Locke always loved Harvard, loved its architecture, its Yard, even the smell of the grass at Cambridge’s Mt. Auburn Cemetery, where he could wander on his light days of classes and visit the graves of the leaders of the New England Renaissance, the only renaissance America had known. He remained a Boston aesthete despite the many turns in the road his intellect would take afterward and was just a bit giddy as he contemplated that spring of 1916 the possibility of returning to Harvard. With his Race Contacts lectures over, he began to imagine what it would be like to get the doctorate from the place of his most spectacular triumph academically and socially. But a fear lurked in him as he planned for that return. Since his undergraduate years, he had tasted failure. He needed the PhD not only to get a promotion at Howard but also to keep pace with Du Bois and join the coming generation of Black scholars, all of whom would have PhDs. Without a PhD, he would remain a mere prodigy, a bright little boy; with it, he would be a man among the leading scholars of the race, likely a full professor in the College of Arts and Sciences at Howard in a couple of years. A bit of nervousness crept in as he went about preparations to leave for Cambridge—not doubt about his ability, but about the unknown that had derailed in Oxford and Berlin.
For once at Harvard, where he would be able to enjoy his romantic friendships without Howard’s restraining eyes, a danger would emerge. Unlimited freedom of romantic association had been partially responsible for his debacle at Oxford. Harvard in 1916 was likely his only chance to get the PhD, and he could not afford to risk disaster again, especially since attending any failure in the United States would become public knowledge. Instinctively sensing the danger, Locke began to think of taking his mother with him to Harvard. Shortly after learning that he had been awarded the Austin Teaching Fellowship at Harvard, he wrote his mother that “barring slips, here’s to our year in Cambridge.”1 The almost romantic quality of his comment covered up a more practical consideration—in this final struggle to get his terminal degree, Locke needed his mother close at hand to maintain his psychic stability and restrain his self-destructive impulses for sexual excess, high living and overspending.
Mary Locke began to play this role as early as the summer of 1916. As soon as Locke obtained a leave of absence and “$350 or $400 of my salary” from Howard, he traveled to Boston to scout out living arrangements. Initially, Locke stayed with William Stanley Braithwaite, who suggested some lavish and expensive rooms for Locke and his mother. Put off by the price, Locke lost the rooms, and then lamented that he had not taken them. He also discovered that he would face more serious obstacles in renting a room than he had imagined. Racial prejudice had increased dramatically in Boston since his undergraduate days. “I am up against a difficult proposition—considerable prejudice—and colored places scarce—and undesirable,” he informed his mother.2 It was no longer his undergraduate days when he could just present himself to landlords in his fine coat and hat, and obtain a room. Here was a concrete example of his observation in the Race Contacts lectures—that race feelings changed over time, hardening in the era of the European war and Wilson’s segregationist policies. Unwilling to take a place in a Black rooming house, Locke began to consider seriously the suggestion of William Lewis, a Black lawyer and one of Booker T. Washington’s former operatives, to get an apartment in a White building by mailing in his lease and deposit, and then letting the neighbors howl when they discovered that the Lockes were Black. Mary Locke’s response to both Braithwaite’s and Lewis’s suggestions set the right tone and the priorities for coming year: “I am sorry you are having a time to locate rooms,” she wrote him on June 28. “The apartments Mr. B[raithwaite] selected were too expensive. I have been wishing you would just engage board for both of us. Surely you could find some suitable place—it would save so much expense and worry for just 10 months—stow the furniture (storage) we have, and start fresh at light housekeeping (flat) in Washington in the fall of 1917. I cannot see how we are going to manage to move things up to Cambridge—then back to Washington. Or get furnished rooms—with some one. … Do not have the risk and trouble of being put out of white apartment house—or even having trouble with them. You need a quiet mind—and peace.”3
Mary’s letter reveals that they also planned to live together once he returned to Washington, D.C., and for the rest of her life. Paying to live separately in Camden and Washington had seemed a waste of money by 1916, especially since he had not been able to increase his salary while at Howard. His mother retiring from her job in Camden seemed appropriate now, especially as she would be able to bring her retirement money to Cambridge and then Washington, allowing them to live more comfortably together than separate. But the decision also meant a change for the foreseeable future. For the last twelve years, he had lived on his own, beginning at Harvard and ending at Howard. In both of those instances, being connected to her but also on his own had resulted in his most spectacular successes. What would his productivity let alone his personal life be like once he shared domestic space with her every day?
