Abstract
At the end of the 1920s, around the same time as he was fighting for popular democracy against administrative progressives like Lippmann, Dewey began to push back against another wing of the progressive movement that I term “personalism.” In some ways, the personalist vision was even more antibureaucratic than Dewey’s. As a result, to some extent Dewey was in a struggle against both more conservative and more radical progressives. As I show in this chapter and the next, however, this way of framing his position obscures the fact that Dewey was much closer to the personalists than he would ever admit. Dewey tended to describe the positions of the personalists as simply atheoretical caricatures of his model of collaborative democracy, but in fact the personalists developed authentic and sophisticated alternative visions of democracy and freedom that drew deeply from Dewey’s own philosophy.
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Notes
Susan F. Semel and Alan R. Sadovnik, “Schools of Tomorrow,” Schools of Today: What Happened to Progressive Education (New York: Peter Lang, 1999);
John Dewey, Schools of To-Morrow, ed. Evelyn Dewey (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1915).
Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 501.
Jan Olof Bengtsson, The Worldview of Personalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006);
Rufus Burrow Jr., Personalism: A Critical Introduction (St. Louis, MO: Chalice Press, 1999).
Bernard Schmidt, “Bronson Alcott’s Developing Personalism and the Argument with Emerson,” American Transcendental Quarterly 8, no. 14 (1994): 311–27.
James J. Farrell, The Spirit of the Sixties: The Making of Postwar Radicalism (New York: Routledge, 1997) gave an overview of the broad uses of personalism in America from Day’s conversion in the 1930s, through the emergence of the Civil Rights Movement and antinuclear pacifism during the 1950s, to the dissipation of the counterculture in the North in the 1970s.
With respect to education, see especially Paul Averich, The Modern School Movement (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2006). Numerous personalists considered themselves anarchists at different times, including Waldo Frank.
Paul Lichterman, The Search for Political Community: American Activists Reinventing Commitment (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 6.
This was Harold Rugg’s solution to the problem of democratic education within a personalist framework. Ronald W. Evans, This Happened in America: Harold Rugg and the Censure of Social Studies (Charlotte, NC: Information Age Pub., 2007).
Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre, Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 25.
Terry P. Pinkard, German Philosophy, 1760–1860: The Legacy of Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 167–68, 169.
Philip F. Gura, American Transcendentalism: A History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007);
Lance Newman, Our Common Dwelling: Henry Thoreau, Transcendentalism, and the Class Politics of Nature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
Bronson Alcott, “Bronson Alcott on Amusements,” Concord Magazine, March 1999, http://www.concordma.com/magazine/mar99/amuse.html;
see Elizabeth Palmer Peabody and Amos Bronson Alcott, Record of Mr. Alcott’s School Exemplifying the Principles and Methods of Moral Culture (Boston: Roberts, 1888).
William E. Leuchtenburg, The Perils of Prosperity, 1914–1932 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 124.
Lynn Dumenil, The Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995), 8.
Paula S. Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 19.
See Robert Cohen, When the Old Left was Young (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
Most of this section is informed by Casey Blake, Beloved Community: The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne, Van Wyk Brooks, Waldo Frank, and Lewis Mumford (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), which is the most comprehensive text about the Young Americans and other associates like Rosenfeld.
See also James Livingston, Accumulating America: Pragmatism, Consumer Capitalism, and Cultural Revolution, 1850–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994).
A number of biographies have also informed my analysis, including Bruce Clayton, Forgotten Prophet: The Life of Randolph Bourne (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press 1984);
Raymond Nelson, Van Wyck Brooks: A Writer’s Life (New York: Dutton, 1981);
Donald L. Miller, Lewis Mumford, A Life (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989);
and although it is quite limited, Michael A. Ogorzaly, Waldo Frank: Prophet of Hispanic Regeneration (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1994).
Key works that defined the cultural, social, and political vision of this group included Randolph Bourne, “Trans-National America,” in History of a Literary Radical and Other Essays, ed. Randolph Bourne (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1920), 266–99.
Van Wyck Brooks, America’s Coming-of-Age (New York: Viking, 1930);
Waldo Frank, Our America (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1919);
and Lewis Mumford, The Golden Day: A Study in American Experience and Culture (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1926).
