The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with Jeff Rigenbach.
Randolph Bourne was an American intellectual journalist who flourished for a few years in the second decade of the 20th century, in the teens, the decade that ran from 1910 to 1920.
Born wrote mostly for magazines during this period.
His byline was particularly familiar to readers of The New Republic until his radically anti-war
views on the eve of the U.S. government's intervention in World War I got him fired.
He moved over to The Seven Arts, a newly launched magazine with a smaller circulation than The
New Republic and one less well-suited to Born's particular talents and interests, since its
Its primary focus was the arts, rather than social and political issues.
He was able to publish only six anti-war articles in the Seven Arts before its doors were closed
by an owner fearful of the Wilson administration and its Sedition Act of 1918, which made it
a crime to criticize the Constitution, the government, the military, or the flag.
And only a few months after the 7 Arts ceased publication, Randolph Bourne died, a victim
of the flu epidemic that killed more than 25 million people in 1918 and 1919, nearly
a million of them in the United States.
That was one percent of the population 90 years ago.
One percent of the present U.S. population would be more than three million Americans.
Imagine what it would be like to live through a flu epidemic that killed more than three
million people in the space of little more than a year.
That's what it was like for Americans living 90 years ago at the end of World War I.
Most of the people that flu virus killed have long been forgotten, except of course by members
of their own families.
But Randolph Bourne has not been forgotten, not completely.
People are still reading his work.
are still talking about his ideas and about his memorable phrases.
The most famous of these has gradually become so widely quoted in our culture that millions
of people have heard it, even heard it repeatedly, without ever learning who originally wrote
or said it, war is the health of the state.
Randolph Silliman Bourne first emerged into the light of day on May 30th, 1886 in Bloomfield,
New Jersey, a small town fewer than 20 miles from Manhattan.
His family was comfortably middle class, and he was the grandson of a respected congregational
minister.
But he seems to have been born unlucky all the same.
First, his head and face were deformed at birth in a bungled forceps delivery.
Then, at the age of four, after a battle with spinal tuberculosis, he became a hunchback.
Then, when he was seven, his parents lost everything in the panic of 1893, and he and his mother were abandoned by his father and left to live in genteel poverty on the charity of his mother's prosperous, if somewhat tight-fisted, brother.
Meanwhile, his growth had been permanently stunted by the spinal tuberculosis of a few years before,
so that by the time he graduated from high school at the age of 17 in 1903,
he had attained his full adult height of five feet.
Born was an exemplary student.
His academic record in high school earned him a place in the class of 1907 at Princeton,
But by the time he was supposed to appear on campus to register for classes in the fall of 1903,
it was evident that he couldn't afford to attend.
He could barely afford books, he was flat broke, and his mother needed his financial help
if she were going to go on living the decent middle-class lifestyle to which she had become accustomed.
So Born postponed college and went to work.
He knew his way around a piano, so for the next six years he worked as a piano teacher,
a piano tuner and a piano player, accompanying singers in a recording studio in Carnegie
Hall.
He also cut piano roles.
On the side, he freelanced for book publishers as a proofreader.
Now and then, when musical work was harder to find, he did secretarial work.
By 1909, when he was 23 years old, Bourne had saved enough to cut back on his working
hours and try to catch up on the college experience he'd been putting off.
He enrolled at Columbia, where he fell under the sway of historian and political scientists
Charles Beard and philosopher John Dewey, and began publishing essays in The Dial, The
Atlantic Monthly and other magazines.
His first book, Youth and Life, a collection of his magazine essays, was published the
year he graduated from Columbia, 1913.
And that fall, the now 27-year-old Bourne set out for Europe.
In his senior year, he had been awarded the Gilder Fellowship for travel abroad, which
the historian Louis Filler has called Columbia's most distinguished honor during that period.
Boehm spent a year traveling around Europe and pursuing such independent study as interested
him.
Then, in August 1914, he returned to America, took up residence in Greenwich Village and
resumed writing for The Dial and The Atlantic Monthly, along with a new upstart weekly called
The New Republic.
Actually, it might be more accurate to say that Boehm fled Europe in August 1914 than
And to say that he merely returned to America at that time, for it was in late July and
early August of 1914 that Europe, virtually all of Europe, embarked upon the conflict
we know today as World War I.
Born opposed this conflict, and he was especially worried that his own country, the United States,
would choose to enter it before long.
He wrote about many subjects over the next four years.
He wrote enough about education, for example, that he was able to fill two books with his
magazine pieces on the subject, The Gary Schools in 1916 and Education and Living in 1917.
But his main subject during the last four years of his life was the New World War and
the urgent need that the United States stay out of it.
Born made few friends by adopting this stance.
brought him, as the journalist Ben Reiner later put it, into sharp conflict with the
rising pro-war hysteria that preceded America's entry into World War I.