Answers to those kinds of questions were less pressing than the challenge of finding rooms before the fall term began. But as usual Locke delayed even that challenge in order to enjoy the intellectual freedom of Cambridge immediately. Staying that summer with Braithwaite, the Boston poet, critic, and anthologist who was the son of a very light-skinned British Guianan of French, English, and Creole ancestry, was a pleasurable interlude before he figured out the matter of housing. The son of a West Indian patriarch who taught his children the French language and Victorian manners at home, as well as to avoid social contact with American Blacks, Braithwaite left school for work after his father’s early death. He was rescued from a laborer’s life while working in a printer’s office when he discovered his love for poetry while setting to type John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Braithwaite’s first book of poetry, Lyrics of Life and Love (1904), showed the influence of Keats and Shelley, but his second, The House of Falling Leaves (1908), announced a mystical and modern voice. That modern voice gained maturity and authority in his critical articles in Century, Scribner’s, the Atlantic, and the Boston Evening Transcript and reached its greatest influence in Braithwaite’s annual anthologies of magazine verse that introduced such younger poets as Carl Sandburg, Edgar Lee Masters, Conrad Aiken, and Amy Lowell to a broader audience. Braithwaite was not a race poet or race critic, but someone who encouraged Black writers to focus on the craft, the form of their art, even to the point of avoiding race themes altogether. And his success in insinuating himself as a critical voice in the poetic modernism of the early twentieth century suggested that one need not be confined to race if one had the chops to perform mainstream modernism in one’s poetry.
Locke’s Howard colleague, Montgomery Gregory, probably introduced Locke and Braithwaite, whom Gregory may have known from his undergraduate days at Harvard. Braithwaite had already taken a liking to Gregory in 1915 and had collaborated with Gregory to edit and publish the Citizen, a magazine of African American literary and cultural discussion. Braithwaite’s first letter to Locke was a request for an article for the Citizen on the literary significance of Booker T. Washington, who had just died. Braithwaite wrote Locke again in April 1916, when Braithwaite was planning a poetry reading and lecture trip to Howard University. Invited initially by Roscoe Conkling Bruce to lecture to the Washington teachers association, Braithwaite had added Howard at Kelly Miller’s suggestion, but relied on Locke to chaperone him around campus. Locke was flattered by the attention and inspired by Braithwaite’s presence, which included a lecture, “Current American Poetry,” that resonated with Locke’s analysis that the European war was a turning point in culture. For Braithwaite, however, as he stated in his introduction to the 1916 Anthology of Magazine Verse, the European war was catalyzing a renaissance of American poetry that had begun in the poetry of Edgar Arlington Robinson, Robert Frost, Edgar Lee Masters, Anna Branch, Amy Lowell, and James Oppenheim. While most had begun writing before the war, after the conflict broke out their “body of work has ascended with convincing proof of power on the wave of the great European war.”4 Braithwaite was an important literary influence on Locke because he rejected Ezra Pound’s advice to modern American poets to divorce their poetry from the American social environment, and advocated, instead, that poetry respond to social forces without becoming social propaganda.
When Locke arrived at Braithwaite’s residence at 27 Ellsworth Street in Cambridge around June 21, an additional pleasure was that Gregory was also spending part of his summer there. Perhaps Gregory was also experiencing the longing to return to the place of his triumph as a Harvard undergraduate and the prize Black student of George Pierce Baker. Locke, Gregory, and Braithwaite talked of poetry, of the drama, and no doubt of the central conflict Locke and Gregory had been involved in that year in Washington—their recent disagreement in the Drama Committee of the Washington, D.C., branch of the NAACP over the kind of theater the committee should produce. While the committee members—Laura Glenn, Clara B. Bruce, E. C. Williams, Anna J. Cooper, Carrie W. Clifford, Georgia Fraiser, E. E. Just, Montgomery Gregory, and Locke—agreed on what they were against (the savage caricatures of Black life that dominated the American popular theater) they disagreed on what kind of drama should be presented to the Washington Black community. Some on the committee, including activist Anna J. Cooper, believed that Black drama should be political and critique American racism. That wing succeeded in convincing the rest of the committee to support the production of Angelina Grimke’s three-act play “Rachel,” which opened at the Miner Normal School auditorium on March 3, 1916. Apparently, Locke and Montgomery had supported the production of “Rachel” with the understanding that afterward the repertoire would expand to include “folk-drama” and plays about Negro life written by White authors. But shortly after “Rachel” opened, Locke learned that only more political plays would be put on, and he promptly resigned from the Drama Committee, explaining in a letter to Archibald Grimke, head of the Washington, D.C., branch, that “an utter incompatibility of point of view—something more than a mere difference of opinion—indeed, an abysmal lack of common meeting ground between myself and the majority of the members forces my retirement. It was my impression that … other types of race or folk play should be considered along with the problem-play on their respective merits, and probably one each of several kinds experimented with, but most of all I had anticipated and regard as fundamental, the careful consideration of the work that has already been done in the field of drama with ourselves or our problem as the subject if only as a point of departure and an attempt to enlist the influence and interest of men who are already fast becoming authorities on the matter of modern playwriting and presentation.”5
Locke and Gregory were critical of “Rachel,” because, as Gregory recalled eleven years later, its chief limitation was “shown by the announcement on the program: ‘This is the first attempt to use the stage for race propaganda in order to enlighten the American people relative to the lamentable condition of ten millions of Colored citizens in this free republic.’ ” That view of art was precisely what Locke and Gregory objected to, as Gregory also recalled: “a minority section of this committee dissented from this propagandistic platform and were instrumental later in founding the Howard Players organization, promoting the purely artistic approach and the folk-drama idea.”6 It is possible that these conversations with Braithwaite in Cambridge laid the foundation for Locke and Gregory to establish the Howard Players later in 1919.
