An American Friendship: Horace Kallen, Alain Locke, and the Development of Cultural Pluralism 9781501763106

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AN AMERICAN FRIENDSHIP

AN AMERICAN FRIENDSHIP

H O R AC E K A L L E N , A L A I N LO C K E , A N D T H E D E V E LO P M E N T O F CU LT U R A L P LU R A L I S M

David Weinfeld

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS Ithaca and London

Copyright © 2022 by David Weinfeld All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress​.­cornell​.­edu. First published 2022 by Cornell University Press Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Weinfeld, David, 1982– author. Title: An American friendship : Horace Kallen, Alain   Locke, and the development of cultural pluralism /   David Weinfeld. Description: Ithaca [New York] : Cornell University Press,   2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021052349 (print) | LCCN 2021052350   (ebook) | ISBN 9781501763090 (hardcover) | ISBN   9781501763106 (pdf ) | ISBN 9781501763113 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Kallen, Horace Meyer, 1882–1974—   Influence. | Locke, Alain, 1885–1954—Influence. |   Cultural pluralism—United States—History—20th  century. Classification: LCC HM1271 .W445 2022 (print) |   LCC HM1271 (ebook) | DDC 305.80097309/04—  dc23/eng/20211029 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021052349 LC ebook record available at https://lccn​.loc.gov /202105​2350 Cover photographs: Above, Alain Locke, courtesy of Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, The New York Public Library; below, Horace Kallen, courtesy of Harvard University Archives.

Co n te n ts

Acknowledgments  vii Author’s Note xiii

Introduction: What Difference Does the Difference Make? Cultural Pluralism as Friendship

1

1. From Berenstadt to Boston

18

2. The Talented among the Tenth

40

3. Locke and Kallen, Student and Teacher

67

4. American Pluralists, Friends at Oxford

87

5. The Plural Is Po­liti­cal

113

6. Plural in Culture, Universal in Religion

147

7. Friendship Rekindled, Pluralism Refined 170 8. Locke’s Legacy, Kallen’s Memory

194

Conclusion: Differences Made

207

Notes  211 Index  241

A ck n o w l­e d gm e n ts

My first thanks go to the editors at Cornell University Press who made this book a real­ity. Michael McGandy recognized the proj­ect’s potential from the beginning and never ­stopped believing in it. Sarah Grossman saw it through to the end, and I am thrilled with the result. Thanks to two anonymous reviewers who made this book much better. Thanks to Kirsten Elmer, Michelle Scott, and the team at Westchester Publishing Ser­vices for the copyediting and to Enid Zafran for d­ oing the index. Thanks also to Lexington Books and to Northwestern University Press for allowing me to include previously published material as part of this book. Writing a book is emotionally taxing, particularly for t­ hose who already suffer from m ­ ental illness. Over the years, in dif­fer­ent cities, vari­ous therapists, psychologists, and psychiatrists have helped keep me on the right path. I owe them all a debt of gratitude. As a student in New York University’s joint doctoral program in Hebrew and Judaic studies and history, my primary adviser, Hasia Diner, advised me to take what was a seminar paper and turn it into a dissertation. This was excellent advice. Along the way, she offered incredibly thorough feedback—­red-­inked page a­ fter red-­inked page—­that made the final product vastly improved. Since I graduated, she has remained in my corner, providing more advice and encouragement for which I am eternally grateful. Rounding out my dissertation committee, my secondary adviser, Thomas Bender, helped ground the dissertation in American intellectual history and offered insightful comments throughout the writing pro­cess. He also ran a terrific monthly seminar on US history where I was able to share my work with peers. Martha Hodes inspired me with her beautiful narrative style of writing. David Engel helped situate the proj­ect in modern Jewish intellectual history. Jonathan Holloway, the external reader, provided incredibly insightful commentary at the dissertation defense and has championed my work ever since. I was also inspired and stimulated by the teaching of other NYU faculty members, especially Larry Wolff, who taught me about nationalism; Linda Gordon, whose class led me to discover Horace Kallen; and Jeffrey Sammons, vii

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whose class led me to discover Alain Locke. At Harvard, where I received my undergraduate degree, several professors also influenced my thought and supported my continuing education, particularly Peter Machinist, Stephan Thernstrom, and Ruth Wisse. Fellow gradu­ate students at NYU provided intellectual stimulation, laughter, and friendship, especially David Benkof, Greg Childs, Andrea Cooper, Daniella Doron, Sandy Fox, Gabby Goldberg, Julie Yanofsky Goldstein, Hillel Gruenberg, Nick Hersh, Shira Klein, Elizabeth Knott, David Koffman, Shira Kohn, Rachel Kranson, Geoff Levin, Jed Lewinsohn, Atiba Pertilla, Lara Rabinovitch, Afrah Richmond, Josh Teplitsky, Amy Weiss, and Peter Wirzbicki. I want to especially thank Jessica Lynne Pearson, my ice cream buddy, who did a superb job looking over the book’s proofs and is one of the most brilliant and kindest scholars I know. I also want to share my appreciation for the three academic organ­izations that have been most helpful to my ­career—­the Association for Jewish Studies (AJS), the African American Intellectual History Society, and the Society for US Intellectual History. Scholars at numerous institutions have contributed to my intellectual development. Many years ago, I spoke on an AJS conference panel on Kallen featuring Daniel Greene and Kevin Zdiara, with comments by Stephen Whitfield, which would prove crucial to my intellectual development. Over the years, many other scholars have offered comments, criticisms, and encouragement, including Eric Goldstein, Cheryl Greenberg, David Hollinger, Laura Levitt, Tony Michels, Noam Pianko, and Jonathan Sarna. Jonathan Karp, with whom I share many interests, chaired a terrific panel on Black-­Jewish relations at the AJS with me, Gabby Goldberg, and Robert Greene II. Since then he has been a ­great mentor and friend. During my two two-­week research trips to the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati, Dana Herman, Jason Kalman, and Kevin Proffitt ­were incredibly helpful and kind, and Dana’s stewardship of the American Jewish Archives Journal provided me with the opportunity to publish on American Zionism, including a healthy dose of Kallen content. Dustin and Alyson Lee showed me around the city and made my visits to Cincy much more pleasant. Thanks also to the archivists at the Center for Jewish History; at both the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and the American Jewish Historical Society; at Houghton Library and the Harvard University Archives; at the Bodleian Library, Rhodes House, Hertford College, at Oxford University; at the Library of Congress; at Columbia University; and at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the Dorot Jewish Division of the New York Public Library.



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After leaving New York, I often stayed with my friend Nathan Burstein to complete my research there. I cannot recall how many times I visited the Alain Locke Papers at the Moorland-­Spingarn Research Center at Howard University. T ­ hose trips to Washington, DC, w ­ ere made pos­si­ble by my friend Flora Lindsay-­Herrera, who kindly allowed me to stay in her spare room within walking distance of Howard. When this proj­ect began, I read the Locke Papers in a cramped basement archive without Wi-­Fi and was not allowed to take photo­graphs. When my research was done, the archives had moved to a beautiful reading room on the main floor, with Wi-­Fi, and photo­graphs ­were allowed. Through it all, ­there was the recently retired JoEllen ElBashir, an incredibly talented, helpful, and kind archivist who was crucial to making this book pos­si­ble. She has my eternal gratitude. I have had the honor of appearing on three conference panels about Locke, putting my work in conversation with such excellent scholars as Davarian Baldwin, Melanie Chambliss, Jay Garcia, Brittany Hall, Leonard Harris, and Amato Nocera. Correspondence with Christopher Buck on Locke’s Baha’i faith was also valuable. My affiliation with the African American Intellectual History Society has been especially fruitful, particularly in introducing me to Christopher Cameron. He, along with Keisha Blain and Ashley Farmer, solicited my essay on Locke’s Baha’i faith for their volume on Black intellectual history. Shortly before the pandemic, I participated in a workshop on Kallen at NYU, or­ga­nized by Clemens Schmidt and including Hasia Diner, Matthew Kaufman, Esther Schor, and Michael Steiner. Each of ­these superb scholars helped shape the book in its final stages. When I first met Adam Etinson and Julian Nemeth back in Montreal, none of us yet knew we would pursue academia, but I have benefited tremendously from their friendship along the way. Over the years, I have befriended many other academics who have made life better. An incomplete list includes Danny Bessner, Charles Chavis  Jr., Ari Cohen, Yedida Eisenstat, Andrew Hartman, Daniel Heller, and Eli Rosenblatt. I have found a new scholarly community in Richmond, ­Virginia. At ­Virginia Commonwealth University, Michael Dickinson and Rohan Kalyan have become close friends. I have also benefited from the friendship and insight of Aspen Brinton, Christopher Brooks, Melis Hafez, Chioke I’Anson, Samaneh Oladi, Isabelle Richman, Kate Roach, Ryan Smith, Faedah Totah, Tricia Vesely, Jon Waybright, and Mark Wood. I met historians Samantha Sealey and Geoff Traugh at NYU, but in Richmond they have become ­great friends and supporters, as have Josh Chafetz, Jonathan Kruschwitz, and fellow Canadian Gill Frank.

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Peter and Lindsay Eubanks, a scholar and a l­awyer, are dear friends who appreciate our differences, and we theirs. I have found a wonderful religious community in Richmond at the Conservative synagogue ­Temple Beth-­El. Friendships with Stephen Frost, Sherrina Gibson, Gary Goldberg, and Kristen Gorin have made my life richer. I also count our terrific clergy as friends. Rabbi Michael Knopf and cantor Dara Rosenblatt have renewed my commitment to Judaism, to ahavat yisrael, and to appreciating difference while finding common ground. Other friends outside academia kept me sane, especially Mike Conti, Joanna Giordano, Alexia Korberg, Clara Magram, Margaret Mede, Matt Osten, Seth Ross, Ronit Rubinstein, Mike Wagner, and Charles Wasserman. Along with my friendship circle, my f­amily has expanded. Half of my in-­ laws are from West V ­ irginia and, ­needless to say, grew up very differently from how I did. But my father-­in-­law, Rex, and his wife, Kathy, have kindly welcomed me into their home more times than I can remember. So has my wife’s wonderful cousin Jess, along with her husband, Jeremy; her ­daughters, Calla and Cadyn; and Jess’s ­mother, Caron. Tonya, Kristen, and numerous other Patterson cousins have become my ­g iant extended ­family. My amazing mother-­in-­law, Nancy, made this book pos­si­ble by watching over our baby ­daughter and constantly g­ oing beyond the call of duty in providing love and support. Her wonderful boyfriend, Carl, is as reliable as they come and has run countless errands and offered his ser­vices whenever needed. Locke celebrated “pride of lineage,” and I certainly take pride in mine. My grandparents, Arnold and Irene Weinfeld and Sigmund and Nina Zelkowitz, all survived the Holocaust while numerous relatives, including their parents, perished. They made lives for themselves in Montreal, and f­ amily became incredibly impor­tant. On my ­mother’s side, my aunt Lily and cousins Ryan and Jason; Ryan’s wife, Ruth, and ­children, Josh and Nina; and on my ­father’s side, his cousin David and David’s c­ hildren, Dara and Michael, form my small but loving ­family. My ­father, Morton Weinfeld, is a sociology professor, and his influence inspired me to pursue an academic ­career. I cherish our conversations and the far too infrequent time we get to spend together. I miss our annual tradition of attending the AJS conference as a father-­son duo, a tradition I hope resumes soon. I am always encouraged when he tells me how much he loves me and how proud he is of me. My ­mother, Phyllis Zelkowitz, prob­ably knows Kallen and Locke as well as anyone by now. She has edited countless drafts of this proj­ect, when it was a dissertation and then as a book. She also did an amazing job looking over the proofs. This book would not be ­here without her. She is a wonderful editor and



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an even greater m ­ other, providing me with unconditional love and support through good times and bad. My ­sisters, Rebecca and Joanna Weinfeld, are more than just s­ isters. We jokingly call ourselves “the three best friends that anyone could have,” but it’s not ­really a joke. I trea­sure our closeness and the love and support they provide. Their husbands, Andrew and Jer, are the best brothers-­in-­law I could ask for, and their c­ hildren, Ellie, Abby, and Ezra, fill me with joy. The biggest bundle of joy came in January 2020, as I was revising this manuscript, shortly before a global pandemic set in. Opal Donna Weinfeld reminds me of me: loud, always moving, and a voracious eater. I hope she grows up in a world defined by what is best in cultural pluralism. My rock, teammate, and best friend through this journey has been my brilliant wife, Marjie Patterson. We had three weddings, one in Toronto, one in Richmond, and one in Lewisburg, West V ­ irginia, and strangely she agreed to marry me each time. I am very lucky. She edits my work, offers counsel when I have questions that concern the minutest details, and always encourages me to write better and be better. She is the most efficient, pragmatic, hardworking person I know. She has endless reserves of energy that leave me in awe, and her intelligence and kindness make our lives so much better. She is an incredible ­mother to Opal and a source of strength to me. She helped me find my way back to a religious Judaism that feels right. She provides me with renewed confidence and a world of possibilities. With deep love, re­spect, and humility, I dedicate this book to her.

A u th o r ’ s N ote

In this book, I include quotations that contain racial slurs to adhere to the historical record; to fully communicate the sentiment conveyed by different historical actors; and, most important, to contrast these slurs to different terms employed by the same actors or by other contemporaneous figures.

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AN AMERICAN FRIENDSHIP

Introduction What Difference Does the Difference Make? Cultural Pluralism as Friendship

In the fall of 1906, in a discussion section of the Harvard professor George Santayana’s class on Plato’s philosophy, a student named Alain Locke argued with his teaching assistant Horace Kallen. They did not argue about the world of forms or the nature of the good or the parable of the cave. They argued about color and humanity and difference. Locke, an African American, “insisted he was a h ­ uman being and that his color o ­ ught not to make any difference” in his life or in p­ eople’s perception of him. Kallen, a German-­born Jewish immigrant, believed other­wise. He asserted that Locke’s position, however heartfelt and idealistic, was mistaken. Kallen insisted Locke’s color “had to make a difference,” and more impor­tant, “it had to be accepted and respected and enjoyed for what it was.”1 That disagreement sowed the seeds of friendship and watered a very fertile, very American idea—­cultural pluralism, the ancestor of t­ oday’s multiculturalism. The budding phi­los­o­phers continued their conversation the following year at Oxford University. Kallen was finishing his doctoral dissertation on a Sheldon fellowship, and Locke had been awarded a Rhodes Scholarship, the first Black man to be so honored. When the two men spoke in E ­ ngland, it was not as student and teacher but as peers, as friends. Locke again exclaimed, “I am a ­human being. What difference does the difference make? We are all alike Americans.”2 Yet for Americans at Oxford, the difference made a big difference. In November 1907, the white southern Rhodes Scholars did not invite Locke 1

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to the American Club Thanksgiving dinner. Angered at this slight against his former student, Kallen invited Locke to tea. Kallen’s stance solidified the friendship, sparking further conversation. He and Locke debated “the question of how the differences made differences,” with the term cultural pluralism emerging from t­hose very interactions. Kallen explained this concept in s­ imple, clear language as the “right to be dif­fer­ ent,” a response to nativist bigotry and the assimilationist melting pot.3 He first used cultural pluralism in print in his 1924 book Culture and Democracy in the United States. But the phrase’s genesis in his friendship with Locke illuminates how it became the most impor­tant idea about American diversity to emerge ­until it spawned multiculturalism in the 1960s. This book tells the story of the friendship between Kallen and Locke to elucidate the idea of cultural pluralism they developed. The two ­were never best friends. No photo­g raph of them together exists. At the beginning of their friendship, Kallen held racist views ­toward Black p­ eople, and Locke held anti-­ Semitic opinions of Jews. The friendship was strongest from 1907 to 1908, when they ­were at Oxford. It waned with geographic distance but rekindled in 1935. They grew closer over the next two de­cades ­until Locke’s death in 1954. The two philosophy professors’ linked lives not only birthed the term cultural pluralism but also provided a paradigmatic example of cultural pluralism in action. Kallen and Locke bonded over shared experience as intellectual outsiders, a Jew and a Black man living and working among white Christians. They also shared values as pragmatists, individualists, elitists, and secularists committed to ethnic particularism, high cultural expression, and communal leadership. Above all, they shared an appreciation of difference, including their own differences. ­These commonalities and differences forged their friendship. The Kallen-­Locke relationship illustrates their understanding of friendship as the ideal meta­phor for cultural pluralism. For both men, whereas ­family would come to symbolize stale sameness, friends found common bonds while accepting and appreciating their differences. Although many other meta­phors exist to describe American diversity, from melting pots to symphonies to salad bowls, friendship reflects a pro­cess that all individuals engaged in, even more than cooking and m ­ usic. Their mutually beneficial friendship came with strug­gle, as Kallen overcame his racism and Locke his anti-­Semitism. In becoming friends, neither erased his differences, but instead they embraced each other’s distinctions and learned from each other’s culture. Their complicated relationship shows that cultural pluralism, befriending the stranger, can be difficult yet rewarding to ­those who make the effort, particularly in a society that values diversity. Locke called this

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3

value “reciprocity,” suggesting dif­fer­ent cultures could meta­phor­ically be friends, borrowing, exchanging, and learning from one another, just as individuals like he and Kallen did.4 As the f­ athers of cultural pluralism, Kallen and Locke w ­ ere impor­tant figures in their own right. A leading American Zionist, Jewish educator, and promoter of secular Hebraic culture, Horace Meyer Kallen (1882–1974) was a disciple of William James and an exponent of Jamesian philosophical pragmatism, a professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison from 1911 to 1918, and a founding faculty member of the New School for Social Research in New York City in 1919, where he taught philosophy and psy­chol­ogy for four de­cades. In his long life, he wrote on many topics, including the book of Job, consumer cooperatives, adult education, and environmentalism. Alain LeRoy Locke (1885–1954) has an even larger place in the intellectual history of the United States.5 He became the first African American Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and then a professor at Howard University in 1912, where he taught u ­ ntil 1953. Locke’s legacy endures, as he is considered the intellectual godfather of the Black aesthetics movement of the 1920s known known as the Negro Re­nais­sance or Harlem Re­nais­sance. He brought together brilliant Black artists and intellectuals, including Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, in this New Negro movement. He penned its manifesto, “The New Negro,” and edited a compilation by that name in 1925. In a 1927 letter, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote, “Locke is by long odds the best trained man among the younger American Negroes.”6 As a pragmatist phi­los­o­pher, Locke explored value theory and relativism, and as a critic he wrote on numerous subjects, from art, ­music, and lit­er­a­ture to the race prob­lem and adult education. But all his intellectual endeavors, like t­ hose of Kallen, w ­ ere linked to his efforts to navigate the universal and the par­tic­u­lar, nearing that unreachable equilibrium through the American idea of cultural pluralism. Cultural pluralism emerged at the beginning of the twentieth ­century as an idea that both described the real­ity of the United States and articulated an ideal for the nation’s f­ uture. It developed in opposition to discriminatory nativism as well as the more “progressive” assimilationist ideal of the “melting pot,” the title of the popu­lar 1908 play written by British Jewish writer Israel Zangwill. Contra nativism and the melting pot concept, cultural pluralists believed ethnic groups could and should maintain and develop their par­tic­u­lar heritages while peacefully coexisting in the United States. Kallen hoped to replace the culinary meta­phor of the melting pot with a musical version, the “symphony of civilization,” with dif­fer­ent cultures represented by instruments in an orchestra playing in harmony. He may have borrowed the musical meta­ phor from Locke. Regardless, Kallen and Locke argued that this pro­cess would

4 I NT R OD U CT I ON

enrich the constituent cultures and the nation as a ­whole by allowing each to borrow and learn from the other. During the First World War, cultural pluralism offered an appealing contrast to the absolutist nationalism exploding across Eu­rope. Locke and Kallen championed American heterogeneity as freer, more modern, and more in­ter­ est­ing than the homogenous and monotonous countries of the Old World. The melting pot, insofar as it represented coercive assimilation, seemed better suited for Eu­ro­pean nationalism than for American democracy. Cultural pluralism offered a path for Black p­ eople and Jews to navigate between universalism and particularism, the central binaries of African American and Jewish history. Neither Kallen nor Locke had any use for cultural uniformity. They embraced particularistic pluralism over bland universalism. Locke’s and Kallen’s varied and distinguished ­careers, along with their experiences and relationships, reflected the “manyness” at the heart of cultural pluralism. They rejected monism in f­ avor of a universe containing multitudes, including a variety of cultural groups. At the individual level, cultural pluralism allowed for dual and hybrid identities. Its very essence favored hyphenation, a concept both Kallen and Locke embraced, in which two or more identities coexist within a single person. Identity is not a tangible ­thing but a feeling of loyalty to a par­tic­u­lar community and a distinct heritage, a feeling that could coexist with other loyalties and wax or wane over time. Cultural pluralists preferred open borders between communities that could shift without disappearing or compromising the integrity of t­ hose communities. Kallen and Locke agreed cultural pluralism was only pos­si­ble ­under democracy, as it was an inherently demo­cratic idea, allowing individuals the freedom to preserve their identities and to build ethnic enclaves without segregation, and creating a framework where all identities and communities ­were equal. As an idea that celebrated diversity, cultural pluralism was foundational to the development of modern multiculturalism. ­There are at least two significant differences between the two ideas. First, cultural pluralism, as envisioned by Kallen and Locke, was largely secular. Kallen and Locke lumped Jews with Black p­ eople, Italians, Germans, and Anglo-­Saxons as ethnic or cultural groups—­they usually called them races or nations—­not with religious groups like Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, and Hindus. Both Kallen and Locke criticized mainstream religion and saw secular ideas and aesthetics as the anchors of modern cultures.7 Multiculturalism, as espoused in the United States, Canada, and elsewhere, is more embracing of religious distinctions woven into the tapestry of diverse societies.

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Second, in embracing religious distinctions, multiculturalism reveals itself to be concerned with popu­lar culture, not only religious rituals and spirituality but also food, fashion, and mass entertainment. Kallen and Locke’s cultural pluralism, however, was more elitist and oriented ­toward intellectualism. For American intellectuals in the first quarter of the twentieth c­ entury, cultural pluralism went beyond an expression of ethnic solidarity. It entailed not simply preserving ancestral heritage but rather building something new by forging intergroup friendships, networks, and intellectual communities and by providing aesthetic portrayals of ethnic particularity and hybridity. Locke and Kallen hoped their movements would spread high culture to the masses—­ hence their shared interest in adult education. But they had a very narrow, hierarchical, and elitist view of what constituted culture and similarly elitist preferences in terms of whom they wanted in their friendship circles. The Kallen-­Locke friendship was dif­fer­ent from other stories of Black-­Jewish relations. Most such collaborations of that period occurred on the po­liti­cal or economic level, through shared commitments to social justice, mutual experience of discrimination, and self-­interested pragmatism—­the conviction that protecting Jews also protects Black ­people and vice versa. Locke and Kallen connected on a cultural and intellectual level. Many Jewish philanthropists and communists who allied with African Americans ­were deeply assimilated. Kallen was dif­fer­ent: he rejected assimilation through his secular endorsement of Hebraism and Zionism. Similarly, Locke never affiliated with the Black church but was dedicated to developing Black culture. Their friendship went beyond a shared commitment to socialism or philanthropy. Both men overcame their prejudices and formed a genuine friendship based on shared values, intellectual interests, and recognition and appreciation of cultural difference. Locke and Kallen ­were connected in their dedication to cultural nationalism. According to Moses Rischin, “The most striking evidence of the impact of Kallen’s theory of cultural pluralism upon any ethnic group was in fact exemplified in the ­career of Alaine [sic] Locke, who became the ­father of the New Negro and the champion of the Harlem Re­nais­sance.”8 Locke’s cultural nationalism and his appreciation for his African past ­were the areas that overlapped the most with Kallen’s cultural pluralism and Zionism. Both men envisioned a rebirth for a long-­oppressed ­people in which culture would play a major role. In the 1956 book The Negro in American Culture, by Margaret Just Butcher, a work “based on materials left by Alain Locke,” Butcher cites Kallen for his “repudiation of the ‘melting pot’ idea and deliberate cultivation of differences.” Unlike Kallen, and like Locke, she applies his doctrine specifically to the case of African Americans: “­Because the Negro has fought against superficial

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differences and intolerance for so long, he is identified with the idea of tolerance and thoroughgoing re­spect for all races and cultures.”9 The New Negro movement, as Locke ­imagined it, served to prove African Americans could produce elite secular culture through exquisite artistic and intellectual achievement. This would earn Black ­people a place within the American framework of cultural pluralism. By advancing Black cultural nationalism, somewhat paradoxically, Locke was helping himself, and other African Americans, integrate into the broader society of the United States.10 Kallen’s cultural nationalism was rooted in a similar paradox, ethnic assertion in the ser­vice of assimilation. For him, this cultural nationalism displayed itself as Zionism. Kallen was also a po­liti­cal Zionist who endorsed the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. But for him, and unlike other po­liti­cal Zionists like Theodor Herzl, the culture of the Jewish state mattered a g­ reat deal. For Kallen, that culture needed to be Hebraic, a secular Jewish culture with roots in Jewish religious history. Kallen sought to develop Hebraism in the United States. His was a po­liti­ cal and cultural Zionism and a cultural Diasporic Jewish nationalism. It was also a thoroughly modern Zionism that he rooted in progressivism, secularism, and democracy, values that the United States shared. As Matthew Kaufman argues, by embracing modern science, Kallen became something of a prophet of secular Judaism and “fused American democracy, secularism, and Jewishness into an interconnected ­whole.”11 Thus, Zionism, a movement dedicated to nation building in Palestine/Israel, was for Kallen a means to further Americanization while preserving Jewish culture. Kallen’s and Locke’s dif­fer­ent experiences led them to dif­fer­ent expressions of cultural pluralism. As Kallen admitted, as a white man, “unlike the Negro,” he “could ‘pass.’ ”12 He benefited from white privilege. Though he experienced anti-­Semitism on more than one occasion, he never had to deal with the intense racism that Locke endured. Locke’s race proved inescapable, try as he might to escape it, even by fleeing to ­England. Kallen’s religion proved much easier to abandon. He affirmed and ­shaped his Jewish identity on his own secular Zionist terms. Nobody forced him in that direction. Locke, meanwhile, faced a starker choice, to accept and embrace his Black identity or to live in denial and fight hopelessly against the strictures of a racialized society. The world would not let him enjoy the universalism he might have preferred. Given ­these dif­fer­ent contexts, Kallen and Locke articulated versions of cultural pluralism that ­were similar but not identical. Kallen, secure in his whiteness, sought to build a strong Hebraic culture so Jews would not dis­appear into the American melting pot. Locke knew his ­people could not fully assimilate given the extent of racism in the United States. He hoped to use the tools

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of Western civilization to form a modern Black culture that African Americans would take pride in for its own sake and employ in the fight against prejudice. Despite this difference, they united in their commitment to cultural particularism, interethnic learning, and secular humanism. During the First World War, as the United States turned ­toward religious pluralism, Locke and Kallen argued that ethnic groups should develop elite secular cultures to contribute to the international community of arts and letters.13 Their story enlightens and entertains b­ ecause the protagonists had colorful histories. Born in Germany, the son of an Orthodox rabbi, Kallen moved to Boston at age five. By high school he had abandoned Judaism, but at Harvard he became a secular Zionist. As a gradu­ate student ­there, he spent a fellowship year at Oxford, where he picked up an entirely affected En­glish accent, which he maintained for the rest of his life. He wrote poetry about the Harvard philosophy department. Kallen signed his letters alternately with the Hebrew shalom u’vracha, meaning “peace and blessing,” or the decidedly pagan “May the gods keep you well and merry.” When something amused him, he said it “tickled [his] gizzard.” The Philadelphia-­born Locke, for his part, stood five feet tall, weighed a hundred pounds, was gay and raised Episcopalian, but also embraced the Ethical Culture movement and in 1918 converted to the Baha’i faith. When his ­mother died, he placed her corpse on a chair in his apartment and had guests talk to her as if she ­were alive. The Harvard gradu­ate, first Black Rhodes Scholar, longtime philosophy professor at Howard University, and leader of the Harlem Re­nais­sance had been born Allan Locke, but in high school he added the i to his first name to sound French and sophisticated. Locke and Kallen w ­ ere ­brothers in pretentiousness. This narrative extends from their early lives, before they knew each other, to their meeting and friendship at Harvard and Oxford, their drifting apart through the prime of their ­careers, and the rekindling of their friendship ­later in life. ­After Locke’s death in 1954, Kallen honored their friendship by continuing to spread the gospel of cultural pluralism for the next two de­cades. For Kallen and Locke, cultural pluralism facilitated cultural preservation and enhancement, along with acculturation into the American scene. Can multiculturalism fulfill the same function t­ oday in the United States, Canada, and elsewhere? Perhaps. Understanding the origins of cultural pluralism can help us make sense of modern multiculturalism, its strengths and shortcomings. By looking at the friendship between Locke and Kallen, we can envision new possibilities for navigating ethnic and religious diversity t­oday, new strategies for rebuilding frayed bonds between Black p­ eople and Jews in the United States, and new ave­nues for applying philosophical pragmatism to prob­lems of identity and

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community. Or we can just enjoy a r­ eally good story. Before we do, however, we need to delve deeper into ideas of cultural pluralism and friendship, and how Kallen and Locke understood ­those ideas. As a Jew and an African American, respectively, Kallen and Locke ­were outsiders in the United States and ­England. Yet both men ­were enthusiastic outsiders. They expressed enthusiasm for elite cultural institutions they wished to join, Harvard and Oxford. They took pride in their affiliations with t­ hese universities, while knowing their affiliation did not entitle them to the sense of belonging white Protestants felt. Locke and Kallen also took a mea­sure of pride in being outsiders, in proving themselves worthy, and in fostering mutually beneficial relationships between their ancestral communities and the wider civilization in which they lived. As enthusiastic outsiders, they became friends and developed the idea of cultural pluralism out of shared experience. Biographical parallels reflect similarities in the cultural movements they helped lead. A leader of the Harlem Re­nais­sance, Locke possessed what Paul Allen Anderson calls “the aestheticist dream of elite cultural production.”14 Locke encouraged the use of African and African American source material, rooted in the Black American experience, to build a modern, sophisticated Black culture. Kallen never achieved Locke’s prominence, but he helped found the Menorah movement, which was dedicated to advancing secular Jewish culture, called Hebraism. Though Hebraists w ­ ere not necessarily Zionist, for Kallen, the cultural and po­liti­cal movements ­were inextricably linked, and he passionately supported Jewish statehood in Palestine. As liberal nationalists, Locke and Kallen envisioned cultural pluralism creating space for ethnic communities to flourish in the United States. Although they did not always call it by that name, Kallen and Locke wrote about cultural pluralism extensively. More impor­tant than writing about it, they lived it. As Daniel Greene observes, cultural pluralism is not only an abstract concept but also a lived experience.15 To understand it, one must go beyond Locke’s and Kallen’s philosophical writings and investigate their private lives. Analy­sis of their everyday actions illuminates their most celebrated texts and provides a lens to read between the lines of their often vague and dense prose. This entails looking at how Kallen and Locke socialized, how they spent their leisure time, how they formed friendships and romantic relationships, and how they privately responded to professional endeavors. ­These personal moments demonstrate how they engaged with ethnic, racial, and religious diversity and crafted a world of cultural pluralism for themselves. Phi­los­o­phers grappled with friendship long before Kallen and Locke. Aristotle asserted that “no one would choose to live without friends but possessing all other good ­things.” The ancient Macedonian identified three types of

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friendship, that based on utility, that grounded in plea­sure, and last, and greatest, that based on virtue. We make friends with ­people who help us, with ­people whose com­pany we enjoy, and with ­those we admire as peers.16 Kallen and Locke’s friendship shared all t­hese characteristics. It provided them with professional opportunities, introductions to colleagues and new friends, and topics for scholarship and teaching. They enjoyed spending time with each other in intellectual conversation, over dinner or tea or alcohol, in groups or just the two of them; expending time and energy to see each other in dif­fer­ent locations; and engaging in a lengthy correspondence. But they also respected each other for their intellects and their characters. Theirs was an elitist vision of friendship, where ideas and cultures would be shared in a refined, cosmopolitan setting, which the university exemplified. The university, an idealized microcosm of the United States and a real institution, was a laboratory for cultural pluralism as friendship. Nonetheless, their progressive ideals led them to believe high culture could be made available to anyone who wished to embrace it. They became leading advocates of adult education for precisely this reason. More than phi­los­o­phers, Kallen and Locke ­were educators. They educated their students, but they also educated each other. Their friendship was itself a form of education. Their friendship was also complicated. In Kallen’s letters and diaries, he made disparaging remarks about African Americans, on one occasion using the term n—­—.­ Locke made frequent anti-­Semitic comments in letters and private conversations, and even in one published work. At the same time, Locke repeatedly used n—­—­ in letters to his m ­ other to describe Black p­ eople he disliked.17 Prejudice is often the by-­product, or even the foundation, of pluralism. To divide ­people into dif­fer­ent races, religions, or cultures is to open the door to discrimination. Yet Kallen and Locke overcame their prejudices and established a real, substantive friendship. That friendship provides an underused paradigm for studying Black-­Jewish relations. Their story offers a new history and interpretation of cultural pluralism, a crucial idea for understanding the United States. Kallen connected cultural pluralism and friendship in a 1955 memorial address for Locke. As Anderson notes, Kallen’s eulogy depicted “cultural pluralism as a technique for representing the philosophical basis of friendship between ­people” of diverse backgrounds.18 Kallen told a story of friendship in the United States, of an intellectual relationship that birthed the idea of cultural pluralism. He spoke eloquently of his and Locke’s history, and of the connection between cultural pluralism and friendship, to honor his friend and cement their linked legacy. In his remarks, Kallen revealed his preference for “friendship” over “brother­ hood,” observing humorously that biblical friends David and Jonathan got

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along better than did b­ rothers Cain and Abel. Kallen feared the sameness implied in the fraternal relationship. Unlike brotherhood, the word friendship carried “no implication of an identical beginning and a common end.” The United States’ ethnic groups needed a more pragmatic ideal than brotherhood in order to go beyond coexistence and thrive together. “The expression ‘cultural pluralism’ is intended to signify this endeavor t­ oward friendship by ­people who are dif­fer­ent from each other but who, as dif­fer­ent, hold themselves equal to each other.”19 Though Kallen believed “differences are primary,” he lamented that so many groups continued to “penalize one another for their differences.” Reviewing conflicts in Africa, Asia, and the ­Middle East, Kallen summarized each side’s worldview: “Agree with me, be my ­brother—or e­ lse! And so that you may become completely a b­ rother, you must offer up your own dif­fer­ent being to be digested into identification with mine. You must replace your purposes with mine, your ways and means with mine. ­Unless you do this you refuse brotherhood.”20 Kallen decried cultural imperialism that led to cultural erasure. It evoked “totalitarian” philosophies he had long opposed: fascism, Nazism, and communism. He thus rejected brotherhood in ­favor of friendship. “Be my friend. I am dif­fer­ent from you. You are dif­fer­ent from me. Let us exchange the fruits of our differences so that each may enrich the other with what the other is not or has not in himself. In what e­ lse are we impor­tant to one another, what ­else can we pool and share if not our differences?”21 To Kallen, friendship entailed embracing difference rather than sameness. Friendship formed the backbone of the right to be dif­fer­ent, of cultural pluralism. This allowed for “the ­free and friendly barter of dif­fer­ent ­things and thoughts and neighborly relations.” Kallen’s ideal society encouraged “untrammeled communication between the dif­fer­ent on all levels.” Constant exchange between ­peoples represented “the idea of civilization that the expression ‘cultural pluralism’ denotes.”22 His lifelong friendship with Locke was an example of this idea in action. Friendship provides a new paradigm for the study of Black-­Jewish relations. As Hasia Diner shows, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most interactions between Black ­people and Jews ­were e­ ither economic or “mythic,” operating at a “meta­phoric level.” Immigrant Jews learned ste­reo­ types about Black p­ eople, and vice versa, that proved as impor­tant as real-­life encounters. “Imaginary” archetypes helped them understand their position relative to the white Christian majority and also colored real-­life interactions with each other.23 To Eu­ro­pean Jewish immigrants, African Americans w ­ ere a novelty. Black ­people in the United States, meanwhile, had long known white

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p­ eople but began to develop an understanding of Jews as dif­fer­ent from white Christians. The two groups frequently acted as allies fighting against prejudice. They also felt their share of friction. Popu­lar histories of Black-­Jewish relations are typically drenched in nostalgia, lamenting the decline of this historic alliance. Scholarly studies of Black-­Jewish relations usually focus on moments of cooperation or conflict or both. This scholarship gives the impression that Black-­ Jewish relations w ­ ere largely transactional. The alliance was tit-­for-­tat: Black ­people would help Jews fight anti-­Semitism, and Jews would help Black p­ eople fight racism. Any explanation beyond that was mere nostalgia. David Levering Lewis observes that Black ­people and Jews had “quite dif­fer­ent, if not antipodal, cultural pasts.” He notes that the “forced and per­sis­tent analogies between t­ hese two ethnic groups, pertaining to slavery, Diaspora, subculture, and pariah status, are legacies of an era of slightly disingenuous underdog solidarity that once served a positive civil rights function for both parties, but tend now to clutter and distort impartial analy­sis.”24 Lewis adds, “What Afro-­Americans and Jews principally shared, of course, was not a similar heritage, but an identical adversary—­a species of white gentile. Theirs was a po­liti­cally determined kinship, a defensive alliance cemented more from the outside than from within.” To Lewis, Black-­Jewish relations ­were starkly utilitarian. “For all this apparent rather than real soul-­fellowship, dissimilarity and opportunity underlay the Afro-­American-­Jewish co­ali­tion. . . . ​ Both groups saw each other as means to ends, rather than as syncretic and equal partners in a strug­gle for citizenship without disabilities.”25 Most writings on Black-­Jewish relations do not mention Locke or Kallen, and if they do, it is only in passing.26 Friendship is not frequently explored as a theme of Black-­Jewish relations. Marc Dollinger refers to the post–­civil rights era as a time when “few Jews engaged with African Americans as part of their primary friendship networks.”27 That was even truer of the period when Locke and Kallen knew each other, from the early twentieth ­century to the 1950s. The iconic image of Black-­Jewish friendship was that of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marching arm in arm during the civil rights movement. Theirs was a religious bond. Philanthropist Julius Rosenwald, the president of Sears Roebuck, befriended Black leader Booker T. Washington. Scholar-­activists W. E. B. Du Bois and Joel Spingarn w ­ ere friends.28 ­These men came together out of mutual philanthropic interests. Kallen and Locke, on the other hand, connected through culture. Scholars have examined the cultural connections between Black p­ eople and Jews in the first half of the twentieth ­century.29 They focus mostly on ­music, Hollywood, and popu­lar culture. Kallen and Locke connected through the life of the mind.

12 I NT R OD U CT I ON

They shared a mutual appreciation of high culture and a desire to foster elite cultural production rooted in ethnicity, but with universal appeal. The Kallen-­Locke friendship s­ haped and exemplified an intellectually oriented form of cultural pluralism. This friendship was rooted in an appreciation for distinctions among elite secular cultures, from Japa­nese art to Hebrew poetry to African American ­music. T ­ hese two themes, friendship and secular culture, ­were more than essential ele­ments of cultural pluralism. They represented ideas put into practice by Kallen and Locke in the spirit of philosophical pragmatism. Cultural pluralism flowed from philosophical pragmatism as advanced by Harvard professor William James (1842–1910). Kallen had studied directly ­under James and helped publish his mentor’s last book posthumously. Locke heard James lecture on pluralism at Oxford in 1908. James’s pragmatism was pluralistic, empiricist, and individualistic. He believed individuals made their own personal truths by pragmatically testing what worked best for them. To Jamesian pragmatists, ideas w ­ ere “tools” that became true when used by individuals to obtain material, intellectual, or spiritual sustenance.30 Neither Kallen nor Locke is a major figure in the history of American pragmatism.31 But both employed pragmatism to help build cultural movements in the United States, shaping their environment to conform to larger truths of American diversity. As David Hollinger argues, pragmatists believed “the world was responsive to h ­ uman purpose,” “that inquiry could change the world.”32 Kallen and Locke’s friendship consisted of inquiry into each other and into themselves. It widened their worlds and birthed the idea of cultural pluralism. For them, friendship was a pro­cess of learning, of recurring inquiry. Pragmatism undergirded their understanding of cultural pluralism as lived experience. For Locke and Kallen, diversity itself was a tool for learning. One could not develop cultural pluralism without experiencing diversity, without interacting with individuals from a variety of cultures, and without forming friendships with p­ eople of dif­fer­ent backgrounds. Cultural pluralism was less a means of ethnic solidarity than it was a form of education. Ancestral heritages would be preserved and modernized through interethnic interaction, especially friendship. Ethnic communities enabled individual exploration of cultural diversity. Cultural pluralism was a way of life, a practice they employed and experienced when interacting with diverse thinkers and groups. Cultural pluralism was a tool for Kallen and Locke to explain and shape the United States. Kallen saw a fundamental symmetry between Zionism and cultural pluralism. Zionism enabled Jews to develop a modern Hebraic culture in Palestine while si­mul­ta­neously contributing to world civilization. Cultural pluralism enabled Jews and other ethnic groups to contribute their unique cultures to

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American society. Kallen described this symmetry in a 1913 speech to the Boston Zionists: “As the individual Jew makes the best of himself as a citizen of the United States . . . ​only by developing and expressing what is best in his nature as a Jew freely and autonomously, so the Jewish ­people can give their best to civilization only by expressing the nature of the race freely and autonomously.”33 As Mark Raider notes, Kallen “synthesized” American patriotism with Jewish nationalism “by affirming the centrality of Eretz Israel in Jewish life and the contributions of diaspora Jews to their lands of residence.”34 Kallen and Locke’s United States did not have a unifying national culture, nor did it need one.35 It was a land of many cultures, united by princi­ples like freedom, democracy, mutual re­spect, economic cooperation, and obeying the law. ­Because of t­hese princi­ples, Black and Jewish culture could develop through interaction with other cultures. This organ­izing philosophy was cultural pluralism. Kallen and Locke w ­ ere two among many American thinkers to grapple with ideas of diversity, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Jane Addams, Judah Magnes, and Randolph Bourne. When comparing Kallen with some of t­ hese writers, several scholars have cast Kallen as more conservative than the ­others.36 Hollinger describes Kallen’s cultural pluralism as dedicated to the preservation of “durable ethnic units” at the cost of individual freedom to enter, exit, and redefine t­hese groups.37 Noam Pianko disagrees, arguing that this critique of cultural pluralism “distorts the conscious effort Kallen made . . . ​to find a language of collectivity that supported both permeable and fixed bound­aries of identity.”38 In his 1915 article “Democracy versus the Melting Pot,” Kallen uses a f­ amily meta­phor: “Men may change their clothes, their politics, their wives, their religions, their philosophies, to a greater or lesser extent: they cannot change their grand­fathers. Jews or Poles or Anglo-­Saxons, in order to cease being Jews or Poles or Anglo-­Saxons, would have to cease to be.”39 Despite this putative biological determinism, Kallen knew that immigrants could choose to abandon their grandparents’ culture, as he had abandoned his ­father’s traditional Judaism. He simply preferred for individuals to honor their ancestral heritage. The racialist language of “Democracy versus the Melting Pot” was a call to resist assimilation, more prescriptive than descriptive. He wanted ethnic groups in the United States to coexist and thrive as an “orchestration of mankind,” each culture representing a dif­fer­ent musical instrument. Together they formed the “symphony of civilization.”40 In an anthropological framework, Locke also celebrated the contributions of dif­fer­ent ethnicities to the United States and the world. His 1915 speeches at Howard on “race contacts and interracial relations” (repeated the following year) criticized minority populations who merely imitated the dominant

14 I NT R OD U CT I ON

group. This was not the way to participate in W. E. B. Du Bois’s “kingdom of culture.” Instead, groups must offer something new, something dif­fer­ent. “Culture-­citizenship is not acquired through assimilation merely, but in terms of a racial contribution to what becomes a joint civilization.”41 Imitation may be the highest form of flattery, but at the cultural level, it does not add a new sound to the symphony. Kallen and Locke’s friendship adds a new dimension to their contributionist cultural pluralism and demonstrates the strength of intellectual history, as a discipline, in connecting thought and experience, as well as the power of ideas to shape ­people, and ­people to shape ideas. The story of Kallen and Locke not only led to the coining of the term cultural pluralism, it demonstrated the importance of friendship in the lived experience of cultural pluralism. Their narrative shows the ways that they experimented socially in a world of diversity, helping them fashion their own identities and the idea they would make famous. As Ross Posnock notes, Locke referred to friendship as his “one religion,” particularly the “Greek ideal of friendship” directed at “sensitive young men.” Locke’s homo­sexuality was an “open secret.”42 Howard history professor Rayford Logan recorded in his diary in 1941 that his “protégé,” William Willis II, had received an invitation from Locke to his apartment and asked his mentor ­whether he should go. “I told him flatly, NO!”43 Despite his homophobia, Logan and Locke w ­ ere friends and confidants while colleagues at Howard. Locke’s ideal of friendship, Greek or other­wise, did not necessarily have a sexual component. His friendships typically took a strongly intellectual form. In 1904, he wrote a short essay titled “Friendship.” He noted that, “in lit­er­a­ ture and history,” many groups of men ­were impor­tant “solely in their influence upon each other; the stimulating force of literary friendship or intellectual sympathy.”44 When Kallen met Locke in 1905, he had a dif­fer­ent conception of friendship. As a Harvard gradu­ate student, Kallen looked up to his non-­Jewish professors but sought friends primarily among Jewish undergraduates who w ­ ere engaged in Jewish life on campus. Meeting Locke led Kallen to a new conception of friendship, and their own friendship was one that appreciated difference and became foundational to the idea of cultural pluralism. Locke, enmeshed in the white world, understood that many of his friends would come from backgrounds dif­fer­ent from his own. He gravitated t­oward ­those with intellectual orientations. Kallen and Locke shared a commitment to intellectual life and secular culture. Kallen’s move ­toward culture enabled him to maintain Jewish particularism while abandoning irrational religious beliefs. He called this secular Jewish idea Hebraism and saw Zionism as its most impor­tant po­liti­cal mani-

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festation. He helped found the Harvard Menorah Society in 1906 with other gradu­ate, professional, and undergraduate students to promote Hebraic culture. The society expanded into the Intercollegiate Menorah Association and by 1915 began publishing the Menorah Journal, a magazine of Jewish ideas and aesthetics. The Menorah movement inspired the development of academic Jewish studies in the United States. For Locke, the move ­toward culture was influenced by the anthropology of Franz Boas (1858–1942). A secular German Jew and professor at Columbia, Boas rejected a biological interpretation of race in f­ avor of a cultural one. Locke made this approach central to the Harlem Re­nais­sance. He argued that what defined African Americans was not the color of their skin, or even the content of their character, but the content of their culture. Character defines individuals, but culture defines groups. Cultural production leaves room for individual creativity, but communal heritage enriches individual artistic efforts. Kallen and Locke each rejected a crucial aspect of their identities: in Kallen’s case, religion; in Locke’s, biology. They met on the plane of high culture. They envisioned cultural pluralism as an elite proj­ect.45 They embraced the civilization they lived in and loved, particularly in the United States’ and ­England’s most prestigious institutions. ­These intellectual worlds provided space for transcending racial and religious barriers while upholding ethnic particularism. Accordingly, Kallen and Locke did not direct their ideas to the masses. They engaged the talented few who inhabited diverse intellectual settings like Harvard, Oxford, and the academic and literary worlds of New York. While they appreciated traditional food and clothing, and even some religious rituals, Kallen and Locke concerned themselves primarily with upper-­crust aesthetics and academics. Kallen and Locke freely criticized their own p­ eoples. Cultural pluralism, though oriented t­ oward groups, championed the individual right to preserve and shape one’s identity. This right defended against t­ hose who sought to impose an identity on ­others, be it hegemonic Anglo-­Saxonism or a Judaism or Blackness that felt foreign and unappealing. In articulating secular Zionism, Kallen disparaged Reform and Orthodox Jews. Locke disdained the clannishness of the Black community at Harvard, as well as the way that some African Americans acted differently around their fellow Black p­ eople than they did around white p­ eople. To Locke, “self-­criticism” was one of the highest forms of group cultural expression.46 Both men came to embrace what they regarded as the strengths of their respective groups, rather than the weaknesses. Each man came to appreciate the value of the other’s community, though Kallen more slowly than Locke.

16 I NT R OD U CT I ON

They would praise contributions Black p­ eople and Jews made to American and global civilization. Years l­ater, when recalling his conversations with Locke, Kallen defined cultural pluralism as “the right to be dif­fer­ent.” Kallen and Locke shared a fundamental belief in that right. Yet their adherence to cultural pluralism went beyond the language of rights. Group difference should not merely be tolerated; it should be celebrated. Before proceeding, a final question is worth pondering: Was Kallen in fact telling the truth in his account of the origins of the term cultural pluralism? Correspondence involving Kallen and Locke’s mutual friend, Jewish social worker, activist, and philanthropist Jacob Billikopf, casts some doubt. In 1942, Billikopf, who sat on the board of Howard University, wrote to Locke, “It w ­ ill interest you to note that my dear friend, Horace Kallen, developed the theory of pluralistic culture in American life as early as a quarter c­ entury ago.” He informed Locke that Kallen’s “magnum opus, art and freedom,” would soon “be published in two volumes.”47 Billikopf may not have known of Kallen’s early friendship with Locke. ­After the Second World War, Kallen corresponded with Billikopf about cultural pluralism but did not mention Locke. In a handwritten letter from December 1947, Kallen warned, “This is for your personal information, to use as you like. But a­ fter you have read it, please destroy. I ­don’t want to seem to blow my own horn.” The word “destroy” was circled. He then told an abbreviated origin story of the term cultural pluralism to correct the impression that John Dewey had in­ven­ted it. Kallen referenced Dewey, Randolph Bourne, Norman Hapgood, Julius Draschler, and Isaac Berkson as ­people who discussed similar ideas and had been stimulated by his 1915 essay “Democracy versus the Melting Pot.” Kallen first used cultural pluralism in print in his 1924 book Culture and Democracy in the United States but insisted he had employed the term “in lectures and addresses for nearly 20 years” before that. He pointed to four Harvard influences: (1) his sophomore year, when he lived in a settlement ­house and worked with Jewish and Italian immigrants; (2) his courses in American history and lit­er­a­ture taught by Barrett Wendell; (3) his studying “pluralism and pragmatism” with William James; and (4) his Zionist activity. He did not mention Locke.48 Which version in true? Perhaps Kallen did not want to credit Locke with contributing to cultural pluralism’s genesis u ­ ntil ­after Locke died. Perhaps he made up the story a­ fter Locke died, so it could not be disproven. Kallen’s letter to Billikopf does not contradict his l­ater account of the time and place of the term’s origins. It simply omits Locke’s role. Despite this mystery, the Kallen-­Locke relationship remains in­ter­est­ing and impor­tant as an understudied episode in American intellectual history. While

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they can be studied on their own, as a pair, as friends, their story comes alive, revealing deeper and wider insights. Their friendship reveals the character of their cultural pluralism: secular, aesthetic, elitist, and particularistic. Their story demonstrates the idea of friendship as an ideal way to understand cultural pluralism. To study their friendship, however, requires knowledge of where both men came from and how their paths eventually coincided.

C h a p te r   1

From Berenstadt to Boston

In his 1910 article “Judaism, Hebraism, Zionism,” Horace Kallen distinguished between three historical manifestations of Jewish ideals. Judaism was the rigid, ancestral faith he rejected. Hebraism, his guiding philosophy, represented organic, dynamic Jewish culture, which reflected the spirit of the Bible and Jewish history. Zionism was the pragmatic manifestation of Hebraism in the modern world. Although he did not personalize the essay, Kallen’s own ideological development mimicked this trajectory. This progression culminated in his theory of cultural pluralism. Kallen’s formulation for the United States was a by-­product of his reclaiming his Jewish heritage through Zionism. Understanding his Zionism requires an examination of his origins, along with the childhood ideologies he rejected and displaced. Kallen experienced cultural pluralism as an educational pro­cess of learning through encountering o ­ thers. At the same time, in the spirit of philosophical pragmatism, Kallen formed cultural pluralism through his interactions with American diversity, in Boston and beyond. Kallen’s childhood encompassed his journey from Old World to New. The young Kallen encountered ideas, embraced them, fought with them, lived them. Years before he developed the term cultural pluralism in 1924, he had already enjoyed a multitude of experiences that he would use to fashion his ideas on diversity. Friendship, however, did not appear to be one of them. Kallen did not retain a single friend from primary school, high school, or college. 18



F r o m B e r e n sta dt to B o s to n

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His earliest memories were of his parents and teachers. He made some friends in the Harvard Menorah Society in 1906. He made his first non-­Jewish friend in 1907, at the age of twenty-­five. That friend was Alain LeRoy Locke. Horace Kallen was born in Berenstadt, Germany (­today Poland), in 1882, the first of eight ­children to an Orthodox rabbi and his wife. Five years ­later, the ­family immigrated to Boston’s North End, an immigrant neighborhood first populated by the Irish and ­later by Jews and Italians. Few Jews had settled in Boston before 1880, avoiding the conflict between older central Eu­ro­pean Jewish immigrants and newer eastern Eu­ro­pean ones that marked the New York Jewish experience. Many of Boston’s Jews came from Posen, a nominally German city more accurately described as Polish, giving Boston’s Jewish community a “Polish character.”1 The Kallens arrived with a massive wave of Jewish immigration. Boston’s Jewish population increased from five thousand to forty thousand between 1880 and 1900. Mostly Yiddish speakers from the Czarist Empire, the Kallens did not quite fit the mold. Horace’s f­ather, Jacob, was a Yiddish speaker from Latvia but spoke German at home while serving as a rabbi in Germany, before he was expelled as a foreigner. He led a German-­speaking congregation in Boston, Society Har Moriah. While Horace’s “long-­suffering” ­mother worked tirelessly for “the liberation of the ­children,” his strict ­father hoped his eldest son would follow him into the rabbinate. He initially instructed Horace himself, but the local “truant officer” made the boy attend Eliot Grammar School.2 Horace Kallen bristled at the strictness of his Jewish education, both from his ­father and at cheder, the local Jewish school. As a teenager, he took steps ­toward in­de­pen­dence. He hung out in Scollay Square, a “honky-­tonk area” filled with “sports,” “saloons,” and “gay places.”3 To supplement the f­amily finances, he read gas meters, sold the Boston Herald, blackened boots, clerked in a grocery store, assisted a potato peddler, and gave En­glish, German, and French lessons.4 Linguistic proficiency was one of Kallen’s strengths. A native German speaker, he learned Hebrew from his f­ ather. A ­ fter immigrating, he learned En­ glish and picked up Yiddish from his neighbors and schoolmates. At En­glish High School, the oldest public school in the United States, he studied Greek, Latin, and French and developed an “excellent command of himself in vari­ ous languages.” His language skills and “extraordinary ­mental powers” made him an “omnivorous reader,” such that his teacher James A. Beadly prophesied ­g reat success in college “departments of lit­er­a­ture and philosophy.”5 Kallen came to Harvard highly recommended. In school he had developed an “excellent reputation” for being “honest, very ambitious, and industrious.”

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His teacher James E. Thomas, a Harvard alumnus, called Kallen “the possessor of a wonderful mind” who would “make a name for himself at Harvard.”6 Kallen graduated a year early, at seventeen, but took a postgraduate year to prepare for the Harvard curriculum. Poverty defined Kallen’s childhood. In winter he frequently came to school without sufficiently warm clothing and developed a respiratory ailment that “hampered his work during the spring.” Nonetheless, his teachers remained confident in his talents. En­glish and history teacher Albert Perry Walker praised his work ethic, “maturity of thought,” and “literary gifts, both critical judgment and of expression,” as “the most promising” he had ever seen.7 Kallen’s disposition earned him similar accolades. He appeared “uniformly kindly and courteous” to fellow students and teachers alike. Another teacher, William H. Sylvester called him “a young man of excellent moral character, and a scholar of first-­rate ability.”8 He was a Franklin Medal Scholar, placing among the top “half dozen” in his class, including first in chemistry.9 Teachers attributed his success to his Jewish origins. Many knew he lived in “slim circumstances” and had to “work hard outside of school to keep the pot boiling.” He impressed chemistry teacher Rufus P. Williams as a “very promising fellow, unusually ambitious, and—­like most of his nationality—­not at all afraid of work.” Beyond the curriculum, Kallen attended “advanced” science lectures a­ fter school. As a se­nior, he “or­ga­nized a group of small boys” to stay out of trou­ble, his first step in community activism.10 That same year, Kallen used his ­mother tongue to make an impor­tant discovery. He stumbled upon German translations of Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics and Theological-­Political Treatise among his ­father’s books. Though Jacob Kallen observed Jewish law strictly, he fancied himself a scholar and kept ­these blasphemous works in the ­house. While Jacob approved of his son reading Spinoza, the heretic’s writings hastened Horace’s escape from traditional Judaism. Still, some attachment to his f­ ather’s world remained. In 1899, Horace Kallen was “stage man­ag­er” for a standing-­room-­only concert put on by the Sons and ­Daughters of Zion, a Zionist group. Along with the m ­ usic and dancing, amateur actors put on brief theater per­for­mances and “very clever impersonations.” Kallen played Macbeth. The following year, he spoke on Zionism to his ­father’s congregation, Society Har Moriah, at Minot Hall. Zionism was part of his life before he left for college.11 In the fall of 1900, eighteen-­year-­old Horace Meyer Kallen stood among the incoming freshmen at Harvard, the United States’ oldest college, ready to embrace modernity. Despite his teenage accomplishments, the Harvard freshman class may well have intimidated him. He did not recall “any kind of antisemitism” at Harvard ­under the relatively tolerant and philo-­Semitic university



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president Charles William Eliot. Though being Jewish “was enough to cut one out,” Kallen did not remember his religion affecting his interactions with students or teachers in a negative way.12 Social class proved more significant. Kallen felt he “belonged to the other side of the tracks” and stood out as a poor Jew among wealthy white Protestants. He was a “ragged fellow” who worked his way through school, tutoring and taking odd jobs.13 He lived not in Harvard Yard with most other students but at a rooming ­house in Boston. Among his classmates in a Eu­ro­ pean history course sat Franklin Delano Roo­se­velt, cousin of the vice president, who de­cades ­later would advance to the nation’s highest office. Though Kallen earned a B to FDR’s “gentleman’s” C, he undoubtedly felt less comfortable at Harvard than his well-­to-do peer. Jews did not figure prominently in Kallen’s undergraduate memories. He recalled “one or two Jews,” from Cleveland and Boston, but observed that “Jews ­were not vis­ib­ le at Harvard in my day.”14 He took two classes alongside Herbert Straus, scion of the wealthy German Jewish Macy’s department store fortune, but never mentioned him.15 Hastings Hall, one of the fanciest dormitories, with rooms “costing $350 per year,” was nicknamed ­Little Jerusalem and “suffered in reputation ­because a large number of Jews lived in it,” but Kallen likely spent ­little if any time ­there.16 Kallen attended classes with African American students but left no rec­ord of any thoughts about them. A relative rarity on campus, they ­were likely the first African Americans he encountered as peers. What­ever prejudices he brought ­toward Locke and other Black ­people ­later in life may have emerged from t­ hese experiences. His college classmates had l­ittle impact on him. Kallen recalled, “The fellows you sat beside in the classroom w ­ ere tangent, they sometimes borrowed your notes or they made some kind of comment in the course of a lecture, but that was all, that was that.”17 Kallen did not maintain any friendships from his undergraduate years, and the historical rec­ord does not reveal ­whether he had any. Despite his ­limited social life, Kallen kept busy. He read meters for the Dorchester Gaslight Com­pany and worked as a “salesman in a shoe store, and a shipper in a grocery.” In 1901 he “established a private school for boys, teaching elementary subjects.”18 All told he earned between seventy-­five and one hundred dollars per year. As a sophomore, Kallen moved to Civic Ser­vice House, a settlement h ­ ouse in Boston’s North End across from a fire station. Philip Davis, another Jewish immigrant, Harvard student, and volunteer at Civic Ser­vice House, compared the neighborhood to a “Rus­sian fair, but a more cosmopolitan one.” He recalled constant commotion of “men, ­women and ­children in multicolored

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garb” navigating “pushcarts loaded with fruit and vegetables, fish and crabs, and edibles of e­ very description that cluttered the streets and sidewalks.” As “cries of ‘hot tamales,’ ‘fresh bagels,’ and ‘Fish! Fresh Fish’ in Yiddish, Italian and Portuguese filled the air,” the pushcarts constantly scattered as fire wagons came and went. Kallen made his way through the hustle and bustle and up the stairs to the “unassuming” entrance of the ­house, a site far from the idyllic Harvard Yard but at once more familiar and educational.19 Religious antagonism from Catholics afflicted the poor Jews of Boston, which Kallen likely sensed. In 1902 sociologist and Boston settlement ­house leader Robert A. Woods noted that the Irish, in attempting to swing Italians to the Demo­cratic Party, united over “their common enmity to the Jew.”20 Nonetheless, Kallen found a comfortable home for himself in returning to the immigrant life he had fled. One of a dozen workers and volunteers, Kallen received a ­free room in exchange for ser­vices performed for the settlement. He taught American history and En­glish and or­ga­nized the “youth” of the ­house. He ran a club of “Italian anarchists” and another of “young Jews,” some older than him.21 Recalling his adolescence, he or­ga­nized “the Bootblacks League” for kids who sold papers and shined shoes.22 He took boys “out to the country” to play football, visited them in their homes, ate meals with them, drank with them, and received a “­g reat education,” more significant than anything he learned in the classroom.23 Kallen also learned from his fellow volunteers at Civic Ser­vice House, some of whom had similar immigrant backgrounds. House leader Meyer Bloomfield emigrated from Bucharest to New York. He graduated from City College and earned another undergraduate degree from Harvard.24 Philip Davis, born Feivel Chemerinsky in Motol, Rus­sia (now Belarus), had also immigrated to New York, where he worked in a sweatshop. ­After struggling to or­ga­nize workers ­there, Davis made his way to Chicago, where he met Jane Addams and volunteered at Hull House. He enrolled at the University of Chicago but transferred to Harvard in 1901. He eventually moved to Civic Ser­vice House, where he likely encountered Kallen. Davis prob­ably told Kallen of his first cousin Chaim Weizmann, chemist and active Zionist, who would become Israel’s first president.25 Kallen’s experiences at Civic Ser­vice House opened the door to another teaching opportunity: communicating the contours of immigrant life to a larger public. In May  1902, Kallen lectured at the progressive Twentieth ­Century Club alongside Bloomfield and Max Mitchell, superintendent of Boston’s Jewish charities. Kallen depicted the “life, amusements and interests of the Jews and Italians of the North End.”26 He decried the lack of government-­



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supported opportunities for entertainment and the lack of green space amid the narrow streets and overcrowded ­houses. Since public parks ­were far away, he proposed creating makeshift parks on roofs, “for breathing spots and places for recreation, with an occasional band concert.” He advocated more “reading rooms” with “gymnasia and ­music.” Writing in the spirit of Teddy Roo­se­ velt’s masculine Progressivism, Kallen emphasized the demand for “leadership,” for individuals who would immerse themselves in the community, would get to know its population, and, “by the manly quality in their own lives, would attract and develop the manly quality in the lives of ­these ­people.”27 Kallen saw himself as such a leader. Yet he felt a stronger affinity for his fellow Jews than for the more foreign Italians. The Italians lived a more “blank” existence than the Jews did. A “musical” p­ eople, the Italians enjoyed gambling and the theater. They drank relatively l­ittle and accounted for few of the crimes in the district. They frequently or­ga­nized clubs, preferring athletic organ­ izations to the “intellectual” associations typically formed by Jews. The Italian clubs, however, had l­ ittle staying power and dissolved rather quickly b­ ecause of frequent quarrels. For Italians, marriage signaled the end of this more active social life, as they settled into the “humdrum of existence.”28 By contrast, Kallen found a vibrant cultural life among the impoverished Jewish immigrants. To Jews, Salem Street became a Spanish or Italian “plaza” where individuals gathered and mingled. Boys tossed pennies and gambled, despite facing scorn from adults and raids by the police. Many went to the theater and the dance halls. Ghetto lunchrooms served diverse crowds across the socioeconomic and ideological spectrum, “from the worst parasite of the ward politician to the dreamers, the poets and the idealists.” Although Jews seldom became drunkards, Kallen worried about the “growing seriousness” of the prob­lem of saloons. Jews preferred “kitchen barrooms” to saloons, as the former provided a more comfortable environment for the “discussion of social questions.”29 Discussions also took place in the “plethora” of private social institutions, “chief among them the Zionist clubs.” Kallen visited their headquarters on Hanover Street and explored the reading rooms and “entertainments of vari­ ous kinds” that occurred frequently t­here. He noticed a “softening” among “revolutionists and socialists” ­toward their Zionist compatriots. Unlike other Jewish immigrants, Kallen never felt a strong attraction to socialism. Although he held progressive views, Marxism seemed too absolutist and anti-­American. Economics interested Kallen, but not as much as culture. Nationalism was more inspirational. Zionism “was d­ oing for the elder Jew what the public school is d­ oing for the child”—­that is, enabling personal growth and maturation. “Through Zionism, the modern spirit is entering and leaving.”30 In this

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talk, Kallen told his own story as much as he described the lives of the North End Jewish immigrants. The roots of cultural pluralism can be traced to Kallen’s early experiences at Civic Ser­vice House. In contrasting Italians and Jews, Kallen outlined their differences without prejudice. He implicitly acknowledged that both groups had a right to remain in the United States, to cultivate their cultural differences while embracing the best the country had to offer. Kallen’s approval of Jewish intellectualism reflected the elitist bent to his cultural pluralism. Zionism, for Kallen, cultivated intellectual elitism, as it represented the path to modernity. The “softening” he noticed among radicals ­toward Zionism reflected a stronger attachment to Jewish communal identity. Already attracted to Zionism, he would come to embrace the movement more fully yet remained committed to his life as a Jew living in a diverse United States. Kallen complemented his practical training at Civic Ser­vice House with theoretical learning in the Harvard classroom. In fall 1901 he took the Ethics of the Social Questions, taught by Unitarian minister Francis Greenwood Peabody. The course examined “the prob­lems of poor relief, the f­ amily, temperance, and vari­ous phases of the L ­ abor Question, in the light of ethical theory.” Assignments included “special researches,” presumably fieldwork.31 This proved easy for Kallen, as his residence, Civic Ser­vice House, functioned as a so­cio­log­i­cal laboratory. Kallen impressed Peabody. The Plummer Professor of Morals supported Kallen’s application for more financial aid ­going into his final year, calling his student “a most deserving youth.” Labeling Kallen a “Jew, the son of a Rabbi,” Peabody described him as “very poor + very self-­sacrificing,” but with a “vein of Semitic mysticism and despondency, for which he has been wracked by college life.” Peabody believed Kallen “should be encouraged to go on,” as all he required was some “sunshine + the discovery that this is a good world.” Kallen would succeed b­ ecause “ability + heroism he has in plenty.”32 Peabody’s class led Kallen to try his hand at muckraking. He drafted an article titled “In Darkest Boston.” His research focused on Rayne Street, “the West End Bowery,” a street that “leads to nowhere.” He visited the homes of immigrants ­there, mostly Jews but some Italians and a few Irish. He witnessed economic stratification, with better-­off Jews working as “pawn-­brokers, second-­hand clothing dealers or peddlers,” while the rest toiled as “indigent tailors,” “rag-­pickers,” or peddlers of fruit and dry goods. The Italians dealt exclusively in “worm-­eaten wood,” while the Irish ­were “not so honest.” The Irish on the street, who ­were mostly ­women, labored as washers and sex workers, while the few men existed as “sports, or social parasites,” a type Kallen



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recognized from his adolescent jaunts in Scollay Square.33 Rayne Street bustled far from Harvard Yard, but not too far from Kallen’s youth. Atlantic Monthly and the Boston Transcript both rejected “In Darkest Boston,” the latter deeming it “too sensational.”34 Undeterred, Kallen began traveling to New York, working with the Committee of Fifteen, the anti-­vice group that included Jewish philanthropist Jacob Schiff and the founder of the Ethical Culture movement, Felix Adler. Kallen focused on the “white slave prob­lem.”35 While in New York, Kallen joined the Federation of American Zionists. In August 1902, the federation printed Kallen’s poem “The Word Miraculous” in its monthly journal, the Maccabaean. The poem described his progression ­toward po­liti­cal Zionism. Kallen stood “on the threshold of the coming age,” both the dawning of the new ­century and college graduation. A “sleeper . . . ​ who obsoletely lay immured,” he had been “wakened” by the “magic word” of Zion.36 In real­ity, ­those words originated not from God or Moses but from Kallen’s lit­er­at­ ure professor, the blue-­blooded Yankee and white Anglo-­Saxon Protestant Barrett Wendell. Kallen met Wendell in two En­glish classes he took beginning in 1901, En­glish Composition and the Works of Shakespeare. Wendell “judaized” him, converting him to a secular embrace of Jewish culture. He also opened Kallen to Hebraism, which manifested itself through Zionism. In his 1916 semiautobiographical short story, “A Convert in Zion,” Kallen told the tale in thinly veiled fiction. The story describes Simon, a chemist who “came by his own Zionism altogether in­de­pen­dently of any Jew or Jewish connections.” Simon, a stand-in for Kallen, entered college “orthodoxly cosmopolitan and international.” He embraced “Amer­i­ca, the quintessence of humanity; Amer­i­ca, democracy; Amer­i­ca, social justice; Amer­ic­ a saving the world through freedom.” Simon “turned Americanism into a fetish,” sharing it with fellow students at “keg parties” and preaching this secular gospel to Italians in the settlements, while ignoring Jewish immigrants.37 Simon came to Zionism through a course on American lit­er­a­ture, where he uncovered the “unconsidered origins and roots” of American values. They “­were nourished by a tradition that he despised, b­ ecause belonging to it had hurt him.” His hatred for his Jewish background demonstrated his firm attachment to it. Though he tried to deny “that Americanism owed anything to the Hebraic tradition,” in discussion with his En­glish professor, he had a revelation. The scholar, modeled ­after Wendell, “was a friend as well as a teacher” and delved into the personal aspect of Simon’s animus ­toward his Jewish identity.38 He called Simon “a coward and a sham, passing as something that he ­really ­wasn’t,” and asserted “that he was disgracing a g­ reat tradition.” Simon had

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thought himself “cosmopolitan,” but “his cosmopolitanism demonstrated a mere provincialism of vanity.” In response Simon sought out Jews in the settlement h ­ ouse and on campus, and began to study Jewish history. While he still “balked at religion, and ­couldn’t even be persuaded to enter a synagogue,” he became a Zionist and “acquired that w ­ hole anschauung [intuition] of civili39 zation and the place of Jews in it.” The real story with Wendell played out similarly, but with some details that Kallen had left out of his fictionalized version. Wendell, a New ­England Yankee, was staunchly nativist and racist. Kallen knew Wendell’s reputation for being “very snobbish.”40 Wendell made no secret of his disdain for Jews and would ­later dismiss Jewish immigrant writer Mary Antin’s claims to American patriotism as offensive and impossible.41 Yet he took to the assimilationist Kallen, who downplayed his Jewish background. In his En­glish Composition course, Wendell highlighted the Puritan reverence for the Hebrew Bible, speculating that En­glish colonists had Israelite blood. This seemed to Kallen “far-­fetched,” and Kallen drafted a paper contesting Wendell’s “entire position.” Wendell “went over that paper with [him] sentence by sentence, not only for the job, for style, but for doctrine, for opinion, for the right meaning of the terms.” Kallen left the meeting “feeling like a dirty dog.”42 This deconstruction led Kallen to a “dif­fer­ent perspective,” and he recalled, “Every­thing that I had been shutting out was something I turned to.” He audited courses with Divinity School professors, biblical scholars, and philo-­ Semites like George Foot Moore, David Gordon Lyon, and James Hardy Ropes. Kallen had formerly regarded his Jewish identity as Old World, yet Wendell insisted it had relevance and prestige in the New. Against Kallen’s protests, Wendell won a “convert in Zion.”43 In a letter endorsing the renewal of Kallen’s scholarship, Wendell praised him as “a Jew” of “unusual personal quality, with a touch of Hebraic genius.” Although he found Kallen “a bit radical, even anarchistic,” he did not see a “dangerous person,” but one full of promise who “­will learn wisdom with the years.” Impressed with his “remarkable” development, his “growth in maturity,” and “charity in disposition,” and aware Kallen had to “overwork to remain in college at all,” Wendell knew few pupils as worthy of financial assistance.44 Kallen felt more comfortable among his professors than among his peers. He “only knew the faculty” ­until he moved to Civic Ser­vice House, when his activity was publicized in local newspapers and non-­Jewish students introduced themselves. Kallen did not approach “the goyim [non-­Jews].”45 ­Little had changed from the time of Bernard Berenson, a Jewish Harvard student in the class of 1887, who “preferred the conversation of [Professors William] James,



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of [Crawford H.] Toy, of [W. B. S.] Climer, of [Barrett] Wendell, to that of [his] fellow students.” Berenson found his teachers “better worth while” and “more accessible,” whereas “nothing was so clicky [sic] and exclusive as the schoolboy or the schoolboy-­minded Anglo-­Saxon of all ages.”46 Philip Davis, who attended Harvard between 1900 and 1903 and lived in Civic Ser­vice House, recalled the “­g reat men of Harvard—­Professors William James, George Herbert Palmer and George Santayana”—­more clearly than he did his undergraduate peers. The professors’ impact “transcended all other influences” on his intellectual development.47 That Kallen related better to his professors reflected his elitist sensibilities. Seemingly uninterested in romantic relationships or any party scene, living far from the dormitories, and shunned from the exclusionary Final Clubs, Kallen had l­ittle choice but to interact mostly with his teachers on campus. Beyond Wendell, numerous professors influenced Kallen. In 1902 he took an economics course titled Princi­ples of Sociology: Theories of Social Pro­ gress, taught by Thomas Nixon Carver and William Zebina Ripley.48 Carver, a laissez-­faire conservative, was a traditional economist. Ripley became famous for his 1899 book, The Races of Eu­rope: A So­cio­log­i­cal Study.49 In that influential tome, he posited the existence of three races in Eu­rope: Teutonic, Alpine, and Mediterranean. Relying heavi­ly on phrenological and physiological traits, Ripley asserted the biological foundation of race and clear distinctions among white groups, along with a sharper divide separating Black and white ­people. He referred to sub-­Saharan Africans as “deficient in civilization.” Black ­people ­were a wholly separate race: “The negro differs physiologically, rather than anatomically, from the Eu­ro­pean or the Asiatic.”50 Among white ­people, Jews ­were exceptional. In his chapter “Jews and Semites,” Ripley examined Jewish demographic distribution throughout the world. He noted “hostile legislation” that hampered Jewish mobility and declared “Anti-­Semitismus” as a “protest against a ­future possibility” he looked on ominously. “Germany shudders at the dark and threatening cloud of population of the most ignorant and wretched description which overhangs her eastern frontier.” Berlin must not become “a new Jerusalem” for a “horde” of Rus­sian Jews. This was also an “American prob­lem,” as the “­great Polish swamp of miserable ­human beings, terrific in its proportions, threatens to drain itself off into our country as well, ­unless we restrict its ingress.”51 Ripley applauded restrictive bound­aries in czarist Rus­sia, which he believed rendered “their Jewish prob­lem” less serious than the United States’. The “alien population” of Jews in the Pale of Settlement, however, constituted “an industrial and social menace” to the newly formed German nation-­state and to the Austro-­Hungarian Empire.

