by Thomas Cryer
David Weinfeld is an Assistant Professor of World Religions at Rowan University. He is a scholar of North American Judaism and Jewish history with a focus on ideas of diversity and the intersection of religion, race, ethnicity, and culture. Thomas Cryer spoke with Dr. Weinfeld about his most recent book, An American Friendship: Horace Kallen, Alain Locke, and the Development of Cultural Pluralism (Cornell University Press, 2022).
Thomas Cryer: An American Friendship tells the story of the friendship between two marginalized intellectuals, the Jewish philosopher Horace M. Kallen and the African American philosopher, Alain Leroy Locke. It traces their first interactions at Harvard, their shared time at Oxford from 1907–1908, and the half-a-century of correspondence that followed until Locke’s death in 1954. In so doing, it seeks to provide a biography of the idea of cultural pluralism, an idea you argue was “the most important idea about American diversity to emerge until it spawned multiculturalism in the 1960s” (2). To introduce us to your work, could you briefly describe what Kallen and Locke meant by cultural pluralism?
David Weinfeld: For Kallen and Locke, cultural pluralism was an idea that both described America and provided a vision for its future. It was not a detailed framework, rather more like a guiding principle or ethos. Their vision of cultural pluralism rested on three main premises. First, that America was made up of different cultural communities that functioned within an overarching American legal and political system and that this arrangement was fundamentally a good thing. They thought of these groups as secular cultural groups; we might say ethnicities today. The Jews were an ethnic group, like the Irish, Italians, Chinese, and, at Locke’s insistence, African Americans. These groups mixed and mingled and interacted with one another, influencing and shaping each other and the larger American civilization, but they maintained some degree of integrity, of cultural, if not political or legal autonomy. Cultural borders between groups would be porous, but they would exist. Kallen called this the “symphony of civilization,” with all cultures playing together harmoniously, though he may have borrowed that musical metaphor from Locke. In this way, cultural pluralism served to counter both the intense racism, antisemitism, and nativism of the era but also the assimilationist idea symbolized by the melting pot. In 1908, English playwright Israel Zangwill wrote a popular play called The Melting-Pot about a Jewish immigrant to New York. The image, more than the play itself, came to represent the disappearance of cultural groups into a bland, homogenous Americanism.
The second premise is that the cultural groups required active cultivation. Ethnic cultures developed organically but also needed to be shaped and moulded. Both men took leadership roles in this regard. For Kallen, it was to help build modern Jewish secular culture, which he called Hebraism. He did this first through the Harvard Menorah Society in 1906, which became the Intercollegiate Menorah Association, which would publish The Menorah Journal to promote Hebraism in the United States. He also saw Zionism, the establishment of a Jewish state in Israel/Palestine, as the political manifestation of Hebraism, and thus American Jewish support for Zionism was a way to participate in Hebraism. For Locke, it was through a series of endeavours culminating in The Harlem Renaissance, and his editing of its main text, The New Negro, in 1925, it’s the hundredth anniversary this year. Locke highlighted Harlem, but his culturally nationalist project was not state-oriented, but geared toward modernizing global Black culture, with African Americans taking a lead role.
The third premise, both abstract and practical, was that the principal metaphor of cultural pluralism was friendship. Both Kallen and Locke rejected melting pot imagery. Though they liked musical metaphors, friendship was the idea that best embodied their cultural pluralism. Both men wanted to live in a world where they could preserve and adapt their own cultures through encounters with other intellectuals of different cultures, people they could befriend. The college or university campus was an ideal locus for these friendships, though they could certainly occur in other areas of encounter as well.
T.C.: Discussions of Locke, Kallen, and cultural pluralism often concentrate on a 1906 discussion during a Harvard philosophy seminar in which the two debated the difference that difference makes. Your book, however, goes further, examining how this ideal developed in tandem between Kallen and Locke as they communicated over the following half-century. In other words, Kallen was not the sole architect of cultural pluralism. How does this broader story change our understandings of the term cultural pluralism and its conceptual development?
