U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [206]
or give me death
RANDOLPH BOURNE
Randolph Bourne
came as an inhabitant of this earth
without the pleasure of choosing his dwel ing or
his career.
He was a hunchback, grandson of a congregational
minister, born in 1886 in Bloomfield, New Jersey;
there he attended grammarschool and highschool.
At the age of seventeen he went to work as secre-tary to a Morristown businessman. He worked his way through Columbia working in
a pianola record factory in Newark, working as proof-reader, pianotuner, accompanist in a vocal studio in Carnegie Hal .
At Columbia he studied with John Dewey,
got a travel ing fel owship that took him to England Paris Rome Berlin Copenhagen,
-103-wrote a book on the Gary schools.
In Europe he heard music, a great deal of Wag-ner and Scriabine and bought himself a black cape.
This little sparrowlike man,
tiny twisted bit of flesh in a black cape,
always in pain and ailing,
put a pebble in his sling
and hit Goliath square in the forehead with it.
War, he wrote, is the health of the state.
Half musician, half educational theorist (weak
health and being poor and twisted in body and on bad terms with his people hadn't spoiled the world for
Randolph Bourne; he was a happy man, loved die
Meistersinger and playing Bach with his long hands
that stretched so easily over the keys and pretty girls and good food and evenings of talk. When he was
dying of pneumonia a friend brought him an eggnog;
Look at the yel ow, its beautiful, he kept saying as his life ebbed into delirium and fever. He was a happy
man.) Bourne seized with feverish intensity on the
ideas then going around at Columbia, he picked rosy glasses out of the turgid jumble of John Dewey's teach-ing through which he saw clear and sharp the shining capitol of reformed democracy,
Wilson's New Freedom;
but he was too good a mathematician; he had to
work the equations out;
with the result
that in the crazy spring of 1917 he began to get
unpopular where his bread was buttered at the New
Republic;
-104- for New Freedom read Conscription, for Democ- racy, Win the War, for Reform, Safeguard the Morgan Loans
for Progress Civilization Education Service,
Buy a Liberty Bond,
Straff the Hun,
Jail the Objectors.
He resigned from The New Republic; only The Seven Arts had the nerve to publish his articles against the war. The backers of The Seven Arts took their money elsewhere; friends didn't like to be seen with Bourne, his father wrote him begging him not to disgrace the family name. The rainbowtinted future of reformed democracy went pop like a pricked soapbubble. The liberals scurried to Washington;
some of his friends plead with him to climb up on
Schoolmaster Wilson's sharabang; the war was great. fought from the swivel chairs of Mr. Creel's bureau in Washington.
He was cartooned, shadowed by the espionage
service and the counter-espionage service; taking a walk with two girl friends at Wood's Hole he was arrested, a trunk ful of manuscript and letters was stolen from him in Connecticut. (Force to the utmost, thundered Schoolmaster Wilson)
He didn't live to see the big circus of the Peace of Versail es or the purplish normalcy of the Ohio Gang. Six weeks after the armistice he died planning an
essay on the foundations of future radicalism in Amer-ica. If any man has a ghost Bourne has a ghost,
a tiny twisted unscared ghost in a black cloak
hopping along the grimy old brick and brownstone
streets stil left in downtown New York,
-105-crying out in a shril soundless giggle:
War is the health of the state.
NEWSREEL XXIII
If you dont like your Uncle Sammy
If you dont like the red white and blue
smiles of patriotic Essex County wil be concentrated and recorded at Branch Brook Park, Newark, N. J., tomorrow afternoon. Bands wil play while a vast throng marches hap-pily to the rhythm of wartime anthems and airs. Mothers of the nation's sons wil be there; wives, many of them carry-ing babes born after their fathers sailed for the front, wil occupy a place in Essex County's graphic pageant; relatives and friends of the heroes who are carrying on the message of Free-dom wil file past a battery of cameras and al wil smile a message recording instal ment no. 7 of Smiles Across the Sea. The hour for these folks to start smiling is 2:30.