Horace M. Kallen in the Heartland The Midwestern Roots of American Pluralism

Abstract

Born in Germany, educated at Harvard, and a founding faculty member of the New School for Social Research, Jewish-American pragmatist and Zionist philosopher Horace Meyer Kallen (1882–1974) is credited with coining the term “cultural pluralism,” the precursor to modern multiculturalism. Kallen first used the words “cultural pluralism” in print in 1924, but claims to have come up with the phrase while a graduate student at Harvard and Oxford, in conversation with his student and then friend Alain Locke,
sometime around 1906–1908. Locke, the first Black Rhodes Scholar, would go on to become a leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance, as well as a philosophy professor at Howard University. Kallen also pointed to his Harvard mentor William James, fellow pragmatist John Dewey, and rabbi and scholar Solomon Schechter as other inspirations for the concept of cultural pluralism.