D.W.: Looking at the larger story shows that Kallen and Locke were significant individuals beyond just their friendship. Kallen (1882-1974) was the son of an Orthodox rabbi born in Silesia, Germany (today Poland). He immigrated to Boston as a child and eventually became an important exponent of his Harvard mentor William James’ philosophical pragmatism and a founding faculty member of the New School for Social Research in 1919, along with John Dewey. He was also a leading American Zionist intellectual and had a wide range of contacts in philosophical, literary, and Jewish circles, from Albert Einstein to T. S. Eliot. He is best known for having coined the term “cultural pluralism” in print in 1924, though he claimed to have come up with it in conversation with his student and then friend Alain Locke while they were at Harvard and Oxford together in 1906–1908.
Locke (1885–1954), born in Philadelphia to a well-educated African American family, is the better-known figure. The first Black Rhodes Scholar and intellectual godfather of the Harlem Renaissance. He was also a long-time professor of philosophy at Howard University for many years. He was also gay, and his sexuality was something of an open secret by the time he got to Howard. He met Kallen at Harvard, where Kallen was his graduate teaching assistant and they became friends at Oxford the following year. As a professor at Howard and leader of the New Negro Movement, he had meaningful interactions with numerous leading African American intellectuals, from W. E. B. Du Bois to Langston Hughes to Zora Neale Hurston.
Thus both men were plugged into large intellectual networks, which helps us understand the breadth of their notion of cultural pluralism. It shows that ideas labeled cultural pluralism by Kallen and Locke, cosmopolitanism by Locke and Randolph Bourne, trans-nationalism by Bourne, double-consciousness and two-ness by Du Bois, even the melting-pot by Zangwill, are all more similar than different, though some scholars stress the differences between them. There’s a simplistic version of the melting pot as hyper-assimilation, but I think intellectuals used these terms to embrace American diversity. We see this in their writings but also in the ways they lived. They all wanted an America that contained different cultures, so they could befriend people of different cultures, learn from them and use other cultures to enhance their own. None wanted bland uniformity. All these intellectuals saw American diversity as a strength, they just articulated this in slightly different ways.
At the same time, the larger story shows the importance of the Kallen-Locke friendship as a demonstration of cultural pluralism in action, as “lived experience,” to borrow from Daniel Greene’s book on the Intercollegiate Menorah Association. Kallen and Locke lived cultural pluralism through their friendship with each other, and with many other interlocutors. If we focus on Kallen and Locke’s writings over their careers, and the details of their long friendship, we learn more about what they meant when they said cultural pluralism, about America and the world they wanted to live in.
T.C.: A perpetual theme of this book is friendship; friendship as “itself a form of education” (9), as “the backbone of the right to be different” (10), as “a crucial concept in understanding race relations” (109). Perhaps friendship is most useful in foregrounding how cultural pluralism was an ideal to be lived. How does friendship reshape our understanding of Locke and Kallen’s intellectual exchange? More broadly—and perhaps a tricky question—do you think intellectual historians adequately recognize the generative power of friendship?
D.W.: I really like that term you used, “generative.” In Kallen’s eulogy for Locke, he distinguishes between “brotherhood,” which he casts negatively, as homogenizing, “be my brother, or else!” as opposed to friendship, which is not just respectful but appreciative of difference. So I think generative is really the right word. Not that brotherhood or sisterhood or siblinghood are bad, but rather that those relationships can be understood as supportive, whereas friendship is generative, it facilitates growth.
Randolph Bourne, a progressive writer and friend of Kallen’s wrote about this kind of intellectual friendship, as did Kallen and Locke themselves. But I think intellectual historians and other scholars are beginning to appreciate the generative power of friendship, as you say. Certainly we have books that identify intellectual cohorts, like Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club and Beloved Community by Casey Nelson Blake, both of which were very influential to me, or the scholarship on the New York Intellectuals, of which Ronnie Grinberg’s Write Like a Man is a great recent example from my own subfield of American Jewish history.
I read The Radical and the Republican by James Oakes in graduate school, about the cross-racial friendship between Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, which was also important for me. Closer to my own work, there’s an excellent article by literary scholar Lori Harrison-Kahan, “Scholars and Knights,” about W.E.B. Du Bois’ friendship with Jewish activist Joel Spingarn and the founding of the NAACP. Just this year, two historically oriented scholars of American Judaism, Sarah Imhoff and Rachel B. Gross, have co-authored a great article about two American Jewish Zionist women who had a highly intellectual and generative friendship, the writer Mary Antin and poet and activist Jessie Sampter, both of whom were also friends with Kallen. So I think we’re going to see more of this.
