In Search of a Democratic America: The Writings of Randolph S. Bourne

The America Randolph Silliman Bourne searched for his entire life-but never found-was an America in which the institutions of democratic government remained responsive to the needs of all. A progressive in the age of progressivism, Bourne fully understood John Jay’s dictum that the United States ＂should be governed by the people who own it.＂ The Atlantic Monthly, the New Republic, and the Dial were the forum for Bourne’s social commentary during a brief career that lasted from 1912 to 1918. In Search of a Democratic America offers the best of Bourne’s writings on politics, religion, education, philosophy, society, and youth. The readings, and commentary, reveal the literary radical and social critic in his true guise as a spokesman for liberal democracy, a democratic theorist who strove for a modern, industrial, multi-ethnic nation peopled by the intelligent, the caring, and the concerned.

Martin S. Sheffer has taught at Old Dominion and Tuskegee universities. He is the author of God versus Caesar: Belief, Worship, and Proselytizing under the First Amendment (1999), The Judicial Development of Presidential War Powers (1999), and Presidential Power (1991).