An American Friendship: Horace Kallen, Alain Locke, and the Development of Cultural Pluralism

By David Weinfeld

In An American Friendship, David Weinfeld presents the biography of an idea, cultural pluralism, the intellectual precursor to modern multiculturalism. He roots its origins in the friendship between two philosophers, Jewish immigrant Horace Kallen and African American Alain Locke, who advanced cultural pluralism in opposition to both racist nativism and the assimilationist "melting pot." It is a simple idea—different ethnic groups can and should coexist in the United States, perpetuating their cultures for the betterment of the country as whole—and it grew out of the lived experience of this friendship between two remarkable individuals.

Kallen, a founding faculty member of the New School for Social Research, became a leading American Zionist. Locke, the first Black Rhodes Scholar, taught at Howard University and is best known as the intellectual godfather of the Harlem Renaissance and the editor of The New Negro in 1925. Their friendship began at Harvard and Oxford during the years 1906 through 1908 and was rekindled during the Great Depression, growing stronger until Locke's death in 1954. To Locke and Kallen, friendship itself was a metaphor for cultural pluralism, exemplified by people who found common ground while appreciating each other's differences. Weinfeld demonstrates how this understanding of cultural pluralism offers a new vision for diverse societies across the globe. An American Friendship provides critical background for understanding the conflicts over identity politics that polarize US society today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: May 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781501763113

Book preview

Cover: An American Friendship: Horace Kallen, Alain Locke, and the Development of Cultural Pluralism, HORACE KALLEN, ALAIN LOCKE, AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF CULTURAL PLURALISM by David Weinfeld

AN AMERICAN FRIENDSHIP

HORACE KALLEN, ALAIN LOCKE, AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF CULTURAL PLURALISM

DAVID WEINFELD

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

Ithaca and London

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Author’s Note

Introduction

1. From Berenstadt to Boston

2. The Talented among the Tenth

3. Locke and Kallen, Student and Teacher

4. American Pluralists, Friends at Oxford

5. The Plural Is Political

6. Plural in Culture, Universal in Religion

7. Friendship Rekindled, Pluralism Refined

8. Locke’s Legacy, Kallen’s Memory

Conclusion

Notes

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My first thanks go to the editors at Cornell University Press who made this book a reality. Michael McGandy recognized the project’s potential from the beginning and never stopped believing in it. Sarah Grossman saw it through to the end, and I am thrilled with the result. Thanks to two anonymous reviewers who made this book much better. Thanks to Kirsten Elmer, Michelle Scott, and the team at Westchester Publishing Services for the copyediting and to Enid Zafran for doing the index. Thanks also to Lexington Books and to Northwestern University Press for allowing me to include previously published material as part of this book.

Writing a book is emotionally taxing, particularly for those who already suffer from mental illness. Over the years, in different cities, various therapists, psychologists, and psychiatrists have helped keep me on the right path. I owe them all a debt of gratitude.

As a student in New York University’s joint doctoral program in Hebrew and Judaic studies and history, my primary adviser, Hasia Diner, advised me to take what was a seminar paper and turn it into a dissertation. This was excellent advice. Along the way, she offered incredibly thorough feedback—red-inked page after red-inked page—that made the final product vastly improved. Since I graduated, she has remained in my corner, providing more advice and encouragement for which I am eternally grateful.

Rounding out my dissertation committee, my secondary adviser, Thomas Bender, helped ground the dissertation in American intellectual history and offered insightful comments throughout the writing process. He also ran a terrific monthly seminar on US history where I was able to share my work with peers. Martha Hodes inspired me with her beautiful narrative style of writing. David Engel helped situate the project in modern Jewish intellectual history. Jonathan Holloway, the external reader, provided incredibly insightful commentary at the dissertation defense and has championed my work ever since.

