Locke’s exile in Berlin was interrupted late in February 1911 by the arrival of Frederich von Voss, who wanted to spend a month with him in Berlin. Voss confided that his parents objected to his going to Berlin, so he wanted to come in secret. Voss hoped he could share a room with Locke for the month, which would have helped Locke save some of his rent money. But it was not to be. When Locke met Voss at the Anhalter Station on February 27, Locke was not able to offer him a place in his apartment, most likely because Locke’s very protective landlady refused. She had even shut the door in Voss’s face without checking to see if Locke was home. Nonetheless, Voss’s appearance in Berlin cheered Locke. Together, they walked the promenade on Friedrichstrasse, enticing the young homosexual trade. Voss introduced Locke to several of the cafes and restaurants that he knew from his earlier days in Berlin, and Voss’s companionship soothed Locke’s jangled nerves. Voss also introduced Locke to Charlottenburg, the lovely, tree-lined suburb at the outskirts of Berlin. Not long after that first visit, Locke moved into an apartment in Charlottenburg, perhaps taking over the one occupied by Voss during his Berlin stay. By March 9, however, Voss had returned to Potsdam and his family, and Locke was once again alone with his secret.
Locke had informed his mother and his closest Oxford friends that his thesis was rejected, but they did not seem to comprehend that he was prevented from obtaining an Oxford degree. An April 7 letter from his friend Lionel de Fonseka reflected how confused even Oxford undergraduates were about Oxford rules and regulations. “What does it mean—your name being taken off the books of the college. I hope it does not mean that you can’t get a degree at all.”1 Of course, it did. In one sense, it made little immediate difference whether he got the degree or not. Unemployed and near destitute in Berlin, he would have remained so regardless of Oxford’s decision. What failure to get the degree really meant was that he could not face the embarrassment such failure would cause him at home. So he kept it a secret and remained in Berlin.
It might have been better if Locke had returned home before he knew the results of his thesis. In the fall of 1910, he had been offered a job unofficially through his mother to be principal of a Black school. If Locke was back employed in the United States, he easily could have put off inquirers that he was still awaiting a decision. But he had turned the offer down. Though desperate for money, he was too proud to take a job in elementary education and too hopeful that after receiving the bachelor of science degree, he could return to Oxford for the doctorate. Having never before experienced academic failure, he had no experience of coping with it. As he sat in his Berlin hovel, penniless and alone, even he must have wondered what this failure said about him. Some doubt had crept into his consciousness ever since he had difficulty with Greek during his first year. At the time, he had been able to blame it on his tutor and subsequently on the educational system at Oxford; but a bit of self-doubt had returned during the long haul of working on his thesis, year after year, without being able to make any real progress on it. Locke, a man of supreme confidence, had begun to wonder privately to himself if he would ever finish. In a sense, it would never be finished; he would never really be over Oxford, for the rest of his life. As a good Victorian, who believed that each man was master of his fate, he could not escape the conclusion that he had been the master of his.
But academic failure rejuvenated Locke’s journalistic writing. Freed from his thesis, Locke found that he could write easily and quickly again. On April 10, Locke completed an essay, “Some Aspects of Modernism,” less than two weeks after seeing a similar article published in the March 29 issue of the Saturday Evening Post by a “special correspondent” living in Paris. That article convinced Locke that enough interest existed in the United States to get his essay published, and that there might be an income for him writing similar articles as a “special correspondent” in Berlin. But “Some Aspects of Modernism” is unique in Locke’s oeuvre, because it presents an ideological argument for Modernism in the Roman Catholic Church. Another consequence of the Oxford debacle may have been that Locke contemplated converting to Catholicism, perhaps even going into the church, influenced perhaps by de Fonseka’s fervent Catholicism. If so, then Locke’s article was his way of defining what kind of Catholic he could become.
Locke argued vigorously that Modernism within the Catholic tradition was an authentic challenge to papal authority and not a movement toward Protestantism as the earlier article suggested. Spawned by the rise of Higher Criticism that revised biblical interpretation through the use of historical knowledge, Modernism, according to Locke, was really an evolutionary movement toward the acceptance of relativism in the Roman Catholic Church. Modernism emerged as an answer to the pragmatic problem facing the Roman Church that over half of modern church membership did not believe in such rigid church doctrines as papal infallibility. Yet such members wanted to remain in the church. German Protestantism was a response that rejected the pope, yet enshrined a new absolute truth imposed just as ruthlessly as papal edict. What Locke liked about Modernism was its tendency to see truth as progressive, as reflective of a world in the making and not already made, a precursor, perhaps, to what he would argue about the New Negro fourteen years later. “Modernist scholarship, more modestly perhaps, more wisely perhaps, expresses the prevailing relativism of contemporary thought and theory. It gains thereby in interpretative power, in literary charm, and in its relevance to the private thought and problems of the time. For the Catholic tradition, for any tradition, this is … appropriate.”2 Locke’s essay was thus a continuation of his interest in values and the necessity to accept relativism in values. Indeed, Locke saw Modernism as a blueprint for successful change in the modern world:
The success of Modernism will mean something more than the success of a new cause; it will mean the triumph of a new method of mental and moral warfare. Springing up on the old controversial ground of religion and within the jurisdiction of Catholicism, Modernism might easily have reinstated another era of controversy and have had reactionary effects of the greatest consequence. [But] with rare caution and unusual success, Modernism has refused to compromise itself by joining issue with the opposition, and has achieved thereby its unique character and advantages. Reform movements of consequence, in the religious as in the political world, have hitherto been of necessity partisan and revolutionary in character; and although they may have taken origin out of the most abstruse issues, have scarcely ever been prosecuted or carried on the intellectual plane.3
Locke was suspicious of revolutions because, in their total repudiation of a tradition, they tended to resurrect a dogmatism often as bad as or worse than that which they sought to replace. Locke disliked Protestantism because in its rebellion it had become totalitarian; he liked Modernism because it preserved the Catholic tradition at the very moment that it reinvented it. “The steadier undercurrent of events, even in Germany, gives clear indications that Modernism has more in common with a Renaissance movement than with either a Revolution or a Reformation.”4 Locke approached the Catholic tradition as an intellectual tradition of rigorous engagement with and debate of spiritual issues. Locke sided squarely with the reformers in historical Catholicism.