Beneath the art versus politics debate were others over race and class. To fight racism, the committee wanted plays that featured only middle-class Blacks as characters, whereas in George Pierce Baker’s classes at Harvard, Gregory had imbibed his drama teacher’s dictum that modern dramatists should draw material from and develop a realist portraiture of the lower-class folk. Locke believed that Black drama needed to reflect the revolution in storytelling, stage direction, set design, and costume seen in White modernist theater. But the politically minded members of the NAACP Drama Committee wanted nothing to do with such plays as “The Nigger,” by White playwright Edward Sheldon, which opened in New York on December 4, 1909.
At stake here was more than meets the eye, more than simply whether plays by White dramatists or about lower-class Black sexuality were offered to bourgeois Black audiences in Washington. Locke and Gregory had mounted a resistance to the very notion that protest to racism was the essence of Black identity. Was Black aesthetics going to explore the subtle, sublime, and quiet dimensions of Black humanity as well as the robust?7 African American life contained many other episodes of dramatic significance than the encounter with and struggle against White racism. Everyday life, the wrestling with one’s inner self-destructive tendencies, the pains of adolescent life, the tribulations of families arriving in the city and leaving back home memories and departed ancestors—all of these and more were subjects Locke and Gregory wanted the theater to encourage young writers to explore in connection in the Black theater to open up the psychological dimension of modern Negro life. But that would never happen in a drama narrowed to the proposition W. E. B. Du Bois would express in print ten years later—“all Art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda.”8
Locke and Gregory, of course, wanted a drama that showed Black folk could already love and enjoy despite the terror of racism. Indeed, their view went to the core question of twentieth-century Black aesthetics: could art show that Black people have an existence, a being, a worth, beyond the debate about their worth generated by White racists? Black aesthetics was thus an absolutely essential way to reveal Black humanity in all of its complexity. But Locke had resigned from the NAACP Drama Committee because he knew that the political establishment that drove Black bourgeois aesthetics in 1916 would not allow that kind of dramatic exploration. Talking with Braithwaite over the next year would strengthen Locke’s resolve to refuse to participate in an aesthetic politics that denied the deeper dimensions of Black humanity.
Mary Locke soon joined her son at the end of June, after vacating her home and moving up to Cambridge. Both stayed at the Braithwaites’ into the month of August, until Locke, ignoring his mother’s advice, obtained lodgings at 552 Newbury Street in the heart of an all-White, middle-class Boston neighborhood. Although most of the inhabitants of the three- and four-story brick row houses on Newbury Street were renters rather than owners, Locke and his mother were certainly the only Black residents. Locke had followed, probably, William Lewis’s advice and secured the lease through the mail, and then weathered the storm of indignation when they moved in. The neighborhood apparently did not protest too much. The location was convenient: Locke could walk the four blocks from his home to Massachusetts Avenue, where he could catch a bus or trolley to take him across the Charles River to Cambridge. Most important, 552 Newbury Street was probably the least expensive housing in an all-White neighborhood that he could afford. And being in an all-White neighborhood was essential to Locke. He knew his White friends, especially his Central High School friends, would be uncomfortable visiting him in a Black rooming house.
When Locke enrolled in Harvard that September, he received a shock: Josiah Royce died suddenly. Locke had returned to Harvard in part to study with Royce: the California-born idealist had been the first Harvard philosopher to befriend him in 1904, had been his major professor during his undergraduate career, and had written a strong letter of recommendation for the Rhodes Scholarship. Not only had Royce extended himself personally with Locke but also modeled the kind of philosopher Locke was becoming, a social philosopher akin to the old New England minister. Men like Royce and James cultivated a public audience for their writings, and Locke wanted to follow in their footsteps. Royce’s death, however, removed the one man in the Harvard Department of Philosophy whose vision of the philosopher’s vocation might have helped Locke find a way to integrate his public and social concerns with a career as an academic philosopher.
Who would Locke work with now? James had died in 1910, and George Herbert Palmer, who, next to Royce, had been Locke’s friend in the department, had retired in 1913. Hugo Munsterberg, who had interested himself in Locke at the University of Berlin, died in 1916 as well. Locke’s Oxford friend and intellectual ally, Horace Kallen, also was gone. At a time when the Philosophy Department was attempting to rebuild, Harvard president Lowell blocked the appointment of Arthur Lovejoy, Bertrand Russell, and John Dewey because he disapproved of their character. As a result, Locke entered a much weaker Philosophy Department in 1916 than he had graduated from in 1907. William James, Josiah Royce, and George Santayana were probably irreplaceable, but the remaining faculty was not even the best in the country.
