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John Dewey and the Hope for Reform

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Alan Lawson
Alan Lawson*
Affiliation:
History Department, Boston College
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Extract

By the end of his long, productive life John Dewey had become as familiar a part of the American scene as any man of ideas of the century. He reigned as aegis of progressive education, the final architect of Pragmatism—America's own philosophy—and the writer of so many books, articles, reviews and broadsides that it is hardly any wonder he has been so often mistaken for Melvil Dewey, the inventor of a library classification system!

Type
Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 15 , Issue 1 , Spring 1975 , pp. 31 - 66
Copyright
Copyright © 1975 by New York University 

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References

Notes

1. Frankel, Charles, The Love of Anxiety and Other Essays (New York, 1966), “John Dewey's Legacy.” Google Scholar

2. Hook, Sidney, “Some Memories of John Dewey,” Commentary, XIV (September, 1952): 245–253. Similar reports on Dewey's nature are to be found in: Feuer, Lewis, “HAP Torrey and John Dewey: Teacher and Pupil,” American Quarterly, X (Spring, 1958): 34–54; Edman, Irwin, Philosopher's Holiday (New York, 1938), ch. XII, “Former Teachers,” pp. 131–143; Kilpatrick, William Heard, “Personal Reminiscences of Dewey and My Judgement of His Present Influence,” School and Society, LXXXVII (10 Oct. 1959): 374–375; Lamont, Corliss, ed., Dialogue on John Dewey (New York, 1959); Mitchell, Lucy Sprague, Two Lives: The Story of Wesley Clair Mitchell and Myself (New York, 1953), passim; and Dykhuizen, George, The Life and Mind of John Dewey (Carbondale, 1973), passim.Google Scholar

3. “Courage” was a term frequently reiterated in Dewey's correspondence, especially to his old allies, Boyd Bode, H. Gordon Hullfish, Jack Lamb, and George Geiger. In a letter to a graduate student in social science he had befriended Dewey dismissed the existentialist religion of neo-Calvinists lik Reinhold Niebuhr as “the reactions of people who are scared and haven't got the guts to face life.” The revealing exchange between Dewey and Daniels has been published in the Journal of the History of Ideas, XX (October-December, 1959): 569–576. One of Dewey's last letters poignantly illustrated his commitment to a courageous concern for the future. On March 8, 1951, while recuperating from an operation, Dewey wrote to Boyd Bode that he was “not only cheerful but confident at the prospect of the morrow—since my chief intellectual regret as to the past is that those of us who hold the same faith haven't worked more together. I hope there will be a chance to remedy that deficiency. How shall we go about the together business and who should or shall be in and of it?” Google Scholar

4. Strout, Cushing, “Pragmatism in Retrospect: The Legacy of James and Dewey,” Virginia Quarterly Review, 43 (Winter, 1967): 126.Google Scholar