Locke’s sexual orientation may have conditioned his insistence that the church recognize the relativism of moral values, even though he did not mention sexual issues in his essay. He was well aware that the Roman Catholic Church was a harbinger of many homosexuals and that it must liberalize its doctrine or sink into complete hypocrisy. Clearly this was a problem that did not face the Catholic Church alone, as a letter that Locke received two weeks after finishing his essay attests. His Chelsea London friend Jayston Edwards confided to Locke:
I have been the guest of a man at the Isle of Wight—he is a parson too. He is a very nice man but I had suspicions at first that I was accepting his hospitality under false pretenses. Sunday, expectations of his were not realised. Physically he did not attract me at all. However we remained friends and he took me into his confidence entirely. He had been 5 years chaplain to a bishop in India and knew them of all colors. He had a young friend of 22 a pupil at a farm who was also so disposed and whose whole life and being were absorbed in the pursuit of boys, etc. I went to hear my host, the parson, preach and wondered how he had the brass to talk about priority, hypocrisy, etc.5
The Modernists argued against the hypocrisy typical of “parsons” in the church who habitually railed against homosexuality but practiced it themselves. Locke’s essay outlined what he required of any religion he embraced: it must preach what it practiced and frankly acknowledge the relativity of all normative dictates. It must embody a methodology of social reform and be responsive to it. Ultimately, the Modernist movement Locke depicted in 1911 failed to conquer its opposition, which may be one of the reasons that Locke never converted to Catholicism.
But an unanswered question remains: why would Locke turn to writing an extensive essay on reform Catholicism after failing in his quest for an Oxford degree? Perhaps he sought a form or forum of absolution for his Oxford failure. Catholicism, Locke believed, had had the good sense to formalize the process by which if one confessed one’s sins, one was forgiven, and allowed to go forth a new man. The process of how to become a new man was a central thread in Locke’s philosophical life. Here, Locke acknowledged he himself needed absolution from his sins as long as he did not have to view his homosexuality as a sin. That he continued to write—and such a powerful essay as this—suggests that his ego had not been destroyed by that failure. Writing “Some Aspects of Modernism” may have started the process of absolution he desired without his having to take the step of joining the Catholic Church. For writing that essay may have concretized that his refusal to bend to Oxford’s strictures, to accept what he clearly felt was the hypocrisy and despotism of Oxford’s system, had, perhaps, saved him as an independent thinker.
While Locke enjoyed writing “Modernism,” the essay, sadly, was not published. It is not clear why. Perhaps the problem for Locke’s journalistic aspirations was that his subjects were too esoteric to command a wide American readership. If he really wanted to become a journalist, he would have to return to the United States and work in a newsroom or on the staff of a magazine. Locke, however, wanted to start at the top, as a foreign correspondent, but he was not famous or even well known enough to be published regularly doing that. In Germany, Locke was beginning, slowly, to realize that he needed a regular income, from teaching or something else, to sustain him until he could establish a reputation as a writer. That line of thinking brought him back to the Oxford problem.
Sometime in the spring of 1911, Locke decided it was time to become serious about getting the German doctorate. In May 1911, he matriculated into the university for study under the philosophical faculty and took a full complement of courses: two courses, a lecture course in the history of philosophy, Kant and Idealism, and a seminar on Kant’s Antinomies, from Professor Riehl; another lecture course on fundamental problems of philosophy from Professor Lasson, plus a course on the philosophy of Will and Action from Professor Munsterberg. But the most important courses he took that spring bridged the divide between philosophy and modern sociology: Analysis of the Fundamentals of Science, and Problems of Modern Culture taught by Germany’s premier sociological theorist, Georg Simmel.
