Horace M. Kallen in the Heartland: The Midwestern Roots of American Pluralism

Abstract

The philosopher and social thinker Horace M. Kallen (1882–1974) is rightly known for coining the term and promoting the concept of cultural pluralism, the intellectual progenitor of multiculturalism created in the first part of the twentieth century to push back against the idea that Anglo-American culture should be normative in the United States and the assimilationist “melting pot” ideal. Kallen, who grew up in Boston after immigrating from Silesia, spent many decades at the New School for Social Research in New York City, which he helped found. Michael C. Steiner is the first historian to consider Kallen's eight years in the Midwest—as an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin—not as a deviation from the northeastern norm of his upbringing, education, and long maturity but instead as a pivotal time of ferment and generation. Steiner argues for the importance of the Midwest as a region in Kallen's development and...