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Ripley’s Jews preferred to “live by brain, not brawn,” but they derived t­ hese characteristics “not by heredity, but by force of circumstances.” Remarking on Jews’ “absolutely unpre­ce­dented tenacity of life,” Ripley opted for a cultural rather than an “ethnic” explanation. To him, Jewish sobriety and re­sis­ tance to social ills such as suicide resulted from “the greater force of religion and other steadying moral f­ actors.” The strength of Jewish culture, not biology, led Ripley to conclude, “The boasted purity of descent of the Jews is, then, a myth.” The category had no “ethnographic significance” as “modern Jews are physically more Aryan than Semitic.” Jews took on “to a large extent the physical traits of the ­people among whom their lot has been thrown.”52 Ripley could not escape biological Jewishness entirely, inserting sketches of Jewish and Gentile “nostrility.” Nonetheless, he deemed his rejection of Jewish racialization “the most in­ter­est­ing phase of our discussion” and, “if true, of profound so­cio­log­i­cal importance.” Though Jews ­were “radically mixed” in terms of “racial descent,” they held fast to religion and culture “as a m ­ atter of choice,” an example of “purely artificial se­lection.” Jews felt a ­g reat “consciousness of kind” and a keen awareness of their own “social individuality.” Through enforced isolation and self-­segregation, with group pride, Jewish distinctiveness could be “encouraged and perpetuated as one of their dearest possessions.” Ripley concluded, “The Jews are not a race, but only a ­people . . . ​ [with] cosmopolitan adaptive attitudes.”53 Kallen absorbed some of t­ hese sentiments from his professor. He received an A in the course, one of only three A grades he earned in college. In his 1906 essay “The Ethics of Zionism,” Kallen accepted biological racialism but endorsed Jewish racial unity more than his teacher did. Still, he subordinated race to culture and advocated a strong spiritual and national life, recognizing that Jewish pride was a choice.54 By denying Jewish racial cohesiveness, Ripley may have bolstered Kallen’s budding Zionism. A committed empiricist, Kallen likely trusted Ripley. While he thought religion nonsense, Kallen embraced science and dedicated himself to the practical, the material. Already a good pragmatist without even knowing it, Kallen applied this knowledge in an economics seminar he took that same year that allowed capable students to perform in­de­pen­dent research and pre­sent their discoveries for discussion. The data Kallen collected in Boston’s North and West Ends solidified his relationship with Professor Edward Everett Hale, whom he had met the previous year. Hale, a Unitarian minister, was friendly with Boston’s Jewish community. He attended synagogue dedications and befriended author Mary Antin and other prominent local Jews.55 Hale had helped Kallen with “In Darkest



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Boston” and guided his research in Boston’s West End. He was Kallen’s mentor and friend. In Kallen’s final year at Harvard, he left Civic Ser­vice House and moved to an apartment on Irving Street in Boston. Citing financial difficulties, Kallen petitioned the administration to gradu­ate early. In his 1902 scholarship application, he wrote that his ­family, which took in less than $1,000 per year, relied on him “in part for support.” He and his f­ ather made up the only sources of income, and the el­derly rabbi had become an “invalid.” He estimated he earned between $300 and $350 per year from tutoring, social work, and writing, sending “the greater part” home and keeping only $75 for himself. He insisted he “must be f­ ree as soon as pos­si­ble” to provide for relatives. His f­ ather’s Yiddish signature marked the document.56 The administration granted Kallen’s request, allowing him to focus on his studies. T ­ hese included two philosophy classes with George Santayana, and one, Philosophy 3, the Philosophy of Nature, cotaught by Dickinson Sergeant Miller and William James. More than any other professor, James left the greatest impression on the young Kallen. “A very slight, bearded man, grayish-­red beard, with very bright blue eyes and his ­great dome of a head,” James had “a certain charm of manner.” He had spent the previous year lecturing on “the va­ri­e­ties of religious experience” in Scotland, and the Harvard undergraduates felt a “­great curiosity” t­ oward him upon his return. James rejected the Spinozistic monism that had so appealed to Kallen in his youth, the rational monism that helped Kallen break from irrational Jewish dogmas. Instead, he offered Kallen “a pluralistic conception of experience and perception and feeling of individuality.”57 Kallen appreciated James’s “disarming” demeanor and his willingness to talk to any “damned fool” around. Just as James took religious mystics and cranks seriously, so too did he take undergraduates seriously, in a way that other professors, like Santayana or even Wendell, did not. While Santayana appeared as a “Socrates talking to a young man,” James did his best to appear an “equal . . . ​ taking your views and vision the way you took them yourself.”58 Kallen felt James took him more seriously than his f­ather ever did. This openness stayed with Kallen a long time. Though he left for Prince­ton to teach En­glish, he would eventually return to Harvard to study pragmatism ­under James. Pragmatism would provide a guiding philosophy for Kallen, allowing him to apply his experiences to his academic work and to develop the idea of cultural pluralism. From 1903 to 1905 Kallen was a writing instructor at Prince­ton. He also took an En­glish seminar with Thomas Marc Parrott and a philosophy seminar with Alexander T. Ormond. He helped coach the debate team, which

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included Norman Thomas, ­future Socialist Party candidate for president of the United States. Out of place at Harvard, Kallen experienced greater alienation at Prince­ ton. It did not have a philo-­Semitic president like Charles William Eliot. It was less diverse than Harvard, as no Black p­ eople graduated from the school u ­ ntil ­after the Second World War. The university, located in Prince­ton, New Jersey, did not have the large immigrant population that Boston did. Among elite schools heavi­ly populated with wealthy white Protestants of En­glish origin, Prince­ton had a reputation as the snootiest among the snooty. Kallen’s professor Hale had anticipated this prob­lem. In November 1903 he wrote Kallen jokingly of their “plans for the reconstruction of the University of Prince­ton” and instructed him to “do the duty that comes to your hand, make a few true friends, and live to the glory of God.”59 At most, Kallen obeyed the first request. He passed his time at Prince­ton in a thoroughly godless manner and did not make any friends ­there. Hale introduced Kallen to vari­ous acquaintances, but t­hese introductions did not bear fruit. Kallen likely complained to the Unitarian minister, ­because by February 1904, Hale acknowledged that Prince­ton life “may be drudgery.” He advised Kallen to keep his chin up and not look at ­things “from the darker side.” Better to keep his options available and to “never shut a door ­behind” him ­unless he saw a “door open” ahead. He compared Kallen to a “soldier,” noting that it was “considered dishonorable” to give up just ­because “his regiment is ordered into an unhealthy country.” Hale had l­ittle re­spect for t­ hose who abandoned their jobs simply ­because “they could imagine a more agreeable one.”60 Wendell sounded more optimistic, telling Kallen that he would not “find an hour wasted during a year’s residence at Prince­ton.” As Kallen’s social life suffered, Wendell encouraged him to write “stories” and offered this advice: “A man of letters should understand how life pre­sents itself to ­those who observe it from ­angles other than his own—­the more, the better.”61 Wendell’s suggestion was ironic considering his own nativist proclivities, but Kallen took it to heart nonetheless. Despite his dissatisfaction with school, Kallen’s written output increased in his Prince­ton years. He studied Elizabethan playwright William Marston and began a dissertation on him. He earned “something of a reputation with the faculty for difference in perception.”62 His 1905 essay “Concerning the Teaching of En­glish Composition” appeared in the Journal of Education.63 Kallen would be accused of vague, opaque, and garbled writing by critics like William James and Mary Antin, yet he maintained strong opinions on how good writing should be taught.



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Kallen directed his most significant work to American Zionism. He spent time in nearby New York and socialized with impor­tant Zionist leaders. Kallen ­later recounted drunken memories of an eve­ning with British Jewish playwright Israel Zangwill at the Lotus Club. Along with dinner, Kallen drank “­every wine from A to Z” and by night’s end “did not know where he was.”64 When sober, Kallen published two more Zionist poems, “The False Hope” in December 1904 and “­Temple and Minyan” in March 1905. He began “The False Hope” by quoting Max Nordau: “Zionism’s only hope is in the Jews of Amer­i­ca.” Kallen was more pessimistic. The narrator saw “the heavy eyelids” of American Jewry’s “Midased face” open, implying they could see past the abundant wealth to find deeper spiritual meaning. By the end, the narrator remained convinced American Jews would not emerge from superficial materialism and would remain dormant, a “shameless shame.”65 “­Temple and Minyan” sounded similarly pessimistic. In the first section, “­Temple,” Kallen described the beautiful architecture but lamented the spiritual void of the Jews who prayed ­there, “so blank of holy cheer” and ­limited to the “plains of platitude.” The second section, “Minyan,” referring to the ten-­ man quorum required for Jewish prayer, was equally gloomy. In a “bleak and vaporous small room” of the ­temple, with “odors as from an old, new-­opened tomb,” Jews prayed with “voices as a ­mother’s when her ­children die,” prophesying “invocable doom.” The narrator then cried out to an absent God, proclaiming with a wail, ­ hese be Thy chosen that have broke again T And worship not Thee at Thy unique shrine Which tabernacle claim Thee denizen? Why riseth Babel in thy Jacob’s line?66 This last line may be a meta­phor for the American Jewish community, which Kallen believed had once been pure and harmonious but now produced a blasphemous cacophony. An atheist, Kallen had no interest in religious purity, but rather in cultural preservation and development. American Jews, in his mind, had stumbled down the wrong path. He approved of neither the rigid Orthodoxy emblemized by his ­father nor the blandly universal Reform movement, both of which ­were institutionally hostile to secular, cultural, and po­ liti­cal Zionism. Beyond writing Zionist poetry, Kallen attempted a novel on a Jewish theme, which he never published. It may have begun as a short story, “One of the Unfit,” which he then expanded into “One of the Fit.” He signed the story “Zevi Meier,”67 an occasional pseudonym. “One of the Unfit” told the story of Elisha,

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a Jewish immigrant to the United States from Rus­sia who displayed obvious parallels to Kallen. Elisha’s parents “orphaned” him at five, the same age at which Kallen had moved to Amer­i­ca. His “sage ­uncle,” an “unusually learned and tolerant” man “pregnant with the impassioned humanism of which his nephew was the consecrated priest,” took him in. Seven years l­ ater this heterodox u ­ ncle died. “Elisha became the charge of the community,” a community that warmly accepted “Orthodox mendicant students” but had no use for the boy or his recently deceased ­uncle, whom they “held in abhorrence as Epicureans.” They stood guilty of the usual litany of sins: they “dared to be clean and cut their hair” and “read forbidden books and refused to worship the rabbi.” The community had no “re­spect for the new culture or the Maskil [enlightened Jewish thinker] who was its exponent.”68 Elisha thought of himself as one of the enlightened. Just as Elisha’s enlightenment forced him to leave the stultifying eastern Eu­ro­pean Jewish community for Amer­i­ca, so too did Kallen’s enlightenment force him to leave Prince­ton. In 1905 Kallen was “dismissed for religious reasons” from Prince­ton.69 He had been accused of teaching atheism to his students, but he l­ater remarked that if the administration had known him to be Jewish, then he never would have been allowed to work t­ here in the first place. Since he did not have a particularly Jewish-­sounding name and his referees, Hale, Wendell, Santayana, and James, did not mention his religion in their letters, Prince­ton officials thought him a Gentile when they hired him. While ­there, Kallen did not deny his Jewish origins. Kallen’s lack of religion got him fired. He did not spread the gospel of atheism, but in teaching En­glish composition, he made frequent reference to Percy Bysshe Shelley, and as he mused l­ater, if you teach Shelley, “how can you avoid talking about atheism?”70 A few years l­ ater, Kallen’s Harvard En­glish professor Le Baron Russell Briggs noted that according to Marc Parrott, Kallen’s teaching per­for­mance at Prince­ton had been “thoroughly good,” but in addition to displaying the school’s notorious anti-­Semitism, the trustees also objected to Kallen’s “tendency to discuss theological questions in a radical manner at what they regarded as inappropriate times.” As a teacher, Kallen pushed bound­aries with taboo subjects. Prince­ton’s En­glish Department wanted to keep Kallen on and even raise his salary, and students had “petitioned for his reappointment.”71 It did not come to pass. Kallen suspected his pupils’ parents got involved. Prince­ton did not ask him back, and he returned to Harvard in the fall of 1905 to pursue his doctorate. His two years at Prince­ton represented a break from his experiences of cultural pluralism, although he took some respite from the



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university’s homogeneity by traveling to New York. Back at Harvard, he returned to his pluralistic community and continued to forge the idea of cultural pluralism by interacting with a range of American intellectuals, Jews and non-­Jews, white and Black. By 1905, Kallen had become a full-­fledged Zionist. Although his f­ ather likely approved of this renewed interest in the Jewish ­people (if not the Jewish religion), when Kallen moved back in with his parents that fall, he was not ­really returning home. His Zionism was too secular, too pragmatist, too ce­re­bral. Kallen soon left the North End and found a new apartment in Boston. Committed to a po­liti­cal movement, Kallen felt less certain about his academic path and wondered what to study upon returning to Harvard. He started with En­glish lit­er­a­ture and enrolled in four En­glish courses, including one for undergraduates, the Origins of En­glish Lit­er­a­ture, taught by Wendell. In that class, he first encountered Alain Locke. He may not have interacted with Locke, but he certainly noticed him, as he would mention Locke having taken the class in a letter written two years ­later. Kallen took two philosophy courses and switched to the Philosophy Department. Still, his bond with Wendell never wavered. Wendell counted Kallen among his favorite students, and they kept in touch ­until Wendell’s death in 1921. Ironically, Kallen dedicated his 1924 book, Culture and Democracy in the United States, to Wendell, the advocate of Anglo-­Saxon cultural hegemony in Amer­i­ca. In that book, Kallen coined cultural pluralism in print and defended ethnic diversity in the United States. Then again, Wendell had encouraged Kallen to embrace his Jewish heritage, an embrace that led him to Zionism. In July 1906 Kallen combined his Jewish nationalism with ideas on Darwinism, philosophy, and Jewish history in an address to the Federation of American Zionists’ retreat in the Catskills, New York. As Sarah Wilson notes, many American Jewish thinkers, including Kallen, “read Darwin primarily as a historical figure and only secondarily as a biologist.” Wilson continues, “Like the pragmatic phi­los­o­phers of their day, immigrant Jewish intellectuals of the early twentieth ­century w ­ ere willing to extend the implications of evolution far beyond the strictly scientific sphere.”72 In Kallen’s address, published in the Maccabaean as “The Ethics of Zionism,” Kallen used rhe­toric from the theory of evolution to account for Jewish history.73 He outlined his hierarchical vision of cultural pluralism, a vision Locke would come to share. Along with their belated embrace of ethnic pride, elitism was one of the strongest bonds between the two men, facilitating their friendship. As a budding pragmatist, Kallen was more concerned with the particulars of Jewish culture than universal values of truth, beauty, and morality. In “The Ethics of Zionism,” Kallen planted the seeds for cultural pluralism in the pragmatist

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spirit of William James. Kallen’s Zionism in 1906 was pluralistic, pragmatist, elitist, hierarchical, racist, and thoroughly American all at the same time. He began by stating a prob­lem: How to justify Zionism? Why create a Jewish state in Palestine? Kallen rejected two common justifications, the philanthropic and the religious. Saving Jews as a ­people for the sake of saving them did not constitute a good enough reason. Kallen conceived of religion as mere “cult,” nothing but “an outgrown and transcended ideal.” Nor could existence, or “per­sis­tence,” justify national survival. A ­people could only justify their continuation by providing an ethical contribution to the broader “house­hold of nations,” to advance “the onward march of the ­human kind.”74 He posed three questions: “What then has the Jew done for civilization? What is his place in the evolution of the ­human race? What is his moral worth to humanity?”75 To answer t­ hese questions, Kallen set up a pluralistic framework for civilization. He divided the world into “cultures,” which fought a Darwinian strug­gle for superiority and survival. Many cultures existed throughout history, but “only two remain[ed] masterful and ever assertive”: ancient Greece and ancient Israel. Through “spiritual rape,” ­these p­ eoples acquired the best traits of other cultures they surpassed, improving upon themselves throughout. As Israelites entered Canaan, they “inherited from their Semitic victims, as more than once a conquering race must, their language, and took over their culture.”76 Kallen employed the language of philosophical pragmatism. When Hebraic and Hellenic spirits fi­nally clashed, the aesthetic brilliance of Athens first dominated, yet “the invincible Hebraic soul, trained in the most fearful, so the best of schools, turned the evil to its own good, absorbed the danger and made it a healthy part of its own nature, as bread is turned to blood.”77 Jewish culture, brought to life through Greek aestheticism, emerged a triumphant hybrid. Chris­tian­ity was a perversion of that hybridity, embodying sterile and super­natural Judaism in its “lowest and simplest terms.” Athens represented joyful hedonism, Chris­tian­ity joyless morality. Judaism, which would become Hebraism and then Zionism, embodied an ethical philosophy strengthened by a proud aesthetic, rational, and scientific tradition. That spirit was preserved throughout the ­Middle Ages, u ­ nder Islam and Chris­tian­ity. When given the chance to excel, in Spain or in Rus­sia, Jews “became masters of events as of thought.”78 In the modern era, a Jewish cultural re­nais­sance emerged, in Hebrew, Yiddish, Ladino, and all the languages where Jews lived. Despite facing tremendous suffering, the Jewish community remained “the lightbearer of the world. In a society of ignorance and superstition it constituted a nucleus of culture and enlightenment.”79



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In celebrating Jewish achievement, Kallen reinforced biological racialism. Although Jews w ­ ere “by no means a pure race,” Kallen insisted, “they are still purer than most Eu­ro­pean races.” He discounted Jewish scientist Maurice Fishberg and his former professor William Zebina Ripley, who both denied Jewish racial purity “based on an assumption amounting to a prejudice.” Kallen jumped through pseudoscientific hoops to claim the “Jewish race is of Asiatic, prob­ably of Turanian, and not Afro-­Semitic origin.”80 As Eric Goldstein observes, Kallen “argued that Jews ­were a white race,” a par­tic­u­lar racial group within the broader white category. The terminology of the era could be rather ambiguous. As Noam Pianko notes, terms like race and culture and nation often functioned “interchangeably with other concepts of group cohesion.”81 Kallen used ­those words in a slippery fashion, shifting from scientific concepts to social constructs and then to spiritual entities. What he called racial could be interpreted as cultural. Yet his adherence to biological racialism was undisputable. According to Kallen, racial integrity enabled Jews to survive plagues and pogroms and rape and intermarriage. But Jews survived not by biology alone but by possessing an adaptable moral energy. Through blood and spirit, body and mind, the Jew “fulfills the condition we set upon which a race can ethically assert its right to maintain its self-­hood.”82 The last step was to prove that Zionism fit t­ hose criteria. He began this section provocatively, asserting what is “true” about anti-­ Semitism: “that the Jewish race is alien, separated in mode of life, tradition, and spirit from the countries in which it sojourns, and that in the strug­gle for existence this race is the more successful. . . . ​Jews are tribal in an age of territorial nationality . . . ​they are transients where ­others are citizens.”83 Citing French historian Anatole Leroy-­Beaulieu, Kallen identified the three most significant aspects of social solidarity: ‘ “unity of language, a common heritage of tradition and belief and the permanent occupation of a definite territory.” ’84 Although Kallen noted Jews only had the second of t­ hese three, they also possessed a more impor­tant characteristic, “consanguinity.” Jews shared blood relations, enabling a “very close social solidarity.”85 This biological distinction allowed Jews to balance their universal and par­tic­ u­lar commitments, to develop “an inner as well as a world culture.” He praised Yiddish writers for communicating this social solidarity in “so high an artistic expression,” providing evidence that “a nation must have lived deeply before it can be sung highly.” He agreed with social Darwinian anti-­Semites that “the ­battle between race and race is one of life and death.” Anti-­Semites, however, approached this truth “without enlightenment” and relied on “prejudice rather

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than wisdom” to guide them. They discounted the contributions of Hebraic civilization, deeming Jews inferior or threatening.86 ­Here was the crux of Kallen’s essay. How did Jews respond to anti-­Semitism? To avoid persecution, some Jews, despite being of an “intensely united p­ eople, of relatively unmixed blood, and intense race consciousness,” assimilated into their surroundings, learning the languages of their host countries and adopting their national traits; becoming “Rus­sian, En­glish, French, Austrian, or American”; reducing their “racial character to a sectarian label” to blend in. Nevertheless, Germany and Austria developed anti-­Semitic po­liti­cal parties, France had the Dreyfus Affair, Rus­sia engaged in pogroms, and even ­England and the United States saw the growth of anti-­Jewish sentiment. Concurring with his former professor, economist Thomas Nixon Carver, Kallen feared “an efficacious anti-­Semitism” would soon engulf the United States.87 Assimilation had failed. “Chameleon Jews” change colors but remain the same under­neath. They “aim to be spiritual mongrels,” but ­behind their masks, “the spirit shines clouded, dark and defiled, but itself, unalterably itself and recognized in its self hood.” Kallen proclaimed defiantly, “It is better not to live at all than live a Marrano.” Jews should not have to shed their identity or suffer anti-­Semitic persecution. They satisfied Kallen’s biological and spiritual requirements for self-­preservation. Jews could not be assimilated; they ­were absorbers and not among “the absorbed.” Jewish blood dominated in the “child of a mixed marriage,” and ­after several generations, the Jewish stream would win out or the offspring would be sterile.88 Zionism provided a solution. But not just any kind of Zionism; a pure focus on the Jewish mind and spirit would not be enough. As he asserted, “Nor is the Cultur-­Zionism of Achad Haam much better than assimilation.” Cultural Zionism was “at best only an intensification of the status quo.” While cultural Zionists recognized the ethical contribution of “the Jewish spirit” to the world, the result of their program of “art and letters” would be artificial, “mangy” and “distrait,” of “chameleon quality,” lacking the purity Kallen desired.89 Achad Haam, usually spelled “Ahad Ha’am,” was the pen name of Asher Ginsburg, the Rus­sian Jewish writer considered the ­father of cultural Zionism. His program, unlike Theodor Herzl’s, did not explic­itly call for a Jewish state in Palestine, but rather a Jewish cultural center ­there where Hebrew language and aesthetics could flourish alongside a rejuvenated Judaism without requiring any state apparatus. This cultural center would provide guidance and spiritual nourishment for Jews of the Diaspora, helping to stave off assimilation. In critiquing Ahad Ha’am, Kallen insisted that “a ­people’s individuality cannot receive its highest and most adequate expression” when surrounded by dangers in an “alien environment.” Anti-­Semitism stifled cultural growth. Sim-



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ilarly, the constant “criss-­cross of influence” that Jews felt in the Diaspora rendered their culture hybrid and inauthentic, not “truly representative” as it would be “on native soil, u ­ nder native laws, amid native institutions.” Moving to Palestine without the framework of a state would not be enough. “A cultural center u ­ nder any other conditions can be l­ittle more than artificial, a make-­believe.”90 Jews needed some kind of state to build the purest version of their elite culture. While Jews in the past had benefited from intercultural contacts, which they had absorbed rather than being absorbed, Kallen wanted to limit the degree of interaction that might follow. Jews had won the Darwinian strug­gle with other p­ eoples. Their purity could shine through on a homeland they controlled. Again citing Leroy-­Beaulieu, Kallen insisted that the development of the Jewish “race’s life, the expression of its spirit, the envisagement of its moral idea in art and letters,” to make its greatest contribution to the world, needed “the permanent occupation of a definite territory.” Only then could a ­people have the “absolute freedom for the play of the Jewish individuality, for the reintegration of the Jewish soul, for the intensification of the Jewish self-­hood, for the emphasis and projection of what is most characteristically Jewish by the ­free strug­gle of Jew with Jew.”91 A new Darwinian strug­gle would emerge, this time between dif­fer­ent kinds of Jews from all over the world. A Jewish melting pot in Zion would produce the ideal Hebraic culture in safety and autonomy, ­under the protection of an in­de­pen­dent Jewish government. Although open to a federalist framework for Zionism, Kallen clearly rejected Ahad Ha’am’s nonpo­liti­cal program in 1906 and would maintain that position his entire life.92 Culture remained crucial to Kallen, and would become even more impor­tant, but it could never be enough to guarantee Jewish survival. In rejecting Ahad Ha’am, Kallen rejected the Jewish equivalent of the Harlem Re­nais­sance, what David Levering Lewis would ­later call “civil rights by copyright.”93 Jews needed autonomy; they could not develop their culture on rented Ottoman land any more than African Americans could truly develop their own culture in white-­owned buildings and institutions and with white patrons. Although rejecting purely cultural Zionism, in good pragmatist fashion, Kallen sympathized with Territorialism, the view that the Jewish state need not be in Palestine but rather anywhere feasible. Kallen believed Zionists and Territorialists simply had a “difference in the mode of expressing” the same ideal. As Kallen recognized, in 1906, “Zion, the Jewish state, ­free and autonomous, is still remote.” He demanded “broader activity than the colonization in Palestine and a franker assertion of our self-­hood than the organ­ization of Bzalels,” referring to the art school in Jerusalem.94

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Kallen called for action in the Diaspora, especially the American Diaspora, in the pre­sent, as he anticipated another “forty years in the wilderness to be lived and to be lived bitterly, in fierce combat,” once again alluding to Darwinian strug­gle. Kallen called on his Diasporic Jewish brethren to fight assimilation through “spiritual self-­assertion.” This included “frank and open combat” in order to “Judaize the Jew” and communicate the nobility of the Jewish heritage. “We have to crush out the Maranno, chameleon, and spiritual mongrel; we have to assert the Israelite.”95 In hostile parts of the world, this might mean physical self-­defense. Kallen called for “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” in response to pogroms, to “repay Bialistok with Bialistok and Kishineff with Kishineff.” But in the United States, the platform would be dif­fer­ent. “[In] Amer­i­ca our duty to Zion is our duty to our ­children—­they who ­shall be citizens of Zion. National education of the c­ hildren must be our program; or­ga­nized training in self-­knowledge must be our work.”96 Despite rejecting Ahad Ha’am’s cultural center, Kallen called for a cultural and educational program in the Diaspora that was close in spirit to Ahad Ha’am’s but even closer to “Autonomism,” the ideology of Rus­sian Jewish Diaspora nationalist Simon Dubnow (1860–1941). In Letters on Old and New Judaism, written between 1897 and 1903, Dubnow called for the creation of semiautonomous Jewish cultural centers outside Palestine, especially in eastern Eu­rope. While Dubnow remained committed to Eu­rope, Kallen saw a ­f uture for Jews in Palestine and the United States.97 His program a mix between Herzlian Zionism, Dubnovian Autonomism, and American patriotism, Kallen concluded that Jews had a “spiritual self-­ hood” expressed through their “vigorous natu­ral life,” through their or­ga­ nized ­legal tradition and social life, and through “art and letter.” This rendered them an “indispensible force” within “the ­family of nations.” He contended that “the Jew’s moral right to live” was justified “by virtue of its effect on ­human civilization and pro­gress [and] its physical integrity and spiritual splendor.” This was “the ethic of Zionism.”98 Kallen believed Hebraism could thrive in the United States, bolstering and bolstered by Zionism in Palestine. But that Hebraism needed to be ­shaped. This required elite leadership, the development of which required concrete action. Such action took place at Harvard on October 6, 1906, in Grays 46, a few floors above the room that Locke had lived in the previous year. T ­ here, Kallen, among Jewish peers and undergraduates, helped found the Harvard Menorah Society. That organ­ization eventually went national and became the Intercollegiate Menorah Association, which came to sponsor the Menorah Jour-



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nal in 1915. In this organ­ization and journal, Kallen found a vehicle for Jewish self-­expression and “self-­knowledge,” a platform for Hebraism that was more intellectual and aesthetic than the Maccabaean. ­These same princi­ples would eventually spur Locke to compile The New Negro and inspire the Black Arts movement known as the Harlem Re­nais­sance.

C h a p te r   2

The Talented among the Tenth

In his 1935 “psychograph” written for Horace Kallen’s volume American Philosophy ­Today and Tomorrow, Alain LeRoy Locke wrote about his childhood in a Philadelphia marked by “provincialism flavored by urbanity and her petty bourgeois psyche with the Tory slant.” He lived a “paradox,” as “circumstance” decreed him “a Negro, a dubious and doubting sort of American and by reason of racial inheritance . . . ​more of a pagan than a Puritan, more of a humanist than a pragmatist.”1 Locke belonged to what his Howard colleague E. Franklin Frazier called “the Black Bourgeoisie.” Well educated and ­middle class, Locke developed conservative cultural sensibilities, if not po­liti­cal ones. He did not choose to be African American but, testing the limits of integration, found social circles that accepted him as a Black intellectual. In describing himself as “pagan,” he alluded to his allergic reaction to religious orthodoxy that led to his conversion to the Baha’i faith, while perhaps making a veiled reference to his homo­sexuality. In labeling himself “more of a humanist than a pragmatist,” Locke set up a false dichotomy. His humanistic approach to culture was laced with a pragmatic spirit, open to experimentation, flexible, unwilling to be ­limited by conventional bound­aries. He approached his birth date the same way. Born in Philadelphia on September 3, 1885, Locke frequently claimed to have been born in 1886. He made his own truth. 40

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How did Locke develop this sensibility? He was a phi­los­o­pher, a lover of wisdom. But he also loved culture and refused to be placed in a box. He sought to build a g­ rand ­house to live in. Locke formed this h ­ ouse out of the ancestral material around him, using the tools acquired in places of learning. From his earliest days, he yearned for the knowledge experience brings. S­ haped by his background, Locke refused to be ­limited by it. Instead, he used it as a springboard to a richer, more cosmopolitan existence, an existence colored by his unique interpretation of his African American ancestry.2 Locke took pride in his lineage. His paternal grand­father, Ishmael Locke (1814–1852), had been born a freeman. Ishmael taught at a Black school in Salem, New Jersey, before traveling to Liberia, where he helped establish schools for native Africans. In Liberia he met Mathilda Saunders, freeborn d­ aughter of a Black m ­ other and German American f­ather. Saunders, Ishmael’s f­ uture wife, worked in the educational movement t­ here. A ­ fter returning to the United States, Ishmael headed a school in Rhode Island before becoming principal of the Institute for Colored Youth in Philadelphia. Ishmael and Mathilda’s son, Alain’s ­father, Pliny Locke, graduated from the Institute for Colored Youth and taught at a Reconstruction school in North Carolina before entering Howard University Law School. Pliny matriculated first in his class in 1874 and gave a class day oration. He worked as personal secretary for General Oliver O. Howard, the university’s founder, as a teacher and then principal, and then as a clerk in the Philadelphia post office, before returning to teaching. In Philadelphia, Pliny married Mary Hawkins, Alain’s ­mother and the most impor­tant ­woman in his life. Mary worked as a teacher, like her m ­ other before her. Locke’s maternal grand­mother, Sarah Shorter Hawkins, had helped found schools in Liberia. Mary followed a similar ­career path in the United States. Born in 1853 to an “old Philadelphia ­family,” she, like her husband, graduated from the Institute for Colored Youth.3 She spent thirty-­six years as a teacher in nearby Camden, New Jersey, retiring in 1915. She took two years off, from 1884 to 1886, when she worked as a h ­ ouse­keeper and gave birth to her only child. ­After struggling to name the boy, Mary came up with “Allan LeRoy Locke.” By 1898, Allan had changed his first name to Alain, perhaps to correspond to the Francophone etymology of LeRoy, French for “the king.” More likely, Locke simply hoped to be more Eu­ro­pean and sophisticated, and above all to be dif­fer­ent, for he knew that difference, of the group and the individual, made life more in­ter­est­ing. Young Locke’s life contrasted starkly to the plight of the majority of African Americans, who lived in poverty below the Mason-­Dixon Line. In 1890

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nearly forty thousand Black ­people lived in Philadelphia, 6 ­percent of its population of 1.3 million. The city had been a hotbed of ­unionism and abolitionism, and its African American citizens lived ­ under relatively tolerant circumstances. They asserted communal strength by educating their c­ hildren.4 Education began at home. Locke’s parents “idolized” him but enforced strict discipline. They “washed interminably” and refrained from kissing or expressing outward emotion and affection. His parents “barred” Locke from laughing but encouraged him to smile “in a debonair way.” They permitted themselves to laugh but “rarely did,” his ­father preferring to whistle. Pliny took a night shift at the post office to be with his son during the day. He bathed Alain, oversaw his “intimate care,” and became his “constant companion and playmate.” When Locke turned four, however, his ­father returned to teaching and daytime work, and his m ­ other assumed an increasingly impor­tant role 5 in his life. Although Mary Locke was Episcopalian by religion, she also subscribed to Felix Adler’s Ethical Culture movement. Ethical Culture required no faith or theology, but rather a commitment to behaving ethically and bearing responsibility for the community. The secular church embraced education, and Mary made her home a shrine to Locke’s academic achievement. When Pliny died ­after Alain turned six, Mary took it upon herself to ensure her son’s scholastic success. This became easier when Locke enrolled in the Charles Close School, where Mary taught. He performed brilliantly, frequently attending classes with students one or two years his se­nior and occasionally earning the wrath and jealousy of his peers. Locke found solace in his studies and continued to excel at Philadelphia’s Central High School (CHS), where he started at age thirteen. CHS had a storied tradition in Philadelphia of providing public education to white and Black ­people. Known as the ­People’s College, the school sought to endow its pupils with “the best and most complete education that modern standards can prescribe.”6 According to W. E. B. Du Bois’s classic The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study, in 1897, fifty-­eight Black students attended elite Philadelphia schools, including CHS, “about one p­ ercent of the total enrollment.”7 Locke was one of only a handful of Black students in his school. One of Locke’s earliest academic memories was a trip to the Apprentices’ Library. He explored his f­ amily’s roots along with t­ hose of other members of Philadelphia’s Black elite. He stared at the paintings lining the library walls, which portrayed distinguished, educated African Americans. ­These paintings showed that one need not flee one’s heritage to become a member of the cultured elite. Years ­later, Locke recalled how “he was taken out of the Negro slums into Ritten­house Square in order that he might grow up a pure l­ittle gentleman.”8

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In school, Locke dreamed of more grandiose locations than the local library. In 1902 he contributed an article to the Mirror, the CHS monthly magazine, titled “The Alhambra; Its Historical Position and Influence.” Without ever having left the United States, Locke appreciated the atmosphere of his i­magined cosmopolitan medieval Spain. He marveled at the ­castle fortress at its center, “the Mecca for pilgrims of ­every land and clime.” He lamented the loss of the Muslim Moors, “that race and religion” that shone as a beacon while the rest of Eu­rope was “divided into numerous tribes and factions of professed christians [sic].” The gifts of this ­great civilization lived on, “infused and imparted to all of Eu­rope.” Borrowing and preserving from ancient Egyptians and Greeks, “they did not hoard the golden trea­sures which they brought from the Orient, but called upon all of Eu­rope to come and receive them.”9 The idea of common owner­ship of philosophy, art, and science remained with him his entire c­ areer. Si­mul­ta­neously, he celebrated the specific culture of the Moors, signifying a particularism he never quite abandoned, despite frequent urges to do so. ­After graduating from high school, Locke enrolled in the School of Pedagogy, a teachers’ college affiliated with CHS. Of eight students, Locke graduated first in his class with a 92.6 ­percent average, earning above 92 ­percent in all his courses except math, which he barely passed with a 60 ­percent grade.10 The School of Pedagogy improved Locke’s writing. His instructors assigned a “Daily Theme” essay on topics ranging from culture, ideas, and aesthetics to current events and po­liti­cal debates. Locke’s Daily Themes showed remarkable intellectual breadth. He reviewed philosophical texts by George Santayana and Josiah Royce (his ­f uture professors at Harvard), as well as works by John Keats, Alfred Tennyson, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. He wrote about Emile Zola’s death and about communism. He examined educational questions, like ­whether athletics had any place in college (Locke thought they did but that their place should become smaller), or ­whether boys and girls should be schooled together (he believed they should not). The content and style of ­these essays allow for an examination of the adolescent Locke’s life and thought. His Daily Themes shared a fundamental optimism, humanism, and pragmatism, a belief that the world could be made better by ­human ingenuity. In September 1902 Locke wrote an essay titled “Opinion of the Lynching Which Occurred in Tennessee.” The topic struck him personally. He lamented the “mob vio­lence” and lawlessness that enabled white racists to have a Black man “taken from jail and burned at the stake.” He posed the question he feared might again tear the nation apart: “What is to be done with the ­g reat majority of the negro population of the South?” Then the essay changed course. Locke surmised that the “crimes” for which white p­ eople lynched African American men remained “shocking and almost unbearable,” particularly to

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“the average Southerner” who still lamented the Confederacy’s destruction. He invoked the biblical dictum “The sins of the f­ athers are visited even upon the third and fourth generations.”11 Presumably Locke was referring to “crimes” of sexual relations between Black men and white w ­ omen. He asked, “Can it be that this is but the final expression of a trait inherited directly from the practices which we all know ­were so prevalent during slave-­times?” Inspired by Lamarckian theories of evolution, Locke ­imagined that the sexual predilections of the “former slave-­ owners have formed indelible impressions on their indirect descendants, and that ­these traits have been fostered by the general existing conditions among the mass of the negroes of the South.” He attributed African Americans’ crimes to poverty and racism, but also to their biological inheritance as the offspring of masters who raped their slaves. With his ­people “shut off from education and culture,” and their “animal nature rampant,” Locke found their situation both tragic and predictable.12 He felt no sympathy for white men of the South who chose to “revert to the barbarous methods of their early ancestors,” the slave ­owners, or even mimicked “the methods of the Inquisition.” To prevent another civil war, he advocated the use of force to prevent lynching, “­until the morals of the offending parties are so raised by education and culture that such crimes w ­ ill at least be rarities and not daily occurrences.”13 Locke received harsh criticism from his instructor, who demanded he revise the piece. ­After lambasting Locke’s introduction as “wordy,” the teacher commented on the second page, “I miss the fire that comes in discussing a case like this. You mention many commonplaces, but I want, rather, your opinion.”14 To the grader, Locke had not adequately embraced his identity, nor sympathized enough with his ­people. This criticism plagued him throughout his life. The teenage Locke was not a wide-­eyed idealist and injected a healthy dose of pragmatism into his writing. In another Daily Theme, “­Shall We Annex More Islands?,” Locke examined the Spanish-­American War in the Philippines. Even with the Philippines “subjugated,” American troops still suffered casualties. Locke disdained American “greed for territory” and was skeptical of the United States’ “so called interest in humanity,” particularly the harsh American methods of imposing humanitarianism on the Filipinos. “It may be true that it is humanity to force t­ hose ­little patients to take down at a gulp a civilization centuries in advance of their own, but are ­there not plenty within the very bounds of this country who are sadly in need of instruction in the right use of the privileges given by Amer­i­ca’s civilization?”15 Locke asserted the superiority of Western civilization and culture but dismissed the United States as a perfect example of this shining ideal.

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He believed the United States should not be static but rather in constant flux. In his May 1903 essay “The Alien Invasion,” he noted that the country’s absorption of six hundred thousand immigrants in 1902 had caused concern over the “­future of Amer­i­ca.” Although some worried immigrants would “segregate,” and ­others feared they would “mingle with the other ele­ments they find ­here and contribute their national traits and characteristics to the general American character,” Locke did not panic. Immigrants ­were “greatly influenced by the character and manners of their ­adopted country and ­will not maintain their clannish tendencies but soon become Americanized.” As long as “the amount and character of the immigration” w ­ ere restricted, US citizens need not fear the “new influences which w ­ ill be the results of this assimilation.”16 Locke approved of assimilation, to a point. He acknowledged some cultural benefits of new immigrants, as long as the immigration was controlled in terms of quantity and quality. In “Immigration Laws,” Locke considered both sides of the debate. He noted that restrictionists argued that typical immigrants unleashed a “degenerating influence into the community” and that the United States had a higher proportion of poor ­people than it could “well take care of.” Yet proponents of immigration welcomed this influx as impoverished foreigners performed “the most menial ser­vices.” Better them than native-­born Americans, they reasoned. Rather than take a position, Locke hoped for a “happy medium between the two,” which he called “discriminated immigration.”17 Locke saw immigrants as a greater benefit to the American l­abor force than to American culture. He regarded his own background quite differently. In a 1903 essay, “Pride of Lineage,” he asserted, “The person who has a f­ ather and a grand­father to be proud of ­will, all other ­things being equal, have greater care of his personal conduct than he who has no such ancestry.” While too much pride could lead to a “haughty overbearing air,” this was preferable to a “laxly demo­cratic” persona. Locke asserted the value in taking pride in one’s identity, one’s personal heritage, over and against merely taking pride in some broad and vague conception of humanity. He also compared “pride of lineage” favorably to “pride in riches,” demonstrating his preference for spiritual over material inheritance.18 Though at this stage “pride of lineage” stood for f­ amily ancestry rather than cultural inheritance, already Locke seemed to prefer particularism over universalism. In another Daily Theme balancing universalism and particularism, Locke shared his “thoughts on Rabbi ben Ezra.” The essay referenced the 1864 poem by Robert Browning celebrating medieval Spanish rabbi Abraham ibn Ezra.19 Locke lauded Ibn Ezra for his “religious philosophy, sublime in its ideals,” and for his cosmopolitan experience in Muslim Spain. This essay evoked

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the Alhambra, which Locke had praised a few months e­ arlier in the Mirror. Ibn Ezra “lived during such an eventful period of the world’s civilization,” prompting the question, “What words would have a more solid foundation than ­those which ­were built upon the vast and varied experience of that famous teacher?”20 Locke emphasized the diverse experiences Spain’s Golden Age offered. Locke again broached Jewish themes in his 1904 poem “A Supposed Soliloquy of Shylock ­after the Trial Scene in The Merchant of Venice.” Locke’s Shylock laments losing “honor, wealth and child.” His Shylock yearns for revenge, noting in his final words, “Already have I waited long, but still I am a Jew and they ­were taught to wait.” The image of the eternal Jew waiting to regain his riches reflected anti-­Semitic imagery of the time.21 Did Locke make any association between the cosmopolitan Rabbi Ben Ezra, the low-­class foreigners who had a “degenerating influence on society,” and the Shylock figure of Shakespearean fame? T ­ hese texts, along with his Daily Theme “The True Nature of a Church,” from March 1904, provide a sense of Locke’s broader religious views. CHS president Robert Ellis Thompson, a mathematician and Presbyterian minister, asked the students, “What is a Church?” Thompson rejected the commonplace definition of “a body of ­people united in a common divinity and a common creed.” Instead, Thompson explained that “the essential idea of a church was that it should be so universal in doctrine and in intended scope as to include all humanity in its proper form of combination—­ the brotherhood of man.”22 Based on this formulation, Locke reasoned that “only a very few” of the world’s religions could be counted as churches with a “self-­imposed duty of universal realization.” He found Thompson’s argument “absorbingly in­ter­est­ ing,” especially b­ ecause of the variety of “creeds, doctrines, and sects” known to humankind. Locke concluded, “The fallacy is not in adopting creeds, formulas and rituals, but in looking upon them as the essential ele­ments without which true religion means nothing.” In insisting that creeds are necessary, ­people reduced the already “remote probability of a universalization of their religions and [denied] to themselves the right to the name of church.”23 At an early age, Locke valued religion as something universal rather than par­tic­u­ lar. He believed true religion, like a true church, functioned as a universal philosophy that transcended the more par­tic­u­lar religions of humankind. In April 1904 Locke wrote an essay for the Teacher, an education journal, titled “Moral Training in Elementary Schools.”24 He attempted to “distinguish between morality and religion,” asserting that, “apart and separate from the province of religion, ­there is a code of ethics—­a more universal standard of

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right and right action, that is the possession of no one institution of society, but the common property of the organic ­whole.”25 Locke quoted Ethical Culture founder Felix Adler, who stressed that schools not only develop the intellect but also “build up character.” Adler, like Mary Locke, had made education into a religion. Alain Locke felt the same way, holding the school above the church and even the ­family as an institution to inculcate morality in the young. “Is not the school custodian of the richest and most liable inheritance of man, the combined and formulated achievements of his thought and action?”26 For Locke, education not only consisted of drinking from the bottomless fountain of knowledge, it also meant ­doing. He invoked John Dewey: “I see, I like, I wish, I w ­ ere, I w ­ ill be.” He preferred “inductive” reasoning and “pro­ gress” to the more “deductive” maxim “To know is to do.”27 Locke displayed an early familiarity with pragmatism and a preference for empiricism over rationalism. He also recognized that education was fundamentally social. Locke emphasized two units, “the individual and the social environment,” claiming that the essence of “morality” was “the connecting bond between the social and the individual life.”28 His own education took a decidedly social step in the fall of 1904, when he entered Harvard College as a freshman. At Harvard, Locke learned a ­great deal in the classroom, but his experiences with peers, professors, and friends had at least as large an impact as his scholastic endeavors. More universalist in high school, Locke saw this universalism challenged and ultimately transformed at Harvard. His tendency t­ oward pluralism, his appreciation of difference, buried beneath universalist abstractions about morality and religion, emerged as he encountered diversity in college. Locke found Harvard a “beautiful place,” but the university accommodations did not impress him. He compared “the cheaper dormitories” to unheated “barns” he would not stay in “rent f­ree,” and he spent his first two weeks of college looking for a suitable room. He eventually roomed at 50 Irving Place, within walking distance of Harvard Yard and on the same street as phi­los­op­ hers William James and Josiah Royce. While wandering about campus, he observed a “funny looking lot, dudes about 20–22 years of age, some eccentric with hats 2 in[che]s or more high, skin tight jackets, and handkerchiefs tied around their rough ­under hats, then some poor looking Jews—­some with moustaches—­and then the rabble,” who did not look like they belonged.29 He concluded that “­there is no prejudice” at Harvard, enabling him to excel academically and socially.30

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In his freshman year, Locke took Greek and German, medieval history, En­ glish lit­er­at­ure, history of philosophy, and the required introductory course in rhe­toric and En­glish composition. His CHS classmate David Adam Pfromm, whom he called Dap, joined him in all but Greek. Another CHS friend, Charles Henry Dickerman, “Dick” or “Dickus,” took no classes with him that year but assumed an intimate role in his social circle. Locke’s letters made no mention of the exclusive Final Clubs, Harvard’s extra-­elitist version of fraternities. The clubs did not allow Jews or Black ­people. Locke’s classmate Van Wyck Brooks remembered without fondness his brief experience in such a club being “surrounded by oarsmen and football players.” Brooks was the “ ‘mollycoddle’ among the ‘red bloods,’ ” to borrow President Theodore Roo­se­velt’s words. In ­those circles, Locke likely felt the same way.31 Locke did associate with other Black students at Harvard, who numbered between twenty-­five and thirty. He did not have particularly nice t­ hings to say about them.32 In October a Black classmate took him “to see ‘the boys’ ” at a party. Nine resided in the same ­house, and when Locke arrived he encountered “5 n—­—­s all Harvard men.” Though impressed by “their pluck and their conceit,” their appearance startled him, and he de­cided that “some are ugly enough to frighten you but I guess they are bright.” They asked Locke to “come around the dances.”33 He had no interest in socializing with ­these individuals. While Locke looked for tutoring work, many Black students worked as waiters at the Harvard dining halls to pay tuition. An African American se­nior from Montgomery, Alabama, named William Clarence “Matty” Matthews initially impressed Locke. Well-­liked by his peers, Matty played for Harvard’s baseball and football teams. But Locke was dismayed by the story he heard of Matthews venturing to a dance in Boston, losing his cab fare in a card game, and being forced to walk back to Cambridge in the freezing cold.34 Locke stayed at the party most of the eve­ning, but he l­ater informed his ­mother this would be the last such event he would attend. He described his Black peers as “not fit for com­pany, even if they are energetic and plodding fellows,” and added, “I’m not used to this class and ­don’t intend to get used to them.” Even if they did get an education at Harvard, Locke declared, “they are not gentlemen.” They spoke about Roscoe Conkling Bruce, a Black 1902 Harvard gradu­ate whom Locke considered a gentleman. He suspected that when Bruce had been ­there, “he ­didn’t notice them.” Locke told his ­mother not to worry, as he had no intention of associating with t­ hese ­people again.35 He had no use for Black ­people who would not speak to him when he was with white students, who had “come up ­here in a broad-­minded place like this and stick together like they w ­ ere in the heart of Africa.”36

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Locke’s ­limited patience wore thinner over time. One Black student, Aubrey Howard Bowser, persisted in trying to get Locke to socialize with them. He gave Locke his second invitation to the first dance of the season, but Locke again declined, saying, “I ­don’t dance, I d­ on’t like it, I ­don’t think it consistent with a student’s life.” When Bowser stated that it was “customary” to get the new students “acquainted with the girls,” Locke declined yet again, citing his schoolwork as an excuse.37 Bowser and Locke went to see the last practice of the football team before the Harvard-­Yale game in November 1904. Bowser “acted like a fool, talked all sorts of nonsense,” telling Locke that “the ‘boys’ ” wanted to let him know that “their usual dance and card party” had a subscription fee of one dollar, and that they let new students know early so they could find “some ‘lady’ to bring,” and then hand in “the ‘lady’s’ name” in advance. Locke refused, and ­after that conversation, which Locke described as “hot air,” Bowser left and Locke hurried over to Memorial to eat. A few minutes l­ ater, he sat at the t­ able and laughed at Bowser’s “foolishness.”38 Although he was amused by the conversation, his discomfort with situations of heterosexual courtship further alienated him from the Black community at Harvard. Locke appreciated that Black classmates received him “cordially.” He expressed pride in their athletic and scholastic achievements. In that fall’s Harvard-­ Yale football game at New Haven, which Yale won twelve to zero, Matthews received particularly harsh treatment from the Bulldogs. When Harvard coach Edgar Wrightington rewarded Matthews’s strong play with a trip to the bench, Harvard captain Daniel Joseph Hurley insisted that Matthews stay in the game, to the delight of Crimson fans. Locke was disappointed that Harvard and Boston papers made no mention of the incident. He would have preferred some acknowl­edgment of Matthews’s bravery in the face of racism on the field.39 In the spring, Locke followed Matthews’s exploits for the Harvard baseball team. He was proud when Matthews led the Crimson to a six-­to-­one victory over Prince­ton, calling him the “hero of the game.” He felt “very glad” it had been Matthews who played such a key role, considering Prince­ton’s prejudice against African Americans.40 Yet he resented how “clannish” Black students ­were, “even in athletics.”41 Despite his complaining, Locke continued to associate with them, indicating a certain level of comfort with the ­people whom he understood formed his community. Yet in an autumn 1904 letter to an unspecified Martin, Locke wrote, “Perhaps it is not within my province as a newcomer to criticize a slight tendency to segregation when ­there is ­little cause for it as t­ here is at Harvard.”42 At eleven thirty on Thanksgiving morning 1904, Bowser came to his abode and told him that “the boys” had gathered at the room of another Black student,

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William Augustus Hinton, and that they requested Locke’s presence. Locke relented and accompanied Bowser to the gathering. He entered the smoke-­filled room with a fit of coughing but eventually adjusted to the “atmosphere.” Dirty glasses abounded. Someone offered Locke what he thought was eggnog. Locke “gasped, took one gulp, and put it down,” disgusted by “the rankest whiskey” he had ever tasted. Not one to overindulge in alcohol, Locke never drank outside his own home except “a sip for sociability.”43 ­After his drink, Locke discovered the real reason they had requested him: to once again invite him to dance, and ask for his one-­dollar subscription fee. Locke said he had never gone to a dance and “­didn’t care to” and had “no one to take.” They persisted, “Oh we w ­ ill fix that up for you,” and began discussing pos­si­ble dates for Locke. “Gentlemen, I am h ­ ere to study,” Locke replied. “I go to meetings of our club, I visit my schoolmates and go to places when I have been formally introduced by friends at home—­but I do not go to dances and ­don’t approve of them.” When one of the African American students said, “We’ve counted on you and thought you w ­ ere surely g­ oing,” Locke forked over one dollar but insisted he would not go to the dance.44 That Saturday, two Black peers invited Locke to go to Joseph Brown’s ­house. Since he admitted to not having plans, they forced him to go along. Brown, an African American Harvard gradu­ate, offered his h ­ ouse as a “home for the fellows.” They told Locke the address on Mas­sa­chu­setts Ave­nue. In the car, Locke realize “with a jolt” that they meant Mas­sa­chu­setts Ave­nue in Roxbury. His companions paid the fare and Locke thought he “had been sold.” He soon discovered that Brown himself would not be pre­sent, as he taught down at Tuskegee. Instead, he encountered Matthews, along with the Brown w ­ omen, a ­mother and four d­ aughters.45 Locke stayed for ninety minutes. He felt “restless and fidgety” most of the night, as “3 more n—­—­wenches” entered along with “3 fellows.” They brought out more ­tables and started to play cards. ­After they left, Locke’s friends said they thought he knew it was the “ ‘girls at home’ night for the fellows.” Although he did not begrudge them their desires, Locke threw a fit, as he “was hot and let them know it.” Locke wrote his m ­ other, “I never fell so completely into a trap in my life.”46 Every­one at the party appeared to be “southern,” including Matthews. Locke had mixed feelings ­toward the Harvard athlete. When Matthews told of a lynching he had witnessed in his hometown of Montgomery, Alabama, Locke focused not on the crime but on the fact that Matthews, the “hero” of the group, “must have said ‘­ain’t’ at least 20 times.”47 Locke liked Matthews, but not in the com­pany of other Black ­people.

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In December 1904 two African American students s­ topped by Locke’s room and again asked him to attend the end-­of-­semester dance. Locke refused, saying he had “no desire to go,” but they persisted ­until fi­nally Locke relented, asking them to call on him at nine ­o’clock in the eve­ning but insisting that he would not stay long at the party. He made a brief appearance at 9:05. He appreciated the hall decorations in the Harvard colors and was amused at his peers, who ­were dancing in the manner of a “cake walk” and dressed inappropriately. He refused to be introduced to the ­women, saying he could not interrupt the dancing. ­After fifteen minutes, Locke left and “whisked out again home.” He suspected ­those in charge “understood” his position, but he did not want to “openly offend them.” Locke found the Black students amusing but, to preserve his “dignity,” could not stomach the display for more than a few moments.48 ­After this dance, the Black students fi­nally began to leave Locke alone, acting “pleasant” t­ oward him but not “overphony”—­precisely as he preferred it. They never spoke to him when he stood with white students, which he found ridicu­lous, declaring, “Shades of Harvard, they d­ on’t know freedom when they have it.” Locke always looked directly at them during t­ hese situations, prepared to start talking if they ever met his gaze.49 Locke felt ­free at Harvard. He felt ­free to leave the concert put on by the famous Fisk Jubilee singers before it concluded. He enjoyed their renditions of Negro spirituals, but when they turned to “the comedian sort of ragtime that one hears at a cheap bowery theatre,” Locke had had enough. He retreated to the library but could still hear ­those “darkies” delivering “stump speeches” to the audience. He mimicked them to his ­mother, “Ahm glad to see so many of de white folkses ­here,” and pointed out that ­after he left, only white ­people remained in the crowd. “It just shows you how the average coon ­will act if he is given a chance to show himself—­I was told afterward that they jigged and joked and all that goes with it. It’s a shame for troupes of that sort to appear before intelligent p­ eople.”50 To Locke, anti-­Black discrimination was not a major prob­lem at Harvard. In April 1905 he went on a walk with his African American friend Edwin French Tyson. Tyson wore yellow shoes and gloves and walked with a “n—­—­ swagger” that Locke “could not stand.” No sooner had they begun their stroll than Tyson told Locke how a white classmate had sat with him at a t­ able and then gotten up and left. Tyson, attributing this to prejudice, “got ‘red in the face’ ” and left the t­ able in a huff. Locke had a hard time imagining Tyson red in the face, telling his ­mother, “I do not see how he managed to do it, I ­can’t and I am a shade or two lighter.” Bowser then joined them and Locke had to listen

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to the story again. He felt so “disgruntled and ashamed” at Tyson and Bowser’s “loud” and “disgraceful” complaining and gum chewing that he “deliberately lied” about having someplace to be and left them.51 Locke frequently used racial slurs to describe African Americans he felt w ­ ere beneath him. Writing to his ­mother, Locke expressed anger at Christopher Perry, editor of the Black newspaper the Philadelphia Tribune, over the description of Mary’s dress at a banquet. “I never liked the n—­—­anyhow,” Locke wrote. He wanted to put a stop to Perry’s “n—­—­tendency of talking back in his columns.” Locke saw ­g reat distance between himself and Black ­people he deemed less refined. Class and character mattered to him. He had ­little use for racial separatism.52 Locke was not self-­hating. He read an “excellent article” in the Atlantic by African American ­lawyer Edward Everett Wilson on “the joys of being a Negro.”53 He preferred optimism to the negativity he saw in his Black peers at Harvard, whom he believed complained too much about racial prejudice and acted as if they did not belong, implying a separate space for them was needed. Locke befriended one Black student, Antiguan James Arthur Harley, who also shunned separatism. A mature student, Harley had already received a law degree from Howard University in Washington, DC, and spent two years at Yale before moving to Cambridge, Mas­sa­chu­setts. He began his freshman year at age thirty, already an accomplished orator who aspired to a ­career as an Anglican clergyman. He excelled on the Harvard debate team and won first prize for elocution in 1906. Locke met Harley at the Harvard Ethical Society, which was loosely affiliated with the Ethical Culture movement. Harley was “dif­fer­ent from the rest” of the Black students at Harvard. He angered his fellow Black students by insisting, in Locke’s words, that “they w ­ ere conscious of their inferiority and justly so,” and even referred to the abode they resided in as “N—­—­Hell.” Harley appreciated Locke precisely ­because the other Black students had criticized him as well.54 Locke felt comfortable among tolerant white ­people, especially educated and assimilated Jews. Dickerman, although not Jewish, traveled in t­hese circles through the Ethical Society. Dickerman secured Locke’s entry into the club and introduced him to Meyer Bloomfield, Kallen’s old mentor from Civic Ser­ vice House. Dickerman volunteered his ser­vices at the ­house, tutoring Jewish immigrants, and Locke periodically aided in the endeavor.55 Locke appreciated the opportunity. He wrote his m ­ other that “­those rich philanthropists” affiliated with Civic Ser­vice House “are the p­ eople you want to know.”56 Although Locke initially “thought l­ittle of ” Bloomfield, he eventually came to consider the director of Civic Ser­vice House to be “one of the

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most influential politicians in Boston” and thus very useful. He began spending more time at Civic Ser­vice House and visited a reform school with Bloomfield as well. Locke declared himself willing to go anywhere to “get in with him.”57 He informed his ­mother of his plans to see the Boston schools’ superintendent a­ fter he graduated and, referring to Bloomfield, wrote, “I w ­ ill use 58 my Jew,” presumably to get a job as a teacher. In February 1905 Bloomfield invited Locke to a “Rus­sian reception” at the American ­Hotel in Boston. The event honored “Rus­sian celebrities” Locke characterized as “reformers.” Locke joked to his ­mother that they would “leave their bombs home.” The overwhelming majority of “Rus­sians” in the United States at the time w ­ ere Jews, suggesting this was a largely Jewish event. The group of honorees included the famous “Rus­sian Jew poet” from ­England, Israel Zangwill. Locke anticipated “entertainment and Rus­sian tea.” He had already experienced the latter, as Bloomfield’s wife offered Locke Rus­sian tea “nearly e­ very time” he went to Civic Ser­vice House.59 The “Rus­sian party” began nearly an hour late. “The foreigners are just like negroes,” Locke observed. He chatted with the “stunningly dressed” Bloomfields as their c­ hildren handed out flowers. The men wore “shiny black suits and turned up razor pointed shoes,” while the ­women dressed so “outlandishly” in “richly embroidered Rus­sian costumes” or “the height of American fashion” that even the Bloomfields laughed at the sight of them.60 The way t­ hese groups “mixed as freely as w ­ ater with w ­ ater” impressed Locke, especially how “the poorer ones” appeared “delightfully unconscious of an inferiority.” Locke found the concert “lovely.” It consisted of Rus­sian ­music and “native folk songs,” followed by “recitations in Yiddish—­a veritable hodge podge of languages, Rus­sian, Bohemian, German, Yiddish.” Zangwill, who would pop­u­lar­ize the term melting pot with his 1908 play of the same name, could not make it to the party, but Locke reveled in his own melting pot that eve­ning.61 The melting became more pronounced when the dancing began. Locke, along with Dickerman and fellow CHS and Harvard classmate Clarence Henry Haring, did not dance but looked on like “wall-­flowers” at the other dancers. Locke was amused by the ­couples, “a dirty common looking Rus­sian Jew dancing with ladies in exquisite embroidered gowns, while her escort danced with the shoemaker’s wife” and Mrs. Bloomfield danced with a “Harvard fellow” and then switched off to “the cobbler” and then to her d­ aughter. ­After the dances, speeches declaring “Rus­sia must be f­ree” ignited the audience, who “stomped, clapped, shrieked, threw flowers.” Locke and friends left the “delightful event” ­after midnight and walked around Boston for half an hour before heading back to Cambridge.62

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Jewish students at Harvard entered Locke’s social circle, including David Rosenblum, the “most attractive” of his friends. Rosenblum hailed from Brooklyn and was popu­lar in Locke’s freshman class. Locke hoped to use Rosenblum as an “Open Sesame to the winners set—­the exclusives.” Although dif­fer­ent “in temperament,” they shared interests in m ­ usic and rhe­toric. Locke described Rosenblum as “a bit literary, and more than all ­else is a lovable fellow—­one of the effusive sort it is true but he nevertheless seems genuine.” Rosenblum walked “arm in arm” with Locke across Harvard Yard, a “sure sign of friendship,” or perhaps more than friendship.63 One eve­ning Rosenblum came by Locke’s dorm and the two of them attended a gathering at a neighbor’s place. They cleared the living room and set up ­tables with beer steins to mimic a “German university beer-­festival.” While the beer flowed, members of the orchestra or glee club would play what Locke called “discourse m ­ usic” that to him sounded “popu­lar, catchy, almost barbarous.” The other students would whistle or sing along. ­These raucous events typically ended with the singing of “Fair Harvard,” although that night Locke did not stay to hear it, as he had too much work to do.64 Though studious, Locke valued his social life. With the academic year winding to a close, he began to take stock of his circle of friends. He planned to room with Rosenblum as a sophomore. They aimed to arrive before the fall semester started, when they could get a room in one of the “aristocratic dormitories” for a reduced price. Rosenblum was not a “wealthy fellow,” though he pretended to be rich and socialized with the “swell set.” Locke hoped their plans would work out, as Rosenblum had become his favorite freshman, a man he called “almost too pleasant.”65 Locke also enjoyed the com­pany of Bruno Beckhardt, a “millionaire” Jewish student from New York. Beckhardt impressed Locke by ordering a fancy car to take the two of them and Dickerman for an after­noon by a beautiful lake near Newton, Mas­sa­chu­setts.66 Beckhardt also traveled to Philadelphia in May 1905 for the anniversary of the Society for Ethical Culture. Being “prominent New York Jews,” his ­family was well acquainted with Felix Adler. Locke hoped to benefit from this connection when he returned to Philadelphia and visited the director of the society ­there, and Beckhardt advised him, “Just tell him you know us.” Locke appreciated the offer but not the arrogance. “That’s a Jew for you ­isn’t it—­they are so egotistical about what­ever they do ­whether they sell you a second-­hand suit of clothes or offer to give you an introduction.”67 Anti-­Semitism was commonplace among elite white Christians in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was also common among educated African Americans, who learned it from white ­people. Booker T. Washington embraced anti-­Semitic ste­reo­types early in his

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c­ areer, u ­ ntil 1896, when white reverend Robert C. Belford advised him to “leave out the Jew as distinct from ­others in cheating the ­people.”68 W. E. B. Du Bois employed similar ste­reo­types. In an 1896 diary entry chronicling a transatlantic voyage to the United States, he listed vari­ous “types” on board, including “the Jew.” Though he recognized distinctions among Jews, characterizing some as “the noble aristocracy of the race,” his overall impressions ­were negative, particularly of the “low mean cheating pobel [rabble].” Having met wealthy Jews at Harvard and now traveling in steerage, Du Bois judged that Jewish ­people “lacked the strong m ­ iddle class which in e­ very nation holds the brunt of culture.” He had not met a Jew who was an “ordinary good heartened good intentioned man,” and of ­those on board, ­there ­were “vari­ous specimens, but none of a very virtuous character.” Du Bois avoided them, put off by their “slyness” and “lack of straight-­forward open heartedness.” One gave “a sort of Shylock impression”; even his son “sneak[ed] rather than walk[ed] about.” An arrogant British Jew spoke with an accent and “swagger” that “out E ­ ngland[ed] ­England.” The numerous Polish Jews ­were “as dirty and rough as the Poles themselves,” but with an “overbearing slyness” instead of the “Polish innocence + greenness.”69 Anti-­Semitic ste­reo­types appeared in Du Bois’s published writing as well. The original edition of his 1903 book, The Souls of Black Folk, asserted that “the Jew is the heir to the slave baron” and made references to “shrewd and unscrupulous foreigners” exploiting African Americans ­after the Civil War. Du Bois described their tendency ­toward “deception and flattery” and “cajoling and lying” that “the Jews of the M ­ iddle Age used.”70 Locke read The Souls of Black Folk in college, and ­those verses may have resonated with him. But Locke directed his most pronounced prejudice t­oward his African American friends. Harley was “the only exponent of good sense” among Black students at Harvard. Most had “abandoned” Locke to his white friends, hoping he would be forced to return to their “good graces.” Locke admitted he could not “stand the appearance and actions of the colored fellows ­here.” Occasionally Matthews proved tolerable, but even he had his “lapses” when he hung around other African American students. As for the rest, Locke labeled them “de­cided n—­—­s in every­thing they wear, do and say,” and insisted to his ­mother, “I just ­won’t walk a half square with them if I can help it.”71 Despite his protests, Locke enjoyed the 1905 graduation festivities with his Black friends, five of whom earned their degrees. He attended their class-­day reception in a “­little den” on Mission Street. En route he met “a seedy looking colored man” named Richard R. Wright, the president of the Georgia State Industrial College for Colored Youth, whom Locke described as “a bigoted, half-­educated Southern school teacher.” At the party, Locke encountered one

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of the gradu­ates, Haley George Douglass, grand­son of famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass. His f­ ather, Frederick’s son Charles, also attended, “looking the loving image of the old man himself.” Locke also saw gradu­ate Edwin  J. Chesnutt, along with his famous ­father, African American author Charles W. Chesnutt.72 The f­athers impressed Locke more than the sons. “The younger generation i­sn’t much credit to them,” Locke observed. He called his Black peers “typical Southern n—­—­s” and was “mighty thankful for the training that has separated [him] from them.” He hated that “they w ­ ere all t­here mixed together—­think of Fred Douglas’s grand­son being with ­those common ­people.” Disgusted by their be­hav­ior and desperately seeking a “contrast,” he did some “tall talking” and ducked out down a side street when he left to avoid being seen. He went to Dickerman’s spread, which was “quite the opposite.”73 Nonetheless, Locke returned to the African American ­house that eve­ning. “­Those n—­—s­ ” who had been so nicely dressed had “peeled their superfluous clothing like a snake does to its skin.” Walter Foster, another gradu­ate, had removed his shoes, stockings, collar, tie, and coat and rolled up his pants “to his knees” and was now lying down on a bed snoring. Bowser said, “Excuse me but my feet hurt,” and took off his shoes, telling Locke, “If y­ ou’re tired take yours off too.” Locke tried to convince one of them to accompany him home, as it was dark and the area looked to be “a nest for footpads.” They told Locke to stay the night, saying, “This old bed can hold three easy,” and apparently Bowser often stayed. Matthews did not return, as he had duties as a class-­day officer, yet Locke i­magined Matthews would have felt “more at home” in the ­house than he did. “A night like this is enough to sicken you with Harvard, let alone n—­—­s,” Locke lamented. “Yet five of them become Harvard AB next Wednesday. Can you imagine fellows not getting civilized in 3 or 4 years ­here?”74 Locke fancied himself civilized, and though he did not want to “endure such contrasts” in the f­ uture, he recognized that the bad made the good “so much more pleasant and desirable.” He did not tell his African American friends that he intended to move into a small dorm room in the fall with the “rest,” the term they used to refer to white students. At the party, when Locke brought up Harley and “praised him for dev­ilishness,” they replied, “Old Mr. Harley ­doesn’t mix, you know.” Locke thought this was “prejudice turned round and ­going the other way.” Harley and Locke had become “very chummy” ­because they had a “common ­enemy,” the other Black students at Harvard.75 Beyond his social pursuits, Locke had another impor­tant intellectual experience that year outside the classroom. That April 1905, he heard a lecture from Herbert Adolphus Miller. A doctoral candidate in philosophy and psy­chol­ogy,

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Miller had taught at Fisk University, the Black college in Nashville, Tennessee. At Harvard, Miller worked with psychologist Robert Mearns Yerkes to develop primitive intelligence tests. With the help of his adviser, William James, Miller secured a grant to travel south and administer the tests to “hundreds” of African Americans, “mountain whites,” and Native Americans at Hampton University and Carlisle Indian Industrial School. His dissertation, “Comparative Psy­chol­ogy of the Negro,” won the prestigious Bowdoin Prize. Miller found less merit in his own work than the awards committee did. “Its one essential value to me was to convince me that, as a method of group classification, [the intelligence test] was utterly useless.”76 He shared his results with ­others at Harvard, and Locke took note. On the back of a letter from his ­mother, Locke scribbled a few lines attributed to Miller. “Race prob­lems develops [sic] from the lack of common ideals and not from psychophysical difference. The cause of the diff in ideals is the accidental existence of external conditions which stand for the symbols of sameness of kind. That the external [symbols?] are only accidental is proved by the many cases [where?] individuals go from one class to another.”77 Like Miller, Locke understood that physical differences between races ­were more accidental than real. A strident individualist, he experienced firsthand that individuals such as himself could achieve the highest of academic distinctions, regardless of their racial background. Moreover, they could distinguish themselves among members of their own group. Locke felt that the other Black students at Harvard had de­cided to “freeze” him out, refusing to speak with him when he associated with white p­ eople. Locke amused himself by attempting to force them into conversation in ­these situations, for he felt only “dev­ ilishness” rather than any “humanitarian” sentiment ­towards them.78 Locke showed greater interest in culture than in biology. Culture referred to folkways, ideals, values, ways of thinking, aesthetic achievements, and sensibilities, t­ hings he appreciated. Like biology, culture could be changed or, even better, s­ haped. Locke may not have fully fleshed out this realization yet. But he would develop it soon, especially through contact with Jewish students at Harvard, most notably Horace Meyer Kallen. In the fall of 1905, Harvard professor Barrett Wendell taught the Literary Origins of En­glish Lit­er­at­ure. Locke, a student in the course, observed that some of his classmates ­were already “recognized in literary circles.” This included his CHS friend Dickerman, his CHS rival and f­ uture celebrated American author Van Wyck Brooks, and, perhaps, gradu­ate student auditor Kallen.79 When Kallen and Locke met in Wendell’s classroom, Harvard was ­under the philo-­Semitic reign of Harvard president Charles William Eliot, who publicly praised Jewish contributions to civilization. In this environment, ­because

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Jews ­were considered white, Kallen had the freedom to assert his Jewish identity. He found a peer group of like-­minded Jews enamored of secular education but committed to Hebraic culture. While Locke had to balance group loyalty with his social preferences, Kallen, having experienced more anti-­ Semitism at Prince­ton than he ever had at Harvard, had much less difficulty navigating this terrain. Upon returning to Harvard in the fall of 1905, Locke noted the “ser­vice and food” at Memorial Hall had “extremely improved” and came as close to resembling real meals “as colored waiters and cooks ­will permit.”80 His disdain for Black ­people he believed beneath him emerged again as he searched for sophomore housing. On his first day back in Cambridge, Locke bumped into Bowser, who greeted him as he would a friend. “Where are you stopping?” Bowser asked. Locke had not told Bowser he had been in Philadelphia for the summer and was pleased his classmate had not found out. “Nowhere at pre­ sent,” Locke replied, dodging the question about his residence, saying only that he would “prob­ably stop at the Parker House again” ­until he found something more suitable.81 Bowser invited Locke to stay with him and ­others at the boarding ­house of Sarah Estelle Caution, an el­derly African American ­woman, on Museum Street in Cambridge. “­We’re all over t­ here, all the old and 3 new fellows.” Locke refused. Leaving Bowser b­ ehind, he took his sophomore entrance exam and hung out with white friends through the after­noon. He spent the night at Crawford House in Boston, gladly paying the extra twenty-­five cents rather than shacking up with the “16 or 17 negro students in that ­house besides Mrs. Caution, her two or 3 c­ hildren, and a boarder.”82 Locke stayed the next three nights at New American House, a h ­ otel in Boston. He wrote his m ­ other using their stationary but made sure to use Harvard envelopes, lest she, a teacher, leave the h ­ otel envelopes on her desk and her students think her son “a bell-­boy ­there” rather than an “honored guest.”83 Appearances mattered greatly to the Lockes. Although their elitism consisted mostly of intellectual pretension rather than economic ostentation, they did not want anyone to think them poor, or that they engaged in lowly ser­vice work. The Lockes used their minds to live within their means but still liked to live well. As in his freshman year, Locke did not rush to find permanent housing, preferring to wait for prices to drop for a spot he truly desired. As previously mentioned, he planned to live with or near his friend Rosenblum, whom he found “as pleasant as ever.”84 They vowed to live together if they could find an affordable double. If not, they would take singles in close proximity. Locke had an offer to room with Rosenblum in Claverly, a dorm on Mount Auburn

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Street a few blocks away from Harvard Yard. Claverly was “one of the swell dormitories.” Theodore Roo­se­velt Jr., son of the sitting president, lived ­there. Locke knew it would look strange “to take a scholarship and live in Claverly.” More impor­tant, the “swell set” to which Roo­se­velt belonged felt “particularly hostile to Jews—­far more so than negroes,” and Rosenblum would not feel welcome ­there.85 Locke de­cided to room in Grays Hall, a dorm on Harvard Yard, for ninety dollars per year. He lived in Grays 19, facing the yard, opposite the office of Wendell, who had returned to Cambridge ­after a year in France. Rosenblum took the room next to Locke’s, which would make ­things “very pleasant.”86 Locke continued to hang out with his Antiguan friend James Arthur Harley, and Harley’s roommate, an eastern Eu­ro­pean Jewish immigrant named Jacob Loewenberg, who helped Locke with his German coursework. In keeping this com­pany, Locke distanced himself from the African American students at Harvard. He found Bowser “too friendly again” and “iced” him out of his social circle, labeling him “one of t­ hose irrepressible coons.” Locke heard of a few new Black students arriving, whom he suspected of being “of the same upper class” as most of the ­others. He made no effort to meet them and avoided contact with most Black ­people at Harvard.87 Eventually his hair grew too long and he needed to go to the “colored barbershop where religion, politics and criticism of Booker T. Washington reign[ed] supreme.” Locke hoped to go ­there during a less crowded time, but he encountered Black men who discussed the “moral degradation of the times” in their “usual eloquent pompous domineering fashion.” Like ­those at the barbershop, Locke preferred Du Bois to Washington, hoping to meet him eventually, and commended his m ­ other for reading The Souls of Black Folk.88 Locke had more in common with Du Bois than he did with Washington. He belonged to Du Bois’s “talented tenth,” which they believed should lead the Black race. He felt entitled to the full rights and privileges of American citizenship. He did not embrace Washington’s gradualist approach, which emphasized industrial education and economic mobility before po­liti­cal and civil rights. Locke, like Du Bois, believed Black p­ eople belonged in the “Kingdom of Culture.”89 Locke did not think his African American peers at Harvard mea­sured up to Du Bois’s high standard. When administrators placed three Black students at the same t­ able at Memorial dining hall, one of them, Edwin French Tyson, “raised quite a stir” to the Harvard auditor, claiming they had been “jim-­ crowed.” Another student, Jerome Barlow, had faced a similar experience, and complained to the directors of the dining hall. Locke wanted nothing to do with the ­matter. He wished they could “act like gentlemen” and ignore the

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slight or subtly ask to be seated elsewhere without bringing race into the equation.90 When Tyson told him the story, Locke responded that he “was not looking for discrimination” before changing the subject. Eventually, all Black students other than Locke, Harley, and Hugh Richard Francis left Memorial for another dining hall, Randall, and “by common consent” sat at a separate t­ able as a form of protest. “Now what do you think of that?” Locke asked his ­mother. “It’s the same old lifelong criticism I ­shall be making against our ­people,” and he remained “thankful” that he avoided the ­whole situation.91 By May, even light-­skinned Francis had “been ‘unvited’ from Memorial.” Locke did not know the details beyond that it involved “the eternal negro question.” He could not “see why ­those fellows ­don’t get along.” He insisted, “I ­don’t ever intend to investigate or try to find out for myself ­because it is my policy to act as if no such ­thing ever existed and my friends seem to agree with me that it d­ oesn’t.”92 Locke preferred his white friends, “as exclusive and valuable a set of friends as one could wish.”93 When Black freshman Madison Charles Butler Mason Jr. found himself “petitioned out,” presumably by white members of Locke’s first ­table in early January, Locke did not make a fuss e­ ither. He had already switched to a t­ able with Beckhardt and Dickerman, and considered the m ­ atter none of his business.94 Locke and Harley took it as a “hobby” to make fun of the other Black students.95 When Locke left Cambridge for Christmas break in 1905, Harley filled him in on the d­ oings of the African American community at Harvard. “Crows meanwhile thick as bees at the Museum Street zoo,” he wrote, referring to the Black students at Sarah Estelle Caution’s boarding ­house in derogatory, animalistic terms. Harley swung by their abode that morning. They mentioned him and Locke “slowly, cautiously, but surely, + ­were ‘glad’ on general grounds—­ you know—­‘our p­ eople.’ ” Harley described a ceremony for the opening of Emerson Hall, which he attended along with his “Jewess pupils from Boston.” ­After the other men departed, Harley separated a “grown young lady” from her “married s­ ister,” taking the single w ­ oman for a tour of the Harvard campus, which ended in his own dorm room “for an hour (Treason to the race!).”96 Harley’s sarcastic reference to “our ­people” and “treason to the race” suggested near-­total alienation from the Black community but also from Black history in general. Locke did not share that alienation, despite his sympathy for Harley’s view of the Harvard crew. Harley regularly referred to the other Black students as “the zoo and the inmates.”97 Locke thought this arrogance and elitism was “perhaps wrong,” but for him and Harley it signified “self-­ respect,” and they wanted to avoid “erring on the side of too ­little of it.”

