11
Berlin Stories
Alain Locke’s return trip to England at the end of April 1910 contained a welcome surprise: the Pan-Africanist bishop Alexander Walters was also on board the Lusitania. The renowned bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, co-organizer of the Afro-American Council and, more recently, sympathizer with Du Bois’s Niagara Movement was on the first leg of a maiden voyage to Africa to organize AME Zion conferences in Liberia and across West Africa. Locke and Walters conversed extensively as Locke judged him one of the most cosmopolitan “representative men of our race,” committed to forging alliances between Africans and African Americans. It is likely Walters confirmed for Locke what Seme championed—that Africa was the crucial field of development for enlightened African Americans. Once Walters reached Liberia, he claimed, “a thrill of joy possessed me as I stepped from the boat on to the shores of my fatherland.” Not only did this transatlantic meeting further encourage Locke to visit Africa but it also launched a lifelong friendship between the two men.
Back in London, Locke visited the Daily News and the Manchester Guardian trying to obtain additional commissions for his travel scheme before heading to Oxford. He probably would have been better off staying in London. Not long after reaching Oxford, Locke was notified he would have to appear again before the Vice Chancellor’s Court because of more unpaid debts. This time his creditor was the Oxford Wine Company, whose bill he had run up hosting so many gatherings in his rooms for the Cosmopolitan Club, the Rationalist Society, and his friends. This time he owed £3, 9 s, and 1 d, and when he appeared before Judge Holland on May 27, he again could not pay his debt, even though he had asked his mother to borrow money on her salary to send to him. On June 3, he would have to appear in court yet again for an overdue debt to Admanson and O. of Oxford. The Chancellor Court Record reads: “defendant appeared. Adjourned for a week. Defendant to have the costs of today. Consent signed in meantime for payment of Debt and L1..18..0 costs as follows: L3 on 9 July and the balance on or before 1st Oct. 1910.”1
Locke was close to destitute, unable to pay these and other debts as well. His trip to America had exhausted the family’s resources, and Mary was worried. When he suggested her coming over to Europe that summer, she dismissed it as absurd. She was right. If she had come, neither of them would have any money for the fall, when he might have to return to Philadelphia. A note of criticism appeared in her letters as she learned how committed he was to remaining in Europe. Magazine and newspaper work was unreliable, she reminded her son. What he needed to do, she chided, was to “finish that darn thesis” and think of getting a job. Locke, however, remained as resolute as ever about avoiding both and staying in Europe.
Hertford College was also resolute. On May 31, the board of his college met and “decided that Mr. Locke must send in his thesis by October 10th 1910, otherwise his name will be taken off the books. As he has been adjudged to be in debt to various creditors, whilst he appears to have no means of satisfying these claims, the College decided that he should go down from Oxford on or before Saturday, June 4th; and that the above decision be communicated by the Dean to the Registrar of the Vice Chancellor’s Court.”2 His high-living ways now threatened his ability to come away from Oxford with a degree. Evidently, Locke still had political if not financial resources in Oxford, since he was not sent down on June 10, 1910.
Locke’s June 15 letter to Booker T. Washington exuded confidence in his journalistic plan. Things did look good. Washington had provided Locke with a letter of recommendation to Lawrence Abbott, editor of the Outlook, whom Locke had met in England and who was encouraging. Moreover, Locke had “been successful in obtaining further commissions in London from the Daily News and the Manchester Guardian, and am hopeful of ultimate success in the undertaking. The scheme seems to have assume[d] quite some proportions, and I have high hopes not only of making it a success as a personal and journalistic venture, but as furnishing some material of permanent value towards the comparative study of the race problems.”3 Locke knew that such a “comparative study of the race problem” was of prime interest to Washington, who himself was planning a European trip to compare the plight of the American Negro with those of the lower classes abroad. Washington was even more concerned about criticism of his policies in the press and during his long battle with his critics had gained financial control of several Black newspapers. Locke attempted to assure Washington that he could be counted as an ally in this struggle. His plan “includes as you will notice, the rights of free reprint for a number of Negro journals,” he wrote Washington, but had “not made the offer as yet to any of the editors because the trip is not yet definitely assured, and because I have been contemplating asking your advice in the selection of an effective and representative list.”4
After assuring Washington of his loyalty, Locke made his pitch.
