He found reading Rousseau a revelation. Assessing Rousseau’s arguments about the need for a General Will, Bourne exclaimed: “Yes, that is what I would have felt, done, said! I could not judge him and his work by those standards that the hopelessly moral and complacent English have imposed upon our American mind. It was a sort of moral bath; it cleared up for me a whole new democratic morality, and put the last touch upon the old English way of looking at the world in which I was brought up and which I had such a struggle to get rid of.”
Bourne was also drawn to the French proto-fascist Maurice Barrès, who believed an all-encompassing nationalism should replace bourgeois individuality. In France, “the search for the nationalisme intégral of Barrès, the youth of today, one feels, are seeking the nourishing quality of…the richness of a common culture, which has a right to make traditionalism seem seductive and beautiful.” Writing in The Atlantic in an article titled “Maurice Barrès and the Youth of France,” he found in Barrès “a traditionalism from which all the blind, compressing forces of the social groups have been withdrawn, so that one feels only the nourishing influence of a rich common culture in which our individual souls are steeped.” “This is a gospel to which one could give one’s self with wistfulness and love!” he enthused. Bourne was drawn to Barrès’s evocation of the “ ‘communion of saints’—the ideal collective life where the hunger of ‘moi individuel’ is satisfied by the ‘moi social.’ ” In this glorious France, “the land and its dead” along with its “worshipers” would be “bound together in interwoven links of amitiés, a consciousness of a common background of living truth.”
“The new national consciousness” of Barrès, he argued, was “not a mere chauvinism, but sounds deeper notes of genuine social reform at home.” Bourne—whose most famous and enduring essay, “War Is the Health of the State,” was a denunciation of American involvement in WWI—wholeheartedly approved of French preparations for war with Germany. He saw them as contributing to the health of the French state:
The hard decivilizing life of the caserne [barracks] is accepted . . . as a necessary sacrifice against the threats of the foe to the east. Politically, a restlessness seems to be evident, a discontent with the feebleness and colorlessness of the republican state, and a curious drawing together of the extreme Left and the extreme Right, in an equal hatred . . . of the smug capitalism of the day—a rapprochement for the founding of the Great State, which shall bind the nation together in a sort of imperial democracy, ministering to the needs of the people and raising them to its ideals of splendor, honor, and national defense.
Drawn as he was to France, he found Germany even more captivating. Arriving in Germany just as the Kaiserreich ignited World War I, Bourne was in the Berlin crowd when Wilhelm II, speaking from his balcony, declared war. Bourne was enthralled by an entire nation in Kultural revolt against the values of Anglo-America Zivilization. “German ideals,” he believed, were the only broad and captivating ones for his generation. He was moved by “the feel of their sheer heroic power” compared with the pale fare of the Anglo-Saxon world. “Whatever the outcome of the war,” he insisted, anticipating Charles Lindbergh, “all the opposing countries will be forced to adopt German organization [and] German collectivism.”
Although not drawn to German militarism, he compared Germany very favorably with “shabby and sordid” America and its “frowsy towns.” He found that in Germany “war on squalor and ugliness was being waged on every hand,” because “taste is, after all, the only morality.” Taken by the beauty of German architecture and town planning, he anticipated the arguments made on behalf of the USSR in the 1930s: “The Stadtbaurat [head of municipal planning and building] went over for us the development of the city, and gave us considerable insight into the government, policy and spirit of a typical little German municipality. Undemocratic in political form, yet ultra-democratic in policy and spirit, scientific, impartial, giving the populace—who seemed to have no sense of being excluded from ‘rights’—what they really wanted, far more truly than our democracies seem to be able to secure.”
In America, he felt oppressed by the “blind compressing forces of conventionality” he had experienced in his New Jersey hometown. In America, he wrote, “social pressures warp and conventionalize and harden the personality,” inhibiting truly creative people. American society was “one vast conspiracy for carving one into the kind of statue it likes.” He preferred the “spirit” of “the open road, with the spirit always traveling . . . always escaping the pressures that threaten its integrity.”
Bourne occasionally spoke of the open road, which invokes individuality, but he also spoke and wrote often of his hunger to be swept up in something larger than himself, of “vibrating in camaraderie with the beloved society, given new powers, lifted out of himself, transformed through the enriching stimulation of his fellows—the communion of saints—into a new being, spiritual because no longer individual.”
Enthralled by Germany, he bracketed its militarism as being of limited importance; after all, Germany offered its people the possibility of being absorbed into an oceanic spirit of oneness. In 1915, a few months after German submarines sank the Lusitania, a British passenger ship with a large number of Americans on board, Bourne opened an article for The New Republic with the following words: “German ideals are the only broad and seizing ones that have lived in the world in our generation. Mad and barbarous as they must seem to minds accustomed to much thinner and nicer fare, one must have withdrawn far within a provincial Anglo-Saxon shell not to feel the thrill of their sheer heroic power.”
While praising the imposing tastefulness of German sculpture and town planning, with its “clean, massive and soaring lines,” he wrote that “the cosmic heroisms of the German ideal fall . . . strangely on our ears.” “It comes to us as a shock to find a people who believe in national spirits which are heroic, and through the German spirit, in a world-spirit; for the ‘world spirit,’ says one of their professor-warriors, ‘speaks today through Germany.’ ” In fighting Germania, the British and the French, stuck in the aesthetic status quo, were rejecting “the most overwhelming and fecund group of ideas and forms in the modern world, ideas which draw all nations after them in imitation, while the nations pour out their lifeblood to crush the generator.”
Bourne identified deeply with Germany, which he saw as a victim, not unlike himself, of those with inferior taste who were waging war on superior beings. Just as he saw himself as a victim of his traumatic birth and uncomprehending bourgeois family, so Germany in his eyes had become a victim of its troubled origins and philistine neighbors. “It has been the tragedy of the German spirit that [it] has had to dwell in a perverse universe, so that what from within looked always like the most beneficent working-out of a world-idea seemed from without like the very running-amuck of voracious power.” He was taken by the promise of a German victory:
From the prospect of German hegemony, we can at least foreshadow the Pax Romana. With its lulling truce, its shelter for the recuperation of the world, its enforced learning of the ideas of order, neatness, prosperity to which the British and Latin civilizations seem as yet relatively indifferent. A Germanized England or France would be an England or France immensely furbished, immensely modernized. Germanization would be the rough massage that would bring the red blood to the surface and a new glow of health to these two nations.
“The world,” he went on, explaining why taste was morality, “will never be safe until it has learned a high and brave materiality that will demand cleanliness, order, comfort, beauty, and welfare as the indispensable soil in which the virtues of mutual respect, intelligence, and good will may flourish.”
Like his fellow Greenwich Village lyrical leftist Max Eastman, Bourne had little interest in either Germany’s political culture or the conduct of the war. Eastman spoke approvingly of Germany’s “state-socialism attended by paternal discipline,” and he admired the “candor” of Germany’s expression of its war aims, which, he thought, reflected the authenticity of German culture. The German attempts to encourage a Mexican invasion of the United States; German sabotage in America, such as the explosion of Black Tom Island in New York Harbor;