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They succeeded. Locke and Harley saw themselves as the intellectual elite at Harvard and chose their friends accordingly.98 Locke had ­little regard for the Black student “that carries prejudice along with him.” As he explained to his ­mother, “You ­can’t get along anywhere ­unless you prove by your actions that you are a gentleman. T ­ hose fellows up h ­ ere eat, walk, sleep, and do every­thing ­else together—­they are isolated as if they ­were quarantined, and they hate Harley of course.”99 In addition to their ages and national origins, Locke and Harley differed in another way: Harley romantically pursued w ­ omen. He went to “see white girl friends out at Wellesley—­has white girl pupils and brings them to chapel,” while his Black Harvard peers “nearly choke[d],” and Harley simply laughed “his dev­ilish West Indian laugh and sneer[ed].” Locke avoided the race question and insisted, “As far as prejudice goes I should be willing to ­table any place north of Mason and Dixon’s line.”100 He may have been alienated by Harley’s relationships with ­women in general, not simply ­those with white ­women. At Harvard, Locke “tabled” where he felt most comfortable, with the p­ eople whose com­pany he enjoyed the most, regardless of race. He attended numerous “beer nights” with his white friends. He renewed his membership at the Ethical Society, which gave him the opportunity to meet Harvard president Charles William Eliot, who spoke ­there, and gradu­ate student Morris Cohen, an eastern Eu­ro­pean immigrant who would become the first Jewish philosophy professor at City College. Succumbing to peer pressure, Locke joined the Debating Forum, as he liked the club’s members and hoped to make new friends t­ here. He had previously refrained from joining. He labeled debating the “failing of the Jew and the negro,” two classes of ­people he found to be overly argumentative. 101 Locke emphasized the former group, writing his m ­ other, “I think [debating] the personification of the spirit of the Jew and cordially hate it.”102 While he appreciated the value of debating, he “despise[d] the debating, argumentative temperament especially if it is combined, as it usually is, with a Roman nose and other Hebraic characteristics. To wrangle is bad enough, but to hear a man wrangle through his nose is absolutely unbearable.”103 Oblivious to his own anti-­Semitism, Locke wrote, “Quite an anti-­Semitic feeling exists ­here at Harvard.” He noted how some ­tables in the dining hall had “petitioned away their Jewish members.” In one instance, where two “objectionable Jews” w ­ ere asked to leave, two of Locke’s friends who w ­ ere Jewish in name only “left the t­able in sympathy” despite being quite popu­lar. Locke lamented this decision as “the same old ­mistake our colored ­brothers make, for the objection w ­ asn’t to them as Jews but as disagreeable, ungentlemanly fellows.” He found it bizarre that his friends revealed their anti-­Semitic sentiments

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to him “as if I could admit that I shared them.” This made him “uncomfortable,” but he appreciated the trust they put in him.104 While Locke’s anti-­Semitism contained a biological reference to noses, his views proved contradictory, as he did not regard race as an entirely fixed category. His comments acknowledged Jews had choices: they could behave as gentlemen or as Jews. He did not regard his perspective as anti-­Semitic; he treated Jews as he treated Black ­people, as individuals, even as he propounded negative group distinctions. Locke’s life choices proved more revealing than anything he wrote. He chose to associate with white and Black p­ eople ( Jews and Gentiles) whom he deemed worthy of friendship. Locke regularly socialized with high school classmates Dickerman and Pfromm (Dick and Dap). He took walks with Dick and listened to his poetry, and went to church with Dap, although he often joked around, “much to the disgust of pious Pfromm.” Locke maintained the close relationship with Dap, despite distancing himself from his friend’s religion. In that regard, he had less in common with Dap than he did with his friend Bruno Beckhardt, who came from a Jewish background but embraced the Ethical Culture movement, as Locke’s ­mother had. Beckhardt treated Locke well. One night in March 1906, Locke was in Beckhardt’s room when a terrible snowstorm commenced. Beckhardt “bundled” Locke up in his oilskins to protect him from the weather on their way to the dining hall. Locke “looked awfully funny” in the “stiff sailor’s oilskins.” Beckhardt had wrapped Locke so tightly that a waiter had to help Locke remove the skins. Locke wrote his m ­ other, “My friends take awfully good care of me” as “compensation for being small.” He expressed bemusement at how “­these big walloping fellows treat you like a piece of bric-­a-­brac,” giving Locke a “ghastly look” for fear that he would break “in pieces” if they bumped into him. In this instance, Locke’s size proved more impor­tant than his race.105 That spring, Locke attended an after­noon reception in Beckhardt’s room in honor of a visit from Beckhardt’s m ­ other. Locke arrived underdressed but saw through Mrs. Beckhardt’s formality. “Mrs. Beckhardt is a very refined ­woman. She has the makings of an ordinary Jewish frau, but money and the Ethical Society of New York have made quite a product by being grafted on—­ and considering that its grafting it is not so artificial a­ fter all—in short, she is well-­trained.”106 Locke punned on the word graft—­referring both to the act of stitching together and to monetary or po­liti­cal corruption, the latter reflecting a common anti-­Semitic trope for the time. His comment indicated an astute awareness of upwardly mobile German Jews’ efforts to integrate into the American elite, and their anxiety and self-­consciousness at being detected and deemed impostors.

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Locke felt at ease in this crowd. Beckhardt’s friends and relatives “­were very pleasant but very surprised for vari­ous reasons,” perhaps ­because of Locke’s presence as an African American, but Locke felt comfortable at the party. He had a “delightful time” with the numerous Jews in attendance, including Meyer Bloomfield, his “Jew civic ser­vice friend from Boston” and Kallen’s former mentor, as well as Charles Fleischer, “the celebrated Boston Rabbi” of the Reform congregation Adath Israel, who “corresponds to Rabbi [Joseph] Krauskopf of Phila[delphia].”107 Fleischer, like Locke, felt at home among the Ethical Culture crowd. Although he initially believed Jews could “retain a certain amount of their individuality” while remaining “as broad as humanity,” he eventually found Reform Judaism too narrow. ­After battling the synagogue trustees, in 1911, he left Adath Israel to found Sunday Commons, an ecumenical, nonsectarian congregation that combined liberal Judaism and Chris­tian­ity into a modern, humanistic religion dedicated to “enlightened citizenship.” In 1919 he married Mabel R. Leslie, a Presbyterian.108 At their 1905 meeting, Locke likely appreciated Fleischer’s open-­mindedness, but social barriers for the white rabbi, like for Jewish members of the Ethical Society, proved more porous than they did for Locke. Locke was hyperaware of p­ eople’s Jewishness. In a letter to his m ­ other, he mentioned how his CHS teacher Louis Nusbaum kept writing him. “Strange how the Jews w ­ ill stick when they think you are succeeding. Just the slightest prospects of success and the Jews take up like shares of stock that promise to rise. Buy below par and sell out above—­that’s a Jew for you w ­ hether it’s stocks or friends.”109 Locke had imbibed the anti-­Semitic ste­reo­types of the time but had no trou­ble learning from Jews or befriending them. Dorm life provided a social outlet. Along with Rosenblum, Locke’s neighbors included a non-­Jewish white student named Francis Stuart Montgomery, a classmate with a reputation as “a very charming and popu­lar fellow” worth befriending both at “face value and also for his standing” at Harvard.110 Montgomery was Locke’s h ­ uman alarm clock. He r­ ose early e­ very day and knocked on Locke’s door to and from his morning visits to the bathroom to wake Locke up for his spring philosophy class. Locke prioritized schoolwork. He particularly enjoyed his “delightful literary course” with Wendell and his ethics class with phi­los­o­pher George Herbert Palmer.111 Meetings with Palmer and Wendell would prove most enlightening. Locke met with Wendell in December 1905. While his professor spoke with an affected British accent, Locke found him thoroughly “frenchified,” perhaps seeing a kindred spirit, as he himself had frenchified his own name by adding the i in Alain. Other students joined Locke in Wendell’s office, located next to Locke’s

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dorm room, but they soon left, leaving Locke with “his highness and a Jewish rabbi.”112 This “Jewish rabbi” may have been Kallen. Wendell did not have many Jewish friends or associates in 1905. Since Kallen was a few years older, and perhaps still in possession of a mild immigrant accent, Locke might have mistaken him for a rabbi. Kallen had developed a close relationship with Wendell and was enrolled in the same lit­er­a­ture course as Locke. Kallen, a gradu­ate student, may have been pre­sent at the meeting as some kind of teaching assistant. Locke gave no other indication of the rabbi’s identity. He told his m ­ other that Wendell wore garters, “smoked cigarettes and twirled his cane” all throughout encounter, which lasted an hour.113 The professor reminisced and joked rather than providing assistance to his student. They met again in March 1906 to discuss Locke’s paper on Tennyson. Locke impressed Wendell, a reputedly “stingy” grader. The professor nearly promised his student an A if he followed through with his outline. He insisted on loaning Locke vari­ous books on the subject. Locke did not need most of them but accepted them to be polite. He wrote his ­mother, “I have now on my t­ able quite a few absolutely useless books whose only value, if they have any at all, is that they have his lordship’s private book plate and his signature.”114 Locke valued his encounters with Wendell, not knowing, or perhaps not caring, about the deep prejudice the latter felt ­toward Black ­people. Locke also met with philosophy professor George Herbert Palmer. He had taken a course with Palmer his freshman year but had never been to the professor’s home, which was next to Harvard president Charles William Eliot’s abode. Locke left the conversation disappointed. Palmer “talked on the negro prob­lem, praised Tuskegee, and then started off on [Black Harvard alum Roscoe Conkling Bruce] who seems to have stuck deep into the very best ­people up ­here.”115 Bruce, son of senator Blanche K. Bruce and a prominent teacher and reformer, had made quite an impression at Harvard. To ingratiate himself, Locke told Palmer of meeting Bruce the year before. Palmer referred to Bruce as a “wonderful boy.” He admired his work at Tuskegee but hoped his former student would become a l­awyer. Perhaps he saw the same potential in Locke to extend beyond the self-­help industrialism of Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee and into the ranks of the American intellectual elite. Palmer told Locke that Bruce would be staying with him when he addressed Phi Beta Kappa in June, and he hoped that he and Locke could get together.116 Although annoyed with forced discussion of the “race question,” Locke remained engaged with the issue. He heard a talk by the white principal of a Black school in Alabama who “proved conclusively that given a fair show even

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the worst of the southern negroes accomplish much.” Locke believed that the right education enabled Black ­people to succeed in Amer­i­ca, just as he had. At a luncheon following the address, the principal invited Locke to his school, located “within a few miles of Tuskegee which ­every colored educated man visits.” Locke hoped he would not have to visit, preferring opportunities in the North, particularly Philadelphia, where his connections gave him his “greatest chance.”117 Around the 1906 Harvard commencement, Locke attended Bruce’s lecture in Sanders Theatre. ­After Palmer’s introduction, Bruce gave a “scholarly discussion of the Negro prob­lem in the South,” including numerous statistics and references to Booker T. Washington. Bruce was a mediocre speaker but kept the crowd’s attention, and Locke enjoyed the “fair-­minded” talk. Despite working at Tuskegee, Bruce did not toe the Washington line in his pre­sen­ta­tion and came off as “decidedly in­de­pen­dent and self-­respecting in tone.” He did not tell the crowd what they wanted to hear and instead asserted their complicity with slavery, “warning that stiff backed New ­England audience” with a bold statement: “You of Mas­sa­chu­setts sinned with the South.”118 ­After Bruce spoke, Locke held back and waited at the entrance to Sanders Theatre u ­ ntil Palmer brought Bruce out and reintroduced them. They met again the following day. Though Bruce did not remember their initial encounter, Locke did not mind, finding Bruce “very much the lion of the day.” Locke said Bruce comported himself as a “typical Harvard gentleman, very reserved, refined.”119 Locke was dismayed that Bruce’s talk had been “centered on the ‘Negro prob­lem.’ ” He spoke of “­little e­ lse except it be [sic] to talk of Harvard.” Locke politely excused himself from a “long tiresome conversation” to hear another “visitor” who had the university “agog,” the Rus­sian writer Maxim Gorky.120 Locke only caught a glimpse of Gorky, whose philosophical outlook resembled his own. William James placed Gorky in “a higher nation, the cosmopolitan communion of liberal minds, of ‘les intellectuels,’ ” referring to the Dreyfus Affair in France.121 Locke, ever the elitist, wanted to be a part of this “higher nation.” He did not want to emulate Bruce. He had grander ambitions for himself: to become a man of the wider world. The world would not always let him. “The Negro prob­lem” kept drawing him back in, and Locke engaged it, evidence of his sympathy for his p­ eople. His desire to join the “cosmopolitan communion of liberal minds” combined his universalist humanism with his pragmatist pluralism. He hoped to help his community and cultivate his ancestral culture, but he did not want to be ­limited by them ­either. He wanted to be both a race man and an intellectuel at the same time.122

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Locke felt his intellectual prowess acknowledged in the spring of 1906, during a class with Wendell. A ­ fter returning their essays, Wendell mentioned a student paper that “made an original contribution to the subject.” The author of this impressive thesis was none other than Locke. The young Locke, a sophomore, broke into a “cold sweat” that lasted the entire lecture. His paper, on Tennyson, had been the only one that received an A. Wendell insisted the essay could be published. Locke preferred to hold on to the Tennyson paper and revise it for a competition in the Lit­er­a­ture Department. He hoped to share with Wendell an essay he wrote on the recently deceased African American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. He thought this essay might be fit for publication, and perhaps Wendell could assist in the pro­cess.123 Although “certain of his backing,” Locke believed the blue-­blooded Wendell might have been caught up in “the enthusiasm of the moment” in publicly praising an African American student. In his comments on the paper, Wendell complimented the “combined solidity of thought and sensitive fluency of style” in Locke’s “remarkable piece of work.” Wendell believed it to be, “both in substance and in expression, a real contribution to the subject at hand” and “among the most brilliant and suggestive essays of literary criticism” he had ever read.124 Some of Locke’s classmates must have seethed with jealousy upon hearing a Black man received the only A grade. Was Kallen pre­sent, and if so, did he share their sentiments? The extent to which Locke and Kallen interacted in 1905–1906 is unknown. Kallen would l­ater write Wendell and remind him of Locke from his lit­er­a­ture course. But their real encounters began in George Santayana’s class on Greek philosophy in the fall of 1906.

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Locke and Kallen, Student and Teacher

In the academic year 1906–1907, Horace Kallen served as gradu­ate assistant for Philosophy 12, a course on Plato taught by Professor George Santayana. Alain Locke, a student in the class, participated in Kallen’s discussion section. They had met the previous year in Barrett Wendell’s En­glish lit­er­a­ture class, which Kallen had audited as a doctoral student. Now, Kallen was the teacher, Locke his pupil. The only written rec­ord of Kallen and Locke’s interaction that year consists of a smattering of marginalia he put on Locke’s exams, which he graded. Locke earned a B in the course. But their relationship involved more than grading. Kallen knew Locke well by the time they left for Oxford in the fall of 1907. That closeness was achieved through their interactions in section. They discussed the course material. But they also engaged on other topics that interested them, topics of a more personal nature. How did t­hese conversations in an academic setting lead to the development of the friendship between Kallen and Locke and, from that friendship, the idea of cultural pluralism? Kallen’s ideas about teaching and friendship, which he outlined in an essay he wrote the following year, provide some answers. In February 1908, while at Oxford, he submitted an essay, “University Ideals,” to the Nation.1 Although Nation editor Hammond Lamont rejected the essay, Kallen sent it to his friend Wendell, who preserved it in his papers. In

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his opaque style, Kallen compared Harvard favorably to Oxford, presenting an image of a Harvard setting that fostered friendship along with learning. Kallen described Oxford’s “tutorial” system, where lectures proved less impor­tant than one-­on-­one contact between students and tutors, who often occupied a relatively se­nior position. He argued that Harvard’s system was not that dif­fer­ent. Although much of the teaching occurred through professors’ lectures, a tutorial system existed at Harvard “in all but name.” Harvard’s “tutors” w ­ ere called “assistants.” Financially, they w ­ ere worse off than Oxford tutors, “underpaid,” and too small in number to manage so many pupils. But the Harvard assistant’s lower rank and relative youth, the fact “that his life [was] before him” and that he had not yet won “his spurs” in his par­tic­u­lar discipline, made Harvard’s assistant system “infinitely better than the tutorial.”2 In praising Harvard, Kallen sang his own praises, noting that assistants ­were “generally picked for distinguished proficiency and ­great promise” in their par­ tic­ul­ar subjects. Most conducted research en route to advanced degrees and ­were “full of the subject, fresh and keen.” Their entire field was “alive for them and full of meaning.” ­There ­were stakes in their teaching, which could lead to “promotion or dismissal.” Their work included grading their students’ papers and exams, “meeting their pupils in conference,” and leading discussions about assigned readings.3 Kallen had this sort of relationship with Locke in Santayana’s class. Kallen read and graded some of Locke’s assignments. They met for one-­on-­one conferences on several occasions. Locke did not write of t­ hese interactions, and Kallen only spoke of them de­cades ­later. But Kallen’s 1908 essay offers clues: “Being younger than most tutors are, [assistants] are closer to the students, discussion with them is franker and less formal than with tutors, invites more frequently spontaneity and individuality of opinion.”4 This “franker and less formal” interaction allowed for Locke to pose the question, “What difference does the difference make?” It allowed for the “spontaneity” from which the term cultural pluralism emerged. Kallen’s Harvard dialogues with Locke ­were not formal learning sessions between teacher and student but closer to conversations between peers. Kallen was only three years older than Locke, and they became friends at Oxford the following year. The tutorial system at Oxford was dif­fer­ent. Oxford tutors occasionally had breakfast with their students. The student, however, ate “amid a silence punctuated by desultory remarks about a variety of topics; then talk[ed] perfunctorily of sports, the theatre, and what­ever e­ lse that may not be taboo, and gladly retire[d].” The conversations between Harvard assistant and student ­were livelier. Kallen and Locke touched on the “taboo” topics of race and religion, of Kallen’s Jewishness and Locke’s Blackness. Perhaps they spoke of Zionism and W. E. B. Du Bois and

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Booker T. Washington. Kallen’s essay on Oxford tutors and Harvard assistants, combined with his recollections, suggests that such topics arose. He noted that “the very youth and callousness and enthusiasm of the Harvard assistant makes friendship and quarrels with him easier.”5 Locke and Kallen quarreled over difference and American identity, and t­ hose quarrels sparked a lifelong friendship. In his 1907 essay (published in 1909) “Oxford Contrasts,” Locke made a similar observation. He described the American gradu­ate assistant as “Prometheus-­ like, ‘a maker of men,’ ” while the Oxford tutor was “a prudent gardener,” patient and cautious, who would never “think of inoculating a set of young men with a dangerous or contagious idea” or “reversing the natu­ral, logical, traditional order of exposition, or of altering the perspective to inspire interest and enthusiasm.”6 Locke h ­ ere may have been praising his Harvard gradu­ate assistant Kallen, who challenged Locke’s question “What difference does the difference make?” The similarity between Kallen’s and Locke’s comparisons of Oxford and Harvard suggests they discussed the topic as their friendship deepened. Both saw the advantage of receiving dif­fer­ent perspectives in an intellectual setting, and how ­those perspectives could be more effectively presented when the relationship between student and teacher more closely resembled friendship founded on mutual re­spect and comfort with difference. In the same vein, Kallen also criticized the Oxford “college” living arrangements. “The segregation of dons from undergraduates, and among undergraduates of scholars and commoners is absolutely destructive of what­ever benefit the contact of minds of vari­ous calibers might give.” He noted that “some of the Rhodes Scholars relate that even at this late day, they have exchanged no more than an invitation to pass the salt with their table-­neighbours.”7 This may have been an oblique reference to the prejudice Locke experienced at Oxford as opposed to Harvard. Though social isolation thrived on both sides of the Atlantic, at Oxford segregation proved “even more so,” b­ ecause of the university’s En­glish character. “The Harvard man, with all his indifference, is still an American, bound by no tradition save that of democracy, and regardful of no distinction save that of merit or his preference.” Meanwhile, “the Oxford man is swathed in distinctions traditionally held and kept ready-­made for him. He neither chooses them nor breaks them. The Harvard man does both.” At Harvard “the boy from the slum and the Brahmin from Beacon Hill rub intellectual noses, to their mutual advantages,” while at Oxford “a similar pair w ­ ill debate with each other, but they w ­ on’t see each other when they pass.”8 “Preference” suggested that Americans formed more demo­cratic and less superficial friendships than their En­glish counter­parts. Kallen and Locke maintained their elitist sensibilities, but like so many American elitists before

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them, they believed in an aristocracy of “merit,” a purportedly objective standard. At Harvard, Kallen and Locke would first judge each other worthy of re­spect as individuals. The assistant system made that relationship pos­si­ble. Eventually they would become friends. As a philosophy gradu­ate student at Harvard, Kallen made friends with the faculty. He took courses with Hugo Munsterberg, George Herbert Palmer, and Santayana. Studying with and working for Santayana led to a lifelong friendship, despite their significant po­liti­cal disagreements. The Spanish-­born Santayana (1863–1952) moved to Boston as a child and was educated at Harvard, a trajectory similar to Kallen’s. They maintained a correspondence even when Santayana resided in fascist Italy in the 1920s and 1930s. Apart from Santayana, however, Kallen did not meet his friends in class, but instead through his chief extracurricular interest: secular Hebraism. On October 25, 1906, in Grays 44, a Harvard dorm room three floors up from where Locke had lived the previous year, Kallen and several other Jewish students founded the Harvard Menorah Society (HMS). Henry Hurwitz, a ju­nior who took four courses with Locke, called the meeting to order. Kallen presided as chair, an elder statesman as a twenty-­four-­year-­old gradu­ate student. They designated a three-­man committee to draft a constitution for a club or­ga­nized along “Jewish cultural lines.”9 The HMS, which would become the Intercollegiate Menorah Association, provided the institutional framework for Kallen to advance the ideology of Hebraism, which he had outlined in his address “The Ethics of Zionism” the previous summer. As historian Daniel Greene notes, even at its earliest stages, the HMS served both to advance “Jewish humanities as the foundation of a modern Jewish identity” and to champion “cultural diversity as the essence of democracy.”10 Already by the second meeting, the club declared its goal “to foster the study of Jewish History and Culture.” The members listed seven ways to do this: “1. Discussions on Jewish topics, 2. Essays by the members, 3. Lectures—­private and public, 4. Dramatic Pre­sen­ta­tions, 5. Ser­vices to the Jewish community—­ individually or in a body, 6. The proper recognition of Jewish achievements in all fields, 7. The fostering of like organ­izations in other universities.”11 Most of the Jews who attended the HMS meetings came from eastern Eu­ ro­pean backgrounds.12 Other Jews at Harvard, wealthier ones of German descent, ­were more ­eager to assimilate, often involving themselves with the Ethical Culture movement or Reform Judaism. The Jews of the HMS, mostly Zionists, had greater investment in the quantity of Jewish content in their lives. While some may have been religious, the organ­ization was secular. They un-

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derstood themselves as fully American and fully Jewish. A thorough embrace of Jewishness in no way compromised Americanness. HMS members formed a diverse, polyglot bunch. One Saturday-­evening meeting, January 12, 1907, Shmaryahu Lewin, a member of the first Rus­sian Duma and a Zionist activist, spoke to the group. Before he began, the HMS members had to decide w ­ hether he should speak in German or Yiddish. They cast a vote, with German winning out. Lewin “spoke on Zionism and Jewish conditions in Rus­sia.”13 ­After his talk, he fielded questions in German, Yiddish, Hebrew, and En­glish. Kallen proposed that Lewin be “elected the first honorary member of the Society.” Kallen then suggested they conclude the meeting by honoring the guest with a singing of “Hatikvah” (The hope), the ­future Israeli national anthem. The group carried the motion and sang the Hebrew song in unison, Jews from dif­fer­ent lands coming together for a common purpose. Kallen would continue his involvement with the HMS when he returned to Cambridge, Mas­sa­chu­setts, from Oxford in the summer of 1908 as an instructor in philosophy, a position he would hold for three years. Of the members of the HMS, Kallen’s closest friend was Henry Hurwitz (1886–1961). Born near Kovno (Kaunas), Lithuania (then czarist Rus­sia), he moved to Boston at age five, just as Kallen did. He graduated from Harvard in 1908 and continued on at the law and business schools. An accomplished debater, writer, and orator, he served as the first secretary-­treasurer of the HMS and its third president, and then cofounded the Intercollegiate Menorah Association in 1913, serving as its inaugural president. In 1915 Hurwitz founded and edited the association’s bimonthly magazine, the Menorah Journal. He edited ­every issue except the final one, which appeared in 1962, a year ­after his death. ­Until the Second World War, the Menorah Journal was the premier American Jewish intellectual publication, including contributions from non-­Jewish scholars and journalists like Charles William Eliot, John Dewey, and Randolph Bourne, ­people Kallen knew and perhaps introduced to Hurwitz. Kallen contributed to the second issue of the Menorah Journal in 1915 and to several issues thereafter, including the final one. Along with Kallen and Hurwitz, Locke took classes with eigh­teen members of the HMS, including the organ­ization’s first president, Allan Davis, who had been the Harvard Zionist Society’s first president the year before.14 Other than Kallen, Locke only referred to one HMS member in his letters, Alvin Ess Block, a Jew from Kansas City whom he described as a “friend” while remarking on the similarity of their names.15 Even if the o ­ thers ­were not friends, given that t­ hese ­were small classes, Locke interacted in classroom discussion with many of the Jews who ­were most committed to preserving and developing Jewish identity.

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Kallen’s approach to his social life at Harvard was dif­fer­ent from Locke’s. De­cades ­later he recognized that “unlike the Negro,” he “could ‘pass’ ” as a white Christian among the American elite, but he chose not to and instead socialized mostly with his own kind.16 Although Kallen celebrated diversity on the American college campus in his 1908 essay “University Ideals,” at Harvard Kallen associated with ­people who ­were dif­fer­ent from him primarily in the professional realm. They ­were his teachers and, in Locke’s case, his student. The friends he made who ­were his peers—­despite being a few years younger than him—­were fellow Jews in the HMS. In the strug­gle to preserve and strengthen an intellectual Jewish community, Kallen gravitated to t­ hose most similar to himself, who shared his biographical profile and interest in Hebraism and Zionism. His earliest vision of cultural pluralism was not yet one of friendship but rather one where contact between dif­fer­ent individuals and groups occurred in mediated intellectual settings. For Kallen, the college campus was a place where cultures ­were consolidated and created anew. For Locke, college was a place where cultures collided. Unlike Kallen, Locke spent most of 1906–1907 socializing with p­ eople of significantly dif­fer­ent backgrounds from his own, namely his white friends. He moved into a new room, 11 Holyoke House, which did not face Harvard Yard but had the advantage of quiet, being located on the second floor and at the back of the building. Locke knew his close friends would be able to find the room, but “the curious” would not bother to search for it. He could avoid the unwanted attention of the Black students who had both­ered him in the past.17 “Several new colored fellows” had come to Harvard that semester, but Locke only liked Thomas Montgomery Gregory, who would eventually contribute to The New Negro.18 Although Locke felt Harvard was “being deluged with Negroes,” he wrote to his ­mother that their presence did not affect him. He would prefer “if they w ­ ere the right sort” like Gregory. “The looks of some” of the Black students, though, led Locke to fear “race riots ­here if anybody is so as rash as to bother with them and ruffle their crow feathers.”19 Despite issuing his preliminary approval, Locke did not spend much time with Gregory. And he continued to disdain the other Black students, complaining that the biblical passage “Ethiopia s­ hall stretch forth her hands” (Psalm 68:31) was a curse rather than a blessing.20 In the winter of 1907, Locke seemed more annoyed than grateful when he agreed to speak before the Cambridge Lyceum of the African Methodist Episcopal church. He complained to his m ­ other, “Confound t­ hose n—­—­s—­I ­don’t know what to say to them and wish they ­were in the Stygian darkness that matches their complexions.”21 Perhaps Locke agreed out of a sense of duty, of racial uplift in the spirit of Progressive reform. Perhaps he felt he owed a

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debt to the community that s­ haped him. Or perhaps he agreed in order to end the pestering. Locke’s barber had extended the invitation around Christmastime, and Locke had hoped he had forgotten. But in February, the Black waiter at Locke’s t­ able in Memorial Hall asked him ­whether he was the “Mr. Locke” who was set to speak at the church next Wednesday. Locke went to see the president of the congregation, “a pompous, ignorant black shyster l­ awyer and real estate man” originally from South Carolina. He wrote his ­mother, “You know the breed—­I daresay—­without further description.” The president informed Locke that he would be speaking on “adversity, or what makes a race successful.” Locke, who minimized any adversity he faced, had no wish to speak on this topic and make a “fool” of himself. He believed Shakespeare had said enough on the ­matter in As You Like It: “Sweet are the uses of adversity.”22 Instead, Locke complimented the ­lawyer on his choice of theme but insinuated that someone “of more commercial experience” would be better suited to h ­ andle it, implying that he, the l­ awyer, should do it. Then, “while the N—­—­was unsuspiciously distending himself,” Locke suggested he speak on the Black poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, a topic on which he had already prepared a paper some time ago. To Locke’s relief, the president accepted this proposal and told Locke he should show up at eight fifteen and “wait til de audience assem­bles.”23 Locke anticipated a reasonable crowd for his “first public appearance.” The barber had been telling his customers about it for a week, and the waiter had told Locke, “Oh ­we’ll be dere.” Locke worried he might have trou­ble getting through the talk with a “straight face,” but as long as he did not “succumb to the heat and the odor,” he would manage. He hoped the barber would act as an intellectual bodyguard and defend him from any criticism.24 The after­noon of the talk, a “small blizzard” fell upon Cambridge. Locke remained in his room working on the speech, finished “just in time,” ate a quick dinner, and rushed over to “the blooming church.” Though it took him fifteen minutes to find it, he arrived before anyone ­else showed up. Fi­nally, at eight twenty, the chairman appeared and “with a doleful face” told Locke that his talk would be competing with a movie and lecture on the “colored man in Cambridge.” That event would take place upstairs, and Locke’s talk would be held downstairs. Locke told the other lecturer, “a certain V ­ irginia silver tongue,” that he would give his speech quickly so the audience could join him upstairs. About thirteen ­people attended Locke’s talk and then moved upstairs, thus avoiding any debate on Dunbar.25 Locke had begun working on an essay on the Black poet, which he unsuccessfully submitted to vari­ous magazines, including Harper’s, shortly ­after Dunbar died in February 1906. The draft in the Alain Locke Papers at Howard

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University dates from the following year, as Locke noted, “It is now nearly a year ago since [Dunbar] died.”26 Locke delivered this updated version to the congregation. Since the time he first drafted the essay, he had attended a semester and a half of Santayana’s class, with Kallen as his gradu­ate assistant. In ­those sections, Kallen and Locke had conversed about culture and race. Kallen may have mentioned the HMS he helped cofound, or the address “The Ethics of Zionism” he gave the previous summer. Locke may have mentioned Dunbar and his experiences with African Americans at Harvard. Locke did not use the words cultural pluralism in his address. But what he said suggests t­hose conversations with Kallen had an impact. Locke praised Dunbar, son of slaves, for preserving and not selling his “birthright of a race tradition.” Dunbar took pride in his birthright, accepting it “as both an opportunity and at the same time a limitation.” Locke noted that “Dunbar devoted his life to expressing his race tradition in lit­er­at­ ure.”27 Locke honored that tradition by honoring Dunbar. Dunbar did not have the standing of other writers of African origin, such as Alexandre Dumas, Robert Browning, Alexander Pushkin, and Jose Mairee de Heredia. But he had something dif­fer­ent, an American birthplace. The aforementioned writers did not represent “the Afro-­American,” nor did they write “as exponents of the race tradition.” Locke labeled Dunbar “a minor poet of very ­g reat significance” ­because he represented the first ­free Black man in the United States to acquire “literary recognition” for documenting “American Negro life in poetry.”28 Dunbar’s most celebrated work was his poetry that incorporated African American dialect and vernacular from the time of slavery. Locke believed that “all lit­er­a­ture, especially lyric or ballad poetry, is a nation or race product.” Writers of all races looked to the “primitive emotions and traditions of h ­ umble ­people” as sources for “new material and new inspiration for lit­er­a­ture.” This was true with African Americans, but with this difference: “The more a ­people has suffered the more they have been isolated and left to themselves out of the blurring contact of an education that substitutes a written for a spoken tradition, the closer that ­people has been left to richer soil and the outdoor life which agriculture demands, the more does this folk tradition develop.”29 He compared the Black tradition to the Irish, though he could just as easily have referred to the Jewish. Slavery left African Americans with a par­tic­u­ lar history, a tragic history, but one that built up “the priceless ware­house” of source material for a folk tradition, “the one g­ reat compensation of the days of oppression and slavery.” And so Locke advised his audience that when they read Dunbar’s dialect poetry and recognized their own “race tradition in it,” they should “first be humbled, and then thankful, and then be proud.”30

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Yet Locke also praised Dunbar’s heroic efforts written in modern Standard En­glish as opposed to African American En­glish. To Locke, this poetry stood “with the best of En­glish lyr­ics, poetry not doggerel, clear worded not tongue tied with dialect, but nevertheless expressive of Negro sentiment.” When Dunbar brought the “crude thoughts” of an African American farmer into expression in refined En­glish, he performed a ser­vice to educated Black ­people. For Locke noted ­here that the “En­glish language” itself served as a vessel for “the benefits of civilization.” Black ­people, like all En­glish speakers, “owe [the language] a debt.” In Locke’s mind, “the only way to repay that debt is to repay it in kind—­you c­ an’t pay for civilization except by becoming civilized, you c­ an’t pay for the En­glish language and its benefits except by contributing to it in a permanent endowment of lit­er­a­ture.”31 Locke argued that African Americans w ­ ere not only entitled to the En­glish language, they had an obligation to use it, in their own unique fashion, to develop their own race lit­er­a­ture. Locke employed a pragmatist approach. The “benefits” of Western civilization served as tools for aesthetic racial uplift. Black ­people could use ­those tools to advance as individuals but also to craft their own par­tic­u­lar culture.32 Although Locke knew African Americans had a culture, or as he called it, a “race tradition,” he felt they had a long way to go, particularly in comparison to a culture that included “Shakespeare and Milton.” Locke proclaimed Dunbar Black Amer­i­ca’s “first contribution” to En­glish language and lit­er­a­ture, a small contribution but certainly a “very significant” one, “for surely it is more blessed to give than to receive.”33 Locke would make it a life goal to help African Americans contribute to American and world culture. Inherent in this formulation is the idea of multiple cultures coexisting si­mul­ta­neously, influencing each other. Locke’s speech on Dunbar contained the seeds of cultural pluralism, likely as a result of conversations with teaching assistant Kallen. Another result may have been Locke’s burgeoning pragmatism. He suggested “one practical application of the practical significance of Dunbar” to his audience, boldly proclaiming, “If we are a race we must have a race tradition, and if we are to have a tradition we must keep and cherish it as priceless—­ yes as a holy t­ hing—­and above all not be ashamed to wear the badge of our tribe.”34 Locke defined race as nonbiological. “I do not think we are Negroes ­because we are of varying degrees of black, brown, yellow, nor do I think it is ­because we do or should all act alike,” he insisted. “We are a race ­because we have a common tradition, and each man of us becomes such just in proportion as he recognizes, knows, and reverences that tradition.”35 Locke’s cultural definition of race laid the groundwork for the Black cultural nationalism that inspired the Harlem Re­nais­sance. Culture triumphed over color.

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Yet his speech did not sound an entirely triumphant note. As he praised Dunbar’s efforts at preserving and building an African American literary tradition, the twenty-­one-­year-­old Locke noted “the younger generation” and their desire “to forget.” They wanted to forget not just slavery but also the “plain, ­simple, useful religion” and the “probity” that came with it. In attempting to escape the ste­reo­typical “love of watermelon and chicken, the banjo and the barn dances,” they fled from the strength Black p­ eople had acquired through “suffering.” They forgot “the lessons their f­ athers and grand­fathers learned before them.”36 For race traditions to survive, improve, and evolve, they needed to be valued and passed down from one generation to the next. Locke argued that “a race to advance must accept the experience of one generation as a starting point for the next—­race-­tradition is the means of handing down that experience—­ lit­er­a­ture, race lit­er­a­ture is necessary to preserve that tradition, especially when by means of social conditions the unwritten tradition is weakening.” Dunbar did his part by honoring his birthright. Though individuals might feel differently about their birthrights, Locke thought it impor­tant to maintain “that one which we all possess in common, which is, to my thinking, the most impor­tant in all, our race tradition.”37 Locke emphasized the importance of continuity and community, themes Kallen valued greatly. Locke’s language about forgetting the suffering of the past, about evolving and improving rather staying the same, and about holding grand­fathers in high esteem likely lingered on in Kallen’s memory. In celebrating Dunbar, Locke made a rhetorical gesture similar to that which Kallen had made in his essay “The Ethics of Zionism,” g­ oing from the individual to the group. Dunbar made use of the En­glish language and Western culture in a way that resonated with Locke, who aspired to do the same. Locke may have told Kallen about his Dunbar address. He believed that Dunbar’s example could inspire African Americans and so help establish and preserve their culture, much as the HMS did. Locke may have inspired the audience that eve­ning, but he prob­ably did not care all that much and hoped to duck out quietly. Just as he began buttoning his coat and preparing to exit, he heard one of the attendees shout, “Heah ya ­brother, you surely ­aren’t ­going to leave us—­come up,” and so Locke went up the stairs to watch the film. He did not enjoy the moving pictures but was able to get out of the church without igniting an argument. His talk on Dunbar had been well received and uncontroversial, just as he hoped. He knew that if he had spoken on the assigned topic, the churchgoers would try to debate with him, as they apparently had done with his Antiguan friend James Arthur Harley a­ fter his talk t­ here.

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Harley remained Locke’s friend. Yet even he got on the young Locke’s nerves. Over the summer, Harley had gotten himself into a sticky situation when he tutored “one of his Jewish girls” in his room without a chaperone. Harvard dean Byron Satterlee Hurlbut got wind of the story, giving him yet another weapon against Harley. Rather than display sympathy for his friend, Locke blamed Harley’s “lack of tact and foresight.”38 Did Locke disapprove of Harley’s association with white w ­ omen, with Jewish w ­ omen, or with ­women in general? Or did he simply disapprove of Harley’s breaking the rules? What­ever the reason, Locke’s mixed feelings ­toward Harley appeared evident. He was amused that his ­mother found Harley “particularly cultured,” observing that the Antiguan behaved in a manner as “refined as any man with his training should be” but nonetheless possessed a “fighting West Indian temperament.” Locke proclaimed, “[Harley] is out­spoken like all of them [West Indians], and d­ oesn’t hesitate to sling mud and sarcasm when he gets good and ready.” While he praised his friend as “naturally gifted in speaking” and observed that “like all of them [he] is alert and ambitious,” he instructed his ­mother not to idealize him, for “if he ever gets crucifixion and hands you your bread and wine a la Phillips you [­will be] disillusionized [sic].”39 As Locke distanced himself from Chris­tian­ity, he associated more with Jews through the Ethical Society and Civic Ser­vice House. He attended a debate between Harvard and Yale on the subject of immigration restriction. The Harvard team was given the role of defending immigration restriction but ironically fielded a team of Jewish immigrants to advance its position: Gilbert Julius Hirsh as well as HMS members Henry Hurwitz and Isaiah Leo Sharfman. On his debate program, Locke wrote “know” next to ­those three debaters, suggesting familiarity with ­these immigrant Jews who ­were proud of their ethnic heritage and a­ dopted country.40 His familiarity with the debaters suggested a level of comfort in mingling with assimilated eastern Eu­ro­pean Jews like Jacob Loewenberg, Meyer Bloomfield, Morris Cohen, and Kallen. He felt even more comfortable with assimilated German Jews like Bruno Beckhardt. Some Jews, however, both­ered him, and he made a point of emphasizing their Jewish identity. He distinguished sophomore Lee Simonson, “the Jewish fellow,” from Beckhardt, “who is just a good fellow to us—we have since ­stopped thinking of him as a Jew.” Simonson tagged along with Locke and Charles Henry Dickerman and insisted on sharing his verse and prose poems, which Locke described as “idiocies.”41 Simonson was gay, a man “­after our own fashion, or I suppose I should say Dick’s fashion.” Locke explained his statement by noting that Simonson “plays the piano, paints, writes, and is generally artistic.”42 Simonson would pursue a

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c­ areer in theater and earn acclaim as a set designer but would not remain friends with Locke. Locke and Dickerman tolerated Simonson b­ ecause he flattered them, ­because he came from a wealthy f­ amily and periodically took them out to dinner, and b­ ecause he promised to paint pictures for them. Beckhardt, whom they previously had deemed a Jew, had been able to shed his Judaism by virtue of not only his membership in the Ethical Society but also his friendship with Locke. Simonson, however, remained a Jew and less of a friend. Locke’s ability to make t­ hese distinctions demonstrated his cultural understanding of Jewish identity, an understanding Kallen shared. Being Jewish did not mean practicing Judaism. Locke’s outlook was fundamentally pluralistic. Dif­fer­ent p­ eoples existed, and Jews ­were among them. Jews also differed as individuals and could change the degree to which they conformed to a “traditional” Jewish identity. Despite his prejudices, Locke’s flexible pluralism would prove crucial to his development as a Black cultural leader. Further training in cultural leadership came among well-­meaning white ­people at Harvard, where Locke could not escape discussions on race. In a meeting with Locke, idealist phi­los­o­pher Josiah Royce “chatted for nearly a half hour about the negro question.” He inquired ­whether Locke had read his paper “Race Questions,” which Royce had delivered before the Chicago Ethical Society in 1905.43 Locke may have read the essay, and Royce likely shared its contents if he had not. From Royce, Locke learned a philosophical basis for loyalty to his p­ eople. With Kallen, Locke developed the pragmatic manifestation of that loyalty in cultural nationalism, and cultural pluralism. In addition to his conversation with Royce, Locke also took one of Royce’s classes and read his work. In his essay “Race Questions,” Royce dismissed racial science as mere prejudice, since ­those who conducted it always placed their own ­people atop the racial hierarchy. He noted the Japa­nese had been thought to be inferior but eventually came to impress the West as having an advanced culture. On the other hand, he acknowledged Black ­people to be in a “backward state as a race.” Nonetheless, Royce suggested that the differences between the races proved more likely to be “accidental” than “essential.” Although some races seemed more “capable of civilization,” in fact, “physical environment” mattered more in determining which races developed which civilizations where.44 Royce also observed that while in the American South white ­people treated Black p­ eople as inferiors, and thus Black p­ eople often felt themselves inferior, in Jamaica, where white ­people treated them as relative equals, their social status improved considerably, if not to the advanced level of the white minority on the island. He concluded that the United States must eliminate racial prej-

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udices and antipathies, must rid them of their pseudoscientific legitimacy, and must rob them of their power, so that no members of any race would feel themselves inferior. Royce denied that ­there could be anything “fixed and hereditary” among races, asserting their basic malleability when interacting with each other.45 When Locke told him of his plans to teach, Royce replied, “I hope not in Atlanta.”46 Royce feared for Locke’s exposure to the more “backward” African Americans. He felt Locke validated his theory of the races, that by remaining in the North, especially surrounded by educated elites, Locke had staved off any racial degradation. Royce’s work proved especially influential for Locke, Kallen, and W. E. B. Du Bois, each of whom had been his student. Unlike William James, the empiricist and individualist, Royce embraced idealism and communitarianism. He subscribed to a “philosophy of loyalty” and a belief in “­wholesome provincialism.” He valued the creation, development, and preservation of par­tic­u­ lar, clearly defined groupings of ­people, ­because he recognized the universal ­human need for community as a positive force.47 Like Kallen, Locke, and Du Bois, Royce wanted bound­aries between groups to be porous. Royce prized American national unity, but he felt loyalty at the federal level was strengthened by state and city loyalty. In addition to being loyal to the province and the nation, individuals should feel “loyalty to loyalty.” They should appreciate how loyalty to their own community resembles the loyalty ­others feel to their communities. This appreciation would lead to mutual re­spect and admiration. “Loyalty to loyalty” served as both an ideal and a practical value. “If I am indeed loyal, I am d­ oing something for the cause of universal loyalty, however narrow my range of deeds.” Royce supported any loyalty, so long as it did not “arouse [his] hatred” or “directly injure [his] chance to be loyal.”48 Royce’s philosophy of loyalty reflected his idealism, but it also allowed for a pluralistic vision of equality and cooperation. Though Royce’s “provinces” represented geographic communities, as George Hutchinson notes, his work had “obvious ramifications for ethnic and racial groups in the United States.” Kallen and Locke clearly picked up on ­these ramifications. Locke, in par­tic­u­lar, despite his occasional expressions of anti-­ Semitism, appreciated Jewish communal strength, along with the idea that cultural exchange strengthened distinct groups and the nation as a w ­ hole. Years ­later, Locke pronounced Royce “one of the greatest of the American phi­los­ o­phers” and noted that he saw the prob­lem of combining universalism with particularism “more clearly than any other Western thinker.” For this reason, Royce developed “his admirable princi­ple of loyalty,” which vindicated “the princi­ple of unity in diversity” through the means of “spiritual reciprocity.”49

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Loyalty and reciprocity w ­ ere interconnected. By being loyal to your own culture, you could appreciate the loyalty of other p­ eople to theirs. When you witnessed ­others being loyal to their cultures, you realized that their culture might have traits worth exploring and sharing, and in turn you would have a willingness to share your own. Both ideas w ­ ere mutually reinforcing. Loyalty and reciprocity ­were foundational to Locke and Kallen’s cultural pluralism. Locke may have told Royce about some of his conversations with Kallen, as the three men ­were acquainted. Royce frequently ­stopped Locke when they encountered each other on campus to ask how Locke was d­ oing, and Locke went to Royce’s office hours ­every other week. Although Locke attempted to discuss his work, inevitably Royce changed the subject to racial issues. Locke labeled Royce a “crank on the Negro prob­lem” who would go on a “regular tirade at the slightest provocation.” Locke could barely get a word in and often simply gave “a nod of the head or a yes” to placate his teacher.50 Another Harvard phi­los­o­pher pestered Locke about the race question. One Saturday night in February 1907, Locke visited Professor George Herbert Palmer at his home, in what he called “the finest library in Cambridge.” Locke told Palmer he had applied for the Rhodes Scholarship, then he “listened patiently” as Palmer gave him advice and then inevitably “went on to talk about the race question.” Palmer praised Du Bois as an “indisputable genius” but nonetheless a “failure” who should have accomplished more with his talents rather than teaching in Atlanta.51 Palmer mentioned his friendship with African American Harvard alumnus Roscoe Conkling Bruce, whom he advised to leave Tuskegee. Like Royce and Locke, Palmer felt African Americans fared better north of the Mason-­Dixon Line. ­These interactions became a common experience of Locke’s at Harvard. He appeared before old white professors as an oddity and listened to them prattle on about race. Professor of Semitics George Foot Moore, who did not teach Locke, had been “very charitable” to invite him to lunch, and Locke assumed that “­little more than curiosity” had led the older scholar to do so.52 At ­these meetings, Locke likely smiled and nodded rather than express his annoyance, as he depended on his professors for letters of recommendation. He could not shed his race, try as he might. And he did try. In considering teaching jobs in Washington, DC, Locke relied on connections with his white friend and tablemate Harold Braddock, nephew of a prominent Washington educator, who was “so intimate as to need cooling off.” By contrast, Locke remained “in­de­pen­dent” of any aid from “Mrs. Francis, and that crowd,” referring to the ­mother of Locke’s Black friend and Washington, DC, resident Hugh Richard Francis.53

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That same Francis “raised an awful kick” about discrimination in Memorial Hall, where he and Locke dined. Francis swore at the auditor and president of the dining association, insulted their ancestry, and found himself suspended from the hall. Locke admitted Francis “was partly justified,” but believed his Black classmate “­didn’t go about it in the right way.” Locke felt “angry” ­because Francis’s tirade affected Locke and his friends. Locke’s t­ able did not have enough students to meet the official requirement for having a “club ­table,” and b­ ecause of Francis’s outburst the dining hall administrators threatened to break up Locke’s group.54 Locke took m ­ atters into his own hands and visited the president of the dining association, who brought up the Francis affair as justification for the disbandment of Locke’s t­able. The president said “Francis was no gentleman” and t­ hose who objected to his presence ­were right to do so. Locke replied that Francis was not his business, and that he (Locke) “was a gentleman and expected to be treated as such.” Locke “scared the wits out of him” by threatening to “personally use money, influence, [and] time to bring down the administrative board on his head.” Although the management appeared “sore” for causing so much “unwarranted trou­ble,” Locke stood his ground.55 “I can and ­will give you more if you d­ on’t come round,” Locke said. He was bluffing, but the official did not know that and eventually conceded. He granted Locke, David Adam “Dap” Pfromm, and Dick a “special t­ able” in the guest room u ­ ntil one opened up in the main hall, which occurred a few days ­later, and ­things went back to normal. He even gave Locke and his friends their choice of waiters. Their previous waiter had been “a West Indian black as coal” who disliked Locke, but Locke had had him “discharged for insolence.”56 In providing the account of the ­whole episode to his ­mother, Locke wrote, “You r­ eally ­couldn’t blame him for being sore on any negro a­ fter the way Francis acted—­I think they just said ‘­we’ll get them all out of the hall.’ ” Locke l­ater spoke to Francis and told him about the w ­ hole affair. He seemed to understand, but Locke did not “think much of him,” writing, “He’s a regular n—­—.”57 To Locke, the word n—­—­ implied a par­tic­u­lar sort of African American, one he deeply disdained, and with whom he did not need to spend any time. Locke had fun with his white classmates. In the winter of 1907, he and Dap went to their friend Paul Dudley White’s ­house in Roxbury. White took them tobogganing at Franklin Park, “coasting down the hills on the snow,” all three of them on the same sled “at what seem[ed] express train speed.”58 ­After the sledding, Locke and Dap met a party of White’s friends. Though they “would hardly have been mistaken for Harvard students,” Locke did not mind and had a ­g reat time. They went skating and then for dinner at White’s ­house. Locke

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marveled at “how demo­cratic and in­de­pen­dent one gets when one ­really can afford to be.”59 By April, Locke had added classmate Carl Sawyer Downes to his group. He, Pfromm, Dick, and Downes had friendships “so intimate” that they felt “always sure of a good time with each other.” They lent each other money, and they interacted without “formality” and simply said what they felt.60 Locke enjoyed ­these interactions and experiences, where he was ­free to do what­ever he wished, whenever he wished, with whomever he wished. When he applied successfully for the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford in the winter of 1907, however, he thrust himself into a spotlight he did not always enjoy. Endowed by Cecil Rhodes, wealthy Oxford alumnus and inspiration for South African apartheid, the scholarship would be awarded to two candidates from each American state, as well as several from British Commonwealth countries and five from Germany.61 When Locke applied, the scholarship had only been available for three years, having been first awarded in 1904. He applied representing Pennsylvania, and ­after passing the exams and submitting his application, he was eventually selected as a Rhodes Scholar.62 During the interview pro­cess, Locke suspected the Rhodes committee might inquire as to his position on the race question. When they asked him why he sought to study at Oxford, he answered, “Besides the further education, I want to see the race prob­lem from the outside. I d­ on’t want to run away from it, but I do want to see it in perspective.”63 Locke’s interest in race relations was clear from the extent to which he documented his interactions with African American classmates. But he understood that the race question differed geo­g raph­i­cally and would depend on the perspectives of the ­people he encountered. Locke entered a new phase in relations with his Harvard peers a­ fter winning the award. Upon his triumph, numerous white classmates “who ­were mere speaking acquaintances” tried to become his friend. Even some “wealthy gold coasters” surprised Locke by calling him Alain, the use of the first name being “a distinction between the wealthy and the non-­wealthy classes.” Locke even joked that he would not be shocked if a fraternity opened its doors to him. When he encountered ­these wealthy students, he smiled, and they failed to see the “cynicism” of the situation. This state of affairs pleased him, as he wrote, “If they think I am more acceptable now why they can think so.”64 Locke understood that they put aside their racism to flatter him, but he appreciated the flattery and had no interest in causing a stir by calling attention to their hy­poc­risy. Journalistic reactions to Locke’s success ­were mixed. On March 13, 1907, the New York Eve­ning Post editorialized, “A Negro has won the Rhodes Schol-

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arship at Oxford University. . . . ​Mr. Locke . . . ​g ives offense beyond that of race. He announces: ‘I intend to devote myself to study while in E ­ ngland.’ To be a negro beating white competitors is bad enough; but to advertise one’s self, in addition, as a mollycoddle, is to strain even the impossible beliefs of Oxford.”65 Locke fumed though de­cided that he would wait ­until his graduation to respond, or have one of his professors respond for him. The “damn reporter” had misquoted him. Locke did intend to study, but also to fulfill the athletic requirements of the scholarship, telling his m ­ other that he would go through “a regular course of sprouts to get ready,” would play tennis and learn ­horse­back riding and fencing, and employ his small stature to be coxswain for his college crew. He knew that to be a “mere student over ­there is nothing” and that he would have to represent the United States, and his race, as a man, not as a mollycoddle.66 In the South, some critics protested Locke’s winning the scholarship. One Gustaf R. Westfeldt, an administrator at Tulane University in New Orleans, wrote to the British ambassador protesting against the awarding of a Rhodes Scholarship to an African American, claiming that this appointment would render the scholarship unpop­u­lar in the South. Locke expressed relief that “what’s done cannot be undone,” although he thought he might write a letter of his own to the ambassador or even to President Theodore Roo­se­velt but admitted that he did not think he would ever “get mixed up in international politics.” Locke presciently predicted that “no other negro w ­ ill smell the scholarships for some years to come.” He wanted to ensure that no “bungling negro editors” weighed in on the controversy. A Black Boston publication, Alexander’s magazine, scheduled an article on Locke to appear on May 15, 1907, though Locke wished they would “keep quiet.”67 Locke did not keep quiet. The Philadelphia Rec­ord quoted Locke as saying, “It is my purpose, ­after three years at Oxford, to return to Amer­i­ca and devote my entire time to the uplifting of my race. . . . ​I ­will prob­ably become an instructor in one of the colored universities.”68 The uplift Locke had in mind ­here consisted of higher education, art, philosophy, lit­er­a­ture, history, math, and science. He wanted Black p­ eople to be able to represent themselves as sophisticated intellectuals before their like-­minded white peers. He wanted Black p­ eople to be more like him. Privately, Locke expressed more ambivalence. That March, he wrote to his ­mother, “I do not care for this muddying of a purely personal issue of my life with the race prob­lem. I am not a race prob­lem. I am Alain LeRoy Locke and if t­ hese ­people ­don’t stop I’ll tell them something that w ­ ill make them.”69 That April, he continued, “I’m not g­ oing to E ­ ngland as a Negro. I w ­ ill leave the color

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question in New York and En­glish ­people ­won’t have any chance to enthuse over the Negro question.” His only interest in this area was “race leadership in Amer­i­ca.” Other­wise, he could imagine himself “in the En­glish consular or diplomatic ser­vice.”70 Locke hoped the scholarship would allow him to grow intellectually, to make new friends, to learn, to study, and to write. Yet he realized it might help him achieve a position of “race leadership” back in the United States. Locke had a keen awareness of what W. E. B. Du Bois called “double-­consciousness” or “two-­ness.” He understood himself as a ­human being, as an American, and as an African American. In the United States, he felt he had a job to do, a moral calling. In ­England, though he wanted a new perspective on the race question, he also wanted a vacation from the obligation to have to do anything about it. Despite his disavowal of emphasizing his Black identity in ­England, Locke remained involved with the Black community in Cambridge, Mas­sa­chu­setts. One slushy eve­ning in April, he went to give his Dunbar talk again at the church. This time, he had Dap Pfromm in tow, who had de­cided to tag along with him ­after dinner. ­After some searching, the two classmates found the church, although the lights had been turned off and nobody could be found inside. Just before they de­cided to leave, “de chairman came” and greeted them.71 “Oh its only twenty minutes past eight,” he said. “Come right up.” So up they went, and he turned on the lights. “De audience be h ­ ere alright, you just wait,” he assured them, and then ran off to get his gavel, which he had forgotten at home. Dap and Locke relaxed, “let off some steam,” and had a “good laugh” at the ­whole situation.72 By five minutes to nine, about seventy-­five or eighty ­people had showed up. During the opening hymns, Dap and Locke could barely contain their laughter. ­After a soprano solo, the chairman introduced Locke. He read his speech from the pulpit in twenty-­five minutes—­Dap swore he read it well. The two men hoped to run back to Harvard in time for ten ­o’clock tea. This time, however, the guests forced them to stay for a discussion, which took the form of a “combined eulogy for Dunbar and the speaker of the eve­ ning.”73 The chairman, the minister, a Cambridge schoolteacher named Miss Lane, Locke’s barber friend Roan, then other members of the audience praised Locke, forcing him to get up and bow repeatedly, and thank them over and over again, and occasionally add his own comments. ­After the discussion, the audience wanted Pfromm to speak, and he looked “scared out of his wits,” but he “got up, said a word or two and sat down.” Though Dap seemed “dazed and bewildered,” the audience loved it, “uncorked the champagne of oratory,” and showered them both with praise. Locke thought the ­whole ­thing silly but felt pleased with himself, writing his ­mother,

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“I set them thinking and am very glad I said what I meant frankly—­for instead of thinking it heretical they hailed it as a new revelation.”74 The experience came as a revelation to Locke as well. He “took pains” to explain to Dap “what type” of African Americans “they represented.” Locke felt happy he could deal with this par­tic­u­lar “class of p­ eople,” that he could “­handle them as a public audience without having to toady to them.” As Locke neared graduation, he gained in confidence. He had no use for flattery, no use for pretending to be something that he was not. ­After this experience, he felt convinced that he could “­handle the masses quite as effectively as F ­ ather.” The audience “surprised” Locke by telling him “they ­were proud he had condescended to come speak to them.” He concluded, “You can come to them if you are tactful enough and yet do not have to come as one of them.” He lamented how “educated colored men queer themselves with the masses ­either by condescending so that they resent the difference, or [by becoming] too familiar so that they forget it.”75 Locke saw himself as an effective race leader, a member of Du Bois’s talented tenth, especially with this strategy. “I think I have discovered one ­great help in the m ­ atter of public speaking—­I ­shall always have a white friend to accompany me—or if I ever lectured extensively—­I would have a white man­ag­er—­it’s a capital stunt.” A white friend symbolized an elevated status, a level of ac­cep­ tance in American society. This did not represent a renunciation of his Blackness but rather an assumption of his position atop the social hierarchy as a member of the Black elite who could pander to “the masses” without sinking to their level, without becoming like them. Locke broached this idea when he asked his ­mother in exasperation, “Why c­ an’t educated colored men realize that they ­mustn’t be n—­—­s?”76 Locke’s interest in Black affairs carried over into his interactions with white friends and acquaintances. That May, he met a wealthy Harvard gradu­ate student from New York named Richard Delafield Shipman, who had begun the pro­cess of founding schools “of higher Occidental culture and learning” in China and Japan. Shipman presented himself as a “charming conversationalist,” and they walked and talked from six to eleven o ­ ’clock at night. They discussed the discovery of a pre-­Egyptian African civilization in the Congo, but they spent most of their time talking about “the Negro question.” Shipman expressed an interest in “practical philanthropy” for Black ­people, setting up educational institutions for them. Locke had fi­nally developed “a definite system of the race prob­lem. Strange how a conversation of that sort w ­ ill suddenly crystallize and precipitate one’s ideas.” He ­later heard from Harley that Shipman’s conversation had a “definite purpose.” A debate in Mas­sa­chu­setts raged over the issue of separate

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churches, and Shipman “was at par­tic­u­lar pains” to glean Locke’s opinion on the ­matter. Locke opposed separate churches, just as he opposed separate schools.77 Locke believed that through academic integration, the best Black individuals would excel. This meant engaging in scholarly activity even when school let out. He mocked his Black classmates like Aubrey Howard Bowser, who worked as a Pullman porter; Edwin French Tyson, who found employment “on the steamboats in New York”; and George Wesley Harris, who toiled as a “yard laborer.”78 He did not deem ­these jobs fit for the Harvard elite. Locke spent his summer tutoring and preparing for his trip to Oxford. ­Later that July, Locke had a “very in­ter­est­ing chat” with William Lloyd Garrison, the grand­son of the famous abolitionist, on “the race prob­lem.” Garrison encouraged Locke to stop in New York on his way back to Camden and meet his cousin, Oswald Garrison Villard, editor of the New York Eve­ning Post. Garrison encouraged Locke to work as a correspondent for the paper. Locke thought this “an excellent suggestion” but did not take it up. Though he would become a famous man of letters, his immediate ­f uture was as an academic, not a journalist. Oxford remained his principal focus.79 Kallen also began to focus on his voyage to Oxford, where the two men would continue their conversation about cultural pluralism.

C h a p te r   4

American Pluralists, Friends at Oxford

In October 1918 Horace Kallen published a book titled The League of Nations ­Today and Tomorrow. A supporter of the American war effort, Kallen w ­ holeheartedly embraced President Woodrow Wilson’s internationalism and his plan for a league of nations to administer the postwar world order. Kallen saw an educational role for the league and called for an “International Commission on Education” to foster the development of an “ ‘international mind’ in each student, by direct contact and study with the ­peoples of Eu­rope.” Kallen worried such education was “everywhere the privilege of a negligibly small number of the upper class.” He believed Oxford’s Rhodes Scholarship corresponded with his goal but was “totally inadequate” in terms of the number it served.1 Kallen based his assessment on personal experience. In 1907 he had earned a fellowship to complete his Harvard dissertation in residence at Oxford. While he had looked forward to studying with some of the world’s leading philosophical minds, he also hoped to benefit from scholarly exposure to non-­ Americans. He was already a Zionist and a champion of American diversity when he arrived in ­England, but his Oxford education helped him adapt ­these ideals to a global scale. Kallen i­ magined himself the possessor of an “international mind,” one he could cultivate while studying abroad. Alain Locke too had an international mind, and his ability to see beyond borders made him an attractive friend and intellectual interlocutor to Kallen. 87

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Their friendship deepened b­ ecause of this shared cosmopolitan and pluralistic outlook. They also shared familiar experiences. They w ­ ere both Americans, both foreigners in ­England. They had both gone to Harvard. As a Black man and a Jew, they had been outsiders, though still proud of their identities. This combination of intellectual elitism, outsider status, American patriotism, ethnic pride, and progressive cosmopolitanism led to their developing the idea of cultural pluralism, a guiding philosophy for the “international mind.” The term international mind presupposes that dif­fer­ent nations can coexist peacefully. It assumes that individuals w ­ ill belong to par­tic­ul­ar nations but be able to interact and exchange cultures and ideas with p­ eople of other nations. Although Kallen and Locke may have hoped that such an open-­minded spirit could spread among the masses, in practice, their cultural pluralism functioned as an elite, even elitist, phenomenon that primarily served intellectuals. They believed in an elitist cultural pluralism ­because that had been their experience. Much of the scholarship surrounding Locke and Kallen at Oxford has focused on the Oxford American Club’s Thanksgiving dinner of November 1907, when white Rhodes Scholars declined to invite Locke, and Kallen refused to attend in protest.2 Kallen’s Jewishness proved an impor­tant marker of difference. Locke’s Blackness proved more significant and created a power imbalance between the two men, complicating their friendship. That friendship featured prejudice and admiration, bigotry and re­spect. Over time, admiration and re­spect won out. The burgeoning friendship between Kallen and Locke exemplified cultural pluralism as lived experience. Kallen’s experience with Locke was not his only encounter with nonwhite ­people at Oxford. T ­ hese friendships, even if only brief, colored the pluralistic universe in which he lived. Early in the fall of 1907, he socialized with an Indian named Rau, whom he labeled “another Hindu.” Kallen went to Rau’s home one eve­ning, and they discussed “vari­ous ­matters Hindustani +  other­wise.” Kallen told a “nationalist tale,” possibly about Zionism. On another occasion, he joined Rau at “a meeting of Hindu nationalists.” Rau gave Kallen a “startling” introduction, and the crowd received him with “unexpected” hand-­clapping.3 Kallen appreciated the Indians, but other Oxford men did not. In conversation with Canadian Rhodes Scholar Herbert J. Rose, Kallen witnessed anti-­Indian prejudice. Rose vigorously insulted Hindus and compared them to “coons,” an attitude Kallen deemed “barbarous.”4 Kallen had his own prejudices, but he avoided using racial slurs in public and had no qualms about openly associating with nonwhite, non-­Christian, and non-­Jewish students at Oxford. Still, Kallen clung to the familiar. He got a vision of home when he went with a “young Jew from Roumania” to investigate the Jewish slums of Lon-



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don. Kallen asked his companion about “the apprenticing work, the sanitary work, and the immigration and repatriation work.” In exploring forty-­two ­houses and private tenements, he encountered numerous recent Jewish immigrants. He was dismayed by En­glish Jewry’s relief efforts for their poorer brethren, thinking that the “social and eugenic side of the m ­ atters seems to be entirely neglected.” He did appreciate, however, the “bright ­children” he met who asked to be “apprenticed.”5 The experience reminded Kallen of his own efforts at Civic Ser­vice House in Boston. He then visited Toynbee Hall, the immigrant settlement h ­ ouse in the White­ chapel neighborhood of London’s East End. Kallen found Whitechapel to be “very much like the Bowery,” with its pushcarts, shops, Jewish merchants, and old architecture from “a better time” that appeared decidedly “not homogenous.” Kallen thought that London, much more than the United States, felt “local, detached, individual,” a characteristic best exemplified by the “extreme individuality of each borough.” He felt the “absence of a central power.” He deemed London “a mass of survivals, not a city,” and preferred the “homogeneity of the very diverse American public.” Kallen appreciated diversity within a unity. In ­England, minority groups anglicized or kept to themselves but did not form a common identity, still allowing for a variety of cultures. ­England had “society but not sociality,” and while ­there was “sociability” at least, “­there can hardly be said to be anything like u ­ nion or friendship.”6 To Kallen, friendship was American. Despite his criticisms, Kallen admitted the difficulty of the Toynbee mission. “Culture, like all t­ hings excellent, is rare,” Kallen wrote in his diary. “It is difficult to achieve, it means injustice for it implies leisure. How give all men souls and maintain a civilization that can be the flowering of a few men’s spirits only?” Kallen, ever the elitist enamored with high culture, lamented that high culture remained the preserve of the elite.7 Though still an atheist, Kallen occasionally went to synagogue. Rabbi Moshe Zvi “Hirsch” Segal led ser­vices, wearing a cap and gown and chanting Hebrew in a “hybrid fashion.” He told Kallen about the Jewish community at Oxford, which included about fifteen Jewish locals, in addition to some Jewish students. They frequently did not have the required ten men for a Jewish prayer quorum, and the synagogue had been built with contributions from Jews who did not live in town. One could get kosher dinner but not “kosher board.” Oxford had a Zionist club, which technically only allowed college students, but Segal promised they would make an exception for Kallen and have him as an “honorary member.”8 Kallen’s opposition to assimilation emerged in his interaction with ­these more religious Jews. Segal, a “typical Lithuanian Jew,” told Kallen disdainfully

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of a man named Margolowith who had assimilated. Margolowith had become “thoroughly anglicized,” had intermarried, and sought to convert Jews to Chris­tian­ity. Kallen, similarly disdainful, noted that Margolowith “evidently confuses Jew and Judaist.”9 Kallen believed Jews could change their religion, but they had an innate Jewish essence that could not easily be shed. This view reflected the pseudoscientific thought of the day, but Kallen’s opinion on the racial or biological nature of Jewishness evolved at Oxford. In late December 1907 he and his friends Samuel Ely Eliot, a Rhodes Scholar from Portland, Oregon, and a man named Kirchau went on an “adventure” to London.10 They heard Stanton Coit speak at the Eugenic Society. Eugenicists believed in the power of biological determinism, that selective breeding could improve the health of ­human populations. They often embraced pseudoscientific racial thinking, ranking dif­fer­ent races in a civilizational hierarchy, and stood in opposition to miscegenation. Coit, the American-­born leader of the Ethical Culture movement in ­England, had been an associate of Felix Adler and founder of the Neighborhood Guild, a settlement ­house on New York’s Lower East Side, which eventually became the University Settlement Society of New York. He had had considerable exposure to Jewish immigrants, which influenced his views on eugenics. Coit wrote, “The Jews, ancient and modern, have always understood the science of eugenics, and have governed themselves in accordance with it; hence the preservation of the Jewish race.”11 Coit likely discussed Jews in his lecture. Kallen was not impressed, noting Coit had “made a characteristic and clerical ass of himself.”12 Kallen’s views on race would evolve through the de­ cades. Although he continued to use biological language in order to promote and justify ethnic particularism and occasionally Zionism, his reliance on this terminology was more rhetorical flourish than strict adherence to biological racialism. Interactions with Oxford professors and peers proved more impor­tant. Kallen frequently discussed his feelings about Locke with ­these acquaintances. One such interlocutor was an American professor named Louis Dyer. Born in Chicago in 1851, Dyer had been educated at Harvard and Oxford and taught classics. Like Kallen, he spoke in a hybrid accent, “neither En­glish nor American.”13 Although Kallen criticized Oxford, he made an excellent impression on Dyer, who thanked Barrett Wendell for the introduction, writing that Kallen’s “acquaintance ha[d] been a ­great acquisition” for him. He appreciated Kallen’s “charm and tact and solidity of character,” which rendered him a “real friend.” He praised Kallen’s “nimbleness of mind and instantaneous efficiency of speech” but worried that ­those very characteristics had led him to “prematurely” judge Oxford unfavorably. Intelligence such as Kallen’s was “excep-



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tional” and came with both strengths and weaknesses, but he had no doubt that in the case of a man with Kallen’s “solid gifts and acquirements,” the advantages would outweigh the disadvantages. “I have ­under rather exceptional circumstances had to experience the very best side of him and can only applaud your remarkable tribute to his worth.”14 The “exceptional circumstances” likely referred to the Thanksgiving dinner affair. Kallen’s diary points in that direction. Dyer and Kallen conversed about the “hubble” regarding Alain Locke and discussed Harvard historian Roger Bigelow Merriman’s “damned impertinent interference,” which stirred up trou­ble surrounding Locke’s appointment as a Rhodes Scholar. Dyer and Kallen also talked about the southern Rhodes Scholars’ “objections” to Locke. A few nights ­later, Kallen promised Dyer he would “bring the boy around.”15 Kallen invited Locke to his room on October 22, 1907, with the express purpose of arranging a meeting with Dyer.16 What Kallen said at this meeting remains unknown, but his choice of language in his diary suggests sympathy with Locke’s plight. Kallen’s diary documented his burgeoning friendship with Locke. The night of October 21, Locke and James Arthur Harley, the West Indian Harvard alumnus also at Oxford, called on Kallen in his room. Locke seemed “darker than at home” and appeared “much troubled by the regulations” of Oxford, paying a significant amount in fines. Kallen walked Locke back to his abode in a “­g reat rain.” On their way, they encountered a “big fat person” who opened his gate, turned to Locke, and “looked him up and down with infinite scorn.”17 The next day, Harley visited Kallen alone. Kallen noted, “What is disagreeably black crops out in him much more readily than in Locke.” He described Harley as “an egregious ass.”18 He may have found something “agreeably black” about Locke. Alternatively, he may have felt that African Americans ­ought to assimilate and shed as many of their “black” tendencies as pos­si­ble, a sentiment he would never have expressed ­toward Jews or other white ethnic groups. At this stage, Kallen believed that African American culture was not worth preserving but Eu­ro­pean cultures possessed ­g reat value. Kallen valued his time with Locke and Harley. On October 21 he went to Locke’s room. Harley had “appropriated” the place to do schoolwork. They had conversations “vari­ous and devious.”19 Kallen felt comfortable socializing with Locke and Harley, belying his letter to Wendell, where he said he would not dine with an African American. He had misgivings about Black p­ eople but did not hesitate to become Locke’s friend. Perhaps Kallen expressed t­ hese misgivings in conversation with Oxford ethnologist and anthropologist of religion Robert Ranulph Marrett, whom he met with when he and Rau visited Exeter College. Marrett and Kallen “talked

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shop” and then “swapped stories, some risqué, some poor, and some coarse.”20 On the way home, they talked about Locke. The frequency with which Kallen mentioned Locke in his diary suggests he thought about him a lot. One Friday, Locke, Harley, and Carl Sawyer Downes went to Kallen’s room for tea. They had a “nice talk,” a­ fter which Kallen went to synagogue. Kallen did not enjoy the ser­vices, led by a man who spoke in a “dreadfully Germanic fashion.”21 The next eve­ning, Locke visited Kallen again, and the two men “walked a ­g reat deal, about 3 miles each way.” Kallen enjoyed the walk, judging Locke positively as an individual while scorning African Americans as a race. “I should say [Locke] is now quite the sport and one need not fear for his ­future if he keeps down the n—­—­who is cropping in and out most of the time in his clothes, manners, and speech.”22 In his diary, Kallen did not hold back his racism. Yet he appeared to use the term n—­—­ much in the same way that Locke had used it at Harvard. Locke employed the term to distinguish himself and Harley from other Black p­ eople. For Locke, n—­—­ may have been a class or regional marker, as he used it mostly to refer to African Americans from the South. Kallen used it to compare Locke favorably to other Black p­ eople like Harley. Neither Locke nor Kallen used n—­—­ in place of Negro or Black or colored but rather employed the slur in reference to a specific type of Black person. Kallen regarded Locke not as a “n—­—” but as a Black man who had some “n—­—” tendencies. Kallen did not mention any valuable African American traits, or w ­ hether Black ­people needed to assimilate entirely to prove themselves worthy. He prob­ably told Locke to retain a certain pride in his heritage, even while privately criticizing Locke’s Blackness. In the fall of 1907, the American Club of Oxford hosted a Thanksgiving dinner. The white southern Rhodes scholars did not invite Locke. In protest, Kallen refused to attend and instead invited Locke over for tea. Before extending this invitation, however, he wrote to Wendell for advice. This exchange of letters has received considerable attention from scholars, largely due to Kallen’s admission that he shared Wendell’s racist assumptions about Black ­people. Other correspondence regarding the Thanksgiving dinner, however, sheds light on how Kallen’s thinking on cultural pluralism was s­ haped by close contact and friendship with Locke and vari­ous individuals of diverse backgrounds. Kallen began his letter on October 22 by reminding Wendell of “­little Locke, the yellow boy” who took his En­glish course. He informed Wendell that Locke was a Rhodes Scholar, “and some ­people have been in Amer­i­ca officious and mean-­spirited enough to draw the ‘color-­line’ for the benefit of En­glishmen.” While Locke won the distinction “in an open competition” and had not reg-



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istered a complaint, ­others certainly had. So Kallen proclaimed, “But he is ­here, one of Amer­i­ca’s scholars, and a Harvard man. He finds himself suddenly shut out of t­hings, unhappy, and ­doesn’t know how or why.” Then Kallen’s tone changed. “As you know, I have neither re­spect nor liking for his race—­but individually, they have to be taken each on his own merits and value, and if ever a negro was worthy, this boy is.” Kallen initially heeded Wendell’s “warning” and stayed quiet, but he boiled “with ­g reat anger” as opposition to Locke persisted. “I have said all that I could that is commendable in him, and now I want to get you to write a word to [Louis] Dyer and ­others, if you can, to help right this wrong.”23 To Kallen, ­there was a clear “wrong” to “right.” Yet his use of the term boy for his twenty-­two-­year-­old former student, only three years his ju­nior, carried racist connotations. More explic­itly, Kallen claimed to not re­spect or like Black p­ eople. The words “as you know” implied that Kallen had already expressed his opinion on African Americans to Wendell and come to some sort of bigoted agreement with his mentor. Wendell’s response contained even greater prejudice. The professor always refused to dine with African Americans, even t­ hose he “thoroughly” respected, such as Booker T. Washington. Although “professionally” he did his best to “treat negroes with absolute courtesy,” Wendell noted, “It would be disastrous to them, if they be gentlemen at heart, to expose them, in private life, to such sentiments of repugnance as mine, if we ­were brought into anything resembling personal relations.”24 The bigotry in Wendell’s response demonstrated that without friendship, or at least friendly social relations, an atmosphere of cultural pluralism could not emerge. Wendell could treat Locke professionally, as teacher to student. He could even admire Locke’s work and invite him into his office. But he could not dine with him. He could not lower the bound­aries of segregation he had put up between them. Friendship, for Wendell, could not cross the color line. This stood in stark contrast to the fundamental premise of cultural pluralism, which encouraged interethnic friendship rather than segregation.25 In order to make the transition from professional relationship to friendship, however, Kallen and Locke needed something in common. They w ­ ere both Harvard alumni and both US citizens. Wendell too was a Harvard alum with American citizenship, and roots in the United States far deeper than t­ hose of Kallen. But Wendell regarded Kallen, a white man, as an American and as his friend. Wendell did not feel the same way about Locke. For he wrote, “As an American, I cannot but feel that Locke, in applying for a Rhodes scholarship, which

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involves some suggestion of national repre­sen­ta­tion, committed an error in which the Pennsylvania board of appointment w ­ ere most injudicious in supporting him.” Wendell did not believe that Locke, a Black man, could represent the United States. In his view, the Rhodes Scholarship demanded winners whom the state population deemed “widely, comprehensively representative,” and Locke did not fit the bill. Wendell insisted that “at least for many years to come, no negro can take just this position anywhere in Amer­i­ca!” Such a ­thing could only occur when Americans of “unmixed native blood” such as himself had faded into “memory.”26 Wendell did not consider Locke American. Although he allowed for a pos­ si­ble ­future in which Black p­ eople could be considered American, he lamented the possibility. In displaying a preference for “unmixed native blood,” by which he meant Anglo-­American and not American Indian, Wendell expressed his adherence to the racialist social Darwinian hierarchies of the time. Although Wendell recognized that “men as good” as he might treat Locke differently, he felt that Locke had “no right to expect” any sort of kindness from men of his (Wendell’s) “race and time.” He had no intention of sabotaging Locke’s success, and even stated he would help Locke secure financial support if he needed the assistance. Wendell would not publicly “oppress his race” nor argue for “equality or superiority” of the races. “He is to me what I am to certain orientals I have met,” Wendell wrote. “A man to be treated with courtesy, but not as one’s own kind.” To do other­wise would be “hypocritical.” Wendell advised Kallen to take Locke out to tea with some “Oxford friends,” noting “some such kindness to Locke is perhaps in your own power.” He reminded Kallen to warn the Oxford friends that t­ here would be a Black person pre­sent, for to do other­wise “might be inconsiderate.” Wendell saw no need for Kallen to “make a ‘cause’ of the ­matter,” advising him to look out for himself before he looked out for Locke.27 Wendell’s attitude was in direct opposition to the cultural pluralism that Kallen and Locke would espouse. Wendell could not dine with Locke, ­because dining together represented not only friendship but also ac­cep­tance, an admission that Locke, and ­people like Locke, belonged in the United States. To dine with Locke meant that African Americans could be equals and peers and friends to white p­ eople. Wendell did not want to live in such a world. Kallen responded in kind. “As to Locke—­you have phrased my own feeling to the race so well that I d­ on’t see how t­ here is anything now to say.” He informed his former mentor that he had taken Locke to tea and introduced him to a Rhodes Scholar from Prince­ton (prob­ably football star Donald Grant Herring), the classicist Louis Dyer, and the British ­brothers Albert and Edward