5. The implications of rejection of both the New Deal and Marxist alternatives are broad. They set Dewey off against most large-scale accounts of the tendencies of the time in social and political development. It has become common, for example, in historical sociology to identify Karl Marx and Max Weber as the two viable guides for the all-inclusive process of “modernization.” That interpretation offers a bipolar view of American society that leaves scant room for such as Dewey. On the one hand is the New Deal, exemplifying Max Weber's bureaucratic state and riveted by the charisma of Franklin Roosevelt. The value-free approach outlined by New Arnold, Dealer Thurman in The Symbols of Government (1935) echoed Weber's analysis of the organization of myths into government policy. And Harold Lasswell's formula of government as the problem of “who gets what” sums up the interest group coalition aspect of the Weberian New Deal perception. Only Rexford Tugwell, the most articulate of the New Dealers, has shown an inclination toward Dewey's instrumental approach. After some forty years of pondering the issues, Tugwell has come to be sharply critical about the lack of purposive vision in the New Deal's bureaucratic style. “The succeeding decades have shown,” concludes, Tugwell, “that in the 1930's we should have responded to the technological imperative. That, I still believe; and I believe Roosevelt missed the best opportunity we would ever have in our lifetime to recast the economy and redefine the objectives of our people.” Stated in In Search of Roosevelt (Harvard, 1972), p. 20. Tugwell makes it clear that the means for reconstruction he favored would be in line with Dewey's instrumentalism, not Marxism.Google Scholar On the other side, the distance between Dewey and the Marxist alternative has received close examination in Cork, Jim, “John Dewey, Karl Marx, and Democratic Socialism,” Antioch Review, IX (December, 1949), 435–452. Cork's view echoes the contention by Marxian theorists during the thirties like Sidney Hook and Max Eastman that Dewey should have paid closer attention to what Marxism and instrumentalism had in common. Yet, if Dewey was somewhat less than fair in his quick dismissal of Marxism, the Marxist attacks on Dewey were so crude and vituperative as almost to insure Dewey's alienation. See, for example, Selsam, Howard, Socialism and Ethics (Toronto, n.d.,) and Philosophy in Revolution, (New York, 1957). And Wells, Harry K., Pragmatism: Philosophy of Imperialism (New York, 1954). Revisionist interpretations of early twentieth century progressive reform as a vehicle for social control by business leadership have in recent days caused Dewey to be dragged once again onto the Marxist carpet. See, for example, the highly critical articles by Karier, Clarence J., “Liberalism and the Quest for Orderly Change,” History of Education Quarterly, 12 (Spring, 1972): 57–80, and by Karier's colleague, Feinberg, Walter, “The Conflict between Intelligence and Community in Dewey's Educational Philosophy,” Educational Theory, 19 (Summer, 1969): 236–248. The most direct restatement of the old Stalinist attack on Dewey is in David H. De Grood's “Intelligence and Radicalism in John Dewey's Philosophy,” Telos, 2 (Spring, 1969): 72–81. De Grood's position is ramified in the same issue by Riepe, Dale, “The Collapse of American Philosophical Naturalism,” 82–89, and Hansen, James E., “Hook, Liberalism and the Ideology of Naturalism,” 90–105.Google Scholar

6. Recalled by Hook, Sidney in John Dewey: An Intellectual Portrait. (New York, 1939), p. 24.Google Scholar

7. Dewey, , Individualism Old and New, (New York, 1930), p. 105.Google Scholar

8. Dewey, , “Why I Am Not a Communist,” Modern Monthly, VIII (April, 1934): 137. Dewey had built up other practical hedges against Marxist politics. In “Social Change and Its Human Direction,” Modern Quarterly, 5 (1931), Dewey argued that Marxists and captains of industries shared the fault of positing laws of historical inevitability. In “Who Might Make a New Party?” New Republic, 68 (April 1, 1931): 177–9, Dewey contended that any reform labeled Marxist or socialist would automatically discredit itself in the eyes of the American public.Google Scholar

9. Dewey, , “Introduction,” to Significant Paragraphs from Henry George's Progress and Poverty, ed. Brown, Harry Gunnison (New York, 1929), p. 2. Dewey's programs for political reform persistently echoed George's Single Tax strategy. In 1945 Dewey reiterated his belief in George by seconding the nomination of George to the Hall of Fame: “While I, personally, accept his theory of Land taxation, it is my belief as a technical and professional student of social philosophy, that the statement I made years ago holds good, even if his view on that point is not accepted.” Dewey to Royal Cortissoz, Sept. 18, 1945. For a discussion of the formation of Dewey's social activism and affinity for Henry George see Feuer, Lewis, “John Dewey and the Back to the People Movement in American Thought,” Journal of the History of Ideas, XX (Oct.-Dec., 1959): 545–566.Google Scholar

10. Dewey, , “A Great American Prophet,” Common Sense, III (April, 1934): p. 7.Google Scholar

11. Feuer, , “John Dewey and the Back to the People Movement.” Google Scholar

12. Alexander, Frederick Matthias, Man's Supreme Inheritance (New York, 1918), with an introduction by Dewey. Dewey also wrote introductions to two later Alexander works: Constructive Conscious Control of the Individual (New York, 1923); and The Use of the Self: Its Conscious Direction in Relation to Diagnosis, Functioning and the Control of Reaction (New York, 1932).Google Scholar

13. Dewey expressly endorsed Beard's economic interpretation of the Constitution in a letter to Scudder Klyce on July 5, 1915. On May 8, 1920, Dewey argued with Klyce on behalf of socialism, concluding that “I do not suppose you would deny that the existing system in America is essentially autocratic, and that that autocracy affects (of course) concrete politics.” Scudder Klyce Papers, Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress.Google Scholar