Also see, Christine Stansell, American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000), for a discussion of the intellectual vibrancy and radical lifestyles of the Greenwich Village context of the time
Also see, Christine Stansell, American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000), for a discussion of the intellectual vibrancy and radical lifestyles of the Greenwich Village context of the time, and Celeste Connor, Democratic Visions: Art and Theory of the Stieglitz Circle, 1924–1934 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), for a discussion of Steiglitz and, to a lesser extent, Rosenfeld.
Thomas Carlyle Dalton, Becoming John Dewey: Dilemmas of a Philosopher and Naturalist (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 112, 114, 118.
John Dewey, “Letter to Max Otto, September 10, 1940,” in The Correspondence of John Dewey (CD-ROM), ed. Larry A. Hickman (Charlottesville, VA: Intelex, 1992).
Lewis Mumford, The Golden Day (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1926).
Lewis Mumford, “The Pragmatic Acquiescence,” in Pragmatism and American Culture, ed. Gail Kennedy (Boston: Heath, 1950), 47. Note that this anthology collects the key texts of this debate as well as other related texts together in an accessible way.
John Dewey, “The Pragmatic Acquiescence,” in Pragmatism and American Culture, ed. Gail Kennedy (Boston: Heath, 1950), 53, 50.
Lewis Mumford, “The Pragmatic Acquiescence: A Reply,” in Pragmatism and American Culture, ed. Gail Kennedy (Boston: Heath, 1950), 54.
Waldo David Frank, The Re-discovery of America: An Introduction to a Philosophy of American Life (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1929).
John Dewey, “Individualism Old and New,” in The Later Works 1925–1953: 1929–1930, vol. 5, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), 74, 72.
Harold Ordway Rugg and Ann Shumaker, The Child-Centered School: An Appraisal of the New Education (Yonkers-on-Hudson, NY: World Book Company, 1928);
Stanwood Cobb, The New Leaven: Progressive Education and Its Effect Upon the Child and Society (New York: John Day, 1928).
Key works on the educational vision of the personalists include Robert Beck, “Progressive Education and American Progressivism: Margaret Naumburg,” Teachers College Record 60, no. 4 (1959): 198–208;
Robert Beck, “Progressive Education and American Progressivism: Caroline Pratt,” Teachers College Record 60, no. 3 (1958): 129–37;
Lawrence A. Cremin, The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876–1957 (New York: Knopf, 1961).
Also see Cobb, The New Leaven, and Agnes De Lima, Our Enemy, The Child (New York: Arno, 1925).
See the recent biography of Pratt by Mary E. Hauser, Learning from Children: The Life and Legacy of Caroline Pratt (New York: Peter Lang, 2006). This work provides a useful overview of Pratt’s life, but lacks much reference to the context of her life in New York.
D. B. Curtis, “Psychoanalysis and Progressive Education: Margaret Naumburg at the Walden School,” Vitae Scholasticae 2, no. 2 (1983): 354.
Naumburg, The Child and the World: Dialogues in Modern Education (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1928), 289–90.
John Dewey, “Progressive Education and the Science of Education,” in The Later Works: 1925–1953: Vol. 3, 1927–1928, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), 262–63, 266.
In 1922, he acknowledged that in “trying to stand for freedom, I have found that I have been considered by many as upholding the doctrine ‘that children should do exactly as they please.’ Therefore I was led to analyze more carefully what I really did believe, and I had to admit that I had set out without knowing what the real meaning of individuality was.” John Dewey, “What I Believe, Revised,” in The Middle Works 1899–1924: Volume 15, 1923–24, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983), 178.
Dewey, John Dewey, “Individuality and Experience,” in Art and Education, ed. John Dewey and Albert C. Barnes (Merion, PA: The Barnes Foundation Press, 1929), 37–38.
John Dewey, “How Much Freedom in the New Schools?” in The Later Works: 1925–1953: Vol. 5, 1929–1930, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), 323.
See David A. Granger, John Dewey, Robert Pirsig, and the Art of Living: Revisioning Aesthetic Education (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006);
Naoko Saito, The Gleam of Light: Moral Perfectionism and Education in Dewey and Emerson (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005).
John Dewey, Experience and Education (New York: Macmillan, 1938), 63.
John Dewey, “Individuality in Education,” in The Middle Works: 1899–1925: Vol. 15, 1923–1924, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983), 176.
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© 2010 Aaron Schutz
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Schutz, A. (2010). The Lost Vision of 1920s Personalists. In: Social Class, Social Action, and Education. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230113572_5
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