The Decadent Worker

“Before the First World War, the Lyrical Left, a loose coalition of cultural radicals living in New York City, dreamed of changing the world with pens, paint brushes, and new publications. They thought they could liberate society by combining radical politics and modern culture. New expressions in art, drama, literature, and cultural criticism, members of the Lyrical Left felt, could have a revolutionary impact on the world’s social, economic, and political structures. To advance their belief, in a burst of creative excitement they founded experimental magazines, clubs, theaters, art galleries, and schools. These, they hoped, would shake the foundations of the established world.

“The Lyrical Left opposed the politics of reform even more than it opposed the forces of conservatism. Instead of programmatic solutions to real problems, such as those proposed by their progressive antagonists, they offered a transpolitical, redemptive vision of personal freedom and social liberation. Fun, truth, beauty, freedom, peace, feminism, and socialist revolution were their bywords and guideposts.” (p. ix)

“The moment the poet James Oppenheim heard that Randolph Bourne had died, he rushed to the apartment on West Eighth Street in New York City where Bourne lay, a victim of the flu epidemic of the winter of 1989. When he lifted the sheet that covered his friend’s face, he felt that Bourne’s death ’seemed to mean that all had stopped.’ It is not surprising that Oppenheim associated his fellow cultural radical’s untimely death, six weeks after the armistice, with the demise of a ‘new vision of the world.’ For his contemporaries as well as for many intellectuals since 1989, Bourne’s life represented an unfinished search for a new culture that would have enlarged personal freedom at the same time that it supported collective social ideals. Few of Bourne’s admirers did not interpret his passing as signifying the end of their own hopes for a cultural revolution in the United States…

“His short life — he was thirty-two when he died — was dedicated to creating radical transformation…. In particular, Bourne wanted to reform education in order to end the alienation of students from their environment and one another. He wanted to establish a cosmopolitan civilization in the United States in which immigrant communities and cultures could thrive and flourish. And, finally, he vehemently opposed the First World War, which he felt destroyed everything he had believed in.

“Bourne’s vision of a new America, however, represented more than the sum of its parts. His was an integrated ideology that stressed the cultural roots of social change, the necessity for diverse intellectual and ethnic communities, and, above all, the independence and integrity of the individual. These unshakable assumptions formed the bedrock upon which Bourne built his radical beliefs. If he directed his life and thought toward achieving a single goal, it was to liberate simultaneously both self and society from what he considered to be arbitrary and oppressive social systems. He dreamed of growth and expansion, but most of all he longed for a new freedom not only for himself but for the society in which he lived.” (pp. 23-24) — Edward Abrahams, The Lyrical Left (University Press of Virginia, 1986)

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