Further study with Royce would, however, have been a step backward for Locke. He had already moved beyond Royce’s idealism in his Oxford thesis. Harvard’s younger generation of philosophers better served Locke’s main purpose—to get his PhD without a great deal of difficulty. There was the German-born Oxford graduate R. F. Alfred Hoernlé, who had received an assistant professorship after visiting at Harvard and who was widely liked because of his geniality. Hoernle taught Metaphysics, Royce’s old course, and Logical Theory to Locke, and they seemed to get on very well. Locke also seemed to enjoy very cordial relations with Henry M. Sheffer, the Jewish lecturer in the Philosophy Department during Locke’s graduate year, who was a brilliant logician. Sheffer taught Locke logic and corresponded with him years after both had left Harvard. But the most important philosophy professor for Locke would be Ralph Barton Perry, who had introduced him to modern philosophy in his freshman year, had administered Locke’s honors exam in 1907, and who had tried to get Locke a scholarship to return to graduate school in 1911. Perry was a tall, wiry, clean-cut man who epitomized what Lowell looked for in his faculty: he was a White, Anglo-Saxon Protestant, mildly anti-Semitic and pro-war. Perry not only wrote several books and essays linking the German war effort with German philosophy, but traveled as a recruit to the military training program at Plattsburg, New York, in the summer of 1916 to become a “citizen soldier.” He seemed to like Locke a great deal and to be genuinely supportive of his attempt to become the first Black American to secure a PhD in philosophy from Harvard University.
Locke excelled in Hoernlé’s Logical Theory course that fall of 1916, in part because the course played to Locke’s strength. It focused on the “comparative study of Logical and Epistemological Theories with special attention to Bradley and Bosanquet, Russell, Husserl, and Meinong”—philosophers with whom he was familiar from his Oxford thesis research. It was a rigorous course, but Locke liked Hoernle and applied himself diligently to his studies, passing a particularly difficult set of examinations in November. Then, Locke wrote for the class one his best papers of the fall semester, “A Criticism of the Bosanquetian Doctrine of Judgment Forms.” It was a brilliant critical analysis of Bernard Bosanquet’s tendency to oscillate between a genetic, psychological approach to value judgments and a Hegelian dialectical approach. Locke showed that despite Bosanquet’s pose of keeping the question open as to which methodology was the best for analyzing judgment forms, Bosanquet had subtly decided on the Hegelian over the psychological approach. By critiquing this tendency in Bosanquet, Locke declared his allegiance to the psychological account of how values emerge in human consciousness. Locke’s paper also reveals his reason for backing the genetic account, for when he quotes Professor Baldwin on the subject, he indirectly states his own belief: “this natural genesis forbids our taking these principles out of their context and treating them as having miraculous and mysterious ontological virtues.”9 For Locke, the psychological approach to valuation preserved the relationship of values to their social context, and, in particular, preserved the sense that feeling was as much a part of the valuing process as reason. What is also remarkable here is how easily Locke writes with command and assurance about exceedingly technical issues in logical theory and the theory of values, despite having spent little time on such issues in the six years that intervened between his Oxford thesis and his first semester of graduate school in 1916. Hoernlé rewarded Locke’s effort with this comment on his paper: “An exceedingly interesting piece of work, which I have read with pleasure and profit.”10 The Bosanquet paper proved that Locke belonged in Harvard’s graduate program in philosophy.
Locke would have chosen Perry’s year-long seminar on Ethics and the Theory of Value, Philosophy 20, regardless of Royce’s death; but this seminar took on heightened importance in Locke’s plans once his former mentor was not available to direct his dissertation. Perry represented the shift of Harvard philosophy toward professionalism, increased specialization, and the invocation of science as the model for philosophical inquiry. He was also the department’s foremost authority on value theory and the only man who could direct Locke’s PhD dissertation on value. Perry had taken William James’s argument in The Principles of Psychology that interest was the key to consciousness and transformed it into a definition of value: interest was the key to why humanity valued the good over the evil, the truth over falsity, and the beautiful over the ugly. According to Perry, a value was nothing more than “the fulfillment of [a] bias of interest. An object would be said to possess value in so far as it fulfilled interest.”11 By contrast, Locke identified value with the ability to rise above naked interest and passion. He did not believe that simple interest could explain all of valuation. But he had also learned something from his disastrous attempt to force his psychological interpretation of value theory on Wilson and the other logically inclined philosophers at Oxford. Perry was Locke’s best hope for success at Harvard, and it did not make sense to make a frontal assault on Perry’s definition of value as the core of Locke’s dissertation. So, Locke devised a more academic, more circumspect thesis than the one he had submitted to Oxford. Locke shifted the emphasis to a less contentious ground—the problem of classifying values into categories in the theory of value. When Locke read the outline of his dissertation in Perry’s seminar on January 18, he had revised the argument of his Oxford thesis: the nature of valuation could best be discovered by observing how well explanations of valuing sorted our values into usable categories. For this problem of classification, Locke argued, the only reasonable approach was a “functional analysis and the genetic method as proper to the inquiry.”12 Locke also sharpened his critique of idealist theories of values by arguing that they failed to adequately explain how humans sorted values into their categories. Value categories emerged not from the idea of value, but from the practical, everyday experience of valuing. His argument came down to this: if we followed out how valuing worked in everyday experience, we would discover that Locke’s definition of value, as educated feeling, was the most adequate to classifying values in their appropriate categories.