I was also inspired and stimulated by the teaching of other NYU faculty members, especially Larry Wolff, who taught me about nationalism; Linda Gordon, whose class led me to discover Horace Kallen; and Jeffrey Sammons, whose class led me to discover Alain Locke. At Harvard, where I received my undergraduate degree, several professors also influenced my thought and supported my continuing education, particularly Peter Machinist, Stephan Thernstrom, and Ruth Wisse.

Fellow graduate students at NYU provided intellectual stimulation, laughter, and friendship, especially David Benkof, Greg Childs, Andrea Cooper, Daniella Doron, Sandy Fox, Gabby Goldberg, Julie Yanofsky Goldstein, Hillel Gruenberg, Nick Hersh, Shira Klein, Elizabeth Knott, David Koffman, Shira Kohn, Rachel Kranson, Geoff Levin, Jed Lewinsohn, Atiba Pertilla, Lara Rabinovitch, Afrah Richmond, Josh Teplitsky, Amy Weiss, and Peter Wirzbicki. I want to especially thank Jessica Lynne Pearson, my ice cream buddy, who did a superb job looking over the book’s proofs and is one of the most brilliant and kindest scholars I know.

I also want to share my appreciation for the three academic organizations that have been most helpful to my career—the Association for Jewish Studies (AJS), the African American Intellectual History Society, and the Society for US Intellectual History.

Scholars at numerous institutions have contributed to my intellectual development. Many years ago, I spoke on an AJS conference panel on Kallen featuring Daniel Greene and Kevin Zdiara, with comments by Stephen Whitfield, which would prove crucial to my intellectual development. Over the years, many other scholars have offered comments, criticisms, and encouragement, including Eric Goldstein, Cheryl Greenberg, David Hollinger, Laura Levitt, Tony Michels, Noam Pianko, and Jonathan Sarna. Jonathan Karp, with whom I share many interests, chaired a terrific panel on Black-Jewish relations at the AJS with me, Gabby Goldberg, and Robert Greene II. Since then he has been a great mentor and friend.

During my two two-week research trips to the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati, Dana Herman, Jason Kalman, and Kevin Proffitt were incredibly helpful and kind, and Dana’s stewardship of the American Jewish Archives Journal provided me with the opportunity to publish on American Zionism, including a healthy dose of Kallen content. Dustin and Alyson Lee showed me around the city and made my visits to Cincy much more pleasant.

Thanks also to the archivists at the Center for Jewish History; at both the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and the American Jewish Historical Society; at Houghton Library and the Harvard University Archives; at the Bodleian Library, Rhodes House, Hertford College, at Oxford University; at the Library of Congress; at Columbia University; and at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the Dorot Jewish Division of the New York Public Library. After leaving New York, I often stayed with my friend Nathan Burstein to complete my research there.

I cannot recall how many times I visited the Alain Locke Papers at the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University. Those trips to Washington, DC, were made possible by my friend Flora Lindsay-Herrera, who kindly allowed me to stay in her spare room within walking distance of Howard. When this project began, I read the Locke Papers in a cramped basement archive without Wi-Fi and was not allowed to take photographs. When my research was done, the archives had moved to a beautiful reading room on the main floor, with Wi-Fi, and photographs were allowed. Through it all, there was the recently retired JoEllen ElBashir, an incredibly talented, helpful, and kind archivist who was crucial to making this book possible. She has my eternal gratitude.

I have had the honor of appearing on three conference panels about Locke, putting my work in conversation with such excellent scholars as Davarian Baldwin, Melanie Chambliss, Jay Garcia, Brittany Hall, Leonard Harris, and Amato Nocera. Correspondence with Christopher Buck on Locke’s Baha’i faith was also valuable. My affiliation with the African American Intellectual History Society has been especially fruitful, particularly in introducing me to Christopher Cameron. He, along with Keisha Blain and Ashley Farmer, solicited my essay on Locke’s Baha’i faith for their volume on Black intellectual history.