Simmel was an interesting mentor for Locke, as he, like Locke, was a perennial outsider. Although a brilliant Kantian scholar, prolific writer who wrote on such esoteric subjects as The Philosophy of Money, and founder of modern German sociology, Simmel never received an appointment as a full professor at the University of Berlin because he was Jewish. Simmel also was disparaged because he was a thoroughgoing Modernist, who did not suffer the romantic nationalism of Volkish philosophy sweeping academic circles in the late nineteenth century. He argued that gradual, painstaking, and democratic reform was the best solution to modern problems in a world without a priori certainties.
Simmel’s classrooms confirmed Locke had been on the right track in “The Concept of Values.” According to Simmel no certainties, no fixed unities, existed from which ideas of law, morality, religion, and society could be developed in modern societies. Modern values were essentially pragmatic “social unities” in a fluid state of interaction, and they bound dissimilar elements and peoples together despite the social distance of modern, urban living. A creative tension existed in modern societies that responded to changes in population and attitudes that reestablished a society’s equilibrium after incorporating new elements. Unlike such German sociologists as Ferdinand Tonnies and Ernst Troeltsch, who romanticized traditional German society as possessing greater unity, stronger values, and more Gemeinschaft, Simmel argued modern society was actually superior to past rural societies because it demanded more of its individuals. Only in the city, he argued, and especially in Berlin, could the citizen become a true individual, for in rural communities, the need for social control imposed a rigid conformity on community members.
What Simmel meant for Locke can best be seen by comparing it to Du Bois’s intellectual debt to Gustav Schmoller, whom the older Black scholar studied with at the University of Berlin fourteen years earlier. Whereas Du Bois learned sociology as a highly detailed, empirical science of observation of social phenomena, Locke learned sociology as a theoretical inquiry into how modern society functioned as a system. Schmoller’s thinking might have been responsible, in some respects, for Du Bois’s attachment to the notion that societies, no less than race groups, should be understood in terms of fixed, transcendent ideals.6 By contrast, Simmel suggested all modern social entities like races were fluid constructions produced by the overall system of a society. Actually, Locke had the benefit of familiarity with both Simmel and Schmoller, as Locke found his way into some of Schmoller’s lectures, where he imbibed this conservative professor’s Marxist-inspired analysis of class and class groups. What Locke wanted to do, however, was to combine the economic approach to race conflict that came from Schmoller with Simmel’s more social psychological engagement of society as a social organism. In that synthesis, Locke believed, lay the best of what modern society could offer.
There was an aesthetic benefit for Locke in taking Simmel’s classes in 1911: by then, Simmel had become an aesthete, who responded to early twentieth-century German modernism in art by evolving a “sociological aestheticism.”7 Though Simmel extolled the virtues of modern life, he nevertheless developed in the early 1900s a utopian vision of what society could become if it became more responsive to the spiritual enlightenment of its best artists. Simmel developed an elitist utopianism that held some artists and scholars in great esteem as “persons of distinction” whose vision could give meaning to an increasingly chaotic world. In the first decade of the twentieth-century, Simmel surrounded himself with such writers and artists as Ranier Rilke, Lou Salome, and Stefan George, and wrote extensively on how the artist was a messenger of social and spiritual enlightenment in modern society.
The Berlin of Simmel’s day witnessed a Secession movement that, like its stronger cousin in Munich, expressed younger artists’ rejection of the taste of Imperial Germany. Refusing to show their work in official, state-sponsored exhibitions, artists like Max Lieberman held their own independent exhibitions at which Symbolist, Impressionist, Cubist, and Jugendstil art was jumbled together. Caught up in the enthusiasm of revolutionary art change, Simmel tried to organize a salon in his Berlin home of like-minded artists, critics, and scholars whose fellowship he believed would foster a renaissance in Berlin. Although such Modernist intellects as Simmel, Rilke, Kandinsky, and others would lose the battle against anti-Modernist forces in prewar Germany, Locke’s exposure to this milieu provided him with a model of the kind of aesthetic community he wanted to live in. Simmel even modeled the type of philosopher that Locke wanted to become—an engaged scholar who moved outside of the academy to transform his culture.
Despite the intellectual stimulation of studying under Simmel and visiting Secessionist exhibitions, Locke’s financial problems forced him to leave Berlin. By June 28, Locke had become desperate, as de Fonseka’s reply to a previous letter from Locke suggests. “I don’t know how hard-up you are,” de Fonseka wrote his friend. “I gather from your defiance that you are pretty hard up. I think you had much better come to England and stay with me,—at least for a time. I am sending you either three or four pounds tomorrow through Cook’s,—so mind you call for it when you get this letter. I think it will pay your fare over. If you have an outstanding landlady’s bill, let me know by return and how much the bill is. You could live here on nothing.”8 Just as important to Locke as de Fonseka’s kind offer of free room and board was his assurance that his landlady would shield Locke from his creditors.
