454 Making It New: 1900–1945prescience. In it, Bourne attacked the idea of “the melting pot,” which, he said,
reflected “English-American conservatism” and “washed out into a tasteless, color-
less fluid of uniformity.” Instead, he anticipated “a new and more adventurous ideal,”
“a federation of cultures” in which each immigrant community could retain the
“distinctiveness of their native cultures” and so be “more valuable and interesting to
each other for being different.” America, he argued, was destined to be “the first
international nation,” “not a nationality but a trans-nationality, a weaving back
and forth ... of many threads of all sizes and colors.” And in this “transnational”
mosaic, each American would enjoy a “dual citizenship”: a cosmopolitan double
consciousness which, unlike the dual consciousness described by Du Bois, would
be a privilege and a possibility rather than a burden. To this “novel international
nation,” a “future America” woven out of the “threads of living and potent cultures,”
Bourne gave the name “the Beloved Community.” It was a potent expression of
the belief in a multicultural community that has sustained many American writers.
And, as Bourne saw it, it offered a way out, liberation from the social divisions and
“Anglo-Saxon predominance” characteristic of the society around him.
Michael Gold was born Yitzhak Granich to Jewish immigrants on the Lower
East Side of New York City. The major themes of his work are derived from that
background. Yitzhak was anglicized to Isaac; then, in adolescence, evidently
dreaming dreams of glory of the kind that persuaded Fitzgerald’s James Gatz to
rename himself Jay Gatsby, he took the name Irwin. It was in 1919–1920 that he
took the name Michael Gold, in honor of a Jewish veteran of the Civil War who, he
said, had fought to “free the slaves.” And already, embittered by the failure of his
father’s business and aroused by a demonstration he witnessed in Union Square
in 1914, the commitment suggested by this final name change had prompted him
to write. As a youth, Gold recalled, he had “no politics ... except hunger,” but now he
gravitated to the political left and a lifelong involvement with the Communist Party.
His first piece was published in 1914 in The Masses, the radical magazine edited by
Max Eastman (1883–1969) and Floyd Dell. It was, typically, a poem about three
anarchists who had died in a bomb explosion. Not long after, he was to publish a
more important piece, an essay entitled “Toward Proletarian Art” arguing for a
literature by workers rather than bourgeois leftists, about workers and for workers.
If any single work was responsible for initiating the proletarian movement in
American literature, then this was it. Moving to Greenwich Village from the Lower
East Side, Gold became involved in the leftist literary circles centered around
Eugene O’Neill and John Reed (1887–1920), the writer and activist whose most
important work was an eyewitness account of the Russian Revolution, Ten Days
That Shook the World (1919). He left the United States for a while to avoid the
draft but, on returning in 1920, he became editor of The Liberator, the successor to
the suppressed Masses. Then, when The Liberator became wholly political, he helped
found The New Masses, becoming editor-in-chief of the new magazine in 1928.
His fiery columns, notable for their polemical communist views and their espousal
of the cause of proletarian literature, were to be collected in The Mike Gold Reader
(1954) and Mike Gold: A Literary Anthology (1972).GGray_c04.indd 454ray_c 04 .indd 454 8 8/1/2011 7:54:00 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 00 AM