I am hoping further for your advice, and, should you be so inclined your endorsement, in financing the venture … as the initial expenses in the matter of photographic and personal outfit will be large as well as the expense of collecting materials, and they cannot be repaid perhaps until the entire trip has been completed; while nothing [echoing his mother] would be more hazardous than to chance it on remissions from articles as they are published. I am endeavoring to get the whole scheme assured by private guarantees to the extent of some five thousand dollars, with an initial advance of two thousand, the whole to be protected by personal life insurance. … If I could, through you, be brought into touch with some likely sources, a second visit to America would be obviated, and I should be profoundly grateful. … Is Mr. Carnegie a possibility? I could, of course, see him this side.5
Unfortunately, Washington did not consider this speculative venture important enough to commit his or Carnegie’s financial resources to it. Washington acknowledged Locke’s aplomb in promoting his idea when writing back, “I am wholly unable to offer any direct suggestion as to how the trip may be financed, but you seem to be going about the matter in an altogether satisfying way.”6 Locke did have some prospects. Sydney Franklin alerted him that Dr. Nicholas Butler, the president of Columbia and director of the Albert Kahn Travelling Fellowship, was stopping in London at the Berkeley Hotel. Locke quickly fired off a letter asking for an interview and presenting his plan to the director. It was “just the thing you want,” Franklin advised. Whether or not Locke met with Butler, he applied for the Kahn Fellowship during the next cycle.
Locke’s problem in June 1910 was that no one would give him any upfront money for the venture. As his Rhodes scholarship was ending, he had no visible means of support for the coming year. There was other bad news. The Eagle Insurance Company of London informed him it would not offer him a life insurance policy. That policy had been a key part of Locke’s plan to guarantee the investment in his travel scheme by Booker T. Washington’s financial backers. Locke’s health was too fragile for the company to take the risk.
Suddenly, Locke seemed stuck, while others were moving on. Seme was leaving England to return to South Africa and begin his career as a lawyer and leader of his people. Seme wanted Locke to come to South Africa with him, but he was in no position to finance Locke’s travel expenses to South Africa. Locke’s relationship with Dansey also came abruptly to an end. The details are unknown, but its effect was to further isolate Locke. Fortunately for Locke, Sydney Franklin came to the rescue: “I am thinking of going for an Orient cruise to Norway, leaving June 24 and back July 9. It goes as far north as Trondheim, and includes some of the most delightful parts of the country. You simply must come too, it is just the kind of holiday that will suit you, and a kind friend will provide the funds, so that need not trouble you.”7 Locke jumped at the chance to get away from Oxford, do some thinking, and spend a romantic holiday with Franklin, one of his closest friends.
By the first week of July, Locke had returned to Oxford and had begun to regard this summer as no different from any other. Although he needed to save as much of his last Rhodes Scholarship installment as possible, Locke demanded obsessively that his mother spend another summer traveling with him. As in every crisis, his need for his mother increased the worse it became. But Mary Locke insisted it was impossible for her to come over. As a substitute, she recommended that Mr. Bush, her roomer and itinerate substitute teacher, come over. Bush was a long-time family friend who was also something of a surrogate father figure for Locke. Although Bush still lacked a permanent teaching position, he had saved his money from the school year and, with a temporary position assured for the fall, was eager to see Europe. He sailed from New York on July 2 and arrived at Southampton just after Locke returned from Norway. Mary Locke thought that Bush would satisfy Locke’s need for her companionship. “Remember I have had two fine summers and am happy in the memory of them. I think everything depends on your staying there and awaiting your chance with Booker.”8 She was wrong. Apparently, as Locke got closer to having to leave Oxford for good, his need for his mother skyrocketed. On July 11, Locke cabled his mother a ticket for second-class cabin passage on the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse scheduled to sail on July 12, 1910, from Hoboken, New Jersey. She was shocked by his move. “I am so worried and sick at heart,” she responded. Having returned home on the evening of July 11 to find the telegram at her door, she was “two hours from sailing of vessel. This was the first I knew of any such plan. I scarcely believe I could have made it. … I did not dream you would try to have me come at this late date. My child, try and look at things in a more philosophical mood. I was surely not to come. Every plan has gone astray. Yet my boy—compel yourself to think for a little while of yourself and your career. Give your work your time and thoughts. You will best please your mother, the time soon pass, and we will be re-united again.”9
Once Locke knew that his mother was not coming over, he desperately needed a place where he could focus all of his attention on completing the writing of his thesis—without the distractions of his friends, his debts, and his unhappy relationship with Oxford. He decided that that place was Berlin. He had liked the city when he visited there with his mother the year before; he could live more inexpensively there; and it was far enough away from Oxford that neither creditors nor inquiring Americans could find him. Then, too, his thesis on the Austrian theory of value relied heavily on the work of German scholars who lived in and around Berlin. Perhaps settling near these thinkers in Berlin would help him to finish it. Then, he could perhaps enroll in one of Germany’s several fine universities and make some progress toward getting the doctorate. Like most American students of his generation, Locke viewed the German universities as superior not only to the American but also the British. A German doctorate would put a stamp on him that would transcend the Oxford degree for prestige in American academic circles. Then, he would possess the intellectual and scholarly validation he craved so desperately as he approached his twenty-fifth birthday.