Perry responded positively to Locke’s outline at the end of the first semester, a sign that Locke had successfully cleared a major hurdle of his graduate year at Harvard. Then, during the second semester of the weekly seminar, Locke, along with the rest of the students, developed his outline into a rough draft, titled “The Types of Classification in the Theory of Value.” In addition to attending classes, Locke devoted considerable recreational time to those extracurricular activities that he deemed “cultured.” He was a member of the Harvard Philosophical Club, attended most of its meetings, and used them to deepen his relationships with his professors. Locke’s scribble on the back of an invitation to the February 23 meeting at which Professor Hoernle spoke reveals something of Locke’s easygoing manner in interacting with his superiors. “Went. Met Dr. Langfeld on the way—talked of Harris. Entered room late. Dewey Philosophy [apparently Hoernle’s subject] Downstairs Hoernle’s apology—fine talk with Sheffer [about] Freud, etc.—then Hoernle & Mrs. H. Left.”13 He also felt most comfortable socializing with his peers in the Central High School Club at Harvard, which elected him to membership shortly after he arrived in Cambridge. Presided over by his friend, David A. Pfromm, now a lawyer in Boston, the CHS club met at the homes of prominent members and at Boston cultural shrines such as the Copley Theatre, where on February 8 they witnessed the Henry Jewett players “present ‘MILESTONES’ by Arnold Bennett and Edward Knobloch.” Dickerman was often present at such club meetings, allowing Locke to re-create the triumvirate of Pfromm, Dick, and Locke from his undergraduate days. As before, Dick and Locke planned writing projects together and may have renewed their former romantic interests, although in 1917, “Dickus” seemed increasingly preoccupied by the war, which he was convinced would likely stimulate literary activity in the United States. Sometimes, such extracurricular activities synchronized with Locke’s graduate work to make for exceedingly pleasurable and syncretic days. “Read Outline to Perry’s seminar,” Locke scribbled on the back of an invitation to the January 18 meeting of the CHS club. “Braithwaites Next. D A P[fromm at the Harvard] Union had dinner there—splendid discussion of Dick & the War. Then to Fairfax Squires (Gross for the first time). Afterwards with Jamie Miller to the Square. Fun Day.”14
Locke felt at home at Harvard, because there he was able to balance his academic and non-academic responsibilities such that they did not divide him, as they had at Oxford. In Cambridge, he could have friends, meet up with them without concern of who was checking on him, and then go to classes, have intellectual discussions with the likes of Hoernlé, Perry, and Braithwaite, and not feel torn by the contrasts. For the first time, Locke found it easy to connect the philosophical and the literary sides of his intellect in Cambridge through what emerged as a rather consistent preoccupation with the psychological dimensions of human experience. His formal studies of the psychological dimension of valuation with Perry resonated with his informal discussions with Braithwaite that a Negro literary aesthetics of the future must be open to the psychological as well as the political dimensions of the Black experience.
Spending a year at Harvard also allowed Locke to reconnect with the generation of young Harvard graduates that was shaping the American literary rebellion of the 1910s, the cadre of Van Wyck Brooks, Lee Simonson, Harold Stearns, and Walter Lippmann who would combine aesthetic and political revolt. Some of them had been his classmates, such as Lee Simonson, the modernist set designer and authority on the new American theater, who wrote for Seven Arts. Simonson, whom Locke probably reconnected with at several dinners, may have introduced Locke to the magazine. Locke, in turn, introduced it to his Oxford friend, de Fonseka. Locke’s recommendation of the Seven Arts to de Fonseka signaled that Locke’s taste was shifting away from older, conservative magazines like the North American Review. Moreover, by recommending the Seven Arts rather than the Masses to his Sinhalese friend, Locke also showed that he sympathized less with the New Masses’ Marxian-inspired debates in that magazine and more with the Freudian-inspired cultural revolution that contributors to Seven Arts seemed to believe lay ahead. Romain Rolland’s essay on America in the November issue of Seven Arts was typical of this optimism, for the author seemed to believe that in America would begin a worldwide cultural liberationist movement. Unfortunately, Locke did not contribute anything to the magazine.