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Dicey, jurist and journalist, respectively. Kallen invited Locke to tea to meet his Prince­ton colleague George McLean Harper and Bryn Mawr psychologist James Leuba, and instructed him to “bring such other Rhodes men as you can find and bring [Carl Sawyer] Downes anyway.”28 Kallen also invited Locke to tea again, though he said, “It is personally repugnant for me to eat with him.” With some irony, he invoked “Shylock’s disclaimer,” referencing how Shakespeare’s Jewish character agrees to do business with gentiles but refuses to dine with them. Kallen justified his continuing friendship with an African American by observing, “Locke is a Harvard man and as such he has a definite claim on me. I think he is g­ oing to do us credit. Already he has cox’d a boat to victory and won a silver cup.” Mostly finished with the ­matter, Kallen went on to other topics but closed his letter by writing, “I understand that the immortal [literary scholar William Henry] Schofield, a Canadian, has been sent to Germany. Well that is in keeping with sending a negro as Rhodes Scholar.”29 Kallen implied that a Black man could not better represent the United States abroad than a Canadian could. He did not vouch for Locke’s Americanness so much as his Harvardness. Did Kallen think Locke un-­American? A contemporaneous source indicates other­wise. Kallen also wrote of the Locke affair to his former philosophy professor Ralph Barton Perry. Unlike Wendell, Perry held staunchly antiracist beliefs and would go on to protest Harvard’s anti-­Semitic quotas in the 1920s. Kallen’s letters to Perry struck a dif­fer­ent tone: “Do you remember A. Le R. Locke, the black boy we gave honors in philosophy and who won a Rhodes scholarship for us?” Kallen noted the “considerable stir about him h ­ ere in Oxford, of the unpleasant American sort.” He blamed it on “the officiousness of a certain Harvard man who was so inherently a snob as to be wholly untouched by the Harvard spirit, and to be wholly unable to take a man on his merits.”30 The “we” and “us” referred to Harvard affiliates. In noting a “stir . . . ​of the unpleasant American sort,” Kallen referenced the anti-­Black racism affecting Locke. Being abroad in ­England helped Kallen define his own Americanism. He contrasted the unpleasant American stir with the “Harvard spirit,” which embraced tolerance and meritocracy. Kallen thought Harvard morally superior to the United States. Yet Kallen was a patriotic American and would remain that way his w ­ hole life. To Kallen, Harvard did not represent something in­de­ pen­dent of the United States; it represented the best of it. Anti-­Black racism, meanwhile, represented the worst. It would follow that Locke belonged in Kallen’s United States, as he exemplified the Harvard spirit. Kallen’s letter to Perry did not directly contradict his letter to Wendell, but it demonstrated an

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understanding that racism existed along a spectrum, that Wendell was much more racist than Perry, and that Kallen, though not without his prejudices, stood closer to Perry in that regard. If Locke knew of any “stir” surrounding his presence at Oxford, he downplayed it. Yet Kallen believed the ­matter affected Locke. “The poor boy found himself shut out of ­things, unwelcome in the place he had won, and ­matters generally made hard for him, in no crass way, but in a way which is readily felt, and which I, being ‘white,’ both was told about and observed.” He thought even Locke’s “scent made a difference,” and believed Locke “altered his be­ hav­ior when white ­people—­namely myself, was [sic] in the boy’s room.”31 Kallen acknowledged his own whiteness—to a degree. In his racial schema, Jews, or at least Ashkenazi Jews, could and should be designated as white. The quotation marks around the first mention of “white” suggest Kallen may have believed Jews belonged to a subracial category within the broader white race, although he does not indicate this ­here. By acknowledging Jewish whiteness, Kallen affirmed a belief that skin color united Jews with other white Eu­ro­pean ­people. Jews distinguished themselves from Italians and Poles through their religion, through their culture, but not ­really through race or biology. Kallen understood that in at least one visibly impor­tant way, he had more in common with other white students at Oxford than he did with Locke. By extension, white Jews bore a stronger resemblance to white non-­Jews than they did to Black p­ eople. Even if he and Locke shared intellectual interests, Kallen knew Locke would continue to suffer prejudice ­because of the color of his skin, prejudice Kallen never faced. ­After reaching this conclusion, Kallen entreated Perry to “write to p­ eople of subs [substance] in Oxford” who could visit Locke and make him “feel at home.” Kallen had already mentioned the issue to Dyer, who had “his prejudices” and who had fallen ­under Merriman’s influence concerning Locke. Dyer seemed to be more of a man “led in ­these ­matters” than one who made decisions “of his own accord,” and at Kallen’s suggestion he invited Locke to his home. Kallen recognized this as “a gain” but noted that Locke, “the poor fellow,” would almost certainly “have a hard time of it.” Still, he knew if Locke performed at Oxford at the level he did at Harvard, he would “make his own place.” Locke was already on pace for a “double-­first,” the highest academic standing at Oxford, and according to Kallen, he knew “more philosophy” than his own tutor. He concluded that “Oxford education is a F.A.K.E. They breed ‘gentlemen,’ we ‘men.’ ”32 Perry’s response remains lost, but Kallen’s next letter noted that he boycotted the American Club’s Thanksgiving dinner on Locke’s behalf: “They ­didn’t invite him, so I d­ idn’t go.” He convinced Professors Louis Dyer and



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Albert Venn Dicey to stay away too. He applauded Locke for receiving “a satisfactory statement from his tutor” and for “the winning of a silver cup in [a] rowing contest.” Kallen concluded, “[Locke] ­will get on. Harvard may depend on him, I think.”33 Kallen’s letters to Wendell and Perry reveal his racist views ­toward African Americans. But they also reveal his understanding that some p­ eople would be more receptive to racism than o ­ thers. Whereas he referred to Locke as a “yellow boy” to Wendell, he called him a “black boy” in his letter to Perry. The color yellow implied sickliness and was more insulting than “black,” a purely racial designation. In both letters, Kallen referred to Locke paternalistically as “boy” while praising him. But to Perry he attempted to appear less prejudiced. In all the letters, Kallen emphasized the Harvard connection. To Wendell, he referred to Locke as a “Harvard man.” Locke’s membership in the American intellectual elite mattered more to Kallen than the color of his skin. Though he had “neither re­spect nor liking for [Locke’s] race,” he insisted African Americans be evaluated “individually . . . ​each on his own merits and value.” He evaluated Locke this way and found him “worthy.” His worthiness derived from his academic success. Locke’s Crimson connection gave him a “definite claim” on Kallen.34 Another source, previously unexamined by scholars, corroborates the fact that Kallen went to g­ reat lengths to support Locke in the face of this discrimination and encouraged ­others to do so as well. At the same time, it casts doubt on Kallen’s claim that he boycotted the Thanksgiving dinner himself. On January 11, 1908, an unsigned article appeared in the Boston Eve­ning Transcript titled “Thanksgiving at Oxford: An American Student’s First Experience.” The author, most likely Kallen himself, recalled a gathering the Wednesday before Thanksgiving at Oxford’s Baliol College. He remembered Locke, mentioning his name three or four times. “Point out the celebrities,” he asked Locke, who directed him to F. C. S. Schiller, “the famous pragmatist and only live phi­los­o­ pher in Oxford.”35 The next morning, the author arrived for a religious ser­vice at the Cathedral Church of Christ. The Rhodes Scholars had seats reserved “near the pulpit,” but Locke did not sit with them. Instead, he chatted “with a man who had been pointed out the night before as a pernicious advocate of pragmatism, fresh from the ­g reat William James’s pragmatic factory at Harvard”—­ almost certainly referring to Kallen.36 Thus while the racist Rhodes Scholars snubbed Locke in the church, Kallen, a Jew, openly fraternized with him. That eve­ning, the author attended the American Club’s Thanksgiving dinner in the “cold and draughty dining room of the Randolph H ­ otel,” along with more than 130 other Americans out of “the two hundred and fifty said to be

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in Oxford.” The author was not impressed by the cooking or the speeches. He noted some of the more distinguished guests, but also the absences: “Louis Dyer was not ­there, kept away by a cold, they told. Professor Dicey, the club’s other honorary member,” was also not in attendance.37 The author likely knew the real reason Dyer and Dicey skipped the dinner, in protest of the American Club’s snubbing Locke, and that they had in fact invited Locke over to dinner themselves. The American Club Thanksgiving dinner of 1907 shows how Kallen behaved differently with dif­fer­ent ­people, catering to Wendell’s bigotry while still able to come to Locke’s defense. Kallen did not expunge his anti-­Black prejudice, but the prejudice diminished as he and Locke spent a g­ reat deal of time together in their year at Oxford and became friends. This friendship reflected the essence of cultural pluralism, not simply b­ ecause Kallen’s and Locke’s ideas influenced each other but ­because their friendship embodied precisely the sort of interaction that cultural pluralism envisioned. Two men, one Jewish, the other Black, became friends and brought their cultures into close contact. Kallen had other adventures before the New Year, including some “with Locke and Downes.”38 On January 15, 1908, Locke “turned up” at Kallen’s room and told him of all the “queer ­things” he and Downes had done in Paris. Locke slept over at Kallen’s, but not before charming all the other guests. “He made an excellent impression on all concerned,” Kallen wrote, “particularly [ John Howard] White­house,” secretary of Toynbee Hall, who was “delighted with him.”39 That eve­ning, in his smoke-­filled room, Kallen “held forth in debate” on “ ‘Religion as an Economic Asset.’ ” The “Toynbee Debaters,” as Kallen ­later called them, proved to be a diverse bunch: “Jews, En­glishmen, Socialists, Atheists, Christians and Working Men,” and of course Locke. Some ­women also participated. Kallen’s article for the Toynbee Rec­ord gave an account of the eve­ ning. He wrote the piece in the third person and described his per­for­mance in a self-­deprecating manner: “All his utterances ­were cryptic. When they ­were not paradoxical, they w ­ ere commonplace; when they w ­ ere not commonplace, they ­were unintelligible. He appeared to be less in earnest than sincere.”40 The audience showered Kallen with numerous “delightful epithets” in response, the most memorable being “ ‘Christian’ and ‘cap­it­ al­ist intellectual.’ ”41 The socialists and atheists in the Toynbee crowd deemed Chris­tian­ity a greater sin than capitalism. We do not know anything of Locke’s thoughts the next morning when the smoke cleared and he woke up in Kallen’s apartment. Although Locke made a good impression, he may not have felt truly included. Locke did not identify as a socialist, atheist, Christian, En­glishman, or Jew. He considered himself American, even though the southern Rhodes Scholars disagreed. He consid-



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ered himself a Harvard man. And he considered himself Black, and this outsider status, along with the Harvard connection, drew him into an especially close relationship with his former teaching assistant. Their friendship was one that allowed for practical jokes that poked fun of Oxford stiffness. In one undated note, Kallen jokingly chastised Locke “for overconfidence” in leaving his door unlocked. Kallen seems to have locked the door and taken the key as “punishment” and directed Locke to pay the “fine” between seven and eight o ­ ’clock at night from the “guardian in chief, Mr. Harley.”42 Kallen and Locke’s developing friendship may have had a sexual component, although the available evidence makes it impossible to ascertain. In January 1908 Kallen wrote to Locke and Downes, who had briefly returned to the United States, with instructions to write to him in London: “Please write to me t­ here and let me know ­whether your visions of Amer­i­ca are materializing—­also of American girls.” Kallen had accumulated “comic tales” that would “make monkeys of you with laughter.” He wished them a “happy new year” and requested that they “throw a kiss to Amer­ic­ a” for him.43 Did Kallen believe that Locke and Downes had an interest in American girls? Or did the letter represent some sort of inside joke between the three men, with the understanding that they did not have any sexual interest in ­women? A postcard from Kallen to Locke also may or may not have had sexual undertones but certainly indicated a growing closeness between the two men. In the spring of 1908 Locke wrote Kallen about his brief stay in France. Kallen replied, “Your letter tempts me sorely inasmuch as I hunger for Paris and its adventures therein.” He briefly discussed his strug­gles with his doctoral dissertation. “I wish that you could vibrate to me y’r flowering abundance of joy, such as it might make the muse rise and perform his task, steadily and quickly and awaken the pace that cometh from a finished task as a reward.” This would allow Kallen to go to Paris “with freedom.” Kallen insisted, “Let me hear from you again and come as may be, we ­shall meet.” Before signing off, Kallen sent his “love to Downes.”44 This expression of “love” likely did not imply any romantic feelings. But Kallen was clearly operating in gay circles. A letter from Downes to Locke, written in April 1908, offers vague clues about Kallen. ­After describing a play he had seen, Downes noted that “K’s cold is worse, + he is more grumpy than ever!” While Kallen read the Boston Transcript, Downes read “Boediker,” indicating that the two men w ­ ere relaxing together. Downes had tickets to the philharmonic, but Kallen was “not sure that he could go,” ­because their friend, the painter Louis Kronberg, had promised to “take him to see Rodin!”45 Kronberg was, like Kallen, a Jewish immigrant to Boston. He was prob­ably gay.

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Kallen may have been sexually attracted to men, although no evidence has been found to prove this supposition. In July 1906 Kallen wrote to Wendell, “I am not sure about talking to w ­ omen. I am a l­ittle afraid of them.” The following year, while teaching summer school at Harvard, Kallen described his students in a letter to Wendell. Most ­were male, though Kallen did observe a “general assortment of the genus schoolmarm whose distracted heads hold opinions as a sieve w ­ ater.”46 In 1912 Marvin Lowenthal, one of Kallen’s students at Wisconsin, described Kallen (whom he assumed to be En­glish) as follows: “He strikes one at first as effeminate. This impression is increased by the fact that he carries his handkerchief up his shirt sleeve, and talks in a soft, gentle voice with broad ‘a”s of the ‘bawth-­tub’ sort.”47 Elsewhere, Lowenthal noted that Kallen did “not mix well with the girls.”48 Writing his ­f uture wife, Sylvia, Lowenthal insisted that he did “not [have] Kallen’s attitude to the average ­woman,” implying Kallen felt superior to ­women, whereas Lowenthal treated them as equals.49 Kallen’s interactions with ­women in the first four de­cades of his life remained remarkably minimal. Perhaps the best contemporaneous source on Kallen’s thoughts about sexuality was a letter he wrote to Wendell concerning his trip to Paris in April 1908. Kallen did not like the French capital, labeling it a “dirty city.” At the Luxembourg Museum, he saw a watercolor by Adolph Willette “representing a naked, impudent crowned female leaning at her ease on the towers of Notre Dame” while “gazing at a diseased-­looking Caped man who is perched on a flagstaff opposite her.” To Kallen this captured Paris perfectly, “the vileness of sex negligently supporting itself on the stability of a negative ideal—an unregenerate Magdalen making eyes at immorality ­behind the skirts of Christ.”50 Kallen blamed the “touring rabble” and the “demi-­mondaines” (­those committed to hedonism) for Pa­ri­sian immorality. Even bookshops ­were “essentially lewd,” replacing the “glorification of love” with “an unmistakable pander to fleshly taste.” Writing to Wendell, Kallen tempered his revulsion: “I ­don’t object to fleshliness. Sanity depends on clean fleshliness.” Yet French “fleshliness was that of the nasty canvases painted with consummate skill” hanging in prominent museums. “It was the incarnation of the carnal, it reached the nostril, and in spite of the odor of sanctity it got from being called art, was fundamentally bad taste.”51 Aside from the arts, Kallen’s living conditions in Paris proved less than desirable. He stayed in Port Royal, near the Sorbonne, which unfortunately was closed when he was ­there. His “neighbours ­were ‘intellectuals,’ queer shadows of [his] undergraduate days, impatient, e­ ager, unkempt and unwashed, a promiscuous and absorbingly in­ter­est­ing society of Jews, Turks, Americans,



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En­glish, Germans, Spaniards, Algerians, Copts, Rus­sians, and Japa­nese.” He appreciated their diversity and attended a c­ ouple of gatherings, “queer and almost libertinous,” marked by the “callow baldness of Byronic youth accentuated by Celtic traditions.” The attendees did not impress Kallen with their “ideals” but did make him “crave a bath.”52 What w ­ ere ­these experiences? Lord Byron was bisexual. W ­ ere ­these parties where sexual bound­aries ­were bent or broken? Kallen expressed revulsion to his former professor, but was he also titillated? He expressed relief upon returning to ­England, “with the clean-­faced, straight-­looking ­women, the well-­kept sheets, the poise.”53 Kallen was twenty-­five with ­limited sexual experience. In an age when the notion of sexual orientation did not r­ eally exist, Kallen may have been in the pro­cess of sexual self-­discovery. Although he painted himself a prude to Wendell, he had also painted himself more racist than he actually was. If Kallen’s sexuality was uncertain (perhaps even to himself ), Locke’s was not. Ambiguous evidence suggests Locke and Downes shared a sexual attraction to Kallen. Downes sent a revealing letter to Locke, likely in December 1907 or January 1908, on stationery from the Lion ­Hotel in Cambridge, ­England. When he wrote the letter, he had been drinking. Downes began by claiming his letter would be “just a line, while K is in the—­I forgot. Never mind.” He and Kallen discussed “philosophy and anthropology.” Downes noted, “The taboo was decimated by us and our vauses [sic] of lilies and 3 Mary Virgin candles.” Then he wrote, “How beautiful our dear K looked over opposite me in the candle light, arguing the difference of the concepts of objects to objections to conceptions. I should hesitate to say.”54 Downes may have been poking fun at Kallen’s philosophical orientation, something he would do again in letters to Locke. Downes then saw Kallen returning, “­Here he comes, tata,” and signed off, adding, “We return Sunday eve,” presumably to Oxford. “Kal says he wanted you to be gathering the [illegible] in anticipation.”55 The letter referred to Kallen. Downes expressed attraction to him. He wrote about this to Locke. Did the sentiment resonate with Locke? Did Locke feel similarly attracted to Kallen? Did Kallen reciprocate that feeling? Kallen married at forty-­four. He had no public romantic relationships with ­women before then. He felt close enough to Locke and Downes in 1908 to discuss “taboo” topics. Before the First World War, Americans’ attitudes about friendship, romance, and sexuality w ­ ere dif­fer­ent from the ones they have ­today.56 Writing about male friendship in the early United States, Richard Godbeer notes that “declarations of love by one man to another” would not have aroused suspicions of sexual impropriety, and “nonerotic love between men was seen as decent, honorable, and praiseworthy.” Elite male friendship was expressed through words, written and spoken, but also through physical displays

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of affection. Love between men could be “passionate yet nonsexual.”57 Perhaps Locke and Kallen had this sort of friendship at Oxford. That Locke slept over at Kallen’s abode, along with Kallen’s language in their correspondence, might suggest a close friendship, rather than a sexual, erotic, or romantic relationship. Regardless of the nature of their relationship, Locke’s friendship had a ­great impact on Kallen. ­These interactions represented the beginning of Kallen’s journey t­ oward more progressive views of race. Clearly prejudiced against African Americans while at Harvard and Oxford, he came to see Locke as an intellectual peer and friend. This realization forced Kallen to reevaluate his position on Black p­ eople. This would be a slow pro­cess, in which Locke would continue to play a role, and would ultimately lead to Kallen’s ac­cep­tance of Black culture as part of the fabric of American civilization, a more inclusive vision of cultural pluralism. On that same trip to Paris in April 1908, Kallen went to the home of Max Nordau (1849–1923), a close associate of Theodor Herzl and a major Zionist leader. Kallen described him to Wendell: “Nordau is voluble, epigrammatic, and opinionated—he exercises all the privileges of his ­g reat age.”58 Nordau’s idea of a muscular Judaism appealed to Kallen, and as po­liti­cal Zionist he believed firmly in state institutions, particularly a Jewish military, to protect the Jewish ­people. Nonetheless, Kallen remained more concerned with culture, as an American and as a Zionist. Cultural pluralism emerged from cultural nationalism. Cultural nationalists believed a nation’s language, lit­er­a­ture, ­music, and art, and perhaps its religion, cuisine, and dress, mattered more than po­liti­cal borders or military prowess. Kallen had already criticized Ahad Ha’am’s cultural Zionism as inadequate, committing himself to Herzl’s po­liti­cal model. To Kallen, statehood was required to establish cultural institutions to develop secular Hebraism in Palestine. Yet Kallen was clearly enamored of culture, having helped found the Harvard Menorah Society, which promoted Hebraism in the Diaspora. If the pluralism in cultural pluralism rested on a bedrock of interethnic friendship, the culture in cultural pluralism needed a firm foundation of elite aesthetics. In January 1908 Rabbi Segal took Kallen to En­glish Zionist leader Leon Simon’s London home. Ahad Ha’am, who had recently moved to ­England from Rus­sia, was pre­sent when they arrived. Also pre­sent was Israel Belkind, a leader of the original Bilu (pioneer) Jewish settlers of Palestine in 1882, but Ahad Ha’am was the guest of honor. Kallen was not impressed.59 The conversation covered vari­ous topics, “none very impor­tant,” according to Kallen, “and hung desultory thro’out the eve­ning.” The key sticking point “was a certain objection to Yiddish” and a debate as to w ­ hether Yiddish was a “language.” Kallen found this “silly.” ­After Ahad Ha’am left, they argued over “the effect of



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language as defending interests and ideals of young ­people in Palestine” while Simon and some ­others protested the use of French in Alliance Israelite schools, fearing Paris would become “the ideal” instead of Jerusalem. Kallen concluded, “It is queer what ­these intelligent p­ eople w ­ ill invent to explain facts.”60 Kallen again dismissed Ahad Ha’am’s cultural Zionism. He thought Yiddish worth preserving b­ ecause of its hybrid nature, b­ ecause it represented a blending of Judaic and Germanic languages. It showed evidence of the Jewish ability to absorb ele­ments of other cultures without entirely assimilating. Kallen approved of the use of French by the Alliance Israelite Universelle b­ ecause it represented the maintenance of Jewish heritage in another language, the positive mixture of French and Jewish cultures. Hebrew remained the most impor­tant Jewish language, but teaching Hebrew did not negate the Diaspora. Hebrew should coexist alongside Judaic languages like Yiddish and Ladino, along with the promotion of Jewish culture in non-­Jewish languages like En­ glish, German, and French. Kallen believed in cultural pluralism, not just in terms of Jewish culture coexisting with non-­Jewish cultures, but that Jewish culture itself should be pluralistic and diverse. Kallen may have communicated some of t­ hese realizations to Locke and may well have told Locke about Ahad Ha’am. Locke’s proj­ect of cultural nationalism known as the Harlem Re­nais­sance, which he would help lead in the 1920s, bore a strong resemblance to Ahad Ha’am’s cultural Zionism. In the latter, Palestine would act as the cultural center for Jews; in the former, Harlem would serve that function for Black ­people. The parallels between Ahad Ha’am’s cultural Zionism and the Harlem Re­nais­sance are too strong to be denied, and Locke’s friendship with Kallen sits at the nexus between ­these two movements. Kallen’s friendship was not the only one that had an impact on Locke during this period. Locke’s identity as a Black man led him to form friendships with non-­American students of color at Oxford. ­These friendships would form another chief influence on Locke’s thought and his development of cosmopolitan cultural pluralism. Locke was both­ered by his exclusion from the American Club Thanksgiving dinner. Yet he did not show it. He mentioned the incident in a letter to his ­mother but spent more time describing his victory as a coxswain for Hertford College, for which he won his “first athletic cup—­a large silver pot pint size” with his name, along with the names of the four oarsmen, engraved on the side. Locke celebrated his achievement, which gave “a black eye” to ­those who questioned his athletic credentials for the Rhodes Scholarship.61 When he did mention being excluded from the Thanksgiving dinner, Locke emphasized that he dined with classicist Louis Dyer, “the acknowledged

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granddaddy of all Americans” at Oxford. Locke also spent time with law professor Albert Venn Dicey, making a “pilgrimage” to his home e­ very Sunday. The older guests wanted to talk about the “Negro Prob­lem” in the United States, and Locke held court “with the assurance of a self-­ordained authority.” ­These conversations ­were “good practice” for his role as race leader back home. With the younger guests, however, race relations did not come up, and Locke observed, “prejudice is out of the question.”62 Locke held some prejudices of his own t­ oward his friend Harley. He found the Antiguan “ill-­mannered” and insisted on visiting him to avoid receiving him for visits in his own room. Locke told his m ­ other that Harley was not “fit to pre­ sent to one’s friends”—­and Locke had made numerous friends. Many Rhodes Scholars wanted to meet Locke, although the southerners remained “­silent.” Despite this snub, Locke proclaimed, “I have almost forgotten I was colored.” Though offended by the southerners’ prejudice, he appreciated this reprieve. He found socializing rather exhausting, with fellows coming by his room before he woke up in the morning and a­ fter he went to bed. Locke hoped to host them for “literary and musical eve­nings” the following semester, to “learn the art of entertaining.”63 Beyond his social exploits, Locke attempted to excel athletically, at least to the best of his ability. His friends again selected him to be a coxswain for their boat, but this time the competition judges required him to pass a swimming test. Locke did not know how to swim. In preparation, his teammates took him to the Merton baths and “dangled” him on the end of a pole and ­belt “like a scared fish.” Locke gave no indication that this resulted from his being Black, or ­whether they would have done the same to a white classmate.64 Locke especially liked the members of the Oxford Cosmopolitan Club, men of “remarkable refinement and culture” from all over the world, including several “East Indian Brahmins.” He realized it would be impor­tant to make friends with ­these elites, many of whom had power­f ul connections. T ­ hese friendships formed Locke’s impor­tant experience of cultural pluralism. ­These ­were proud, progressive men from across the globe who cherished their own national cultures but also prized tolerance, mutual re­spect and appreciation, and international exchange. They inspired Locke to explore his own heritage. Among Locke’s new friends was Pixley ka Isaka Seme, a South African who would go on to help found the South African Native National Congress. He introduced Locke to Theo­philus Scholes, a Jamaican-­born physician and “author of some repute.” Locke went to ser­vices at St. Paul’s Cathedral with Scholes before dining with him at his h ­ ouse in London. Tall and nearly fifty years of age, Scholes towered over the young Locke, both physically and educationally.65



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Scholes had authored two books on topics that interested Locke. The first, published in 1899, was The British Empire and Alliances: Britain’s Duty to Her Colonies and Subject Races. Scholes defended Africans from charges of backwardness, noting that no civilization, from ancient Greece and Rome to modern Eu­ro­pean nations, had ever developed without contact with other p­ eoples. He compared African society with Western socie­ties of recent history. He aimed to thoroughly discredit discrimination based on color. The second book, Glimpses of the Ages, or, The “Superior” and “Inferior” Races, So-­Called, Discussed in the Light of Science and History, advanced a similar goal. Using the Natal province of South Africa as a case study, Scholes argued that the oppressive manner in which white colonials ruled over the Black Africans retarded African development.66 Scholes’s ideas contained seeds of cultural pluralism. Locke, like Scholes, thought any notion of Black inferiority ridicu­lous. Yet Locke also lamented what he perceived as the backwardness of most Black ­people, in the United States or in Africa. The secret to their advancement, according to Scholes, lay in cultural contacts with other ­peoples—in a word, cultural pluralism. Locke already believed intercultural mingling was the ave­nue forward for his fellow African Americans. Scholes did not offer Locke any immediate professional connections but provided intellectual stimulation that lasted a lifetime. Locke found professional connections and intellectual stimulation through Kallen. He referred to Kallen as “a brilliant Boston Ghetto Jew” he knew from Harvard who had connections to William James and Josiah Royce. Kallen was “hob-­knobbing with the chief intellectual lights of E ­ ngland” and had promised to take Locke to see Bertrand Russell, the famous mathematician and phi­ los­o­pher, and the writer George Bernard Shaw. “He is working himself up and I am holding on to his coat tails so to speak,” Locke admitted, calling Kallen “extremely cordial” during his weekly visits for tea.67 A friendship was blooming. Locke saw Kallen frequently. He thought Kallen “brilliant” and “cordial.” He also found him extremely useful in terms of meeting other impor­tant figures in ­England. At the same time, he deemed Kallen a “Ghetto Jew.” He recognized the difference between a Jew who grew up in poverty and the wealthy German Jews who associated with the Ethical Society. Kallen stood apart from the Oxford elite, despite his obvious talents. In February 1908 Kallen introduced Locke to the WaWa p­ eople, “young American composers who are trying to found an American school of ­music on Indian and Negro melodies,” a proj­ect that resembled the Harlem Re­nais­ sance. This s­ imple act of introduction was a lived experience of cultural pluralism, of dif­fer­ent ­people assisting each other to advance par­tic­u­lar cultures within an American, or this case American and British, setting.68

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Kallen also introduced Locke, Harley, and Downes to Israel Zangwill, the British Jewish author whose play The Melting Pot would debut in Washington, DC, that fall. The introduction came at a meeting of suffragists. The crowd greeted Zangwill with light applause. He spoke in a “thin” voice and kept a “sneer” on his face. The suffragists, meanwhile, appeared to Kallen “ugly, el­ derly, eye-­glassed.”69 Kallen, Locke, and Zangwill shared something crucial. Each of them offered a vision of ethnic diversity for the United States. Although Kallen would pit his idea of cultural pluralism against Zangwill’s melting pot concept, their ideas had much in common. Kallen and Zangwill remained friendly through the end of Zangwill’s life. Although Kallen disagreed with Zangwill’s Territorialism, he placed it in the same f­ amily as the vari­ous Zionist movements and regarded Zangwill as an ally in the fight against global anti-­Semitism. Locke came to treat Kallen like a peer and a friend. On the eve­ning of Saturday, March 14, 1908, Locke prepared for a night out. First he visited Harley for tea and then took “so long” to get dressed. He went to Merton College to intercept Downes, who always complained at having to dress up and had left his back collar button undone. Locke endeavored to put the oft-­g rumpy Downes in a good mood before meeting Samuel Ely Eliot, a Rhodes Scholar from Portland, Oregon, and “Kallen the Jew Harvard instructor in philosophy who is making such an impression h ­ ere.” The four men indulged in a “splurge dinner” at Buol’s restaurant. They got “considerably boozed” while eating and “startled” themselves and t­hose around them by taking a train to working-­ class East Oxford, sitting on the top level and “singing American college songs all the way” over to their destination.70 Once in East Oxford, they went to the theater and amused themselves “by throwing bread, lump sugar, and cheese dons up in empty match boxes at the stage.” The play was a “telling melodrama in several senses of the word.” Locke was appalled at the “shocking taste” of the En­glish Cockneys enjoying this “fool play,” along with the “shocking smell” of wine and “heated fetid air and the vile tobacco smoke.” The four Americans “had a ­g reat time” and “danced” all their way back to “sober Oxford,” where they “serenaded the balcony win­dow of All Souls and Hertford [Colleges],” playing “­here we go round the noreberry bush” and “ring around the posey” with the lamppost outside the college gate, before retreating indoors and singing and dancing “til two o ­ ’clock” in the morning.71 The four Americans, all Oxford University men, three Harvard alumni, and two Rhodes Scholars, felt themselves superior to the Cockney theatergoers and actors they encountered. Yet the four men also represented something of American diversity: Downes a blue-­blooded Bostonian, Eliot from the north-



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west, Kallen a Jewish immigrant, and Locke a Black man. In describing this eve­ning to his m ­ other, Locke again identified Kallen as a Jew. This designation meant something to him and to his ­mother. But Kallen’s Jewishness did not prevent Locke from seeing him as a friend. They could have dinner together, and they could have raucous fun eve­nings together as well. When they sang “American college songs,” the color they both cared about most appeared to be Crimson, or perhaps red, white, and blue. The United States, and more specifically Harvard, served as the linchpin that allowed for cultural pluralism, even in faraway Oxford. That April 1908, another Harvard connection, phi­los­o­pher William James, visited Oxford to give the Hibbert Lectures. ­These eight talks formed the basis of his 1909 book, A Pluralistic Universe. Kallen attended the first three lectures. He then sailed back to Cambridge, Mas­sa­chu­setts, to attend his Harvard commencement and receive his doctorate. In a letter to Locke in May 1908, Kallen wrote, “As Downes and I are g­ oing away, it remains up to you to collect the Harvard men—­etc. about, and to bring them to the degree-­g iving on Tuesday—­ and as many other Americans as pos­si­ble—­+ to give James the proper Rah! Rah! when he gets his degree.”72 Kallen wrote to several of his peers, including Locke, asking, “What are the contents and the effect of James’s lectures, they should be coming to an end in another [illegible] night, ­shouldn’t they?”73 In a postcard delivered at sea, Kallen sent Locke a cryptic message. In the communication, dated May  21, 1908, addressed to “Allan Leroy Locke Esq” from “on board the Saxonian,” and directed to “All Royal Lockeus,” Kallen wrote, “I scarce dare heed your verses.” He accused Locke of “seeking respectable anonymity or anonymous respectability,” declaring both “damnable.” He offered “comment on Downes’s allegorical picture” and asked Locke to “tell him I am a member of the Varsity—­Harvard Varsity—­and that’s good enough even for me, and be damned to him.” He concluded, “I was encountered—in my armor—­and by an armed (seriously) person. I was not disarmed tho’ sorely tempted to fire off my gun. Let that content you.”74 Difficult to decipher, this letter communicated content that could only be shared between friends. Another letter sent ­after a week on board the Saxonian, this one undated, also suggested Kallen’s familiarity with the nature of Downes and Locke’s relationship at Oxford. It was written to the two men “collectively,” both to save stamps, for lack of content, and ­because “you are such inseparables any way.”75 Kallen may have made this comment from pure observation, but it may have been recognition of the special, and perhaps sexual, bond between Locke and Downes. The correspondence continued when Kallen arrived in Cambridge, Mas­sa­ chu­setts. ­After his Harvard commencement ceremony, Kallen sent Locke a

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postcard dated June 2, 1908. He reported from his doctoral graduation. “I came. I saw. I was zapped. I was made a doctor.” The next word on the card is difficult to read, though Kallen may have written, “Cuddle with me.” He complained of having to “slave like a [sic] 2 h ­ orses in an upper river meadow” in preparing lectures for his summer course. He was “trembling with eagerness” when he asked about Locke’s “relations” with phi­los­o­pher Stewart Williams and “arrangements” with his new advisor, F. C. S. Schiller, whom Locke had met through Kallen. He sent his “love to the gang” and requested that Locke write back “immediately,” before asking, “What of [William] James?”76 Kallen, intrigued by the content of James’s pre­sen­ta­tion, chose Locke as his chief correspondent to provide him the details of the lectures he missed. The notes Kallen took in his diary about the first three lectures contained nothing about cultural pluralism or ethnic identity, although the Jamesian philosophy of pragmatic pluralism would form the backbone of Kallen’s ideas.77 The choice of Locke as chief reporter spoke to the budding friendship between the two men. Their correspondence revealed a growing degree of closeness. In vari­ous letters, Kallen referred to Locke as “Lockeus” or “All Royal Lockeus,” a nickname he earned in high school or at Harvard. Frustrated by Locke’s lack of correspondence, Kallen even wrote a poem to his friend in a postcard: I believe you promised to write? Why ­don’t you? So lost in Oxford delight You ­can’t keep your pledges? Oh fie! The night You receive this—­write!78 Their growing closeness revealed itself in a postcard full of warmth and friendship that Kallen sent to Locke in July 1908. He wished Locke’s m ­ other a speedy recovery, feeling “immeasurably pleased” they got some time together. Kallen encouraged Locke in his studies, describing his friend’s chosen topic of value theory as “excellent, practically a virgin field and rich with promise.” Exhausted with the demands of summer school, Kallen promised to write “in much greater detail” when he heard from Locke again. He applauded Locke’s attendance at the end-­of-­the-­year banquet for the Rhodes Scholars and appearance in the official Rhodes photo­g raph, despite what­ever racist opposition he may have faced. “You’ll never have to go again, but this first time was very impor­tant. Damn the cotton belters.”79 As Kallen and Locke became friends they exchanged ideas. This mutual influence emerged in some of their earliest writings. In December  1907 Locke



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wrote an essay titled “Oxford Contrasts” for the In­de­pen­dent magazine, published by Henry Holt. The essay, printed two years l­ ater in the In­de­pen­dent and the Colored American, provided a win­dow into Locke’s impressions of Oxford. The bulk of the article criticized the Oxford tutorial system for perpetuating an elite caste of scholars unconcerned with the broader dissemination of knowledge. The “finished Rhodes man,” who has experienced the best of American and En­glish universities, w ­ ill be “a man whose sympathies are wider than his prejudices, whose knowledge is larger than his beliefs, his work and his hopes greater than he himself. He w ­ ill be an ideal type—­a rare type, indeed, a patriotic cosmopolitan.”80 Kallen and Locke broadened their horizons at Oxford by questioning their prejudices against African Americans and Jews, respectively. Locke’s term patriotic cosmopolitan implied loyalty to American ideals of equality and appreciative curiosity for global diversity. Fi­nally addressing his perspective as a Black American at Oxford, Locke admitted that the apparent British indifference to his race struck him as more disingenuous than the discrimination he encountered back home. He preferred “disfavor” and “persecution” to “indifference,” arguing, “One cannot be neutral ­toward a class or social body without the gravest danger of losing one’s own humanity in denying to someone e­ lse the most h ­ uman of all rights, the right to be considered ­either a friend or an ­enemy, ­either as helpful or harmful.” He concluded, “I infinitely prefer race prejudice to race indifference.”81 Locke’s preference recalls Kallen’s accusation that he (Locke) sought “anonymous respectability” or “respectable anonymity.” Locke seemed to be taking Kallen’s advice and eschewing anonymity altogether. More impor­tant, Locke’s essay posits friendship as a crucial concept in understanding race relations. Forming friendships required discernment, the ability to distinguish p­ eople who are good or bad, or, to put it in Oscar Wilde’s terms, “charming or tedious.” Friendship rested on appreciation of difference. ­These differences could be founded on individual traits and cultural heritage. To be dif­fer­ent meant to be h ­ uman, Locke asserted, and he saw the ideal Rhodes man as someone who could re­spect and appreciate the distinctiveness of o ­ thers and be proud of his own. The ideal Rhodes man embraced cultural pluralism. The following year, Locke interrogated the relationship between par­tic­u­ lar racial commitments and universal values, especially in terms of aesthetic production and achievement. He paid special attention to his own African American background. On June 9, 1908, shortly ­after Kallen returned to Harvard, Locke delivered a paper to the Oxford Cosmopolitan Club, “Cosmopolitanism.” In discussing common owner­ship of ideas, Locke asked his audience ­whether they would allow him an illustration “more significant than personal.”

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In the United States, ­there lived a “transplanted race” who some believed did not have a “birthright” to American civilization. Echoing his Dunbar address, Locke argued that culture should be available to all who could use it, including ­those not formally recognized as members of that par­tic­u­lar culture. Locke had confidence that Black ­people would use it and foresaw that “the ideal heritage of that transplanted race w ­ ill reassert itself not as po­liti­cal ambition or economic greediness, but as a distinctive and vital national idea embodied in a race lit­er­a­ture, a race art, a race religion and a sense of corporate history and destiny.”82 In 1908 Locke planted the seeds of the Harlem Re­nais­sance in ­England. He also planted the seeds of a formula for cultural pluralism, or what he called “cosmopolitanism.” He defined the term, writing, “The new, rational cosmopolitanism, is not an inclusive culture of a universal education, it is the heightened through contrast effect of one tradition by another.” For a tradition to be “organic” it “must be exclusive.”83 Locke insisted on cultural distinction in comparing Japa­nese and Western art. Differences in aesthetic styles would be best appreciated not by “the eclectic blending of the one with the other, but [by] a distinct sense of the parallel evolution between the two.”84 As Kallen would do years l­ater, Locke developed an organic theory of cultural pluralism, strongly anti-­assimilationist, that favored cultural exchange and exclusivity at the same time. Although he showed no fear of diversity, his views had changed significantly from t­ hose of the teenager who wrote “The Alien Invasion.” In another 1908 speech, “Cosmopolitanism and Culture,” Locke outlined a program for his vision. He rooted his ideology in the Enlightenment, invoking Madame de Staël, who argued that “nationality in lit­er­a­ture and art was a sort of social individuality developed in the course of history and perpetuated through tradition and institutions.” In insisting that each group develop its own culture, de Staël also emphasized “how vitally conditioned” each par­tic­u­lar group became “by the contrasts of nations with their fellow nations.” With this understanding, she “put to rest the inveterate superstition that over the borders live the barbarians by proving once and for all that the real ‘barbarian’ is the provincial who knows nothing of what lies across his borders.”85 Locke’s cosmopolitanism occupied a m ­ iddle ground between the archetypical melting pot and a more rigid ethnic chauvinism. He insisted that borders between nations be porous but nonetheless maintained that borders should exist. But while Locke believed in borders, he did not like the nation “reduced to po­liti­cal and geo­g raph­i­cal terms.” In accordance with his “professed goal of internationalism,” Locke envisaged “a strict construction of the nation as an intact body of tradition as uncommunicable and as permanent even as racial



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characteristics themselves.” This would allow “a liberating divorce of ideal from administrative groups, of social from po­liti­cal nationality.” His cultural nationalism depicted the nation as “a body of social tradition not necessarily tied down to a po­liti­cal institution, and certainly not constraining itself in po­ liti­cal and geo­g raph­i­cal terms.” Locke even went so far as to anticipate a “divided nationalism . . . ​an ideal difference within a geographic unity,” or in other words, “a cosmopolitanism within a nation.”86 Culture trumped politics. This repre­sen­ta­tion of nationalism resembled Ahad Ha’am’s cultural Zionism and Kallen’s cultural pluralist model of the United States. In Locke’s schema, culture played the most impor­tant role. He celebrated the “national resurgencies of all sorts” that “along the original lines of race and tradition have been further developing and characterizing themselves, and not along lines parallel with the po­liti­cal nation.” He even highlighted “one of the most significant of the constructive tendencies” as “the conscious revival of obsolescent languages.”87 Locke likely referred to the reinvigoration of Hebrew and to the flowering of Judaic and Hebraic culture inside and outside Palestine. Hebrew as a spoken language had been resurrected from the dead, and Locke admired the Zionist effort to preserve and expand it. Throughout the address, Locke championed cultural preservation. He conceded that “a cosmopolitanism of some sort or degree” represented a noble “goal of culture.” But, paraphrasing Mark 8:36, he warned against “that characteristically modern pursuit of [cosmopolitanism], by which culture in gaining the w ­ hole world, loses its own soul.” Locke believed individuals should remain proud of their own identities while exploring the cultures around them. In criticizing the cosmopolitanism of ­those who denied group difference, Locke employed musical meta­phors, anticipating Kallen’s cultural symphony. Locke referred to universalists who sought a single world culture as desiring “world harmony,” a “march of pro­g ress,” and even a “­music of civilization,” two years before Kallen would use a similar meta­phor in 1910. Locke criticized the idea, labeling it not “at harmony with itself.”88 Where did Locke first encounter this musical meta­phor? He may have borrowed it from Ernest Renan, who wrote of an “orchestration of civilization” in his 1882 essay “What Is a Nation?,” which Locke could have read in the original French. Henry James employed a similar phrase in his 1907 account of his return to the United States, The American Scene. The younger James compared the cacophonous “daily sensation” of New York to “a keyboard, as continuous, and as ­free from hard transitions, as if swept by the fin­gers of a master-­ pianist.” James observed the Yiddish inflection that Jewish immigrants added to American En­glish, and wondered w ­ hether this infusion portended the demise of En­glish, to be replaced by “the accent of the very ultimate ­f uture, in

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the States,” a melodious blend of voices that “may be destined to become the most beautiful on the globe and the very ­music of humanity.”89 Locke read The American Scene while at Harvard.90 Locke may have learned the meta­phor from James and lent it to Kallen. They may have come up with it in­de­pen­dently or from dif­fer­ent texts, Kallen possibly from Zangwill’s Melting Pot, whose protagonist hopes to conduct an “American symphony.”91 What­ever the source, Kallen and Locke clearly exchanged ideas about the attempt to find harmony in a world of ethnic diversity. The closeness of their ideas reflected the strength of their friendship. They had not become best friends at Oxford, but they developed a unique bond as enthusiastic outsiders looking to preserve and cultivate their own cultures. Their friendship itself served as a tool for their respective cultural nationalist proj­ects. Through their friendly intellectual exchanges, they strengthened their own identities and experienced the world they wanted to live in, a world of cultural pluralism.

C h a p te r   5

The Plural Is Po­liti­cal

From 1909 to 1935, in numerous essays and addresses, Alain Locke and Horace Kallen developed their philosophies of cultural pluralism. ­Until 1924, neither of them referred to the concept in ­those texts, and they elaborated t­ hese ideas separately, with l­ imited correspondence and interaction. Yet their visions remained remarkably similar, a product of their friendship and intellectual exchange. Both i­ magined a United States, and a world, with a multitude of cultures, each bringing its par­tic­u­lar gifts to strengthen society as a ­whole. Although they painted abstract pictures, their ideas had concrete manifestations in Kallen’s Zionist activism and Locke’s leadership of the Harlem Re­nais­sance. Kallen and Locke formulated their ideas of cultural pluralism at a time when the United States was experiencing enormous demographic changes. The Jim Crow laws reigned in the South. Though anti-­Black discrimination loomed large in the North as well, millions of African Americans migrated ­there in search of opportunity. Immigrants, especially Italians and eastern Eu­ ro­pean Jews, poured in from distant shores. Xenophobia increased apace. In response to this nativism, some liberals suggested the possibility that immigrants could assimilate. In 1908 British Jew Israel Zangwill wrote a play about immigration to the United States titled The Melting Pot, providing Amer­ic­ a with one of its most iconic and malleable meta­phors.

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The play tells a hokey love story that puts the enmity of the Montagues and Capulets to shame. Musician David Quixano, a Rus­sian Jewish immigrant to New York, falls in love with Vera Revendal, a Rus­sian Christian immigrant. Quixano l­ater learns that Revendal’s f­ather, a Rus­sian nobleman, led the pogrom that murdered his ­family. Nonetheless, love conquers all in the United States, and the two live happily ever ­after. This happiness is symbolized through Quixano’s efforts to write an “American symphony,” introducing a musical meta­phor for the United States. Quixano also offers a culinary meta­phor in the speech that gives the play its title: “Amer­i­ca is God’s Crucible, the ­g reat Melting-­Pot where all the races of Eu­rope are melting and re-­forming! . . . ​Germans and Frenchmen, Irishmen and En­glishmen, Jews and Russians—­into the Crucible with you all! God is making the American. . . . ​The real American has not yet arrived. He is only in the Crucible, I tell you—he ­will be the fusion of all races, perhaps the coming superman.”1 Kallen and Locke both responded to Zangwill’s image. Kallen’s best-­known work, his 1915 article in the Nation, “Democracy versus the Melting Pot,” outlined cultural pluralism in all but name. Locke’s Howard University addresses “Race Contacts and Interracial Relations,” delivered that summer, advanced a similar vision. The two men responded to the changes around them, to prejudice and nativism and immigration and assimilation, with programs for the promotion of elite secular cultures as part of a diverse and demo­cratic United States. Kallen never gave a concrete definition of cultural pluralism, and much of his writing was vague. In 1917 his friend, author Mary Antin, told him, “You write less simply than you talk,” and urged him to edit his lectures and publish t­ hose, as they sounded clearer than his essays.2 Kallen did not take Antin’s advice to heart. The series of essays he wrote on American diversity a­ fter 1917 ­were just as confusing, contradictory, opaque, and open to interpretation as ­those he wrote e­ arlier. Kallen’s ideas had been simmering for some time. While Zangwill was cooking up the melting pot, Kallen returned to Cambridge in June 1908 to receive his doctorate in philosophy from Harvard. Although Locke remained in ­England, their friend Carl Sawyer Downes also returned to Harvard, and mentioned Kallen in a few of his letters to Locke, demonstrating that Locke maintained an interest in Kallen’s activities. Kallen taught at Harvard that fall, working ­there for two more years before heading to Clark University in Worcester, Mas­sa­chu­setts, and then the University of Wisconsin–­Madison, where he remained from 1911 to 1918.

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Securing a permanent academic position had not been easy in an era when genteel anti-­Semitism remained the norm in the ivory tower. In February 1911 Kallen’s professor Ralph Barton Perry contacted John Patterson, dean at the University of Kentucky, to help Kallen get a job ­there. Perry called Kallen “the most brilliant and promising of the younger men available.” He also noted, “[Kallen] is a Jew, but without, I should say, the traits calculated to excite prejudice.”3 No offer from Kentucky followed. Two months ­later, Perry wrote to Thomas M. Shackleford, a Florida Supreme Court judge in Tallahassee. Shackleford had connections with the University of Florida. Perry called Kallen “brilliant as a thinker, writer, and teacher,” though was worried that his “somewhat radical and uncompromising temper” might not be a good fit for Gainesville. This was code for Jewish.4 Shackleford communicated with University of Florida president Albert Murphree. Murphree was “most favorably impressed” with Kallen’s rec­ord but admitted that “his being a Jew would prevent his appointment.”5 Kallen may not have known any of this, but he would not have been surprised based on his experience at Prince­ton. Nonetheless he remained committed to being accepted among the American academic elite. Unlike Locke, who could find work at Howard or any of a number of other historically Black colleges and universities, Kallen did not have a network of Jewish universities to rely on. On the other hand, Kallen found more ac­cep­tance in the mainstream white acad­emy than Locke ever did. One ave­nue to that ac­cep­tance was the further development of a modern, secular Jewish culture. During this period, Kallen further developed his idea of Hebraism. He continued his activity with the Harvard Menorah Society and ­later the Intercollegiate Menorah Association, formed in 1913. He expanded his Zionist activity and became friendly with Louis Brandeis, a pioneering progressive ­lawyer and eventual US Supreme Court justice. Kallen helped bring Brandeis into the Zionist fold. He wrote about Zionism in the American Hebrew, the Maccabaean, the Intercollegiate Menorah Association’s Menorah Journal, the Nation, and the New Republic. As a Zionist, Kallen remained a pragmatist. His practical program was to rebuild a new secular Jewish identity in the United States, with strong ties to Palestine. He believed that Jews, as Zionists, could and should create a new culture. His Hebraic pragmatism meant understanding Judaism and Jewish culture as something that could be molded and ­shaped, rather than something static and inflexible. Zionism, a movement linked to modernity and progressivism, meshed well with philosophical pragmatism. The notion that the universe was fundamentally many, what William James called a “multiverse,” lay

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at the heart of Kallen’s cultural pluralism.6 Pluralism, melded with pragmatism, suggested that cultures could grow and develop by learning and borrowing from one another, just as Jewish culture had. Kallen deviated from James in emphasizing particularism within a pluralistic United States. This emphasis represented not an antimodern sensibility but rather a fuller rejection of the stale religiosity and empty universalism he found in both Orthodox and Reform Judaism. Inspired by Darwinism and scientific racialism, Kallen embraced cultural particularism as a forward-­looking response to the diversity of modern life. He asserted this viewpoint in several lengthy articles in the American Hebrew in the years before the First World War. In the first, “Hebraism and Current Tendencies in Philosophy,” published in 1909, Kallen appropriated the term Hebraism for his own secular nationalistic purposes. He referred to the binary established in Matthew Arnold’s celebrated work Culture and Anarchy, which contrasted Hebraism with Hellenism as the two pillars of Western civilization, the latter representing an attempt “to see ­things as they ­really are” and the former championing “conduct and obedience.” Kallen rejected t­ hese distinctions in ­favor of his own. He suggested that the Greeks gave primacy to “structure, harmony, order immutable, eternal,” whereas the Hebrews saw their world in constant motion, embracing “flux, mutation, imminence, disorder.”7 Asserting his secularism, Kallen paid lip ser­vice to Darwinian notions of natu­ral se­lection in heralding the triumph of Hebraism over Hellenism. Darwin’s theory of evolution embraced change and mutation and the fundamental unpredictability of life. Yet Kallen’s views w ­ ere more spiritual. Among phi­los­op­ hers, the Hebraic spirit emerged most clearly in the pragmatism of Kallen’s mentor, William James, and in the thought of Henri Bergson, a French Jew whom Kallen had encountered in Eu­rope. Jamesian pragmatism, with all its flexibility, is best suited to a Darwinian universe dominated by flux. Kallen interpreted Bergson’s notion of élan vital, the “propulsive flux of the universe,” as corresponding to the Hebraic understanding of existence. This new version of Hebraism became the guiding philosophy of the Menorah movement, in which Kallen played such a large part.8 Kallen positioned Hebraism as an alternative to both Reform and Orthodox Judaism but directed his real ire t­oward Reform, a movement that originated with nineteenth-­century German Jews who sought to make Judaism more compatible with reason and modernity, but also more palatable to their Protestant neighbors. Kallen’s January 1910 article in the American Hebrew, “On the Import of ‘Universal Judaism,’ ” criticized the Reform movement for emptying Judaism of any unique content. “Judaism is Judaism, not ­because it is merely religion, but ­because it is a religion, ­because it is dif­fer­ent from Christianism or

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Mohammedanism or Vishnuism or Parseeism.” He quipped that gravity never hurt anybody, but “a par­tic­u­lar falling stone, a concrete moving train,” could do real damage. “Particularity, as opposed to universality, is the essence of life and power,” he wrote. “The most universal ­thing is the deadest.”9 Kallen opposed universalism by stressing a pragmatist, particularist Hebraism within a pluralistic universe. In his June 1910 American Hebrew article, “Judaism, Hebraism, Zionism,” he defined Hebraism as “a life and not a tradition,” made up of “growing and changing t­ hings, expressions of a palpable vitality, not dead unalterable ‘universals.’ ”10 This Hebraism could only maintain its strength through in­de­pen­dence, interacting with but maintaining autonomy from other cultural units. The individual cultures took pre­ce­dence over any united ­whole, even as they strengthened that larger entity. This argument echoed sentiments Kallen had expressed in 1906 in “The Ethics of Zionism,” but with more of a pragmatist bent. He stressed that Jewish separatism should be “national, positive, dynamic and adequate.” Kallen did not embrace particularism for its own sake. In the Darwinian “strug­gle for survival,” “the intrinsic goodness of the units is never moral u ­ nless it happens at the same time to be good instrumentally.”11 The term instrumentally brought Kallen to his famous musical meta­phor: “Culture thus constitutes a harmony, of which ­peoples and nations are the producing instruments, to which each contributes its unique tone, in which the ­whole ­human past is pre­sent as an enduring tension, as background from which the pre­sent comes to light and draws its character, color, vitality.” To Kallen, culture was “the standard whereby any nation or race is judged for conservation or destruction.” A p­ eople “is morally and socially valuable, entitled to continued life, only in so far as it has a distinct nature that produces an individual note, a note that enriches and changes the harmony, not a mere overtone, a secondary and derivative ­thing, but a ­thing primary, fundamental, tonic.”12 Kallen may have borrowed this musical meta­phor from Locke. His emphasis on secular cultural nationalism resembled sentiments expressed in Locke’s writings at this time. But his Darwinian and moralistic understanding suggested only valuable cultures should persist in the face of assimilationist forces. He did not clearly delineate the standard by which cultures should be judged. Jews, in Kallen’s formulation, contributed “Hebraism, not Judaism.” For while “sects and dogmas pass, ethnic groups and cultures endure.” Zionism was a po­liti­cal manifestation of Hebraism, an effort not only to preserve Hebraism but also to ensure the continuing contributions of the Jewish nation for generations to come. Kallen endorsed Zionism b­ ecause “with the Jews as a ­free ­people in Palestine or elsewhere, that unique note which is designated in Hebraism has a chance to assume a more sustained, a clearer and truer tone

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in the concert of h ­ uman cultures, and may genuinely enrich the harmony of civilization.”13 Kallen also endorsed Zionism and Hebraism b­ ecause they corresponded to his embrace of modernity. In his 1911 article “Judaism and the Modern Point of View,” Kallen pointed to Darwinism ushering in a new era of scientific thought. Judaism as religion, to which both Reform and Orthodox Jews subscribed, appeared outdated to Kallen. “The ­whole of the life of the Jews, in all its phases, is best designated as Hebraism, and Judaism is best understood as a special aspect of this Hebraism.”14 ­After completing this series of articles, Kallen set off for Wisconsin in the fall of 1911. Between 1908 and 1935, only a single January 1916 letter from Kallen to Locke survives. Yet Kallen and Locke maintained some contact at least u ­ ntil that year. Locke gave speeches at Howard University in 1915 and 1916 that specifically refer to Kallen—­not by name but rather as his “friend.” Most importantly, the ideas of cultural pluralism that they discussed as their friendship bloomed in Harvard and Oxford emerged in their published work, which displayed similarities and evidence of mutual influence. Locke stayed at Oxford ­until 1910, then spent a year at Humboldt University in Berlin. During that time, he attended the Universal Races Congress in London in 1911, or­ga­nized by Ethical Culture founder Felix Adler and Gustav Spiller, leader of the Ethical Culture movement in E ­ ngland. W. E. B. Du Bois also participated in the event, as did Zangwill and representatives from the Baha’i religious community. T ­ hese experiences, along with Kallen’s influence, ­shaped Locke’s development as a race thinker and provided more seeds for his aesthetic program of racial uplift back in the United States. Locke began to express some of t­hese views in writing. In 1911, in his second published article, “The American Temperament,” Locke presented a subtle critique of American economic individualism. He condemned this “national character so unique that it is the despair of critics, and yet so s­ imple and available that to acquire it one only need live in Amer­i­ca.” He lamented the fact that “the emigrant, Slavic, Teutonic, Irish or of the Romance stocks, acquires it and becomes an American spiritually before he has resided long enough to be naturalized.” In criticizing the fully assimilated immigrant, Locke had come a long way from the seventeen-­year-­old assimilationist who wrote “The American Invasion” in high school.15 In his 1911 speeches to the Negro Historical Socie­ties of Philadelphia and Yonkers, Locke further emphasized the necessity for cultural autonomy. In the first speech, “The Negro and a Race Tradition,” delivered in October in Philadelphia, he declared, “To have a tradition means to have a separate tradition,

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to have a culture means to have a special culture, indeed to have a history in any real sense of the word one must have acquired a corporate sense, a racial or national consciousness which segregates and claims one’s past as definitively and legitimately as if it w ­ ere private property.”16 Locke recognized that in developing such a culture, African Americans faced significant disadvantages. In a second speech, “A Race Tradition in Education,” presented to the Negro Historical Society of Yonkers on December 9, Locke proclaimed, “The historical dilemma of the Negro is the painful position of standing between two heritages, one lost, the other not fully acquired.” Like Du Bois, he saw this as “both the price and the reward of the Negro’s unique history.” He quoted Du Bois’s famous passages on “two-­ness” and “double-­ consciousness” from The Souls of Black Folk, then argued, “What is admittedly a social prob­lem is at the same time a rich intellectual alternative.”17 In a refrain similar to that of his 1907 Paul Laurence Dunbar address, Locke advocated an approach built on pragmatism: “I justify the claim to American institutions and utilities on the grounds not that the constitution says that they are the common property of all men, but on the grounds that they are utilities, nothing more, and that they are therefore to be had [for] the earning.” Locke’s United States stood “for the common owner­ship of all the so-­called benefits or utilities of civilization.” He did not question Black ­people’s “right to ­these ­things, but of what ends we are g­ oing to use them ­after we have obtained them.”18 The Black community’s “racial or national consciousness” constituted “private property,” but “American institutions” ­were simply “utilities of civilization,” tools that belonged to anyone who could use them. This distinction was a crucial one: the source material was par­tic­u­lar; the tools ­were universal. In arguing that culture belongs to t­hose who use it effectively, Locke celebrated one par­tic­u­lar group’s achievements: “At all events racial traits and traditions are in several notable instances, most notable of all that of the Jews, perpetuating themselves and garnering re­spect at home and influence abroad in proportion as they emphasize the earmarks of race loyalty and effectiveness.”19 Locke praised the Jewish embrace of American institutions as a way to preserve a distinct heritage while remaining patriotic Americans. “The Jewish communism in this country further has contributed to its racial life the world over and stands ­today as the champion of some of its most significant reform movements.” In the United States, one could embrace a full “race life and propaganda . . . ​ without contradicting national and patriotic loyalties and responsibilities.”20 It may be that the word “communism” was misrecorded and what Locke meant was “community.” His vision was culturally communitarian but not eco­ nom­ically socialist. Locke believed the United States offered a unique opportunity for dual identities and to contribute to broader civilization. His arguments

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­ ere echoed Kallen’s in “The Ethics of Zionism,” which justified Jewish nationh alism based on the Jewish ­people’s historical achievements. In Locke’s mind, Black ­people had a model to follow. The similarity between Kallen’s and Locke’s ideas ­here suggests considerable intellectual exchange. Locke’s pragmatism brought him especially close to Kallen’s dynamic, modernist Hebraism. Locke hoped that Black ­people, like Jews, would use American culture and institutions to further their own aims: “The admission that we participate in an alien culture justifies us in a certain historical and ­actual pride of acquisition, in having made our own what was in the beginning not ours—­and further, that such an admission should enable us by way of contrast to realize nationally our own position, our own derivations and allegiances and to help us to build up in addition a tradition worthy of our united loyalties.”21 Locke did not advocate that Black ­people simply embrace the En­glish language and American traditions to create a modern culture. Rather, he turned to Africa. He warned of excessive cele­bration of the abolitionist legacy, favoring instead a rich African heritage “in need of patient and painstaking scholarship to recover.” Yet this African reconstruction did not preclude “entering into the full heritage of a liberal education,” just as “race loyalty to Anglo-­ Saxon civilization” did not interfere with “American patriotism.”22 Locke’s words invoked a sense of ­limited options for African Americans. Kallen had envisioned a hierarchy of cultures in 1906, and Locke felt the sting of this hierarchy. Locke saw culture as high culture. Kallen did not include African Americans in his orchestra, quite literally relegating Black culture to a footnote in his 1924 book, Culture and Democracy in the United States: “I do not discuss the influence of the negro upon the esthetic material and cultural character of the South and the rest of the United States. This is at once too considerable and too recondite in its pro­cesses for casual mention. It requires a separate analy­sis.”23 By 1924 Kallen knew Black ­people belonged in the American symphony of civilization but was perhaps unsure of where they stood in the cultural hierarchy. Locke may have felt something similar. In his snobbery, he did not feel Black culture had sufficiently developed yet, which is why he preached enthusiastically for the development of a Black American high culture rooted in African history. The addresses to the Negro Historical Socie­ties increased Locke’s prominence and attracted attention from a prominent member of the Black community. He had been invited to speak at Yonkers by Arturo Schomburg, the Afro–­Puerto Rican historian and ­future Harlem Re­nais­sance leader who would become Locke’s close friend. Schomburg was likely influenced by Locke’s re-

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marks about Jews as a cultural model for Black p­ eople, ­because he echoed them in his writing shortly thereafter. In a 1913 essay, “Racial Integrity,” Schomburg made a plea for “a collection or list of books written by our g­ reat men and ­women,” which could be improved on by “the ­children of tomorrow,” who could “build upon the crude work” using the knowledge they acquired from higher education. Following in Locke’s proto-­Harlem Re­nais­sance footsteps, Schomburg justified this proj­ ect by referring to the Jewish p­ eople, “who though not a practical nation, live in theory a nation of most power­ful intellects.” Jews survived off “the very groups of nations who destroyed them” and emerged stronger. “The Negro must strive to follow in the good examples of the Jews—­they cling to their customs and traditions, no ­matter ­whether they live in Timbuctoo or in the highest peaks of the Andean mountains; they cling to together and uphold the maxim that ‘in unity t­ here is strength.’ ”24 Inspired by Jewish cultural successes, Schomburg and Locke embarked on a proj­ect to merge elite Western civilization and modern aesthetics with African and African American source material and experiences. This was race work, but Locke still had ­limited exposure to the region of the United States where most Black p­ eople lived. He headed south to learn. Locke spent the first few months of 1912 touring the South and West with Booker T. Washington, the best-­known Black man in the United States at the time. Washington, born into slavery, had been the first African American invited to the White House, dining with Theodore Roo­se­velt in 1901. He headed the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, where he championed industrial and agricultural education and practical training. In temperament, the gregarious and out­going Washington presented a stark contrast to the reserved, contemplative Locke. Yet they got along well on this journey. Locke and Washington visited poor African Americans in cities, small towns, and urban areas and examined the educational prob­lem that faced the overwhelming majority of Black ­people who resided ­there. This trip, balanced with his experiences at Harvard and Oxford, led Locke to develop a new ideology for racial uplift. It would be a combination of Du Bois’s high cultural elitism and pursuit of civil rights and Washington’s emphasis on practical self-­ improvement. Rather than relying on po­liti­cal change to open opportunities, African Americans could advance that change by embracing their own culture and developing that culture through sophisticated aesthetic production and achievement. ­After he and Washington parted ways, Locke continued touring the South, corresponding with Washington and Washington’s personal secretary, Emmett Jay Scott. In a letter to Scott concerning Robert Ezra Park, an assimilationist

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sociologist from the University of Chicago, Locke wrote, “­There are in education, in philosophy, in art, questions introduced, themes outlined by the Negro prob­lem construed intellectually that I regard as the specific mental-­spiritual assets of race scholarship. We younger fellows of some training must hustle or they too—­our spiritual heritage, ­will be appropriated and exploited.”25 Locke displayed a proprietary feeling ­toward Black culture, a feeling of owner­ship, along with a desire to cultivate that culture and make it accessible to the Black masses. ­Later that year Washington helped Locke secure a teaching position at Howard University. Although Locke’s journey south had been transformative and informative, his public writing in the years to come reflected his comfort in elite academic settings. In 1914, for his Harvard Class of 1908 Second Report, Locke reflected on his time at Oxford, a place where he “temporarily abandoned education for the pursuit of culture.” He learned l­ittle in the classroom t­ here, but he became a cultural nationalist. He noted that Oxford allowed him to become “­really cosmopolitan,” providing him the “rare experience” of socializing with “so many foreign students” that he could afford to pay the white British ­people “the very high tribute of not even attempting to be like them.” Rather than assimilate, Locke felt one could be “more one’s self.” His friendships with diverse men of color at Oxford provided him with “the very rare opportunity to choose deliberately to be what [he] was born.” He lamented the fact that the “tyranny of circumstances” back in the United States prevented so many of his brethren from seeing “the privilege and opportunity of being an African American.”26 In 1914 Locke no longer sought escape from his race or the obligations that came with it. He embraced being a Black intellectual with an obligation to provide racial uplift to his community in the United States and abroad. Locke also advanced the impor­tant notion that African American identity could be both something innate and something he could choose to actively embrace and cultivate. This notion of choosing “deliberately to be what [he] was born” proved crucial to his understanding of Blackness. Locke had been born phenotypically Black and had never been given a choice over his skin color. Thus he partially accepted a racial or biological ele­ment to his Blackness. Yet this ele­ment paled in comparison to the voluntary ele­ment of his Blackness, that which he chose and sought to develop. Locke knew that he could not change his grand­father, but he could choose the extent to which his grand­father’s legacy and culture s­ haped his own life. Kallen felt the same way. When he arrived in Madison, Kallen was not yet concerned with grand­ fathers. His first goal was fitting in with the faculty at the University of Wisconsin. One helpful contact was Joseph Jastrow, a Warsaw-­born professor of

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psy­chol­ogy, “very Jewish, very pompous, with a choice vocabulary and the face of a peach.”27 Jastrow’s wife, Rachel, was ­sister to Henrietta Szold, American Zionist leader and founder of Hadassah. Joseph and Rachel ­were staunch Zionists, and Kallen found them welcome allies in Wisconsin. One Monday night in October 1911, Jastrow brought Kallen to a small gathering of the Literary Club. The meeting was held at the home of Margaret Loring Andrews Allen, the w ­ idow of Latin scholar William Francis Allen, a Harvard alum who had taught freed slaves in South Carolina during the Civil War. The occasion for the gathering was a panel of papers on race and Reconstruction. The first speaker, historian Carl Russell Fish, “argued that reconstruction worked in opposition to the tendencies of the time.” A native of Rhode Island, Fish had earned his bachelor’s degree at Brown and his master’s and doctorate degrees at Harvard. Kallen seemed to approve of his mea­ sured analy­sis. Fish asserted that Reconstruction had helped poor white p­ eople and ushered the white aristocracy “into the professions.” When it came to African Americans, however, his conclusion was grimmer. “The negroes, well, are the negroes,” Kallen summarized. “Nature did the reconstructing, not man. Man set himself against this.”28 The implication was that no amount of government intervention would improve the African American lot. ­After Fish finished, the next speaker delivered an even harsher attack on African Americans. University president Charles Van Hise asserted “that the negroes in their own country had contributed nothing to civilization. The white, the yellow, and the brown races have. Not so the negroes. Wherever they are left to themselves they are barbarous,” be it Brazil, Haiti, or the United States. “In the American South, Black leadership consisted of African Americans who ­were “½ or ¼ white.” In Barbados, where En­glishmen ruled without concern for ­human rights, three hundred thousand Black p­ eople lived in decent conditions. “They are not rich, they live well, cleanly, in well-­kept ­houses, ­etc.” Where Black ­people ­were “left to themselves t­ here is filth, disease, lechery, ­etc.,” as in Brazil or Mexico. Africans ­were “a conquered ­people,” and “history shows that one of two ­things can happen to the conquered. They are ­either assimilated to the conquerors or they are killed.”29 Kallen continued to summarize the university president’s remarks. Van Hise acknowledged that the Spanish and Portuguese had killed or enslaved most of the natives, and that Columbus had advised his patrons Ferdinand and Isabella to enslave the “nice, well-­behaved” p­ eoples he encountered. Van Hise then asked, “With the negroes in Brazil, in Mexico, they are intermarrying. What ­will happen in this country?” A ­ fter again insisting “he was not a prophet, far be it from him to prophesy,” he invoked the Bible, declaring that “the sins of the ­father are visiting on the sons to the fourth or fifth generation.” Kallen

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believed Van Hise “was afraid we would suffer for the sins of our f­athers to the hundredth generation.” The sin in question, according to Van Hise, was miscegenation. “What ­will happen to our civilization?” he asked in horror. “With animals, men instate and breed the best stock, but we h ­ adn’t yet reached that stage with men.”30 While Kallen’s opinion of Van Hise’s racist pitch for eugenics is unknown, he was not impressed with the man’s delivery, calling it “extraordinary” in a bad way. “It was a cross between a stump orator who stutters, a revivalist, and [Harvard] pres. [Charles William] Eliot.” Kallen suspected Van Hise may have been trying to imitate Eliot but instead delivered “a curious staccato singsong, some incipient gestures, and a strangely disagreeable ineptitude and insufficiency.”31 Van Hise was followed by another historian, Professor Frederick Logan Paxson. A Philadelphian who studied at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, Paxson had a dif­fer­ent take. He “glibly pointed out that reconstruction was a po­liti­cal, and not a sociologico-­economic event.”32 Kallen offered l­ittle analy­sis h ­ ere, perhaps ­because of agreement. Fi­nally, a professor of Greek, who happened to be Kallen’s landlord, closed out the panel. Charles Forster Smith was a classical scholar from Abbeville, South Carolina. His “pleasantly soft” southern drawl contrasted with the “hardness” of the previous speakers. He invoked the “confession” of South Carolina’s Republican governor Daniel Henry Chamberlain, who had been elected in 1874 but then defeated by some 1,100 votes two years ­later in a disputed election that required President Rutherford B. Hayes to end the military presence in the state in 1877, effectively bringing Reconstruction to a close. Although Chamberlain was “a northerner and a good reconstruction gov[ernor],” he came to regret his support for the effort. Smith remembered that controversial campaign, claiming that the “legislature exploited [the] negro vote” and wasted their money spent in the capitol on “good cigars, wine, and yella girls.”33 Smith also recalled the suppression of African American suffrage: “To intimidate voters, a red shirt brigade. On election day, n—­—­s lined up, heard noise, and saw red shirts in the distance.” It is unknown ­whether the racial slur was Smith’s word choice or Kallen’s. In his diary, Kallen mimicked Smith’s words, delivered in U ­ ncle Remus dialect: “I run massa, like de debble come catch and I stop when I ­can’t see he tail. In de wattah. Ah had red publican ticket what I done put into box, but he come yaller demo­crat.” Smith then cursed Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, and Thaddeus Stevens. Kallen thought “the speech was in bad taste, but it made ‘reconstruction’ live before us. By far the most real t­ hing of the eve­ning.”34 In 1913 Kallen began a reconstruction of his own by positing a highly unorthodox idea. Long fascinated by the intersection of cultures, he turned his

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gaze to the ancient world. He ­imagined the biblical book of Job had been influenced by Greek drama, written by an ancient Israelite who had encountered Greek culture through a connection in Babylon or somewhere along the Mediterranean. No evidence exists to support this position, and biblical scholar Morris Jastrow Jr. ­later declared it “ingenious but entirely beside the mark.”35 Kallen believed it, though, so much so that he reconstructed the book of Job as he believed its author originally intended, as a drama. Actors at the University of Wisconsin put on The Tragedy of Job that year, with Kallen in the titular role delivering “despairing cadences.” His costar Howard Mumford Jones, who played Job’s friend Bildad the Shuhite, lamented the excess of speeches and paucity of “action in the drama” and was disappointed in the production.36 Nonetheless, the play spread to other campuses, occasionally performed by students in the Menorah Socie­ties. In 1918 Kallen published the text, along with his own lengthy essay on the subject, as The Book of Job as Greek Tragedy. The text reveals Kallen’s obsession with ethnic mixing. He argues that Job, one of the Bible’s greatest books and best example of the spirit of Hebraism, actually emerged as a hybrid work. The Jewish and Greek cultures interacted to produce a masterpiece. The blending of ­these two traditions brought the world the book of Job; neither in isolation could have produced it. This obsession with cultural mixture resembled a similar belief held by Locke. Locke’s high school article on the Alhambra, his essay on Rabbi Ibn Ezra, and the emphasis in his post-­Oxford speeches on Black ­people in the United States using the instruments of Western civilization to enhance their own African heritage all celebrate cross-­cultural exchange. The Menorah proj­ ect had the same goal, using the tools of modernity to bring Hebraism to life in the Diaspora and in Palestine. Kallen and Locke ­were on the same page. This convergence became stronger when Kallen returned his attention to the topics of immigration, nativism, and the melting pot. Although he would not use the term cultural pluralism in print ­until 1924, his writing in the 1910s elucidated the idea that became cultural pluralism. He did not advance this vision particularly clearly. He offered no concrete policy proposals, no new laws or statutes, no formula for organ­izing immigrant life. Instead, he offered abstract meta­phors and idealistic rhe­toric. The vagueness of Kallen’s speech reflected an inherent difficulty with immigration prob­lems of that era. Intellectuals w ­ ere often short on specifics. Kallen had thus far confined his analy­sis to the Jewish question. With the outbreak of the First World War, he globalized and Americanized his Zionist vision of cultural pluralism. In his early Zionist writings, the Jews of Palestine gifted Hebraism to world civilization. In his pluralist essays, the Jews of

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the United States contributed Hebraism to the country, just as other ­peoples contributed their cultures. Kallen began this intellectual leap in a 1914 article he submitted to the Nation. When it rejected the piece, Kallen sent it to the Maccabaean, which published it in its final issue that year. In the essay, Kallen asserted that the strength of the modern, Western world lay “in the conservation and harmonious development of differences of national type.” He took the countries of Eu­rope as models b­ ecause they formed “an international mosaic . . . ​developed by the harmonious and discordant contacts of ­these nations.”37 As in his 1910 essay “Judaism, Hebraism, Zionism,” Kallen used a musical meta­phor and placed Zionism within this Eu­ro­pean context. “In the concert of nationalities whose reciprocally interacting cultures make up the symphony of civilization, the Jewish p­ eople are recorded as having played a distinct part. The Hebraic note which has been an expression of their corporate life has given to the history of Eu­rope an unquestionable coloring, for the possession of which that history is claimed to be spiritually the richer.”38 Substitute the word “Amer­ i­ca” for “Eu­rope” and Kallen’s doctrine of cultural pluralism emerges. Kallen had come a long way from the Americanizing Jew attempting to cast off his origins at the turn of the c­ entury. He came to cultural pluralism by blending Zionism with Americanism. He advanced this idea in his 1915 article in the Nation, “Democracy versus the Melting Pot,” penned as a response to his Wisconsin colleague E. A. Ross’s 1914 nativist book The Old World in the New. Ross attacked Jews, Italians, and other immigrants, employing prejudicial ste­reo­types and warning of the risk foreigners brought to white Protestant Americans. Kallen vehemently opposed Ross’s xenophobia. An immigrant himself, he staunchly supported immigrant rights. But Kallen’s essay also took on Zangwill’s 1908 play, The Melting Pot, which offered support for immigrants but which many interpreted as a paean to assimilation. In “Democracy versus the Melting Pot” Kallen argued that supporters of assimilation and Americanization behaved like British nationalists. To them, “Americanization” meant “the adoption of En­glish speech, of American clothes and manners, of the American attitude in politics.” It also implied “the fusion of the vari­ous bloods, and a transmutation by ‘the miracle of assimilation’ of Jews, Slavs, Poles, Frenchmen, Germans, Hindus, Scandinavians into beings similar in background, tradition, outlook, and spirit to the descendants of the British colonists, the ‘Anglo-­Saxon’ stock.”39 Kallen’s inclusion of “Hindus” reflected his positive experience with Indians at Oxford and elsewhere. He believed Hindus, a nonwhite, non–­Judeo-­Christian group, had something to contribute to American civilization. He did not want them to assimilate and ­water down that contribution.