You need not be afraid of Oxford creditors—they haven’t got me and I owe some £90. Two or three gentlemen have called at 45 Ashburton Mansion with summonses for me—but Mrs. Frost encloses her card and sends the summonses back to the Registrar of Oxford County Court objecting to having summonses left for me, against her wish, at her private address (II) refusing to pay the postage to forward these summonses on to me in France, (III) refusing to save the summons of the Law the trouble of discovering my address in France. You can have your letters sent to 45 Ashburton Mansion, or to Cook’s office—no one need know that you are at 131 Cheyne Walk, [London].9
Lionel de Fonseka’s offer and good humor was a godsend: Locke was finding it increasingly difficult to survive on his mother’s monthly $30 contribution, and even that source of funds threatened to dry up as summer approached and her school year salary ended. For de Fonseka, eluding Oxford creditors was still a game; for Locke, being protected was serious business. The last thing he needed was to be arrested and have that information get back to the United States. The monthly contribution from de Fonseka’s wealthy Sinhalese father to his son’s education made it possible for him—and now Locke—to live on fashionable Cheyne Walk in Chelsea. His father thought that his son was studying for his BA in modern history, with an eye to going on to get a bachelor in civil law. But de Fonseka had passed up taking the exam for this year because, in his words, “I have done no studying.”
One reason de Fonseka invited Locke to spend the summer with him was that he wanted Locke to help him flesh out a book—a dialogue between an “Occidental” and an “Oriental” over the relative merits of each civilization’s conceptions of art. De Fonseka’s idea was that such a dialogue would demonstrate his great insight—that decorative art, what he believed “Oriental” art excelled in, was actually the highest form of art. Western art was decadent, because its aesthetic impulse was invested in art “objects” put on display in museums, whereas in the East “daily life is beautiful.” True art was alive in the “Oriental” societies: “the ancient Sinhalese, who do not paint pictures, but decorated objects of daily use” were the true artists. De Fonseka rejected English aestheticism, because “to look on art as ‘an escape from Life’ is corrupt: a confession that in the West art is kept in a compartment. In the East, art is a product, an adjunct, and an unconscious expression, [a] symbol of daily life—really a ‘mirror of life.’ ”10
De Fonseka’s theory turned the West’s denigration of Oriental art—that it was primarily decorative and lacked morality and sophisticated emotion—back on Western art as its weakness. Decorative art enhanced space with spiritual possibility, as the West had itself once done during the Renaissance. “Western art [is] most successful when decorative, e.g. the frescoes meant to decorate the walls of Santa Maria Novella in Florence by Ghirlandago, Rafael’s decoration of the roof of Sistine Chapel.” These were the same decorations that had moved Locke and, interestingly enough, included non-Western figures. For de Fonseka, that high-water mark in Western art had been replaced in the contemporary period by the artlessness of the recent coronation of the new king of England, which de Fonseka judged “a failure—in Ceylon they do these things as they ought to be done.”11 Now certain that he had a demonstrable critique that could be developed into a book, de Fonseka drew Locke to London to “midwife” his book.
Locke was excited by the prospect of helping de Fonseka with his book, but he had his own reasons for accepting the offer. He had learned that Felix Adler’s Universal Races Congress was due to be held in London from July 26 to July 30. Adler was the founder of the Ethical Culture Society that Locke and his mother regularly visited in Philadelphia, especially since it was an integrated forum of lectures by America’s best minds. The secular society promoted nonsectarianism, interracial tolerance, and world peace, values Adler hoped to promote by bringing together international authorities and delegates at a Congress that would launch, he hoped, an international peace organization. Although the organization never materialized, the Congress was a success, as thousands of scholars, professors, diplomats, and laypeople descended on the University of London for four days to read and hear critiques of pseudoscientific racism, analyses of imperialism, and proposals for greater racial harmony. If Locke was to be courant on race issues, he needed to be at this conference and “back in circulation” with the community of scholars and activists working for racial reform in America. Although still a fan of Booker T. Washington, Locke realized that he needed to broaden his contacts, especially since Washington had so far not really helped Locke’s plans. The NAACP would be present in force at the Congress, in part because John E. Milholland, one of its founders, was also a co-organizer of the Congress and had secured travel funding for some of its most prominent members, including Mary White Ovington, William A. Sinclair, and W. E. B. Du Bois.
Locke evaded his creditors and arrived in London around the third week of July 1911. After settling into de Fonseka’s luxurious digs on Cheyne Walk, Locke hurried over to the University of London’s Imperial Institute just in time to hear the papers presented the first day at the Races Congress. At the first and second sessions Locke heard three of the most important papers that he would hear at the whole conference—“Race from the Anthropological Point of View” by Professor Felix von Luschan of the University of Berlin, “Race from the Sociological Point of View” by Professor Alfred Fouillee of the University of Paris, in the first session, and “The Instability of Human Types” by Professor Franz Boas of Columbia University in the second session. Locke may have been familiar with von Luschan from Berlin, as the renowned curator who had bought Europe’s most valuable collection of Benin sculpture at an auction in Britain. Respect for African art and for the people who created it lay behind von Luschan’s assertions that morning that African peoples possessed highly developed cultures and lifestyles that were superior to those of Europeans. As a man who liked to shock his audience, Luschan went on to assert that the average African was cleaner than most Europeans, that beauty was relative and not confined to the White race, and that variations in color among humans were caused by environmental factors. Luschan’s radical assertions were counterbalanced, however, by his conservative belief that racial barriers had a positive role to play in human affairs, that segregation of the races was unavoidable, and that nationalism and even war were necessary to human civilization. His discrediting of the cultural basis of White superiority jibed quite well with the argument that de Fonseka was struggling with at his writing table while Locke attended the Congress.