Life in Boston offered a near idyllic social life and world for the Lockes. There were frequent visits and dinners with the Braithwaites, of course, but also a chance to visit frequently with the Philadelphia-born artist and intellectual Meta Warrick Fuller, who had studied sculpture with Rodin and been a sensation in Paris art circles before settling down in Framingham, Massachusetts, with her husband, the psychiatrist Dr. Solomon Fuller. They entertained the Lockes repeatedly during his Harvard year. Being at Harvard also meant the opportunity to reconnect with Dickerman, who by the fall of 1917 was nicely ensconced as an instructor of English at Mt. Holyoke Collection. That year also brought new friends into his life. He met and befriended Plenyano Gbe Wolo, the outstanding son of the chief of the Kru tribe in Liberia, who had entered Harvard in 1913. Known on campus as “the African prince,” Wolo was a member and vice president of the Harvard Cosmopolitan Club and, like Locke, interested in finding a way to utilize an American education (he went on to obtain a BA from Harvard, an MA from Columbia, and a BDiv from Union Theological Seminary) to leverage the independent economic and social development of African people.15 Blending a social life with new and old friends, in the nearly constant company of his mother provided Locke with a social life that seemed to buoy his creative spirit.
Locke contributed an important article to the Poetry Review, William Stanley Braithwaite’s fledgling journal, on the Belgian poet Emile Verhaeren, one of the Symbolists and a favorite of Amy Lowell, another contributor to Seven Arts. Locke’s essay was a commemoration of the recently deceased Verhaeren and showed Locke’s familiarity with both the poetry and prevailing critical opinion of Verhaeren. But the essay’s real significance was Locke’s discussion of modernism in literature away from the issues of Black writing and racial politics. Verhaeren had been one of the founders of the Belgian Renaissance, a national movement of literature that had emerged in the 1880s as Belgium reacted against the political and cultural domination of France and Germany and struggled for national self-determination. The movement began with the study of Belgian history, caught flame with the establishment of Art Moderne and other literary reviews in Brussels, and blazed in the work of Camille Lemmonier in fiction and Verhaeren’s painter-like portraits of Flemish peasant life in poetry. Eschewing sentimental idealism, Verhaeren depicted Belgian life, in such early books as Les Falmandes (1883), with the “crude defiant realism” of the modernist, according to Locke.16 Verhaeren wrote about peasants with an eye on their vices, brutality, and criminality, and avoided fin-de-siècle decadent aestheticism and the hyperrealism of Émile Zola. Verhaeren was
the greatest exponent of modernism in poetry. In so styling him, we rate as the really vital modernism in the art, not the cult of sheer modernity of form and mood,—the ultra-modernism in which the poetic youth exults, but that more difficult modernity of substance which has as its aim to make poetry incorporate a world-view and reflect the spirit of its time. The task,—ancient and perennial in some respects, of getting the real world into the microcosm of art without shattering either one or the other, was unusual in Verhaeren’s day. No life has been harder to transmute into art than modern life, and in no art so difficult as in that of poetry. Yet this was the master-passion of Verhaeren’s temperament and the consummate achievement of his work.17
In his later work, Verhaeren had extended poetic modernism by exploring the symbol of modern life, the city in such works as Les Campagnes Hallucinees (1893), Les Villes Tentaculaires (1896), and La Multiple Splendeur (1906). Just as the city had been the sign of the modernity of Simmel, the Berlin sociologist, the city symbolized for Verhaeren the real, the throbbingly actual. “It is obviously not the city as such—indeed Verhaeren never quite escaped his old preoccupation with peasant folk and country life in all their Flemish provinciality—but the city as a symbol, a point of view, behind Verhaeren’s real gods, Humanity and Force.”18
Such views help situate Locke’s modernism within the context of his times. Locke embraced the modernism of the Seven Arts magazine, rejected moralistic progressivism, and advocated a revolution in literary taste to accept the franker, more Freudian discussions of sexuality, the moral uncertainty of modern life, and the sordid lives of the poor in the cities. That was the challenge of modern poetry that Verhaeren had met and Negro literature would need to meet—adopt a radically new content and derive new forms of expression, as Whitman, another Locke favorite, had done in Leaves of Grass. But Locke was not sympathetic to what he called “ultramodernism,” whose main goal was a complete rebellion against tradition in form and the artist’s responsibility to reflect the life of the people in content. Locke liked Verhaeren, because for him, the “real did exist,” and he revolutionized form because he knew that the classical tradition’s insistence on grace, balance, and symmetry could not accommodate the contrast, contrapunctuality, and dissonance of the modern urban reality. Verhaeren exhibited something akin to the blues aesthetic that later poets like Langston Hughes would try to capture in poetry of Black urban life. The challenge for modernism, Locke believed, was to extend the reach of poetic beauty to accommodate the raucous diversity of modern life.