Locke may have hoped that if his mother came over, she could accompany him to Berlin, calm his nerves, and help him get down to work before she returned to America. Instead, he had to settle for Mr. Bush, with whom he would travel around Europe. At the last moment, Philip, who sensed Locke’s desperate need for reassuring companionship, decided to accompany him and help him get settled in Berlin. Locke left London for Paris during the last full week of July and did what he loved to do—show a newcomer, Bush, Paris. By now, Locke was not only an expert on the environs of Paris but also had a coterie of Parisian friends with whom he, Bush, and Philip were able to stay. Bush had a great time on this trip; yet on August 4, Mary Locke wrote that she was relieved to learn that he had gone off on his own. “I am glad you have Bush off your hands and I do hope you have not incurred any expense by his coming.”10 Although the details of their itinerary are fuzzy, it seems that Bush was still traveling with Locke and Philip in early August. From Paris, they traveled east into Germany, stopping at Koln and Bonn. Then, on his own, Bush took side trips to Wiesbaden and Frankfurt am Main, before all three rendezvoused temporarily in Hamburg. Locke was almost out of money, and with little time to spare, he hurried on to Berlin, while Bush remained in Hamburg, awaiting the departure of his ship for home. On the day of his departure, Bush wrote to Locke, who had arrived in Berlin and was desperate for money. “I am so sorry that I cannot comply with your request. I have had to begin on my $20 reserve before coming abroad and also had to pay $5 for the extra passage from Hamburg,” when he departed for the United States. “I will see that something,” he promised Locke, “is sent you as soon as I reach home. I hope you will get on all right. … I have had a good time, and no trouble whatever, except to try to hold on to my money that I did not spen[d] it. That I found the hardest thing to do. Try to hold out till I can get something to you from home. I send you these 20 Marks. It is the best that I can do. Keep in close touch with Cook’s Office.”11
Locke and Philip found cheap lodgings through the intercession of their friend, F. H. P. von Voss, who was in Gotha that summer. Von Voss was a tall, blond-haired German whom Locke had met at Oxford, possibly in connection with the Cosmopolitan Club, and he shared Locke’s interest in young adolescents. Apparently, Voss had an appointment perhaps through the German diplomatic corps or the military that allowed him to do extensive travel and to sample the homosexual trade in a variety of cities. “Every day,” Voss had written from Capri, Napoli, “I go bathing with my friends, some Germans, Italians, and English. One day there are two English aristocrats. He [sic] introduce himself and ask me to come to dinner to his Hotel. I never met a homosexual man like he before. He called me sweetheart for some waiters. I told [him to] go away. He really envy about my friends. We all cannot stand him because he says that he saw us masturbating together (that is not true) & always when we tell him to go away, he says he is going to tell that we are homosexual. It is horrible. Do burn this letter!”12 From time to time, Voss would turn up in Oxford, and more than once Locke had put him up for several days. Locke had even acted as Voss’s art agent for a while, trying to sell several pictures, including a Holbein, that Voss left in Oxford. He wrote Voss when he and Philip reached Hamburg.
Locke’s decision to migrate to Berlin may have been shaped by the expectation that he and Philip might be able to stay with Voss for a while, either in his native Potsdam, just outside of Berlin, or in Gotha in central Germany. That didn’t happen, however. “I am very sorry,” Voss wrote Locke on August 19, “that I cannot ask you and Philip to visit me for some time; but my mother just came back from Switzerland and is very ill and I got plenty of troubles with her and her doctors. When are you leaving West-Deutschland for Berlin? You can go very well via Gotha and stop here some hours or go in a Hotel. I will everything arrange it about hotels here and in Berlin if you like. I really cannot tell you how sorry I am that I can’t ask you to come and visit me, as you were so kind to me and had so many trouble with me.”13 Possibly something more fundamental than his mother’s illness, such as Locke’s race, made it impossible and embarrassing for Voss to invite Locke to his house. But Voss atoned by meeting Locke at the train station in Gotha, repaying an overdue debt, and directing Locke and Philip to a suitable hotel in Berlin. Within another week, Locke had located a rooming house run by Frau Haupt at Grossbeerenstrasse 5. He could confide to his mother by the end of August that he was pleasantly situated in Berlin and settling down to work on his thesis.
Locke felt at home in Berlin, the German capital, in a way he never had in London or Paris. He loved the city’s wide boulevards, tall modern buildings, and sumptuous gardens. Berlin exuded an openness and expansiveness that lifted Locke’s mood and his confidence. Here was a city with the kind of industrial might and cultural modernity that all twentieth-century cities should offer. The cleanliness, orderliness, punctuality, and obsessiveness of the Germans matched perfectly Locke’s own fastidious temperament. Berlin also possessed a bustling street culture, nightlife, and cultural ferment that made it an interesting city for an aesthete and homosexual. In Berlin, at last, Locke had found his spiritual home.
