-deceptive quest for influence.Footnote ⁴⁵

According to Bourne, liberal reasons to go to war—such as Dewey's argument for taking hold of “social possibilities”—co-opted intellectuals, making them instruments of the nationalist war machine. As Casey Blake explains: “Bourne accused Dewey and his followers of forsaking the creative tension between ideals and existing conditions that he saw as the critical dynamic in pragmatism. Without that tension, the injunction to ground ideals in practice meant ‘a mere surrender to the actual, an abdication of the ideal through a sheer fatigue from intellectual suspense.’”Footnote ⁴⁶ Bourne best developed this logic in his final essay, “The State,” in which he famously criticized the insidious interconnection of industry, commerce, politics, and the military, declaring, “War is the health of the state.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Bourne likely worked on portions of this essay in fall 1918 while he succumbed to the influenza outbreak. The draft article, not discovered until after he died, helps us to see where his wartime writing seemed to headed. It reveals how a wartime environment abroad created a vortex that pulled the United States into the conflict, producing the conditions to generate a wartime state. In turn, these developments exacerbated the pandemic. Thus, the war quite literally determined the health of the author/intellectual/cultural critic—a central Bournian insight.Footnote ⁴⁸

The war risked undermining domestic reform, including “education as its national enterprise.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Bourne highlighted an “insistent care for democratic values at home, and unequivocal alliance with democratic elements abroad for a peace that should promise more than a mere union of benevolent imperialisms.”Footnote ⁵⁰ In partial contrast, Dewey repeatedly connected ends with use of force. “No ends are accomplished,” wrote Dewey, without the use of force. “It is consequently no presumption against a measure, political, international, jural, economic, that it involves a use of force. Squemishness [sic] about force is the mark not of idealistic but of moonstruck morals.”Footnote ⁵¹ While Bourne's and Dewey's views of democratic ideals at home were more compatible, they quarreled over the use of force, especially in view of the means-ends relationship to war. Could these factors be separated? And would the proper focus be at home or abroad? According to Bourne, Dewey's means abroad (force) inevitably undermined his educative program at home. Bourne held that the use of force would yield limited international benefits and risked undercutting efforts at domestic reform.Footnote ⁵² Bourne tied this critique to James's pragmatism and also to his own anti-interventionist, anti-war isolationist orientation, a position Dewey staunchly opposed.

Historian Robert Westbrook adroitly captures Dewey's attitude toward various neutralist and non-interventionist isolationist ideas. “Isolation,” Westbrook explains, “was not only an illusion but an illusion that foreclosed what Dewey saw as an important American mission.”Footnote ⁵³ In Bourne's view, however, Dewey was wrongheaded because isolation from foreign conflict was compatible with—perhaps essential for—a transnational American project. Unlike Dewey, Bourne saw no separation between the foreign and the domestic; but military force, Bourne consistently argued, could and must be separated from genuine international mediation to have meaningful influence and hopes for success.

Bourne furthered his analysis of the peoples and nations at war to build out his conviction that the American democratic public was and should be transnational, possessing a wide range of multiple overlapping citizenships. The nation's mission at home and in the world, this view held, should be defined by the fact that their people's identities included diverse religions, languages, work, genders, and abilities, according to Bourne. The logical conclusion: governments—with their narrow, parochial visions of nationalism—were at war, not the people. If so, for Bourne, Americans had an obligation to steer clear of such bellicose nationalist parochialisms. Voluntarily joining a foreign conflict was incompatible with Bourne's vision of an educated, cultivated, cultural pluralist democratic citizenry. For Dewey, in contrast, the U.S. democratic project was premised on a democratic citizenry's obligations to each other and to the world community. In turn, for Dewey such a commitment justified the use of force, even illiberal means, to achieve the Wilsonian mission of “making the world safe for democracy” and a post-war goal of advancing progressive education reform at home.