14. The story of Dewey's involvement in the war effort and his celebrated argument with Randolph Bourne and other pacifists is discussed in the preceding paper by Paul Bourke. Dewey's practical sense that the nation should make the best of a bad situation is conveyed in “What America Will Fight For,” New Republic, XII (August 18, 1917): 68–69; “Internal Social Reorganization after the War,” Journal of Race Development, VIII (April 1918): 385–400; and “What Are We Fighting For?” Independent, XCIV (June 22, 1918): 474, 480–483.Google Scholar

15. The story of Levinson's campaign is told in Stoner, John E., S. O. Levinson and the Pact of Paris: A Study in the Techniques of Influence (Chicago, 1942).Google Scholar

16. Dewey, , The Public and Its Problems (New York, 1927), pp. 126–127.Google Scholar

17. Dewey, , “Why I Am For Smith,” New Republic, 56 (Nov. 7, 1928): 320–1.Google Scholar

18. Dewey, , Impressions of Soviet Russia and the Revolutionary World: Mexico-China-Turkey, ed. Brickman, William W. (New York, 1964), p. 46.Google Scholar

19. Ibid., p. 72.Google Scholar

20. Ibid., p. 105.Google Scholar

21. Ibid., p. 50.Google Scholar

22. Ibid., p. 103.Google Scholar

23. Ibid., p. 105.Google Scholar

24. Jane Addams once made a pilgrimage to visit the saintly Tolstoy; in turn the influential Russian educational reformer, Aleksander Zelenko (1871–1953), stayed for a time at Hull House. Upon his return to Moscow in 1906 Zelenko and a friend who was to become equally prominent, Stanislav Shatskii (1878–1934), opened a settlement house and school on the Hull House model. In 1907 the school was closed on Tsarist orders and Shatskii and Zelenko arrested for “trying to plant socialism in the minds of little children.” Quoted in Brickman, , ed., Impressions of Soviet Russia, p. 17, 75fn.Google Scholar

25. Ibid., p. 99.Google Scholar

26. Ibid., p. 57.Google Scholar

27. Ibid., p. 59.Google Scholar

28. Ibid., p. 70.Google Scholar

29. Ibid., p. 11.Google Scholar

30. Dewey, , Not Guilty, Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Charges Made Against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials (New York, 1938). Dewey engaged in debate with Trotsky, rebutting Trotsky's claim that liberals were too timid in grasping unpleasant means ever to be able to bring about desirable social transformation. Trotsky, , “Their Morals and Ours,” The New International, IV (June 1938): 163–173. Dewey, , “Means and Ends,” The New International, IV (August, 1938): 232–233. In the autobiographical sketch he supplied the next year for the compilation of essays on his philosophy, The Philosophy of John Dewey , Schilpp, Paul, ed. (New York, 1939), Dewey declared that the Trotsky Commission episode was the culminating factor in the reinforcement through experience in social and political movements of his belief in the interdependence of means and ends.Google Scholar

31. Conkin, Paul, Puritans and Pragmatists, (New York, 1968), p. 402, passim.Google Scholar

32. Dewey, to Klyce, Scudder, May 11, 1915.Google Scholar

33. Dewey, , “From Absolutism to Experimentalism,” in Contemporary American Philosophy, Adams, G. P. and Montague, William Pepperell, eds., p. 19.Google Scholar

34. See: Pochmann, Henry, New England Transcendentalism and St. Louis Hegelianism, (New York, 1948), pp. 112–113.Google Scholar

35. Dewey, , German Philosophy and Politics, (New York, 1915), p. 132.Google Scholar

36. Ibid., p. 14.Google Scholar

37. Ibid., p. 76. In 1942 Dewey reissued the book with a new introduction on “Hitler's National Socialism.” Nazism seemed to Dewey the most dreadful example of misplaced German trust in “Destiny.” Dewey rejected any attempt to trace a direct influence by the orthodox philosophic tradition on Hitler's barbaric creed; yet, he added, “there is no blinking away the all but incredible one-to-one correspondence that has been proved by events to exist between the terms of the appeal of Hitler and the response aroused in the German people—a correspondence without which Hitler would have remained an obscure agitator with at most a nuisance value. Only a prepared soil and a highly favorable climate of opinion could have brought to fruition the seeds which Hitler sowed.” p. 14.Google Scholar