Berlin’s reputation as a mecca for male homosexuals was another strong attraction. Locke’s friend von Voss seemed to epitomize the freedom to develop an all-but-out gay personality in Berlin. Although Germany had passed its infamous paragraph 175 that made homosexual activity a capital crime, the law was inadequately enforced, even though some scandals occurred. A famous case was that of an army officer who was exposed as being gay, and in the aftermath of his trial, a kind of hysteria had reigned in Germany that was not unlike that of the Oscar Wilde affair in England. But just as was the case in England, when the hoopla died down, gays who were discreet—those who did not get caught or have some jealous “aristocrat” accuse them publicly of homosexuality—were left alone. The promise of such social and sexual freedom, as well as the anonymity of being a foreigner, may have made Berlin seem perfect to Locke.
But Voss’s letters to Locke during this period also suggest that the love life available to him in London was superior to that of Berlin. In London, after attending some lectures at the university there, Voss wrote Locke on October 28 that “I have had the most splendid time I ever had in my life! Every evening and not for money, only for love! The youth here are beautiful. I love them.” Teasingly, he questioned Locke—“are all those youths in Berlin professional or do they do it for love like here?”14 Voss knew very well that the principal source of gay sex came from young boys from the provinces who walked the promenade along Friedrichstrasse and Unter den Linden, and made a living as male prostitutes. Locke knew this too and probably frequented the area. By the spring of 1911, Locke appears to have decided that the city and its “trade” had been overrated. “I quite agree with you,” Voss wrote to Locke, “that in Berlin are not so many nice looking youngsters as in Italy, London, Paris, Cairo, and so.” Planning his own visit to Berlin, Voss queried Locke: “Could you give me any idea what the fee of a nice looking boy in Berlin is in the age of 16 or 17?”15 This Voss rather incredibly inscribed on a postcard; when Locke did not write him back immediately, Voss queried again, “Are you mad that I wrote about those boys on the postcard?” More than likely Locke was mad: he was too discreet for such bold admissions. But Voss expressed the deeper truth when he wrote, “You are only a sir if you got money? Everybody want money, money! I know it myself, but never mind. Cheer up! Don’t be downhearted!”16 Clearly, Locke, who was down to his own last pennies, was hardly in a position to pay for sex on a regular basis. Without a scholarship or a lucrative endowment, Berlin was hardly a homosexual paradise for him. That was probably good, since without distractions, Locke had little else to do but concentrate on his thesis. In Berlin, he was able to finish it.
Locke produced a brilliant analysis of value theory in his Oxford thesis, “The Concept of Value,” by constructing a wholly psychological account of how values arise in human beings. Unlike writings by such major value theorists as Brentano, Meinong, Ehrenfels, Urban, and Munsterberg, Locke’s philosophical discussion of values is a readable, almost lyrical account of the process by which human beings learn to value. Thus, in terms of its philosophical orientation and its literary form, “The Concept of Value” was an extension of William James’s two-volume opus, The Principles of Psychology, into a philosophy of values. As a thesis for Oxford in 1910, however, and especially for Locke’s principal supervisor and examiner, J. Cook Wilson, this was not a particularly strategic approach. In fact, by choosing to write a psychological rather than a logical account of valuation, Locke’s thesis was a frontal attack on the logical tradition of value theory that Cook Wilson himself represented. Nevertheless, it was a major step in Locke’s progress toward becoming a philosopher, proof that he could sustain a sophisticated philosophical analysis over four hundred handwritten pages.
Locke asked: How do our values come into being? Are values derived from feelings, desires, or cognitive judgments? The prevailing view in Locke’s time was that values arose because of our desires and through the exercise of the logical, judgment faculty of our minds. By contrast, Locke argued that, while logic and reason played a role in the discrimination of values once they had arisen, we could only understand how values arose in the first place through a psychological reconstruction of the valuation process from the “experient’s own point of view located and explained in terms of its own activity and its psychological implications.” Using several real-life examples of valuing, Locke showed that values were “selected” on the basis of feelings, which arose in our experience, and led us to place a value upon one part of that experience. Reflecting James’s insights, Locke argued valuation emerged as part of the selecting agency of consciousness. Confronting what James called the “stream of experience,” our minds, Locke argued, elevated that which moved us emotionally. That became what we valued ethically, practically, or aesthetically as the good, the useful, and the beautiful. Locke’s theory of value, therefore, applied James’s method of introspective psychological inquiry to valuation and came up with a no-nonsense portrait of how people actually valued. Indeed, by using “real-life” examples of valuing, Locke made his work accessible in a way that also recalled William James.
What remains most interesting about “The Concept of Value” are the philosophical choices Locke made in this, his initial philosophical treatise. For one thing, he labels himself rhetorically as a psychologist in the text. This is a remarkable choice for a man who often seemed not to have a clue about his own complicated motivations and about how others reacted to him. Even more profound is his choice of feeling as the most important factor in valuation. If we assume that this essay is not only about values but also about Locke himself, a man who personally came across to some as cold, logical, and rational to a fault, he “comes out” in this thesis and throws his entire philosophical weight behind feeling. In his thesis, Locke revealed the romantic that stood behind the stoic Rhodes Scholar exterior: here was a man whose feelings drove his engagement with the world.