The wartime loss of intellectual rigor in American life haunted both men. But it was Dewey's “defection” that highlighted, to Bourne at least, the reality that “intellectualism” functioned as what he termed “the ‘liberal’ curse.” According to Bourne this curse functioned to instill the “habit of moving in concepts rather than in a warm area of pragmatic life.” In short, Dewey and his pro-war quasi-pragmatic position stood in for a society and an intellectual class that had thrown off the “responsibility of thought” and embraced Wilson's wartime promise to advance global democracy through “peace without victory.” This “cult of politics” had been “inherent in the liberal intellectual's point of view long before the war,” Bourne argued, and to some extent Dewey came to see after the armistice in November 1918. The ways in which left intellectuals, politicians, and citizens joined in the war effort lent itself to justifying the “patriotic” conscription of the broad middle class and enabled the state's suppression of thought alongside mobilization and an acute centralization of power.Footnote ⁵⁴

CONCLUSION: BITTER IRONIES, THEN AND NOW

Randolph Bourne died late in 1918, just as his prophecies were seeming to come true. Although Dewey never accepted the Bournian critique, as early as fall 1917, he began to see the war effort as less than that which Wilson had promised. By 1919, and again in the wake of the Washington Naval Conferences on disarmament in 1921, and into the 1920s, Dewey came to reject the fetish of force; he sought to restrict and rebuff the “war system”—akin to what Bourne had called the “war technique”—and helped promote civil liberties at home through the ACLU and protect peace abroad by championing the worldwide Outlawry of War movement. He opposed what he deemed the coercive collection of governments embodied by the League of Nations.Footnote ⁵⁵

The one-hundredth anniversary of the publication of Dewey's Democracy and Education reminds us that the Dewey-Bourne debate did not concern merely one war; rather, it struck at the very heart of unfolding philosophies and practices of cultural pluralism and civic education. Out of the crucible of World War I came new visions of the state and new ways of thinking about the complicity of intellectuals in times of crisis. When understood in context, these debates also illuminate how American democracy and citizenship practices collided to shape the ideals undergirding America's course in world affairs. From the 1927 publication of the Public and Its Problems to the 1935 release of Liberalism and Social Action, Dewey pushed back against parochial nationalism and forms of patriotism. He made a remarkably Bournian case that the state should not be the focus of a citizen's faith. Instead, Dewey argued, social progress would result from the steps taken by an educated, informed, transnational public as he rejected the legal sanctioning of an international war system. He firmly believed that the United States in the wake of World War I had an “economic interest in international peace.”Footnote ⁵⁶

Much of the broader liberal intellectual response to the post-World War I world continued to revolve around debates over the nature, stability, and justness of democracy, as well as the proper role of citizens and intellectuals in democratic education. These debates endured and deepened around the incendiary politics of large-scale immigration restriction laws that were passed during and in the wake of the war. Anti-corruption policies intensified with the Red Scare and the massive labor activism and strikes that followed the war. Prohibition, policing, radical deportations, and a rising proto-surveillance state fed into the imperatives of the nascent Federal Bureau of Investigation, which, in turn, reinvigorated activists like Dewey and the ACLU on issues of civil liberties. New democratic practices and politics emerged to meet the challenges of economic cataclysm at home and abroad and in confronting the threats of fascism and fractures in the world system. The democratic dilemmas Dewey and Bourne debated remained at the forefront of “interwar” efforts to re-envision progressive politics in crisis and conflict.

This contest between liberal intellectuals during a moment of national and international crisis is a timely reminder of the stakes of these debates. The one-hundredth anniversary of Dewey's Democracy and Education overlaps with the centennial of the United States’ entry into World War I. This shared anniversary presents us with an opportunity for careful and deep thought about how progressive principles can be applied to improve a dire situation. History provides a cautionary tale about Dewey and fellow progressive intellectuals who were swayed by the siren song of power, influence, and expediency. Bourne, in comparison, was steadfast in his vision of how to apply progressive ideals pragmatically to create a better nation and world. He never developed, however, a program to mobilize (or enact) his critical analysis and vision for the relationship between citizens, education, and democracy.

In this light, we can read Dewey against himself at a pivotal moment in his thought and in the nation's history. After all, in concluding his book-length analysis of democracy and education, Dewey argued that “there is no intimate organic connection between the methods and materials of knowledge and moral growth, particular lessons and modes of discipline have to be resorted to: knowledge is not integrated into the usual springs of action and the outlook on life, while morals become moralistic—a scheme of separate virtues.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Democracy and Education’s relevance to the present moment, in terms of the issues at stake in the Dewey-Bourne debate, coupled with the shortcomings of Dewey's wartime thought, point out some of the ways in which the present U.S. political situation might be seen as a failure of democratic education. These broader efforts to interconnect technique, methods, and morals in the World War I moment reveal how much it was shot through with seemingly intractable democratic dilemmas that remind us of the present.

At stake for Dewey and for Bourne, and for us today, was how to apply genuinely progressive ideals when searching for solutions to crises. This is a history, however, which clarifies one thing for certain: the dangers and the costs of embracing expediency.