Last, I should mention that I’ve found my own intellectual friendships to be incredibly generative. Especially people I’ve met through two relatively young but impressive intellectual organizations, the Society for US Intellectual History (S-USIH) and the African American Intellectual History Society. These scholarly societies and social networks have provided me with outstanding new interlocutors and friends who have helped me with my work, and I do my best to help them as well.
T.C.: One theme that perhaps bubbles under the surface is cosmopolitanism. You write that Locke’s “desire to join the ‘cosmopolitan communion of liberal minds’ combined his universalist humanism with his pragmatist pluralism” (65). For his part, Kallen “imagined himself the possessor of an ‘international mind’, one he could cultivate while studying abroad” (87). Yet, for both figures, the United States—and more particularly Harvard—represented a unique setting in which cosmopolitanism could thrive. If this was a cosmopolitanism that held that nowhere was quite as cosmopolitanism as the United States, what does cosmopolitanism tell us about Kallen and Locke’s internationalism and their conceptions of Americanness?
D.W.: I do think that the term “cosmopolitanism” can be a bit misleading. In Kallen and Locke’s day some people used that word to refer to a bland universalism, and eventually others, like Josef Stalin, used the term “rootless cosmopolitans” as a kind of slur for Jews. But there’s been an effort to reclaim the term. Historian David Hollinger and philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah have helped with that, and more recently James Loeffler’s award-winning work of transnational Jewish intellectual history, Rooted Cosmopolitans combats the antisemitic legacy of the term. And certainly Randolph Bourne saw the word positively. I see it as a kindred term to cultural pluralism, as a term that resists assimilationism.
Both Kallen and Locke appreciated the insistence that difference mattered in America. At Oxford, despite the diversity of some of the students from across the British Empire, Anglo culture dominated. While Locke and Kallen were anglophiles, they did not want to see distinctions completely erased. At Oxford, Kallen and Locke felt that their particular identities were ignored, perhaps because they were deemed inferior. In America, they were not ignored. And, yet, there were some problems there, too. Kallen admitted that in some situations he could “pass,” but most knew he was Jewish. Locke could not pass and even spoke of fleeing America for Oxford to avoid the “race problem,” but ultimately realized he didn’t want to pass. Locke wanted Black culture, in its communal and individual manifestations, to be appreciated as part of American culture. That’s the key point. Kallen and Locke understood they had hybrid identities, which could be better appreciated in a land as diverse as the United States.
T.C.: An American Friendship skilfully utilizes Kallen and Locke’s intertwined lives as lenses on issues of identity and race. If intellectual biographies and even group intellectual biographies have come of age in recent years, studies of two thinkers like An American Friendship remain comparatively rarer. What were the promises and pitfalls of this approach when writing?
D.W.: I think one of the pitfalls of intellectual history is the danger of overstating the influence of one thinker on another. I tried to be somewhat cautious with this, noting that Kallen and Locke were never best friends. They began communicating when Locke was Kallen’s student at Harvard, that they were close in 1907–1908 while together at Oxford, then drifted with distance and time, and may not have communicated at all between 1916 to 1935 before rekindling their friendship in the last two decades of Locke’s life and were significantly closer by the 1950s. Even when they were not close, though, their ideas dovetailed in crucial and fascinating ways, occasionally explicitly, and they themselves acknowledged the intellectual significance of their friendship, especially later in their lives. In 1947, Locke called Kallen “a pioneer and creative advocate of pluralism” (185), decades later, Kallen called Locke “the first ‘black cultural pluralist’” (206). But I think it’s important to be mindful of all their other friends and interlocutors who shaped their worldviews as well, and I certainly tried to do that in the book.
But the promises of this dual biography of a friendship are huge, like in Yuval Taylor’s Zora and Langston: A Story of Friendship and Betrayal (Norton, 2019), about Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, both closely connected to Locke. In my own work about Locke and Kallen, I tried to show how intellectual history works to support what we might call the history of ideas. To look not just at connections in published work—how one idea flowed into the next or contrasted with the other—but at how people engaged with ideas, and with each other, on a personal level, and how the things they did together, as friends, could shape those ideas. We really see this in the earliest years of Locke and Kallen’s relationship, when they moved from a student-teacher relationship to a friendship, to becoming peers who had fun together, found common ground, an appreciation for ideas and cultures, but ultimately never losing sight of their differences either.