Shortly before the pandemic, I participated in a workshop on Kallen at NYU, organized by Clemens Schmidt and including Hasia Diner, Matthew Kaufman, Esther Schor, and Michael Steiner. Each of these superb scholars helped shape the book in its final stages.

When I first met Adam Etinson and Julian Nemeth back in Montreal, none of us yet knew we would pursue academia, but I have benefited tremendously from their friendship along the way. Over the years, I have befriended many other academics who have made life better. An incomplete list includes Danny Bessner, Charles Chavis Jr., Ari Cohen, Yedida Eisenstat, Andrew Hartman, Daniel Heller, and Eli Rosenblatt.

I have found a new scholarly community in Richmond, Virginia. At Virginia Commonwealth University, Michael Dickinson and Rohan Kalyan have become close friends. I have also benefited from the friendship and insight of Aspen Brinton, Christopher Brooks, Melis Hafez, Chioke I’Anson, Samaneh Oladi, Isabelle Richman, Kate Roach, Ryan Smith, Faedah Totah, Tricia Vesely, Jon Waybright, and Mark Wood. I met historians Samantha Sealey and Geoff Traugh at NYU, but in Richmond they have become great friends and supporters, as have Josh Chafetz, Jonathan Kruschwitz, and fellow Canadian Gill Frank. Peter and Lindsay Eubanks, a scholar and a lawyer, are dear friends who appreciate our differences, and we theirs.

I have found a wonderful religious community in Richmond at the Conservative synagogue Temple Beth-El. Friendships with Stephen Frost, Sherrina Gibson, Gary Goldberg, and Kristen Gorin have made my life richer. I also count our terrific clergy as friends. Rabbi Michael Knopf and cantor Dara Rosenblatt have renewed my commitment to Judaism, to ahavat yisrael, and to appreciating difference while finding common ground.

Other friends outside academia kept me sane, especially Mike Conti, Joanna Giordano, Alexia Korberg, Clara Magram, Margaret Mede, Matt Osten, Seth Ross, Ronit Rubinstein, Mike Wagner, and Charles Wasserman.

Along with my friendship circle, my family has expanded. Half of my in-laws are from West Virginia and, needless to say, grew up very differently from how I did. But my father-in-law, Rex, and his wife, Kathy, have kindly welcomed me into their home more times than I can remember. So has my wife’s wonderful cousin Jess, along with her husband, Jeremy; her daughters, Calla and Cadyn; and Jess’s mother, Caron. Tonya, Kristen, and numerous other Patterson cousins have become my giant extended family.

My amazing mother-in-law, Nancy, made this book possible by watching over our baby daughter and constantly going beyond the call of duty in providing love and support. Her wonderful boyfriend, Carl, is as reliable as they come and has run countless errands and offered his services whenever needed.

Locke celebrated pride of lineage, and I certainly take pride in mine. My grandparents, Arnold and Irene Weinfeld and Sigmund and Nina Zelkowitz, all survived the Holocaust while numerous relatives, including their parents, perished. They made lives for themselves in Montreal, and family became incredibly important. On my mother’s side, my aunt Lily and cousins Ryan and Jason; Ryan’s wife, Ruth, and children, Josh and Nina; and on my father’s side, his cousin David and David’s children, Dara and Michael, form my small but loving family.

My father, Morton Weinfeld, is a sociology professor, and his influence inspired me to pursue an academic career. I cherish our conversations and the far too infrequent time we get to spend together. I miss our annual tradition of attending the AJS conference as a father-son duo, a tradition I hope resumes soon. I am always encouraged when he tells me how much he loves me and how proud he is of me.

My mother, Phyllis Zelkowitz, probably knows Kallen and Locke as well as anyone by now. She has edited countless drafts of this project, when it was a dissertation and then as a book. She also did an amazing job looking over the proofs. This book would not be here without her. She is a wonderful editor and an even greater mother, providing me with unconditional love and support through good times and bad.