The autobiographical character of Locke’s thesis is also illustrated by the examples he chose of value formation from his own experiences listening to music. “Let us suppose,” he writes, “as usually happens, that some disproportionate variation in one of the sensation elements [of a musical composition] attracts attention, say an unusual stress, and on the basis of it we catch a rhythm movement, go along with it a little while, lose it, catch it up again until finally we have some distinct feeling of form succession in which all the other sensation accompaniments center. And then suddenly some of the sensation hooks on to the rhythm, subordinates it, and gives us a sense of time, heightens perhaps the successive feeling into a pleasurable feeling tone. This persists for a while, and then quite as suddenly again perhaps the feeling-tone spreads over the whole content. At last we have something which from the aesthetic point of view we can call a musical appreciation.”17
Locke rewrote value theory because most value theories could not account for his experience of aesthetics. Neither logical inference nor self-interest could account for how the beautiful and the ugly were differentiated. Nor could such theories solve the mystery of “value-transfer,” when one value attribute (useful, noble) became associated with another value category (logical, ethical). Such transfers proved to Locke that values were not fixed objects, but attributes transferable from one area to another. “The prevalent interchange of value predicates, as for example, a ‘pretty demonstration,’ a ‘wrong inference,’ are not to be wholly accounted for as mere verbal tropes or figurative transfers. Some real psychological linkage seems involved in certain value metaphors. For example, ethical distinctions for certain temperaments present themselves in aesthetic contrasts, and actual motives of ethical action may often be purely aesthetic or mixed aesthetic as conveyed by terms [such] as ‘noble’ or ‘ignoble’ action.”18 Only feeling was comprehensive enough to account for the ambiguity of valuation and the ways that value predicates moved from one category to another. Clearly, our feelings change about our value objects, and with those changes came shifts in the values and the categories we commonly used to order them.
Locke’s focus on value shift suggests that he believed values had no permanent character: the expert and the novice might listen to the same music, but hear it differently and certainly value it differently, depending on their levels of appreciation. Since the values were attributes determined by the subject who listened and reflected the complexity of feeling that the listener brought to the experience, the expert and the novice did not share the same musical experience. Values were not even permanent for the same individual. They changed with changes in consciousness.
Such a skeptical view of values extended to Locke’s view of race as malleable and changeable. At a time when Du Bois’s “The Conservation of the Races” (1896) argued races were fixed entities with discrete spiritual contributions to make to world civilization, Locke took a more revolutionary position that racial character and identity changed over time, and in response to changing social and cultural conditions—and the attitude (consciousness) of the racial subject himself or herself. That view of race had its philosophical grounding in “The Concept of Value.” In one context, he was certainly an American Negro; but he also was rapidly becoming a European, a man whose identity had taken on many of the characteristics of his European education. His subjectivity had evolved and so had his valuations. Locke’s value theory provided a way of conceptualizing what he would eventually call the New Negro as racial identity that would shift with the changing context and valuation of our experiences.
But in 1910, the connections between his value theory and modernism in literature and art were stronger than any racial analogies. When Locke depicted aesthetic valuation, he went behind the process and described the kind of “open” and indeterminate state of consciousness that many writers and artists cultivated as a source of inspiration for their work. “Such states as objectless sadness, moods of poetic melancholy, and the like have very little or no sensational content, and involve practically no mental reactions, cognitive or conative. They are therefore, very difficult of explanation for the judgment in the desire theory of value. That they have value is beyond dispute. A little introspective analysis will reveal why. They are diffused emotional states covering, as it were, the whole field of consciousness, and leaving us room … to take an attitude and discriminate a relationship. And we do so through the medium of feeling. The feeling deepens somehow and we get a sense of the context as a subjective ‘mood,’ a phase of consciousness and its very diffusion becomes a sense of immediacy, of close identification.” As Locke went on to argue, modern art was given to cultivating such moods in order to create new forms of art. “Impressionism has experimented in the creation of aesthetic values out of just such vague emotional states and to the extent it has succeeded has proved that they were values before, only much neglected and dissociated. As aesthetic values, they have been formalized and might be accounted for as a ‘cultivated taste,’ which would only mean the formation of a feeling disposition, but as they occur in the ordinary experience, a propos of nothing in particular, they are better illustrations of how feeling tones and feeling references condition value acquirement.”19
Locke’s reference to “diffused” emotional states as the origin of valuation suggests that he may have also had his experience as a homosexual in mind while he was writing his essay on values. “Diffused emotion” was a metaphor Locke later used in his correspondence to describe some of his feelings as a homosexual. “Diffused feelings” was Locke’s longing for male companionship without any specific person or “value object” in mind. It often produced in him a state of “objectless sadness”—longing for a specific person who is absent. “Objectless” emotions, according to Locke, ultimately resolved themselves into more specific desires for some specific person, or as in the case of valuation, resolved themselves into a more definite “value-feeling-unified emotional state fused or identical with its feeling content.”20 Locke used his “diffused feelings” for bonding with any man as a source for understanding that stage in which an individual senses a value preference before conceiving of a particular object of value. In that way, some of Locke’s feelings and experiences as a homosexual provided him with insight for his theory of values.