In the view of yet another journalistic commentator, Christopher Phelps, few 20th century American
dissenters have suffered the wrath of their targets as greatly as Born did.
By 1917, the New Republic stopped publishing his political pieces.
The Seven Arts collapsed when its financial angel refused further support because of Bourne's anti-war articles.
According to Reiner, the problem was that once Bourne's biting attacks on government repression began to appear in The Seven Arts,
this gave birth to rumors that the publisher was supporting a pro-German magazine.
She withdrew her support, which closed the magazine down.
Nor was the demise of the Seven Arts the end of the punishment Born had to bear for speaking his mind.
Phelps notes that even at the dial he was stripped from editorial power in 1918,
the result of an uncharacteristically underhanded intervention by his former mentor John Dewey,
one of the objects of Born's disillusioned anti-war pen.
Phelps quotes a letter Born sent to a friend shortly thereafter,
The Historian Robert Westbrook put the matter as memorably and eloquently as anyone when he said in 2004 that Bourne disturbed the peace of John Dewey and other intellectuals supporting Woodrow Wilson's crusade to make the world a better place to live.
The World's Safe for Democracy, and they made him pay for it.
Yet the ruination of his career was far from the only price he had to pay.
Westbrook quotes John Dos Passos' claim from his novel, 1919,
that in addition to his professional setbacks, friends didn't like to be seen withborn,
and that his father, who had walked out of his life a quarter century before,
War is the health of the state, Randolph Bourne wrote in that discarded essay, which he probably died believing would never see print.
And it is during war that one best understands the nature of that institution.
For it cannot be too firmly realized that war is the chief function of states.
War cannot exist without a military establishment, and a military establishment cannot exist
without a state organization.
War has an immemorial tradition and heredity only because the state has a long tradition
and heredity.
But they are inseparably and functionally joined.
Moreover, Born argued, it is not too much to say that the normal relation of states
is war.
Diplomacy is a disguised war, in which states seek to gain by barter and intrigue, by the
cleverness of wits, the objectives which they would have to gain more clumsily by means
of war.
Money is used while the states are recuperating from conflicts in which they have exhausted
themselves.
It is the wheedling and the bargaining of the worn-out bullies as they rise from the
ground and slowly restore their strength to begin fighting again.
Randolph Bourne believed that informed citizens needed to realize the implications of what
he was saying.
For if the state's chief function is war, then the state must suck out of the nation
a large part of its energy for its purely sterile purposes of defense and aggression.
It devotes to waste or to actual destruction as much as it can of the vitality of the nation.
No one will deny that war is a vast complex of life-destroying and life-crippling forces.
If the state's chief function is war, then it is chiefly concerned with coordinating
and developing the powers and techniques which make for destruction.
And this means not only the actual and potential destruction of the enemy, but of the nation
at home as well.
For the calling away of energy into military pursuits means a crippling of the productive
and life-enhancing processes of the national life.
Adolf Born believed that we cannot crusade against war without crusading implicitly against
the state, and we cannot expect to end war unless at the same time we take measures to
end the state in its traditional form.
Born had reason to be wary when writing sentences like those in 1918.
People were being imprisoned and, in some cases, deported for writing things like that.
There was a particular prejudice against anarchists and against people who sounded as though they
might be anarchists.
Perhaps this is why Born added the following caveat to his call for ending the state.
The state is not the nation, and the state can be modified and even abolished in its
present form without harming the nation.
On the contrary, with the passing of the dominance of the state, the genuine life-enhancing forces
of the Nation will be liberated.
Randolph Bourne was an idealist.
He hoped for a world free of war, a world in which what he called the productive and
life enhancing processes were the dominant processes in our national life.
It is appropriate then that in the internet age, he is perhaps best known to the general
public not only for his immortal phrase, war is the health of the state, but also as the
The namesake of a non-profit foundation that runs a popular website.
The non-profit foundation is the Randolph-Born Institute, and the website is antiwar.com.
The folks who run antiwar.com would have us believe that their site should not be construed
as libertarian in its essence.
As Development Director Angela Keaton put it recently, antiwar.com is not a libertarian
site.
randwar.com is a foreign policy site operated by libertarians, which seeks a broad-based coalition in educating about the dangers of empire.
I'm inclined to think Randolph Bourne cut through to the heart of the matter more effectively, however, when he wrote that
we cannot crusade against war without crusading implicitly against the state.
In effect, you can't be consistently and intelligently anti-war unless you're libertarian.
The folks at antiwar.com are, of course, aware of this.
They quote that very same sentence of Bourne's on the Who We Are page on their website and
state further that their own dedication to libertarian principles is inspired in large
part by the works and example of the late Murray and Rothbard.
The work that's being done 24-7 at antiwar.com not only honors Randolph-Born's contribution
to the libertarian tradition, it also helps to assure that that tradition will continue
and grow.
This is Jeff Rigenbach.