Yet it was a paper read by Alfred Fouillee after von Luschan’s that probably had the most influence on Locke. Fouillee’s paper confirmed what Locke had argued about values in his thesis, only applied to race. As Locke sat listening to Fouillee’s lecture in the stuffy Imperial Institute, he must have thought he was hearing himself lecture. “Every idea contains within it,” Fouillee said, “not merely an intellectual act, but also a certain orientation of sensibility and of will. Consequently every idea is a force that tends to realise its own object more and more fully. This is true of the idea of race, just as it is true of the idea of nation. Hence we have (I) a certain self-consciousness in a race, imparting to each of its members a kind of racial personality; (2) a tendency to affirm this personality more and more strongly, to oppose it to other racial types and secure its predominance. In other words, the race-idea includes within it a race-consciousness.”12 In an odd way, here was a pragmatic theory of race: a group tended to adopt and even try and live up to a tendency that was identified with or subscribed to a group. That insight would become one of the key ingredients of Locke’s own lectures on race in 1916.
Another paper delivered during the second session by Franz Boas backed up earlier speakers’ assertions that race was a mode of consciousness, not a biological reality. Based on research gathered while working for the Immigration Commission, Boas’s paper “Instability of Human Types” showed that racial characteristics varied so much under environmental conditions that there were actually no stable physical characteristics that reliably distinguished humans by race. Boas’s research had shown that the head size and shape of immigrants had changed over generations, and that skin color varied within groups as much as it varied among race groups. No one factor correlated always with a race group, and many factors, stereotypically associated with one group, could be found abundantly in other groups. Racial characteristics resembled what Locke had discovered about value attributes: they moved across racial lines as values moved across ethical, aesthetic, and utilitarian lines in value theory. Boas’s work confirmed that racial categories were just as inaccurate as the value categories that Locke critiqued in “The Concept of Value.”
Race consciousness was so powerful because it was practiced self-consciousness. Racial prejudice gave those who held such attitudes a heightened sense of purpose and legitimacy, reinforcing their idea of themselves. “If an ethnic consciousness gives a race greater solidarity and inward unity, it has, on the other hand, the disadvantage of culminating nearly always in an assumption of superiority and for that very reason, in a feeling of natural hostility,” Boas explained.13 What was the best way to deal with the intensity of racial ideas and feelings? Fouillee had answered we should oppose racist ideas with “the force of other ideas which contain a different set of feelings,” and the most important of these were scientific ideas. Boas modeled the power of the social scientist with his clinical deconstruction of race as a biological concept. Locke was naturally drawn to the role of the scientist, especially after studying with Georg Simmel, for science not only promised a pose of detachment, which Locke liked, but also a sense of community with other like-minded scientists. “Men of science, be their colour white or yellow, hail one another as brothers.”14 The Universal Races Congress convinced Locke that a scientific critique of race was a real option for him to create a community around his modernist ideas. Five years later Locke explained what the Congress and the scientific vocation had meant to him:
Ever since the possibility of a comparative study of races dawned upon me at the Races Congress, in London in 1911, I have had the courage of a very optimistic and steadfast belief that in the scientific approach to the race question, there was the possibility of a redemption for those false attitudes of mind which have, unfortunately, so complicated the idea and conception of race that there are a great many people who fancy that the best thing that can possibly be done, if possible at all, is to throw race out of the categories of human thinking.15
Locke had been planning a “comparative study of races” for some time as a journalistic project, but the Congress revealed the benefits of a scientific investigation of race to demolish the claims of the pseudoscientific racists and create space for a progressive race politics. The Congress, therefore, outlined a future vocation for him as well as a future role as the voice of a progressive-minded community.
That role seemed particularly open to Locke after he heard W. E. B. Du Bois’s speech in the sixth session. Du Bois’s paper conceded the theoretical discussion of race science to others, and instead presented a detailed narrative history of the Black experience in America from slavery to the contemporary era, packed with tables and lists of facts about Negro poverty, education, birth rates, and lynchings. He concluded with a critique of Booker T. Washington’s racial program. This was understandable, given that Washington, in London on a speaking tour in 1910, had given his listeners the impression that the situation of African Americans in America was dramatically improved. Such political infighting and programmatic squabbling left the field of a theoretical investigation of race by a Black social scientist wide open, Locke believed.