The Verhaeren reflections elucidate what Locke was trying to achieve in his formal philosophical discussions of value and beauty that spring of 1917. Locke sought to answer the late nineteenth-century attack on values led by Nietzsche, who, once he declared God dead, asserted that the system of universal social values, derived from God or an Absolute, was dead too. No longer could we depend on the existence of transcendent ideals or argue that standards of the good, the true, and the beautiful existed for all peoples. Locke agreed that people perceive values differently, and that no God or universal intelligence can be posited that creates ideal value types. But Locke rejected the extreme of the position that insisted, as Nietzsche did in Thus Spake Zarathustra, that now the individual, the super-individual, was the only source of values. Instead, Locke wanted to reestablish socially shared values on a psychological basis and argued that certain values are products of the way people habitually perceive their experience. He found a metaphor of what he wanted to say in formal value theory in the psychological research of A. Mussell, who wrote on color and sound perception. In a series of psychological experiments, Mussell determined that large numbers of people habitually perceived certain colors and sounds as complementary or harmonious, and that these colors and sounds were habitually grouped together when experiments were repeated with the same or different subjects. Mussell had developed a qualitative scale of color and sound apperception, and Locke took that as more than an analogy of what happened when people perceived certain values as harmonious or complementary to one another.
According to Locke, complementary “color and sound sensations are felt differently from the type of sensation lacking that aspect, and such aspects of sensory experience are called ‘values’—not merely by analogy, I think, but because they really are a type of value, in an elementary way as a conditioning of experience principally in terms of its affective factors.”19 Since Mussell’s work was based on direct perception rather than reflective comparison, Locke argued by analogy that valuation contained gradations of qualitative discrimination such as harmonious, inharmonious, and unharmonious. In short, Mussell suggests that people’s qualitative sense is shared and can be measured scientifically, such that one can claim, without reference to some ideal notion of values, that socially shared values exist. Despite the dramatic diversity of experience and sophistication, there is something fundamentally similar about the experience of an art critic viewing a Rembrandt in a museum, of a peasant viewing a Belgian countryside, and of an African artist carving a tribal fetish—all would sense their experience as somehow harmonious. Something aesthetic connected the experience of all of them. Locke’s modernist approach to art, literature, and philosophy was designed to rescue that which was “ancient and perennial” in values from the dustheap of nineteenth-century idealism and re-establish them on the more scientific foundation of twentieth-century psychology.
By the end of the spring semester, Locke had gained a reputation for his psychological theory of value and developed his outline into a rough draft essay of his dissertation, “The Problem of Classification in the Theory of Value.” He had convinced Perry of his capacity for first-class philosophical work and gained the professor’s support for his dissertation subject. Locke had also gained the esteem of his other professors that year: Locke completed his graduate year at Harvard with straight As except for his only B in Sheffer’s class in logic. Whether because of his mother’s reassuring presence or his own greater maturity, Locke excelled that year in his studies and regained the earlier academic form of his undergraduate years at Harvard.
Locke’s success may also have been related to his reluctance to involve himself in African American projects, a posture that may have been strengthened by his Harvard experience. Locke completed a bibliography of slave narratives during the fall of 1916 and sent a copy of it to Arthur Schomburg. Locke wrote that he was thinking of submitting it to Carter G. Woodson’s Journal of Negro History, but he never did. Locke was too busy with his studies. “I have great facilities here for research,” he informed Schomburg, “but little time to exploit them.”20 During his second semester, Locke did manage to pen a tribute to his old mentor Bishop Walters, who died in January 1917, but only reluctantly. Invited by Walters’s wife to come to Philadelphia to attend the bishop’s funeral, Locke had declined: not only did he hate funerals but also he could not leave Cambridge because of his work. But when Lelia Walters offered to pay him for a written tribute that could be published, Locke agreed to write one, and it provides an interesting insight into this Harvard aesthete’s critique of political leadership. Locke used Walters’s death to deliver a sharp critique of how Black people treated their leaders:
I know the good spirit of Alexander Walters will pardon that I take him for the text. It is no secret that beneath all of his success, over all his other satisfied ambitions, above and beyond all the honor that came to him, there was a tragedy in his life. Did I share it only to betray it? No, I consecrated it to this moment of its proper and highest use. … With what brave optimism Bishop Walters strove to the end to be saved from despairing of Christian leadership among us? He had the instinct for leadership as all really great men have. He had a position which was a constant reminder of the highest and most responsible type of leadership. He had a charge and a flock to keep. It is sad to think that the best definition and example of human leadership is built upon an analogy … of the shepherd and the flock. I am not propounding dark or idle riddles when I ask again “What sheep is it that knoweth not his own shepherd?” I wish I could say that we were a shepherded and shepherdable people with the same certainty that I can say “This man was a shepherd of his people.” Too often we take the wolf for shepherd, or scatter because of bells tinkling from many directions[s]. Trust in men is afterall the basis of trust in principles. And I see on every hand a growing distrust among us which is sapping at the source the vital force of race life, the belief in and respect for the man of disinterested motive and unpurchasable loyalty.21