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Kallen rejected biological miscegenation as impossible. Throughout history, “no new ethnic types have originated,” and “breeding” provides no guarantee of “the disappearance of the old types in ­favor of the new” but only the creation of “a new type, if it succeeds in surviving,” supplementing the previous ones. “Biologically, life does not unify; biologically, life diversifies; and it is sheer ignorance to apply social analogies to biological pro­cesses.”40 This dismissal of Herbert Spencer’s social Darwinism was coupled with an assertion of an almost biological durability to ethnic identity. “Men may change their clothes, their politics, their wives, their religions, their . . . : they cannot change their grand­fathers. Jews or Poles or Anglo-­Saxons, in order to cease being Jews or Poles or Anglo-­Saxons, would have to cease to be.”41 Yet in other passages, Kallen implicitly argued that while one could not change one’s grand­father, one could betray the legacy of one’s grand­father. He criticized writers Edward Steiner and Mary Antin, the latter his friend, for being “intermarried, assimilated even in religion,” as both Steiner and Antin left Judaism. He mocked them for being “more excessively self-­consciously American than the Americans.” Like the assimilated German Jews who aspired to be more German than the Germans, Steiner and Antin went to ­great lengths to renounce, if not deny, their Jewish heritage. Kallen criticized their voluntary decision to abandon their heritage. He recognized this rejection as a choice. They could not change their grand­fathers, but they could actively decide to become something their grand­fathers would abhor.42 Similarly, Kallen was Jewish like his parents and grandparents before him, but while they had been deeply religious Orthodox Jews, he became a secular atheist or agnostic, a Zionist and Hebraist who had no religious faith and kept few if any Jewish rituals. For Kallen, religion was a minor, fungible characteristic easily discarded. Culture, however, consisting of language, lit­er­a­ ture, art, and a sense of communal identity and ethnic nationalism, mattered greatly. Using the meta­phor of an orchestra, Kallen called for cultural preservation and autonomy, united loosely through a language of public socialization and commerce, En­glish, and an adherence to democracy. T ­ hese cultures would operate in harmony to create “the symphony of civilization.” He ­imagined a society constructed as a “federal republic,” what he called “a democracy of nationalities, cooperating voluntarily and autonomously in the enterprise of self-­realization through the perfection of men according to their kind.”43 While “the common language” of this republic would be En­glish, each national group would communicate “its emotional and voluntary life in its own language, in its own inevitable aesthetic and intellectual forms.” The politics and economics of the state would secure a “foundation and background for

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the realization of the distinctive individuality of each natio that composes it.” To Kallen, “American civilization” meant “the perfection of the cooperative harmonies of ‘Eu­ro­pean civilization,’ the waste, the squalor, and the distress of Eu­rope being eliminated—­a multiplicity in a unity, an orchestration of mankind.”44 Doubling down on the musical meta­phor, Kallen elaborated, “As in an orchestra, ­every type of instrument has its specific timbre and tonality, founded in its substance and form; as e­ very type has its appropriate theme and melody in the w ­ hole symphony, so in society each ethnic group is the natu­ral instrument, its spirit and culture are its theme and melody, and the harmony and dissonances and discords of them all make the symphony of civilization.”45 He noted one difference between his meta­phor and the real­ity of ethnic diversity: “A musical symphony is written before it is played; in the symphony of civilization the playing is the writing, so that t­ here is nothing so fixed and inevitable about its progressions as in ­music, so that within the limits set by nature they may vary at ­will, and the range and variety of the harmonies may become wider and richer and more beautiful.”46 With t­ hese words, Kallen repudiated not only the prejudiced nativism of Ross but also the assimilationist ideology attributed to Zangwill’s melting pot. In employing the language of a “federal republic,” Kallen borrowed from his mentor William James’s 1909 book, A Pluralistic Universe. He did not merely support the desire of immigrants to maintain their cultures on princi­ple, he also thought this cultural retention would bring about the best pos­si­ble outcome for the United States. Cultural pluralism honored the country’s demo­ cratic princi­ples more than nativism, and more than the melting pot. In 1915 this argument proved radical, even revolutionary. Opinions on his Nation article ­were mixed. In a March 31, 1915, letter, Kallen’s friend and fellow pragmatist phi­los­o­pher John Dewey admitted to being “much interested” in the article, but he had some concerns with the pluralistic formulation. Of En­glish and Flemish extraction, Dewey declared his desire to “see this country American,” which to him meant reducing the En­glish tradition to “a strain along with the o ­ thers.”47 He accepted the notion of a plurality of cultures in the United States. His concern lay with how t­hese cultures would interact. Dewey agreed with Kallen’s “orchestra idea, but upon condition we r­ eally get a symphony and not a lot of dif­fer­ent instruments playing si­mul­ta­neously.” While he had ­little use for “the melting pot meta­phor,” Dewey believed “genuine assimilation to one another—­not to Anglo-­Saxondom—­seems to be essential to an Amer­i­ca.” Each ethnic group “should maintain its distinctive literary and artistic traditions,” with the goal of having “more to contribute

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to o ­ thers.” Dewey worried about “an implication of segregation geo­g raph­i­ cal and other­wise” in Kallen’s schema. “That we should recognize the segregation that undoubtedly exists is requisite, but in order that it may not be fastened upon us.”48 Kallen would not have approved of ethnic segregation of the kind Dewey described in his letter. He enjoyed interacting with diverse groups of p­ eople and, despite his prejudices, fought against efforts to exclude Locke at Oxford. Dewey wanted each culture to “maintain its distinctive literary and artistic traditions” so they could enhance the ­whole. Kallen wanted the same ­thing. He believed that cultures should be preserved only if they had something to contribute. Kallen laced his pluralism with pragmatist elitism. ­There is no rec­ord of Kallen’s response, but in a subsequent letter, Dewey offered his support “in behalf of the relief of the Jews” suffering during the world war. He then observed, “I d­ on’t think I disagree about the melting point [sic] ­matter.” Rather, he believed that “the more dif­fer­ent groups in the past (dif­fer­ent merely ­because of isolation) interact the greater is the probability that genuinely individual reactions w ­ ill get called out and get a footing.” “That kind of assimilation to one another” required an individualist ethos. Dewey recognized Kallen’s fear “in underestimating the value of the past and its traditions” but felt that history “has such a dead hand over us, that I think it is the ­factor in the pre­sent situation which may take care of itself—­provided we ­really keep an eye on the possibilities of the ­f uture and ­don’t just tear up and then drift.”49 Dewey agreed with Kallen’s formulation but was more invested in fostering group interaction than group preservation. He came from the Anglo-­ Protestant majority in the United States. He had l­ittle interest in his mostly En­glish heritage and only a minor interest in his Flemish roots. Immigrants, to Dewey, brought ­g reat potential for sharing and mixing their cultures and enhancing his own. He hoped for “individual reactions” that would emerge from ­these encounters, which would lead to an “adequate individualism,” the healthy creation of new American identities. He feared the “dead hand” of history stifling growth but also worried that without cultural traditions as an anchor, Americans would be set adrift.50 Kallen’s response may have warned of the dangers of abandoning the immigrant past and losing that culture. As he had experienced anti-­Semitic persecution and the seductive lure of complete assimilation, Kallen’s primary goal lay in the establishment of strong ethnic communities that could both fight discrimination and preserve culture in the face of American temptations. Kallen and Dewey had dif­fer­ent priorities, but their visions w ­ ere more similar than dif­fer­ent. Kallen too hated the “dead hand” of tradition, having abandoned

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his ­father’s Orthodox Judaism. But he feared that ­there would be no more Jews left to advance their brilliant Hebraic culture in Zion and the United States. Kallen never endorsed ethnic segregation in the United States. Jim Crow was anathema to him. Although he barely addressed African Americans in “Democracy versus the Melting Pot,” his private writing to friend and former student Marvin Lowenthal sheds some light on the ­matter. In an undated letter, prob­ably from 1917 or 1918, Kallen warned that some sentiments driving the American war effort w ­ ere “race antagonisms g­ oing back to the difficulty of the melting-­pot.” White American Protestants feared the specter of further immigration but “­couldn’t raise a race issue with white men as they had with black,” so they in­ven­ted “the melting pot.” The war liberated enduring prejudices “and made them respectable,” with cries of “100% American! Enemies in our own gate!”51 In public and private, Kallen criticized nativist bigotry and the melting pot, but his solution, cultural pluralism, remained vague. In Culture and Democracy in the United States, he resisted any form of legalized segregation and never called for “special territorial sovereignties or institutions.”52 He believed in communal organ­izations, like the Menorah Association or the Federation of American Zionists, allowed by the state but not officially mandated or supported by it. Hebraism in the United States would not be government sponsored. Kallen’s Zionism, however, had both po­liti­cal and cultural objectives. Jews in Palestine needed territorial sovereignty, po­liti­cal institutions, and state-­ supported Hebraic cultural organ­izations. They could live fully and completely as Jews. Jews in the United States needed hybrid cultural continuity, as Jews and as Americans. Kallen believed Dewey wanted the same t­ hing, even though Dewey’s “sense of the solidity and continuity of the ethnic groups was much weaker” than Kallen’s.53 Both believed in hyphenation, in dual identities, and in resisting total assimilation. Dewey, like Kallen, contributed to the Menorah Journal and supported the progressive Zionist proj­ect. He likely supported Kallen’s involvement with the American Jewish Congress, founded in November 1918 as a counterweight to the stodgy and elitist American Jewish Committee, one more committed to democracy, progressivism, and Zionism. Pragmatism, ­whether of the Deweyian or Jamesian variety, led Kallen to a more flexible approach to Zionism during the First World War. With deadly conflict raging in Eu­rope but not the United States, Kallen did not believe the Jewish state needed to be entirely in­de­pen­dent. In conversations with his friend Sir Alfred Zimmern, a British scholar and internationalist, and a devout Christian of Jewish ancestry, Kallen explored the idea of including the Jewish state in a larger federation. In a March 1918 letter to Zimmern, Kallen wrote,

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“I want as nearly as pos­si­ble to think out a modus vivendi which ­will lead to an ultimate United States of Asia Minor, involving the Jews, Arabs, Armenians, ­etc. ­under international or British guarantee.”54 Kallen believed that the United States had something to teach Zion as well. In the same vein, Kallen elucidated a more flexible vision of a cultural pluralism in his Zionist writings ­after the First World War. In his 1921 book, Zionism and World Politics, he asserted that improving Arab-­Jewish relations “required a unity established through a meeting of the minds, an interchange of intellectual culture, a cooperation in the public enterprises necessary to the smooth ­going and the progressive enrichment of the daily life of the two ­peoples.” As a concrete step in that direction, Kallen advised that the anticipated Hebrew University swiftly create “a Department of Arabic Life and Letters.” He believed Jews and Arabs should attend integrated schools, in Palestine and across the Arab world, “and invite reciprocity.”55 Kallen insisted that “cultural communion must be coupled with economic cooperation,” with the aim to “raise the standard of living of the Palestinian fellah,” a pro­cess he believed already u ­ nder way with the “mere existence of the Jewish colonies.” He hoped Zionist settlement would liberate them from “the exploitation” they suffered from greedy Arab landlords and moneylending. Like many other Zionists, he believed Jews would make life better for every­one in Palestine in the economic realm by making the literal and meta­ phorical desert bloom. In his mind, all this “must be accomplished not by coercion but by contagion,” the latter an only slightly less ominous word choice.56 This vision was a colonialist version of cultural pluralism. Still, Kallen’s emphasis on cultural development through Arab-­Jewish interaction in Palestine is striking: “The fellah of Palestine is in a case of arrested development and enforced degradation typical of the ­whole Arabic-­speaking and Mohammedan world.” Kallen characterized the Palestinian Arab “cultural level” as “barbarous,” stuck on “immemorial precepts, prescriptions, and taboos” that kept them mired in a backward state. As Jews provided “ave­nues t­oward culture and occidentalism,” Arabs would follow down the path to modernity. This would lead to, “within Palestine, the assimilation to one another of Jew and Arab, and on the Eu­ro­pean level of life and culture,” and perhaps even a “confederation of the ­peoples of Asia Minor,” a culturally pluralist vision reminiscent of the symphony of civilization he ­imagined for the United States.57 Kallen’s assessment of Arabs and Arab culture was similar to his assessment of African Americans and Black culture. Their culture was at a low level but could be improved, and they could be redeemed with enough exposure to white Eu­ro­pean civilization, of which Jews formed an integral part. Despite Arab cultural deficiencies, Jews had something to gain from exposure to primitive Arab

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culture. ­After fi­nally visiting Palestine, he noted in his 1929 book, Frontiers of Hope, “The halutzim are the rivals of the Arabs for the hewing of wood and drawing of ­water,”58 reminiscent of the assistance Native Americans provided to Eu­ro­pean colonists hundreds of years ­earlier. In Kallen’s paternalistic framework, the African, like the Arab and Native American, could be saved. Even in their lowly cultural state, individuals among them could impress. In his own mind, Kallen had not yet encountered such an Arab. But he had proof about African Americans. Locke was such a man. Meanwhile, Locke, now a professor at Howard, was developing his own ideas about cultural pluralism and reciprocity, which would expand and elaborate on t­ hose of Kallen. ­ fter touring the South with Booker T. Washington, Locke began teaching at A Howard University in 1912. He taught ­there for nearly four de­cades. During his tenure at the United States’ most prestigious historically Black college or university, Locke worked with some of the greatest African American intellectuals of the twentieth ­century, including Kelly Miller, Ralph Bunche, E. Franklin Frazier, and Abram Harris. Although Locke did not write many philosophical works, he produced significant cultural writings, none greater than the volume he edited in 1925, the bible of the Harlem Re­nais­sance known as The New Negro. That book came out the year a­ fter Kallen had coined the term cultural pluralism in print. In leading the Harlem Re­nais­sance, Locke developed his own version of cultural pluralism, asserting the strength and vitality of the Black “race tradition” in the form of aesthetic achievement. But the New Negro movement was also about interacting with surrounding cultures. Locke’s major expressions of Black cultural nationalism in The New Negro demonstrate the influence of Kallen’s friendship, as well as his friendships with diverse classmates in the Oxford Cosmopolitan Club. The New Negro movement was a proj­ect of racial uplift, but it was also about creating a level cultural playing field where ­people of dif­fer­ent races could enter into productive intellectual friendships. Long before he compiled The New Negro, Locke worked through his own philosophy of race and culture. A few months a­ fter the Nation published Kallen’s “Democracy versus the Melting Pot” in February 1915, Locke expounded his version of cultural pluralism in a series of speeches at Howard entitled “Race Contacts and Interracial Relations.” In ­these talks, Locke drew on his own experiences with elite education and Franz Boas’s ideas about race and culture. Boas, a German Jewish professor at Columbia and a founding ­father of the modern discipline of anthropology, had been one of the first thinkers to posit

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the existence of many distinct cultures, as opposed to one cultural continuum from barbarism to civilization. He also rejected the notion of biological races, arguing instead that most racial groups could be better described as cultural ones and that a given group’s be­hav­ior stemmed from its history and geography rather than its biology. Locke embraced this cultural definition of race. To him, race existed as nothing more than a “theory of culture stages and of social evolution,” or more plainly, “the historical rec­ord of success or failure of an ethnic group.”59 He used this standard to evaluate African Americans and Jews. Locke offered prescriptive advice to ethnic groups. Advancing a via media between assimilation and ethnic self-­segregation, he advocated acculturation to the common “civilization type,” along with a moderate “race pride or secondary race consciousness.”60 In his civilizationist rhe­toric, the two forces complemented each other. Locke brought them together using the language of loyalty, harking back to the philosophy of his and Kallen’s teacher Josiah Royce. “The group needs . . . ​to get a right conception of itself, and it can only do that through the stimulation of pride in itself,” Locke remarked. “Pride in itself is race pride, and race pride seems a rather dif­fer­ent loyalty from the larger loyalty to the joint or common civilization type.” Despite this apparent paradox, Locke believed that “through a doctrine of race solidarity and race culture, you r­ eally accelerate and stimulate the alien group to a rather more rapid assimilation of the social culture, the general social culture, than would be other­wise pos­si­ble.”61 Locke and Kallen articulated strikingly similar ideas at nearly the same time. Both argued for a common social fabric to go along with cultural diversity, and both believed that cultural diversity strengthened that social fabric. The differences in their thought ­were minor or semantic, the commonalities crucial and comprehensive. Locke referred to Kallen in his talk, although not by name. He mentioned “some correspondence with a friend of mine, now at the University of Wisconsin.” The friend was Kallen. None of that correspondence has survived. That Locke called Kallen a friend affirms that he considered Kallen a peer rather than a teacher. Locke did not yet have his doctorate, but he had studied at Oxford and Berlin and had a teaching appointment at Howard, a post of similar rank to that of Kallen’s at Wisconsin. It also affirms that Kallen and Locke maintained contact through the spring of 1915.62 The correspondence dealt with intermarriage. Locke asked Kallen to gauge “the relative strength of denominational feeling and race feeling” among Jews. He referenced Kallen’s contention that Orthodox Jews could never intermarry and remain Orthodox and that Judaism as a religious faith proved even stronger than Judaism as a secular “race feeling.” Locke referred to “Anglican” Jews

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(he prob­ably meant Reform Jews) who displayed more openness to intermarriage. He mused about modern anti-­Semitism, referring specifically to Rus­ sia, but did not specify ­whether he expressed his own sentiments or Kallen’s.63 Although critical of intermarriage, Kallen recognized it as a distinct if rare possibility, particularly for secular Jews such as himself. His rhe­toric about not being able to change one’s grand­father was more moderate than it appeared. Kallen offered a prescriptive rather than descriptive message. Jews and other immigrants could determine their c­ hildren’s grandparents by selecting a par­ tic­ul­ar partner; he hoped that they would choose someone within their own group, and advised that they do so. Locke was less concerned with intermarriage between Black and white ­people, still a crime in many states in 1915 and taboo throughout the country. What­ever their views on t­ hese topics, the two men had not yet lost touch. Kallen sent a postcard to Locke, postmarked January 8, 1916, from Madison, Wisconsin, to Washington, DC, with this message: “Cordial thanks for your greetings, and the same to you, a thousand times. Do let me hear from you. Yours ever, H.M. Kallen.”64 It would be the last correspondence between them for nearly twenty years. ­ fter the First World War, with the triumph of the Bolshevik revolution, A both Kallen and Locke began a mild drift t­ oward radicalism. Although neither was a Marxist, both w ­ ere progressive and somewhat sympathetic to socialism. Even into the early 1930s, Kallen had nice t­ hings to say about Soviet Rus­sia. But in the years following the First World War, he remained fixated on ethnicity. Kallen had long understood Zionism as a progressive force, and he came to see other national movements in a similar light. His controversial stances usually came in print. An able public speaker, shortly a­ fter the war’s conclusion, he took to a grander and more surprising stage to deliver a radical message rooted in pluralism. On January 6, 1919, at Car­ne­g ie Hall, he addressed the annual meeting of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored ­People (NAACP). He spoke alongside famous African American author James Weldon Johnson, and the event concluded with the reading of remarks on “the ­future of Africa” by W. E. B. Du Bois, who could not attend the meeting. The NAACP ­later compiled Kallen’s and Johnson’s speeches in a pamphlet called Africa in the World Democracy. Kallen began by discussing Eu­ro­pean colonists’ mistreatment and exploitation of native Africans, whom he lumped among the “weaker ­peoples of the world.” He argued for the creation of a league of nations. That league would appoint a commission, which should include some Africans, to protect “the

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common man who is black and the common man who is white,” to ensure laborers across the globe would not be exploited. Invoking the American Declaration of In­de­pen­dence, he noted that “all men, regardless of creed or color,” possessed equal rights. It took a civil war to establish that princi­ple in the United States, so that all men “are at least legally ­free and equal,” though true equality had not yet been achieved. Africa, as an “integral part of the world,” deserved the exact same “consideration and care” as Eu­rope and the United States. If the United States failed to deliver on this promise, Kallen argued, they would have fought the world war “in vain.” He hoped the new league of nations would protect the “hope and security of the black man in Africa no less than of the white man in Eu­rope.” This would be the first step in reparations for the “injustice” inflicted “upon the black man at the hands of the white, from the outset of his cruel history.”65 In this text on Africa, Kallen asserted the equality of the races. This implies that race was less significant for him than culture. Race, even if indicative of biological difference, did not necessitate unequal treatment. Culture, meanwhile, represented not the basis on which to treat dif­fer­ent groups but rather the content of t­ hose groups’ contributions to the United States, or in this case, the world. For Kallen, racial discrimination involved issues of economic justice. Cultural discrimination, while sometimes related to the economy, had more to do with aesthetics. Africa’s place in the “world democracy,” according to Kallen, should be one of equality. Of Africa’s cultural contributions, he made no mention. Kallen’s presence at this event suggests his willingness, and perhaps eagerness, to participate in a program put on by and for African Americans. It negated any notion of segregation unfairly imputed to his vision of cultural pluralism. In Kallen’s ideal world, German-­born Zionist Jews ­were perfectly appropriate speakers for the NAACP. Who invited Kallen to speak, and how his speech was received, remains unknown. For Kallen, cultural pluralism represented a radical path forward, at once more pragmatic, more egalitarian, and more liberationist than the Bolshevik revolution. In the 1920s Kallen became involved with the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of Amer­i­ca, a u ­ nion led by Sidney Hillman that counted many immigrant Jews among its members. The ­union began and was headquartered in New York but hoped to spread across the country. In 1923 Kallen was helping with their efforts to or­ga­nize workers in Pittsburgh. As he wrote to his friend Jacob Billikopf, one difficulty was the “Negroes displacing the whites” in the garment industry. “The Negroes have to be or­ga­nized and to or­ga­nize them means to overcome race prejudice among our own ­people.” Kallen hoped Billikopf could provide contacts in Pittsburgh “for co-­operation and advice, particularly with re­spect to the ­handling of the Negro prob­lem.” Billikopf suggested Abraham

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Epstein, who in 1918 had “made quite a study of the negro prob­lem in Pittsburgh” and was likely “in touch with negro leaders,” but Kallen rejected this suggestion.66 He remained squarely on the progressive end of American politics, sympathetic to the welfare state but wary of authoritarianism. He preferred ­unions and consumer cooperatives to government, although he had no use for anarchism. Locke’s slight radicalism emerged in a letter to Francis Wylie, the Oxford University supervisor of the Rhodes Trust while Locke was t­here.67 Initially a Locke supporter, he got skittish when racist southern Rhodes Scholars protested Locke’s presence, and eventually became disappointed in Locke’s per­ for­mance at Oxford. He hid t­ hese sentiments effectively enough from Locke that the two maintained occasional friendly correspondence, and Locke even admitted to feeling an “obligation” to return to ­England and fi­nally “take the Oxford degree.”68 In that same letter from 1919 or 1920, Locke wrote to Wylie about being a professor at Howard. He complained of his “frail health,” which left him at “odd parity” with his seventy-­year-­old ­mother, yet he enjoyed their companionship “in cheerful invalidism,” as they shepherded each other “to the repair shop.” Locke had grown weary of “race work,” with all the “­running about involved,” and he lamented the “standard of leadership” as far too “demagogic.”69 Locke observed since Booker T. Washington’s death in 1916 a “tremendous” and “desirable” backlash against his ideas of gradualism and accommodationism. Du Bois, once on the “extreme left,” was now “outflanked by more extreme radicalism” and forced to the center. “Personally, I welcome the radicalism—­ though I do not share it,” Locke wrote to Wylie, b­ ecause he took it as “inevitable” and “an accelerator of the social movement.” Locke admitted that his own position resembled the “cowardice of the man who could stand socialism but not the socialists.” Yet he felt it correct given his c­ areer. “As an educator, t­ here is a very proper refuge in the younger generation and the tempered idealism and unpartisan Socraticism upon which it is right to bring them up.”70 Although Locke held radical sympathies and progressive po­liti­cal views, his temperament was moderate, or even conservative. He strove to be objective but progressive, to guide idealism rather than quash it or allow it to run unfettered. He was on his way to achieving equilibrium between scholar and activist, progressive and radical, intellectual and educator. He had recently converted to the Baha’i faith, emphasizing the unity of humankind while respecting diversity. Secure in his c­ areer at Howard, Locke felt the freedom to explore a new religion and a new politics. That “tempered” radicalism was rooted in the early civil rights movement, with the goal of improving the lives

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of African Americans. Unlike universalist Marxism, Locke’s radicalism enhanced his commitment to cultural pluralism. Though only mild radicals, Kallen and Locke saw their cultural pluralisms as thoroughly modern. They harked back to their cultures’ ancient pasts in order to create something new. Both also highlighted education. Even before he left Oxford, Locke envisioned himself as a ­f uture president of Howard, which he hoped would become “the first ­g reat Cosmopolitan university.”71 Outside the university, Locke’s program for African Americans also called for the creation of a movement. While he insisted that Black p­ eople preserve their history—­hence the Negro Historical Society—he saw American civilization, and Western civilization more broadly, as a tool for African Americans to create a high culture. It would be a culture facilitated through “acquisition,” but one they could call their own, develop further, and express proudly to ­others. He emphasized pragmatism, a forward-­looking philosophy, even as he sought to reclaim an ancestral Black heritage. To Locke, any effort to reconstruct and preserve African American history required a commitment to “racial consciousness” and “the development of a sense for corporate interests and destinies.”72 Unlocking the past opened the door to the ­f uture. In emphasizing culture, Locke deviated slightly from Kallen. For Kallen, culture could never be enough. He repudiated Ahad Ha’am’s cultural Zionism. His Zionist vision endorsed po­liti­cal action and called for Jewish statehood in Palestine. Or­ga­nized national education served an American means to a Palestinian end, paving the road to a nation-­state in Zion. Locke, meanwhile, placed cultural development at the center of his program. For Kallen, culture justified po­liti­cal action. For Locke, culture was po­liti­cal action. When speaking to the Negro Historical Socie­ties with “academic intentions,” he nevertheless made a “frank demand that it s­ hall become increasingly more honorable and meaningful to be a Negro.”73 ­Behind this pragmatism lay an impor­tant ideological distinction, revealing Locke’s nationalism as cultural rather than po­liti­cal. In his speeches to the Negro Historical Socie­ties, Locke anticipated Kallen’s framework for cultural pluralism. He prophesied that “though the nation may remain indivisible as it thinks it is, the time is coming which ­will contain many distinct and mutually respecting bodies of tradition divergent and tolerant enough to make even a racial distinction such as ours seem a social heritage worthy of recognition and perpetuation.”74 He noted that the United States “cannot stand for the amalgamation of cultures” and that “­behind the traditional uniformities of American life and thought . . . ​certain racial traits and traditions [are] in [the] pro­cess of development and assertion.”75 Locke wanted Black p­ eople in the United States to assert themselves too. He saw the African American community as an “experiment in the land of

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experiment,” proving a potential solution to a “­great culture prob­lem” and also to a “­g reat American prob­lem”—­namely, ­whether “a race can exist within a nation without disrupting the nation or contradicting itself.”76 By invoking the language of experiment, he signaled his pragmatism. In 1925, with the publication of The New Negro, Locke’s ­great experiment would fi­nally be ­under way, with “Harlem,” not Africa, as “the home of the Negro’s ‘Zionism.’ ”77 This was the height of Locke’s influence. With the death of Washington in 1916, Du Bois had become the single most impor­tant African American leader in the United States. Du Bois’s method of pursuing civil and po­liti­cal rights through the efforts of a talented tenth appealed to Locke’s intellectual sophistication, although Locke remained more aesthete than activist. With his emphasis on culture and aesthetics, Locke is sometimes cast as almost apo­liti­cal. This is a m ­ istake. Despite his elitist sensibilities, he was always po­liti­cally progressive. In the 1930s he became an adamant supporter of the New Deal. He advocated egalitarian economic policies and, beyond his teaching at Howard, championed adult education within the African American community. Elite culture belonged to all who could use it, regardless of class. Nonetheless, he could never quite shake the elitist label, and with good reason. Despite his lyrical and accessible style of writing and speech, the content that interested him most, philosophy and aesthetics, did not appeal to the broadest of audiences. This tendency t­ oward elitism and high culture marked The New Negro. The compilation consisted of essays, short fiction, and poems from some of the preeminent African American intellectuals and artists from the period, including Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, Bruce Nugent, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, James Weldon Johnson, Jessie Fauset, Arthur Huff Fauset, Kelly Miller, Arturo Schomburg, Walter White, William Stanley Braithwaite, E. Franklin Frazier, and Du Bois, as well as white academics and authors like Melville Herskovitz and Carl Van Vechten. Almost immediately, some of Locke’s contemporaries criticized him as an elitist based on this compilation. In their column in the Messenger, “Shafts and Darts,” Black journalists George Schuyler and Theo­philus Lewis called Locke the “high priest of intellectual snobbocracy” and honored Locke with the newspaper’s monthly award, an “elegantly embossed and beautifully lacquered dill pickle.”78 In their mockery, Schuyler and other elites indicated their doubt about the practicality of Locke’s program. The charge of elitism may have also been associated with the known or suspected homo­sexuality of the New Negro movement’s male participants, including Locke, McKay, Hughes, Cullen, and Nugent. As Henry Louis Gates Jr. observes, the Harlem Re­nais­sance was “surely as gay as it was black, not that

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it was exclusively ­either of ­these.” The contribution of gay men to the Harlem Re­nais­sance cannot be overstated, especially in terms of explorations of the intersection between race and sexuality.79 As George Chauncey notes, many New Yorkers in the 1920s regarded Harlem as the city’s “most exciting center of gay life.” It was a gay space where Black and white could comingle. At the same time, homo­sexuality was still considered abnormal and deviant. While working-­class “fairies,” as effeminate gay men w ­ ere known, often flaunted their sexuality, in elite circles gay identity was usually hidden and suppressed. Harlem’s gay nightlife may have contributed to charges of de­cadence directed t­ oward the re­nais­sance, and Locke’s widely suspected gay lifestyle could not have helped his movement’s broader reputation.80 At the same time, Locke’s idea of homo­sexuality was much more personal, and more intimate, than the flamboyance he found in gay Harlem in the 1920s. As Jeffrey Stewart notes, while Locke did visit Harlem’s new gay bars and clubs in order to “meet young men,” he did not find “­these random sexual encounters” to be “emotionally satisfying nor creatively stimulating.” Locke was “looking for love” with an intellectual muse, someone who would fit in with his peers at Harvard or Oxford or Howard, or whom he could champion during the New Negro movement, like Hughes or Cullen.81 Locke’s sexuality was not so much secret as it was private, and his preference for intimacy over extroversion reflected his moderate temperament. His disdain for the more flamboyant side of 1920s gay life, in Harlem or elsewhere, may have been a product of his elitism. That elitism and temperament may have caused Locke to underestimate the largest and most significant mass movement among Black Americans in the 1920s—­namely, Garveyism, the movement led by Jamaican activist Marcus Garvey (1887–1940) to bring Black p­ eople in the United States to Africa.82 Nonetheless, Locke’s 1924 essay “Apropos of Africa” applauded Garveyism not for inciting Black p­ eople to move back to Africa but for having “stirred the race mind to the depths with the idea of large-­scale cooperation between the variously separated branches of the Negro ­peoples.”83 In “The New Negro,” Locke wrote that “Garveyism may be a transient, if spectacular phenomenon, but the pos­si­ble role of the American Negro in the ­f uture development of Africa is one of the most constructive and universally helpful missions that any modern p­ eople can lay claim to.” Participating in this cause gave “the Negro valuable group incentives, as well as increased prestige at home and abroad.”84 Though dismissive of Marcus Garvey, Locke held equally nationalist aims. His was a cultural, rather than po­liti­cal, nationalism. In the realm of politics,

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he was a liberal and a progressive, promoting equality, ­unions, and the welfare state, all universal in their reach and application. While Locke believed that “our greatest rehabilitation may possibly come through such channels,” he nonetheless thought that “for the pre­sent, more immediate hope rests in the revaluation by white and black alike of the Negro in terms of his artistic endowments and cultural contributions, past and prospective.”85 Even critics of Locke recognized his accomplishment as a pre­sen­ta­tion of African American cultural achievement and a means of breaking down barriers. As Jonathan Holloway shows, Abram Harris Jr., a Marxist economics professor at Howard with l­ittle patience for racial particularism and even less for Locke, saw some value in the New Negro movement. Harris wrote to his white Marxist friend V. F. Calverton that The New Negro showed “the world b­ ehind the veil, as W.E.B. Du Bois calls it.” Harris hated racial segregation b­ ecause “it makes strangers of p­ eople who by nature and education o ­ ught to associate and become endeared to each other.” Although Harris preferred a class-­ based analy­sis of Black life to a race-­based one, he knew Calverton needed The New Negro ­because “someone had to tell [him] and o ­ thers equally as ignorant of the Negro’s cultural and artistic efforts.”86 Before the Harlem Re­nais­sance reached full bloom, Locke had already seized on the connections between Jews and African Americans, and more specifically, between Zionism and Black nationalism. In “Apropos of Africa,” he noted that “even with the sturdy Jewish sense of patrimony, Zionism has had its difficulties in rekindling the concrete regard for the abandoned fatherland.”87 He clearly admired Jewish nationalism but understood the difficulty in getting assimilated American Jews to care about some far-­off land in the M ­ iddle East. Locke used this essay to advocate for a sustained academic program in African studies in journals and universities, culminating in research trips to Africa, but he also sought po­liti­cal unity among the darker-­skinned ­peoples of the world, from the United States to Liberia to Haiti to Ethiopia to Egypt. In this advocacy, he saw Jews as a model. “The success and strength of the Jew, still very precariously situated in some parts of the world, has been his international scale of organ­ization, promoted first of all by his religion, and latterly through many other channels of cooperative race effort, of which Zionism is only one phase.”88 Locke believed Henry Ford’s phrase “the International Jew” was accurate but misleading and slanderous. Jews became international “by persecution and forced dispersion,” and Black ­people had the same potential. ­Because Jews faced threats everywhere, their “only intelligent safeguard has been international appeal and international organ­ization.” Locke believed that “to relieve pressure in one place very often pressure has to be strategically applied in an-

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other, and the Jewish ­people have become masters in this intelligent and modern strategy of group action.” If all ­peoples sought to develop an “international mind,” Jews simply had “acquired it a ­little in advance of the rest of the world.”89 ­After praising the Jews in his essay on Africa, Locke concluded, “­There is much value to us in this g­ reat example.” He celebrated Jewish internationalism, despite the fact that “Mr. Garvey’s hectic efforts” had led to “no Zionistic hope or intention” among the majority of African Americans. “For protection and mutual development,” Locke insisted, “we must develop the race mind and race interest on an international scale.”90 What Locke admired, more than state-­oriented Zionism, was the international sense of community Jews had created. Through Zionist agencies, but also non-­Zionist organ­izations like the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society or the Alliance Israelite Universelle, Jews had established international networks that provided aid and security but also religious, educational, and cultural ser­vices. Black interests in Africa would be primarily “educational and eventually economic,” but African Americans should also “be keenly interested in the po­liti­ cal fortunes of all African ­peoples.”91 This sounded very similar to the American Zionist movement to which Kallen belonged, rooted in the United States but invested in the cultural, economic, and po­liti­cal development of the Jewish outpost in Palestine. The following year, Locke brought ­these ideas to the Harlem Re­nais­sance. In March 1925 a “Harlem Number” of the magazine the Survey Graphic hit newsstands. It formed the backbone of The New Negro, which was published ­later that year. Locke thus understood “Harlem’s significance” among the vari­ ous centers of Black culture, in the same way that Ahad Ha’am had insisted on the cultural centrality of Palestine to Zionism. Like Ahad Ha’am, Locke envisioned that the more peripheral centers could follow Harlem’s lead to create a “racial awakening” across the globe. Locke explic­itly compared his movement to ­those “in India, in China, in Egypt, Ireland, Rus­sia, Bohemia, Palestine and Mexico,” each site “witnessing the resurgence of a ­people.”92 In The New Negro, references to Jews and Zion abound. In his foreword, Locke wrote that “the New Negro must be seen in the perspective of a New World, and especially of a New Amer­i­ca. Eu­rope seething in a dozen centers with emergent nationalities, Palestine full of a renascent Judaism—­these are no more alive with the progressive forces of our era than the quickened centers of the lives of black folk.”93 In his introductory essay, Locke compared his movement to contemporaneous nationalisms, writing that Harlem is a “race capital” with “the same role to play for the New Negro as Dublin has had for the New Ireland or Prague for the new Czecho­slo­va­k ia.”94 Yet one nationalism in par­tic­u­lar resonated

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most strongly, Zionism. Locke also saw similarities between the international nature of world Jewry and the “growing group consciousness of the dark ­peoples,” which led him to support some degree of Pan-­Africanism. “As with the Jew,” he wrote, “persecution is making the Negro international.”95 Diasporism was a major theme of The New Negro, and one that saw obvious echoes in the Jewish situation. Africa was given a place of importance, as was Harlem, but the Harlem Re­nais­sance was meant to be a global movement. This notion is echoed in Du Bois’s contribution to the volume, “Worlds of Color: The Negro Mind Reaches Out.” The essay was originally an article in the April 1925 issue of Foreign Affairs. In reworking it for The New Negro, Du Bois added a paragraph specifically comparing the conditions of “two international groups—­the Jews and the modern Negroes.”96 Du Bois acknowledged the hybrid nature of Jewish identity, hailing from all over Eu­rope and the ­Middle East. He also highlighted growing Jewish secularism. “Their ancient unity of religious faith is crumbling, but out of it all has come a spiritual unity born of suffering, prejudice and industrial power which can be used and is being used to spread an international consciousness.” When Jews faced anti-­Semitic bigotry, be it in Germany or Poland or the United States, their enemies’ true target was “any spirit that works or seems to work for the u ­ nion of h ­ uman kind.” In the following paragraph, he examined the tiny but growing movement ­toward Pan-­Africanism, clearly seeing the plight of Jews and Black p­ eople as linked.97 Unlike the more overtly po­liti­cal Du Bois, however, Locke argued for a more explic­itly cultural program. This program revealed his elitism but also the importance of establishing cross-­cultural contacts. Although Locke h ­ ere wrote in terms of Black and white ­people, his vision could just as easily be applied to the more par­tic­u­lar groups he already mentioned. He zeroed in on “race relationships in Amer­i­ca,” lamenting “the fact that the more intelligent and representative ele­ments of the two race groups have at so many points got quite out of vital touch with one another.” The prob­lem was not the separation of the races but rather “that they have touched too closely at the unfavorable and too lightly at the favorable levels.” Locke was not speaking of the “inter-­racial councils” of the South, or the contact between “manual laborers” in the North, but rather about “community and business leaders” who remained distant. He believed ­these elite groups needed more interaction. “The only safeguard for mass relations in the ­f uture must be provided in the carefully maintained contacts of the enlightened minorities of both groups.”98 Cultural pluralism, to Locke as to Kallen, began at the top. That is where culture could be exchanged. In his introduction to The New Negro, Locke offered his elitist program, modeled on other cultural nationalisms, especially the cul-

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tural Zionism of Ahad Ha’am. Black culture, like Hebraic culture, would trickle down to the masses and reverberate across the Diaspora. It would thrive in close contact with other cultures, mostly cultures derived from Eu­rope, including Jewish or Hebraic culture. The re­nais­sance could not and would not take place in isolation, but rather surrounded by the symphony of American civilization. Beyond the foreword and introduction, Locke contributed three other essays to The New Negro. The first, “Negro Youth Speaks,” introduced the fiction, poetry, drama, ­music, and historical sections of the volume. Locke celebrated “the Younger Generation,” whom he labeled “the first fruits of the Negro Re­nais­sance.” He attributed “Negro Genius” to the “race-­g ift” that he called a “vast spiritual endowment.” ­Here again Locke demonstrated his Boasian understanding of race as culture, not biology.99 ­These cultural expressions did not entail race propaganda but, in the vein of the Eu­ro­pean Re­nais­sance, featured art for art’s sake. “Racial expression as a conscious motive” became less impor­tant, replaced by a “truer, finer group expression,” b­ ecause “race expression does not need to be deliberate to be vital.” Locke’s movement sought to be “racial . . . ​purely for the sake of art.” Its participants had an “instinctive love and pride of race” and, ­because of the prejudice they faced in the United States, “an ardent re­spect and love for Africa, the motherland.” But unlike Garvey and his followers, they had ­little interest in returning to Africa. Instead, they brought Africa to the United States through artistic achievement. Asserting his elitism and paying lip ser­vice to Du Bois’s notion of the talented tenth, Locke prophesied that “by the evidence and promise of the cultured few, we are at last spiritually ­free, and offer through art an emancipating vision to Amer­i­ca.”100 Locke expounded on this emancipating vision in his essay “The Negro Spirituals.” While critics often rejected “folk art” as genuine art, slave songs had fi­nally received their due. In celebrating African American spirituals, Locke highlighted their Americanness. They existed as hybrid creations, rich with African musical ele­ments, guided by Jewish and Christian liturgy, influenced by American ingredients, and of course inspired by the horrors of ­human bondage and re­sis­tance to ­those horrors. This rich composition led Locke to celebrate them above his more con­temporary Black musical forms—­namely, blues and jazz. Referencing Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk, Locke asserted that spirituals, born of slavery, had only one “historical analogy,” “the spiritual experience of the Jews and the only analogue, the Psalms.” Locke’s analogy pointed to the spiritual strength that held both Black p­ eople and Jews together and manifested itself in cultural expression.101 Locke’s essay “The Legacy of the Ancestral Arts,” on the other hand, locates a decisive break between African and African American visual art. African art

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displayed “rigid, controlled, disciplined, abstract, heavi­ly conventionalized” patterns, while art produced by Black ­people in the United States emerged as “­free, exuberant, emotional, sentimental, and h ­ uman.” This break resulted from Black p­ eople’s “peculiar experience in Amer­i­ca and the upheaval of its ­trials and ordeals.” Slavery tore Africans in the United States from their ancestral art forms. Nonetheless, African Americans learned vari­ous lessons from their forebears, such as “the lesson of a classic background, the lesson of discipline, of style, of technical control pushed to the limits of technical mastery.”102 Locke did not concern himself with differences in the content of African and African American art, but rather with the similarity located in something more spiritual and intrinsic to the artists. That African spirit, like the Hebraic spirit for Jews, carried the culture forward. By 1925 Locke had a well-­developed vision. Cultural achievement trumped economic and po­liti­cal advancement. Black ­people worldwide could be united by high-­level aesthetic production. He concluded, “If in our lifetime the New Negro should not be able to celebrate his full initiation into American democracy, he can at least, on the warrant of ­these ­things, celebrate the attainment of a significant and satisfying new phase of development, and with it a spiritual Coming of Age.”103 The cultural realm reigned supreme. For this reason, Locke never turned to radical socialism the way Du Bois did. For Du Bois, art, however beautiful, served its major purpose as propaganda. For Locke, art served as an end in itself. As a leader of the Harlem Re­nais­sance, Locke did more than usher in a new movement. He identified himself strongly as part of that movement, as a Black man. In a 1926 letter to Nation editor Oswald Garrison Villard, who gave The New Negro a strong review, Locke referred to the “stimulating effect” his book was having on “our younger generation’s minds . . . ​in colleges like Oberlin, Ohio State, Denison University and our own Wilberforce.” Locke approved of an interest not “based on sentiment or even abstract attitudes” but rather in a “healthy curiosity for fresh information and an open-­mindedness that is better than sympathy.” Locke displayed his elitism again, as he preferred an intellectual movement to a passionate or sentimental one. More impor­tant, he referred to the Harlem Re­nais­sance as “our ­little movement.”104 He identified Wilberforce as “our own,” yet he never attended the school. He felt some owner­ship. His identification with the Black community proved significant, particularly ­because it occurred in a private rather than public forum and thus more likely reflected his true feelings on the ­matter. In the fall of 1927 Locke lent his abilities to another university he might have called “our own,” by teaching for a year at Fisk University, the historically Black university in Nashville, Tennessee, before returning to Howard the

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following fall. Although the G ­ reat Depression hampered the Harlem Re­nais­ sance, Locke maintained his commitment to culture. His 1930 essay “The Contribution of Race to Culture” echoed his speeches at Oxford and to the Negro Historical Socie­ties from before the First World War. Depoliticizing race allowed “the limitless natu­ral reciprocities between cultures” to flourish. Locke understood “civilization” to be “a vast amalgam of cultures,” a pluralistic universe. Within this civilizational setting, race, understood as culture, could achieve its highest form of development. “The cult of race is ­free to blossom almost in­def­initely to the enrichment and stimulation of h ­ uman culture.” Racial minorities benefited especially from this new particularistic civilizational energy. Locke saw a “spiritual solidarity of minorities,” especially among “the new nations of Eu­rope, Zionism, Chinese and Indian nationalism, the awakened American Negro and the awakening Africa.”105 Though Locke was moving left po­liti­cally, he used the language of capitalism to elucidate his vision of cultural pluralism. He called for “ ‘free-­trade in culture’ and a complete recognition of the princi­ple of cultural reciprocity.” He declared, “Culture-­goods, once evolved, are no longer the exclusive property of the race or ­people that originated them. They belong to all who can use them, and belong most to ­those who use them best.” Despite his free-­ flowing vision, he insisted that culture “could not be artificially manufactured.” It grew from the ground, “a folk-­product, with the form and flavor of a par­tic­ul­ar ­people and place.” Despite its “subsequent universality,” Locke believed “culture has root in that social soil which, for want of a better term, we call race.”106 In arguing for cultural pluralism, Locke threaded the needle between universal and par­tic­u­lar, between African and American, between belonging and outsiderness. His hybrid identity, as well as his proud but conflicted relationship with the Black community, reflected his sense of self as a phi­los­o­pher. In the “psychograph” he wrote in 1935, Locke called himself “more of a philosophical midwife to a generation of younger Negro poets, writers, than a professional phi­los­op­ her.” Locke used his philosophical training, in pragmatic fashion, to usher in the Harlem Re­nais­sance, to provide it with a guiding princi­ple. That princi­ple guided his entire life. He called it “cultural pluralism and value relativism,” adding that this ideology left him with a “not too orthodox reaction to the American way of life.” He lived as an enthusiastic outsider, embracing the United States while remaining critical of it, always refusing to fit into some predetermined ste­reo­type.107 The contrast between professional phi­los­o­pher and philosophical midwife proved crucial to Locke’s self-­definition. A phi­los­o­pher by his or her very nature seeks universal truths. As a philosophical midwife, however, Locke found

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his purpose in birthing new contributors to this uniquely African American culture. His “personal history” had led him to cultural pluralism.108 That personal history did not simply include his encounters with racism but also his friendship with Kallen and his intellectual encounter with Kallen’s positive affirmation of Jewish culture. Another bond the two men shared was their outsider status in terms of religion. Kallen abandoned Judaism for atheism but came to embrace an individualistic, William Jamesian view of religious experience. Locke, an Episcopalian who drifted to Ethical Culture, converted to the emerging Baha’i faith. Both men insisted that their religious beliefs w ­ ere compatible with their ethnic, communal identities, and with cultural pluralism. In fact, they w ­ ere more than compatible; they ­were mutually reinforcing.

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Plural in Culture, Universal in Religion

Horace Kallen and Alain Locke w ­ ere not religious in the usual sense of the word. Neither spoke much of personal faith, nor did they regularly attend church or synagogue. Kallen did not feel bound by Jewish law, he performed few Jewish rituals, and he described himself as an atheist into the 1920s. Locke abandoned the Episcopal church of his childhood for the Ethical Culture movement, valuing rational moral princi­ples rather than worshiping a deity. Nonetheless, as mature adults, both men found religion. Not Judaism or Chris­tian­ity but a more universal and individualistic spirituality. The religious trajectory of the two men, parallel if not linked, demonstrates the secular nature of their cultural pluralism. For both men, the world of culture was the world of the par­tic­u­lar, vast and diverse. Religion existed in a variety of forms, but they all led to individualized experiences of the ineffable. ­These ­were personal and private, impor­tant to the individual, and always dif­fer­ent, never replicable. Neither man held religion to be a ­matter of belief. Rather, religion was the force that united all ­human beings. Their version of religion was the idea of unity amid the diversity of humankind. Religion was the awe that individuals felt when exposed to the vastness of the universe and of humanity. Communal expressions of religion served as conduits for individual experience. This perspective led Locke to the Baha’i faith. For Kallen, it emerged in an ac­cep­tance of religious experience, of out-­of-­body sensation, in the vein of 147

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William James’s Va­ri­e­ties of Religious Experience. Both men feared ele­ments of mainstream religion, especially the absolutism, rigidity, and rejection of pluralism that Locke saw in Chris­tian­ity and Kallen saw in Catholicism and in Orthodox and Reform Judaism. Their idiosyncratic views of religion reinforced their ideas of cultural pluralism. Kallen’s religion proved difficult to define. He identified as a Zionist and Hebraist, not a Judaist. A Judaist was someone who subscribed to the Jewish religion, which Kallen had discarded as an adolescent. He considered himself racially or ethnically Jewish, not religiously. This distinction was rooted in his cultural pluralism. He found Orthodox Judaism rigid, backward, and irrational, but Reform Judaism was fundamentally assimilationist, seeking to diminish the distinctions in Jewish peoplehood in f­ avor of a monotone universalism. Kallen, a Jamesian pluralist to his core, had no use for that. He had begun publicly criticizing Reform Judaism in 1909, but by the outbreak of the First World War, his prominence as a professor at the University of Wisconsin rendered his attack more effective. Kallen’s view was consistent with his forward-­looking agenda. Despite his ire ­toward the Reform movement, he had greater animosity t­ oward the Orthodox. He resented his ­father for his oppressive religious upbringing, which affected him, his siblings, and his ­mother. Beyond the personal, Kallen understood that Jews could not remain trapped in Orthodox “medievalism.” His cultural pluralism did not entail ethnic segregation. Kallen wrote, “You cannot, in a world of railroads and telegraphs and printing machines, cut off any group from contact with the rest of the world. You cannot any longer make a hermit of the Jewish ­people or of any Eu­ro­pean ­people.” Although he again drew the color line, he still favored a modern, progressive world, where Jews and other groups encounter “the new learning.”1 Orthodoxy, as much as Reform, curtailed pluralism. Kallen’s strug­gles with the Orthodox and Reform also represented ­battles in the name of academic freedom. The issue had been an obsession of his since his teenage years. His early efforts to read the New Testament, and then Spinoza, against his f­ ather’s wishes, demonstrated his chafing against intellectual bound­aries. This pattern continued in early adulthood. At Prince­ton in 1905, his contract had not been renewed a­ fter students’ parents complained about his “teaching atheism.”2 His was an open mind, keen on exploring and teaching his pragmatist, pluralist truths. Academic freedom was essential to cultural pluralism, and absolutist religion, of any type, represented a threat. In late 1914 Kallen was invited to speak at Hebrew Union College, the Reform seminary in Cincinnati, “on the Meaning of Hebraism,” but the seminary administration rescinded the invitation, perhaps ­because his Zionism

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clashed with Reform’s assimilationist ideology, which defined Judaism in religious rather than national terms. An apol­o­getic letter to Kallen from rabbinical students denied this was the reason, claiming that he had been disinvited for “ridiculing the idea of a Jewish mission,” a cardinal princi­ple of Reform Judaism, and for claiming to be “an adherent of no religion” in an address for the Intercollegiate Menorah Association.3 ­Either way, he felt his academic freedom curtailed, and his animus ­toward Reform Judaism increased. The American Zionist movement would curtail Kallen’s speaking in order to protect itself. In January 1917 Jacob de Haas, secretary of the Provisional Executive Committee for General Zionist Affairs and onetime editor of the Maccabaean, wrote Kallen to chastise him for his militant secularism. In Zionist speeches delivered in Boston and New York, Kallen had gone “over the line” in his criticism of “the religious phase of Jewish life, or the tenets of Judaism.” Kallen was alienating Jewish allies, particularly “friends” in Mizrachi, the religious Zionist organ­ization. Additionally, he risked damaging relations with Gentiles sympathetic to Zionism through his cultural pluralism, what de Haas labeled as his “attempt to create an ‘Austrian Empire of the United States.’ ” He asked that Kallen “repudiate the ­whole business” or “set [his] doctrine on one side during this critical time.”4 Kallen refused. Although he never returned to Judaism, Kallen eventually abandoned atheism. Marrying Rachel Oatman van Arsdale, the d­ aughter of a Methodist minister, signaled a turn to the universal that appeared in Kallen’s writing from the mid-1920s. While traveling through Eu­rope, he put the finishing touches on Why Religion?, with the preface dated November 1926 from Rome, Italy. The meandering book decouples religion and belief, a proj­ect Kallen had been working on since at least 1910. He found beliefs in God or gods, or in any absolutist religious dogma, to be deeply pernicious, w ­ hether t­ hose beliefs ­were rooted in Judaism or Chris­tian­ity or Marxism or paganism. His religion was simply a path to a heightened spirituality, to out-­of-­body experiences.5 Kallen championed his mentor William James’s notion of the “religious experience,” something you feel with the entirety of your being rather than something you believe. Kallen had moved from a rigid Judaism as a child to an equally rigid atheism in college. By the 1920s he positioned himself more as a secularist, dismissive of deities but open to embracing spiritual experience that transcended the five senses. ­These experiences w ­ ere universal, open to all ­humans through a variety of means, some religious, some psychedelic. In the summer of 1904, between his two years at Prince­ton, Kallen traveled to Greenacre, a “spiritual Coney Island” in the small town of Eliot, Maine, a gathering place for ­people of dif­fer­ent religions founded by Sarah Farmer, a recent convert to the Baha’i faith. Though Kallen compared the retreat to an

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urban amusement park, he took his time ­there seriously. He met an “Indian ascetic” named Ram Tirtha Swami to experiment with Hindu “Yogic discipline.” A mathematician well versed in “Western philosophy,” Swami was a trained yogi and introduced Kallen to vari­ous Hindu meditation practices, including “mortification of the body, reflection and contemplation.” Although Kallen strug­gled with the methods, another visitor to Greenacre, Ponnambalam Ramanathan, the solicitor general of Ceylon, helped him reach “the full mystic experience by means of the Yogic technique.”6 Two documents from that period suggest Kallen’s deep spiritual engagement with Hinduism. The first, dated August 19, 1904, at midnight in Greenacre and directed to “Sweet Ha­ri,” began with the meditative chant “Om!” Kallen employed a biblical meta­phor, noting his “heart ha[d] become a ‘burning bush.’ ” The letter proceeded with a four-­line poem: Fetch me a cup of tears O Saki! Full up to the brim. Gurgle down the goblet clear. Then wash my out, my in. ­ fter his poem concerning “this bitter-­sweet liquor,” Kallen noted, “To smell A the universe into a tiny-­drop and to evaporate it into a solitary sigh is a good exercise at spiritual chemistry.” He offered more biblical imagery: “Blessed is the contrite heart, for it constructs a ladder of tear-­drops to the Throne of God.” He concluded by reprising the chant “Om! Om! Om!” A few weeks l­ater, writing from Marblehead, Mas­sa­chu­setts, Kallen wrote a brief note, seemingly to himself: “Most Beloved B ­ rother, Peace, Love and Joy ever Abide with Thee. Om! Om!” The letter was signed, “Your Own Self as Swami Rama.”7 Though difficult to decipher, the documents indicate spiritual soul-­searching, a difficult proj­ect for an avowed atheist and son of an Orthodox rabbi. Seeking new experiences around the same time he engaged in Hindu spiritual chemistry, Kallen also experimented with physical chemistry, specifically “nitrous oxide anaesthesia.” Both the Hindu meditation and the drug-­like gas led him to feel, in that space between consciousness and unconsciousness, “presence, moving, ineffable, and beyond words to describe.”8 Originally opposed to James’s embrace of religious experience, by 1926 Kallen came to share it. He admitted that “­there is to be discerned, amid the muck, the perversity, the madness and error that bulk so large in ­these ­matters, a core of presence which comes close to being what we usually mean by the word super­natural.” He had no answers to the question of “what precisely this super­ natural is.”9 He knew it manifested differently for each individual. But unlike in his previous work on culture, when it came to the spiritual end product of

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religion, the super­natural experience, Kallen veered ­toward unity rather than variety. The question, Why religion? is directed to all. Religious experience transcended not only bodily senses but cultural heritage as well. In writing Why Religion?, Kallen was coming to a similar conclusion that Locke did in joining the Baha’i faith: religion was universal, but culture was par­tic­u­lar. In answering a 1915 query from Reform rabbi Martin A. Meyer about the status of the apostate in Judaism, Kallen seemed to locate himself in a liminal place between believer and heretic. Meyer was an open-­minded rabbi known for pushing the bound­aries of Judaism. On a Sabbath in October 1912, he had invited the Baha’i leader Abdu’l-­Bahá to his synagogue, T ­ emple Emanu-­El of San Francisco. It was to be Abdu’l-­Bahá’s longest single talk on his lengthy tour of the United States, and he likely alarmed some in the audience, including Meyer, when he suggested that Jews should praise Jesus and Muhammad as prophets of God, just as Christians and Muslims praised Moses. In asking Kallen about the Jewish apostate, Meyer may have been looking inward. Perhaps Kallen’s answer reassured him. Even “complete apostasy,” which would involve “complete segregation from the Jewish community,” where even “a Jew by birth ceases to be a Jew in his interests or conscious relationships,” would not render a Jew a Gentile. At best he would be an “amateur Gentile . . . ​ fundamentally divided against himself.” At the same time, “Judaism admits of agnostic and even atheistic attitudes with the destruction of internal Jewishness.” Kallen saw himself this way. His religious beliefs or lack thereof w ­ ere not what made him Jewish. His Jewishness was racial, obtained at birth.10 And yet, ­under Zionism, with a functioning Jewish state in Palestine, Kallen could even envision “Christian Jews” whose “Chris­tian­ity would be Jewish” and more closely resemble Judaism than it would Chris­tian­ity. Kallen saw this development as “inevitable” ­because he regarded “Judaism as a life rather than a set of opinions, and in a Jewish environment even the Christian in opinion remains Jewish in life.” In a Jewish state, apostasy was “much less dangerous” than in the Diaspora. As long as Jews are a united p­ eople, all opinions expressed by Jews would intrinsically contain “a distinctly Jewish flavor and distinctly Jewish quality.” Even a “Shabbos goy” in a Jewish shtetl in Rus­sia “inevitably lives, and to that extent thinks, like a Jew.”11 ­These statements suggest that Kallen was working out his own position. He viewed religion as functionalist, meaning that a non-­Jew can live and think like a Jew and in some sense become a Jew. Kallen was not clear on how a person could live Judaism without adopting the tenets of the Jewish faith, or while upholding the doctrines of a Christian one. His was a fundamentally experiential view of Judaism. Jewish is something that you are. Judaism is not something you believe but something you do.

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Despite his embrace of religious experience, Kallen remained a committed secularist, declaring himself in 1928 “neither atheist nor agnostic” but conceding that his “sympathies fall much more strongly to t­ hose who are [atheists and agnostics] than with t­ hose who are not, since in so far as I understand the gods I cannot think highly of them.”12 A staunch defender of religious freedom, Kallen feared religious absolutism as a threat to American democracy, and by extension to pluralism. In the late 1920s Kallen faced one of ­these threats himself, albeit to a minor degree. In 1920 the names Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti had made national headlines when the two Italian-­born anarchists ­were arrested for murdering a man­ag­er and guard at a shoe factory in Braintree, Mas­sa­chu­ setts. Convicted the following year and sentenced to death, they spent six years on death row, failing numerous appeals, before fi­nally being executed by electric chair in August 1927. At a 1928 Boston memorial for Sacco and Vanzetti on the first anniversary of their death, Kallen gave an address in which he commented, “If Sacco and Vanzetti ­were anarchists, so w ­ ere Jesus Christ, Socrates,” and o ­ thers.13 Police arrested Kallen for blasphemy, based on a seventeenth-­century Mas­sa­chu­setts blue law. Although the charges w ­ ere eventually dropped, the incident bolstered Kallen’s conviction that absolutist religion presented the gravest threat to American democracy and to pluralism itself. Through the 1930s Kallen did not concern himself much with religious ­matters, at least not overtly, as racial anti-­Semitism cast a dark cloud above Eu­ rope and the United States. He came to regard communism, fascism, and Nazism as absolutist religions, similar to Roman Catholicism. He began to use this analogy as early as the 1920s but continued to do so in earnest in his role as secretary of the International League for Academic Freedom. Although he did not focus on Catholicism then, he advanced the premise that absolutist ideologies functioned as religions and ­were anathema to pluralism and to academic freedom. The conflict between religion and academic freedom came up again in 1940, in an incident that had Kallen leaping to the defense of his old Oxford friend, the renowned phi­los­o­pher, logician, and mathematician Bertrand Russell. That February, Russell, an En­glishman, was hired to teach at the College of the City of New York (City College) in Manhattan for eigh­teen months starting the following year. He was to teach logic, mathematical theory, and scientific theory and metaphysics, a g­ reat coup for New York’s largest public college. Upon Russell’s appointment, a local Episcopalian bishop caused a stir, proclaiming that Russell was “a recognized propagandist on religion and morality who specifically defends adultery.” Other public attacks on Russell followed,

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and a Jean Kay from Brooklyn filed a suit against New York’s Board of Higher Education insisting that Russell “was an alien and an advocate of sexual immorality.”14 The suit went to the New York Supreme Court, where Judge John E. McGeehan, “a Roman Catholic,” sided with Kay, ruling against Russell’s appointment, which would be “an insult to the City of New York” and represent a “chair of indecency” at City College.15 At the time, Russell was on his third marriage, having been twice divorced. His 1929 book, Marriage and Morals, advocated birth control, separating sex from marriage, and only requiring marriage in the case of childbirth. The book caused g­ reat controversy and formed the basis of the charges against Russell. Being an atheist, socialist, and foreigner did not help his cause. But he had many allies in the academic world. In November 1940 in the magazine Twice a Year, Kallen noted that Russell’s personal life, and his po­liti­cal and religious views, had no bearing on his contributions to the field of philosophy.16 Kallen and John Dewey put together The Bertrand Russell Case, a volume of essays including their own contributions, as well as ­those of phi­los­o­phers Morris Cohen, Sidney Hook, and ­others. Chemist and art collector Albert Barnes wrote the foreword. Kallen again lumped “the Bolsheviks, the Fascists, and the Nazis” with religious authoritarians, especially Catholics.17 Invoking Roger Williams, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Thomas Jefferson to depict Americanism as a “demo­cratic faith,” Kallen described the Russell case as “an ecclesiastical-­political assault on this Americanism.”18 The book did not secure Russell a place at City College, but it highlighted an impor­tant ­battle in the fight for academic freedom in the United States and demonstrated the importance Kallen placed on secularism and religious pluralism. ­After the war, religion became impor­tant to Kallen again. In the 1950s, fearful of religions in vari­ous forms from Catholicism to communism to McCarthyism, Kallen penned a cri de coeur, Secularism Is the ­Will of God. He did not advocate atheism. For him, religion mattered, but certainly not at the level of government policy. “The religion of Secularism” meant for Kallen “the belief in a ­free and fruitful ­union of which should supplement and strengthen each, as a communion of the diverse in equal liberty.”19 His view on religious pluralism was nearly identical to his view on cultural pluralism. It made room for atheism and agnosticism and any and all religions. This was the case precisely ­because he held a nondogmatic view of religion. His religion was universal, something one engaged in through pragmatic Jamesian fashion, at the individual level, as a profoundly personal experience. Community, to Kallen as to Locke, came from culture. Religion one found on one’s own. Marriage proved another area of individualized religious innovation for Kallen. In 1926 he married Rachel, the daughter of a Methodist minister. To Kallen’s

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plea­sure, she observed more Jewish rituals than he did, including making some effort to obey the dietary laws. Kallen came to justify his intermarriage, and any Jewish intermarriage, as a positive venture so long as the c­ ouple shared Hebraic content in their lives, which Horace and Rachel clearly did. Formal conversion proved unnecessary, as Kallen did not abide by religious Judaism anyway. Thus, in Kallen’s mind, intermarriage too aided in the preservation and expansion of the Jewish p­ eople and represented a feature, not a bug, of cultural pluralism.20 While Kallen remained very publicly Jewish, if secular, Locke kept his religion private. In 1935, at age fifty, Locke contributed a chapter to Kallen’s volume American Philosophy ­Today and Tomorrow. In a biographical preamble, Locke described himself as “more of a pagan than a Puritan” and “more of a humanist than a pragmatist.” He then declared himself a “universalist in religion” and a “cultural cosmopolitan” and labeled his philosophical outlook as “cultural pluralism and value relativism.”21 When Locke used the phrase “universalist in religion,” he was subtly referring to his adherence to the Baha’i faith, to which he had converted in 1918. In 1941, only six years a­ fter he wrote the chapter for Kallen’s volume, Locke ended his official ties with the religion b­ ecause of a lack of time and energy for the commitment and disillusionment with its ability to effect positive change on the race question. He wrote to a Baha’i friend, “I naturally am reluctant to sever a spiritual bond with the Bahai community, for I still hold to a firm belief in the truth of the Bahai princi­ples.” Although he “respectfully and regretfully” declined to renew his membership in the Washington, DC, Baha’i organ­ization, he declared himself an “isolated believer.”22 This designation, “isolated believer,” reflected Locke’s lifelong view of religion, even before he became Baha’i. He wrote extensively on philosophy, politics, art, ­music, and many other topics. He rarely wrote about religion and was never known as a pious person. Locke biographer and literary scholar Charles Molesworth notes the fundamentally “modern and secular” character of the New Negro movement, equally “embodied” in all of Locke’s writing.23 The writers and artists he championed, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and ­others, w ­ ere not religiously oriented. His private writing is devoid of religious language. Yet Locke was not an out­spoken nonbeliever like the Clarence Darrows of his day. Locke is absent from scholarship on American secularism precisely b­ ecause of his affiliation with the Baha’i, a religious group. Ironically, the key to understanding Locke’s secularism is examining it alongside his Baha’i faith. He undergirded his universalist secular humanism with a spiritual foundation. His conversion to Baha’i was not a break but a continu-

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ation. It provided a religious framework for his overarching belief in the unity of humankind while sanctioning his pluralistic commitment to diversity in the realm of secular culture, a commitment he best expressed through the Harlem Re­nais­sance.24 While historians of the Black experience privilege the roles of Judaism, Chris­tian­ity, and Islam, particularly the Black Protestant churches, an analy­sis of Locke’s Baha’i faith enriches our understanding of twentieth-­ century Black intellectual history by showing how an oft-­ignored religion from nineteenth-­century Persia provides a win­dow into Black secularism in the United States. Locke used the Baha’i faith, which preaches religious unity and cultural diversity, as a vehicle to bring about greater “race amity” in the United States. His American nationalism sat on a foundation of cultural pluralism, the secular philosophy he developed in conversation with Kallen in 1906–1908 at Harvard and Oxford. T ­ oday, multiculturalism usually includes religious diversity. Yet for Locke and Kallen, cultural pluralism was a secular ideal, referring to dif­fer­ent immigrant groups, such as Germans, Irish, and Italians, and defining Jews and Black p­ eople as members of national or cultural communities. Secularism for Locke was not simply the absence of religiosity but an impor­ tant philosophical orientation. Borrowing from Franz Boas, he ascribed a cultural definition to race and separated religion from race and culture. His views on religion emerged from his Philadelphia upbringing and his experiences at Harvard. Locke’s religious position, Baha’i secularism, would be critical for the New Negro movement. The Baha’i faith is a mono­the­istic religion. Its leaders advocate the unity of God, of all religions, and of all humanity. They stand against race prejudice, making the religion attractive to ethnic minorities, including African Americans. The Baha’i princi­ple Locke came to embrace was “Unity in diversity.” The Baha’i re­spect cultural differences in the name of upholding the religious unity of humankind. Religious unity implies that all religions share the same foundation in mono­the­ism and the same overarching moral framework. When Locke converted to the Baha’i faith in 1918, the religion was less than a hundred years old.25 In 1844 in Shiraz, Persia, a Muslim merchant named Sayyid Ali-­Muhammad prophesied a new religious leader who would unite humankind. He came to be known at the Báb, Arabic for “the gate.” Though the Báb was executed for heresy in 1850, his follower, Mirza Husayn-­Ali Nuri, a Tehran nobleman, claimed to be the prophet the Báb foretold, on par with Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad. He took a new name, Bahá’u’lláh, “glory of God,” and assumed leadership of the new faith. In 1852, accused of plotting to assassinate the shah, imprisoned, and exiled with his f­ amily to Baghdad, Bahá’u’lláh continued to spread his message of universal religion, undergirded

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by a common ethics and mono­the­ism, accepting the legitimacy of the Abrahamic faiths, Judaism, Chris­tian­ity, and Islam. By 1863 Bahá’u’lláh had reinterpreted the Báb’s religion, christening it Baha’i. Religious persecution drove him across the ­Middle East and he fi­nally settled in Acre, Palestine, all the while preaching and composing major Baha’i texts. Bahá’u’lláh’s son, born Abbas in 1844 but renamed Abdu’l-­Bahá, or “servant of Bahá,” succeeded him. In 1907 Abdu’l-­Bahá moved the center of the Baha’i faith from Acre to Haifa. He increased his missionary activity in 1911– 1913, touring Eu­rope and North Amer­i­ca. E ­ ither in ­England or in the United States, he may have encountered Locke. In 1912, Abdu’l-­Bahá visited Washington, DC.26 He spoke (through a translator) at churches and other function halls but also made a point of engaging the Black community. On Tuesday, April 23, at noon, the Baha’i prophet lectured before over one thousand students and faculty of Howard University. That eve­ning, he addressed a packed ­house at the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church for a gathering sponsored by the Bethel Literary and Historical Society, an impor­tant African American intellectual organ­ization. The Washington Bee covered the events, noting, “Quite a colony of colored Bahaists has been developed in Washington,” referring to the Black supporters of Abdu’l-­Bahá as “earnest disciples.”27 Locke was not in attendance, although he likely interacted with members of the Washington Baha’i community ­after he began teaching at Howard in the fall of 1912. He kept his religious affiliation fairly private, even a­ fter his conversion to the Baha’i faith in 1918. He occasionally participated in Baha’i ceremonies and functions, particularly events intended to encourage “race amity.”28 Locke helped or­ga­nize two race amity conferences in 1921 in Washington, DC, and Springfield, Mas­sa­chu­setts, and another two in 1924 in New York and Philadelphia, speaking at all but the Springfield event. He occasionally wrote for Baha’i publications, although his pieces did not circulate widely. Through this participation, Locke came to know Louis Gregory, a leading Black Baha’i, and furthered his active engagement with the faith. At the 1924 Philadelphia conference, Locke spoke on “art and culture” at the Convention for Amity between the Colored and White Races in Amer­i­ca.29 Gregory also participated in the event, and two years ­later, he invited Locke (at the time briefly fired from Howard for supporting more equitable pay for faculty) to go on a Baha’i lecture tour in Ohio and Florida. Locke also went on two pilgrimages to the Baha’i world headquarters in Haifa in 1923 and 1934. Still, he seldom publicly identified as Baha’i to ­people outside the religion. The Baha’i faith corresponded so well to Locke’s philosophy of cosmopolitan cultural pluralism that making the connection explicit felt superfluous outside Baha’i set-

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tings. To most of his American peers, this foreign faith would have seemed deeply unfamiliar, whereas secularism was not uncommon among academics. Locke’s secularism had deep roots. His ­mother raised him Episcopalian, but she was also inspired by the philosophy of Felix Adler known as Ethical Culture, an interest she passed on to her son. Locke took to the movement in high school and especially college, where he joined the Harvard Ethical Society. Religion, to Locke, was like culture: subject to change and relational. Although raised Episcopalian, he told his m ­ other he had developed into “quite a Unitarian by now.” Compared with his devout Lutheran friend David “Dap” Pfromm (whose last name means “pious” in German), Locke could be considered an atheist, although he noted that to Dap’s “childlike mind,” atheism encompassed “Catholicism, Unitarianism and other such kindred religions.” Locke recounted when a ­family friend wanted to have him baptized, joking that “a bath is as much of a compromise with religion as I w ­ ill make.” He occasionally attended Pfromm’s ser­vices, but only “to please him.”30 Locke’s views on religion and Chris­tian­ity evolved in his time at Harvard. He rejected the concept of the Immaculate Conception ­after hearing a professor who argued that the word “Virgin” in relation to the Virgin Mary “had no such meaning” and that Jesus had been the ­human son of Joseph and Mary. Instead, Locke accepted “the divinity of Christ” as a “mystical experience of divinity, a god-­consciousness.” Before that, Jesus had simply been an “ordinary Jewish boy.”31 Religious experiences, to Locke, took place on an individual level rather than a communal one. Despite his heterodox views, Locke remained exposed to the Bible, as his friend Dick read the Vulgate to him aloud, but as a literary rather than religious text. Locke particularly enjoyed the Song of Solomon, which he understood as “nothing but a love song,” but nonetheless “one of the most beautiful lyr­ics of the w ­ hole Bible.” He appreciated aspects of religious culture, if not religious observance itself, noting, “The average Harvard man w ­ on’t stand for 32 ‘come-­to-­Jesus’ sermons.” By the time he earned his Rhodes Scholarship in 1907, he had effectively abandoned any form of religiosity, save for an appreciation of African American Christian spirituals. In July 1911, ­after three years at Oxford and another in Berlin, Locke attended the First Universal Races Congress in London. In attendance w ­ ere Adler, Israel Zangwill, and W. E. B. Du Bois, among other prominent intellectuals. Another speaker, Wellesley Tudor Pole, an En­glish representative of the Baha’i faith, read a letter from Baha’i leader Abdu’l-­Bahá. Tudor Pole called for the “world-­wide recognition of the under­lying unity of religions and ­peoples.” He stressed, however, that “the unification of Races is not intended to mean their suppression of their dif­fer­ent characteristics in order that they

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may be blended into one, but would imply that ­these very differences are needed to constitute a harmonious w ­ hole, and that the duty of this age is to recognize the possibilities of development within each race in order that, in a spirit of love, mankind the world over may cooperate in working for Universal Peace.”33 Abdu’l-­Bahá’s letter reinforced this view with a floral analogy: “Consider the va­ri­e­ties of flowers in a garden. They seem but to enhance the loveliness of each other. When differences of colour, ideas, and character are found in the ­human Kingdom, and come ­under the control of the power of Unity, they too show their essential beauty and perfection.”34 Locke may have attended this session and encountered Baha’i ideas ­there. Years ­later, he recalled the First Universal Races Congress sparking his interest in “a comparative study of races” from a “scientific approach.”35 To Locke, science helped account for and categorize ­human variety, whereas religion facilitated spiritual unity. If he had any religious sentiments, they resembled ­those of Kallen and echoed the views of William James, whose ideas Locke had encountered at Harvard and Oxford. James described religion as “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to what­ever they may consider the divine.”36 Locke’s religion was personal rather than communal. Though he participated in some Baha’i activities, faith never served as his primary affiliation or identifier. He was a ­human being, a phi­los­o­pher, an American, an African American. His religion was an ac­cep­tance of common humanity in a world of diversity. Baha’i provided a spiritual outlet for a secular philosophy he already believed. The Baha’i faith established a dichotomy between the essential origins all ­humans shared and their outward appearances and practices, which are dif­ fer­ent to ensure the world is in­ter­est­ing and exciting. This is precisely the dichotomy Locke advanced through vari­ous endeavors, including the New Negro movement. Appreciating cultural difference led to an embrace of common humanity. The par­tic­u­lar led to the universal. As late as 1916, Locke told his friend Arturo Schomburg that he was “an Episcopalian,” but only ­because he appreciated its “categories of sins as sins of ‘omission’ and ‘commission,’ and the litany.”37 But by 1918, Locke had imbibed enough of Abdu’l-­Bahá’s universalism to formally convert to the Baha’i faith. The Baha’i w ­ ere undergoing their own transition around this time. Shoghi Effendi succeeded Abdu’l-­Bahá in 1921. Effendi, a distant relative of Abdu’l-­ Bahá, had been born in Acre in 1897. More capable administrator than prophet, he spoke En­glish; married a Christian from Montreal, Mary Maxwell; and proved a charismatic and accessible leader. Locke may have appreciated Effen-

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di’s temporal and physical nearness. Just as he had a real-­life encounter with Adler, founder of the Ethical Culture movement, Locke actually met Effendi. Locke’s experience of ­these movements was not distant, as it had been with Episcopalian Protestantism, but personal, immediate, and direct. In 1923 Locke made a pilgrimage to Palestine to visit the Baha’i center in Haifa, where he met with Effendi. Locke wrote about his experience the following year for the Baha’i journal Star of the West. His opening sentences evoked the universalism of his a­ dopted faith: “­Whether Bahai or non-­Bahai, Haifa makes pilgrims of all who visit her. The place itself makes mystics of us all, for it shuts out the world of materiality with its own characteristic atmosphere.” Locke compared the experience to the calm of a monastery, but without the feeling of being shut in, and instead prompting the “opening of new vistas.” It was not ascetic at all, instead combining the “joy and naturalness of a nature-­cult with the ethical seriousness and purpose of a spiritual religion.”38 Spirituality for Locke did not necessitate unreason. He found the shrines of the Báb and Abdu’l-­Bahá “impressive” but also “modern.” They gave the impression, “without mysticism and supernaturalness,” of a religion very much alive. By contrast, Chris­tian­ity had “in such large mea­sure forgotten” that lesson celebrated at Easter, “He is not ­here, He is risen.” For Locke, the power of Chris­tian­ity was in Jesus’s message as “one of the greatest teachers in the world,” his “spirit,” but not his divinity.39 Locke appreciated his guide in Haifa, the living and breathing Effendi. Locke was especially reassured by the “communion of ideas and ideals without the mediation of symbols,” a feature of the Baha’i religion he deemed “novel.” To Locke, “the only enlightened symbol of a religious or moral princi­ple” was a ­human being who embodied that princi­ple. In the Baha’i faith, Locke found “the cure for the ills of western materialism” and a “destined mission of uniting in a common mood western and oriental minds.”40 He had found his universal religion, a source of spirituality individual in its manifestation yet available to all. It offered a shared ethics in a religious realm where, in Locke’s mind, group variety led to strife. But that shared religious ethic enabled and undergirded cultural diversity, giving the world color and character. In the 1920s, although continuing to teach philosophy, Locke put aside most of his philosophical pursuits to focus on the aesthetic and cultural realm. This shift culminated in his leadership of the New Negro movement centered in Harlem. To the volume he compiled and edited in 1925, The New Negro, Locke contributed the introduction and several essays, including one titled “The Negro Spirituals.” He opened this essay with a bold declarative statement: “The Spirituals are ­really the most characteristic product of the race genius as yet in Amer­ic­ a.” He examined their contribution in an admiring but objective tone,

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skillfully navigating the universal and the par­tic­u­lar. What made the spirituals “uniquely expressive of the Negro” also made them “deeply representative of the soil that produced them.” Echoing Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk, Locke labeled the spirituals as both Black and American, “nationally as well as racially characteristic.”41 Locke, however, took this expansive interpretation a step further, noting the spirituals’ “immediate and compelling universality of appeal,” which guaranteed “the immortality of t­hose ­g reat folk expressions that survive not so much through being typical of a group or representative of a period but by virtue of being fundamentally and everlastingly ­human.” The spirituals embodied a particularistic expression of a universal sentiment, of an emotion and an ethic that transcended ethnic and cultural bound­aries. “This universality of the Spirituals” only increased over time. It outlasted the “contempt of the slave ­owners, the conventionalizations of formal religion, the repressions of Puritanism, the corruptions of sentimental balladry, and the neglect and disdain of second-­generation respectability.”42 Locke’s implicit criticism of “formal religion” and the “repressions of Puritanism” is impor­tant. For him, true religion could never be so narrow, so par­tic­u­lar. The “formal” mainline Protestant denominations, of which the Puritan legacy was strongest, sought to stifle the spirituals from extending beyond their African American roots, deeming them inappropriate for their more enlightened Chris­tian­ity. To Locke, the spirituals ­were “among the most genuine and outstanding expressions of Christian mood and feeling.” He acknowledged that “­there is no such ­thing as intrinsically religious ­music,” that purportedly religious ­music contains an observable “interplay of the secular and religious.” The spirituals displayed “sensuous and almost pagan ele­ments.” Nonetheless, “something so intensely religious and so essentially Christian dominates the blend.” Locke did not shy away from declaring, “The Spirituals are spiritual.” To deny this would be “to rob them of their heritage” and would be “untrue to their tradition and to the folk genius” that birthed them.43 Although Locke valued their secular preservation, he observed that per­for­ mances of the spirituals in concert halls and on college campuses distorted their religious character: “They are essentially congregational, not theatrical.”44 The spirituals w ­ ere not, strictly speaking, art, though they could be source material for art. Yet to Locke they embodied the spirit of a par­tic­u­lar ­people, African Americans, more effectively than jazz ­music. They more ably contributed to a universal American and global civilization. Their path to universality was through a musical Chris­tian­ity that could appeal to religious and secular alike, to Christians and non-­Christians, as folk art and folk culture. You did not have to adhere to the Judeo-­Christian tradition to appreciate their spirituality.