My sisters, Rebecca and Joanna Weinfeld, are more than just sisters. We jokingly call ourselves the three best friends that anyone could have, but it’s not really a joke. I treasure our closeness and the love and support they provide. Their husbands, Andrew and Jer, are the best brothers-in-law I could ask for, and their children, Ellie, Abby, and Ezra, fill me with joy.

The biggest bundle of joy came in January 2020, as I was revising this manuscript, shortly before a global pandemic set in. Opal Donna Weinfeld reminds me of me: loud, always moving, and a voracious eater. I hope she grows up in a world defined by what is best in cultural pluralism.

My rock, teammate, and best friend through this journey has been my brilliant wife, Marjie Patterson. We had three weddings, one in Toronto, one in Richmond, and one in Lewisburg, West Virginia, and strangely she agreed to marry me each time. I am very lucky. She edits my work, offers counsel when I have questions that concern the minutest details, and always encourages me to write better and be better. She is the most efficient, pragmatic, hardworking person I know. She has endless reserves of energy that leave me in awe, and her intelligence and kindness make our lives so much better. She is an incredible mother to Opal and a source of strength to me. She helped me find my way back to a religious Judaism that feels right. She provides me with renewed confidence and a world of possibilities. With deep love, respect, and humility, I dedicate this book to her.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

In this book, I include quotations that contain racial slurs to adhere to the historical record; to fully communicate the sentiment conveyed by different historical actors; and, most important, to contrast these slurs to different terms employed by the same actors or by other contemporaneous figures.

Introduction

What Difference Does the Difference Make? Cultural Pluralism as Friendship

In the fall of 1906, in a discussion section of the Harvard professor George Santayana’s class on Plato’s philosophy, a student named Alain Locke argued with his teaching assistant Horace Kallen. They did not argue about the world of forms or the nature of the good or the parable of the cave. They argued about color and humanity and difference. Locke, an African American, insisted he was a human being and that his color ought not to make any difference in his life or in people’s perception of him. Kallen, a German-born Jewish immigrant, believed otherwise. He asserted that Locke’s position, however heartfelt and idealistic, was mistaken. Kallen insisted Locke’s color "had to make a difference, and more important, it had to be accepted and respected and enjoyed for what it was."¹ That disagreement sowed the seeds of friendship and watered a very fertile, very American idea—cultural pluralism, the ancestor of today’s multiculturalism.

The budding philosophers continued their conversation the following year at Oxford University. Kallen was finishing his doctoral dissertation on a Sheldon fellowship, and Locke had been awarded a Rhodes Scholarship, the first Black man to be so honored. When the two men spoke in England, it was not as student and teacher but as peers, as friends. Locke again exclaimed, I am a human being. What difference does the difference make? We are all alike Americans.² Yet for Americans at Oxford, the difference made a big difference. In November 1907, the white southern Rhodes Scholars did not invite Locke to the American Club Thanksgiving dinner. Angered at this slight against his former student, Kallen invited Locke to tea.

Kallen’s stance solidified the friendship, sparking further conversation. He and Locke debated the question of how the differences made differences, with the term cultural pluralism emerging from those very interactions. Kallen explained this concept in simple, clear language as the right to be different, a response to nativist bigotry and the assimilationist melting pot.³ He first used cultural pluralism in print in his 1924 book Culture and Democracy in the United States. But the phrase’s genesis in his friendship with Locke illuminates how it became the most important idea about American diversity to emerge until it spawned multiculturalism in the 1960s.

This book tells the story of the friendship between Kallen and Locke to elucidate the idea of cultural pluralism they developed. The two were never best friends. No photograph of them together exists. At the beginning of their friendship, Kallen held racist views toward Black people, and Locke held anti-Semitic opinions of Jews. The friendship was strongest from 1907 to 1908, when they were at Oxford. It waned with geographic distance but rekindled in 1935. They grew closer over the next two decades until Locke’s death in 1954.