It was especially fun writing about their friendship because it helped me get to know them. They were very quirky and very snobby. Despite his poor and immigrant roots, Kallen adopted a posh accent, part Boston Brahmin and part British. Locke, for his part, added the “i” to his first name to sound French and more sophisticated. They were friends, but I also like to say they were brothers in pretentiousness. And though they became friends over a century ago their experiences, in a way, felt relatable to me.
T.C.: While ostensibly about friendship, this meticulously researched book uncovers plenty of mutual suspicions and tensions, often surfacing in remarkably frank letters. You describe both the racist elements in Kallen’s thought and the anti-Semitic elements in Locke’s, and question whether Kallen truly boycotted the notorious American Club Thanksgiving dinner of 1907 in Oxford, to which Locke was not invited due to his race. How did you navigate the balance between emphasizing the derogatory and supportive aspects of their friendship?
D.W.: There’s conflicting evidence as to whether Kallen attended the Oxford American Club Thanksgiving dinner of 1907. I think Esther Schor may write a bit about this in her forthcoming biography of Kallen, which I’m very much looking forward to reading. But there’s no question that he thought a lot about that dinner, and that the event brought him closer to Locke. But it did not undo either of their prejudices at that time.
I think that Kallen’s racism and Locke’s antisemitism at the early stages of their relationship are crucial to understanding their friendship. Because these views, however derogatory, prioritized difference. They made difference inescapable. Of course, too great of an emphasis on difference can lead to dehumanization and discrimination and violence. But Locke and Kallen had many similarities too. Both of them understood culture to be communal, particularistic and pluralistic, while they saw religion as more individualistic and universal. Kallen abandoned Orthodox Judaism for atheism—which reinforced his secular Hebraism and Zionism—but he eventually accepted the possibility of individual religious experience that William James described. Locke, meanwhile, was raised Episcopalian, but his mother also introduced him to the secular Ethical Culture movement. As an adult, he converted to the universalist Baha’i faith but was rather private about this personal decision.
Their universalistic religious sensibilities reinforced their most crucial commonality: their critical attachment to and engagement with their own particular heritages, communities, and ethnic identities. Kallen cared about being Jewish and Jewish culture, and Locke cared about being Black and Black culture. Because of this, and because of their shared intellectualism and elitism, they were able to overcome their prejudices—though it took decades—while maintaining their appreciation for their differences. Of course, it wasn’t just their friendship. They evolved with the times. But I think their friendship was crucial, because they both had their experience of joyful interactions with one another, of breaking bread, of seeking entertainment.
T.C.: You take no qualms in arguing that Kallen and Locke had “a very narrow, hierarchical, and elitist view of what constituted culture and similarly elitist preferences in terms of whom they wanted in their friendship circles” (5). To what degree did Kallen and Locke’s conceptions of cultural pluralism influence broader public discourses? And was the term “cultural pluralism” itself even used in popular discussions?
D.W.: I’m not sure about popular discussions. After 1924, when Kallen first used the term in print, it became known by scholars and other intellectuals in the United States. Locke used the term to describe himself in a 1935 volume on American philosophy co-edited by Kallen. And Robert Park and some others highlighted Kallen as well.
But others ignored Kallen. A Canadian Protestant minister named Claris Edwin Silcox, then working as a researcher in the United States, co-authored a book in 1934 called Catholics, Jews, and Protestants: A Study of Relationships in the United States and Canada. The book is mostly about religious pluralism. In the conclusion, however, Silcox talks extensively about cultural pluralism, is very critical of it, calls it a Jewish idea, in a manner that is somewhat antisemitic but doesn’t name Kallen as its author!
Twenty years later, historian John Higham linked cultural pluralism to Kallen but also saw its impact as limited largely to “Zionist circles.” Only after Locke’s death in 1954 did Kallen speak about his friend’s role in the idea’s genesis. In 1963 Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan published Beyond the Melting Pot, which is predicated on cultural pluralism but mentions the term once and does not mention Kallen or Locke at all. By Kallen’s death in 1974, multiculturalism had become a better-known word, especially in the Canadian context but also in the US.
Scholars eventually rediscovered the link between Locke, Kallen, and cultural pluralism in the 1980s. More recently, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Locke by Jeffrey Stewart correctly places Locke at the center of these conversations. But even with this scholarly shift cultural pluralism is still not nearly as well-known as multiculturalism. This is partly due to the elitism of early cultural pluralism, a movement of intellectuals and producers of high culture. This meant things like the Menorah Movement for Kallen and the Harlem Renaissance for Locke. Today’s multiculturalism is more democratic, with a greater recognition of factors such as food and clothing and popular cultural forms of dance and music.