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In his discussion of the spirituals, and in his essay on Haifa, Locke did not mention God. A divine being did not play a large role in his written output, in his appreciation of Black m ­ usic, or in his connection to the Baha’i religion. Locke admired the Baha’i ethic and philosophy, not its mono­the­ism. In an unpublished and undated essay, “The Gospel for the Twentieth C ­ entury,” he mentioned God, but in pragmatist rather than religious fashion: “The pragmatic test and proof of the fatherhood of God is ­after all ­whether belief in it can realize the unity of mankind.”45 Implicitly employing William James’s princi­ple of the “cash value” of an idea, and his defense of faith in “The W ­ ill to Believe,” Locke saw Baha’i mono­the­ism as a means to an end—­namely, worldwide peace and spiritual unity.46 Locke lamented Christian otherworldly messianism, which rendered the notion of “Brotherhood of Man” merely a “negligible corollary of the fatherhood of God.”47 Without a peaceful payoff in this world, mono­the­istic belief was not worth much to Locke. The Baha’i faith, he gleaned, had more potential than Chris­tian­ity did in that regard. He concluded his essay by quoting Bahá’u’lláh: “That all nations ­shall become one in faith, and all men as ­brothers; that the bonds of affection and unity between the sons of men should be strengthened; that diversity of religion should cease, and differences of race be annulled. . . . ​­These strifes and this bloodshed and discord must cease, and men be as one kindred and f­ amily.”48 His longest essay for a Baha’i publication, “Unity in Diversity: A Baha’i Princi­ple,” written in the early 1930s, reads more like a philosophical treatise than a religious sermon. It evokes the same balance between universalism and particularism that his response to the spirituals did ten years ­earlier. The subtitle of the essay, “A Baha’i Princi­ple,” reflects the quasi-­secular affiliation Locke felt ­toward his ­adopted faith. What he admired about the Baha’i, what he made his own, w ­ ere their princi­ples much more than their beliefs. Locke understood that a “pure princi­ple” served only to “motivate or sanction,” noting that “mankind is not saved by declarations and professions of faith, but by works and ideas.” His focus was the material world, which included the realm of rational thought. In celebrating a par­tic­u­lar religion, he emphasized that religion’s pragmatic value to broader civilization. Before referring to the Baha’i in the main text, he asserted, “The demand for universality is beyond doubt the most characteristic modern ­thing in the realm of spiritual values, and in the world of the mind that reflects this realm.”49 The Baha’i faith offered a solution to the “pre­sent dilemma” felt by Locke and many o ­ thers: “We feel and hope in the direction of universality, but still think and act particularistically.” The Baha’i religion could help a variety of ­peoples “discover unity and spiritual equivalences ­under the differences.” The

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princi­ple “Unity in diversity” was a ­recipe for peace and reciprocity. A cele­ bration of spiritual and ethical similarities between all ­peoples, and an acknowl­ edgment that t­hese spiritual similarities outweighed cultural differences, paradoxically helped preserve cultural diversity. This princi­ple allowed the cultural differences to flourish as sources of mutual appreciation, of reciprocity rather than conflict.50 Although Locke described the Baha’i as early adopters of this princi­ple, he praised not their originality but the pragmatism and persuasiveness of their message of peace. He thought it cruel to deny “oppressed classes and races” their national expression in the face of racism and nationalism that consistently denigrated them. He cited “the partisanships of Indian Nationalism, or Chinese integrity, and in­de­pen­dence, or Negro and proletarian self-­assertion ­after generations of persecution and restriction.” Locke’s solution, his via media, was not to demand “universalism” from t­ hese p­ eoples but instead to advocate “reciprocity,” which entailed the preservation but also the “restriction of t­ hese movements to their own natu­ral bound­aries, areas and interests.” He allowed for nationalism but not imperialism and colonialism.51 Rather than attribute this idea to the Baha’i, he credited his old Harvard professor Josiah Royce, “one of the greatest of the American phi­los­o­phers.” Royce’s “admirable princi­ple of loyalty” was equivalent to the Baha’i princi­ ple of unity in diversity. Royce had advocated not only group loyalty but “loyalty to loyalty,” as in loyalty and re­spect for ­those who maintained a mea­sure of group pride, even and especially if they ­were not of one’s own group. This mutual re­spect allowed for “spiritual reciprocity.”52 Locke advocated bringing the Baha’i princi­ple of reciprocity to the secular realm, into the “social and cultural fields,” to enlist the support of the “most vigorous and intellectual ele­ments in society.” He challenged ­every “Baha’i believer” not to proselytize but to “carry the universal dimension of tolerance and spiritual reciprocity into e­ very par­tic­u­lar cause and sectarianism he can reach.” The goal was “to share the loyalties of the group, but upon a dif­fer­ent plane and with a higher perspective.” Each Baha’i must “partake of partisanship in order to work ­towards its transformation, and help keep it within his bounds of constructive and controlled self-­assertion.”53 In this balanced message, Locke never called for cultural erasure or assimilation. Instead, he argued for “constructive and controlled self-­assertion.” Groups should distinguish themselves in an effort to improve the w ­ hole, never to overwhelm other cultural units. The “loyalties of the group” should be shared, and appreciated, but on a higher, more spiritual plane. Writing in the 1930s, Locke designated the task for this de­cade as “transposing the traditional

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Baha’i reciprocity between religions into the social and cultural denominationalisms of nation, race, and class and vindicating anew upon this plane the precious legacy of the inspired teachings of ‘Abdu’l-­Bahá and Bahá’ulláh.”54 In a 1936 essay, “The Orientation of Hope,” Locke grouped himself among the “true Baha’i believers.” He saw g­ reat value in “Baha’i princi­ples” of universal “brotherhood, peace, and social justice,” hoping they could be brought “to the attention of statesmen and men of practical affairs.” In communicating ­these princi­ples, Locke advised that while his fellow believers should remember the religious language they learned them in, they should also “speak a language which the practical-­minded man of affairs, and the realistic common man can and ­will understand.” They must translate their message into “terms and ideas and practical issues of the present-­day world.” Locke remained loyal to the Baha’i but pragmatically applied their princi­ples in a secular fashion.55 Locke singled out the Baha’i faith as particularly a­ dept at navigating religious and racial diversity. In 1942 he coedited a volume with anthropologist Bernhard Stern titled When ­Peoples Meet: A Study in Race and Culture. Locke and Stern noted a “Christian cosmopolitanism” of the medieval period that led to a relatively “liberal racial attitude” yet maintained a stark separation with the most common religious other, the Jew. Chris­tian­ity proved too narrow.56 Locke again criticized Chris­tian­ity on a 1942 episode of the radio show Amer­i­ca’s Town Meeting of the Air, recorded at Howard University. The topic was “Is ­there a spiritual basis for world unity?” Locke sat on a panel with three other Howard faculty members, university president Mordecai Johnson, dean of the law school Leon Ransom, and professor of education Doxey Wilkerson. Johnson spoke first, championing Chris­tian­ity as a force for racial justice. Locke disagreed, observing, “One of the trou­bles of ­today’s world tragedy is the fact that this same religion, of which Dr. Johnson has spoken with such g­ rand idealisms, has, when institutionalized, been linked with politics, the flag and empire, the official church and sectarianism.” Locke linked race and religion, finding l­ittle hope for world unity among the “superciliously self-­appointed superior races aspiring to impose their preferred culture, self-­righteous creeds and religions expounding monopolies on ways of life and salvation.”57 Locke declared Chris­tian­ity an ­enemy of racial pro­g ress and cultural pluralism. When an audience member asked him for an alternative force for world unity, “a substitute for the spiritual ideas that you claim do not exist,” Locke had a ready reply. “One of the tragic t­ hings which show our pre­sent ­limited horizons is that ­there are very few institutions where, let us say, the ­g reat philosophies of the East are studied; and when they are and as they are, we w ­ ill be a ­little nearer to that spiritual unity, I think, that you think I ­don’t believe

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in.”58 Locke likely meant the Baha’i faith, though he referred to “philosophies,” not religions. To him, being Baha’i was a spiritual commitment that did not require super­natural beliefs. In 1944 Locke reiterated this critique in an address at Mills College in Oakland titled “Moral Imperatives for World Order.” Locke insisted, in accordance with Baha’i doctrine, that t­here w ­ ere many spiritual paths to salvation. He lamented the opposing view, “a tragic limitation of Chris­tian­ity,” which preached universalism but practiced monism. “If the Confucian expression of a Commandment means the same as the Christian expression, then it is the truth also and should so be recognized.” Locke’s denunciation of Chris­tian­ity, his elevation of an Eastern religion, and his reference to a “Commandment” rather than a theological princi­ple all reflected his commitment to secularism. Religions, for Locke, existed to provide spiritual expression and moral frameworks, not irrational or super­natural beliefs. They served a pragmatic function in this world, not the next. He concluded by linking nation, race, and religion again, not giving any pre­ce­dence over the other but insisting they become “non-­ monopolistic and culturally tolerant” concepts “freed of sectarian bigotry.”59 In 1945 Locke published his final Baha’i essay, “Lessons in World Crisis.” The vio­lence of the twentieth ­century provided an opportunity for a “terrestrial revelation of the essential and basic oneness of mankind.” Locke praised “leading religious liberals” for their interfaith cooperation, which helped to bridge the divides between Protestants and Catholics and Christians and Jews. He lamented, however, the lack of engagement with “Muslim and Oriental religious fronts,” whose philosophies he believed better suited to universal justice. Again he distanced himself from Chris­tian­ity, instead emphasizing “the essential parity of cultures,” an idea that would provide a “spiritual foundation for any true world order of ­peoples and nations.”60 When Locke died in 1954, Channing Tobias, an African American civil rights leader trained at Christian seminaries, presided over the funeral. None of the obituaries mentioned the Baha’i faith. Nor did the Alain Locke memorial edition of the African American culture journal Phylon, which included contributions from Ralph Bunche, Du Bois, celebrated writer William Stanley Braithwaite, Howard dean William Stuart Nelson, phi­los­o­pher Y. H. Krikorian, and psychiatrist Benjamin Karpman. Only Karpman made a vague reference to Locke’s religious affiliation. A Jewish immigrant from Slutzk, Rus­sia (now Belarus), to Minnesota, Karpman had headed the Department of Psychiatry at the Howard University College of Medicine from 1921 to 1941 and authored pioneering studies on homo­ sexuality. A close friend and confidant of Locke, possibly his therapist, the

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two men definitely discussed religion. Karpman called Locke “an extreme individualist” who directed “all his energies . . . ​to helping group and groups.”61 He described Locke as “not being particularly religious in a formal sense” but stated that “internally he was a deeply religious man.” He eschewed “empty and unreflective conformity.” His religion “was internal, not external, a m ­ atter of spirit rather than ceremonial observance; a day by day relationship to other ­humans, carry­ing at all times his God with him.” Locke “was less concerned with cosmos or universe than with society.” He believed “man approached godliness only . . . ​as he bettered his social relations with his fellow men.” For Locke, “the kingdom of heaven was on earth, this very earth, to be striven for and attained h ­ ere and right now.”62 Karpman’s summary of Locke’s faith did not mention Baha’i but captured the essence of his friend’s beliefs. Kallen was prob­ably not in attendance at Locke’s funeral in 1954. He was, however, invited to participate in a conference at Howard that functioned as a sort of memorial ser­vice for his old friend. The three-­day event represented the sixteenth annual spring conference of Howard’s Division of the Social Sciences. It went from April 20 to 22, 1955, and carried the theme “The New Negro Thirty Years Afterward” in honor of Locke. The committee of Howard faculty that planned the event met just before Christmas in 1954 to set the schedule. In attendance ­were phi­los­o­pher Eugene C. Holmes, historian Rayford W. Logan, po­liti­cal scientists Emmett E. Dorsey and Robert E. Martin, and sociologist Harry J. Walker. At the meeting, Logan “suggested that Professor Kallen should speak on Locke’s contributions in the field of philosophy.” The group “further agreed that Kallen should discuss specifically cultural pluralism.”63 They de­cided that Kallen would speak on a panel alongside Dorsey for the eve­ning session of the conference’s second day. That Logan advanced Kallen as a speaker, and that the group agreed on the subject of cultural pluralism, suggests that Kallen’s friendship with Locke was well known and that the two men w ­ ere already associated together with cultural pluralism. When the conference came about that spring, Kallen only attended the eve­ning session that included him as a speaker, but he was mentioned on the first day by Holmes. In his opening remarks, Holmes referred to Locke’s “life-­long friendship with his friend and fellow phi­los­o­pher Horace Meyer Kallen.”64 On April 21, 1955, Kallen delivered his address at the Howard memorial conference for Locke. His paper, “Pluralism and Culture,” was dense and meandering, including extensive comments on seventeenth-­century German phi­ los­o­pher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and his pluralistic ideas about monads, with very ­little commentary on culture and no mention of Locke or African

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Americans. It seemed bizarre and out of place in the compiled volume of essays presented at the memorial. Buried within the inelegant prose, however, Kallen provided a description of an ideal cosmopolitan in the mold of his friend Locke. Extoling the porous nature of bound­aries, Kallen celebrated ­those individuals whose education allowed them maximum “cultural mobility,” for such a person became “a cosmopolitan, literally a citizen of the world.” This would be a rooted cosmopolitan, though, for “without ever losing his commitment to his home base, his citizenship, and his original culture, he is now also no stranger in any dif­fer­ent country and culture.” Kallen cited Gandhi: “I want the winds of all cultures to blow freely about my ­house, but not to be swept off my feet by any.”65 ­After advocating cosmopolitanism, Kallen concluded his remarks by offering another description of cultural pluralism. He called for a “fluid, relativist pluralism which the living individual encounters in the transactions wherewith he constructs his personal history moving out of groups and into groups, engaging in open or hidden communion with socie­ties of his fellows, e­ very one dif­fer­ent from the ­others, and all teamed together, and struggling to maintain the common means which nourish, assure, enhance, the dif­fer­ent, and often competing values, that they cherish.”66 This inelegant description of cultural pluralism captured the lived, experiential nature of the idea, of interacting with ­people dif­fer­ent from oneself. The terms “communion” and “fellows” and “teamed” reflect the lived experience of friendship at the heart of Kallen and Locke’s cultural pluralism. Before delivering his formal paper, however, Kallen opened with some “prefatory remarks concerning his long friendship with Dr.  Locke and Dr. Locke’s role in the ethical and esthetic implications of cultural pluralism.” He reminisced about their time together at Harvard and Oxford, describing Locke as “a sensitive, frail, and brilliant Negro student” who “experienced discrimination from fellow-­Americans” at Oxford that his time in the United States “had not prepared him for.” B ­ ecause Locke belonged to a “minority group” that restricted his opportunities, he gravitated ­toward “aesthetic pluralism, the espousal of nationalism, of Bahaism, of demo­cratically based individualism and to an affirmation in the faith of Amer­i­ca’s ideals.”67 Logan deemed the conference “a success.”68 Kallen’s full prefatory remarks about Locke w ­ ere not recorded. His contribution stands out in the volume, as the o ­ thers dealt ­either directly with Locke or with some issue relating to African Americans. But the editor’s note on Kallen’s prefatory marks contains the only mention of Locke’s Baha’i faith in the entire recorded proceedings of the memorial ser­vice, whose participants included several Howard faculty who ­were friends with Locke, the members of the conference planning com-

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mittee, historian John Hope Franklin, literary scholar and poet Sterling Brown, sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, artist James A. Porter, Fisk University president Charles S. Johnson, and Arthur Huff Fauset, president of the Alain Locke National Memorial Committee. Perhaps Locke had not discussed his Baha’i faith with them. But he clearly discussed it with Kallen. The two men could relate in terms of their feelings about culture and religion. Both men largely divorced culture and religion, taking pride in the former as a secular and par­tic­u­lar manifestation of their identity and community, whereas the latter served as a personalized conduit to the universal. In 1956, a year a­ fter the memorial conference for Locke, Kallen wrote to Shoghi Effendi, the Baha’i leader in Haifa. Kallen’s recently deceased brother-­in-­law, Alfred E. Lunt, “was one of the early and most devoted American Baha’is.” Kallen was planning a two-­month trip with his wife to Israel “to make a study of inter-­group relations” within the Holy Land, and he hoped to secure a meeting with the Baha’i leader to learn what his “ideas of the prob­lem involved.”69 Kallen did not mention Locke, perhaps aware that Locke had distanced himself from the movement. It is unclear w ­ hether he ever met with Effendi. In his 1958 report, Utopians at Bay, Kallen recorded visiting “the Bahai shrine in Acco,” in one of two brief mentions of the Baha’i faith. His primary goal was chronicling cultural pluralism in Israel, not religion. His visit to the Baha’i shrine was more personal than professional.70 Shortly before his trip to Israel, Kallen had been engaged in an intense epistolary debate on Judaism, religion, and the United States with his old friend, the Nobel Prize–­winning poet T. S. Eliot. Kallen had met Eliot at Harvard sometime between 1908 and 1910, possibly as a gradu­ate assistant in one of Royce’s seminars. Although Eliot has long had a reputation for genteel anti-­ Semitism, recent scholarship has complicated that view, pointing to his decades-­ long friendship with Kallen and especially his efforts to help Jewish refugees ­settle in the United States ­after fleeing Eu­rope during the 1930s, endeavors that had him reaching out to Kallen for assistance. Locke also overlapped with Eliot at Harvard, although his correspondence gives no indication that they interacted. Still, it is probable that Kallen mentioned the one to the other. Locke was deeply engaged with the modernist movement that Eliot exemplified, and was influenced by the poet’s 1921 essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” As Jeffery Stewart notes, the New Negro movement saw Locke “synthesize” Eliot’s ideas of a universal artistic canon and aesthetic hierarchy with Barrett Wendell and Kallen’s nationalistic pluralism.71

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In discussing religion with Eliot, Kallen repudiated the biological understanding of race he once held, “a fiction which men use mostly as an instrument of discrimination.” Any “who can breed together” belong to the same race, “their diversities are primarily cultural, not biological.” Kallen included African Americans along with Jews, the Irish, and Indians among his examples. Cultures constituted “a singular configuration of beliefs, thoughts, rites, rotes, works, and ways which have compounded into an ethos, that any individual can enter by birth, by conversion, or by immigration and naturalization.” Gone was Kallen’s insistence on Jewish biological determinism. “Anybody can become a Jew by entering a Jewish community, and committing himself to its ethos or culture.”72 Kallen’s new definition of Judaism may not have been religious, but it was more open and fluid than his racialized ideas of the 1920s. Kallen did not abandon his view about grand­fathers. ­Those w ­ ere still unchangeable. If you leave your community of birth or choice, you cannot simply leave your old life ­behind. That remains with you forever as “memory, habits, and attitudes,” which you must adapt or “orchestrate” with your new life, or live in conflict, suppressing or even rejecting it to the point of self-­hatred. You can abandon your grand­father but not change him. But any community that prevented this right of exit, that left a person isolated, that prevented him or her from “knowing and participating in other, dif­fer­ent cultures,” was dangerous to that individual’s well-­being.73 The Jewish community of the United States was not that insular, but in Kallen’s mind, Jewish education did not do an adequate job and could “perform better their function in the teamplay of cultural heritages and communions” in the country. His experience taught him that “hardly any of our nation’s component groups fails to cultivate some formation of its heritage, or to desire that its neighbors should see and appreciate it as a contribution to the spirt of Amer­i­ca—­e pluribus unum.” Kallen fi­nally included African Americans, and indeed all nonwhite groups, in the United States’ symphony of civilization. His contributionist cultural pluralism was open to contributions from all comers.74 In concluding his letter to Eliot, Kallen returned to the meta­phors of f­ amily and friendship. “None need have two religions, any more than he need have two wives, although he might. But being a loving husband and ­father does not preclude him from respecting, appreciating, and becoming a good friend and neighbor to the wives and ­children of other husbands and ­fathers, nor from uniting with the latter in their joint insurance of their several homes and families.” Religious pluralism exists ­because of this “collective act of faith.”75 This, to Kallen, was the religion of the United States, secularism willed by God.

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Kallen’s view of religion aligned more closely with that of his friend Locke. Their correspondence said ­little about religion, but they undoubtedly discussed it over the de­cades. They expressed their religious views differently but in parallel ways, embracing a universal, individualistic form of spirituality that bolstered their pluralism in the realm of culture. Religion anchored their common bond in the h ­ uman ­family; culture fostered their friendship.

C h a p te r   7

Friendship Rekindled, Pluralism Refined

Alain Locke influenced Horace Kallen’s views on race and African Americans, but the effect took time. Kallen did not write about the Harlem Re­nais­sance u ­ ntil ­after Locke’s death in 1954. The New Negro movement eventually compelled Kallen to accept and even celebrate the Black contribution to American culture. But even beyond the ­actual content of the Harlem Re­nais­sance, the chief influence on Kallen was his friendship with Locke. Through friendship, Locke helped Kallen overcome his prejudices. Kallen never admitted to that in print, but his eulogizing of Locke spoke volumes as to the effect his friend had on his racial thinking, and the bound­aries of cultural pluralism. The irony of this notion of cultural pluralism as friendship is that Kallen and Locke’s friendship faded a­ fter their year together in Oxford. In his 1915 and 1916 addresses on “race contacts and interracial relations” that he delivered at Howard, Locke referred to Kallen not by name but as a “friend.” Locke was reading Kallen’s book on William James and Henri Bergson in January 1916. Kallen sent Locke a short note in January 1915 or 1916 (the date is unclear). A ­ fter that, we have no rec­ord of correspondence or interaction between them ­until 1935. Their friendship, very strong for a brief period from 1907 to 1908, had faded over time and geography. They may have lost touch entirely for nearly twenty years. But when their friendship resumed, it resumed

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in earnest and reinforced the understanding of cultural pluralism as friendship. Their renewed friendship lasted ­until Locke’s death in 1954. One indication of their deepening friendship was the way they addressed each other in correspondence. Early on, when Locke remained at Oxford ­after Kallen had left E ­ ngland, the former teaching assistant referred to his ex-­student by his surname and began his letters, “Dear Locke.” On occasion, he used the nickname “Lockeus” or even “All Royal Lockeus.”1 In one early letter, Locke addressed his former teacher as “dear Kallen.” In the 1930s Kallen started his letters with “Dear Locke.” All subsequent letters, however, begin with “Dear Alain.” The letters from Locke from the 1940s and beyond read “Dear Horace.” Beyond correspondence, the friendship deepened t­oward the end of Locke’s life, when they both lived in New York. In the years a­ fter Locke’s death, Kallen clarified the connection between them. He assisted in efforts to memorialize Locke and eventually gave interviews where he again told the story of how he and Locke came up with the term cultural pluralism so many years ­earlier. Kallen may have played up his friendship with Locke, perhaps to erase the guilt he felt for the racist views he had held t­ oward Black p­ eople at the beginning of the twentieth ­century. ­Those views faded as Kallen and Locke’s friendship grew and developed over time. Kallen had learned from Locke to appreciate the cultural contributions of African Americans. He gave his address on Locke in 1955, before Martin Luther King Jr. had become a national figure. Before the major moments of the civil rights movement, Kallen began to speak of Black ­people as he had of Jews and Irishmen and Italians, as a part of the United States’ symphony of civilization. Locke’s friendship proved pivotal not only to Kallen’s greater appreciation for Black culture but also to Kallen’s own understanding of cultural pluralism as friendship, an understanding he developed most clearly in his memorials for Locke. Three years before they reconnected in 1935, Locke did some memorializing of his own for the recently deceased American Jewish philanthropist Julius Rosenwald (1862–1932). Before the modern civil rights movement, the most celebrated Black-­Jewish friendship in American history was prob­ably that of Booker T. Washington and Rosenwald. Born in Chicago, Rosenwald became the owner of Sears Roebuck. He gave to numerous charitable ­causes, Jewish and non-­Jewish alike, but is best known for helping to finance over five thousand public schools for African Americans in the Jim Crow South and for providing grants and fellowships for numerous Black artists and scholars through a charitable fund that continued ­after he died.

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As Rosenwald grew ill in December 1931, Jacob Billikopf urgently requested that Locke submit to him “a story about Mr. Rosenwald in relation to the complex Negro situation.”2 Busy with end-­of-­semester responsibilities, Locke had gone to the American Philosophical Association meeting at Yale and was headed back to Washington via New York when he heard of Rosenwald’s death on January 6, 1932. Upon his return home, he “hurriedly completed” a brief essay about Rosenwald’s contributions to the African American community. Though he claimed that “remorse and sorrow” impeded his work, the document Locke sent to Billikopf “with deep regret and friendship” proved remarkably insightful.3 Locke’s text on Rosenwald was consistent with his embrace of cultural pluralism and the importance he placed on friendship. He highlighted Rosenwald’s ability to balance the par­tic­u­lar and the universal. “Mr. Rosenwald was a Jew, and a loyal and helpful patron of the many c­ auses of modern Jewry. But the g­ reat bulk of his benefactions was deliberately outside the circle of this pardonable partisanship, ­because without it being any less Jewish, he was all the more American and universally humanitarian.”4 Then, Locke put forward the idea of friendship in describing Rosenwald’s philanthropic activity t­oward African Americans. Rosenwald was “the most con­spic­uo ­ us con­temporary benefactor of the Negro” and “the most helpful and understanding friend that handicapped ­people has had in several generations.” Locke sought to understand the nature of that friendship. “Certainly its ­human heart roots must have been the sympathetic transfer to an oppressed [group] of the sad but spiritually strengthening experience of the Jewish ­people.” Yet most impor­tant was Rosenwald’s “lack of sentimental and patronizing attitude, and an insistence on treating the Negro situation, not as a separate or special issue, but as part and parcel of the working prob­lems of practical social democracy in Amer­i­ca.”5 Friends treated each other as equals. American friends understood that as members of dif­fer­ent ethnic groups, they ­were equal parts of a larger, pluralistic w ­ hole, each providing their own unique contribution to make that w ­ hole better. Rosenwald had been inspired by Booker T. Washington’s philosophy “that you ­can’t keep a man down in a ditch without yourself staying down in the ditch keeping him ­there.” Put another way, “the cause and best interests of any and all minorities is r­ eally the cause and best interests of the majority, and that common interests are the proper and most effective basis of philanthropic enterprise.” Locke concluded that if “the body of American philanthropy” embraced this ideal, it would be b­ ecause of “the spiritual fusion of two minority



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experiences, the Jewish and the Negro, meeting unselfishly and fruitfully in an American environment.”6 Locke’s Rosenwaldian model of Black-­Jewish relations was, at least in its ideal form, a meeting of equals in a pluralistic American democracy. Kallen did not care much for Rosenwald, put off by the latter’s lukewarm attitude ­toward Zionism. But he would likely have agreed with Rosenwald’s pluralistic vision for the United States, or at least how Locke formulated it. A few years a­ fter drafting his Rosenwald essay, Locke rekindled his friendship with Kallen. On April 4, 5, and 6, 1935, a Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, respectively, and again the following week on April 11, 12, and 13, a group of scholars convened at Howard University in Washington, DC. They came for a conference, or a symposium, u ­ nder the auspices of the Department of Philosophy and the Division of Social Sciences at Howard. The theme was “Prob­ lems, Programs, and Philosophies of Minority Groups.” The conference, or­ga­nized by Locke, was a big deal. Howard president Mordecai Johnson presided over the first lectures Thursday eve­ning. Other soon-­ to-­be-­famous African American scholars participated, including po­liti­cal scientist Ralph Bunche and sociologist E. Franklin Frazier. O ­ thers ­were already well known, including W. E. B. Du Bois, as well as the white non-­Jewish sociologist Robert Ezra Park. Numerous Jewish thinkers participated as well, making up a disproportionate number of the white participants. The conference represented something of a point of origin for the academic topic “Black-­ Jewish relations.” Black p­ eople and Jews in the United States had been talked about before, compared and contrasted, posited as allies. But in terms of academic study, this might have been the first instance in which the two groups ­were examined together in a scholarly setting. Kallen’s former student Marvin Lowenthal delivered the opening keynote, “The Plight of Minorities in the Present-­Day World,” on the first eve­ning of the conference. Though Lowenthal focused on minority rights in Eu­rope emerging ­after the First World War, he noted that American minority groups would think “equality before the law” would be “sufficient, with the exception of the Indian and the Negro,” two groups made minorities against their ­will.7 Lowenthal understood that Jews and African Americans, though both minorities, coexisted in significantly dif­fer­ent circumstances. ­These comparisons ­were more explicit in other panels. In a session titled “Minority Tactics and Techniques of Assertion,” Du Bois spoke about the Black experience, while Chicago Reform rabbi Jacob  J. Weinstein spoke of the Jewish experience. On April 11, Bunche chaired a panel titled “Culture Pluralism vs Assimilation,” whose participants included Otto Klineberg, the Canadian Jewish

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social psychologist whose research would become impor­tant in winning the Brown v. Board case two de­cades ­later. A panel titled “Racial and Cultural Aspects of Minority Issues” featured Locke on “the Negro paradox” and twenty-­eight-­ year-­old rabbi Ira Eisenstein on “the Jewish prob­lem.” Eisenstein, the son-­in-­law of Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, the founder of the Reconstructionist movement in Judaism, would be the first president of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in 1968. In a session titled “Racialism vs Assimilationism” one Friday eve­ning, Weinstein compared the Black and Jewish experiences and Park talked about “race and culture.” Other participants w ­ ere Joshua Kunitz, a communist and scholar of Rus­sian Jewry, and Bernhard Stern, a Marxist sociologist of Jewish origin and f­ uture coeditor of a 1942 volume with Locke titled When ­Peoples Meet. If the ideal of cultural pluralism was intellectual friendship, the ideal setting for cultural pluralism was the cosmopolitan university. At a university, one can or­ga­nize a conference like the 1935 symposium on minority group relations. This conference not only helped create “Black-­Jewish relations” as a category of analy­sis, it opened new directions for that category. It helped make Black-­Jewish relations not just about shared suffering or about an alliance against oppression. It showed African Americans and Jews as contributors to culture, together and separately. It showed both groups as the beneficiaries and builders of cultural pluralism. It helped cultural pluralism flourish by forging new friendships and rekindling old ones. Kallen initially was not thrilled to be attending the conference. He wrote to his friend and former Harvard professor, phi­los­o­pher and psychologist Edwin Bissel Holt, who had invited him to a psy­chol­ogy meeting the same weekend as the Howard event, “I am ­going to Washington Saturday to talk ­under the auspices of Alain Locke on ‘Culture and Democracy in the United States.’ . . . ​I wish the Negroes d­ idn’t have a prior claim over the psychologists. I would rather be ­there.”8 Nonetheless, something came of the conference for Kallen. His talk, “Culture and Democracy in the United States,” advanced his ideal of cultural pluralism. But it also referred to the “influence of the African dialect” on southern speech patterns. He mentioned the “contribution” Black ­people made to American ­music.9 Fi­nally, Kallen had begun to publicly appreciate African American culture. This shift may have led him to renew his friendship with Locke. Phi­los­o­ pher William Ernest Hocking, another participant, told Locke, “The few hours with you and with President Johnson and with [T. V.] Smith and with Kallen linger with me as precious hours.” Kallen expressed a similar sentiment to Locke: “It was a plea­sure to be with you and I was especially glad of the l­ittle reunion.” He added, “Be sure to look me up whenever you are ­here.”10



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­After the conference, their friendship rekindled. Kallen invited Locke to contribute an article to the 1935 volume American Philosophy T ­ oday and Tomorrow, edited by him and Sidney Hook. As preface to his contribution, “Values and Imperatives,” Locke wrote a short personal essay he called a “psychograph,” where he labeled his guiding philosophy “cultural pluralism and value relativism.” In identifying himself with the philosophy associated with Kallen, he was asserting their friendship in print.11 By reconnecting with Locke, Kallen became better attuned to bigotry against Black ­people along with the global anti-­Semitism that was growing in the United States. He linked his activism on behalf of German refugee scholars with improving Black-­white relations in the United States. In 1934 Kallen hoped to help “refugee scholar” Julius Lips, a German, non-­Jewish (Kallen called him an “Aryan”) anthropologist and dissenter from Hitler’s regime. Lips had been an officer in the German cavalry during the First World War. He wrote about African, Native American, and other re­sis­tance to Eu­ro­pean imperialists, especially through art and humor, in his book The Savage Hits Back. Lips had been fired from the German University of Cologne but had secured a temporary teaching position at Columbia University in New York. Kallen sought to help him find additional lectureships and a more permanent position in the United States.12 ­After two years, Kallen contacted his friend Jacob Billikopf, a Jewish social worker and philanthropic or­ga­nizer who was involved with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored ­People (NAACP) and sat on the board of trustees at both the New School and Howard, for a time serving as president of the latter. Kallen urged Billikopf to convince Mordecai Johnson, president of Howard, to hire Lips. Kallen soon wrote to Johnson himself, arguing not only for the benefit to Howard “but also b­ ecause the employment of an ‘Aryan’ with Professor Lips’s rec­ord in the ­Great War, ­etc., by a Negro University would be a dramatic and fruitful vindication of the demo­cratic princi­ple.”13 Bringing Lips to Howard demonstrated the power of cultural pluralism. Johnson came through and Howard hired Lips, and Kallen maintained a close friendship with the German scholar and his wife, Eva. He provided contacts in the Washington, DC, area, including Baltimore activist Elisabeth Coit Gilman, who would connect them with “Negro movements of all sorts and with aspects of the life of the South that you w ­ ill want to know.” He also likely mentioned or introduced them to Locke. In 1937 Eva Lips sent Kallen a picture of Julius, Locke, and a “Dr. Muzumdar,” noting, “Mr. Locke is a very charming man. He just presented us with his nice books on Negro m ­ usic and art.”14 The Lipses, as well as Billikopf, became mutual friends of Kallen and Locke, strengthening their connection.

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In the spring of 1939, ­after less than three years, Lips left. He claimed to have liked the students but resigned ­because of the “jealousy, toadying, and general pettiness” at the university. Howard dean Chas H. Thompson, however, claimed Lips did not resign but rather was fired b­ ecause of his “unfortunate temperament and personality.”15 Kallen agreed and elaborated, “Lips started with the notion that he was g­ oing to be a sort of scientist bountiful to all the Negroes.” He became “frustrated partly by their sensitiveness, partly by the fact that a good many of them r­ eally are in their own fields as competent as he is in his.” He expected “a body of grateful dependents” but “found a collection of competitive peers who held themselves to be even better than he, and the German in him c­ ouldn’t stand it.” Kallen declared the m ­ atter “unfortunate” but unsurprising given Lips’s position as a foreign refugee. “In a case where the adjustment is not only to Amer­ic­ a but to Negro Amer­i­ca you can understand that the prob­lems are bound to be worse.”16 In defending the integrity of scholars at Howard, Kallen demonstrated his evolving re­spect for African Americans. His questioning their sensitivity betrayed some residual prejudice. His view of Lips reflected this continuing pre­ judice against non-­Jewish Germans. Just as Germans as a nation saw the Aryan race as superior, so too did individual Germans like Lips see themselves as superior to ­others, especially nonwhites. Locke, for his part, did not reveal his opinion of the Lips affair in his letters, although he did tell Billikopf that he hoped to discuss the ­matter with Kallen. The Lips case reveals Kallen’s willingness to accept Black culture into the American symphony of civilization. This was a gradual pro­cess, involving Kallen’s further exposure to issues that mattered to African Americans. In March 1938 Kallen asked Locke “to what degree Negros are getting into the cooperative movement.”17 Kallen had been involved with u ­ nions e­ arlier in his life, before shifting his interest to consumer cooperatives. His interest was rooted in pluralism, navigating competing forces of the market, but was also universal, as ­unions and cooperatives ­were open to all. By asking about African American involvement in the movement, he was blending the universal with the par­tic­u­lar, wondering how Black ­people could participate in this broader economic trend. This interest in Black ­people in the consumer cooperative movement led Kallen to encounter a young African American scholar named John H. Harmon, who attended Kallen’s lectures on consumerism at the Rochdale Institute of the Cooperative League of the USA. In 1939 Harmon asked Kallen for help building a cooperative movement in Harlem, to secure funding and to prepare for his meeting with Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and other bigwigs “in that community.”18



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Kallen wrote to George M. Reynolds, director of fellowships at the Julius Rosenwald Foundation, and forwarded along Harmon’s application for one of the “scholarships for Negroes.” Kallen described Harmon as “the kind of man who could prove pretty useful to his race” and expressed his “hope that you ­will consider him favorably.”19 Kallen agreed to supervise Harmon’s research should he receive the Rosenwald fellowship. This effort to help Harmon revealed Kallen’s lingering prejudice. In 1940 Kallen asked John Lovejoy Elliott of New York’s Society for Ethical Culture to see ­whether someone ­there could help push Harmon’s Rosenwald application along. Kallen described his “young negro friend” as “a pretty good boy” whom he recommended for a Rosenwald fellowship, as Harmon still had to “eke out to live by continuing his work.”20 Elliott would give Harmon fifty dollars for two weeks. Kallen’s letter contained paternalistic language reminiscent of his Oxford letters about Locke, once again b­ ehind the beneficiary’s back. Harmon invited Kallen to speak at the Conference of Consumers he planned for November  1940, held by the Harlem Consumer Cooperative Council. The conference was or­ga­nized to drum up enough interest “to open a Cooperative store” in Harlem. The event received coverage in the Black press. Kallen was a big hit, and Harmon thanked him for his “very excellent contribution,” noting, “The entire community has been talking about it ever since.”21 Efforts to acquire a charter for the Harlem Consumers Cooperative Society began in the conference’s wake. Despite his renewed friendship with Locke, Kallen maintained some bigotry ­toward African Americans. In 1939 he spoke on a panel on “minorities in the United States” to a hundred members of the Alumni Association of New York University. Kallen’s co-­panelists ­were Walter White of the NAACP and George Hunton of the Catholic Inter-­racial Council. Though they developed friendly relations ­later, Kallen did not seem impressed with White, who “made his characteristic arraignment of the attitude of the United States, and left.” He was even less impressed with Hunton, who “spoke vaguely and sentimentally about the usual flub-­dub concerning democracy.”22 What ­really irked Kallen, who was still actively engaged in condemning totalitarianism abroad, was the fact that ­people did not celebrate the benefits of living in a ­free society like the United States’, though it was an imperfect one. He insisted that “White had ignored the fact that it was pos­si­ble to mobilize money, men and organ­izations other than Negroes against lynching, and that such ­things would not be pos­si­ble in totalitarian countries, and that whites ­were lynched as well as blacks, and that lynching was something p­ eople ­were ashamed of and not a base for public honor, as it is elsewhere.”23 Kallen was

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an American patriot and wanted to defend his country’s honor. He condemned lynching and endorsed equality for Black p­ eople but felt African Americans should be grateful for being Americans. Locke would prob­ably not have appreciated that response. Meanwhile, Locke retained some anti-­Semitic sentiments. In corresponding with Charlotte Osgood Mason, the wealthy white heiress who helped fund Harlem Re­nais­sance endeavors, he followed her lead when it came to anti-­ Semitism. In 1928 he wrote a letter referring to a “New York Jewess,” adding, “I guess you are right about the Jews, though I hate to generalize about any ­people—we ourselves having suffered so from that.”24 Locke reluctantly agreed with Mason’s anti-­Semitism. He had misgivings about prejudice against Jews, but not enough to truly chastise his patron for expressing them. In a 1934 fragment of a letter he may not have sent, prob­ably intended for Mason, Locke relayed his encounter with the nephew of publisher Alfred A. Knopf, who possessed several “Jewish traits.” In Locke’s words, “[He] always repudiates the thought of working for salary—­cap­it­ al­ist urges—­told of scheme for doubling capital in 2 ½ months—­well calculated—­refused to share idea and yet ­hasn’t one red cent!!”25 Locke trafficked in traditional anti-­Semitic ste­reo­ types. Perhaps he believed them; perhaps he knew Mason would be a receptive audience. In his 1936 Bronze Booklet, The Negro and His M ­ usic, Locke publicly expressed economic anti-­Semitism. He insisted that African Americans needed a “class of trained musicians who know and love the folk m ­ usic and are able to develop it into ­great classical m ­ usic, and a class of trained m ­ usic lovers, who ­will support by appreciation the best in the Negro’s musical heritage.” Committed to elitism, Locke warned that Black folk m ­ usic might be undermined by external forces seeking to profit from it. “The very musicians who know the folk-­ways of Negro m ­ usic are the very ones who are in commercial slavery to the Shylocks of Tin Pan Alley.” This “artistic bondage” prevented them from engaging in “composition of a serious kind” or from studying “­g reat ­music for inspiration.”26 Locke was familiar with The Merchant of Venice, having written about Shylock in high school. The Bronze Booklets, published by the Associates in Negro Folk Education, ­were designed to be accessible to the Black masses. Among ­those masses lived the producers of popu­lar tunes who Locke believed could be uplifted to create ­great ­music and real artistic contributions. Kallen was not the intended audience for Locke’s book and prob­ably never read it, nor did many if any Jews. In 1937 Locke’s Howard colleague, African American Marxist phi­los­o­pher Eugene C. Holmes, contributed a paper to the Second National Congress of



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American Writers that touched on Black life in Harlem.27 In the discussion period, author and ­f uture film scholar Robert Gessner brought up the “growing misunderstanding” between Black p­ eople and Jews. Gessner highlighted the anti-­Semitism directed “to Jewish shop­keep­ers who ­will not employ Negroes and who raise prices.” Holmes agreed, noting how “anti-­Semitism could flourish within an even more exploited and persecuted group.” He admitted, “I have seen it in Howard University, where we have Jewish professors.”28 Holmes may have been speaking about Locke. Locke’s per­sis­tent anti-­Semitism appears in the diary of another Howard colleague, African American historian Rayford W. Logan (1897–1982). On the eve­ning of January 22, 1942, as Nazis controlled most of Eu­rope, Logan recalled having “a very in­ter­est­ing chat of about three hours” with Locke.29 They discussed Vichy France, Haiti, publishing, and anthropologist Melville Herskovits. They also discussed Jews in unflattering terms. “We agreed that some Jews are not entitled to the commiseration they implore,” Logan observed. He described an experience with a man named Grosner, presumably a Jewish banker, whom he claimed was “freezing out [his] credit account.” He relayed a story about Howard classicist Frank Snowden, “who was denied credit by the Young Men’s Shop,” a Jewish-­owned store in Washington, DC, that advertised in the newspaper, “Charge accounts invited.” Logan and Locke “agreed that a quota system for Jews in American Universities is the only equitable” solution. Logan revealed “confidentially” that President Franklin Delano Roo­se­velt has assured him that the government required photo­g raphs to work in the civil ser­vice “not b­ ecause of Negroes but ­because of Jews,” implying that Jews could be identified based on their appearance and that they ­were considered undesirable for government work. Both Logan and Locke also “agreed that the world needed spiritual regeneration” and that “the war which many p­ eople want is one in which the US, ­Great Britain, and Germany would be allied against Japan and Rus­sia.”30 Did Locke agree with Logan, or was he feigning agreement out of politeness? At best, in 1942, Locke was comfortable socializing with anti-­Semites. At worst, he continued to espouse ­these views himself. At least on Jewish quotas, his view evolved. In 1948 he wrote to Billikopf, “When challenged years back on [Howard University’s] ‘Jewish quota’ by Norman Cousins, I admitted it was indefensible. I still see it that way, particularly as other general institutions open up, the ‘Negro’ colleges [can] liquidate both the double-­standard and racial chauvinism.” Coincidentally, Locke would be attending “Horace’s reception this after­noon” before returning to Washington, DC.31 Another indication of Locke’s evolution was his close friendships with Jews, including Zionists who strongly identified with the Jewish community. ­These

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­ ere ­people proud to be Jewish, such as Melville Herskovitz, Billikopf, and w Kallen. In the 1940s he would befriend Judaic scholar and rabbi Louis Finkelstein (1895–1991), who brought him into a wider circle of Jews and Jewish thought. In 1940 Finkelstein became chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, the flagship institution for Conservative Judaism. With a vision that extended far beyond the Jewish world, he proposed a major Conference on Science, Philosophy, and Religion that met annually at Columbia University from 1940 to 1968 and included figures such as John Dewey, Hannah Arendt, Bayard Rustin, Mortimer Adler, Paul Tillich, Mordecai Kaplan, and Perry Miller. Locke attended the first conference and delivered papers at several ­others, eventually serving on the conference’s board. Through the conference Locke became friends with Finkelstein. They discussed cultural pluralism, and in 1944 he praised Finkelstein’s use of the term groupism as “brilliantly constructive.” He hoped the word would gain “wide currency” and suggested the conference could aid in this pro­cess by formally “adopting it.” Locke felt the term ethnocentrism to be “so inadequate and academic,” while sectarianism was weakened by its association with religion. On the other hand, “groupism is a good neutral and laymen’s term, and some such word was badly needed.”32 The prob­lem, as Locke and Finkelstein saw it, was chauvinism, be it racial, ethnic, national, or religious. The solution was cultural pluralism that included religious distinctions as well. As his friendship with Finkelstein grew, Locke learned more about Judaism. In 1948 Finkelstein asked Locke to serve on a panel of judges for an essay contest. One essay, by Mordecai Kaplan and his son-­in-­law Ira Eisenstein, had an “obvious need for effective revision” but likely taught Locke about Kaplan’s movement, Reconstructionist Judaism.33 Three years ­later, Locke complimented Finkelstein on being the subject of a Time magazine cover story. The article explained Judaism to a broad American audience but also highlighted Finkelstein’s breadth. It mentioned the Conference on Science, Philosophy, and Religion, quoting Finkelstein: “When I am at work on ­these enterprises . . . ​I feel that I am obeying the commandments just as much as when I go to the synagogue for prayer.” At the heart of Finkelstein’s Jewish mission “lay a challenging paradox—to be a ­people set apart, and yet not apart.”34 It was a paradox Locke knew well. He praised Finkelstein for this “exceptionally moving and enlightening profile” in Time. “It was moving and revealing, even a­ fter having had the privilege of knowing you and your work all t­ hese years,” Locke wrote. He praised his friend’s “unusually strategic move in [his] long campaign for group understanding and collaboration.”35



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Locke’s friendship with Finkelstein ­shaped and improved his views of Jewish ­people as a ­whole. So too did his friendship with Kallen. By the Second World War, Kallen and Locke had resumed regular correspondence, and they met each other when in the same city. In March 1944 Kallen thanked Locke for sending him his article “The Negro in Three Amer­i­cas,” which he “read with ­g reat interest.” He signed his note, “The gods keep you well and merry,” one of his favorite parting quips.36 Two months ­later, Kallen invited Locke to lunch before attending Finkelstein’s Conference on the Scientific Spirit and Demo­cratic Faith in Amer­i­ca in New York, which included Locke as a participant. He offered to take Locke from the meeting to his apartment on the Upper West Side, and closed his letter, “I look forward to seeing you.” Locke had a good time. He wrote Kallen to tell his wife how much he “enjoyed [their] good hospitality,” pronouncing it a “­grand get-­together” and hoping for “another sometime before too long!”37 That same year, Locke became the first African American on the academic council for YIVO (Yiddish Scientific Institute), a secular Jewish historical and cultural institution geared ­toward the Yiddish language that had been rescued from interwar Vilnius and moved to New York. Kallen was also on the council. Their deepening friendship led to professional opportunities for Locke. In the summer of 1945 University of Wisconsin phi­los­o­pher Max C. Otto wrote to Kallen “in confidence” that his department would bring on Locke for the winter semester as a visiting professor, a plan Otto had been working on for some time.38 Kallen commended Otto, replying, “I hope your scheme to get Locke has gone through. It ­will stimulate a ­g reat many other efforts in similar directions.”39 Kallen and Otto hoped to create opportunities for African American phi­los­op­ hers, with Locke at the top of the list. When Locke left for Wisconsin, Kallen provided introductions to Otto and Horace Fries, who grew very fond of their new colleague in the Philosophy Department. Locke shared an office with Fries, whom he labeled “as fine a person as [he had] ever met.”40 Locke also began communicating with Kallen’s protégé Milton Konvitz, the Safed-­born ­lawyer and phi­los­op­ her who had worked as assistant general counsel to Thurgood Marshall for the NAACP l­egal defense fund for three years before joining the faculty. Wisconsin was a welcome reprieve from Howard. Locke enjoyed giving a talk titled “The Price of Democracy” to the Lion’s Club, which not only was well received but included only “indirect reference to the Negro end of it.” He expected a positive “student and faculty response” but was especially appreciative of the “cordial community reaction” ­after only three weeks in Madison, vindicating Otto’s efforts to bring him ­there. Locke was being treated as a phi­los­o­pher, not simply an African American academic. As he told Kallen,

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“I am having the best philosophical time of my life, and it may rejuvenate my mind.” He thanked Kallen for his “past and pre­sent friendship.”41 The next month, Locke reported more good news to his friend. “I am delighted to be able to tell you that t­ hings continue to go well h ­ ere at Madison,” Locke proclaimed. “I think and hope dear Max is satisfied and have tried my hardest to have it so.” Locke preferred his new temporary academic institution to the one he had called home for de­cades. “The contrast both in student reaction, colleague’s friendliness, and of course, administrative attitude has been damning in Howard’s disfavor.” Nonetheless, Locke remained committed to working for his old employer for another five years before retiring, if only to use it as a “base” for ­future visiting assignments, which would increase his “prestige and potential influence at Howard itself.”42 Locke’s experiences at Wisconsin ­were exactly what Otto had been hoping for. As he wrote to Kallen, “One ­thing ­we’ve kept in the forefront: Locke is ­here as a scholar in philosophy deserving this recognition.” Although Otto “made it clear” to Locke that his being Black was “one reason” for his hiring, he also communicated that the faculty “wanted him for what he was professionally.”43 Locke was hired in part b­ ecause of his race, but not to be representative of his race. As Otto elaborated, Locke was “constantly called on to give talks, and he has tried to talk philosophy as a phi­los­o­pher, rather than make a speech as a Negro trying to win consideration for his race.” He and Locke agreed “that it’s all too easy to make t­ hese minority aspects of the American prob­lem, or the prob­lem of democracy, into a prob­lem of this or that minority; to talk about the Negro prob­lem, the Jewish prob­lem, ­etc., and to won­der how ­we’ll ever get ­these queer or unfortunate minority groups to be transformed from within and cease to be prob­lems.”44 Otto advanced the same philosophical formula Locke had championed during the Harlem Re­nais­sance: channel the par­tic­u­lar to reach the universal. In this formulation, the United States and democracy represented universal ideals, and so did philosophy. T ­ here was no such t­hing as African American or Jewish philosophy, any more than t­here was an African American or Jewish mathe­matics or physics. Kallen and Locke almost certainly agreed. Philosophy was like religion to them, universal. Culture was par­tic­ul­ar. Nonetheless, both Kallen and Otto understood that ethnic repre­sen­ta­tion in universal fields mattered. Morris Cohen had broken new ground as a phi­ los­o­pher of Jewish descent at the City College of New York, as had Lionel Trilling in the En­glish Department at Columbia University. Locke himself had broken new ground this way, as the first African American to receive a Rhodes Scholarship and then the first to receive a doctorate in philosophy at Harvard.



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To Otto, bringing Locke to Wisconsin was impor­tant, but it was impor­tant to bring a phi­los­op­ her who was also an African American, and not an African American phi­los­o­pher. ­These exchanges with Otto encouraged Kallen to invite Locke to teach at his home institution, the New School for Social Research in New York, for the spring 1947 semester. Before asking Locke, however, Kallen asked Otto to send him Locke’s application materials, so he could convince the other faculty of Locke’s suitability for the job, making sure that Otto keep the possibility a secret. Otto happily sent material along, writing, “At pre­sent am hushed!”45 In the attached letter, Otto signaled the significance of hiring Locke: “To get him another chance to teach in a ‘White’ college is just the ­thing that should happen, for the sake of the U.S., for Locke’s sake, and also, though you are too h ­ uman a person to agree with my pagan impulses in such situations—­also I say, in order that the president of Howard may get a push in the face. (I hope he’s not a friend of yours.)” Otto may have disliked Howard president Mordecai Johnson, but his primary motivation was helping Locke personally and professionally and improving the United States by increasing diversity on campus. Otto believed that more “opportunity for Negroes in our colleges and universities” was as g­ reat an accomplishment for “liberalism” as he could imagine. He offered his assistance to Kallen and admitted that ­were he to remain at Wisconsin longer, he would try to find another African American phi­los­o­pher for a temporary appointment and then a “permanent one.”46 The New School for Social Research was not as ambitious. Nonetheless, when Kallen reached out with the unofficial offer from the New School, Locke, still in Madison, proved receptive: “So glad to hear from you, and terribly pleased at your usual but ever surprising friendly concern in my behalf.” Even with the “tentative character of the proposition,” he told Kallen he welcomed the opportunity for several reasons, including “the satisfaction of closer touch with New York and with [Kallen].” Kallen felt similarly, writing, “It ­will be a very happy ­thing for me and for all of us to have you with us.”47 Much had changed since their time at Oxford. That summer of 1946, while traveling near Chicago, Kallen described “an unpleasant experience in a restaurant where they w ­ ouldn’t serve a negro friend who was with us.”48 Kallen and his groups planned to contact the local press and the NAACP. With the Second World War over, Kallen began to realize that African Americans had waited far too long for equality. When Locke came to New York to teach at the New School in 1947, he saw Kallen with considerable frequency and their friendship deepened. That summer, when Kallen traveled through Washington, DC, en route to Claremont, California, Locke met him at the train station. He showed up early and

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stayed with Kallen “­until train time.” Locke complained about “his prob­lems at Howard and the potential changes t­here.” He was more upbeat about an NAACP convention he recently attended where First Ladies Eleanor Roo­se­ velt and Bess Truman spoke. Locke described it as “a very good meeting.”49 That August, Locke sent Kallen a card for his sixty-­fifth birthday and offered him “thanks and warm friendship in return—­meagre though it is, for your lifelong interest in my welfare and happiness.” Touched, Kallen wrote back from travels in Chicago. He observed that turning sixty-­five “brings to one’s awareness the comradeship and affection of old friends.” Waxing philosophical, he said, “[I hope to] continue in the Spinozan affirmation of life till the day I die, counting you as one of the dear friends beside me, fighting the daily fight for freedom that never ends.” That December, Kallen sent Locke a Hannukah card directed to “dear Alain” but then, bizarrely, with the Hebrew expression, in Hebrew script, “Sasson veh Simcha L’Hannukah” ( Joy and happiness/celebration on Hannukah), without En­glish translation.50 Theirs was a friendship of cultural pluralism, built on re­spect for each other’s heritages. Around that time, Kallen wrote Locke asking ­whether a Black theater would be interested in putting on The Book of Job as a Greek Tragedy, Kallen’s 1913 reworking of the biblical tale. He wrote, “I am very desirous of seeing this greatest book of the Bible communicated as I believe its author intended it to be, and I have a feeling that a negro com­pany d­ oing it might by that means lay a foundation of attention to its other works which ordinary plays do not bring.”51 Kallen i­magined that the African American theater com­pany would do the play justice and that the play would enable the com­pany to get more attention, furthering the cross-­pollination between Black and Jewish artistic communities. It was a prime example of cultural pluralism in action, particularly when performing a play based on cross-­pollination between the ancient Greek and Israelite worlds. Their friendship paid professional dividends for Locke. In 1947 Locke contributed to a festschrift for Kallen, edited by Sidney Hook and Milton R. Konvitz and published by Cornell University Press as Freedom and Experience: Essays Presented to Horace M. Kallen. Locke attended the event launching the festschrift and wrote about it to Horace Fries. “The Kallen affair was ­really touching,” Locke wrote. He was especially impressed with Kallen’s “marvelous speech,” considering his former teacher was “ghost white and just out of the hospital.” Locke was concerned for his friend’s health, noting that Kallen had not seemed “at all well ­these recent months.”52 Such an assessment could only be made by someone who had seen Kallen frequently, beyond just special occasions. The volume that emerged from the Kallen festschrift gave Locke another opportunity to contribute to the field of philosophy. His entry, “Pluralism and



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Ideological Peace,” demonstrated Kallen’s influence as well as that of the Baha’i faith and Buddhism, a blend of pragmatism, cultural pluralism, and religious universalism. He noted that William James’s pluralism served as an “anti-­authoritarian princi­ple” and rejected “absolutism in all its va­ri­e­ties—­ religious, philosophical, po­liti­cal, and cultural,” preferring “relativism as a safer and saner approach to the objectives of practical unity.” He advocated a “fluid and functional unity rather than a fixed and irrevocable one” and advanced “equivalence and reciprocity rather than identity or complete agreement.” Ever the pragmatist, he was “prepared to accept or even prefer an attainable concord of understanding and cooperation in lieu of an unattainable una­nim­i­ty.”53 It was Locke’s final publication in the realm of philosophy. In its conclusion he paid homage to his old friend, “Horace Kallen, whom we honor in this volume, himself a pioneer and creative advocate of pluralism.” From that point, their friendship solidified, they corresponded frequently, and they made time to see each other for their “usual tete-­a-­tetes.”54 Though Locke was invited to the 1948 New School commencement where Kallen was honored, he could not attend. He wrote Kallen to apologize, reminiscing about “the WM James-­Oxford event which years ago we shared,” to which the commencement would have made a “­grand companion-­piece.” Acknowledging the “significant recognition” of Kallen and his work, Locke closed his letter, “Your friends are proud to share this deep joy and satisfaction,” and asserted that he was honored and pleased to count himself among them.55 ­Later that year, Kallen suggested to his son David, a student at Cornell University, to invite Locke to speak at Watermargin, an interfaith and interracial fraternity founded in 1947 ­under the slogan “All men are ­brothers.” The group’s goal was “to promote better intergroup relations at Cornell, in the town of Ithaca, and we hope on college campuses throughout the country.” Locke approved of Watermargin’s “mighty good proj­ect” but had some difficulty scheduling the event. He proposed giving a version of his “fairly good talk” that was originally titled “Creative Democracy” but that he would rebrand “American Democracy at the Crossroads.”56 We do not know ­whether Locke ever gave that talk at Cornell, but the exchange reveals that Kallen thought highly enough of him to recommend him to his own son and found him especially suitable to speak to a fraternity concerned with brotherhood and intergroup relations. Implicit in the spirit of brotherhood embraced by Watermargin was the princi­ple that difference persisted. Brotherhood recognized common humanity—­today Watermargin’s motto is “All p­ eople are ­family”—­but that value did not trump appreciation of difference.57

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Locke’s appreciation of difference came with a sense of humor, and one perhaps still tinged with anti-­Semitism. In 1947 his friend and onetime Howard University colleague Ralph Bunche became chief negotiator on behalf of the new United Nations and was assigned to brokering peace between Jews and Arabs in Palestine. When Locke learned of Bunche’s assignment, he joked, “I do hope, however, to have a chance to greet you before you formally become ‘King of the Jews.’ (And Arabian satrap too, I suppose!)” In labeling Bunche “King of the Jews,” Locke referred to his friend’s close dealings with Jewish ­people and his potential as a Jesus-­like peacemaker.58 In addition to jokes, Locke also offered advice. He praised Bunche on the Palestine Report, calling it a “remarkable document” that he feared might be “sabotaged” by the US State Department. He agreed about “the internationalization of Jerusalem,” a topic the two men had discussed before. “The more territory that comes ­under UN jurisdiction the better; like the ­free cities of the old Hanseatic League, they w ­ ill become the nuclei of world government.”59 Just as Kallen in 1918 had favored a “United States of Asia Minor,” governed by the League of Nations or British Empire, so too did Locke and Bunche nearly thirty years ­later prefer an internationalist solution to the ­Middle East conundrum. Locke strongly endorsed the UN: “If ­there is no body the w ­ hole proj­ect ­will die. More power to you and it.”60 He believed in porous cultural bound­aries for nations but minimal po­liti­cal ones. In the wake of the Holocaust, Kallen’s po­liti­cal vision for Palestine had grown sturdier, involving real borders and a Jewish army, but his ideal of cultural pluralism remained intact. The year 1948 was an impor­tant one in Jewish history. Kallen celebrated the foundation of the State of Israel, though he was also confused by it. Early in 1949 he sent a letter to his friend Alfred Marrow, attempting to gather a dozen friends for an “informal dinner” on Monday, April 18, at six thirty in the eve­ning at the Town Hall Club in midtown Manhattan. Kallen asked, “Now that Zionism, having achieved its objective, can continue no longer to be the inspiration and goal of Jewish survival in Amer­ic­ a, what is to take its place?” He proposed “an alternative” he deemed “essential” for the f­ uture of American Jewry. This “alternative” would be the topic of discussion at the gathering.61 No rec­ord of that dinner remains. But Kallen, a lifelong Zionist, certainly felt that the American Jewish community needed to move in a new direction. Meanwhile Locke, who had long been sympathetic to cultural Zionism, understood the moment’s significance as well. In his correspondence with Billikopf, Locke revealed some of Bunche’s inner workings in the negotiations. In October 1948 Billikopf reported to Locke that the Nation had suggested that Bunche was opposed to partition. He asked his friend to “throw light on the situation” considering Locke’s closeness to Bunche.62



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In a heavi­ly annotated response, Locke wrote to Billikopf concerning Bunche’s per­for­mance as negotiator. He had done a “­g rand job” but was “suffering” over the assassination of Count Folke Bernadotte and shaken by “the thought that he himself escaped the same death by a c­ ouple of hours.” Then Locke revealed, “In justice to [Bunche], it should be said, he himself told this to me confidentially, that though he wrote the commission report, he was for the minority report which was a federated state. This was made irretrievable by Truman’s early recognition of partition, for the U.S. one was a qualified one ­until so committed.”63 The typed letter contains significant handwritten markings. Locke had crossed out the word “confidential” and then written in a red pen, “Scratched this out by ­mistake. You too treat as confes [sic?].” Next to his own name on the stationary, Locke wrote “Negro” and drew a line to the margin, where he wrote, “One of the most distinguished intellects in the U.S.” At the top of the page, he also wrote, “John, please return.”64 Despite ­these markings, the letter was sent. Billikopf and Locke understood the importance of Bunche’s favoring a “federated state” over partition. Someone cleaned up the letter, removed all mention of Locke, and created a memo with the semianonymous attribution “from a distinguished Negro educator in Amer­i­ca.”65 The memo included only the material regarding Bunche. Both the memo and original letter reside in Billikopf ’s papers at the American Jewish Archives. It is unknown to whom, if anyone, Billkopf sent it, or ­whether Locke shared this information with Kallen. At this time, Locke began to celebrate a new crop of young, African American writers, including James Baldwin. In a 1949 issue of Phylon, Locke wrote favorably of Baldwin’s story “Previous Condition,” published by “discerning editor” Elliott Cohen in Commentary, the new magazine sponsored by the American Jewish Committee. Locke saluted Cohen for having launched “in all probability a significant young Negro writer.”66 Baldwin likely read this review. He may have had a chance to meet Locke as well. L ­ ater that year, he wrote to Locke from Paris. The letter was a shameless plea for money, as he strug­gled to succeed financially in France. Beyond the plea for funds, however, Baldwin offered some commentary on his position as an African American author. Given the begging nature of the letter, it is clear that Baldwin believed he had a sympathetic ear in Locke. “I’m trying to break out of kind of a literary type-­casting—­I’m sick, in a way, of being continually expected to write about Negroes, and am afraid of the easy success such a road can possibly offer.”67 Locke had expressed similar sentiments, particularly when he was Baldwin’s age. But he eventually came to terms with his hybrid identity, and his dual

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commitment to universalism and particularism, by championing Black culture for its unique contributions to the United States and the world. Locke never lost sight of his universal ideals. The wider world contained an im­mense variety of cultures equally worthy of cultivation. Locke wanted to explore them all while keeping true to his heritage and loyal to his community. Baldwin would come to a similar conclusion. We do not know w ­ hether Locke ever gave him money. But by publicly praising him, Locke acted as a midwife for a Black writer, aiding his own community, while celebrating another man who felt “the ironic complications of his being neither ‘fish nor fowl’ between the social ambiguities of Harlem and Greenwich Village.”68 This was the Du Boisian double consciousness of the rooted cosmopolitan. In one of his last published pieces, Locke reiterated t­ hese sentiments while navigating between cosmopolitanism and cultural pluralism. In “Self-­Criticism: The Third Dimension in Culture,” published in 1950 in Phylon, Locke argued that self-­criticism is the highest stage in cultural evolution, a phase to which African Americans should aspire. Locke noted the inadequacy of mining the well of Black “life and experience” for “American dramatic and fictional material,” much of which appeared “overworked and shabby.” The often “provincial and chauvinistic rendering” proved too limiting. A purely particularistic approach to Black heritage would not suffice. Instead, he argued, in “universalized particularity ­there has always resided the world’s greatest and most enduring art.”69 He demanded that the next generation of Black writers, long ­after the Harlem Re­nais­sance, provide for “Negro life and experience in all the arts but with a third dimension of universalized common denominator humanity.” This view lies somewhere between universalism and cultural pluralism. In order to break out of pure parochial pluralism, Black intellectuals would need to abandon absolute loyalty to the race or racial cause and be willing to criticize one another. In d­ oing so, they would be recognizing their common humanity, not their common Blackness. “The releasing formula is to realize that in all ­human t­ hings we are basically and inevitably h ­ uman, and that even the special racial complexities and overtones are only in­ter­est­ing variants.”70 Locke believed that two Black p­ eople had more in common by virtue of being h ­ uman than they did by virtue of being Black. This recognition, paradoxically, allowed them greater freedom to discuss and criticize Black life. Meanwhile, Locke and Kallen developed a closer friendship. From the earliest stages of his relationship with Locke, Kallen accepted Black ­people as individuals. As the friendship deepened, he became accepting of Black ideas and aesthetics as foundational to American civilization. Although the New Negro movement had not earned African Americans equal rights, it had made



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an impressive contribution to American arts and letters and earned Locke a reputation as one of the most significant Black intellectuals in the United States. Locke’s reputation, along with his renewed friendship with Kallen, had begun to influence the latter’s view of African American culture. Locke fi­nally seemed to be earning the re­spect and liking of Kallen as a Black man, not simply as a Harvard alum. Kallen addressed Locke not only as a friend but as a Black man and as an expert on Black culture, a culture to be valued and developed like Jewish culture or any other. In one instance, Kallen wrote to Locke on behalf of his ­sister, Deborah, who had been living in Israel for thirty years. Deborah ran the Julian W. Mack School and Workshops for underprivileged youths in Jerusalem, mostly of Mizrachi, or ­middle eastern, origin. Along with supervising and feeding them, the school introduced students to “tools + materials and via ­there to words and numbers.”71 According to a 1951 letter to Locke, Deborah was visiting the United States, and she hoped to learn from the example of African Americans in combining practical and academic learning. “She thinks that much of this [sort] of education can have been developed and perfected by negroes for negroes, with or without cooperation from public authorities,” which Kallen assumed referred to Tuskegee. She wanted information about ­these endeavors, so Kallen wrote Locke “with an S.O.S.” His ­sister would “go as far South as Tuskegee if that’s desirable.” He hoped Locke could help arrange this quickly. “Deb’s idea is the fusion of training of hand with that of head and heart, in pedagogese, of vocational or industrial with cultural education.” Kallen concluded, “I’ll be seeing you soon, I hope,” and signed off, “Shalom v’Simchah (which being interpreted saith, Peace and joy).”72 ­Later that year, Kallen expressed relief that Locke’s health was improving and that he had made pro­g ress in his book on Black culture. He cautioned Locke, “­Don’t push yourself,” but advised him to share his “ideas in somewhat formal ways to friends and pupils,” much the same way that the two of them had come up with cultural pluralism. He hoped to have Locke speak on the subject at the New School and urged him to “get in touch” once in New York.73 Kallen’s interest in Black culture persisted. In 1952 he began exploring its folklore. He wrote to friends, including Melville Herskovitz, Walter White, and Locke. “Can you advise me where I can find examples of the comic spirit among Negroes which treats whites as whites treat Negroes . . . ​in the folklore, in the journals, and in more substantial lit­er­a­ture of colored Americans a stage white man whose character and traits signalize the Negro’s laughing appraisal of and reactions against the white man’s pretensions, bluff and weaknesses.” Kallen was crafting an essay on “the liberating function of the comic spirit among all p­ eople.”74 He expressed a universal concept, laughter as re­sis­tance to

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oppression, but hoped for a par­tic­u­lar example among Black p­ eople. African Americans found a place in his culturally pluralist universe. Locke responded that “most of the material” Kallen desired was “folk-­say, off the rec­ord for discretion.” He recommended a collection of “secular folk poetry” in The Negro Caravan, edited by Sterling Brown, Arthur David, and Ulysses Lee. “Gellert’s Songs of Protest” from that volume “indicates a considerable amount of [using comedy to treat white ­people as Black ­people] even during slavery.” For con­temporary material, Locke wrote that “­little is printed; Langston Hughes has recorded more of it than anyone e­ lse, slapstick fashion but nevertheless significant,” and referred him to a book titled ­Simple Simon Speaks His Mind. Fi­nally, he mentioned their “mutual friend Julius Lips’s The Savage Hits Back.”75 Kallen thanked Locke for his suggestions on “the negro’s comic view of the white.” He sought to uncover a “folk-­feeling” to understand the “uses of laughter.” He hoped for “a Negro Voltaire or Mark Twain” who could provide “a positive pre­sen­ta­tion of the ludicrousness, ineptness, hy­poc­risy and essential feeling of inferiority that dixiecratic (north as well as south) attitudes express.” He believed this material existed “in the folklore, the popu­lar press, unliterary and spontaneous expression of our darker Americans” and implored Locke to “think about it!”76 Kallen’s research culminated in an article, “The Comic Spirit in the Freedom of Man,” published in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism in March 1955, less than a year ­after Locke’s death. Kallen argued that using humor to resist oppression was universal, but each ethnic group did so in its own par­tic­u­lar way. Along with their deepening friendship, Kallen and Locke’s shared commitment to cultural pluralism manifested through their parallel interest in adult education. While their correspondence does not mention the subject, it seems unlikely they never discussed it, given their dedication to the cause. Adult education resonated with pragmatism. It was not about accumulating degrees but rather about accumulating knowledge. It could be vocational, but it would primarily be about edification, for leisure, or in their words, for liberation. Although both men ­were unabashed elitists, they believed elite education belonged to all who desired it, regardless of age. Kallen put this princi­ple into practice in 1919 as a founding faculty member of the New School for Social Research. According to the New York Times, this new school would educate mature students to “seek an unbiased understanding of the existing order, its genesis, growth, and pre­sent working.”77 A group of distinguished professors including John Dewey, Charles Beard, and James Harvey Robinson would offer lectures and research opportunities in the humanities and social sciences to interested adults in the New York area. Kal-



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len taught philosophy and psy­chol­ogy ­there for the remainder of his c­ areer, eventually serving as a dean. Locke, for his part, had been interested in theories of education since his precollege days at Philadelphia’s School of Pedagogy, when he wrote “Moral Training in Elementary Schools” and invoked John Dewey and Felix Adler.78 In 1924 he attended the first national conference on adult education, or­ga­nized by the president of the Car­ne­g ie Foundation, F. P. Keppel. He remained active within the movement for the rest of his life, and in 1946 he served as the first African American president of the Adult Education Association of Amer­ i­ca.79 He published articles on the topic primarily geared ­toward educating African American adults. Beyond ­these publications, Locke supplemented the education of Black adults in a proj­ect that flowed directly from the New Negro movement. His 1930s contributions to the Bronze Booklets series included The Negro and His ­Music and Negro Art: Past and Pre­sent. Both booklets ­were designed to educate young and adult African Americans about their culture, to take pride in it, and to share it among other Americans. Locke believed that for Black adults in par­ tic­ul­ar, a focus on history and culture, rather than literacy exercises, was the proper starting point for educational advancement. For both Kallen and Locke, adult education served academic and social functions. Since Locke died before the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education US Supreme Court case took effect, he knew segregation as de jure and de facto real­ ity across the South and de facto in the North. By cultivating race pride and communicating the strength of American diversity, adult education would prepare its students for pluralism. More than teaching reading and writing and arithmetic, it would teach tolerance and the value of ethnic and religious difference. Ideally, adult students would be able to experience in their classrooms what Kallen and Locke had at Oxford, a cosmopolitan United States, with all the cultures of the world to learn from. Locke’s embrace of adult education tempered the elitism of his cultural pluralism. In a 1950 article, “Frontiers of Culture,” he expressed regret for his snobbish past, first using a culinary meta­phor in which “bread” stood in for basic material needs, while “butter” represented the benefits of culture. Whereas culture was “not vital,” it was still “an essential.” Then he shifted the meta­phor, admitting he once “thought of culture as cake contrasted with bread.” Now he knew that “real, essential culture is baked into our daily bread or e­ lse it i­sn’t truly culture.” He now stood “firmly on the side of the demo­cratic rather than the aristocratic notion of culture and have so stood for many years, without having gotten full credit.” Such was the price of “Harvard and Oxford and their traditional snobbisms!” He believed “culture [was] so precious that it is worth even

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this price, if we can have it only at the high cost of nurturing and conserving it on the upper levels of caste and privilege.” Yet he knew that “exorbitant price” was unfair.80 Locke had been moving left po­liti­cally since the onset of the ­Great Depression, but he never gave up his preference for cake over bread. His tastes remained high brow to the end of his days. Yet he held two princi­ples in regard to culture that reflected his appreciation for bread. First, as early as the Harlem Re­nais­sance, he had believed that the roots of elite African American culture lay in African and American soil, in the myriad folkways of a proud, resilient ever-­striving ­people. Second, he maintained his pragmatic belief that cultural goods ­were not proprietary, that they belonged to t­ hose who used them, both communities and individuals. As such, education was paramount and must be accessible to all, regardless of race, creed, and color, but also regardless of class and age. Kallen’s similar commitment to education showed that he shared t­ hese princi­ples. Beyond ­these intellectual convergences, Kallen and Locke also shared a more personal connection. When Locke retired to New York ­toward the end of his life, their contact became more frequent. Born with a rheumatic heart, Locke’s health took a turn for the worse in the early 1950s. On Kallen’s recommendation, in the summer of 1952 Locke entered the Fort Valley Heart Hospital, in Fairview Village, Pennsylvania. Kallen referred him to a cardiologist t­ here, Joseph B. Wolffe. When Locke wrote to Benjamin Karpman about the referral, he mentioned his “Jewish phi­los­o­pher friend.”81 Wolffe became a friend to Locke as well. He provided Locke with excellent care, so much so that Locke grumbled to a friend, “How far segregated medicine puts us b­ ehind, even our best.” Wolffe and his team w ­ ere “just wiz82 ards.” Beyond the medical treatment, the two men developed a personal bond reflected in a warm exchange of letters. On a smaller scale, the Locke-­Wolffe dynamic resembled aspects of the Locke-­K allen relationship, two friends, one Black and one Jewish, finding common bonds and exchanging ideas. Their letters demonstrate the importance of friendship in cultural pluralism. In the first letter, in September 1952, Locke addressed Wolffe as his “dear Friend.” He expressed how “encouraged and grateful” he had become at his improving health. Lamenting that he “missed seeing Dr. Kallen in New York,” he promised to convey Wolffe’s messages to their mutual friend. In addition, he sent along a copy of The New Negro, by then out of print. Locke described the book as having “done a constructive work perhaps as nothing e­ lse” he had ever written. He felt the gift especially appropriate for Wolffe, a Jew and a Zionist, writing, “I am sure we have such like-­minded reactions ­towards our



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own ­people and their prob­lems.”83 Locke received a kind thank-­you letter in return. The following year, as Locke’s health deteriorated, they continued their correspondence. On August 20, 1953, Locke wrote to Wolffe, first describing his symptoms and treatments. Then he turned to “brighter subjects” and complimented Wolffe on a speech he delivered on “the Israel proj­ect,” which Locke had “read with enthusiastic interest.” He went on, “I can realize how deeply you are concerned with this proj­ect, and how happy you must be that it is a constructive peace-­maker between the feuding segments over ­there. I hope we ­shall all live to see steady and even rapid healing of the factionalisms involved.” Locke expressed sympathy and commonality with Wolffe’s Zionism, but also with his role as “peace-­maker,” to coordinate the dif­fer­ent “segments” while still respecting their differences.84 Wolffe responded with equal sympathy. He felt “deeply moved” by Locke’s comments on the Israel proj­ect, which he described as “very near to [his] heart.” He expressed e­ ager anticipation at the forthcoming publication of Locke’s book The Negro in American Culture. Wolffe even hoped he could offer his own “observations—­non-­medical.”85 But Locke never published that book. His health continued to falter, and he died less than a year l­ater, on June 9, 1954, at the age of sixty-­eight.