The two philosophy professors’ linked lives not only birthed the term cultural pluralism but also provided a paradigmatic example of cultural pluralism in action. Kallen and Locke bonded over shared experience as intellectual outsiders, a Jew and a Black man living and working among white Christians. They also shared values as pragmatists, individualists, elitists, and secularists committed to ethnic particularism, high cultural expression, and communal leadership. Above all, they shared an appreciation of difference, including their own differences. These commonalities and differences forged their friendship.

The Kallen-Locke relationship illustrates their understanding of friendship as the ideal metaphor for cultural pluralism. For both men, whereas family would come to symbolize stale sameness, friends found common bonds while accepting and appreciating their differences. Although many other metaphors exist to describe American diversity, from melting pots to symphonies to salad bowls, friendship reflects a process that all individuals engaged in, even more than cooking and music.

Their mutually beneficial friendship came with struggle, as Kallen overcame his racism and Locke his anti-Semitism. In becoming friends, neither erased his differences, but instead they embraced each other’s distinctions and learned from each other’s culture. Their complicated relationship shows that cultural pluralism, befriending the stranger, can be difficult yet rewarding to those who make the effort, particularly in a society that values diversity. Locke called this value reciprocity, suggesting different cultures could metaphorically be friends, borrowing, exchanging, and learning from one another, just as individuals like he and Kallen did.⁴

As the fathers of cultural pluralism, Kallen and Locke were important figures in their own right. A leading American Zionist, Jewish educator, and promoter of secular Hebraic culture, Horace Meyer Kallen (1882–1974) was a disciple of William James and an exponent of Jamesian philosophical pragmatism, a professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison from 1911 to 1918, and a founding faculty member of the New School for Social Research in New York City in 1919, where he taught philosophy and psychology for four decades. In his long life, he wrote on many topics, including the book of Job, consumer cooperatives, adult education, and environmentalism.

Alain LeRoy Locke (1885–1954) has an even larger place in the intellectual history of the United States.⁵ He became the first African American Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and then a professor at Howard University in 1912, where he taught until 1953. Locke’s legacy endures, as he is considered the intellectual godfather of the Black aesthetics movement of the 1920s known known as the Negro Renaissance or Harlem Renaissance. He brought together brilliant Black artists and intellectuals, including Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, in this New Negro movement. He penned its manifesto, The New Negro, and edited a compilation by that name in 1925. In a 1927 letter, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote, Locke is by long odds the best trained man among the younger American Negroes.⁶ As a pragmatist philosopher, Locke explored value theory and relativism, and as a critic he wrote on numerous subjects, from art, music, and literature to the race problem and adult education. But all his intellectual endeavors, like those of Kallen, were linked to his efforts to navigate the universal and the particular, nearing that unreachable equilibrium through the American idea of cultural pluralism.

Cultural pluralism emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century as an idea that both described the reality of the United States and articulated an ideal for the nation’s future. It developed in opposition to discriminatory nativism as well as the more progressive assimilationist ideal of the melting pot, the title of the popular 1908 play written by British Jewish writer Israel Zangwill. Contra nativism and the melting pot concept, cultural pluralists believed ethnic groups could and should maintain and develop their particular heritages while peacefully coexisting in the United States. Kallen hoped to replace the culinary metaphor of the melting pot with a musical version, the symphony of civilization, with different cultures represented by instruments in an orchestra playing in harmony. He may have borrowed the musical metaphor from Locke. Regardless, Kallen and Locke argued that this process would enrich the constituent cultures and the nation as a whole by allowing each to borrow and learn from the other.

During the First World War, cultural pluralism offered an appealing contrast to the absolutist nationalism exploding across Europe. Locke and Kallen championed American heterogeneity as freer, more modern, and more interesting than the homogenous and monotonous countries of the Old World. The melting pot, insofar as it represented coercive assimilation, seemed better suited for European nationalism than for American democracy. Cultural pluralism offered a path for Black people and Jews to navigate between universalism and particularism, the central binaries of African American and Jewish history.