Walters had been a kind of hero for Locke, a replacement for his own father, as a political figure who, though powerful, was also humane. Walters was nurturing, selfless, and devoted to the cause, and still had been unable to mobilize the race. “The motives of his leadership were clear and unquestionable: of how many can this be said? Loyalty,—the sterling basic metal of manhood and leadership among men was never better exemplified among us than by this life and character.”22 Locke read Bishop Walters’s death, which most African Americans hardly noticed, as an ominous sign: one could give one’s all to Black people and still not be loved. In one sense, Locke was simply being naive: such leadership was always a sacrifice, because the leader was always betrayed by the masses. That did not keep true leaders from taking on the shackles of leadership, but it did give pause to Locke. He needed more of a payoff for race leadership if he was to disturb the quiet equipoise of his life to descend into the battle of Black leadership. By criticizing Black people’s loyalty, he really defined the limits of his own: without enormous support from the people, Locke could not guarantee that he could be “the man of disinterested motive and unpurchasable loyalty” that he argued Walters had been.23 Locke had been wounded by the rough and tumble of academic and political conflicts in Washington and wondered in this article if it was worth it.
Something of Locke’s detachment, his willingness to sit on the sidelines and simply observe the courage of others, seemed to peak during and after his return to Harvard for graduate school. Even when Woodrow Wilson led the United States into World War I and African Americans responded throughout the country with unbridled enthusiasm for the war effort, Locke remained unmoved. He did like to go down to the Harvard stadium and watch the Harvard men go through their military drill, but that was more of an aesthetic experience for Locke than anything patriotic. Apparently, he responded favorably to Montgomery Gregory’s urgent request in May 1917 to contact New England ROTC representatives about the possibility of Negro officer training facilities. As head of the Committee of Negro Men at Howard University, Gregory was leading the effort at the “Capstone of Negro Education” to force the War Department to set up a separate camp to train Black officers, largely because the Department’s current facility at Plattsburg was for “Whites only.” Locke appears to have responded to Gregory’s request, but that was about all. After the spring semester came to an end, Locke remained in Boston over the summer, working on his dissertation and assisting Braithwaite with his editorial projects. By contrast, Locke’s dissertation director, Ralph Barton Perry, left Cambridge for Washington to become Secretary for Military Training of College Men. Montgomery Gregory enlisted in the army for officer training once Secretary of War Newton Baker declared that facilities would be established at Des Moines, Iowa, for the training of Black officers. Locke was wise to stay put. After all that he had suffered for failure to get his Oxford degree, he needed to commit all of his energies to his dissertation. But as the year at Harvard, and the summer too, came to an end, it was clear that Locke had chosen the path of inner quiet rather than engaged Black cultural leadership. He had developed at Harvard a new, philosophically and literarily rich conception of the kind of work our psychology does in creating and sustaining experiences of value. But he had also come to believe that that view and its complexity was not welcome in the Black world he was returning to.
An unconscious rhythm of maternal intimacy was also now visible in Locke’s creative life. Spatial distance between him and his mother affected his ability to produce. When he had left Camden for Cambridge and Harvard in 1904, Locke had sought and found an ideal psychic distance from his mother—hundreds of miles away yet close enough for constant, almost daily referral and renewal, yet with enough freedom to roam intellectually and personally; in consequence, he had grown in his studies and in his personal intellectual adventurousness. But when he had left her for England and Oxford and too great a distance, his psychic connection with her was broken, leading to panicky episodes and the absence of internal calm, precisely when circumstances meant he needed her most. His failure to get the Oxford degree taught him a lesson. Recognizing that he needed her stabilizing presence to get the German doctorate, he insisted on her coming despite the horrific timing of the decision. Once the war’s outbreak ended abruptly their honeymoon in Berlin, they were separate again, but he was seemingly renewed again by the heightened drama of their forced intimacy on his return to live separately in Washington. Being merely a two-hour train ride from Philadelphia, Locke had embarked on some of his boldest and most original thinking, writing, and public speaking—reminiscent of Harvard.
Locke had taken Mary to Harvard to ensure he would succeed at a graduate career that had stumbled without her. In his rapprochement with her and Harvard, he had healed his wounded student self. Now, after a successful year at Harvard, Locke was headed back to Washington with her. With Mary by his side, he had nestled back into the Black Victorian voice of the settled bourgeois, his psychic needs met, his public criticality quiet.