His life had prepared him for the rôle, for the physical disability that had cut him off from the traditional currents and preoccupations of American life had given him a poignant insight into the predicament of all those others who, like him, could not adjust themselves to the industrial machine--the exploited, the sensitive, the despised, the aspiring, those, in short, to whom a new and very different America was no academic idea but a necessity so urgent that it had begun to be a reality. As detached as any young East Sider from the herd-unity of American life, the colonial tradition, the “genteel tradition,” yet passionately concerned with America, passionately caring for America, he had discovered himself at Columbia, where so many strains of the newer immigrant population meet one another in the full flood and ferment of modern ideas. Shut in as he had been with himself and his books, what dreams had passed through his mind of the possibilities of life, of the range of adventures that are open to the spirit, of some great collective effort of humanity! Would there never be room for these things in America, was it not precisely the task of the young to make room for them? Bourne’s grandfather and great-grandfather had been doughty preachers and reformers: he had inherited a certain religious momentum that thrust him now into the midst of the radical tide. Above all, he had found companions who helped him to clarify his ideas and grapple with his aims. Immigrants, many of them, of the second generation, candidates for the “melting-pot” that had simply failed to melt them, they trailed with them a dozen rich, diverse racial and cultural tendencies which America seemed unable either to assimilate or to suppress. Were they not, these newcomers of the eleventh hour, as clearly entitled as the first colonials had been to a place in the sun of the great experimental democracy upon which they were making such strange new demands? They wanted a freer emotional life, a more vivid intellectual life; oddly enough, it was they and not the hereditary Americans, the “people of action,” who spoke of an “American culture” and demanded it. Bourne had found his natural allies. Intensely Anglo-Saxon himself, it was America he cared for, not the triumph of the Anglo-Saxon tradition which had apparently lost itself in the pursuit of a mechanical efficiency. It was a “trans-national” America of which he caught glimpses now, a battleground of all the cultures, a super-culture, that might perhaps, by some happy chance, determine the future of civilization itself.