U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [223]
-102-you hit the words Democracy wil understand even the bankers and the clergymen I you we must
When three men hold together
The kingdoms are less by three
we are happy talking in low voices in the afternoon sunlight about apres la guerre that our fingers our blood our lungs our flesh under the dirty khaki feldgrau bleu horizon might go on sweeten grow until we fal from the tree ripe like the tooripe pears the arriv know and singing éclats sizzling gas shel s theirs is the power and the glory
or give me death
RANDOLPH BOURNE
Randolph Bourne
came as an inhabitant of this earth
without the pleasure of choosing his dwel ing or
his career.
He was a hunchback, grandson of a congregational
minister, born in 1886 in Bloomfield, New Jersey;
there he attended grammarschool and highschool.
At the age of seventeen he went to work as secre-tary to a Morristown businessman. He worked his way through Columbia working in
a pianola record factory in Newark, working as proof-reader, pianotuner, accompanist in a vocal studio in Carnegie Hal .
At Columbia he studied with John Dewey,
got a travel ing fel owship that took him to England Paris Rome Berlin Copenhagen,
-103-wrote a book on the Gary schools.
In Europe he heard music, a great deal of Wag-ner and Scriabine and bought himself a black cape.
This little sparrowlike man,
tiny twisted bit of flesh in a black cape,
always in pain and ailing,
put a pebble in his sling
and hit Goliath square in the forehead with it.
War, he wrote, is the health of the state.
Half musician, half educational theorist (weak
health and being poor and twisted in body and on bad terms with his people hadn't spoiled the world for
Randolph Bourne; he was a happy man, loved die
Meistersinger and playing Bach with his long hands
that stretched so easily over the keys and pretty girls and good food and evenings of talk. When he was
dying of pneumonia a friend brought him an eggnog;
Look at the yel ow, its beautiful, he kept saying as his life ebbed into delirium and fever. He was a happy
man.) Bourne seized with feverish intensity on the
ideas then going around at Columbia, he picked rosy glasses out of the turgid jumble of John Dewey's teach-ing through which he saw clear and sharp the shining capitol of reformed democracy,
Wilson's New Freedom;
but he was too good a mathematician; he had to
work the equations out;
with the result
that in the crazy spring of 1917 he began to get
unpopular where his bread was buttered at the New
Republic;
-104- for New Freedom read Conscription, for Democ- racy, Win the War, for Reform, Safeguard the Morgan Loans
for Progress Civilization Education Service,
Buy a Liberty Bond,
Straff the Hun,
Jail the Objectors.
He resigned from The New Republic; only The Seven Arts had the nerve to publish his articles against the war. The backers of The Seven Arts took their money elsewhere; friends didn't like to be seen with Bourne, his father wrote him begging him not to disgrace the family name. The rainbowtinted future of reformed democracy went pop like a pricked soapbubble. The liberals scurried to Washington;
some of his friends plead with him to climb up on
Schoolmaster Wilson's sharabang; the war was great. fought from the swivel chairs of Mr. Creel's bureau in Washington.
He was cartooned, shadowed by the espionage
service and the counter-espionage service; taking a walk with two girl friends at Wood's Hole he was arrested, a trunk ful of manuscript and letters was stolen from him in Connecticut. (Force to the utmost, thundered Schoolmaster Wilson)
He didn't live to see the big circus of the Peace of Versail es or the purplish normalcy of the Ohio Gang. Six weeks after the armistice he died planning an
essay on the foundations of future radicalism in Amer-ica. If any man has a ghost Bourne has a ghost,