Neither Kallen nor Locke had any use for cultural uniformity. They embraced particularistic pluralism over bland universalism. Locke’s and Kallen’s varied and distinguished careers, along with their experiences and relationships, reflected the manyness at the heart of cultural pluralism. They rejected monism in favor of a universe containing multitudes, including a variety of cultural groups. At the individual level, cultural pluralism allowed for dual and hybrid identities. Its very essence favored hyphenation, a concept both Kallen and Locke embraced, in which two or more identities coexist within a single person.

Identity is not a tangible thing but a feeling of loyalty to a particular community and a distinct heritage, a feeling that could coexist with other loyalties and wax or wane over time. Cultural pluralists preferred open borders between communities that could shift without disappearing or compromising the integrity of those communities. Kallen and Locke agreed cultural pluralism was only possible under democracy, as it was an inherently democratic idea, allowing individuals the freedom to preserve their identities and to build ethnic enclaves without segregation, and creating a framework where all identities and communities were equal.

As an idea that celebrated diversity, cultural pluralism was foundational to the development of modern multiculturalism. There are at least two significant differences between the two ideas. First, cultural pluralism, as envisioned by Kallen and Locke, was largely secular. Kallen and Locke lumped Jews with Black people, Italians, Germans, and Anglo-Saxons as ethnic or cultural groups—they usually called them races or nations—not with religious groups like Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, and Hindus. Both Kallen and Locke criticized mainstream religion and saw secular ideas and aesthetics as the anchors of modern cultures.⁷ Multiculturalism, as espoused in the United States, Canada, and elsewhere, is more embracing of religious distinctions woven into the tapestry of diverse societies.

Second, in embracing religious distinctions, multiculturalism reveals itself to be concerned with popular culture, not only religious rituals and spirituality but also food, fashion, and mass entertainment. Kallen and Locke’s cultural pluralism, however, was more elitist and oriented toward intellectualism. For American intellectuals in the first quarter of the twentieth century, cultural pluralism went beyond an expression of ethnic solidarity. It entailed not simply preserving ancestral heritage but rather building something new by forging intergroup friendships, networks, and intellectual communities and by providing aesthetic portrayals of ethnic particularity and hybridity. Locke and Kallen hoped their movements would spread high culture to the masses—hence their shared interest in adult education. But they 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.

The Kallen-Locke friendship was different from other stories of Black-Jewish relations. Most such collaborations of that period occurred on the political or economic level, through shared commitments to social justice, mutual experience of discrimination, and self-interested pragmatism—the conviction that protecting Jews also protects Black people and vice versa. Locke and Kallen connected on a cultural and intellectual level. Many Jewish philanthropists and communists who allied with African Americans were deeply assimilated. Kallen was different: he rejected assimilation through his secular endorsement of Hebraism and Zionism. Similarly, Locke never affiliated with the Black church but was dedicated to developing Black culture. Their friendship went beyond a shared commitment to socialism or philanthropy. Both men overcame their prejudices and formed a genuine friendship based on shared values, intellectual interests, and recognition and appreciation of cultural difference.

Locke and Kallen were connected in their dedication to cultural nationalism. According to Moses Rischin, "The most striking evidence of the impact of Kallen’s theory of cultural pluralism upon any ethnic group was in fact exemplified in the career of Alaine [sic] Locke, who became the father of the New Negro and the champion of the Harlem Renaissance."⁸ Locke’s cultural nationalism and his appreciation for his African past were the areas that overlapped the most with Kallen’s cultural pluralism and Zionism. Both men envisioned a rebirth for a long-oppressed people in which culture would play a major role.