Cultural pluralism also suffered because of its secularism. Multiculturalism was originally secular but came to incorporate religion in a more robust way than cultural pluralism ever did. Remember in the 1910s and 1920s Jews were considered by Kallen and Locke and many others to be a kind of ethno-cultural group, more akin to the Irish or Italians or African Americans. Religious pluralism gets a boost in the late 1920s but really took off after WW2, eclipsing cultural pluralism in the US. The best example of the growth of religious pluralism is Will Herberg’s 1955 book Protestant-Catholic-Jew. Increasing numbers of Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh immigrants to Canada and the US since the 1960s resulted in the incorporation of religion in the concept of multiculturalism, especially by the 21st century.
T.C.: On multiple occasions, you describe pluralism as a mode of thought that nuances tensions, one that “thread[s] the needle between universal and particular, between African and American, between belonging and outsiderness” (145). This is reminiscent of recent calls to recuperate the complexity and multiplicity of African American conceptions of race and nation obscured by integrationist-separatist binaries. How does cultural pluralism help to nuance our understanding of African American and Jewish senses of belonging?
D.W.: I think cultural pluralism enhances our understanding of African American and Jewish senses of belonging in a number of ways. I think you’re right that it helps break down the integrationist-separatist binary. Clearly neither Locke nor Kallen were separatists when it came to America. Locke rejected Garveyism, and, though friendly with Booker T. Washington and perhaps somewhat inspired by his autonomist impulse, did not really follow his model either. Locke wanted African Americans to belong in the United States as people with a hybrid identity, both Black and American. And Kallen wanted the same thing for Jews in the United States, for them to be both American and Jewish. For Kallen, Zionism was the model of Jewish separatism: Jewish people, with a state in their ancestral land and a modern, dynamic, Hebraic culture that reflected the diversity within Jewish communities. Ideally, this state would be at peace with its neighbors. But in the United States, Jewish culture would be more of a hybrid. So I think for both Locke and Kallen, who may have had sympathies for Zionism and other nationalisms abroad, in the US they were Diaspora nationalists of a certain kind. They were cultural nationalists rather than political ones, emphasizing harmony and blending and hybridity between cultures while nonetheless maintaining some form of communal cultural integrity. You could belong to your particular cultural community, maybe even to more than one cultural community, but both politically and patriotically belong to the United States as well.
T.C: What’s next for your research?
D.W.: My main focus now is on my forthcoming monograph, to be titled “Southern Jews and the Lost Cause: Between Confederate Memory and Jewish Identity.” It discusses how Jews in the American South used Lost Cause commemoration, that is, honouring the legacy of the Confederacy to integrate into the white Christian society. They were able to do this in a way that was denied to African Americans. At the same time, and crucially, they put a Jewish spin on the Lost Cause to preserve their distinct religious identities in an increasingly evangelical Protestant region.
I’m also working on an edited volume, with fellow American intellectual historians and S-USIH friends Ronnie Grinberg and Kevin Schultz, on the American Jewish intellectual tradition, from the 1880s to the present. Along with that, I’m working on an article on interfaith organizations in North America, the National Conference of Christians and Jews in the United States and its northern counterpart, the Canadian Council for Christians and Jews. As you might have guessed, I’m Canadian, born and raised in Montreal. I’m interested in cultural and religious pluralism in both countries. I became a US citizen in 2018 so I’ve got my own hybrid identity, I suppose, something I can pass on to my American-born daughters.
Last, I’ve been working on an article on the lone Jewish family in the small West Virginia town of Lewisburg, in Greenbrier County right near the Virginia state line. My wife was born there and still has lots of family there and we visit frequently. I’ve become enamoured of the place and discovered this one Jewish family that lived there in the mid-20th century, and there’s a surprisingly large paper trail and much to be said about them. So I’ve got several irons in the fire right now.
Thomas Cryer is a PhD Student at University College London’s Institute of the Americas, where he examines education, memory, and racialization through the activism, life, and scholarship of the historian John Hope Franklin.
Edited by Jacob Saliba.
Featured Image: Diego Velázquez, “Peasants at the Table,” oil on canvas (1620), public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
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