Prof. Murdaco
POL 166
September 26, 2015
Joan Callahan

Assignment #2

Select a paragraph from one of this weeks reading and write a paragraph describing the meaning of your selected paragraph. Write another paragraph explaining why you chose that paragraph.

I selected an excerpt from Trans-National America; by Randolph Bourne, Published in Atlantic Monthly, 118 (July 1916)

It is just this English-American conservatism that has been our chief obstacle to social advance. We have needed the new peoples--the order of the German and Scandinavian,, the turbulence of the Slav and Hun--to save us from our own stagnation. I do not mean that the illiterate Slav is now equal of the New Englander of pure descent. He is raw material to be educated, not into a New Englander, but into a socialized American along such lines as those thirty nationalities are being educated in the amazing schools of Gary. I do not believe that this process is to be one of decades of evolution. The spectacle of Japan's sudden jump from mediaevalism to post-modernism should have destroyed that superstition. We are not dealing with individuals who are to "evolve". We are dealing with their children, who, with that education we are about to have, will start level with all of us. Let us cease to think of ideals like democracy as magical qualities inherent in certain peoples.  Let us speak, not of inferior races, but of inferior civilizations. We are all to educate and be to be educated. these peoples in America are in a common enterprise. It is not what we are now that concerns us, but what this plastic next generation may become in the light of a new cosmopolitan ideal.


The era of the great War found America at a point in history when, more than ever, the immigration of Germans, Slavs, and Huns was having an impact on the country's ability to maintain its conservatism.  Bourne  writes about the expectations of the American people for the newly immigrating people to assimilate to the country's established moral and ethnic culture completely. Bourne explores the value in having both the immigrants and the Americans to jointly assimilate each others strengths and values, thereby enriching and progressing the forward movement of the country as a whole. Bourne states "we have needed the new peoples--the order of the German and Scandinavian, the turbulence of the Slav and Hun--to save us from our own stagnation". (Bourne; Trans-National America, Atlantic Monthly) The "amazing schools in Gary"  he talks about were a  work-study system that could be compared to modern day trade and technology schools that teach education and work related skills. Bourne speaks of the importance of education in the assimilation process with the ultimate goal being the education of the children of the immigrants to become socialized Americans rather than New Englanders. Bourne also encourages Americans to look at these educated children as starting "level with all of us." and view civilizations as inferior rather than individual races.