ABSTRACT
Randolph Bourne grew up in the New Jersey town of Bloomfield, where he was born in 1886. On his father’s side of the family there were Congregational ministers; on his mother’s side lawyers. Bourne was to show that for all his rebellion against Bloomfield and its middle-class stuffiness and triviality, he cared about social roots in a local soil. One day in 1911, when Bourne was in his junior year, Professor Woodbridge suggested that he write an answer to an article in the Atlantic denouncing the younger generation. Bourne did, his article was accepted, and led off the issue. Bourne tried his hardest to become one of the editorial groups, along with Lippmann and Francis Hackett and Walter Weyl. But the best he could get was a retainer to do some reviewing and occasional articles, and the ornamental role of Contributing Editor. Bourne was beginning to see that nationalism was an explosive force that could be used against labor and internationalism.