Israel Zangwill’s talk, “The Jewish Race,” at the fifth session of the Races Congress, came closer than Du Bois’s to outlining an approach Locke felt he could use as a future race leader. Zangwill gave a brief overview of Jewish history, but focused on what he believed was the “real Jewish problem,” the problem of self-preservation of the Jewish identity, a problem that he believed had to be solved by Jews themselves. While pogroms and other forms of Jewish oppression were real, a different kind of problem emerged where nations welcomed Jews: “a minor form of Crypto-Judaism was begotten, which prevails to-day in most lands of Jewish emancipation, among its symptoms being change of names, accentuated local patriotism, accentuated abstention from Jewish affairs, and even anti-Semitism mimetically absorbed from the environment.”16 As a result some Jews embraced wholeheartedly their expatriate cultures, forgot their own, and became the best exponents of their adopted national cultures. Such a “chameleon quality” of diasporic Jews made them excellent actors, artists, and critics, for “if a Russian Jew, Berenson, is the chief authority on Italian art, and George Brandes, the Dane, is Europe’s greatest critic … all these phenomena find their explanation in the cosmopolitanism of the wandering Jew.”17 Instead of becoming a rabid nationalist, Jewish intellectuals often became ardent internationalists.18
This lecture must have also pricked Locke’s conscience a bit. Was he not the perfect example of the kind of cosmopolitanism that Zangwill described in his lecture, a man who had spent most of his last three years further assimilating European art, literature, and culture, even though he himself had lectured the limits of cosmopolitanism in 1908? Just writing about it had not solved the problem. An act of will was needed by Jews (and by inference, Blacks) to will themselves a self-consciousness as a displaced nation. Zangwill shifted away from Du Bois’s focus on the external forces that acted on the group to an analysis on what a minority needed to do to save identity. What Locke heard was a clear clarion call for Jews to accept responsibility for the preservation of Jewish culture, and by analogy, for Black intellectuals to do the same with Black culture. Rather than abandon the masses of the group, an option always open to the more educated members of the assimilating race, the minority intellectual had to find a way to build up the group itself.
Zangwill’s lecture counterbalanced the cosmopolitan scientist role that Fouillee had outlined earlier in the Congress. Locke knew science alone would not solve the African American problem. Locke knew that he needed to find a way to galvanize the Black community as much as to neutralize the White community’s scientific racism. But how? Fouillee provided a clue in his lecture when he had stated that “an ethnic consciousness gives a race greater solidarity and inward unity,” because such a “self-consciousness in a race” imparts “to each of its members a kind of racial personality” that they affirmed “more and more strongly” over time.
Locke’s originality as a thinker came in how he put together what he heard from Fouillee, von Luschan, Boas, and especially Zangwill, at this Congress. Locke heard that racial self-consciousness produced a sense of solidarity and inward unity that empowered the White community in competition with others. While Fouillee had spent the rest of his lecture detailing how such self-consciousness ought to be suppressed, Locke determined he needed to find a way to promote such a self-consciousness in the Black group. Certainly, Locke wanted to foster a Black community in which he could live, in which highly assimilated men of the world could be comfortable. And Locke worried that racial self-consciousness in Blacks might transpose into the kind of hostility toward others that characterized European nationalism. Zangwill had also given Locke a hint of what could be the device for fostering such nationalism—a focus on making a contribution to one’s own culture, to inventing one’s own tradition, as a way of holding onto and building esteem in one’s own group. Other papers at the Congress that caught Locke’s attention were John A. Hobson’s “The Opening of New Markets,” which outlined the economic motive behind imperialism, and D. B. Jayathaka’s that delivered a scathing critique of Christianity and its missionary effort in Ceylon. “Christian methods of conversion must change,” the London Times reported him as saying.19 Du Bois later remembered this speech as a “dramatic incident” at the Congress. The organizers seemed to recall it as well, as an example of the kind of inflammatory statement that they did not wish to see at the conference. As the conference wore on, such speeches were curtailed.
While Locke enjoyed the Congress and the access to information he needed, he was also glad when the last session of the Congress ended on July 29. He relished spending more time with his host, the aesthete de Fonseka, who was consumed with writing his book, and increasingly in need of Locke’s help. As much as Locke liked the Congress, he still preferred the company of aesthetes and the opportunity to give ideology an aesthetic form, as de Fonseka’s book did. De Fonseka’s text of cultural resistance took the insight that the Ceylon delegate to the Races Congress had outlined—that Western cultural influence tends to denigrate traditional Asian culture in the eyes of Asian peoples—and turned it into a scathing, irreverent attack on Western aesthetics and an impassioned recommendation to Sinhalese people to value their own art traditions. His book outlined how to answer the Western racial practice of discursive validation by deconstructing the Western tradition and substituting a non-Western tradition to build pride and independence among the colonized. Locke was imbibing an anti-colonial model of aesthetic education as a tool of Black self-emancipation back home. As de Fonseka put it: “This dialogue is written primarily for the people of Ceylon. Sinhalese art has hitherto been strictly decorative, and as a Sinhalese I view with regret the modern tendency in Ceylon, under Western influences, to abandon our tradition in art and life. … It is regrettable that the rise of Western commerce should involve the decline of Eastern art; but though regrettable, it is not inevitable.20 That last statement provides a sense of what de Fonseka and Locke were up against—economic domination of their peoples—and their faith that aesthetics could interrupt those forces of alienation and stimulate the cultural regeneration of their peoples.
