Bourne, Randolph S. (1886–1918)

On occasion, one encounters a person from the past whose ideas resonate strongly in the present. One such person is Randolph S. Bourne, whose ideas about immigration, education, and culture offer much to the field of bilingual education even though he did not address that subject directly.

Bourne was born in 1886, in Bloomfield, New Jersey, at a time when unrest and conflict existed between those deeply rooted in the United States since colonial times and large numbers of new immigrants entering the country through the port of New York.

Bourne's mother's side of the family was aristocratic. His father, son of a pastor, was an unsuccessful businessman, whom his mother ultimately left when Randolph was a child. Randolph, diminutive in size, had a number of physical deformities, including a double curvature of the spine brought about by disease and a facial disfiguration caused by a birth injury. He began to read at the age of 2 and was a precocious student. In 1902, he was admitted to Princeton but left for financial reasons. By 1909, he had saved up enough money to attend Columbia University, where his professors included John Dewey and Charles Beard. He was an editor for the New Republic, and 300 of his pieces were published in this and a number of other journals. Bourne died at the age of 32 from the flu during the influenza epidemic of 1918.

Bourne was an early critic of the “melting pot” theory and the assumption that immigrant speakers of other languages should be forcibly assimilated into an Anglo-Saxon tradition that is unquestioningly labeled [Page 104]“American.” He also pointed out that Anglo-Saxons were the nation's first immigrants and did not arrive expecting to assimilate into the indigenous culture of the people already living on the continent. Bourne viewed the American culture as a federation of cultures and the United States as a “trans-nation”—a weaving back and forth with other lands—rather than a nation. According to Bourne, newcomers were integral in the building of this “trans-nation,” both literally and figuratively. He asked where the English and the country would be were it not for the large German, Scandinavian, and eastern European immigrant labor pool. He also called for a departure from Americanizing America through sentimentalizing its history.

Bourne contrasted the “melting pot” with what he called a “cooperation of cultures.” He maintained that the notion of the former favored the nativist element in the United States at the time and the latter notion favored immigrants. The effect of the melting pot was to obliterate distinctive languages and cultures in favor of a homogenous mass. He spoke against Americanization that imitated European nationalism, which was not working well at the time in Europe. He called for an Americanism that was conscious of cultural difference and without universal like-mindedness or undesirable overdependence on imported political structures from immigrant homelands. He cited the Jewish people in the United States as an example of a group that had linguistic and cultural ties to a homeland, but not necessarily political ones as, in contrast with the Germans and the English, who reproduced obsolete versions of their homeland political systems in the new country.

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