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Locke’s Legacy, Kallen’s Memory

­ fter Alain Locke’s death, Horace Kallen first A paid homage to his friend by covering his courses at Howard as “Visiting Professor of Philosophy, part time, two fifths, for the academic year 1954–1955,” for the sum of $3,000 plus $1,170 in commuting expenses from New York to Washington, DC. Kallen received a letter of welcome from philosophy professor Eugene C. Holmes, chair of the department at Howard. “It is very good that you are coming,” Holmes wrote. “I think that you ­will enjoy the experience.”1 Friendships followed from Kallen’s time at Howard, with Holmes, with phi­ los­o­pher Winston Kermit McAllister, and with historians Rayford W. Logan and John Hope Franklin. Kallen maintained an interest in the Howard Philosophy Department a­ fter he left, asking McAllister, “I notice that you have a new man in philosophy at Howard. What is he like, and how does it go with all of you?” He expressed “considerable plea­sure” at the news that Franklin had taken a job as head of the Brooklyn College History Department. “If you see him, extend to him my congratulations and my sense of satisfaction. I hope that we s­ hall be able to see something of him at the New School.” He offered warm wishes “to the McAllisters, to the Holmses and to all inquiring friends. Keep well by having all the fun ­there is.”2 Of ­these new friends, Holmes had been the closest to Locke and would remain closest to Kallen. Holmes and Logan served on the Alain Locke Memorial Committee, and they invited Kallen to participate in a symposium honoring 19 4

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Locke the following spring. The sixteenth annual spring conference of the Division of Social Sciences at Howard University was held with the theme “The New Negro Thirty Years Afterward.” Kallen delivered a paper on April 21, 1955, titled “Pluralism and Culture.” The paper did not mention Locke, but before his formal pre­sen­ta­tion, Kallen offered some “prefatory remarks concerning his long friendship with Dr. Locke and Dr. Locke’s role in the development of the ethical and aesthetic implications of cultural pluralism,” including reminiscences about “staid Cambridge and aloof Oxford.”3 Three weeks before the conference, in a letter to his friend Milton Konvitz, Kallen reflected on Locke’s passing: “I am not myself as distressed by the idea of death and d­ ying as most p­ eople, but when they occur among one’s friends and fellow fighters like [NAACP leader] Walter White and Allen [sic] Locke, then I get the feeling of an addition to my responsibility and the necessary thrust of c­ auses.”4 Kallen’s explicit support of the movement for African American civil rights demonstrated Locke’s influence. Filling in to teach Locke’s classes at Howard and assisting in his friend’s memorial ­were the beginning of Kallen’s efforts to continue Locke’s legacy. A few months ­later, Kallen gave a memorial address at New York University, likely derived from his prefatory remarks at the Howard talk in April. Kallen wrote to Martin Chworowsky, director of the program of Intergroup Relations at Teacher’s College, Columbia University, that the NYU Locke memorial was “a meaningful illustration of the spontaneities of ‘Cultural Pluralism.’ ”5 An article based on his NYU speech appeared in 1957 in the Journal of Philosophy titled “Alain Locke and Cultural Pluralism.” It told of Locke’s conversion from universalism to pluralism ­after the Thanksgiving incident at Oxford and of the importance of friendship in the development of cultural pluralism. Kallen placed himself at the heart of his tale. He claimed to have first used the expression cultural pluralism fifty years ago, “around 1906 or 1907 when Alain Locke was in a section of class at Harvard where [Kallen] served as assistant to Mr. George Santayana.” He asserted his preference for “friendship” over “brotherhood,” the former implying pluralism and tolerance for difference, the latter too often used in f­avor of absolutism and forced sameness. Locke eventually “became a cultural pluralist” too, but “it took him some time.”6 Kallen put himself center stage, referencing his and Sidney Hook’s 1935 volume, American Philosophy ­Today and Tomorrow, which featured Locke’s “psychograph.” Locke concluded the biographical sketch with an admission: “I proj­ect my personal history into its inevitable rationalization as cultural pluralism and value relativism, with a not too orthodox reaction to the American

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way of life.” Kallen praised Locke for “the passions and powers of his individuality.” Then Kallen recounted the story of the Oxford American Club’s 1907 Thanksgiving dinner.7 In Kallen’s retelling, the southern Rhodes Scholars refused to associate with Locke and refused to attend the Thanksgiving dinner with him pre­sent. Although Americans at Oxford w ­ ere mostly from the North, they placated their southern brethren and declined to invite Locke. “One or two o ­ thers, authentically Americans, refused to attend in consequence.” ­Those who attended the dinner he labeled “inauthentic Americans.”8 His wording was vague as to ­whether he was among the boycotters, although it seems unlikely he would have described himself as an inauthentic American. Perhaps by encouraging ­others to boycott, and by chronicling the bigotry, Kallen felt he could assert his authenticity as though he boycotted the dinner himself. ­Whether he attended or not, he was correct that for Locke, the incident “left scars.” Locke contemplated staying in Eu­rope, where he felt “at ease.” Eventually he returned to the United States and made peace with, and even celebrated, his Black identity. This was a change, ­because Locke’s initial orientation had been “monistic or universalist.” This Locke “would have preferred real­ity to be basically a One and not a Many.” It was Locke’s “choice as a grown man” to become a cultural pluralist.9 This repre­sen­ta­tion was not entirely accurate, but it served Kallen’s pragmatism. In the face of bigotry, embrace the real­ity of pluralism rather than deny it. By recasting Locke as a reincarnated pluralist, Kallen presented his friend’s intellectual development as the mirror image of his own, from Spinozistic monism to racialized pluralism to modern, rooted cosmopolitanism. By lauding Locke’s contribution to the development of cultural pluralism, Kallen validated his overcoming the Eurocentrism of his youth. Locke’s advancement of Black culture became a means to a Kallenist end. Explicit in Kallen’s recasting stood an ac­cep­tance of the cultural merit of African Americans. “To the American Negro [Locke’s cultural pluralism] pre­ sents the idea of an au­then­tic Negro cultural community sensitive not only to the positive values of all the pre­sent, but aware also of the immemorial African past and rendering it presently a living past.” Kallen reinforced the pragmatism in cultural pluralism. “This past is not in the memory of any living Negro.” Black p­ eople in the United States needed to “create that memory,” employing Locke’s method of “study and exploration,” which came to fruition in the Harlem Re­nais­sance and his teaching at Howard and in adult education. Black p­ eople achieved a prominent place in the American cultural pantheon. With “the New Negro,” Locke shifted the discussion from African American as “prob­lem” to African American as “fact.”10

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The New Negro movement had a lasting impact. “Without the affirmation of Negro as Negro in terms of what cultural and spiritual production Negro as Negro can achieve, without the manifestation of inner strength based on self-­knowledge, developing without tutelage from anybody, the Negro cannot begin to accept himself as a fact instead of a prob­lem to himself.”11 In convoluted language, Kallen articulated what Locke had accomplished. For cultural pluralism to work, “communities of diverse identity” must “accept themselves.” When placed next to each other, this leads to “an orchestration of the diversities” and a “teamplay of their differences.” Showing how his thinking had advanced, Kallen noted, “The concept of ‘race’ w ­ ouldn’t apply to t­ hese differences since any species whose members can breed together may be said to belong to the same race.” Instead, he referred to “cultures.” He downplayed “color,” noting that “transactions between dif­fer­ent ­peoples of dif­ fer­ent colors in the same culture and dif­fer­ent cultures in the same color, and dif­fer­ent colors and cultures have gone on freely throughout recorded time. Alain Locke urged they can go on ­here at home” in the United States, ­under a framework he called “ideological peace.”12 In Kallen’s American symphony of civilization, the “mature share of coexistences” was not merely “laissez-­faire” but rather “a f­ ree, voluntary cooperative relationship where each, in living on, also helps, and is helped by, the ­others living. This is the coexistence that cultural pluralism signifies. It is the consummation of the system of ideas and the philosophic faith that Alain Locke became a notable spokesman for.”13 By linking cultural pluralism forever to the man who helped him coin it, Kallen paid homage to his departed friend. With Locke’s passing, Kallen’s participation in his memorial solidified his friendship with Holmes. In 1956 Holmes asked Kallen for comments on an article he wrote on Locke, knowing he would get Kallen’s “frank opinion.” Kallen mentioned the 1907 Oxford Thanksgiving dinner in his response: “The situation at Oxford became critical when the Rhodes Scholars planned a Thanksgiving dinner to which they refused to invite Locke, and that made it necessary for the bona fide Americans on the scene to refuse to attend the dinner. ­There w ­ ere not many of them. Most of the Northern lads ­were like the Southern whites ­today—­they ­didn’t stick their necks out.”14 Once again, Kallen left the m ­ atter of his attendance at the dinner ambiguous. He surely thought himself a “bona fide American on the scene” and would not compare himself to cowardly southern white ­people in the 1950s. Yet when he wrote of t­ hose who boycotted, he used “them” and not “us.” Perhaps he boycotted the dinner, or wished he had. The truth remains elusive. Less ambiguous ­were Kallen’s evolving views on race. By the time Locke died, Kallen had given up any vestiges of biological racialism. He accepted,

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like Locke had in 1915, that race was cultural rather than biological. In the fall of 1955, Kallen acknowledged the scholarly consensus “that what is Jewish in the Jewish being is not biological heredity but social heritage.” In a word, “tradition:—­that self-­transcending, self-­transforming live configuration of remembrances, attitudes, and value-­systems compounded into doctrines and disciplines and making up the singularity of culture, generating and sustaining its individuality, distinguishing it from neighbours near and far.”15 Although he denied the biological, Kallen had always embraced the quasi-­ spiritual, even as an atheist in his youth. Hebraism and Zionism took on spiritual and world-­historical significance in his writings. Even when he paid lip ser­vice to race “science” in the early twentieth c­ entury, Kallen’s Zionism had pragmatic po­liti­cal goals. The Hebraism that undergirded his Zionism manifested itself and found strength as a cultural movement. Race had always been primarily cultural to Kallen, and to Locke, even when both felt the influence of biological racialism. Nonetheless, ­after Locke’s death Kallen repeatedly denied the validity of biology in race and admitted his past errors on this topic in print. In his 1962 contribution to the final issue of the Menorah Journal, he reminisced about his Harvard years, when he “regarded the term ‘Jew’ as a name for a fear-­nurtured error called ‘religion’ and also as a name for an invidious error called ‘race.’ ” He admitted that as a white Jew, he had it better than African Americans, ­because “unlike the Negro, [he] could ‘pass.’ ” He abandoned assimilation and began celebrating cultural differences but recalled, “I shared the widespread belief—­which I no longer hold—­that t­ hese differences ­were rooted in race rather than created as cultures.”16 His friendship with Locke helped erode this belief. The biggest difference ­after Locke’s death came in Kallen’s growing appreciation of the cultural achievements and potential of African Americans. In the mid-1950s and beyond, Kallen encouraged exactly what Locke had striven for his ­whole life, the creation of a Black high culture with roots in folklore, a culture worth preserving in a pluralist United States. He actively participated in this proj­ect in his efforts to memorialize Locke. In December 1955 Kallen wrote to Arthur Huff Fauset, Locke’s friend and chair of the Alain Locke Memorial Committee. He praised the committee’s choice of celebrated Black writer William Stanley Braithwaite to author Locke’s biography. Kallen lauded Locke’s accomplishments: “What Booker Washington had been to the Negro and the American idea in the field of material skills and material achievement, Alain Locke was in the field of the spirit.” Locke “spoke to generations of young Negroes embittered by the exclusion from equal opportunity in the arts and sciences b­ ecause of their color, and

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coming to resent not only the un-­American prejudice which maintained the exclusion, but also the color which called forth the prejudice.”17 Kallen saw Black artists and intellectuals “filled with self-­hatred even more than with hatred of the prejudice.” Locke’s message was “to replace self-­hatred with self-­respect, to accept the Negro genius as Negro and to devote their talents and powers to recovering its historic and cultural past and to renew and develop it as Negro Americans into a figure of integral strength and beauty.” Locke’s vision of the New Negro “gave a new turn, a spiritually healthier and more hopeful turn, to the aspirations and l­abors of the younger generations of new talent.” He contributed “a chapter of spiritual importance in the history of American culture.”18 The next year, Kallen published a volume based on lectures he delivered at the University of Pennsylvania in 1954. Cultural Pluralism and the American Idea: An Essay in Social Philosophy consisted of a lengthy essay where Kallen updated cultural pluralism, followed by responses to Kallen’s essay and fi­nally Kallen’s “reprise” to his critics. Kallen referred several times to Locke. He observed that during the “Americanization” of the South that occurred in the near c­ entury ­after the Civil War, Black culture began to seep into the broader American culture.19 “The Negro’s m ­ usic, sacred and secular, his dances, his legends and folklore, his group’s epics and his personal histories have flowed into the stream of the arts and letters of American culture and enriched it with the singularities of the au­then­tic Negro difference.” Some of this was done by “white sympathizers, admirers, and borrowers,” but primarily it originated as “the autogenous expression of the Negro ‘racial minority’ itself, as its members achieved the power of self-­help through the activities of self-­education, and thereafter worked spontaneous expression over into conscious art.”20 ­After this description of the Harlem Re­nais­sance, Kallen footnoted Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery and Locke’s The New Negro and “Pluralism and Ideological Peace.” In the “reprise,” Kallen again mentioned Locke. “The ideal of ‘the New Negro,’ whose first prophet was Alain Locke,” epitomized the organic and hybrid nature of culture. African American “strength” came from mixing African and American cultures, the “­free synergy of heritage and habit.” Locke’s “New Negro” ideal “became the releasing symbol of that confluence.” Kallen had labeled this pro­cess “orchestration.” The source material, the folk culture, emerged “unconsciously, spontaneously.” Eventually, that material became expertly crafted into an exquisite high-­culture aesthetic. For Black p­ eople, Kallen offered this example: “The tales of U ­ ncle Remus are samples of spontaneous orchestration; the ideal of the New Negro, of orchestration consciously purposed.”21 He linked Locke’s New Negro movement with his own musical

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meta­phor, which he had used to define cultural pluralism de­cades before. In Kallen’s mind, Black ­people w ­ ere part of the United States’ symphony of civilization. In making t­ hese proclamations, Kallen demonstrated his re­spect and appreciation for Black culture, for Black culture’s place in a United States defined by cultural pluralism, and for the prophet of Black culture, Alain Locke. In November 1959 Kallen continued in this vein. Holmes had taken over the biography proj­ect for the Alain Locke Memorial Committee and asked Kallen to write on his behalf. Only a fragment of Kallen’s letter remains. “I believe that the role of Alain Locke in turning the cultural attitudes of American negroes in new and creative directions forms an impor­tant part of the cultural history of the United States with ongoing consequences.”22 He did not mention cultural pluralism, yet he named Black p­ eople explic­itly as impor­tant contributors to American cultural history. If Locke had converted to cultural pluralism, Kallen had fi­nally converted to a re­spect for African American culture. Holmes trusted Kallen as a source on Locke. In the fall of 1962 he interviewed Kallen for his Locke biography. The following year, he sent Kallen a copy of the contents page, along with a short letter referring to a form, presumably some kind of letter of reference, for a grant from the American Philosophical Society to complete the proj­ect. Kallen had become a go-to source for Holmes on his Locke book. In 1966 Kallen included Locke in more of his own writing. As part of the Saturday Review’s “What I Have Learned” series, Kallen contributed an essay titled “How I Bet My Life.” The essay expounded on pluralism while including dif­fer­ent biographical ele­ments. Sharing his youthful embrace and then rejection of assimilation, Kallen concluded, “My Jewish difference could be no less real, worthy, and honorable than any other I might be fleeing to, that unlearning it might more greatly diminish me than living and orchestrating it.”23 Then Kallen turned to a more power­f ul example. “And if this ­were true of my Jewish difference, how not of my friend Alain Locke’s Negro difference, which had presented this poet, scholar, man of letters, and phi­los­o­pher with a challenge of identity far more poignant and critical than mine?” He referred to their conversations at Oxford, where he pondered, “If my Jewish difference and his Negro difference are ours of right and not by sufferance, then, in the nature of ­things, so are all such differences.” He claimed during ­these conversations that he “first used the phrases that have become clichés—­‘right to be dif­fer­ent,’ ‘cultural pluralism,’ and ‘pluralistic society.’ ”24 He had told the story before, but never with such explicit references to his friendship with Locke, and to the similarity in their experiences, while noting that Locke’s strug­gle had been more difficult than his own. “Experience elsewhere than in my field,” for example, in real-­life relationships, “nourished the

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perceptions which the clichés named, and the reasonings they crystalized.” Experience begat thought. Kallen was an empiricist and came to cultural pluralism b­ ecause of his experiences. “My pragmatist pluralism s­ haped my reflections about persons and ­peoples, nations, religions, arts, sciences—­their economies, and their rivalry and cooperation with one another.”25 Kallen’s friendship with Locke s­ haped his ideas on cultural pluralism. Holmes wrote to the Saturday Review in response. He called Kallen’s article “one of the most moving testaments [he had] ever read from any phi­los­o­ pher,” but focused primarily on the paragraph on Locke. He celebrated the “Locke-­K allen conjoint cultural pluralism,” which went beyond “reciprocity in the relationship with Locke as a Negro and Kallen as a Jew.” They also held similar “philosophical positions,” “attitudes t­ owards teaching (especially adult education),” and in par­tic­u­lar the “awareness arising out of difference, identity, pluralism, and cultural indefeasibility.”26 The Kallen-­Locke story was about philosophy “born of strug­gle,” but also philosophy born of friendship.27 The Holmes-­K allen friendship, a product of the Kallen-­Locke friendship, remained strong. Holmes perhaps felt an affinity for Jews, as his wife, prominent Black hair stylist Margaret Cardozo, had Sephardic ancestry. Holmes certainly felt an affinity for Kallen. He sent Kallen a fuller version of the Saturday Review letter than the one printed in the magazine. Holmes lamented his difficulties in finding a publisher for his Locke biography and sent best wishes to Kallen’s ­family. He signed off, “Sincerely, fraternally, and Shalom.”28 That same year, Kallen was invited to participate in a forum for the American Zionist magazine Midstream on “Negro-­Jewish relations.” Kallen dismissed fears of rising African American anti-­Semitism and insisted Jews should keep on fighting for the civil rights of Black ­people and other minorities. He also recognized that, when it came to alienation from their own communities, Jews more easily shed their Jewishness than African Americans shed their Blackness. “Vis a vis Negroes, history identifies Jews more readily with the oppressive, dispersing white majority,” even though American Jews faced bigotry as well. Kallen advised Jews against appealing to a shared history of oppression, ­because African Americans ­were concerned with “­today and tomorrow.” They wanted “Freedom now; Equality now; Power now.” ­Because “Jews are preponderantly white,” they already enjoyed freedoms that African Americans lacked. The observations reflected a significant shift in Kallen’s understanding of the Black condition.29 That same year, Kallen wrote an article for the Emory University Quarterly titled “Color-­Blind.” He told an “anecdote” or “parable” about two young boys, one Black and one white, who had become friends. They became friends ­because as ­children they did not yet feel prejudice. This allowed them to be friends ­because “friends can be friends only as equals.”30

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When Kallen met Locke, he did not see them as equals. He had been placed in the role of teacher, with Locke assigned to him as a student. But over time, they became friends, as Kallen came to appreciate not only Locke as an individual but also Locke as a member of a group with a proud culture. As Kallen argued, true friendship does not come from color blindness, b­ ecause true color blindness can never be. Friendship comes from re­spect for difference. Kallen also knew that skin color itself resisted rigid categorization. “No man alive has a white skin,” he noted, nor black ­either. Skin tones ranged from “pinkish-­yellow” to “raw-­red” to “brown.” He proclaimed that “ ‘color’ is a status symbol,” what ­today would be called a social construction, where white stands “at the apex of an order of values.” Yet color should not be ignored. Kallen called for “an awareness of race, seeing of color; for accepting, respecting, appreciating and working with them as they are where they are.” He insisted “color is the fact, the vital decisive fact, the actually and potentially creative fact,” while the term color-­blind was “self-­deception.” Kallen’s Amer­ i­ca idea demanded the “ungrudging ac­cep­tance of ‘color’ in all its relations which blindness would shut off.” It required “equality in rights and freedoms for the dif­fer­ents as dif­f er­ents.”31 By the late 1960s, Kallen’s ac­cep­tance of Black culture, and especially Black culture as high culture, became even more apparent. He gave a speech, “Black Power and Education,” to the Mas­sa­chu­setts Institute of Technology’s Hillel in 1968. Since “power is knowledge,” the most impor­tant kind of power enabled individuals or groups “to learn and to use what they learn in order to advance t­ oward freer, safer, fuller life.” While Stokely Carmichael threatened to “smash every­thing Western civilization has created,” Kallen advised Black Power activists to share knowledge with other groups. Although he did not explic­itly mention Locke, he drew inspiration from Locke’s ideas. True power, to Kallen, came not from the barrel of a gun. It came from learning, from high cultural exchange. The best way for African Americans to advance their own ­causes was to commit themselves to education. This had long been Kallen’s idea, but it had also been Locke’s.32 Kallen’s diary from 1968 is revealing in this regard. That June he pasted a newspaper clipping about US soldiers in Vietnam reacting to Robert F. Kennedy’s death that touched him “more deeply.” The article quoted Russell Campbell, a twenty-­year-­old African American radio operator from South Carolina. “­You’re over h ­ ere in this heat and you try to run Charlie down and you count e­ very day in this God-­damn hellhole, and then look, just look at what’s back t­ here waiting for me!” Campbell lamented. “Look, I’m a Negro. ­You’re white. If you p­ eople c­ an’t get together, if you p­ eople kill your best, how do

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you expect me and you to get together? And if we ­can’t get along, ­there’s no way in hell that we can teach Vietnam anything.” Kallen underlined this quote, which represented “the rub” of the ­matter.33 On the eve­ning of April 8, 1969, Kallen and Holmes re­united for a Locke memorial at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. The program, “The Influence of Alain Locke and the Re­nais­sance Writers,” was part of a series called “Harlem on My Mind.”34 Regina M. Andrews, a Black photographer whose home had functioned as a salon for Harlem Re­nais­sance artists and intellectuals, had or­ga­nized the Locke commemoration. She told Kallen, “The warmth of the program was equaled only by your par­tic­u­lar contribution and ready willingness to create a memorable occasion.”35 As Kallen aged, Locke’s memory remained impor­tant to him. In interviews with historian Sarah Schmidt conducted in 1972 and 1973, he recounted the story of his friendship with Locke, of the Thanksgiving incident at Oxford in 1907, and of the development of cultural pluralism.36 Locke would be best known for his achievements in the Harlem Re­nais­sance. Kallen’s greatest legacy is the origin story of cultural pluralism. Although he continued to write prodigiously, as he grew older, Kallen came to see a greater significance in marriage and f­amily. Now a grand­father, Kallen derived plea­sure from the cultural pluralism of his domestic sphere. His wife, Rachel, despite never converting from Methodism, continued to practice Judaism more faithfully than he did, involved herself with Jewish voluntary organ­izations, and was a passionate Zionist. Though Kallen was once an opponent of intermarriage, marrying Rachel opened his eyes. In a 1964 article, “Cultural Pluralism and the Critical Issues in Jewish Education,” Kallen noted that for a tradition to perpetuate itself, it had to appeal to both spouses and had to pre­sent itself as “an unyielding endeavor ­toward pro­g ress in cultural excellence by means of the innovation it creates that preserves while it transvalues the tradition that it inherits.” Such a community would have fewer extramarital affairs and c­ hildren born out of wedlock. “Intermarriage would function as a strengthener of its cultural economy, enriching and diversifying its heritage, and vitalizing its intercultural role.”37 Traditions had to adapt as they preserved their core. Intermarriage would strengthen traditions by diversifying them, augmenting them with external influences, and facilitating their interaction with other cultures. Untroubled by intermarriage, Kallen endeavored to instill a sense of Jewish pride and Jewish education in his c­ hildren, writing to them about Jewish holidays and Jewish history while often showing an awareness of their hybrid identities. In a 1952 letter to his c­ hildren, Harriet and David, he wished them

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shana tova, or “Happy New Year,” in Hebrew script, to celebrate Rosh Hashana, “one of the four new years I am called to celebrate e­ very year—­the ­others are Chinese, western Christian and Greek Christian.”38 In 1959 he wrote his grand­son, David Haines, explaining that along with Christmas came Hanukkah. He told the Hanukkah story and signed the letter “Shalom u’Vrachah,” literally “peace and blessing to you,” a standard Hebrew greeting and salutation. Kallen signed many of his letters to Jews and Gentiles alike this way, alternating with the pagan “may the gods keep you well and merry.” Religion was a source of play and amusement for Kallen, but also of identity and community.39 Late in life, in his f­amily and friendships, Kallen displayed an openness to intercultural exchange and mixing. He embraced a fluid, progressive, dynamic, and evolving view of Jewishness. He also genuinely enjoyed his own cosmopolitan, hybrid existence. In a 1970 letter, he updated his phi­los­o­pher friend Van Meter Ames on his f­ amily life. Kallen’s grand­son, who had only one Jewish grandparent, would be spending the year in Israel. Kallen was thrilled, remarking, “His grand­father Haines—­a Quaker—­has taught him to shoot a ­rifle.”40 The irony of a pacifist Quaker teaching his quarter-­Jewish grand­son to shoot, only to have that grand­son practice his shooting in Israel as part of a modern, militaristic Hebrew culture, was not lost on Kallen. He took g­ reat plea­sure from it. Cultural pluralism made it pos­si­ble. Beyond f­amily, Kallen valued friends. Locke’s friendship circle remained part of Kallen’s life. In May 1971 Holmes declined an invitation to the book launch for What I Believe and Why—­Maybe, Kallen’s collection of essays, “Alain Locke and Cultural Pluralism” among them. “Horace was one of the closest and dearest friends of the man whose biography I have completed, Alain Locke,” Holmes wrote. “Horace supplied me with much material for the book.” He offered warm wishes for Kallen and his wife: “Please tell [Kallen] that I ­shall look forward to his book as I know he and Mrs. Kallen ­shall look forward to the publication of ‘Alain Locke: Life and Times,’ Oxford University Press.”41 Kallen also corresponded about Locke with another friend from Kallen’s Howard days, an African American ­woman named Hera Morgan. Their epistolary friendship lasted from 1955 ­until at least 1972. A native of Washington, DC, Hera Phyllis (née Bowie) Morgan graduated magna cum laude from Howard with a degree in philosophy in 1944, where presumably she studied with Locke. She earned a master’s degree from Columbia in po­liti­cal science in 1946, before returning to Washington to teach Latin at Howard. She prob­ably met Kallen while he was a visiting professor at Howard or at the 1955 Locke memorial ­there.42

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A devout Christian, married with two c­ hildren, Morgan sent Kallen numerous lengthy letters about religion, many unanswered. She referred to Kallen as “papa” or “Jewish f­ ather” and to Rachel Kallen as “mama.” Morgan called Kallen her “intellectual pin-up boy.”43 She asked him about Judaism, about doctoral work, and occasionally about race. In his letters to Morgan, Kallen championed Locke. He compared his friend to Booker T. Washington, arguing that “all Negroes would gain im­mensely” by embracing Locke’s “identification with an African past” while maintaining “the Idea of the Negro as American.” Together with Washington’s program of self-­help, it would aid in “the Americanization of so-­called ‘white’ Americans who are guilty of the atrocities and sedition of which Mississippi is a notorious example.”44 Kallen was “impressed by the vindication that both Alain Locke and Booker Washington are receiving for the current course of events.” To combat discrimination, African Americans must insist that “Negroes are the equals of every­body ­else as Negroes, and that the Negro identity involves a cultural and spiritual difference which is as significant and impor­tant as all the other components of our culture and in certain areas far more fruitful than ­others.”45 Black culture mattered. He urged Morgan, “The more you read Alain Locke on the Negro and study the implications of what he had to say the more likely you are to acquiesce in his views.” Kallen and Locke shared the belief “in the right to be dif­fer­ent and in the ­union of the dif­fer­ent for the cooperative enterprise of living.”46 Cultural pluralism remained the refrain. That fall, Kallen visited Washington, DC, to speak before the American Association for Jewish Education. Morgan came to his talk, and Kallen thanked her for her “patience” in attending what was essentially a “personnel meeting.” He told her “it would be very advantageous if ­there w ­ ere a ­great deal more intercommunication between Jews and Negroes, and for that m ­ atter, between all the dif­fer­ent groups whose lives and ­labors make up the national culture.”47 Two years ­later, Kallen responded to Morgan’s complaints a­fter seeing W. E. B. Du Bois speak at Howard. She was annoyed by his socialism, his anger, his sympathy for the Soviet Union, and his “spitefulness” and hoped she would never again have to “suffer his personal ambition or emotion run rampant.” Kallen had heard such complaints before. “He began his c­ areer as an angry young man and has remained angry throughout his life, so that now he speaks as an angry old man.” Kallen did not begrudge Du Bois his anger but questioned its “wisdom.” Ever the pragmatist, Kallen noted that “one can hardly obviate injustice and degradation by intensifying ­those attitudes in ­people guilty of them.” He concluded, “In the history of liberty, Booker Washington or Alain Locke ­will count much more effective fighters than Du Bois.”48

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As their mostly one-­sided correspondence continued, Morgan referred to Kallen as her “favorite friend” while never ceasing to call him “papa.” She examined the nature of friendship in her final letter to him, dated October 1, 1972. She updated Kallen on her life, her f­amily, and her friends, including a married ­couple, a French man and a ­woman from Martinique. “It is good for colored youth to see good interracial marriages and genuine interracial friendship. Far too many ­people doubt that such exist. I am glad that my ­children, while aware of the sufferings of ‘blacks’ do not seem to be of that school of thought that rejects the possibility of true affection between persons of dif­ fer­ent race.”49 Though Kallen may not have written back, he and Locke would certainly have agreed. In October 1973, nearing the end of his life, Kallen wrote to Milton Konvitz, reflecting on his friendship with Locke. “You make me sorry that I ­hadn’t, between 1906 and 1908 (the years I had my first foregatherings with Alain Locke) been impelled to write of his attitudes and perspectives as he quite unaware insisted on interpreting equality as sameness, and sought only to be recognized as the same as his ‘betters,’ altho’ as I knew him, and as the rec­ord shows, he was a damned sight better.”50 At Harvard and then at Oxford, Locke was “penalized for his difference of color, and the penalty was applied to all his superiorities and excellences.” Though he hoped to “find equality in Eu­rope,” he eventually came to believe “that he must affirm his difference and ­free it to grow where it could become more fertile.” Locke “came back ‘home’ and made the ­career at Howard that qualifies him as the first black ‘cultural pluralist’ (and au­then­tic Zionist).”51 Kallen then concluded the narrative of his relationship with Locke: “Our friendship was renewed a while ­after his return—he had me to Howard, I had him to the New School; and when he died, I took on at the authorities’ request the teaching he used to do.” Thinking about Locke “stir[red] up memories in which the negro relations are part of the foreground.”52 This was Kallen’s version of Locke’s story: Locke as the “first black ‘cultural pluralist’ ” and “au­then­tic Zionist.” It is unclear w ­ hether Locke would have accepted e­ ither of t­ hese designations. Yet Kallen’s recollections, expressed only a few months before his death, point back to his description of the origins of cultural pluralism, that the term emerged from his youthful conversations with his student and then friend Locke at Harvard and Oxford. Kallen’s pang of regret that he had not written about ­these events and ideas as they emerged suggests a missed opportunity to harness the good that could have come from telling this story of Black-­Jewish friendship ­earlier. Perhaps. But the legacy of the Kallen-­Locke friendship lives on beyond their death.

Conclusion Differences Made

Over a c­ entury ago, Alain Locke asked Horace Kallen, “What difference does the difference make?” That question, that interaction, that meeting of the minds helped to define the term cultural pluralism. Their friendship brought the idea to fruition. That idea, as old as the United States itself, had always been ­simple: dif­fer­ent ­peoples coming together to form one nation. That promise, E pluribus unum, inspires, baffles, irritates, unites, divides, and outrages politicians and intellectuals to this day. Kallen and Locke’s conversation did not represent the first attempt to solve the prob­lem, but it helped create a vocabulary for how we approach the issue ­today. It provided a blueprint for what the United States could look like, particularly for elite intellectuals. Locke participated in that intellectual community and paved the way for more African Americans to join him. He saw himself as a ­human being, a phi­ los­o­pher, an American, and an African American. The New Negro movement represented the zenith of a decades-­long effort to create culture that he and other Black Americans could be proud of and could draw on as they engaged with other Americans, exchanging their art, their ideas, their spirit. Locke’s vision of rooted cosmopolitanism lay at the heart of the Harlem Re­nais­sance. The Harlem Re­nais­sance resembled Kallen’s vision of Hebraism in the Menorah movement. While white Jews could pass as non-­Jews, the members of the Menorah movement did not want to simply pass. They proudly proclaimed 207

20 8 CONCL U SI ON

their Jewish identities, in a secular rather than religious fashion, as Jews and Americans. They believed ­doing so would preserve and sustain the Jewish communities in the United States, in Palestine, and across the globe. Both Kallen and Locke championed individual rights but ­were also deeply invested in communities. Cultural groups ­shaped individual characters and provided crucial communal support, but so did groups of intellectuals. ­These intellectuals should come from diverse backgrounds and ideally would become friends. As friends they would work to build and sustain their own culture even as they shared with and borrowed from ­others. When Kallen and Locke spoke of culture, they referred to high culture. They meant the study and production of languages, lit­er­a­ture, theater, and art. They had less concern for food, folkways, clothes, costumes, and religious rituals. T ­ hese ­things mattered too, but mostly they served as source material for the content of high cultural production. Cultural pluralism was secular and elitist, like Kallen and Locke. By the time Kallen died in 1974, the term cultural pluralism had fallen out of ­favor, replaced by multiculturalism, an ideology less elitist and more open to religion. Yet Kallen’s and Locke’s legacies live on. Their imprint can be felt in the debates over multiculturalism, cultural nationalism, ethnic identity and conflict, religion and secularism, and high culture versus low culture. ­These debates rage in the United States, Canada, Israel, G ­ reat Britain, continental Eu­rope, Australia, and everywhere that dif­fer­ent groups of p­ eople try to get along, to preserve their own heritages, and to learn from each other. Kallen’s and Locke’s writings remain relevant to our diverse nation and world. With the divisiveness of the Trump era and the isolation and alienation brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, their vision of cultural pluralism as friendship can inspire greater connectivity. Their lives demonstrate how friendship can foster ideas and bring ­people together across cultural barriers to share their differences in the world of the mind. Meta­phors can of course be overextended, from melting pots to symphonies of civilization. Regardless of the terms used to describe diversity in the United States, from cultural pluralism to multiculturalism to transnationalism to cosmopolitanism, the common thread is a balance between bland universalism and bigoted particularism. For both Kallen and Locke, individual freedom and elite education within a culturally pluralistic framework offered the most practical r­ ecipe for breaking down barriers. Face-­to-­face interactions with equals, re­spect for cultural difference, and embrace of common humanity forged American friendships that could conquer bigotry and make history. Kallen and Locke’s friendship certainly did.

D I F F E R ENCES M A DE

209

Kallen and Locke’s vision of cultural pluralism raises impor­tant questions about the promise and peril of multiculturalism. It does not have all the answers. Too g­ reat a preference for elitism and secularism w ­ ill have some p­ eople left out or ­behind. But their story, one of overcoming obstacles and changing minds, being attracted to difference and fighting bigotry—­including one’s own—­and ultimately developing a loyal friendship, offers hope in troubled times. The legacy of their friendship offers hope for a diverse and divided United States, and for all countries where dif­fer­ent ­peoples meet, learn, love, become friends, and contribute to the symphony of civilization.

N ote s

Introduction

1. Sarah L. Schmidt, “Horace Kallen and the Americanization of Zionism” (PhD diss., University of Mary­land, 1973), 49. Also cited in Werner Sollors, “A Critique of Pure Pluralism,” in Reconstructing American Literary History, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 269; Horace Kallen, “What I Have Learned, Betting My Life,” in What I Believe and Why—­Maybe: Essays for the Modern World by Horace M. Kallen, ed. Alfred J. Marrow (New York: Horizon, 1971), 173; Sarah L. Schmidt, “A Conversation with Horace M. Kallen: The Zionist Chapter of His Life,” Reconstructionist 41 (November 1975): 29; and Sarah L. Schmidt, Horace M. Kallen: Prophet of American Zionism (Brooklyn, NY: Carlson, 1995), 27–28. 2. Schmidt, “A Conversation with Horace M. Kallen,” 29. 3. Horace M. Kallen, “How I Bet My Life,” Saturday Review, October 1, 1966, 30, reprinted in Horace M. Kallen, What I Believe and Why—­Maybe (New York: Horizon, 1971), 173. 4. Alain Locke, “Unity through Diversity: A Baha’i Princi­ple,” The Baha’i World, vol. 5 (1935), reprinted in The Philosophy of Alain Locke: Harlem Re­nais­sance and Beyond, ed. Leonard Harris (Philadelphia: ­Temple University Press, 1989), 135. 5. Alain Locke spelled his m ­ iddle name LeRoy, Leroy, and Le Roy. 6. W. E. B. Du Bois to Jesse Moorland, May 5, 1927, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, MS 312, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Mas­sa­chu­setts Amherst Libraries. 7. On Kallen’s secularism, see Matthew Kaufman, Horace Kallen Confronts Amer­i­ca: Jewish Identity, Science, and Secularism (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2019). On Locke’s secularism, see Christopher Cameron, Black Freethinkers: A History of African American Secularism (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2019), 47–48, 61–64. 8. Moses Rischin, “The Jews and Pluralism: T ­ oward an American Freedom Symphony,” in Jewish Life in Amer­i­ca: Historical Perspectives, ed. Gladys E. Rosen (New York: Press of the American Jewish Committee, 1978), 79. 9. Margaret Just Butcher, The Negro in American Culture: Based on Materials Left by Alain Locke, 2nd ed. (1956; repr., New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971), 293–94. 10. For Locke’s biography, see Jeffrey C. Stewart, The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 11. Kaufman, Horace Kallen Confronts Amer­i­ca, 15–16. 12. Horace Kallen, “The Promise of the Menorah Idea,” Menorah Journal 49, nos. 1 and 2 (Autumn–­Winter 1962): 10. 211

21 2 NOTES

TO PAGES 7– 12

13. See Jessica Cooperman, Making Judaism Safe for Amer­i­ca: World War I and the Origins of Religious Pluralism (New York: New York University Press, 2018). 14. Paul Allen Anderson, Deep River: ­Music and Memory in Harlem Re­nais­sance Thought (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 123. 15. Daniel Greene, The Jewish Origins of Cultural Pluralism: The Menorah Association and American Diversity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011). 16. Aristotle (384–322 BCE), Nichomachean Ethics, bk. 8. 17. The word n—­—­ occasionally appears in this book, always with dashes. 18. Anderson, Deep River, 133. 19. Horace Meyer Kallen, “Alain Locke and Cultural Pluralism,” Journal of Philosophy 54, no. 5 (February 28, 1957): 119–21, based on “Remarks Made at a Memorial Meeting u ­ nder the Auspices of the Alain Locke Memorial Committee, Saturday, October 29, 1955.” 20. Kallen, “Alain Locke and Cultural Pluralism,” 120. 21. Kallen, “Alain Locke and Cultural Pluralism,” 120–21. 22. Kallen, “Alain Locke and Cultural Pluralism,” 121. 23. Hasia Diner, “Between Words and Deeds: Jews and Blacks in Amer­i­ca, 1880– 1935,” in Strug­gles in the Promised Land: T ­ oward a History of Black-­Jewish Relations in the United States, ed. Jack Salzman and Cornel West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 88, 90. 24. David Levering Lewis, “Shortcuts to the Mainstream: Afro-­American and Jewish Notables in the 1920s and 1930s,” in Jews in Black Perspectives, ed. Joseph R. Washington (Rutherford, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1984), 83. 25. Lewis, “Shortcuts to the Mainstream,” 84. 26. Cheryl Greenberg, Troubling the W ­ aters: Black-­Jewish Relations in the American ­Century (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2006), 38. 27. Marc Dollinger, Black Power, Jewish Politics: Reinventing the Alliance in the 1960s (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2018), xiv. 28. Hasia Diner, Julius Rosenwald: Repairing the World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017); Lori Harrison-­K ahan, “Scholars and Knights: W. E. B. Du Bois, J. E. Spingarn, and the NAACP,” Jewish Social Studies 18, no. 1 (Fall 2011): 63–87. 29. See George Bornstein, The Colors of Zion: Blacks, Jews, and Irish from 1845 to 19945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Jeffrey Melnick, A Right to Sing the Blues: African Americans, Jews, and American Popu­lar Song (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); and Jonathan Karp, “Ethnic Role Models and Chosen ­Peoples: Philosemitism in African-­ American Culture,” in Philosemitism in History, ed. Jonathan Karp and Adam Sutcliffe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 211–34 30. Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in Amer­ic­ a (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), xi. 31. David A. Hollinger, “The Prob­lem of Pragmatism in American History,” Journal of American History 67, no. 1 ( June 1980): 102–3; Leonard Harris, ed., The Philosophy of Alain Locke: Harlem Re­nais­sance and Beyond (Philadelphia: T ­ emple University Press, 1989); Leonard Harris, ed., The Critical Pragmatism of Alain Locke (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999).

NOTES TO PA GES 12– 16

213

32. Hollinger, “Prob­lem of Pragmatism,” 97, 93. 33. Horace Meyer Kallen, speech to Boston Order of the Knights of Zion, December 26, 1913, quoted in Schmidt, Horace M. Kallen, 51. 34. Mark A. Raider, The Emergence of American Zionism (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 153. On American Zionism, see Melvin I. Urofsky, American Zionism from Herzl to the Holocaust (1975; repr., Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995); Naomi W. Cohen, The Americanization of Zionism, 1897–1948 (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New E ­ ngland, 2003); Rafael Medoff, Zionism and the Arabs: An American Jewish Dilemma, 1898–1948 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997); and Ben Halpern, A Clash of Heroes: Brandeis, Weizmann, and American Zionism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). 35. Christopher Newfield and Avery F. Gordon, “Multiculturalism’s Unfinished Business,” in Mapping Multiculturalism, ed. Avery  F. Gordon and Christopher Newfield (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 84. 36. Sollors, “Critique of Pure Pluralism”; Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); David Hollinger, Postethnic American: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York: Basic Books, 1995); Ross Posnock, Color and Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Modern Intellectual (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Menand, Metaphysical Club. For a dif­fer­ ent interpretation, see Victoria Hattam, In the Shadow of Race: Jews, Latinos, and Immigrant Politics in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 37. David Hollinger, “Ethnic Diversity, Cosmopolitanism, and the Emergence of the American Liberal Intelligent­sia,” American Quarterly 27 (1975), reprinted in In the American Province: Studies in the History and Historiography of Ideas, ed. David Hollinger (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 65. 38. Noam Pianko, Zionism and the Roads Not Taken: Rawidowicz, Kaplan, Kohn (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 47. 39. Horace Meyer Kallen, “Democracy versus the Melting Pot,” Nation (February 18 and 25, 1915), reprinted in Culture and Democracy in the United States (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1924; repr., New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1998), 114–15. 40. Kallen, “Democracy versus the Melting Pot,” 116–17. 41. Alain LeRoy Locke, “Race Contacts and Interracial Relations,” speeches delivered at Howard University in 1915 and 1916, in The Works of Alain Locke, ed. Charles Molesworth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 259. 42. Ross Posnock, “Black Is Brilliant,” review of Alain L. Locke: The Biography of a Phi­los­o­pher, by Leonard Harris and Charles Molesworth, New Republic, April 15, 2009. 43. Rayford W. Logan diary, June 25, 1941, Rayford Whittingham Logan Papers, Library of Congress, series 2, box 3. 44. Alain Locke, “Friendship,” February 8, 1904, Alain Locke Papers, Moorland-­ Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, box 151, folder 38. 45. See Jonathan M. Hansen, The Lost Promise of Patriotism: Debating American Identity, 1890–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 95, 113–15. 46. Alain LeRoy Locke, “Self-­Criticism: The Third Dimension in Culture,” Phylon 4, no. 4 (4th qtr., 1950): 391–94. 47. Jacob Billikopf to Alain Locke, September 14, 1942, Jacob Billikopf Papers, American Jewish Archives, box 17, folder 8.

21 4 NOTES

TO PAGES 16– 22

48. Horace Kallen to Jacob Billikopf, December 30, 1947, Billikopf Papers, American Jewish Archives, box 13, folder 13. 1. From Berenstadt to Boston

1. Jonathan D. Sarna, “The Jews of Boston in Historical Perspective,” in The Jews of Boston, ed. Jonathan D. Sarna, Ellen Smith, and Scott-­Martin Kosof ksy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 4. 2. Horace Kallen, interview by Milton R. Konvitz and Dorothy Oko, August 31 and September 1, 3, 21, 1964, Dorot Jewish Division, New York Public Library, tape 1, transcript p. 12. 3. Kallen interview, tape 4, p. 53. 4. Horace Kallen, Registration Blank, May 26, 1903, and March 26, 1906, Kallen Rec­ord, Harvard University Archives (hereafter HUA). 5. James A. Beadly to Richard Cobb, August 19, 1900, Kallen Rec­ord, HUA. 6. James E. Thomas to Dean Le Baron R. Briggs, June 20, 1899, Kallen Rec­ord, HUA. 7. Albert Perry Walker to Harvard, May 7, 1900, Kallen Rec­ord, HUA. 8. William H. Sylvester to unnamed Harvard official, July 3, 1900, Kallen Rec­ord, HUA. 9. Rufus P. Williams to Richard Cobb, April 30, 1900, Kallen Rec­ord, HUA. 10. Williams to Cobb, April 30, 1990. 11. “First Attempt a Success: Concert and Dance u ­ nder the Auspices of the Sons and ­Daughters of Zion,” Boston Globe, March 16, 1899; “Local Lines,” Boston Globe, October 7, 1900. 12. Kallen interview, tape 4, side 1, p. 64. 13. Kallen interview, tape 4, side 1, pp. 51, 64. 14. Kallen interview, tape 4, side 1, p. 64. 15. Herbert Straus inherited part of Macy’s department store in 1912 when his ­father, Isidor, died on board the Titanic. 16. Price of dorm rooms in Harvard University Cata­logue, 1901–1902, 520–22. On “­Little Jerusalem,” see Ernest Earnest, Academic Pro­cession: An Informal History of the American College, 1636 to 1953 (New York: Bobbs Merrill, 1953), 216. 17. Kallen interview, tape 4, side 1, p. 64. 18. Jobs listed in Kallen’s May 26, 1903, Harvard Appointment Committee document, Kallen Rec­ord, HUA. 19. Philip Davis, And Crown Thy Good (New York: Philosophical Library, 1952), 118. 20. Robert A. Woods, “Traffic in Citizenship,” in Americans in Pro­cess: A Settlement Study, ed. Robert A. Woods (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1902), 159. See also Meaghan Dwyer, “Ethnic Patriotism: Boston’s Irish and Jewish Communities, 1880–1929” (PhD diss., Boston College, 2010). 21. Kallen interview, tape 3, p. 36. 22. Kallen interview, tape 4, p. 52. 23. Kallen interview, tape 3, p. 36. 24. Mark L. Savickas, “Meyer Bloomfield: Or­ga­nizer of the Vocational Guidance Movement, 1907–1917,” ­Career Development Quarterly 57, no. 3 (2009): 259–73.

NOTES TO PA GES 22– 28

215

25. Davis, And Crown Thy Good, 2; William C. Briddick and Hande Sensoy Briddick, “Feivel Chemerisnky: The Social Worker as Counselor” (unpublished paper, 2010). 26. Kallen quoted in “North End Needs,” Boston Globe, May 18, 1902. 27. Kallen quoted in “North End Needs.” 28. Kallen quoted in “North End Needs.” 29. Kallen quoted in “North End Needs.” 30. Kallen quoted in “North End Needs.” 31. Harvard University Cata­logue, 1901–1902. 32. Francis Greenwood Peabody to Richard Cobb, July 1902, Kallen Rec­ord, HUA. 33. Horace Kallen, “In Darkest Boston,” unpublished manuscript based on data collected August–­October 1902, Horace Meyer Kallen Papers, American Jewish Archives (hereafter HMK-­AJA), box 78, folder 1. 34. Horace Kallen, Registration Blank, March 26, 1906, Kallen Rec­ord, HUA; Barrett Wendell to Horace Kallen, June 21, 1902, HMK-­AJA, box 31, folder 7. 35. Kallen, Registration Blank, March 26, 1906. 36. Horace Kallen, “The Word Miraculous,” Maccabaean 3, no. 2 (August 1902): 67. 37. Horace Kallen, “A Convert in Zion,” American Hebrew, April 14, 1916, reprinted in Judaism at Bay: Essays ­toward the Adjustment of Judaism to Modernity (New York: Bloch, 1932; repr., New York: Arno, 1972), 61–64. 38. Kallen, 64–65. 39. Kallen, 65–66. 40. Kallen interview, tape 4, side 1, p. 64. 41. See Thomas F. Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in Amer­i­ca (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 305. 42. Kallen interview, tape 3, p. 34. 43. Kallen interview, tape 4, p. 65 44. Barrett Wendell to Richard Cobb, July 4, 1902, Kallen Rec­ord, HUA. 45. Kallen interview, tape 4, side 1, p. 64. 46. Quoted in Marcia Graham Synnott, The Half-­Opened Door: Discrimination and Admissions at Harvard, Yale, and Prince­ton, 1900–1970 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1979), 23–24. 47. Davis, And Crown Thy Good, 108, 116. 48. Harvard University Cata­logue, 1902–1903, 380. 49. William Zebina Ripley, The Races of Eu­rope: A So­cio­log­ic­al Study (New York: D. Appleton, 1899). 50. Ripley, Races of Eu­rope, 40, 58. 51. Ripley, Races of Eu­rope, 372–73. 52. Ripley, Races of Eu­rope, 373, 381, 382, 384–85, 390–91. 53. Ripley, Races of Eu­rope, 395, 397–98, 400, 571; emphasis in original. 54. Horace Kallen, “The Ethics of Zionism,” Maccabaean 11, no.  2 (August 1906):61–71. 55. David Kaufman, “­Temples in the American Athens: A History of the Synagogues of Boston,” in Sarna, Smith, and Kosof ksy, Jews of Boston, 182, 188; Mary Antin to Israel Zangwill, February 24 and September 11, 1899, in The Collected Letters of Mary Antin, ed. Evelyn Salz (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000), 9, 13.

21 6 NOTES

TO PAGES 29– 35

56. Horace Kallen Harvard College scholarship application, May 27, 1902, Kallen Rec­ord, HUA. 57. Kallen interview, tape 3, side 1, pp. 33–34. 58. Kallen interview, tape 3, side 1, pp. 33–34. 59. Edward Everett Hale to Horace Kallen, November 2, 1903, HMK-­AJA, box 12, folder 20. 60. Edward Everett Hale to Horace Kallen, February 25 [prob­ably 1904], HMK-­AJA, box 12, folder 20, discussed in William M. Toll, “Ethnicity and Freedom in the Philosophy of Horace M. Kallen,” in The Jews of North Amer­i­ca, ed. Moses Rischin (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987), 156. 61. Barrett Wendell to Horace Kallen, November 3, 1903, HMK-­AJA, box 31, folder 7. 62. Kallen interview, tape 3, p. 38. 63. Horace Kallen, “Concerning the Teaching of En­glish Composition—(I),” Journal of Education 62, no. 9 (August 1905): 241–43; Horace Kallen, “Concerning the Teaching of En­glish Composition—(II),” Journal of Education 62, no. 10 (September 1905): 271–73. 64. Marvin Lowenthal to parents, Christmas 1912, Marvin Lowenthal Papers, P-140, American Jewish Historical Society, box 2, folder 2. 65. Horace Meyer Kallen, “The False Hope,” Maccabaean 7, no. 6 (December 1904): 293. 66. Horace Meyer Kallen, “­Temple and Minyan,” Maccabaean 8, no. 3 (March 1905): 89. 67. Horace Kallen, “Part of the Unfit,” unpublished, undated story, HMK-­AJA, box 81, folder 1. 68. Kallen, “Part of the Unfit,” 5. 69. Horace Kallen, Registration Blank, March 26, 1906, Kallen Rec­ord, HUA. 70. Kallen interview, tape 3, p. 38. 71. Le Baron Russell Briggs to E.H. Wells, February 24, 1909, Kallen Rec­ord, HUA. 72. Sarah Wilson, “The Evolution of Ethnicity,” En­glish Literary History 76, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 249, 270. 73. Kallen, “Ethics of Zionism.” 74. Kallen, “Ethics of Zionism,” 61–62. See Sarah Schmidt, “Horace M. Kallen: The Zionist Chapter,” in The Legacy of Horace M. Kallen, ed. Milton R. Konvitz (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1987), 78–79. 75. Kallen, “Ethics of Zionism,” 62. See Arnold Eisen, The Chosen ­People in Amer­i­ca: A Study in Jewish Religious Ideology (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1983), 47. 76. Kallen, “Ethics of Zionism,” 62, 64. 77. Kallen, “Ethics of Zionism,” 65. 78. Kallen, “Ethics of Zionism,” 66. 79. Kallen, “Ethics of Zionism,” 66–67. 80. Kallen, “Ethics of Zionism,” 67–68. 81. Eric L. Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity (Prince­ ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2006), 179; Noam Pianko, “The True Liberalism of Zionism: Horace Kallen, Jewish Nationalism, and the Limits of American Pluralism,” American Jewish History 94, no. 4 (December 2008): 305. 82. Kallen, “Ethics of Zionism,” 68.

NOTES TO PA GES 35– 44

217

83. Kallen, “Ethics of Zionism,” 68. 84. Kallen, “Ethics of Zionism,” 68, referencing Henri Jean Baptiste Anatole Leroy-­ Beaulieu, Israel among the Nations: A Study of Jews and Antisemitism (originally Les juifs et l’antisemitisme, Israël chez les nations, translated in 1900 by F. Hellmann). 85. Kallen, “Ethics of Zionism,” 69. 86. Kallen, “Ethics of Zionism,” 69. 87. Kallen, “Ethics of Zionism,” 69. 88. Kallen, “Ethics of Zionism,” 69–70. 89. Kallen, “Ethics of Zionism,” 70; emphasis added. 90. Kallen, “Ethics of Zionism,” 70. 91. Kallen, “Ethics of Zionism,” 70. 92. For an opposing view, see Pianko, “True Liberalism of Zionism,” 301, 311–13. 93. David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York: Penguin Books, 1997), xxviii. 94. Kallen, “Ethics of Zionism,” 71. 95. Kallen, “Ethics of Zionism,” 71. 96. Kallen, “Ethics of Zionism,” 71; emphasis added. 97. See Mark A. Raider, The Emergence of American Zionism (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 70. 98. Kallen, “Ethics of Zionism,” 71; emphasis added. 2. The Talented among the Tenth

1. Alain Locke, “Psychograph,” preface to “Values and Imperatives,” in American Philosophy T ­ oday and Tomorrow, ed. Horace Kallen and Sidney Hook (New York: Lee Furman, 1935), 312. 2. On Locke’s childhood, see Douglas K. Stafford, “Alain Locke: The Child, the Man, and the ­People,” Journal of Negro Education 30, no. 1 (Winter 1961): 25. 3. Quote from Mary Locke obituary in the Crisis, as quoted in Leonard Harris and Charles Molesworth, Alain L. Locke: The Biography of a Phi­los­o­pher (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 8. 4. Harris and Molesworth, Alain L. Locke, 7–8. 5. Alain LeRoy Locke, undated biographical essay, as quoted in Harris and Molesworth, Alain L. Locke, 13, 15, 17. 6. Franklin Spencer Edmonds, History of the Central High School of Philadelphia (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1902), 287–88. 7. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (1899; repr., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 68n9. 8. Quoted in Harris and Molesworth, Alain L. Locke, 11. 9. Alain Locke, “The Alhambra; Its Historical Position and Influence,” Mirror 22, no. 8 (April 1902): 3–6. 10. See Harris and Molesworth, Alain L. Locke, 22–23. 11. Alain LeRoy Locke, “Opinion of the Lynching Which Occurred in Tennessee,” September 29, 1902, Alain Locke Papers (henceforth ALP), Moorland-­Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, box 150, folder 15. 12. Locke, “Opinion of the Lynching.”

21 8 NOTES

TO PAGES 44– 50

13. Locke, “Opinion of the Lynching.” 14. Instructor’s handwritten comments on Locke, “Opinion of the Lynching.” 15. Alain Locke, “­Shall We Annex More Islands?,” October 9, 1902, ALP, box 150, folder 16. 16. Alain Locke, “The Alien Invasion,” May 4, 1903, ALP, box 150, folder 21. 17. Alain Locke, “Immigration Laws,” undated, ALP, box 150, folder 17. 18. Alain Locke, “Pride of Lineage,” October 5, 1903, ALP, box 150, folder 9. 19. Alain Locke, “Thoughts on Rabbi ben Ezra,” September 23, 1902, ALP, box 150, folder 15. 20. Locke, “Thoughts on Rabbi ben Ezra.” 21. Alain Locke, “A Supposed Soliloquy of Shylock a­ fter the Trial Scene in The Merchant of Venice,” January 8, 1904, ALP, box 150, folder 20. 22. Alain Locke, “The True Nature of a Church,” March 1, 1904, ALP, box 150, folder 19. 23. Locke, “True Nature of a Church.” 24. Alain LeRoy Locke, “Moral Training in Elementary Schools,” Teacher 8, no. 4 (April 1904): 95–101. 25. Locke, “Moral Training in Elementary Schools,” 95. 26. Locke, “Moral Training in Elementary Schools,” 96–97. 27. Locke, “Moral Training in Elementary Schools,” 98. 28. Locke, “Moral Training in Elementary Schools,” 100–101. 29. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, September [n.d.], 1904, ALP, box 47, folder 25. 30. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, September 26, 1904, ALP, box 47, folder 31. 31. Van Wyck Brooks, An Autobiography (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1965), 102. See Kevin P. Murphy, Po­liti­cal Manhood: Red Bloods, Mollycoddles, and the Politics of Progressive Era Reform (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). 32. Jeffrey C. Stewart, “A Black Aesthete at Oxford,” Mas­sa­chu­setts Review 34, no. 3 (Autumn 1993): 412. 33. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, October 4, 1904, ALP, box 47, folder 37. 34. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, October 4, 1904. 35. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, October 4, 1904. 36. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, October 6, 1904, ALP, box 47, folder 38. 37. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, October 13, 1904, ALP, box 47, folder 41. 38. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, November 17, 1904, ALP, box 48, folder 2. 39. Alain Locke to “Martin,” undated, ALP, box 34, folder 25. See “Yale Beats Harvard in Last Big Game,” New York Times, November 20, 1904. Thanks to Karl Lindholm for directing me to this article. 40. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, undated, ALP, box 47, folder 7. The Prince­ton game was on May 20, 1905. 41. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, April 7, 1905, ALP, box 49, folder 4. 42. Alain Locke to “Martin,” undated, ALP, box 34, folder 25. 43. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, November 27, 1904, ALP, box 48, folder 3. 44. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, November 27, 1904. 45. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, November 27, 1904. 46. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, November 27, 1904. 47. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, November 27, 1904.

NOTES TO PA GES 51– 56

219

48. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, December 2, 1904, ALP, box 48, folder 5. 49. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, December 12, 1904, ALP, box 48, folder 6. 50. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, undated [prob­ably spring 1905], ALP, box 47, folder 7. 51. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, undated [prob­ably spring 1905]. 52. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, undated [prob­ably spring 1905]. 53. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, undated, ALP, box 51, folder 58. See Edward Everett Wilson, “The Joys of Being a Negro,” Atlantic Monthly, February 1906, 245–50. 54. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, April 2, 1905, ALP, box 49, folder 2. 55. Harris and Molesworth, Alain L. Locke, 34; Jeffrey C. Stewart, The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 58. 56. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, undated, October or November 1904, ALP, box 47, folder 51. 57. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, November 6, 1904, ALP, box 47, folder 54. 58. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, November 13, 1904, ALP, box 47, folder 55. 59. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, February 22, 1905, ALP, box 48, folder 60. 60. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, February 26, 1905, ALP, box 48, folder 61. 61. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, February 26, 1905. 62. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, February 26, 1905. 63. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, May 26, 1905, ALP, box 49, folder 17. 64. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, May 26, 1905. 65. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, June 26, 1905, ALP, box 49, folder 27. 66. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, undated [May 21, 1905], ALP, box 47, folder 1. 67. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, May 18, 1905, ALP, box 49, folder 14. 68. Quoted in Louis R. Harlan, “Booker T. Washington’s Discovery of the Jews,” in Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward, ed. J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 269. See Nancy J. Weiss, “Long-­Distance Runners of the Civil Rights Movement: The Contribution of Jews to the NAACP and the National Urban League in the Early Twentieth ­Century,” in Strug­gles in the Promised Land: ­Toward a History of Black-­Jewish Relations in the United States, ed. Jack Salzman and Cornel West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 125. 69. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Diary of My Steerage Trip across the Atlantic,” ca. 1896, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Mas­sa­chu­setts Amherst Libraries, MS 312, Series 10: Essays and Student Papers, 19– 21. See David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois, 1868–1919: Biography of a Race (New York: Owl Books, 1993), 148. 70. Quoted in Herbert Aptheker, “The Souls of Black Folk: A Comparison of the 1903 and 1952 Editions,” Negro History Bulletin 34, no. 1 ( January 1971): 16. See also Weiss, “Long-­Distance Runners,” 125; and Benjamin Sevitch, “W. E. B. Du Bois and Jews: A Lifetime of Opposing Anti-­Semitism,” Journal of African American History 87 (Summer 2002): 323–27. 71. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, May 31, 1905, ALP, box 49, folder 20. 72. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, June 26, 1905, ALP, box 49, folder 27. 73. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, June 26, 1905. 74. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, June 26, 1905. 75. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, June 26, 1905.

22 0 NOTES

TO PAGES 57– 63

76. Herbert Adolphus Miller, “The Negro and the Immigrant,” in Social Attitudes, ed. K. Young (New York: Henry Holt, 1931), 345. 77. Alain Locke, note dated April 1905 on back of a letter from Mary Locke, ALP, box 49, folder 19. 78. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, May 26, 1905, ALP, box 49, folder 17. 79. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, undated, spring [prob­ably May] 1906, ALP, box 50, folder 17. 80. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, October 1, 1905, ALP, box 49, folder 38. 81. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, September 26, 1905, ALP, box 49, folder 34. 82. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, September 26, 1905. 83. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, September 26, 1905. 84. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, October 1, 1905, ALP, box 49, folder 34. 85. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, October 14, 1905, ALP, box 49, folder 41. 86. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, October 14, 1905. 87. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, October 14, 1905. 88. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, October 14, 1905. See Mark R. Schneider, Boston Confronts Jim Crow, 1890–1920 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1997), 58. 89. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth” in The Negro Prob­lem, by Booker T. Washington (New York: J. Pott, 1903); W. E. B. Du Bois, “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” in The Souls of Black Folk (1903; Proj­ect Gutenberg, 1996), ebook. 90. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, November 28, 1905, ALP, box 50, folder 17. 91. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, November 28, 1905. 92. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, May 25, 1906, ALP, box 51, folder 49. 93. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, May 25, 1906. 94. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, January 13, 1906, ALP, box 50, folder 47. 95. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, November 28, 1905, ALP, box 50, folder 17. 96. James Arthur Harley to Alain Locke, December 28, 1905, ALP, box 33, folder 56. 97. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, January 7, 1906, ALP, box 50, folder 43. 98. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, November 28, 1905, ALP, box 50, folder 17. 99. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, May 3, 1906, ALP, box 51, folder 36. 100. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, May 3, 1906. 101. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, November 3, 1905, ALP, box 50, folder 3. 102. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, November 10, 1905, ALP, box 50, folder 6. 103. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, November 10, 1905. 104. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, undated [prob­ably fall 1905], ALP, box 47, folder 2. 105. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, March 20, 1906, ALP, box 51, folder 12. 106. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, spring 1906, ALP, box 46, folder 51. 107. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, spring 1906. Rabbi Joseph Krauskopf was a Reform rabbi and civic leader in Philadelphia who ran in the same educated elite circle as the Lockes. 108. On Rabbi Charles Fleischer, see Meaghan Dwyer-­Ryan, Susan L. Porter, and Lisa Fagin Davis, Becoming American Jews: T ­ emple Israel of Boston (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2009), 40–45, 48–53. 109. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, undated [prob­ably March  1906], ALP, box 46, folder 53. 110. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, October 24, 1905, ALP, box 49, folder 44.

NOTES TO PA GES 63– 71

221

111. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, October 24, 1905. 112. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, December 9, 1905, ALP, box 50, folder 24. 113. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, December 9, 1905. 114. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, March 16, 1906, ALP, box 51, folder 9. 115. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, undated [prob­ably fall 1905], ALP, box 47, folder 2. 116. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, undated [prob­ably fall 1905]. 117. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, February 21, 1906, ALP, box 51, folder 4. 118. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, June 2, 1906, ALP, box 51, folder 54. 119. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, June 2, 1906. 120. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, June 2, 1906. 121. William James to Maxim Gorky, September 20, 1906, in The Correspondence of William James, ed. Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley (Charlottesville: University Press of ­Virginia, 1992), 11:270–71, quoted in part in Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley, introduction to Correspondence of William James, 11. 122. Ross Posnock calls this an “antirace race man” in Color and Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Modern Intellectual (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 5. 123. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, undated [spring 1906], ALP, box 46, folder 53. 124. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, undated [spring 1906]. 3. Locke and Kallen, Student and Teacher

1. Horace Kallen, “University Ideals,” unpublished essay, February 11, 1908, Wendell Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS 1907.1, item 765. 2. Kallen, “University Ideals.” 3. Kallen, “University Ideals.” 4. Kallen, “University Ideals.” 5. Kallen, “University Ideals”; emphasis in original. 6. Alain LeRoy Locke, “Oxford Contrasts,” December 1907, published in The In­de­ pen­dent ( July 15, 1909), 139–42, and as “Oxford: By a Negro Student” in Colored American Magazine (September 1909): 185–90, quoted from reprint in “The Alain Locke Centenary,” American Oxonian 94, no. 2 (Spring 2007): 226. 7. Kallen, “University Ideals.” 8. Kallen, “University Ideals.” 9. Minutes of Harvard Menorah Society meeting, October 25, 1906, Harvard University Archives, HUD 3568.505. 10. Daniel Greene, The Jewish Origins of Cultural Pluralism: The Menorah Association and American Diversity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 4. 11. HMS minutes, November 1, 1906, Harvard University Archives, HUD 3568.505. 12. Greene, Jewish Origins of Cultural Pluralism, 14–15. 13. HMS minutes, January 12, 1907, Harvard University Archives, HUD 3568.505. 14. Locke took classes with ­these HMS members: Kallen, Henry Hurwitz (4), Isaiah Leo Sharfman (5), Allan Davis, Alvin Ess Block, Samuel Hurwitz (2), Hyman Askowith (3), Solomon Feingold, Samuel J. Horvitz (2), Jacob Joseph Kaplan, Robert Tandler Mack (2), Abraham Edward Pinanski (2), Jacob Victor Greenebaum, Benjamin Henry Gordon (2), David Goldstein (3), William Jacob Mack, Aaron Prus­sian (2), and Morris Spear (3).

22 2 NOTES

TO PAGES 71– 79

15. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, March 16, 1906, Alain Locke Papers (hereafter ALP), Moorland-­Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, box 51, folder 9. 16. Horace Kallen, “The Promise of the Menorah Idea,” Menorah Journal 49, no. 1–2 (Autumn–­Winter 1962): 10. 17. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, October 24, 1906, ALP, box 52, folder 13. 18. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, October 17, 1906, ALP, box 52, folder 11. 19. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, October 28, 1906, ALP, box 52, folder 14. 20. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, October 24, 1906, ALP, box 52, folder 13. 21. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, February 3, 1907, ALP, box 53, folder 19. 22. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, February [n.d.], 1907, ALP, box 53, folder 7. See William Shakespeare, As You Like It, 2.1.12. 23. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, February [n.d.], 1907, ALP, box 53, folder 7. Locke mocked the church president’s dialect. 24. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, February [n.d.], 1907. 25. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, February [n.d.], 1907. 26. Alain Locke, “Paul Laurence Dunbar” [prob­ably February 1907], in The Works of Alain Locke, ed. Charles Molesworth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 5–9. Date listed incorrectly as February 20, 1905. 27. Locke, “Paul Laurence Dunbar,” 5. 28. Locke, “Paul Laurence Dunbar,” 6. 29. Locke, “Paul Laurence Dunbar,” 6. 30. Locke, “Paul Laurence Dunbar,” 6–7. 31. Locke, “Paul Laurence Dunbar,” 7–8. 32. Locke, “Paul Laurence Dunbar,” 8. 33. Locke, “Paul Laurence Dunbar,” 8. 34. Locke, “Paul Laurence Dunbar,” 8. 35. Locke, “Paul Laurence Dunbar,” 8. 36. Locke, “Paul Laurence Dunbar,” 8. 37. Locke, “Paul Laurence Dunbar,” 8–9. 38. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, October 24, 1906, ALP, box 52, folder 13. 39. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, undated [prob­ably fall 1905], ALP, box 46, folder 49. 40. Debate program, December 7, 1906, ALP, box 157, folder 6. 41. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, November 3, 1906, ALP, box 52, folder 15. 42. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, undated [prob­ably February 1906], ALP, box 52, folder 6. 43. Josiah Royce, “Race Questions and Prejudices,” lecture given to Chicago Ethical Society, 1905, published in International Journal of Ethics 16, no. 3 (1906): 265–88, republished in Josiah Royce, Race Questions, Provincialism, and Other American Prob­lems (New York: Macmillan, 1908); citations refer to the 1908 publication. 44. Royce, “Race Questions and Prejudices,” 15, 30, 40, 45; emphasis in original. 45. Royce, “Race Questions and Prejudices,” 46. 46. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, September 29, 1906, ALP, box 52, folder 7. 47. George Hutchinson, The Harlem Re­nais­sance in Black and White, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 81, referring to Josiah Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty (New York: MacMillan, 1908), 62, and Royce, Race Questions, 100.

NOTES TO PA GES 79– 86

223

48. Royce, Philosophy of Loyalty. Chapter 3 is titled “Loyalty to Loyalty.” See Royce, 117–18, 125–26; quotes on 133. 49. Hutchinson, Harlem Re­nais­sance, 81–82. Hutchinson quotes Alain Locke, “Unity through Diversity: A Baha’i Princi­ple” (1936), reprinted in The Philosophy of Alain Locke: Harlem Re­nais­sance and Beyond, ed. Leonard Harris (Philadelphia: T ­ emple University Press, 1989), 137. 50. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, February 23, 1907, ALP, box 53, folder 28. 51. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, February [n.d.], 1907 ALP, box 46, folder 54. 52. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, November 18, 1906, ALP, box 52, folder 21. 53. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, October 24, 1906, ALP, box 52, folder 13. 54. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, May 3, 1907, ALP, box 54, folder 49. 55. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, May 3, 1907. 56. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, May 3, 1907. 57. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, May 3, 1907. 58. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, February 3, 1907, ALP, box 53, folder 19. 59. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, February 3, 1907. 60. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, April 14, 1907, ALP, box 54, folder 3. 61. Thomas J. Schaeper and Kathleen Schaeper, Rhodes Scholars, Oxford, and the Creation of an American Elite (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010). 62. On Locke’s Rhodes Scholarship application, see Leonard Harris and Charles Molesworth, Alain L. Locke: The Biography of a Phi­los­o­pher (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 52–57. 63. Locke quoted in Arthur Huff Fauset, For Freedom: A Biographical Story of the American Negro (Philadelphia: Franklin Publishing and Supply, 1927), 175. 64. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, April 14, 1907, ALP, box 54, folder 3. 65. “A Negro Has Won the Rhodes Scholarship,” Eve­ning Post (New York), March 13, 1907, 6, as quoted in Jack C. Zoeller, “Alain Locke at Oxford: Race and the Rhodes Scholarships,” American Oxonian 94, no. 2 (Spring 2007): 190. 66. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, April 14, 1907, ALP, box 54, folder 3. 67. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, May 3, 1907, ALP, box 54, folder 49. 68. “Oxford Prize for Colored Student,” Philadelphia Rec­ord, March 13, 1907, 9. 69. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, March 23, 1907, ALP, box 53, folder 52, as quoted in Jeffrey C. Stewart, “A Black Aesthete at Oxford,” Mas­sa­chu­setts Review 34, no. 3 (Autumn 1993): 412. 70. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, April 19, 1907, ALP, box 54, folder 6. 71. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, April 19, 1907. 72. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, April 19, 1907. 73. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, April 19, 1907. 74. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, April 19, 1907. 75. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, April 19, 1907. 76. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, April 19, 1907. 77. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, May 3, 1907, ALP, box 54, folder 49. 78. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, July 15, 1907, ALP, box 54, folder 44. 79. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, July 25, 1907, ALP, box 54, folder 48.

22 4 NOTES

TO PAGES 87– 94

4. American Pluralists, Friends at Oxford

1. Horace Meyer Kallen, The League of Nations T ­ oday and Tomorrow (New York, 1918), 129–30; emphasis added. 2. Kallen’s statement regarding the 1907 Oxford American Club Thanksgiving dinner suggests he may not have boycotted and did in fact attend. See Carrie Tirado Bramen, The Uses of Variety: Modern Americanism and the Quest for National Distinctiveness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 97–98, 314n20. Bramen notes the pos­si­ble discrepancy between Kallen’s 1973 interview with Sarah Schmidt, where he claimed he boycotted the dinner, and his 1957 article on Locke. In the latter, Bramen writes, Kallen referred to “two authentically Americans [sic]” who boycotted, “but he does not specify if he is referring to himself.” 3. Horace Kallen diary, October 12–13, 1907, Horace Meyer Kallen Papers, American Jewish Archives (hereafter HMK-­AJA), box 89. 4. Kallen diary, October 29, 1907. 5. Kallen diary, January 3, 1908. 6. Kallen diary, January 3, 1908. 7. Kallen diary, January 3, 1908. 8. Kallen diary, October 23, 1907. 9. Kallen diary, October 18, 1907. 10. Kallen diary, December 28, 1907. 11. Quoted in Max Reichler, “Jewish Eugenics,” in Jewish Eugenics and Other Essays (New York: Bloch, 1916), 7. 12. Kallen diary, December 28, 1907. 13. Louis Dyer to Barrett Wendell, November 21, 1907, Wendell F ­ amily Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University (hereafter HOU), bMS Am 1907.1, series 4, subseries A, box 36, item 398. 14. Louis Dyer to Barrett Wendell, November 21, 1907. 15. Kallen diary, October 18 and 20, 1907. 16. Horace Kallen to Locke, October 21, 1907, Alain Locke Papers (hereafter ALP), Moorland-­Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, box 42, folder 15. 17. Kallen diary, October 18 and 23, 1907. 18. Kallen diary, October 23, 1907. 19. Kallen diary, October 23, 1907. 20. Kallen diary, October 29, 1907. 21. Kallen diary, November 2, 1907. 22. Kallen diary, November 3, 1907. 23. Horace Kallen to Barrett Wendell, October 22, 1907, Wendell F ­ amily Papers, HOU, bMS Am 1907.1, series 4, subseries A, box 42, folder 2, item 733. 24. Barrett Wendell to Horace Kallen, November  3, 1907, HMK-­AJA, box 31, folder 7. 25. For an interpretation of this exchange that is more critical of Kallen, see Bramen, Uses of Variety, 98–99. 26. Barrett Wendell to Horace Kallen, November  3, 1907, HMK-­AJA, box 31, folder 7. 27. Wendell to Kallen, November 3, 1907.

NOTES TO PA GES 95– 100

225

28. Horace Kallen to Barrett Wendell, November 12, 1907, Wendell ­Family Papers, HOU, bMS Am 1907.1, series 4, subseries A, folder 2, item 733; Horace Kallen to Alain Locke, undated, 1907, at Oxford, ALP, box 42, folder 15. 29. Horace Kallen to Barrett Wendell, November 12, 1907, Wendell ­Family Papers, HOU, bMS Am 1907.1, series 4, subseries A, folder 2, item 733. See William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, 1.3.33–35. 30. Horace Kallen to Ralph Barton Perry, October 27, 1907, Horace Meyer Kallen Papers-­YIVO Institute for Jewish Research (hereafter HMK-­YIVO), reel 45, folder 811, frames 74, 85. The “snob” was Harvard history professor Roger Bigelow Merriman. 31. Kallen to Perry, October 27, 1907. 32. Kallen to Perry, October 27, 1907. 33. Horace Kallen to Ralph Barton Perry, December 14, 1907, HMK-­YIVO, reel 45, folder 811, frames 87–88. See also Interview with Horace Kallen, April 29–30, 1973, at Dorot Jewish Division, New York Public Library, tape 1, side 2, transcript pp. 22–27. 34. Horace Kallen to Barrett Wendell, October 22, 1907 and November 12, 1907, Wendell F ­ amily Papers, HOU, bMS Am 1907.1, series 4, subseries A, folder 2, item 733. 35. Quotations from “Thanksgiving at Oxford: An American Student’s First Experience,” Boston Eve­ning Transcript, January 11, 1908. This article was reprinted in American Educational Review 29, no. 5 (February 1908): 230–33 as “A Thanksgiving at Oxford.” In his December 20, 1907, letter to Wendell, Kallen wrote, “Two of my ­things might also to [sic] be coming out soon—in the Transcript. They are signed Zevi Meier and are the first I have sent. One contains some words about Thanksgiving Day in Oxford.” Horace Kallen to Barrett Wendell, December 20, 1907, Wendell ­Family Papers, HOU, bMS Am 1907.1, series 4, subseries A, box 42, folder 2, item 733. 36. “Thanksgiving at Oxford.” 37. “Thanksgiving at Oxford.” 38. Kallen diary, December 28, 1907. 39. Kallen diary, January 16, 1908. 40. Horace Kallen, “The Smoking Debate: Its Burning Question,” Toynbee Rec­ord, February 1908, 64, Wendell F ­ amily Papers, HOU, bMS Am 1907.1, series 4, subseries A, folder 2, item 733. Article signed “K. H. M.” 41. Kallen, 65. 42. Horace Kallen to Alain Locke, undated [at Oxford 1907–1908], ALP, box 42, folder 15. 43. Horace Kallen to Alain Locke, January 2, 1908, ALP, box 42, folder 15. 44. Horace Kallen to Alain Locke, undated [prob­ably March or April 1908], ALP, box 42, folder 15. 45. Carl Sawyer Downes to Alain LeRoy Locke, April 25 [prob­ably 1908], ALP, box 25, folder 41. 46. Horace Kallen to Barrett Wendell, July 9, 1906 and July 20, 1907, Wendell F ­ amily Papers, HOU, bMS Am 1907.1, series A, folder 2. 47. Marvin Lowenthal to his parents, November 1, 1912, Marvin Lowenthal Papers, American Jewish Historical Society, box 2, folder 4. 48. Marvin Lowenthal to parents, November 24, 1914, Lowenthal Papers, box 2, folder 4.

