Horace M. Kallen in the Heartland: The Midwestern Roots of American Pluralism by Michael C. Steiner (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Horace M. Kallen in the Heartland: The Midwestern Roots of American Pluralism by Michael C. Steiner David Weinfeld Horace M. Kallen in the Heartland: The Midwestern Roots of American Pluralism By Michael C. Steiner (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2020. Pp. ix, 240. Notes, index. $37.50.) Born in Germany, educated at Harvard, and a founding faculty member of the New School for Social Research, Jewish-American pragmatist and Zionist philosopher Horace Meyer Kallen (1882–1974) is credited with coining the term "cultural pluralism," the precursor to modern multiculturalism. Kallen first used the words "cultural pluralism" in print in 1924, but claims to have come up with the phrase while a graduate student at Harvard and Oxford, in conversation with his student and then friend Alain Locke, sometime around 1906–1908. Locke, the first Black Rhodes Scholar, would go on to become a leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance, as well as a philosophy professor at Howard University. Kallen also pointed to his Harvard mentor William James, fellow pragmatist John Dewey, and rabbi and scholar Solomon Schechter as other inspirations for the concept of cultural pluralism. In the excellent monograph Horace M. Kallen in the Heartland: The Midwestern Roots of American Pluralism, Michael C. Steiner points to a different influence. Between 1911 and 1918, Kallen taught at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Those seven years, according to Steiner, proved crucial to Kallen's [End Page 202] development of cultural pluralism. This is most evident in the fact that Kallen published "Democracy versus the Melting Pot," his most significant exposition of cultural pluralism, in the February 18 and 25, 1915, issues of the progressive magazine The Nation. Cultural pluralism is a fairly simple idea. Contra the racist anti-immigrant xenophobia of the era, but also the crudely assimilationist metaphor of the "melting pot," cultural pluralism embraced the contributions that different ethnic groups made to American life if they retained their national characters. It is an idea often associated with New York, the immigrant-heavy city where Kallen lived most of his life after leaving Wisconsin. Yet as Steiner astutely observes, "immigrants from Germany, Scandinavia, and Poland, and their children, constituted over 50% of Wisconsin's population during Kallen's years there" (p. 73). Kallen also spent a significant amount of time in Chicago, forming a close friendship with George Donlin, editor of Dial magazine, to which Kallen made several contributions, as well as with English-born playwright Maurice Browne and his wife, American actor Ellen Van Volkenberg. Their Sunday afternoon salons included such luminaries as poets Vachel Lindsay and Harriet Monroe, anarchist Emma Goldman, and writer Theodore Dreiser. Kallen's encounter with his University of Wisconsin colleague, sociologist Edward Alsworth Ross, proved even more intellectually fruitful. In 1914, Ross published an antisemitic, xenophobic, racist book, The Old World and the New, encouraging severe immigration restriction and complete assimilation for those allowed in. A few months later, Kallen published "Democracy vs the Melting Pot" in response. In the seventh chapter called "varieties of cultural pluralism," Steiner rightly points to other Zionists as writing in Kallenesque terms, but he also identifies Norwegian immigrant writers Waldernar Ager and Ole Edvart Rolvaag as part of a similar intellectual ferment. Some midwestern influence came from unlikely sources. Kallen's friend and occasional intellectual sparring partner, Randolph Bourne, was influenced by time spent doing research on "progressive, multi-ethnic education" in Gary, Indiana (p. 112). Bourne met the socialist writer Max Eastman not in Greenwich Village where they lived, but in Kallen's Madison apartment. It was a fruitful meeting of the minds that led Bourne to proclaim "really the Middle West is the place for me. It was a great misfortune to be born in New Jersey, and to go to arrogant Columbia" (p. 115). Steiner's book thus makes two major contributions. First, it [End Page 203] provides an accessible and original introduction to Kallen, effectively incorporating both the most recent scholarship and, more significantly, previously unexamined primary sources on a crucial and overlooked period of Kallen's life. Second, by placing Kallen in the larger context of the Midwest, we come to appreciate the Midwest—and not only Chicago—as a...