In the 1956 book The Negro in American Culture, by Margaret Just Butcher, a work based on materials left by Alain Locke, Butcher cites Kallen for his repudiation of the ‘melting pot’ idea and deliberate cultivation of differences. Unlike Kallen, and like Locke, she applies his doctrine specifically to the case of African Americans: Because the Negro has fought against superficial differences and intolerance for so long, he is identified with the idea of tolerance and thoroughgoing respect for all races and cultures.⁹

The New Negro movement, as Locke imagined it, served to prove African Americans could produce elite secular culture through exquisite artistic and intellectual achievement. This would earn Black people a place within the American framework of cultural pluralism. By advancing Black cultural nationalism, somewhat paradoxically, Locke was helping himself, and other African Americans, integrate into the broader society of the United States.¹⁰

Kallen’s cultural nationalism was rooted in a similar paradox, ethnic assertion in the service of assimilation. For him, this cultural nationalism displayed itself as Zionism. Kallen was also a political Zionist who endorsed the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. But for him, and unlike other political Zionists like Theodor Herzl, the culture of the Jewish state mattered a great deal. For Kallen, that culture needed to be Hebraic, a secular Jewish culture with roots in Jewish religious history.

Kallen sought to develop Hebraism in the United States. His was a political and cultural Zionism and a cultural Diasporic Jewish nationalism. It was also a thoroughly modern Zionism that he rooted in progressivism, secularism, and democracy, values that the United States shared. As Matthew Kaufman argues, by embracing modern science, Kallen became something of a prophet of secular Judaism and fused American democracy, secularism, and Jewishness into an interconnected whole.¹¹ Thus, Zionism, a movement dedicated to nation building in Palestine/Israel, was for Kallen a means to further Americanization while preserving Jewish culture.

Kallen’s and Locke’s different experiences led them to different expressions of cultural pluralism. As Kallen admitted, as a white man, unlike the Negro, he could ‘pass.’ ¹² He benefited from white privilege. Though he experienced anti-Semitism on more than one occasion, he never had to deal with the intense racism that Locke endured. Locke’s race proved inescapable, try as he might to escape it, even by fleeing to England. Kallen’s religion proved much easier to abandon. He affirmed and shaped his Jewish identity on his own secular Zionist terms. Nobody forced him in that direction. Locke, meanwhile, faced a starker choice, to accept and embrace his Black identity or to live in denial and fight hopelessly against the strictures of a racialized society. The world would not let him enjoy the universalism he might have preferred.

Given these different contexts, Kallen and Locke articulated versions of cultural pluralism that were similar but not identical. Kallen, secure in his whiteness, sought to build a strong Hebraic culture so Jews would not disappear into the American melting pot. Locke knew his people could not fully assimilate given the extent of racism in the United States. He hoped to use the tools of Western civilization to form a modern Black culture that African Americans would take pride in for its own sake and employ in the fight against prejudice. Despite this difference, they united in their commitment to cultural particularism, interethnic learning, and secular humanism. During the First World War, as the United States turned toward religious pluralism, Locke and Kallen argued that ethnic groups should develop elite secular cultures to contribute to the international community of arts and letters.¹³

Their story enlightens and entertains because the protagonists had colorful histories. Born in Germany, the son of an Orthodox rabbi, Kallen moved to Boston at age five. By high school he had abandoned Judaism, but at Harvard he became a secular Zionist. As a graduate student there, he spent a fellowship year at Oxford, where he picked up an entirely affected English accent, which he maintained for the rest of his life. He wrote poetry about the Harvard philosophy department. Kallen signed his letters alternately with the Hebrew shalom u’vracha, meaning peace and blessing, or the decidedly pagan May the gods keep you well and merry. When something amused him, he said it tickled [his] gizzard.