Of course, de Fonseka’s argument was problematical in several senses, as it accepted as true a kind of fixed construction of “Oriental” and “Occidental” cultural identities produced and disseminated by European imperialism. Was there nothing more diversified and varied than an “Oriental” or “Eastern” aesthetic? As was characteristic of much of the cultural apologetics of this generation of colonial intellectuals, cultural resistance was seen in terms far more related to English cultural imperialism than to the reality of cultural life in the “Orient.” Yet the book did succeed, perhaps better than the Races Congress, in bringing into the open the conflict between colonial cultural nationalists who wished to preserve aspects of their culture during modernization, and imperial intellectuals who wanted to preserve the hegemony of British culture even as they advocated liberal anti-racist politics.
It is unclear what role Locke played in the writing of On the Truth of Decorative Art. Years later Locke referred to this collaboration as his first experience of “midwifing” a book. The book was certainly de Fonseka’s, who brought to the project both the idea and most likely the dialogue form, borrowed from Oscar Wilde’s “The Decay of Lying.” Locke may have written some of the text that went into the dialogue, especially the voice of the “occidental,” who at times had to make the argument for the social realist school of art, as when he queried, “Do you think then that it detracts from the dignity of an art to be used as an instrument of social reform?” Working with de Fonseka helped Locke imagine the kind of argument that he would level at the social reformers of the Negro establishment, who themselves would argue for the propaganda value of Black art over its aesthetic, imaginative, or decorative aspect. But the midwifery role carried within itself its own frustration. Once again, as with his conversations with Kallen, Seme, El Alaily, and other intellectuals in England, Locke was working on their problems, their texts, and their resolutions. Working on the dialogue, however, did help. It got him collaborating with another minority intellectual in a counter-hegemonic project that legitimated Locke’s resistance to English discourses of domination of darker peoples. It also suggested a model for a non-hypocritical approach to the question of minority cultural identity. The dialogue was in fact inside Locke and de Fonseka themselves: they were dialogic constructions, a conversation of opposites, highly assimilated and educated “Occidentals” trying to find a path back to the “Oriental” in themselves—the people they had been before they became Oxonian intellectuals. On the Truth of Decorative Art showed that dialogue itself was productive, not destabilizing as was implied by the concept of “double consciousness,” and creative in giving voice to those who had mastered the European tradition, but still, as Locke had said in “Cosmopolitan” found their way back to their own traditions. Even though they did not finish the book that early August, Locke had helped get most of it done, and it was published in London in 1912.
Even with de Fonseka’s hospitality and the stimulating collaborative work, Locke’s personal problems were mounting in August 1911. He had very little money and was still adrift in England. He did get some good news. His mother wrote him early in the month that she had gone for the “99th time” to the shelves of the library and finally found his article, “The American Temperament,” published in the August issue of the North American Review. She confided that she “nearly dropped—I had no idea that I should live to see it.”21 Payment for that article would be mailed to him shortly in England. Lack of funds, though, blotted the joy of publication. Locke did not even have enough money to pay his landlord in Berlin the back rent he had owed her since April. Since May he had been fleeing the debt he owed another landlady, Mrs. Addis, with whom he had lived in the spring of 1910 before leaving for Berlin. Now she had had a Reverend A. Parker Fitch writing his mother, the head of Oxford, and the head of Harvard trying to embarrass him into paying. Had Locke done so, however, he would have been penniless. Despite the embarrassment of these debts, he held onto his precious few dollars. He also held on to the notion of remaining in Europe, even though to do so might leave him marooned without funds to get back to the United States.
Locke’s decision to stay in Europe without a source of income flabbergasted his mother. Mary had to borrow during the summer to send money for his board even though he was living with Fonseka rent-free. The lenders “think I am helping you. They must know something of the situation.” She was beginning to be critical as well: “What a pity you let so much money slip thro your hands and got yourself in this fix.”22 After one of his manuscripts was returned to her in Camden, she concluded that he would “never make a living at that. Could you not qualify to teach French or German in some of the colored high schools,” back home?23 At the end of June, she advised him, “You must settle on something.” Even he began to realize that was true. Locke had hoarded enough money from the $60 his mother sent him in July so that he could return to the United States if he had to. But how could he return to the United States as a failure, without his Oxford degree, and an embarrassment now to his race? In a fit of desperation, he wrote her that perhaps he might still go to Egypt. As usual, she encouraged him. But both of them knew that salvation lay in the other direction.
Despite nearly becoming a vagabond, Locke’s exile in Europe after Oxford had not been a waste. Having studied under Simmel at the University of Berlin and then attended lectures by Boas, Zangwill, Fouillee, and von Luschan at the Universal Race Congress in London, Locke had given himself a post-Harvard education in the emerging fields of sociology, anthropology, and race studies that would fuel his thinking for the rest of his life. He had deepened his ability to think about the Negro situation in the United States from comparative sociological and cultural perspectives, and become a philosopher of the social sciences even while failing to get the kinds of degrees he wanted. Hunkered down with de Fonseka in Chelsea, he had helped write a dialogue that recalibrated the cultural relationship between the East and the West and articulated a new Sinhalese self-consciousness that prefigured the New Negro’s. With de Fonseka, Locke also had rehearsed his mature role among African American writers—to be a midwife if not the mother of their “pen-children.” Most important, Locke had learned something profound about himself and the race, that transnationalism was the catalyst of his and the Negro’s advancement in the twentieth century.