38. Ibid., pp. 53–54.Google Scholar

39. Walling, William English, Some Further Aspects of Socialism (New York, 1913)Google Scholar

40. For an illuminating account of the relationship of Hook and Eastman to Marx, Dewey and each other see Diggins, John P., “Getting Hegel Out of History: Marx Eastman's Quarrel with Marxism,” American Historical Review, 79 (Feb. 1974): 38–71. Calverton, from further on the periphery of Dewey's attention, pressed his writings upon Dewey in the spirit of an admirer but received little close attention in return. In a letter written on April 18, 1930, Calverton asked Dewey to take part in a “symposium on the doctrinal crisis in socialism”; but Dewey declined in his letter of April 21, 1930. Three other letters from Dewey, May 13, 1925; August 17, 1932; and October 3, 1934, display the same aloofness.Google Scholar

41. Dewey, to Klyce, Scudder, July 5, 1915.Google Scholar

42. Dewey, to Klyce, , May 13, 1915.Google Scholar

43. Dewey, to Klyce, , May 29, 1915.Google Scholar

44. Dewey, to Klyce, , July 5, 1915.Google Scholar

45. Dewey, to Klyce, , May 29, 1915.Google Scholar

46. Dewey, to Klyce, , June 19, 1915.Google Scholar

47. Dewey, , Characters and Events, Vol. I (New York, 1929), :108. Reprinted from Dewey's obituary of James in the Journal of Philosophy (1910).Google Scholar

48. Dewey, to Klyce, , May 29, 1915.Google Scholar

49. Dewey, to Klyce, , May 13, 1915.Google Scholar

50. Dewey, to Klyce, , April 1, 1927.Google Scholar

51. Dewey, to Klyce, , June 19, 1915.Google Scholar

52. Introductions to Scudder, Klyce, Universe (Winchester, Mass., 1921).Google Scholar

53. Dewey, to Klyce, , Oct. 18, 1927.Google Scholar

54. Dewey, to Klyce, , June 20, 1928.Google Scholar

55. Max Eastman describes the remark as having occurred during an interview with Freud, , summarized in “A Significant Memory of Freud,” New Republic, 104 (May 19, 1941). cf. Eastman, , “John Dewey: My Teacher and Friend,” in Great Companions (New York, 1942).Google Scholar

56. Feuer, Lewis, “The Standpoints of Dewey and Freud: A Contrast and Analysis,” Journal of Individual Psychology, 161 (1960): 119–136. A fuller but less incisive comparison is given in Levitt, Morton, Freud and Dewey on the Nature of Man (New York, 1960).Google Scholar

57. A useful introduction to the Freudian view, as related to social issues, is provided by Roazen, Paul, Freud, Political and Social Thought (New York, 1968).Google Scholar

58. Cited in Lamont, Corliss, ed., Dialogue on John Dewey (New York, 1959), p. 91.Google Scholar

59. Dewey, , Human Nature and Conduct (New York, 1922), p. 155.Google Scholar

60. Freud, , Psychoanalysis and Faith (1964), p. 118. Quoted in Roazen, , Freud, Political and Social Thought, p. 245.Google Scholar

61. Freud, , Standard Edition of His Writings, Vol. 21, pp. 8, 6. Quoted in Roazen, , p. 246.Google Scholar

62. Dewey, , Human Nature and Conduct, p. 166.Google Scholar

63. Ibid., p. 167.Google Scholar

64. Ibid., p. 168. Reason for believing that Dewey might have taken a personal as well as professional interest in Freud is heightened when one notes how closely the picture Dewey gives of himself as a young man prefigures the portrait by Erik Erikson in Childhood and Society (1950) of a typical American youth. Erikson, in Freudian perspective, contrasts his American adolescent with Hitler's childhood and the Bolshevik legend of Maxim Gorky's youth, thus including speculation about the patterns of German and Russian Soviet thought that so engaged Dewey in tension. Erikson presents his American youth as “Anglo-Saxon, mildly Protestant … shy … and emotionally retentive, as if he were saving himself for something to do with action and motion…. Neurotic anxiety is avoided by concentration on limited goals with circumscribed laws. Psychoanalytically speaking, the dominant defense mechanism is self-restriction.” (p. 308). Extending his conception to include a family with a strictly moral mother and a more easy-going father, much like Dewey's parents, Erikson asserts that such a situation “breeds, on the whole, undogmatic people…. It also makes it quite impossible for the American adolescent to become what his brothers and sisters in other large countries become so easily, uncompromising ideologists. Nobody can be sure he is right, but everybody must compromise for the sake of his future chance.” (p. 318). Erikson's American youth “will make an efficient and decent leader in a circumscribed job,” while remaining “strangely disinterested in the running of the nation.” (p. 321). Erikson's final plea reads almost like a paraphrase of Dewey's message in The Public and Its Problems: “For the sake of its emotional health, then, a democracy cannot afford to let matters develop to a point where intelligent youth … must leave matters of legislation, law, and international affairs, not to speak of war and peace, to ‘insiders’ and ‘bosses.’” (p. 323).Google Scholar