The Philadelphia-born Locke, for his part, stood five feet tall, weighed a hundred pounds, was gay and raised Episcopalian, but also embraced the Ethical Culture movement and in 1918 converted to the Baha’i faith. When his mother died, he placed her corpse on a chair in his apartment and had guests talk to her as if she were alive. The Harvard graduate, first Black Rhodes Scholar, longtime philosophy professor at Howard University, and leader of the Harlem Renaissance had been born Allan Locke, but in high school he added the i to his first name to sound French and sophisticated. Locke and Kallen were brothers in pretentiousness.

This narrative extends from their early lives, before they knew each other, to their meeting and friendship at Harvard and Oxford, their drifting apart through the prime of their careers, and the rekindling of their friendship later in life. After Locke’s death in 1954, Kallen honored their friendship by continuing to spread the gospel of cultural pluralism for the next two decades.

For Kallen and Locke, cultural pluralism facilitated cultural preservation and enhancement, along with acculturation into the American scene. Can multiculturalism fulfill the same function today in the United States, Canada, and elsewhere? Perhaps. Understanding the origins of cultural pluralism can help us make sense of modern multiculturalism, its strengths and shortcomings. By looking at the friendship between Locke and Kallen, we can envision new possibilities for navigating ethnic and religious diversity today, new strategies for rebuilding frayed bonds between Black people and Jews in the United States, and new avenues for applying philosophical pragmatism to problems of identity and community. Or we can just enjoy a really good story. Before we do, however, we need to delve deeper into ideas of cultural pluralism and friendship, and how Kallen and Locke understood those ideas.

As a Jew and an African American, respectively, Kallen and Locke were outsiders in the United States and England. Yet both men were enthusiastic outsiders. They expressed enthusiasm for elite cultural institutions they wished to join, Harvard and Oxford. They took pride in their affiliations with these universities, while knowing their affiliation did not entitle them to the sense of belonging white Protestants felt. Locke and Kallen also took a measure of pride in being outsiders, in proving themselves worthy, and in fostering mutually beneficial relationships between their ancestral communities and the wider civilization in which they lived. As enthusiastic outsiders, they became friends and developed the idea of cultural pluralism out of shared experience.

Biographical parallels reflect similarities in the cultural movements they helped lead. A leader of the Harlem Renaissance, Locke possessed what Paul Allen Anderson calls the aestheticist dream of elite cultural production.¹⁴ Locke encouraged the use of African and African American source material, rooted in the Black American experience, to build a modern, sophisticated Black culture. Kallen never achieved Locke’s prominence, but he helped found the Menorah movement, which was dedicated to advancing secular Jewish culture, called Hebraism. Though Hebraists were not necessarily Zionist, for Kallen, the cultural and political movements were inextricably linked, and he passionately supported Jewish statehood in Palestine. As liberal nationalists, Locke and Kallen envisioned cultural pluralism creating space for ethnic communities to flourish in the United States.

Although they did not always call it by that name, Kallen and Locke wrote about cultural pluralism extensively. More important than writing about it, they lived it. As Daniel Greene observes, cultural pluralism is not only an abstract concept but also a lived experience.¹⁵ To understand it, one must go beyond Locke’s and Kallen’s philosophical writings and investigate their private lives. Analysis of their everyday actions illuminates their most celebrated texts and provides a lens to read between the lines of their often vague and dense prose. This entails looking at how Kallen and Locke socialized, how they spent their leisure time, how they formed friendships and romantic relationships, and how they privately responded to professional endeavors. These personal moments demonstrate how they engaged with ethnic, racial, and religious diversity and crafted a world of cultural pluralism for themselves.

Philosophers grappled with friendship long before Kallen and Locke. Aristotle asserted that no one would choose to live without friends but possessing all other good things. The ancient Macedonian identified three types of friendship, that based on utility, that grounded in pleasure, and last, and greatest, that based on virtue. We make friends with people who help us, with people whose company we enjoy, and with those we admire as peers.¹⁶

Kallen and Locke’s friendship shared all these characteristics. It provided them with professional opportunities, introductions to colleagues and new friends, and topics for scholarship and teaching.