Faced with complete destitution, and worse, the prospect of arrest and imprisonment in England for his unpaid debts, Locke decided to come home. Sometime before that decision, he made an equally important decision: he decided to lie and state publicly that he had received the Oxford degree. He made that decision sometime between his matriculation at the University of Berlin on May 6 and his return to America. On the inside of his registration folder appears a record of his degrees. BA was printed, but “B. Litt.” appears in Locke’s handwriting, as if it were added later. Locke decided to represent himself as having received the BLitt, his original degree course.
Locke probably made that decision early in August, as he prepared to return to the United States and realized that he had no other way to save face. In one sense, he needed to find some way to put the Oxford situation behind him so that he could get on with his life. With the distance, both culturally and geographically, between Oxford and the educational establishment of the United States, it would be unlikely that anyone would discover the truth. Oxford certainly had nothing to gain from embarrassing him, especially as its own racial treatment of him might get out in the papers. Always the rationalizer, he justified the lie as necessary to avoid an unnecessary racial conflict. But the lie cost him. Although he was never discovered, it haunted him, so much so that twenty-five years later, he woke up at 4 a.m. one morning, and scribbled a note of justification to himself:
The only basis upon which I could reasonably or in full justice to myself be expected to publicly admit my failure at Oxford University would have been a full public statement of the peculiar circumstances of the case. The whole story even now and more so then would have released a storm of public discussion and inflammatory [debate] harmful to the best public interests of all concerned, especially those of the special constituency that had been foisted upon me by sensational publicity attending my appointment as the first Negro appointee to a Rhodes Scholarship. I should have had to publicly complain of arbitrary procedure [and] discrimination which so far as it related to the degree examination itself was in my best judgment personal rather than racial, but which would immediately have been construed as racial by the public opinion, especially in view of the frequent recurrence in my Oxford career of instances of racial discrimination, two instances of which had already appeared by cable report in the public press. I thus deliberately resorted to strategic coverup at the great risk of personal honor and peace of mind and expectation of a correction of the matter by my entry for another Oxford degree and later by the subsequent election and academic success of a stronger or luckier successor. For I should have had to bear the additional blame of being largely responsible for the non-election of Negro candidates for these scholarships during this period of 25 years.24
With the door to an Oxford degree closed, Locke convinced himself that to lie about having received it was an act of noblesse oblige so as not to embarrass the race. He also believed that in a public squabble race spokespersons would seize on racism to rescue his reputation by disparaging Oxford’s. Perhaps the honorable aspect of his note is his unwillingness to attribute his own failure to racism. No, it was personal, despite that Oxford acted poorly from a racial standpoint. Having criticized other Blacks when he was at Harvard for using race to excuse their own failure, Locke at least was honorable enough to refrain from invoking it here.
Yet Locke’s justification remains unsatisfying and unconvincing. Ethically, it was wrong to lie about the degree, and he knew this instinctively. Moreover, he benefited personally from the lie, for it made him into a success story, confirmed what those of the race wanted to believe about him, and gave him a career as a major Black intellectual that would certainly have been compromised if it had been known that he had failed at Oxford. His reminiscence is unsatisfying mostly, because it does not do justice to his anger. How dare Oxford do this to him, how dare they try to embarrass him and his race! As he sat in Berlin and then in London brooding over the predicament, he must have come to feel that race had something to do with it. Weren’t the stories legion at Oxford about the English nobility who wasted away their time partying and drinking, only to emerge with a face-saving degree, a Gentleman’s Third? Why not him? Because he was Black? Because he was American? Or simply because he was the “spoiled” Locke? He couldn’t know for sure, but he had to feel it was unfair. Since they had treated him unfairly, he would return the favor and reject Oxford’s right to judge him. He lied about the degree, partly to protect the race, but also to assert that he had earned his degree, whether Oxford agreed or not.
Locke’s decision also suggests his cynicism toward Black people. He was going to give them what they wanted anyway. Hadn’t Black people been responsible, in part, for the “sensational publicity” that had surrounded his appointment? Hadn’t he just wanted to go off to Oxford on his own, be left alone, and disappear? And hadn’t the Black press, the Black clergy, and the Black progressive establishment violated his privacy by making him a symbol of Black intelligence? Didn’t they owe him something in return? It served them right for their intrusion into his personal affairs. Locke would encourage the applause of hundreds of unsuspecting Black bourgeoisie for his success. They needed culture heroes. He would give them one, whether he was one or not.
As Locke sailed home from England sometime in August, he brought home some additional baggage. Having used race to justify to himself his cover-up of the truth, he owed Black people in a way he had never owed them before. That was what the guilt about Oxford would do to his soul. In the final analysis, perhaps lying about the Oxford degree helped him. Had he gotten the Oxford degree, he might not have been so driven to make a real contribution to the race struggle, might never have become Alain Locke, the race leader. Failing to get the degree and lying about it imposed a heavy burden. Disembarking to New York, Locke returned home in 1911 carrying a debt it would take his entire life to work off.