65. Dewey, , The Public and Its Problems. (New York, 1927), pp. 126–127.Google Scholar

66. Dewey, , Individualism Old and New, p. 120.Google Scholar

67. Dewey, , Liberalism and Social Action (New York, 1935), pp. 15–16.Google Scholar

68. Dewey, , “From Absolutism to Experimentalism,” p. 26.Google Scholar

69. Dewey, , “What I Believe,” reprinted in Kennedy, Gail, ed., Pragmatism and American Culture. (Boston, 1950), p. 31.Google Scholar

70. Dewey, , Art as Experience (New York, 1934), p. 326.Google Scholar

71. Dewey, , Logic, The Theory of Inquiry (New York, 1938), pp. iv–v.Google Scholar

72. Dewey, , Freedom and Culture (New York, 1939), p. 8.Google Scholar

73. Dewey, , “What I Believe, Revised,” p. 31.Google Scholar

74. Ibid., p. 35.Google Scholar

75. Dewey, to Lipman, Matthew, October 24, 1950. Matthew Lipman Paper, Special Collections, Butler Library, Colombia University.Google Scholar

76. See, especially, Brown, Bruce, Marx, Freud, and the Critique of Everyday Life (New York, 1973); King, Richard, The Party of Eros (New York, 1972); and Robinson, Paul, The Freudian Left (New York, 1969).Google Scholar

77. The significant story of the Frankfurt Institute is told in Jay, Martin, The Dialectical Imagination (Boston, 1973).Google Scholar

78. Dewey's anti-Stalinism found a prime target in the Progressive Party campaign of Henry Wallace. See Dewey, , “Wallace vs. a New Party,” New Leader, XXXI (October 30, 1948): iff. In rejoicing over Truman's victory, Dewey wrote to H. Gordon Hullfish on Nov. 16, 1948: “Now we know the New Deal was not just FDR. It's the American common sense and we can go ahead with courage.” But Dewey disclaimed the view most prominently represented in Arthur Schlesinger's influential The Vital Center (1949) that the New Deal represented the best of all possible worlds.Google Scholar

79. Martin Jay in The Dialectical Imagination refers often to the Frankfurt Institute's campaign against positivism but does not mention Dewey, thus suggesting the Institute's general neglect of pragmatism. In the Institute's Zeitschrift für Socialforschung, IX (1941): 144–148, Herbert Marcuse published a review of Dewey's Theory of Valuation in which Marcuse assumes Dewey to be a spokesman for positivism and then, rather than noting that Dewey's ideas actually bear important resemblance to those of Marxist Humanism, castigates the luckless American for not being loyal to falsely presumed positivist allies! Theodor Adorno performs a comparable sleight of hand in his “Veblen's Attack on Culture. Remarks Occasioned by the Theory of the Leisure Class.” Zeitschrift, IX (1941): 389–413. Adorno takes Veblen's close study of institutional structure and the psychology of pecuniary drives to be evidence of Veblen's capitulation to the status quo. Only one captivated by a society would take time away from the great struggle over economic place in order to ruminate on the abstract motives and feelings of society's victims. Marx, in contrast, Adorno insisted, “had no psychology at all,” a remarkable assertion that amounted to arguing that the best way to combat “false consciousness” was to be completely ignorant of its workings! Such rejection of the pragmatic view was more than a match for Dewey's aversion to Marxism! Google Scholar Dewey did have some things to say about the German refugee scholars, though not those associated with the Frankfurt Institute. Dewey's contacts were mostly with Alvin Johnson who led in creating the University-in-Exile as part of the New School for Social Research. To his collaborator, Arthur F. Bentley, Dewey noted that “so many of the Germans in the New School were so bound up with their ‘idealisms’ as to be more or less out of step with American life.” Dewey, to Bentley, , 20 March 1940, in John Dewey and Arthur F. Bentley: A Philosophical Correspondence, 1932–1951. ed. Ratner, Sidney, Altman, Jules, and Wheeler, James E. (Rutgers, 1964), p. 74.Google Scholar