Of course, aesthetic value remained the most important model for Locke’s theory of valuation. Locke believed that having values was evidence of our capacity for an aesthetic disposition toward our environment, just as desires and satisfactions were evidence of our biological nature. What Locke was developing was reminiscent of James—an account of the rise of culture in human beings that rejected biological instinct or behaviorism’s “conditioned-reflex” as the origin of values. Like James, Locke was trying to avoid biological determinism in understanding human life.
The major weakness of “The Concept of Value” was that it relied too much on aesthetic valuation to model all valuation. Locke failed to demonstrate the applicability of his analysis to all other areas of valuation. He also failed to distinguish between a concept and a value, between the concept of a chair and its utilitarian value. Are these the same thing? Is learning the meaning of the chair the same as appreciating its usefulness? If this is so, Locke’s portrait of learning processes needed added complexity to differentiate between learning through habit, conditioned reflex, trial-and-error, and insight learning. The absence of this refinement can be explained in terms of the rudimentary psychological theories of learning behavior Locke had available to him, but it also was due to the narrow focus he had taken. He relied too much on introspection as a methodological tool and paid too little attention to the social context in learning.
Nevertheless, “The Concept of Value” was an impressive work—more than four hundred pages of detailed argument for (1) the ability of psychology to account for valuation without recourse to logic, (2) the primacy of feeling in the origin and discrimination of values, and (3) the demonstration of how a new classification of values could be created based on (1) and (2). Locke completed part 1, chapters 1 through 9, of “The Concept of Value” on September 13, 1910, his twenty-fifth birthday; he completed part 2 on October 7, 1910. After copying them over in a measured, elegant longhand with footnotes at the bottom of each page, Locke sent the manuscript off to Oxford in time to meet the October 10, 1910, deadline imposed by Hertford College for the submission of his thesis.
“The Concept of Value” was a psychological breakthrough in Locke’s life. He had written a massive, original, generative work of philosophy without having his mother with him or at a convenient distance, as had been the case at Harvard. Abandoned, alone, without even money to pay for sex, Locke had holed up in his Berlin apartment, and written his ass off. A rebirth had occurred in Berlin that prefigured what would happen fourteen years later when he was permanently separated from his mother and returned to Berlin to invent himself. His catharsis then as now came through dialogue with a city, its built and human environment that created the psychological space for a momma’s boy to become a mature philosopher.
While waiting for Oxford’s response, Locke attended lectures at the University of Berlin. He enrolled in five lecture courses given that fall by members of the philosophical faculty at the university. Locke took logic from Benno Erdmann, a Kantian professor; logic and theories of perception from Adolf Lasson, another Kantian scholar; nineteenth-century philosophy from Georg Simmel, the Jewish philosopher who founded modern German sociology; introductory aesthetics from Max Dessoir, a well-known professor of aesthetics; and philosophical idealism from Hugo Munsterberg, a visiting Harvard University professor. Munsterberg was the philosopher most familiar to Locke that first semester. Locke knew Munsterberg from Harvard, where he had been one of the faculty on the committee that awarded Locke his magna cum laude. Munsterberg was a Fichtean who believed that humanity possessed a metaphysical will accessible by intuition and a scientific will accessible by observation and experiment. It was Munsterberg the metaphysician who had crept into his major philosophical book, The Eternal Values, which Locke had soundly if sympathetically criticized in “The Concept of Value” for its idealistic notions of values. Still, Munsterberg was someone who remembered Locke’s undergraduate work and probably encouraged Locke to study at the University of Berlin. Munsterberg was also director of the Amerika-Institut and as such was responsible for the growing number of Americans studying at the university. In January 1911, he wrote to Locke formally in this capacity. “In the interest of the American students, the Amerika-Institut is carrying on an investigation concerning the studies of the Americans in the German universities. We beg you kindly to aid us by answering as soon as possible and as carefully as possible the questions of the enclosed sheet in the blank spaces after each question.”21 Locke’s answers are lost, but the surviving letter shows that Locke was not an anonymous entity at the University of Berlin by January 1911. If he played his cards right, he might be able to parlay his stay in Berlin into a German doctorate and then return to the United States as a complete educational success.