22 6 NOTES

TO PAGES 100– 110

49. Marvin Lowenthal to Sylvia, August  22, 1915, Lowenthal Papers, box 3, folder 4. 50. Horace Kallen to Barrett Wendell, May 2, 1908, Wendell F ­ amily Papers, HOU, bMS Am 1907.1, series A, folder 3, item 733. 51. Kallen to Wendell, May 2, 1908. 52. Kallen to Wendell, May 2, 1908. 53. Kallen to Wendell, May 2, 1908. 54. Carl Sawyer Downes to Alain Locke, undated, ALP, box 25, folder 41. 55. Downes to Locke, undated. 56. See George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1995). 57. Richard Godbeer, The Overflowing of Friendship: Love between Men and the Creation of the American Republic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 4–5. 58. Horace Kallen to Barrett Wendell, May 2, 1908, Wendell F ­ amily Papers, HOU, bMS Am 1907.1, series A, folder 3, item 733. 59. Kallen diary, January 10, 1908. 60. Kallen diary, January 10, 1908. 61. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, December [n.d.], 1907, ALP, box 55, folder 18. 62. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, December [n.d.], 1907. 63. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, December [n.d.], 1907. 64. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, February 20, 1908, ALP, box 55, folder 43. 65. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, February 20, 1908. On Locke’s encounter with Scholes, see Jeffrey Green, Black Edwardians: Black ­People in Britain, 1901–1914 (London: Frank Cass, 1998), 148. 66. See Jeffrey Green, “Scholes, Theo­philus Edward Samuel (c.1858–­c.1940),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 67. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, December 7, 1907, ALP, box 55, folder 18. 68. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, February 20, 1908, ALP, box 55, folder 43. 69. Kallen diary, undated [approximately February 2, 1908]. 70. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, April 7, 1908, ALP, box 55, folder 51. 71. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, April 7, 1908. 72. Horace Kallen to Alain Locke, May [n.d.], 1908, ALP, box 42, folder 15. 73. Horace Kallen to Alain Locke et al., May [n.d.] 1908, ALP, box 42, folder 15. 74. Horace Kallen to Alain Locke, May 21, 1908, ALP, box 42, folder 15. 75. Horace Kallen to Alain Locke and Carl Sawyer Downes, [prob­ably May 28, 1908], ALP, box 42, folder 15. 76. Horace Kallen to Alain Locke, June 2, 1908, ALP, box 42, folder 15. 77. Kallen diary, May [n.d.], 1908. 78. Horace Kallen to Alain Locke, June 29, 1908, ALP, box 42, folder 15. 79. Horace Kallen to Alain Locke, July 20, 1908, ALP, box 42, folder 15. 80. Alain Locke, “Oxford Contrasts,” written December 1907, printed in the In­de­ pen­dent, July 15, 1909, reprinted as “Oxford: By a Negro Student,” Colored American, September 1909, 189; quotations from reprint. 81. Locke, “Oxford,” 190. 82. Alain Locke, “Cosmopolitanism,” manuscript of paper presented to Oxford Cosmopolitan Club, June 9, 1908, ALP, box 159, folder 8.

NOTES TO PA GES 110– 117

227

83. Locke, “Cosmopolitanism.” Dale E. Peterson notes Locke’s emphasis on cultural contrast in Up from Bondage: The Lit­er­a­tures of Rus­sian and African American Soul (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 153–54. 84. Locke, “Cosmopolitanism.” 85. Alain Locke, “Cosmopolitanism and Culture,” unpublished speech, 1908, ALP, box 159, folder 9. See Paul Allen Anderson, Deep River:­Music and Memory in Harlem Re­ nais­sance Thought (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 121. 86. Locke, “Cosmopolitanism and Culture.” 87. Locke, “Cosmopolitanism and Culture.” 88. Locke, “Cosmopolitanism and Culture.” 89. Henry James, The American Scene (1907; New York: Penguin, 1994), 89, 106; emphasis added. 90. See Leonard Harris and Charles Molesworth, Alain L. Locke: The Biography of a Phi­los­o­pher (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 36. 91. Israel Zangwill, The Melting Pot, performed 1908, in From the Ghetto to the Melting Pot: Israel Zangwill’s Jewish Plays, ed. Edna Nahshon (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005). 5. The Plural Is Po­liti­cal

1. Israel Zangwill, The Melting Pot, performed 1908, in From the Ghetto to the Melting Pot: Israel Zangwill’s Jewish Plays, ed. Edna Nahshon (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005), 287–88. 2. Mary Antin to Horace Kallen, January 1, 1917, Horace Meyer Kallen Papers, American Jewish Archives (hereafter HMK-­AJA), box 2, folder 4. 3. Ralph Barton Perry to John Patterson, February 3, 1911, Ralph Barton Perry Papers, Harvard University Archives, HUG 4683.5, box 2, folder 1912–1913 [folder dates mislabeled]. 4. Ralph Barton Perry to Thomas M. Shackleford, April 7, 1911, Perry Papers, box 2, folder 1912–1913. 5. Thomas M. Shackleford to Ralph Barton Perry, April 12, 1911, Perry Papers, box 2, folder 1912–1913. 6. William James, A Pluralistic Universe, based on 1908 Hibbert Lectures at Oxford University (1909; Auckland, NZ: Floating Press, 2012), lecture 8, 169. L ­ ater scholars would use the term “pluriverse.” 7. Horace Kallen, “Hebraism and Current Tendencies in Philosophy,” American Hebrew 85, no.  20 (September  17, 1909), reprinted in Judaism at Bay: Essays ­toward the Adjustment of Judaism to Modernity (New York: Bloch, 1932; repr., New York: Arno, 1972), 7, 9. 8. Kallen, “Hebraism and Current Tendencies in Philosophy,” 14. 9. Horace Kallen, “On the Import of ‘Universal Judaism,’ ” American Hebrew 86, no. 11 ( January 14, 1910), reprinted in Judaism at Bay, 24; emphasis in original 10. Horace Kallen, “Judaism, Hebraism, Zionism,” American Hebrew 87, no.  8 ( June 24, 1910), reprinted in Judaism at Bay, 38–39. See Daniel Greene, “A Chosen ­People in a Pluralist Nation: Horace Kallen and the Jewish-­American Experience,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 16, no. 2 (2006): 168–73.

22 8 NOTES

TO PAGES 117– 124

11. Kallen, “Judaism, Hebraism, Zionism,” 32, 34; emphasis in original. 12. Kallen, “Judaism, Hebraism, Zionism,” 37. 13. Kallen, “Judaism, Hebraism, Zionism,” 38–39, 41. 14. Horace Meyer Kallen, “Judaism and the Modern Point of View” (1911), reprinted in Judaism at Bay, 48. Essay appeared with slight changes as “Judaism, Science, and the ‘New Thought,’ ” in American Hebrew 42, no. 25 (April 18, 1913). 15. Alain Locke, “The American Temperament,” North American Review 194 (August 1911), reprinted in The Critical Temper of Alain Locke: A Se­lection of His Essays on Art and Culture, ed. Jeffrey C. Stewart (New York: Garland, 1983), 400. 16. Alain Locke, “The Negro and a Race Tradition,” delivered to Philadelphia Negro Historical Society, October 24, 1911, Alain Locke Papers, Moorland-­Spingarn Research Center, Howard University (hereafter ALP), box17, folder 24. 17. Alain Locke, “A Race Tradition in Education,” speech to Negro Historical Society in Yonkers, New York, December 9, 1911, ALP, box 17, folder 25. This speech was printed in vari­ous Black newspapers, with dif­fer­ent titles and in dif­fer­ent lengths. See “Must Develop More Race Pride,” New York Age, December 12, 1911, 1; “The Question of a Race Tradition,” Afro-­American Ledger [Baltimore], January 13, 1912; and “Race History Discussed by ­Great Scholar,” Pittsburgh Courier, January 13, 1912, 1, 8, where the speech was titled “The Negro and a Race Tradition.” 18. Locke, “Negro and a Race Tradition,” ALP. See Dale E. Peterson, Up from Bondage: The Lit­er­at­ ures of Rus­sian and African American Soul (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 154. 19. Locke, “Negro and a Race Tradition,” ALP. 20. Locke, “Question of a Race Tradition.” 21. Locke, “Question of a Race Tradition.” 22. Locke, “Question of a Race Tradition.” 23. Horace Kallen, Culture and Democracy in the United States (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1924; repr., New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1998), 218n1. 24. Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, “Racial Integrity: A Plea for the Establishment of a Chair of Negro History in Our Schools and Colleges, ­etc.,” Negro Society for Historical Research Occasional Paper, no. 3 (1913): 6–7. Thanks to Don Polite Jr., who directed me to this source. 25. Locke to Emmett Jay Scott, March [n.d.], 1912, Booker T. Washington Papers, Library of Congress, box 84, reel 76, folder 9. 26. Alain Locke, “Alain Le Roy Locke,” in Harvard Class of 1908, Second Class Report (Cambridge, MA, 1914), 207. 27. Horace Kallen diary, October 10, 1911, HMK-­AJA, box 89. On Kallen in Wisconsin, see Michael C. Steiner, Horace M. Kallen in the Heartland: The Midwestern Roots of American Pluralism (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2020). 28. Kallen diary, October 10, 1911. 29. Kallen diary, October 10, 1911. 30. Kallen diary, October 10, 1911. 31. Kallen diary, October 10, 1911. 32. Kallen diary, October 10, 1911. 33. Kallen diary, October 10, 1911. 34. Kallen diary, October 10, 1911.

NOTES TO PA GES 125– 135

229

35. Morris Jastrow Jr., The Book of Job: Its Origin, Growth, and Interpretation (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1920), 179. Morris Jastrow was Joseph’s ­brother. 36. Howard Mumford Jones, Howard Mumford Jones: An Autobiography (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979), 52. 37. Horace Kallen, “Dr. Kallen on Zionism,” Maccabaean 25, no. 5 (November–­ December 1914): 187. 38. Kallen, “Dr. Kallen on Zionism,” 188. 39. Horace Meyer Kallen, “Democracy versus the Melting Pot,” Nation (February 18 and 25, 1915), reprinted in Kallen, Culture and Democracy, 71. 40. Kallen, “Democracy versus the Melting Pot,” 111–12. 41. Kallen, “Democracy versus the Melting Pot,” 114–15. 42. Kallen, “Democracy versus the Melting Pot,” 78. 43. Kallen, “Democracy versus the Melting Pot,” 116. 44. Kallen, “Democracy versus the Melting Pot,” 116; emphasis in original. 45. Kallen, “Democracy versus the Melting Pot,” 116–117. 46. Kallen, “Democracy versus the Melting Pot,” 117. 47. John Dewey to Horace Kallen, March 31, 1915, HMK-­AJA, box 7, folder 13. 48. Dewey to Kallen, March 31, 1915. 49. John Dewey to Horace Kallen, April 16, 1915, The Correspondence of John Dewey, InteLex Past Masters; emphasis in original. 50. Dewey to Kallen, April 16, 1915. 51. Horace Kallen to Marvin Lowenthal, undated [1917 or 1918], Marvin Lowenthal Papers, American Jewish Historical Society, box 5, folder 6. 52. Horace Kallen, “Americanization,” in Kallen, Culture and Democracy, 123. 53. Kallen, “Americanization,” 123. In the text, Kallen refers to Dewey’s sense of the solidity of ethnicity as being weaker than that of Randolph Bourne’s, which was in turn weaker than that of Kallen. 54. Horace Kallen to Alfred Zimmern, March  12, 1918, HMK-­AJA, box 32, folder 20. 55. Horace Kallen, Zionism and World Politics: A Study in History and Social Psy­chol­ ogy (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page, 1921), 294. 56. Kallen, Zionism and World Politics, 294. 57. Kallen, Zionism and World Politics, 295. 58. Horace M. Kallen, Frontiers of Hope (New York: Horace Liveright, 1929), 58, See also Rafael Medoff, Zionism and the Arabs: An American Jewish Dilemma (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997), 24, 34, 38–39, 52, 64. 59. Alain Locke, lectures at Howard University, spring 1915, in Alain Locke, Race Contacts and Interracial Relations: Lectures on the Theory and Practice of Race, ed. Jeffrey Stewart (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1992), 12. 60. Locke, Race Contacts and Interracial Relations, 91–100. 61. Locke, Race Contacts and Interracial Relations, 97. 62. Locke, Race Contacts and Interracial Relations, 71. 63. Locke, Race Contacts and Interracial Relations, 71. 64. Horace Kallen to Alain Locke, January 8, 1916, ALP, box 42, folder 15. 65. Horace Kallen, “Africa in the World Democracy,” speech given January 6, 1919, at Car­ne­g ie Hall in New York, (New York: NAACP, 1919), 10–11.

23 0 NOTES

TO PAGES 136– 140

66. Horace Kallen to Jacob Billikopf, August 21, 1923; Jacob Billikopf to Horace Kallen, August 22, 1923; and Horace Kallen to Jacob Billikopf, August 23, 1923, Horace Meyer Kallen Papers, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, reel 35, folder 621, frames 227–29. 67. On Locke’s mild radicalism, see Barbara Foley, Specters of 1919: Class and Nation in the Making of the New Negro (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), esp. chaps. 1 and 5. 68. Locke, Howard University, to Francis James Wylie, undated [prob­ably 1919 or 1920], Wylie Papers, Rhodes Trust, Oxford University. 69. Locke to Wylie, undated [prob­ably 1919 or 1920]. 70. Locke to Wylie, undated [prob­ably 1919 or 1920]. 71. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, May 19, 1909, ALP, box 157, folder 7. 72. Locke, “Negro and a Race Tradition,” ALP. 73. Locke, “Negro and a Race Tradition.” 74. Locke, “Negro and a Race Tradition.” 75. Locke, “Negro and a Race Tradition.” 76. Locke, “Negro and a Race Tradition.” 77. Alain Locke, “The New Negro,” in The New Negro, ed. Alain Locke (New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1925; repr., New York: Touchstone, 1997), 14. 78. George S. Schuyler and Theo­philus Lewis, “Shafts and Darts,” Messenger 6, no. 6 ( June 1924), as quoted in David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (1979; repr., New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 117. See also Jeffrey B. Ferguson, The Sage of Sugar Hill: George S. Schuyler and the Harlem Re­nais­sance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 83, 267n28. 79. Henry Louis Gates, “The Black Man’s Burden,” in Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory, ed. Michael Warner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 233. See also A. B. Christa Schwarz, Gay Voices of the Harlem Re­nais­sance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003). 80. George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 227. Chauncey claims Locke disapproved of the “flamboyance” (265) of Harlem’s gay scene. 81. Jeffrey C. Stewart, The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 431. Chapter 24 is titled “Looking for Love and Finding the New Negro.” 82. See Arnold Rampersad, introduction to Touchstone edition of Locke, New Negro, xx. 83. Alain Locke, “Apropos of Africa,” Opportunity 2 (1924), reprinted in The Works of Alain Locke, ed. Charles Molesworth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 264. 84. Locke, “New Negro,” 15. 85. Locke, “New Negro,” 15. 86. Abram Harris to V. F. Calverton, April 6, 1925, V. F. Calverton Papers, New York Public Library, quoted in Jonathan Scott Holloway, Confronting the Veil: Abrahm Harris Jr., E. Franklin Frazier, and Ralph Bunche, 1919–1941 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 116. 87. Locke, “Apropos of Africa,” 262. 88. Locke, “Apropos of Africa,” 267.

NOTES TO PA GES 141– 150

231

89. Locke, “Apropos of Africa,” 268. 90. Locke, “Apropos of Africa,” 268. 91. Alain Locke, foreword to Locke, New Negro, xxv–­xxvii. 92. Locke, foreword, xxvii. 93. Locke, foreword, xxv–­xxvi. 94. Locke, “New Negro,” 7. 95. Locke, “New Negro,” 14. 96. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Worlds of Color: The Negro Mind Reaches Out,” in Locke, New Negro, 411. 97. Du Bois, “Worlds of Color,” 411. 98. Locke, “New Negro,” 9. 99. Alain Locke, “Negro Youth Speaks,” in Locke, New Negro, 47. 100. Locke, “Negro Youth Speaks,” 51–53. 101. Alain Locke, “The Negro Spirituals,” in Locke, New Negro, 199–200. 102. Alain Locke, “The Legacy of the Ancestral Arts,” in Locke, New Negro, 254, 256. 103. Locke, “New Negro,” 16. 104. Alain Locke to Oswald Garrison Villard, March 9, 1926, Villard Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University; emphasis added. 105. Alain Locke, “The Contribution of Race to Culture,” Student World 23 (1930), reprinted in The Philosophy of Alain Locke: Harlem Re­nais­sance and Beyond, ed. Leonard Harris (Philadelphia: T ­ emple University Press, 1989), 202–4. 106. Locke, “Contribution of Race to Culture,” 206. 107. Alain Locke, “Psychograph,” preface to “Values and Imperatives,” in American Philosophy ­Today and Tomorrow, ed. Horace Kallen and Sidney Hook (New York: Lee Furman, 1935), 312. 108. Locke, “Psychograph.” 6. Plural in Culture, Universal in Religion

1. Horace Meyer Kallen, “The Place of Judaism in the Jewish Prob­lem” (1918), reprinted in Judaism at Bay: Essays t­oward the Adjustment of Judaism to Modernity (New York: Bloch, 1932; repr., New York: Arno, 1972), 103–4. 2. Horace Kallen, interview by Milton R. Konvitz and Dorothy Oko, August 31 and September 1, 3, 21, 1964, Dorot Jewish Division, New York Public Library, tape 3, transcript p. 38. 3. Board of Literary Society of Hebrew Union College to Horace Kallen, January 6, 1915, Horace Meyer Kallen Papers, American Jewish Archives (hereafter HMK-­AJA), box 13, folder 1. See also Sarah Schmidt, Horace M. Kallen: Prophet of American Zionism (Brooklyn, NY: Carlson, 1995), 73; and Melvin I. Urofsky, American Zionism from Herzl to the Holocaust (1975; repr., Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 165. 4. Jacob de Haas to Horace Kallen, January 22, 1917, HMK-­AJA, box 12, folder 17. 5. Horace Kallen, Why Religion? (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1927). See also Horace Kallen, “Is Belief Essential to Religion?,” International Journal of Ethics 21, no. 1 (October 1910): 51–57. 6. Kallen, Why Religion?, 63–64.

23 2 NOTES

TO PAGES 150– 157

7. Horace Kallen to himself, August 19, 1904, and September 3, 1904, HMK-­AJA, box 25, folder 23. 8. Kallen, Why Religion?, 64. 9. Kallen, Why Religion?, 64. 10. Horace Kallen to Martin  A. Meyer, November  6, 1915, HMK-­AJA, box 21, folder 16. 11. Kallen to Meyer, November 6, 1915. 12. Horace Kallen to Abraham Cronbach, January 16, 1928, Abraham Cronbach Papers, American Jewish Archives, MSS 9, box 2, folder 27. 13. “Blasphemy Charges Confront Kallen,” New York Times, August 28, 1928. 14. Horace Kallen, “­Behind the Bertrand Russell Case,” in The Bertrand Russell Case, ed. John Dewey and Horace Kallen (New York: Viking, 1941), 19–20. 15. John E. McGeehan, “Decision of Justice McGeehan,” Jean Kay vs. Board of Higher Education of the City of New York, March 30, 1940, in Dewey and Kallen, Bertrand Russell Case, 225. 16. This article from Twice and Year was adapted into Kallen, “­Behind the Bertrand Russell Case” two years ­later. 17. Kallen, “­Behind the Bertrand Russell Case,” 37, 39–42. 18. Kallen, “­Behind the Bertrand Russell Case,” 53. 19. Horace Meyer Kallen, Secularism Is the ­Will of God (New York: Twayne, 1954), 11. 20. See Arthur Mann, The One and the Many: Reflections on the American Identity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 145; and Stephen Whitfield, “Introduction to the Transaction Edition,” in Horace Kallen’s Culture and Democracy in the United States (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1998), xlvii–­xlix. 21. Alain Locke, “Psychograph,” preface to “Values and Imperatives” in American Philosophy ­Today and Tomorrow, ed. Horace Kallen and Sidney Hook (New York: Lee Furman, 1935), 312. 22. Alain Locke to Mariam Haney, March 30, 1941, Alain Locke Papers (hereafter ALP), Moorland-­Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, box 33, folder 49. 23. Charles Molesworth, introduction to The Works of Alain Locke, ed. Charles Molesworth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), xii. 24. In a 1935 form for Baha’i rec­ords, Locke noted his conversion was in 1918 in Washington, DC. 25. See the official website of the Baha’i faith, www​.­bahai​.­org, and Christopher Buck, Alain Locke: Faith and Philosophy (Los Angeles, CA: Kalimat Press, 2005), 35–36. 26. See Guy Emerson Mount, “A Troubled Modernity: W.E.B. Du Bois, ‘The Black Church,’ and the Prob­lem of Causality,” in Abdul-­Bahá’s Journey West: The Course of ­Human Solidarity, ed. Negar Mottahedeh (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 85–110. 27. “Abdul Baha on Religious Unity,” Washington Bee, April 27, 1912. 28. Buck, Alain Locke, 69. The fifth chapter of Buck’s book is titled “Race Amity.” 29. “Convention for Amity Meets at Big Local Hall,” Pittsburgh Courier, November 1, 1924. 30. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, undated [prob­ably February 1906], ALP, box 52, folder 6; Alain Locke to Mary Locke, November 18, 1906, ALP, box 52, folder 21. 31. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, December 4, 1906, ALP, box 52, folder 31.

NOTES TO PA GES 157– 164

233

32. Alain Locke to Mary Locke, November 9, 1906, ALP, box 52, folder 20. 33. Wellesley Tudor Pole, “The Baha’i Movement,” in A Recording of the Proceedings of the First Universal Races Congress Held at the University of London, July 26–29, 1911 (London: P. S. King and Son, 1911), 155. 34. Abdu’l-­Bahá, “Letter from Abdu’l-­Bahá to the First Universal Races Congress,” trans. Wellesley Tudor Pole, in Recording of the Proceedings, 156. 35. Alain Locke, Race Contacts and Interracial Relations: Lectures on the Theory and Practice of Race, ed. Jeffrey Stewart (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1992), 1. 36. William James, The Va­ri­e­ties of Religious Experience: A Study in H ­ uman Nature (New York: Modern Library, 1902), 31. 37. Alain Locke to Arturo Schomburg, Thanksgiving Day 1916, Arthur Schomburg Papers, reel 4, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. 38. Alain Locke, “Impressions of Haifa,” Star of the West 15, no. 1 (1924): 13. 39. Locke, “Impressions of Haifa,” 13. 40. Locke, “Impressions of Haifa,” 13–14. 41. Alain LeRoy Locke, “The Negro Spirituals,” in The New Negro, ed. Alain LeRoy Locke (New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1925; repr., New York: Touchstone, 1997), 199. 42. Locke, “Negro Spirituals,” 199. 43. Locke, “Negro Spirituals,” 201. 44. Locke, “Negro Spirituals,” 202. 45. Alain Locke, “The Gospel for the Twentieth ­Century,” undated, ALP, box 143, folder 3, as quoted in Buck, Alain Locke, 234. 46. William James, “Pragmatism’s Conception of Truth,” lecture 6 in Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (New York: Longman Green, 1907), 76–91; and “The ­Will to Believe,” The New World, vol. 5, (1896), 327–347. 47. Locke, “Gospel for the Twentieth C ­ entury,” as quoted in Buck, Alain Locke, 234. 48. Locke, as quoted in Buck, Alain Locke, 236. 49. Alain Locke, “Unity in Diversity: A Baha’i Princi­ple,” in The Baha’i World: A Biennial International Rec­ord, vol. 5, 1932–1934 (New York: Baha’i Publishing Committee, 1936), reprinted in The Philosophy of Alain Locke: Harlem Re­nais­sance and Beyond, ed. Leonard Harris (Philadelphia: ­Temple University Press, 1989), 134. 50. Locke, “Unity in Diversity,” 135. 51. Locke, “Unity in Diversity,” 136–37. 52. Locke, “Unity in Diversity,” 137. 53. Locke, “Unity in Diversity,” 137. 54. Locke, “Unity in Diversity,” 138. 55. Alain Locke, “The Orientation of Hope,” in Baha’i World, vol. 5 (1936), reprinted in Harris, Philosophy of Alain Locke, 130. 56. Alain Locke and Bernhard Stern, “Types of Social Change,” in When ­Peoples Meet: A Study in Race and Culture, ed. Alain Locke and Bernhard Stern (New York: Hinds, Hayden, and Eldredge, 1942; rev. ed. 1949), 237. 57. Alain Locke, “Is ­There a Spiritual Basis for World Unity?,” Amer­i­ca’s Town Meeting of the Air, aired May 28, 1942, as quoted in Buck, Alain Locke, 179. 58. Locke, as quoted in Buck, Alain Locke, 180.

23 4 NOTES

TO PAGES 164– 174

59. Alain Locke, “Moral Imperatives for World Order,” address delivered June 20, 1944, at Mills College, Oakland, California, reprinted in Harris, Philosophy of Alain Locke, 152. 60. Alain Locke, “Lessons in World Crisis,” Baha’i World, vol. 9 (1940–1944, published 1945), pt. 4, article 3, 745–746. 61. Benjamin Karpman, contribution to “The Passing of Alain Leroy Locke,” Phylon (3rd qtr. 1954): 251. 62. Karpman, “Passing of Alain Leroy Locke,” 251. 63. Rayford W. Logan diary, December 23, 1954, Rayford Whittingham Logan Papers, Library of Congress, series 2, box 6, folder 1. 64. Eugene C. Holmes, “Alain Locke—­Philosopher,” in The New Negro Thirty Years Afterward, ed. Rayford W. Logan, Eugene C. Holmes, and G. Franklin Edwards (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1955), 4. 65. Horace Meyer Kallen, “Pluralism and Culture,” in Logan, Holmes, and Edwards, New Negro Thirty Years Afterward, 46, 47n1. 66. Kallen, “Pluralism and Culture,” 47. 67. “Editor’s note” to Kallen, “Pluralism and Culture,” 46. 68. Rayford W. Logan diary, May 13, 1955, Logan Papers, box 6, folder 1. 69. Horace Kallen to Shoghi Effendi, May 3, 1956, HMK-­AJA, box 25, folder 23. 70. Horace Kallen, Utopians at Bay (New York: Theodor Herzl Foundation, 1958), 150. 71. Jeffrey C. Stewart, The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 80. 72. Horace Kallen to T. S. Eliot, May 6, 1955, HMK-­AJA, box 8, folder 26. 73. Kallen to Eliot, May 6, 1955. 74. Kallen to Eliot, May 6, 1955. 75. Kallen to Eliot, May 6, 1955. 7. Friendship Rekindled, Pluralism Refined

1. Horace Kallen to Alain Locke, June and July 1908, Alain Locke Papers (hereafter ALP), box 42, folder 15. 2. Jacob Billikopf to Alain Locke, December 21, 1931, ALP, box 14, folder 1. 3. Alain Locke to Jacob Billikopf, undated [January 1932], ALP, box 14, folder 1. 4. Alain Locke, “Julius Rosenwald: Patron of Democracy,” unpublished, undated address, ALP, box 116, folder 14, p. 2. On Locke and Rosenwald, see Hasia Diner, Julius Rosenwald: Repairing the World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017), 148–50. 5. Locke, “Julius Rosenwald,” 3. 6. Locke, “Julius Rosenwald,” 4–5. 7. Marvin Lowenthal, “The Plight of Minorities in the Present-­Day World,” speech delivered April 4, 1935, at Howard University, ALP, box 186, folder 27, p. 4. 8. Horace Kallen to Edwin Holt, April 11, 1935, [Horace Mayer Kallen Papers, YIVO Institue for Jewish Research (hereafter HMK-­YIVO), reel 39, folder 717. 9. Horace Kallen, “Culture and Democracy in the United States,” speech delivered April 13, 1935, at Howard University, ALP, box 186, folder 16, pp. 9–10. 10. Alain Locke to Horace Kallen, April 15, 1935, ALP, box 42, folder 15.

NOTES TO PA GES 175– 180

235

11. Alain Locke, “Psychograph,” preface to “Values and Imperatives” in American Philosophy ­Today and Tomorrow, ed. Horace Kallen and Sidney Hook (New York: Lee Furman, 1935), 312. 12. Horace Kallen to Janet Wiseman, May 24, 1934, HMK-­YIVO, reel 42, folder 771, frame 878. On Julius Lips, see Gabrielle Simon Edgcomb, From Swastika to Jim Crow: Refugee Scholars at Black Colleges (Malabar, FL: Krieger, 1993), 107–16. 13. Horace Kallen to Mordecai Johnson, November 7, 1936, HMK-­YIVO, reel 42, folder 771, frame 902. 14. Horace Kallen to Julius Lips, March 30, 1937, HMK-­YIVO, reel 42, folder 772, frame 933; Eva Lips to Horace Kallen, March 31, 1937, HMK-­YIVO, reel 42, folder 772. 15. Quoted in Sarah Samuels, “ ‘An Outstanding and Unusual Contribution’: The Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars,” Penn History Review 24, no. 2 (April 5, 2019): 81–82. 16. Horace Kallen to Jacob Billikopf, April 1, 1939, HMK-­YIVO, reel 35, folder 624, frame 474. 17. Horace Kallen to Alain Locke, March 25, 1938, ALP, box 42, folder 15. 18. John H. Harmon to Horace Kallen, November 9, 1939, HMK-­YIVO, reel 39, folder 710, frame 546. 19. Horace Kallen to George M. Reynolds, November 15, 1939, HMK-­YIVO, reel 39, folder 710, frame 547. 20. Horace Kallen to John Lovejoy Elliott, February 23, 1940, HMK-­YIVO, reel 39, folder 710, frame 558. 21. John H. Harmon to Horace Kallen, September 19 and December 12, 1940, HMK-­YIVO, reel 39, folder 710, frames 561 and 565. 22. Horace Kallen to Rachel Kallen, March 9, 1939, Horace Meyer Kallen Papers, American Jewish Archives (hereafter HMK-­AJA), box 91, folder 4. 23. Horace Kallen to Rachel Kallen, March 9, 1939. 24. Alain Locke to Charlotte Osgood Mason, February 6, 1928, ALP, box 68, folder 20. 25. Alain Locke, fragment, possibly from letter to Charlotte Osgood Mason, January 10, 1934, ALP, box 140, folder 23. 26. Alain Locke, The Negro and His M ­ usic, Bronze Booklet 2 (Washington, DC: Associates in Negro Folk Education, 1936), 4–5. See Jeffrey Melnick, A Right to Sing the Blues: African Americans, Jews, and American Popu­lar Song (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 161–62. 27. Eugene Holmes, “A Writer’s Social Obligations,” paper delivered June 6, 1937, at Second National Congress of American Writers in New York, in The Writer in a Changing World, ed. Henry Hart (New York: Quinox Cooperative, 1937), 172–79. 28. Robert Gessner and Eugene Logan, exchange at Second National Congress of American Writers, June 6, 1937, in “The Second American Writer’s Congress,” in Hart, Writer in a Changing World, 233–34. 29. Rayford W. Logan diary, January 22, 1942, Rayford Whittingham Logan Papers, Library of Congress, series 2, box 3. 30. Logan diary, January 22, 1942. 31. Alain Locke to Jacob Billikopf, March 27, 1948, Jacob Billikopf Papers, American Jewish Archives (hereafter AJA), box 17, folder 8. 32. Alain Locke to Louis Finkelstein, April 13, 1944, ALP, box 29, folder 16.

23 6 NOTES

TO PAGES 180– 186

33. Alain Locke to Louis Finkelstein, April 14, 1948, ALP, box 29, folder 18. 34. “A Trumpet for All Israel,” Time, October 15, 1951. 35. Alain Locke to Louis Finkelstein, October 22, 1951, ALP, box 29, folder 18. 36. Horace Kallen to Alain Locke, March 14, 1944, HMK-­YIVO, reel 54, folder 969. 37. Horace Kallen to Alain Locke, May 18, 1944, ALP, box 42, folder 15; Alain Locke to Horace Kallen, June 13, 1944, HMK-­YIVO, reel 54, folder 969, frame 810. 38. Max C. Otto to Horace Kallen, undated [1945], HMK-­YIVO, reel 55, folder 989; emphasis in original. 39. Horace Kallen to Max C. Otto, September 5, 1945, HMK-­YIVO, reel 55, folder 989, frame 845. 40. Alain Locke to Horace Kallen, February 12, 1946, ALP, box 42, folder 15. 41. Locke to Kallen, February 12, 1946. 42. Alain Locke to Horace Kallen, March 8, 1946, ALP, box 42, folder 15. 43. Max C. Otto to Horace Kallen, February 25, 1946, HMK-­YIVO, reel 55, folder 989; emphasis in original. 44. Otto to Kallen, February 25, 1946. 45. Max C. Otto to Horace Kallen, small CV of Alain Locke with accompanying note, February 25, 1946, HMK-­YIVO, reel 55, folder 989, frame 859. 46. Max C. Otto to Horace Kallen, February 25, 1946, HMK-­YIVO, reel 55, folder 989. 47. Locke to Kallen, March 8, 1946, HMK-­AJA, box 19, folder 21; Kallen to Locke, March 14, 1946, ALP, box 42, folder 15. 48. Horace Kallen to Rachel Kallen, July 16, 1946, MHK-­AJA, box 91, folder 7. 49. Horace Kallen to Rachel Kallen, July 1, 1947, HMK-­AJA, box 91, folder 7. 50. Alain Locke to Horace Kallen, August 11, 1947, HMK-­YIVO, reel 54, folder 969, frame 814; Horace Kallen to Alain Locke, August 14, 1947, ALP, box 42, folder 15. 51. Horace Kallen to Alain Locke, December 2, 1946, ALP, box 42, folder 15. 52. Alain Locke to Horace Fries, November 14, 1947, ALP, box 30, folder 40. 53. Alain Locke, “Pluralism and Ideological Peace,” in Freedom and Experience: Essays Presented to Horace M. Kallen, ed. Sidney Hook and Milton R. Konvitz (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1947; repr., New York: Cooper Square, 1974), 63, 68–69. 54. Locke, “Pluralism and Ideological Peace,” 69; Alain Locke to Horace Kallen, [prob­ably March] 1948, HMK-­YIVO, reel 54, folder 969, frame 828. 55. Alain Locke to Horace Kallen, June 6, 1948, ALP, box 42, folder 15. 56. David Kallen to Alain Locke, November 2, 1948; and Alain Locke to David Kallen, November 11, 1948, ALP, box 42, folder 14. 57. See Watermargin’s website, watermargin​.o ­ rg. 58. Alain Locke to Ralph Bunche, undated letter, 1947, box 111, folder 10, “L,” Ralph J. Bunche Papers, Charles E. Young Research Library Special Collections, University of California, Los Angeles. 59. Alain Locke to Ralph Bunche, October 1, 1947, box 111, folder 10, “L,” Bunche Papers. 60. Locke to Bunche, October 1, 1947. 61. Horace Kallen to Alfred Morrow, March 1949, HMK-­YIVO, reel 55, folder 974, frame 59. 62. Jacob Billikopf to Alain Locke, October 22, 1948, ALP, box 14, folder 1.

NOTES TO PA GES 187– 195

237

63. Alain Locke to Jacob Billikopf, October 28, 1948, Billikopf Papers, AJA, box 17, folder 8. 64. Locke to Billikopf, October 28, 1948. 65. “A Distinguished Negro Educator in Amer­i­ca,” memo to Jacob Billikopf, October 25, 1948, Billikopf Papers, AJA, box 17, folder 8. 66. Alain Locke, “Dawn Patrol: A Review of the Lit­er­a­ture of the Negro for 1948,” Phylon 10, no. 1 (1st qtr., 1949): 7–8. 67. James Baldwin to Alain Locke, February 4, 1949, ALP, box 12, folder 17. 68. Locke, “Dawn Patrol,” 8. 69. Alain Locke, “Self-­Criticism: The Third Dimension in Culture,” Phylon 11, no. 4 (1950): 392. 70. Locke, “Self-­Criticism,” 393–94. 71. Horace Kallen to Alain Locke, February 21, 1951, ALP, box 42, folder 15. 72. Kallen to Locke, February 21, 1951. 73. Horace Kallen to Alain Locke, September 17, 1951, HMK-­YIVO, reel 54, folder 969, frame 826. 74. Horace Kallen to Alain Locke, June 13, 1952, ALP, box 42, folder 15. 75. Alain Locke to Horace Kallen, June 24, 1952, HMK-­AJA, box 19, folder 2. 76. Horace Kallen to Alain Locke, June 30, 1952, ALP, box 42, folder 15. 77. “Research School to Open,” New York Times, September 30, 1919, 20. 78. Alain LeRoy Locke, “Moral Training in Elementary Schools,” Teacher 8 (April 1904): 93–101. 79. On Locke and adult education, see Eugene C. Holmes, “Alain L. Locke and the Adult Education Movement,” Journal of Negro Education 34, no. 1 (Winter 1965): 5–10; and Rudolph Alexander Kofi Cain, Alain Leroy Locke: Race, Culture, and the Education of African American Adults, Value Inquiry (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003). 80. Alain LeRoy Locke, “Frontiers of Culture,” Crescent 33 (Spring 1950), reprinted in The Philosophy of Alain Locke: Harlem Re­nais­sance and Beyond, ed. Leonard Harris (Philadelphia: T ­ emple University Press, 1989), 231. 81. Alain Locke to Benjamin Karpman, July 31, 1952, ALP, box 42, folder 19. 82. Alain Locke to Walter [prob­ably Walter White], undated [July 1952], ALP. 83. Alain Locke to Joseph Wolffe, September 30, 1952, ALP, box 94, folder 33. 84. Alain Locke to Joseph Wolffe, August 20, 1953, ALP, box 94, folder 33. 85. Joseph Wolffe to Alain Locke, August 26, 1953, ALP, box 94, folder 33. 8. Locke’s Legacy, Kallen’s Memory

1. Joseph St. Clair Price to Horace Kallen, October 4, 1954, and Eugene C. Holmes to Horace Kallen, October 9, 1954, Horace Meyer Kallen Papers, American Jewish Archives (hereafter HMK-­AJA), box 13, folder 9. 2. Horace Kallen to (Winston) Kermit McAllister, February 15, 1956, HMK-­AJA, box 20, folder 1. 3. “Editors’ note” introducing Horace Meyer Kallen, “Pluralism and Culture,” in The New Negro Thirty Years Afterward, ed. Rayford W. Logan, Eugene C. Holmes, and G. Franklin Edwards (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1955), 41.

23 8 NOTES

TO PAGES 195– 201

4. Horace Kallen to Milton Konvitz, April  1, 1955, HMK-­AJA, box 16, folder 13. Thanks to Esther Schor for sending me this source. The misspelling of Locke’s first name was likely the result of the letter having been dictated. In the same letter, his wife Rachel’s name is misspelled as “Rachael.” Walter White passed away March 21, 1955. 5. Horace Kallen to Martin P. Chworowsky, November 3, 1955, HMK-­AJA, box 6, folder 3. 6. Horace Meyer Kallen, “Alain Locke and Cultural Pluralism,” talk given October 29, 1955, at New York University, Journal of Philosophy 54, no. 5 (February 28, 1957): 119–21. 7. Kallen, 122, quoting Alain Locke, “Psychograph,” preface to “Values and Imperatives” in American Philosophy T ­ oday and Tomorrow, ed. Horace Kallen and Sidney Hook (New York: Lee Furman, 1935). 8. Kallen, “Alain Locke and Cultural Pluralism,” 122. 9. Kallen, “Alain Locke and Cultural Pluralism,” 122–23. 10. Kallen, “Alain Locke and Cultural Pluralism,” 124. 11. Kallen, “Alain Locke and Cultural Pluralism,” 125. 12. Kallen, “Alain Locke and Cultural Pluralism,” 125. 13. Kallen, “Alain Locke and Cultural Pluralism,” 126–27. 14. Eugene C. Holmes to Horace Kallen, March 28, 1956, and Horace Kallen to Eugene C. Holmes, April 6, 1956, HMK-­AJA, box 13, folder 7. 15. Horace Kallen, “American Jews, What Now?,” Jewish Social Ser­vices Quarterly 32, no. 1 (Fall 1955): 13. 16. Horace Meyer Kallen, “The Promise of the Menorah Idea,” in “Henry Hurwitz Memorial Issue,” special issue, Menorah Journal 49, nos. 1 and 2 (Autumn–­Winter 1962): 9–11. 17. Horace Kallen to Arthur Huff Fauset, December 22, 1955, HMK-­AJA, box 4, folder 9. 18. Kallen to Fauset, December 22, 1955. 19. Horace Kallen, Cultural Pluralism and the American Idea: An Essay in Social Philosophy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1956), 80 20. Kallen, Cultural Pluralism, 80. 21. Horace Kallen, “Reprise,” in Kallen, Cultural Pluralism, 186–87; emphasis in original. 22. Horace Kallen, fragment of letter on behalf of Eugene Holmes to write Locke biography, November 19, 1959, HMK-­AJA, box 19, folder 2. 23. Horace M. Kallen, “How I Bet My Life,” Saturday Review, October 1, 1966, reprinted as “What I Have Learned, Betting My Life,” in Horace M. Kallen, What I Believe and Why—­Maybe (New York: Horizon Press, 1971), 173. 24. Kallen, “How I Bet My Life,” 173. 25. Kallen, “How I Bet My Life,” 173. 26. Eugene C. Holmes to Saturday Review, September 30, 1966, HMK-­AJA, box 13, folder 9. Holmes wrote, “What Locke thought about his lifelong friend, Kallen, is in my book.” That book was never published. 27. See Leonard Harris, ed., Philosophy Born of Strug­gle: Afro-­American Philosophy from 1917 (Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt, 1983).

NOTES TO PA GES 201– 206

239

28. Eugene Holmes to Horace Kallen, November 4, 1966, HMK-­AJA, box 13, folder 9. On Holmes, see Alan M. Wald, Exiles from a ­Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-­Twentieth-­ Century Literary Left (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 85–86. 29. Horace Kallen, “Negro-­Jewish Relations in Amer­i­ca,” Midstream 12, no. 10 (December 1966): 54–57; emphasis in original. 30. Horace Kallen, “Color-­Blind,” Emory University Quarterly 22, no. 2 (Summer 1966), reprinted in What I Believe and Why—­Maybe: Essays for the Modern World by Horace M. Kallen, ed. Alfred J. Marrow (New York: Horizon, 1971), 41–42. 31. Kallen, “Color-­Blind,” 48, 52–53; emphasis in original. 32. Horace Kallen, “Black Power and Education,” in What I Believe, 108. 33. Bernard Weinraub, “In Vietnam, G.I.’s Express Grief, with a Touch of Bitterness,” New York Times, June 7, 1968, 28, in Horace Kallen diary, HMK-­AJA, box 90. 34. Advertisement for event at the Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. Source emailed to the author. 35. Regina M. Andrews to Horace Kallen, April 9, 1969, HMK-­AJA, box 21, folder 16. 36. Sarah Schmidt, Horace M. Kallen: Prophet of American Zionism (Brooklyn, NY: Carlson, 1995), 27–28. 37. Horace Kallen, “Cultural Pluralism and the Critical Issues in Jewish Education,” Current Jewish Affairs Pamphlet, no. 4 (1964): 28–29. 38. Horace Kallen to ­children, September 20, 1952, HMK-­AJA, box 34, folder 2. 39. Horace Kallen to David Haines, December 16, 1959, HMK-­AJA, box 34, folder 2. 40. Horace Kallen to Van Meter Ames, August 2, 1970, HMK-­AJA, box 1, folder 18. 41. Eugene C. Holmes to “Sirs,” May 11, 1971, HMK-­AJA, box 33, folder 7. 42. Hera Morgan curriculum vita, HMK-­AJA, box 22, folders 17–19. 43. Hera Morgan to Horace Kallen, April 15, 1956, HMK-­AJA, box 22, folder 17. 44. Horace Kallen to Hera Morgan, February 16, 1956, HMK-­AJA, box 22, folder 17. 45. Horace Kallen to Hera Morgan, March 23, 1956, HMK-­AJA, box 22, folder 17. 46. Horace Kallen to Hera Morgan, April 20, 1956, HMK-­AJA, box 22, folder 17. 47. Horace Kallen to Hera Morgan, November 9, 1956, HMK-­AJA, box 22, folder 17. 48. Hera Morgan to Horace Kallen, April 1, 1958, and Horace Kallen to Hera Morgan, April 3, 1958, HMK-­AJA, box 22, folder 18. 49. Hera Morgan to Horace Kallen, October 1, 1972, HMK-­AJA, box 22, folder 19. 50. Horace Kallen to Milton Konvitz, October 26, 1973, Milton Konvitz Papers, Cornell University, box 20, folder 7. Thanks to Michael Steiner for sending me this source. 51. Kallen to Konvitz, October 26, 1973. 52. Kallen to Konvitz, October 26, 1973.

Index

Abdu’l-­Bahá (Baha’i leader), 151, 156, 157–58 academic freedom, 148–49, 152–53 Addams, Jane, 13, 22 Adler, Felix, 25, 42, 47, 54, 90, 118, 157, 191 Adler, Mortimer, 180 Adult Education Association of Amer­ic­ a, 191 aesthetics: as anchor of modern cultures, 4; cultural discrimination and, 135; Jewish, 15, 36; Locke’s emphasis on, 138 African American En­glish, 75 African Americans: assimilation of, 6, 45, 91–92; Black Power movement, 202; cultural pluralism and, 8, 91, 102, 120, 122, 131, 141, 143, 146, 171, 174, 176, 188–89, 196, 199–200, 202, 205; Harlem Re­nais­sance and, 103, 138–39, 141–45, 182, 207; at Harvard, 21, 48–51. See also race and racism Alain Locke Memorial Committee, 194–95 Ali-­Muhammad, Siyyid, 155 Allen, Margaret Loring Andrews, 123 Allen, William Francis, 123 Alliance Israelite Universelle, 103 Amalgamated Clothing Workers of Amer­i­ca, 135 American Association for Jewish Education, 205 American Club of Oxford, 2, 92–93, 96–98, 196, 224n2 American Hebrew (journal), 115, 116 American Jewish Congress, 130 American Philosophical Association, 172 Ames, Van Meter, 204 Anderson, Paul Allen, 8 Andrews, Regina M., 203 Antin, Mary, 26, 28, 30, 114, 127 anti-­Semitism: among educated African Americans, 54–55; among elite whites, 54; Black-­Jewish relations and, 11; in Eu­rope, 152; at Harvard, 61–62; Kallen’s

experiences with, 6, 36, 115; of Locke, 2, 9, 61–62, 178–79, 186; at Prince­ton, 32; ste­reo­types, 54–55, 63 Arab-­Jewish relations, 131–32 Arendt, Hannah, 180 Arnold, Matthew: Culture and Anarchy, 116 assimilation: of African Americans, 6, 45, 91–92; cultural nationalism and, 6; Dewey on, 128–29; of immigrants, 13, 113–14; of Jews in Amer­i­ca, 5, 36, 38, 70, 77, 89–90, 126, 127, 140, 148–49; of Jews in Eu­rope, 103; Kallen on, 13–14, 36, 38, 89–92, 129, 198, 200; Locke on, 45, 122, 133, 162; Reform Judaism and, 148–49; Zionism and, 36–37. See also melting pot concept atheism, 31–32, 147, 149–53, 157, 198 Baha’i faith, 7, 40, 118, 136–37, 147, 149, 151, 154–67 Bahá‘u’lláh (Baha’i leader), 155–56, 161 Baldwin, James, 187–88 Barlow, Jerome, 59 Barnes, Albert, 153 Beadly, James A., 19 Beard, Charles, 190 Beckhardt, Bruno, 54, 60, 62–63, 77, 78 Belford, Robert C., 55 Berenson, Bernard, 26–27 Bergson, Henri, 116, 170 Berkson, Isaac, 16 Bernadotte, Folke, 187 Billikopf, Jacob, 16, 135–36, 172, 175, 179–80, 187 biological racialism, 28, 35, 90, 197–98 Black Power movement, 202 Block, Alvin Ess, 71 Bloomfield, Meyer, 22, 52–53, 63, 77 Boas, Franz, 15, 132–33, 155 Bourne, Randolph, 13, 16, 71, 229n53 Bowser, Aubrey Howard, 49–50, 51–52, 56, 58, 59, 86 241

24 2 I n d e x

Braddock, Harold, 80 Braithwaite, William Stanley, 138, 164, 198 Bramen, Carrie Tirado, 224n2 Brandeis, Louis, 115 Briggs, Le Baron Russell, 32 Brooks, Van Wyck, 48, 57 Brown, Joseph, 50 Brown, Sterling, 167, 190 Browning, Robert, 45, 74 Bruce, Blanche K., 64 Bruce, Roscoe Conkling, 48, 64–65, 80 Buddhism, 185 Bunche, Ralph, 132, 164, 173, 186, 187 Butcher, Margaret Just: The Negro in American Culture, 5–6 Calverton, V. F., 140 Campbell, Russell, 202 Cardozo, Margaret, 201 Carmichael, Stokely, 202 Carver, Thomas Nixon, 27, 36 Catholicism, 22, 148, 152–53, 157 Caution, Sarah Estelle, 58, 60 Central High School (Philadelphia), 42 Chamberlain, Daniel Henry, 124 Charles Close School (Philadelphia), 42 Chauncey, George, 139, 230n80 Chesnutt, Charles W., 56 Chesnutt, Edwin J., 56 Chworowsky, Martin, 195 Civic Ser­vice House, 21–24, 52–53 Climer, W. B. S., 27 Cohen, Elliott, 187 Cohen, Morris, 61, 77, 153, 182 Coit, Stanton, 90 Columbia University, 175, 180 Committee of Fifteen, 25 communitarianism, 79, 119 Conference of Consumers (1940), 177 Conservative Judaism, 180 Cornell University, 185 cosmopolitanism: cultural pluralism and, 154, 174, 188; of Kallen, 25–26, 166, 204; of Locke, 103, 109–11, 154, 166, 188, 208 Cousins, Norman, 179 Cullen, Countee, 138–39 cultural erasure, 10, 162 cultural nationalism: cultural pluralism emerging from, 102; Harlem Re­nais­sance and, 75, 103; Kallen and, 117; Locke and, 75, 78, 103, 111, 132, 142–43; Zionism and, 5–6

cultural pluralism: development and refinement of, 2, 170–93, 195–96, 203; differences as cornerstone of, 5, 16, 24, 155, 158, 162, 198, 208; ideas of, 8, 113, 118, 148; lived experience of, 2, 5, 8–10, 14, 72, 105, 166; origins of, 7, 75, 105, 206 cultural preservation, 31, 127 cultural Zionism, 6, 36–37, 102–3, 111, 137, 142–43, 186 Darwinism, 33, 116–18 David, Arthur, 190 Davis, Allan, 71 Davis, Philip, 21–22, 27 De Haas, Jacob, 149 De Staël, Madame, 110 Dewey, John, 16, 47, 71, 128–30, 153, 180, 190–91, 229n53 Dicey, Albert and Edward, 94–95, 97, 98, 104 Dickerman, Charles Henry, 48, 52, 53, 54, 57, 60, 62, 77–78, 81–82 differences: as cornerstone of cultural pluralism, 5, 16, 24, 155, 158, 162, 198, 207–9; in Kallen-­Locke friendship, 1–2, 5, 10, 14. See also cultural pluralism Diner, Hasia, 10 discrimination. See anti-­Semitism; race and racism; segregation Dollinger, Marc, 11 Dorsey, Emmett E., 165 double-­consciousness, 84, 188 Douglass, Charles, 56 Douglass, Haley George, 56 Downes, Carl Sawyer, 82, 92, 95, 98–99, 101, 106–7, 114 Draschler, Julius, 16 Dreyfus Affair (1894–1906), 36, 65 Dubnow, Simon: Letters on Old and New Judaism, 38 Du Bois, W. E. B.: anti-­Semitism ste­reo­types in works of, 55; on cultural elitism, 121; on diversity, 13; on double-­consciousness, 84, 188; Harlem Re­nais­sance and, 138; at Howard University conference (1935), 173; Kallen on, 205; on “kingdom of culture,” 14; on Locke, 3, 164; Palmer on, 80; The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study, 42; radicalism and, 136; Royce’s influence on, 79; The Souls of Black Folk, 55, 59, 119, 143, 160; Spingarn’s friendship with, 11; at Universal Races Congress (1911), 118, 157; “Worlds of Color: The Negro Mind Reaches Out,” 142

I n d e x Dumas, Alexandre, 74 Dunbar, Paul Laurence, 66, 73–76, 84, 119 Dyer, Louis, 90–91, 93–94, 96–98, 103–4 Effendi, Shoghi, 158–59, 167 Eisenstein, Ira, 174, 180 Eliot, Charles William, 21, 30, 57–58, 61, 71, 124 Eliot, Samuel Ely, 90, 106 Eliot, T. S., 167 Eliot Grammar School (Boston), 19 elitism: cultural pluralism and, 5, 17, 88–89, 191, 208–9; of Du Bois, 121; friendship and, 9; Harlem Re­nais­sance and, 138–39, 142–44, 178; Kallen-­Locke friendship and, 2, 8, 33; of Locke, 58, 60, 65, 138, 178, 191; Zionism and, 24, 34 Elliott, John Lovejoy, 177 Enlightenment, 110 Epstein, Abraham, 135–36 equality, 79, 109, 135, 140, 183, 201–2 Ethical Culture movement, 25, 42, 47, 52, 62–63, 70, 90, 147, 157 ethnocentrism, 180 eugenics, 90, 124 Eu­rope: anti-­Semitism in, 36, 152; assimilation of Jews in, 103; cultural pluralism in, 91, 127–28, 134–35, 145; internationalism and, 87; minority rights in, 134–35, 173; nationalism in, 4; races of, 27, 35, 114; Zionism and, 38, 126 Eve­ning Post on Locke as Rhodes Scholar, 82–83 Farmer, Sarah, 149 Fauset, Arthur Huff, 138, 167, 198 Fauset, Jessie, 138 Federation of American Zionists, 25, 130 Finkelstein, Louis, 180–81 Fish, Carl Russell, 123 Fishberg, Maurice, 35 Fisk University, 144 Fledt, Gustaf R. West, 83 Fleischer, Charles, 63 Ford, Henry, 140 Foster, Walter, 56 Francis, Hugh Richard, 60, 80–81 Franklin, John Hope, 167, 194 Frazier, E. Franklin, 40, 132, 138, 167, 173 friendship: cultural pluralism and, 2, 5, 8–10, 14, 72, 105, 166; elitism and, 9; Locke on, 14; meta­phors of, 2, 168 Fries, Horace, 181, 184

243

Garrison, William Lloyd, 86 Garvey, Marcus, 139–40, 141 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 138–39 Gessner, Robert, 179 Gilman, Elisabeth Coit, 175 Ginsburg, Asher. See Ha’am, Ahad Godbeer, Richard, 101 Goldstein, Eric, 35 Gorky, Maxim, 65 Greenacre (Maine), 149–50 Greene, Daniel, 8, 70 Gregory, Louis, 156 Gregory, Thomas Montgomery, 72 Ha’am, Ahad (pseudonym of Asher Ginsburg), 36–38, 102–3, 111, 137, 141, 143 Haines, David, 204 Hale, Edward Everett, 28–29, 30 Hapgood, Norman, 16 Haring, Clarence Henry, 53 Harlem Consumer Cooperative Council, 177 Harlem Re­nais­sance, 3, 103, 138–39, 141–45, 182, 207 Harley, James Arthur, 52, 55, 59–61, 76–77, 91–92, 104, 106 Harmon, John H., 176–77 Harper, George McLean, 95 Harris, Abram, 132 Harris, Abram, Jr., 140 Harris, George Wesley, 86 Harvard Ethical Society, 52, 61, 157 Harvard Menorah Society, 15, 19, 38–39, 70–71, 102, 115 Harvard University: African American students at, 21; Jewish students at, 21–22, 38–39, 70–71; Kallen at, 20–29, 33; in Kallen’s “University Ideals,” 68; Locke at, 47–66 Harvard Zionist Society, 71 Hastings Hall (Harvard), 21 Hawkins, Sarah Shorter, 41 Hayes, Rutherford B., 124 Hebraism: assimilation and, 5–6; Kallen’s commitment to advancing, 6, 8, 14–15, 38–39, 70, 130, 198; pluralistic framework for, 34, 115–18, 125–26; Zionism as manifestation of, 14–15, 18, 102, 111, 130, 198 Hebrew Union College, 148–49 Hellenism, 116, 125 Heredia, Jose Mairee de, 74 Herring, Donald Grant, 94 Herskovitz, Melville, 138, 179, 180, 189

24 4 I n d e x

Herzl, Theodor, 6, 102 Heschel, Abraham Joshua, 11 Hillman, Sidney, 135 Hinduism, 150 Hinton, William Augustus, 50 Hirsh, Gilbert Julius, 77 Hocking, William Ernest, 174 Hollinger, David, 12, 13 Holloway, Jonathan, 140 Holmes, Eugene C., 165, 178–79, 194–95, 197, 200–204 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 153 Holt, Edwin Bissel, 174 Holt, Henry, 109 homo­sexuality, 14, 40, 138–39, 164 Hook, Sidney, 153, 175, 184, 195 Howard, Oliver O., 41 Howard University, 3, 41, 118, 122, 132, 173, 194 Hughes, Langston, 3, 138–39, 154, 190 humanism, 40, 43, 154 Humboldt University (Berlin), 118 Hunton, George, 177 Hurlbut, Byron Satterlee, 77 Hurley, Daniel Joseph, 49 Hurston, Zora Neale, 3, 138, 154 Hurwitz, Henry, 70, 71, 77 Husayn-­Ali, Mirza, 155 Hutchinson, George, 79 Ibn Ezra, Abraham, 45–46, 125 idealism, 3, 9–10, 23, 78–79, 136, 163 identity: assimilation and, 36; cultural pluralism and, 13–15, 200–201, 204; double-­consciousness and, 84, 188; hybrid, 4, 130, 142, 204; Jewish, 6, 25–26, 58, 77–78, 142, 208; Locke on pride in identity, 44–45, 111–12; loyalty to culture and, 4; particularism and, 4; pluralism and, 185 immigrants and immigration: assimilation and, 13, 45, 113–14, 128–29, 134; inter­ marriage and, 134; Jewish, 21, 23–24, 32, 77, 89–90, 99, 107, 111, 164; melting pot concept and, 2–5, 13, 16, 53, 106, 113–14, 125–30, 208 Institute for Colored Youth, 41 intellectualism, 24 Intercollegiate Menorah Association, 15, 38–39, 70, 115, 130, 149 intermarriage, 35, 126–27, 133–34, 153–54, 203 International League for Academic Freedom, 152

James, Henry: The American Scene, 111–12 James, William: Berenson on, 26–27; on Gorky, 65; Kallen influenced by, 3, 12, 29, 105, 115–16, 170; Locke influenced by, 12, 158, 161; Miller and, 57; at Oxford, 107–8; pluralism of, 185; A Pluralistic Universe, 107, 128; pragmatism of, 34; on religious experience, 148–49, 158; Va­ri­e­ties of Religious Experience, 148 Jastrow, Joseph, 122–23 Jastrow, Morris, Jr., 125 Jefferson, Thomas, 153 Jewish Theological Seminary, 180 Jews and Judaism: Arab-­Jewish relations, 131–32; cultural pluralism and, 13, 25, 28, 33–34, 103, 115–16, 146, 189; identity and, 6, 25–26, 58, 77–78, 142, 208; immigration and, 21, 23–24, 32, 77, 89–90, 99, 107, 111, 164. See also anti-­Semitism; Zionism; specific branch of Judaism Jim Crow laws, 113, 130. See also segregation Johnson, Charles S., 167 Johnson, James Weldon, 134, 138 Johnson, Mordecai, 163, 173, 174, 175, 183 Jones, Howard Mumford, 125 Julian W. Mack School and Workshops ( Jerusalem), 189 Kallen, David (son), 185, 203–4 Kallen, Harriet (­daughter), 203–4 Kallen, Horace Meyer: biographical background, 18–39; childhood and early education of, 19–20; cultural pluralism development and refinement, 18, 24, 33, 176–93; friendship experiences of, 14, 18–19; friendship with Locke rekindled, 173–75; at Harvard, 20–29, 33, 72; humor of, 99; legacy of, 207–10; linguistic proficiency of, 19; Locke’s first encounter with, 33; at memorial conference for Locke, 9, 165–67, 195–96; at Oxford, 87–112; racial prejudice of, 2, 92, 97, 177–78; religion and, 7, 147–54, 167–69; Royce’s influence on, 79; sexuality of, 99–101; social class affecting Harvard experiences of, 21; social life at Harvard, 72 Kallen, Horace Meyer, works of: American Philosophy T ­ oday and Tomorrow, 40, 154, 175, 195; “Black Power and Education,” 202; The Book of Job as Greek Tragedy, 125, 184; “Color-­Blind,” 201–2; “The Comic Spirit in the Freedom of Man,” 190; “Concerning the Teaching of En­glish

I n d e x Composition,” 30; “A Convert in Zion,” 25–26; Cultural Pluralism and the American Idea, 199; “Cultural Pluralism and the Critical Issues in Jewish Education,” 203; Culture and Democracy in the United States, 2, 16, 33, 120, 130, 174; “Democracy versus the Melting Pot,” 13, 16, 114, 126, 130; “The Ethics of Zionism,” 28, 33–34, 70, 76, 117, 120; “The False Hope,” 31; Frontiers of Hope, 132; “Hebraism and Current Tendencies in Philosophy,” 116; “How I Bet My Life,” 200; “In Darkest Boston,” 24–25, 28–29; “Judaism, Hebraism, Zionism,” 18, 126; “Judaism and the Modern Point of View,” 118; The League of Nations ­Today and Tomorrow, 87; “Most Beloved ­Brother, Peace, Love and Joy ever Abide with Thee. Om! Om!,” 150; “One of the Unfit,” 31–32; “On the Import of ‘Universal Judaism,’ “ 116–17; “Pluralism and Culture,” 165–66, 195; Secularism Is the ­Will of God, 153; “Sweet Ha­ri,” 150; “­Temple and Minyan,” 31; “University Ideals,” 67–68, 72; Utopians at Bay, 167; Why Religion?, 149, 151; “The Word Miraculous,” 25; Zionism and World Politics, 131 Kallen, Jacob (­father), 19, 20 Kallen, Rachel Oatman Van Arsdale (wife), 149, 153–54, 203, 205, 238n4 Kaplan, Mordecai, 174, 180 Karpman, Benjamin, 164–65, 192 Kay, Jean, 153 Keats, John, 43 Keppel, F. P., 191 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 11 Klineberg, Otto, 173–74 Knopf, Alfred A., 178 Konvitz, Milton, 181, 184, 195, 206 Krauskopf, Joseph, 63, 220n107 Krikorian, Y. H., 164 Kronberg, Louis, 99 Kunitz, Joshua, 174 Lamont, Hammond, 67 language: African American En­glish, 75; Yiddish, 19, 22, 34, 53, 71, 102–3 Lee, Ulysses, 190 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 165 Leroy-­Beaulieu, Anatole, 35, 37 Leuba, James, 95 Lewin, Shmaryahu, 71 Lewis, David Levering, 11, 37 Lewis, Theo­philus, 138

245

Lips, Eva, 175 Lips, Julius, 175–76; The Savage Hits Back, 175, 190 Locke, Alain LeRoy: anti-­Semitic prejudice of, 2, 9, 61–62, 178–79, 186; Baha’i faith of, 7, 40, 118, 136–37, 147, 149, 151, 154–67; biographical background, 40–66; childhood and early education of, 40–47; cultural pluralism development and refinement, 176–93; death and funeral of, 164–65, 193; on Dunbar, 73–76, 84, 119; on friendship, 14; friendship with Kallen rekindled, 173–75; at Harvard, 47–66; humor of, 99, 186; Kallen’s first encounter with, 33; as Kallen’s first non-­Jewish friend, 19; legacy of, 207–10; at Oxford, 87–112; prejudice against Black students at Harvard, 55–56, 59–60, 72; religion and, 7, 147, 154–65; Royce’s influence on, 78–79; sexuality of, 14, 101–2, 138–39; social life at Harvard, 54–55, 63, 72 Locke, Alain LeRoy, works of: “The Alhambra; Its Historical Position and Influence,” 43; “The Alien Invasion,” 45; “The American Temperament,” 118; “Apropos of Africa,” 139, 140; “The Contribution of Race to Culture,” 145; “Cosmopolitanism and Culture,” 110; “Friendship,” 14; “Frontiers of Culture,” 191; “The Gospel for the Twentieth ­Century,” 161; “Immigration Laws,” 45; “The Legacy of the Ancestral Arts,” 143–44; “Lessons in World Crisis,” 164; “Moral Imperatives for World Order,” 164; “Moral Training in Elementary Schools,” 46–47, 191; “The Negro and a Race Tradition,” 118; The Negro and His M ­ usic, 178, 191; Negro Art: Past and Pre­sent, 191; The Negro in American Culture, 193; “The Negro in Three Amer­i­cas,” 181; “The Negro Spirituals,” 143, 159–60; “Negro Youth Speaks,” 143; The New Negro, 132, 138, 139–44, 159–60, 199; “Opinion of the Lynching Which Occurred in Tennessee,” 43–44; “The Orientation of Hope,” 163; “Oxford Contrasts,” 69, 109; “Pluralism and Ideological Peace,” 184–85, 199; “The Price of Democracy,” 181; “Pride of Lineage,” 45; “Race Contacts and Interracial Relations,” 114, 132; “A Race Tradition in Education,” 119; “Self-­ Criticism: The Third Dimension in Culture,” 188; “­Shall We Annex More

24 6 I n d e x

Locke, Alain LeRoy, works of (continued) Islands?,” 44; “A Supposed Soliloquy of Shylock a­ fter the Trial Scene in The Merchant of Venice,” 46; “The True Nature of a Church,” 46; “Unity in Diversity: A Baha’i Princi­ple,” 161–62; When ­Peoples Meet: A Study in Race and Culture (with Stern), 163, 174 Locke, Ishmael, 41 Locke, Mary Hawkins, 41, 42 Locke, Pliny (­father), 41 Loewenberg, Jacob, 59, 77 Logan, Rayford W., 14, 165, 166, 179, 194–95 Lowenthal, Marvin, 100, 130, 173 loyalty to culture: Baha’i faith and, 162–63; cultural pluralism and, 78–80, 133, 188; identity and, 4; reciprocity and, 80 Lunt, Alfred E., 167 Lyon, David Gordon, 26 Maccabaean (journal), 25, 33, 115, 126 Magnes, Judah, 13 Marrett, Robert Ranulph, 91–92 Marrow, Alfred, 186 Marshall, Thurgood, 181 Marston, William, 30 Martin, Robert E., 165 Marxism, 23, 134 Mason, Charlotte Osgood, 178 Mason, Madison Charles Butler, Jr., 60 Matthews, William Clarence, 48, 49, 50, 55, 56 Maxwell, Mary, 158 McAllister, Winston Kermit, 194 McGeehan, John E., 153 McKay, Claude, 138 Meier, Zevi (pseudonym of Kallen), 31 melting pot concept, 2–5, 13, 16, 53, 106, 113–14, 125–30, 208 Menorah Journal, 15, 38–39, 71, 115, 130, 198 Merriman, Roger Bigelow, 91, 96 meta­phors: culinary, 191; of ­family and friendship, 2, 168; musical, 3, 111–12, 114, 117, 126–28, 199–200. See also melting pot concept Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), 203 Meyer, Martin A., 151 Miller, Dickinson Sergeant, 29 Miller, Herbert Adolphus, 56–57 Miller, Kelly, 132, 138 Miller, Perry, 180 miscegenation. See intermarriage Mitchell, Max, 22

modernity, 20, 24, 115–16, 118, 125, 131 Molesworth, Charles, 154 Montgomery, Francis Stuart, 63 Moore, George Foot, 26, 80 Morgan, Hera, 204–6 muckraking, 24–25 multiculturalism, 1, 4–5, 7, 208–9 Munsterberg, Hugo, 70 Murphree, Albert, 115 NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored P ­ eople), 134, 175 Nation (journal), 67, 114–15, 126, 128, 132 nationalism, 23, 111, 139, 141, 155, 162, 166 nativism, 2–3, 26, 30, 113–14, 125, 128 Negro Historical Society, 137 Neighborhood Guild (New York), 90 Nelson, William Stuart, 164 New Negro movement. See Harlem Re­nais­sance New School for Social Research (New York), 3, 183, 190 New York Times on New School for Social Research, 190 New York University, 177, 195 Nordau, Max, 31, 102 Nugent, Bruce, 138 Nusbaum, Louis, 63 Ormond, Alexander T., 29 Orthodox Judaism, 15, 116, 127, 130, 133, 148 Otto, Max C., 181, 182–83 Oxford Cosmopolitan Club, 104, 109, 132 Oxford University: American Club of Oxford, 2, 92–93, 96–98, 196, 224n2; James at, 107–8; Kallen and Locke at, 87–112; in Kallen’s “University Ideals,” 68; in Locke’s “Oxford Contrasts,” 69, 109; Rhodes Scholarship and, 82–83; tutorial system at, 68–69, 109 Palmer, George Herbert, 27, 63, 64–65, 70, 80 Park, Robert Ezra, 121–22, 173–74 Parrott, Thomas Marc, 29, 32 particularism: cultural pluralism and, 7, 116; identity and, 4; James on, 116; Kallen on, 116–17; Locke on, 43, 45, 79, 161, 188; Royce on, 79 paternalism, 132, 177 Patterson, John, 115 Paxson, Frederick Logan, 124 Peabody, Francis Greenwood, 24

I n d e x Perry, Christopher, 52 Perry, Ralph Barton, 95, 96, 115 Pfromm, David Adam (“Dap”), 48, 62, 81–82, 84–85, 157 Philadelphia Rec­ord on Locke as Rhodes Scholar, 83 Pianko, Noam, 13, 35 Porter, James A., 167 Posnock, Ross, 14 Powell, Adam Clayton, Jr., 176 pragmatism: Baha’i faith and, 162; cultural pluralism and, 2, 12, 185, 190, 196; of James, 12, 29, 97, 116; of Kallen, 18, 29, 33–34, 97, 115–17, 130, 148, 196, 205; of Locke, 40, 43–44, 47, 75, 78, 119–20, 137–38, 154, 161–62, 185; Zionism and, 18, 115, 130 Prince­ton University, 29–32, 148 progressivism, 6, 9, 23, 72, 102, 115, 130–31 provincialism, 26 Puritanism, 160 Pushkin, Alexander, 74 race and racism: assimilation and, 6; cultural definition of race, 75, 133; culture and, 35, 132, 155, 163, 174; at Harvard, 49, 51–52; of Kallen, 2, 92, 97, 177–78; Locke’s experiences with, 6, 95–96, 146; loyalty to, 119–20; at Oxford, 95–97 race pride, 133, 143, 191 racialism. See biological racialism racial uplift, 72, 118, 121–22, 132 radicalism, 134–36 Raider, Mark, 13 Ramanathan, Ponnambalam, 150 Ransom, Leon, 163 reciprocity: Baha’i faith and, 162–63; cultural pluralism and, 145, 185, 201; Kallen on, 126, 131; Locke on, 3, 132, 162–63; loyalty to culture and, 80; spiritual, 79, 162 Reform Judaism, 63, 70, 116, 133–34, 148–49 religion: Kallen and, 7, 147–54, 167–69; Locke and, 7, 147, 154–65; pluralism in, 7, 153, 168–69; super­natural experience of, 150–51. See also specific faiths and denominations Renan, Ernest: “What Is a Nation?,” 111 Reynolds, George M., 177 Rhodes Scholars, 3, 82–84 Ripley, William Zebina, 27–28, 35; The Races of Eu­rope: A So­cio­log­i­cal Study, 27 Rischin, Moses, 5

247

Robinson, James Harvey, 190 Roo­se­velt, Eleanor, 184 Roo­se­velt, Franklin Delano, 21, 179 Roo­se­velt, Theodore, Jr., 59 Ropes, James Hardy, 26 Rose, Herbert J., 88 Rosenblum, David, 54, 58–59 Rosenwald, Julius, 11, 171–72 Ross, E. A., 128; The Old World in the New, 126 Royce, Josiah, 43, 47, 78–79, 105, 133, 162; “Race Questions,” 78 Russell, Bertrand, 105, 152–53; Marriage and Morals, 153 Rustin, Bayard, 180 Sacco, Nicola, 152 Santayana, George, 1, 27, 29, 43, 67, 70 Saunders, Mathilda, 41 Schiff, Jacob, 25 Schiller, F. C. S., 97 Schmidt, Sarah, 203, 224n2 Schofield, William Henry, 95 Scholes, Theo­philus, 104–5; The British Empire and Alliances, 105; Glimpses of the Ages, or, The “Superior” and “Inferior” Races, So-­Called, Discussed in the Light of Science and History, 105 Schomburg, Arturo, 120–21, 138, 158; “Racial Integrity,” 121 School of Pedagogy (Philadelphia), 43, 191 Schor, Esther, 238n4 Schuyler, George, 138 Scott, Emmett Jay, 121–22 sectarianism, 36, 162–64, 180 secularism: cultural pluralism and, 4, 168, 208–9; Jewish culture and, 6, 8, 115; of Kallen, 115–16, 153–54; of Locke, 154–55, 157–58, 163–64 Segal, Moshe Zvi (“Hirsch”), 89–90, 102 segregation: cultural pluralism and, 4, 135; Dewey on, 129; Jim Crow laws, 113, 130; Kallen and, 129–30; Locke’s experiences of, 49–50, 191 self-­criticism, 15, 188 self-­knowledge, 38–39, 197 Seme, Pixley ka Isaka, 104 Shackleford, Thomas M., 115 Sharfman, Isaiah Leo, 77 Shaw, George Bernard, 105 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 32, 43 Shipman, Richard Delafield, 85–86 Simon, Leon, 102–3 Simonson, Lee, 77–78

24 8 I n d e x

Smith, Charles Forster, 124 Smith, T. V., 174 Snowden, Frank, 179 Society Har Moriah (Boston), 19, 20 solidarity: racial and ethnic, 5, 12, 133, 145; social, 35 Sons and ­Daughters of Zion, 20 Spanish-­American War (1898), 44 Spencer, Herbert, 127 Spiller, Gustav, 118 Spingarn, Joel, 11 Spinoza, Baruch, 148; Ethics, 20; Theological-­ Political Treatise, 20 spirituals (­music), 51, 143, 157, 159–61 Star of the West (journal), 159 Steiner, Edward, 127 Stern, Bernhard, 163, 174 Stewart, Jeffrey, 139, 167 Straus, Herbert, 21 Survey Graphic (magazine), 141 Swami, Ram Tirtha, 150 Sylvester, William H., 20 Szold, Henrietta, 123 Tennyson, Alfred, 43 Territorialism, 37, 106 Thomas, James E., 20 Thomas, Norman, 30 Thompson, Chas H., 176 Thompson, Robert Ellis, 46 Tillich, Paul, 180 Tobias, Channing, 164 Toomer, Jean, 138 Toy, Crawford H., 27 Trilling, Lionel, 182 Truman, Bess, 184 Tudor Pole, Wellesley, 157–58 Tuskegee Institute, 121, 189 Twentieth ­Century Club, 22 Twice a Year (magazine), 153 Tyson, Edwin French, 51–52, 59–60, 86 unity in diversity, 79–80, 89, 136, 161–62 universalism: cultural pluralism and, 188; Kallen and, 117; Locke and, 6, 45–46, 47, 159, 161–62, 195; particularism vs., 4, 45–46; religion and, 159, 161–62; Royce and, 79 Universal Races Congress (1911), 118, 157–58 University of Wisconsin, 3, 122–23, 125, 148, 181–82 University Settlement Society (New York), 90

Van Hise, Charles, 123–24 Van Vechten, Carl, 138 Vanzetti, Bartolomeo, 152 Villard, Oswald Garrison, 86, 144 voting rights, 124 Walker, Albert Perry, 20 Walker, Harry J., 165 Washington, Booker T., 54–55, 59, 93, 121–22, 132, 136, 172; Up from Slavery, 199 Watermargin (fraternity), 185 Weinstein, Jacob J., 173 Weizmann, Chaim, 22 Wendell, Barrett, 16, 25–27, 30, 33, 57, 63–66, 92–94 White, Paul Dudley, 81 White, Walter, 138, 177, 189, 238n4 White­house, John Howard, 98 Wilde, Oscar, 109 Wilkerson, Doxey, 163 Willette, Adolph, 100 Williams, Roger, 153 Williams, Rufus P., 20 Williams, Stewart, 108 Willis, William, II, 14 Wilson, Edward Everett, 52 Wilson, Sarah, 33 Wilson, Woodrow, 87 Wolffe, Joseph B., 192–93 Woods, Robert A., 22 Wright, Richard R., 55 Wrightington, Edgar, 49 Wylie, Francis, 136 Yerkes, Robert Mearns, 57 Yiddish, 19, 22, 34, 53, 71, 102–3 YIVO (Yiddish Scientific Institute), 181 Zangwill, Israel, 3, 31, 53, 118, 157; The Melting Pot, 106, 112, 113–14, 126 Zimmern, Alfred, 130–31 Zionism: assimilation and, 36–37; cultural nationalism and, 5–6; cultural pluralism and, 12–13, 126; elitism and, 24, 34; Harvard Menorah Society and, 70–71, 72; Hebraism and, 14–15, 18, 102, 111, 130, 198; of Kallen, 5–6, 20, 23–25, 28, 31–38, 90, 130, 148–49, 186, 198; Locke and, 140–42, 145, 186; pragmatism and, 18, 115, 130; radicalism and, 134; Rosenwald and, 173. See also cultural Zionism Zola, Emile, 43