John Dos Passos wrote, that if ever a man had a ghost it was Bourne:
A tiny twisted unscared ghost in a black cloak
hopping along the grimy old brick and brownstone
streets still left in downtown New York,
crying out in a shrill soundless giggle:
War is the health of the state.
Dos Passos, 1919 (N.Y.: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1932), pp. 105-106.
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When World War I erupted it came as a surprise to the overwhelming majority of American intellectuals. Its barbarity stuck them as anachronistic and they tended to view the conflict as a temporary sidetrack in the march of civilization, an expression of residual animal instincts. The dawn of the Enlightenment and the tremendous progress made in the Nineteenth Century made war seem quite uncharacteristic (in their view) of humanity's evolving nature.
Of course, they saw themselves as important and instrumental in defining and fine tuning that nature. On the leading edge of political and......
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