As always, Locke had other irons in the fire. He was writing more short stories and articles, which he was trying to get placed in American magazines. He was also still trying to obtain financial support for his race relations travel scheme, and toward that end, planned to meet Washington “this side” of the Atlantic. But after months of having his mother check the newspapers for Washington’s travel plans, somehow Locke let Washington slip into and out of Berlin in January 1911 without meeting him. Washington had come to Berlin to deliver a lecture, but did not contact Locke while in town. When Locke’s mother learned of the miscue, she was astounded. How could Locke have missed this opportunity? Locke himself seemed to have no explanation. Washington apologized with the excuse that he was very rushed. He encouraged Locke to obtain the articles that Washington published from the trip in the Outlook. In a sense, Washington told the truth: he was tremendously rushed. Washington did not have time to dally in Berlin interviewing a powerless aesthete like Locke. He had hurried back to New York to try and woo such powerful representatives of educated Black opinion as Mary Church Terrell and William Pickens, who had established constituencies and access to information on the NAACP. Locke had neither. The costs of staying away from the American scene were beginning to add up. Plus, Washington already had an amanuensis, the only job that Locke would have been interested in taking in 1911. Robert Park, a Jewish American sociologist, was ghostwriting Washington’s articles on race and class relations. Indeed, what could Locke offer Washington? As he confided in a January 1911 letter to Washington after missing him in Berlin, Locke planned to remain in Berlin until he heard about his thesis results, continue to take courses at the University of Berlin, and travel to Egypt in the near future to study their race relations. Locke could not assist Washington in any useful way.
Locke did not have long to wait on his thesis results. On February 8, 1911, the board of the Literae Humaniores met and discussed his thesis. Present that day were Mr. How, master of Balliol, who was the chair of the committee, Professors Cook Wilson, Ellis, Gardner, Murray, Myres, and Stewart, and Messrs. Blunt, Clark, Cookson, Joseph, Matheson, Richards, and Webb. This group rendered a decision, “on the report of the examiners it was resolved not to issue a certificate to Mr. A. L. Locke.”22 Neither his examiners’ report, nor the notes of the discussion that day have survived. The views of Cook Wilson, who had been both Locke’s supervisor and one of his thesis examiners, must have carried considerable weight in shaping the board’s decision. The other examiner of the thesis, Mr. Carritt, who was the only philosopher at Oxford who knew anything about aesthetics, was not present. Even more devastating was the board’s second decision to deny him an opportunity to revise and resubmit it: “Mr. Locke having applied for readmission as a B.Sc. student on the same subject of special study it was resolved that his application be not granted.”23 With that decision, the board and particularly Wilson declared that there was nothing worthwhile or redeemable in Locke’s four hundred–page thesis. For Locke, it meant that his entire struggle to complete the work had been in vain. He now had a thesis that itself had no value to Oxford.
Perhaps Locke had anticipated this outcome. Two days before the board of Literae Humaniores rendered its decision, Hertford College responded to Locke’s request from him to be allowed to reapply to that board for candidacy for the BLitt degree, his original course of study when he had entered Oxford. Locke believed that if he failed in his attempt to have the thesis approved and to receive the BSc in philosophy, he could still hold the door open for a BLitt degree. While Hertford College gave him permission to reapply for candidacy for the BLitt, it simultaneously informed him “his name would be removed from the books at the end of the present term, unless he satisfied the College that he had discharged his debts in Oxford.”24 That was almost as impossible as his getting the BSc degree: he had no income, beyond the $30 his mother scraped together to send to him each month, and thus he had no way to pay his debts. Like Harley at Harvard, Locke’s personal financial problems had derailed his academic career. But unlike Rex, who got his Harvard AB after he paid his debt, Locke was no longer eligible for a degree after he was “sent down.” That occurred on March 10, 1911.
Of course, more had poisoned Locke’s relationship with his college than his debts. Locke had rebelled against the authority of his Hertford tutor, Rev. Williams, and succeeded in eluding Williams’s grasp by gaining admission to the graduate program in philosophy under Wilson. That had angered Williams and set him against Locke. Locke had then moved out of his college, traveled throughout Europe on expensive vacations, and had had the cheek to have the college forward his mother’s letters all over Europe, proving to his college that he was not engaged in serious study. Then, when the board of Literae Humaniores rejected his thesis in February, he was thrown back upon his unsympathetic college as the only possible place through which he could salvage his Oxford career. But they were thoroughly tired of the Black Rhodes Scholar from America who had embarrassed the college by running up huge debts in town and refused to be deferential about it on top of it.
Having subverted the power of his Hertford tutor, Locke seemed not to realize how dependent his getting the degree was on J. Cook Wilson, the fierce white-bearded logician at Oxford who had turned philosophy away from idealism. As a classicist, Wilson also may have heard that Locke had come to him because he could not make the grade in Greek and thus approached him skeptically. Rather than produce a thesis that followed Wilson’s somewhat dated theory of knowledge and apply it to valuation, Locke wrote an entirely psychological account that rejected the logical approach to valuation! That was too much for Wilson. There was much to dislike about Wilson: he was pompous and combative, and, according to one wit, Wilson’s total published work in philosophy was a footnote before his death in 1915. Wilson’s ideas had been passed over by the new logic coming out of Cambridge University, pioneered first by Bertrand Russell and then by Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wilson hated the new logic, and he certainly could not stomach the new psychology of William James. Though Wilson had agreed to work with James’s Oxford disciple, F. C. S. Schiller, in supervising Locke’s thesis, Schiller had apparently abandoned the project, leaving Locke at Wilson’s mercy. Still, had Locke been a deferential student, he might have at least been able to revise the thesis in accord with Wilson’s criticisms. But Locke had not been deferential and he paid the price for that.
Oxford, the place, had defeated him. When Oxford sent him down, it did so as much because of his behavior as the quality of his work. They were done with him as a person, as a character, regardless of what he achieved as a student. The same Victorian nexus of good behavior, proper breeding, and exemplary background that had worked so many times for Locke—that buoyed his career because he was more “gentlemanly” than other Blacks—had finally turned against him. Just as his ability to play the game of deferential politics had helped him flourish at Harvard, his inability to play it effectively at Oxford had sunk him.
What had been different? The racism had destabilized him, cut him to the core in ways he had never experienced before, made him nervous and even scared for his safety. This was the first time that he had really been hated, hounded really, even when the Rhodes Scholars were not around. But he would never admit that race was the determining factor, because the whole apparatus of Black Victorian behavior was designed to manage racism as a constant enemy of Black success. Was race enough of an excuse? Some might have blamed it on his being an American and insufficiently prepared for the rigor of an Oxford education. Indeed, a series of articles had appeared in the American press that February 1911 lambasting American students at Oxford for not being very good. He learned of them because his dutiful mother copied them into her letters to him as he was absorbing the shock of his thesis rejection and imminent expulsion from his college. She did not know yet what had happened, for Locke did not inform her immediately after learning the results. He too was searching for an explanation as to why after so many successes, he had failed this time to come away from Oxford with the one thing he needed—a degree.
Early in March 1911, Locke wrote his mother that he had suddenly changed plans. He was not going to stay in Germany and try for the doctorate, after all. The only place for him was Cambridge, Massachusetts. He would come home, enroll in Harvard’s graduate school, and take his degree. That sudden switch alerted her something was wrong. But not until April 2, almost two months after he had heard the news, did she learn his thesis had been rejected. “My heart goes out to you,” she wrote him, “in your disappointment regarding the Thesis—yet I had expected it.”25 Her superb Victorian intelligence had taught her failure could be expected, when one did not—ironically enough, since his thesis was on values—uphold the values of the institutions one depended on. She wrote him that there was nothing to do but to stay until he earned the Oxford or a Berlin degree. He had not told her the board’s second decision. It was probably too much for him to reveal to her all at once the depth and completeness of his failure.
Perhaps Locke would have been better off telling her, for she went on to admonish him that despite the setback, he could not let go of the Oxford thesis. “I know how hard it will be to take it up again, the thesis, but it must be done. You cannot afford to fail as the first and only one of your race—and more than all—for my sake—because I have my heart and soul fixed on it.”26 The last line had the ring of desperation, as if she had suddenly realized that something like this needed to have been said long ago. Indeed, before she actually learned of the rejection of his thesis, she had peppered him with admonishments and self-recriminations. She should have pressed him to work harder, she wrote to him now—three years too late. The Rhodes Scholarship had seemed so long, and she had gained so much from it herself, for she had been able to see places and things she never dreamed she would see in her lifetime.
A growing sense of shared responsibility and now embarrassment made her angry at him for letting down the race. He had let her down too. And other people would know. People at the post office were already asking her what he was doing in Germany. More well-known folk like Jessie Fauset, the prominent Philadelphia young woman, had met Mary Locke one Sunday in Philadelphia early in 1911 and asked about him too. On April 9, Mary Locke wrote him that Pfromm, his Harvard friend, had stopped by the house and asked if the thesis had gone through all right and whether he had his degree. She, of course, told Pfromm she did not know. But that story would soon be old. The pressure was building on the Lockes, both of whom had lived off the prestige of these last three years. Soon they would look much smaller in light of his monumental failure.
Mary had been a central part of his success; now she was part of his failure. Like a mythological hero, he had had to go off on a quest to become the hero he was destined to be. But going so far away from her had weakened him. It was not just the money he had lost in bringing her over two years in a row, the debts that mounted; it was that he had been unable to manage the multiple pressures on him—the racism, the partying, the sexual distractions, the painful recognition of his intellectual limits—without her stabilizing presence. At Harvard, he had had her in striking distance for easy renewal and steadying in the face of challenges. At Oxford, he had been less emotionally mature even though he was older. And the challenges had been far greater. So far away at Oxford, he had lost his balance. In Berlin, he had achieved something absolutely necessary by finishing his thesis without her presence. He had grown into manhood. But in April 1911, that did not much matter. Now, what reverberated was that line in her letter—“You cannot afford to fail as the first and only one of your race—and more than all—for my sake—because I have my heart and soul fixed on it.”27 Having failed to get the degree, he was an embarrassment to his race—and to her. How could he come home now?
Title page of Lionel de Fonseka, On the Truth of Decorative Art, 1913.