American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas

by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

Emerson.36 If, as Emerson had said, “there is no pure originality. All minds quote,” and that “only an inventor knows how to borrow,” then Nietzsche proved to be quite inventive in his appropriation of Emerson’s ideas and images to wrestle with his doubts about religion.37

Though Emerson raised more questions for Nietzsche than he offered answers, he nevertheless impressed on him that the act of questioning is both the activity of the philosopher and an example of free will at work. Emerson argued that the active intellect could achieve a “double consciousness,” which negotiates the competing desires for freedom and for limitations on that freedom. According to him, fate is nothing more than “a name for facts not yet passed under the fire of thought;—for causes which are unpenetrated. But every jet of chaos which threatens to exterminate us, is convertible by intellect into wholesome force.”

Even accounting for linguistic variations, though, the similarities are striking enough that the additional awareness that Nietzsche “loved Emerson from first to last,” as Walter Kaufmann put it, has made many, like Kaufmann himself, insist that nevertheless, “one would never mistake a whole page of Emerson for a page of Nietzsche.”57

Emerson believed this created a bankrupt spirituality, “as if God were dead,” to which Nietzsche had his madman announce in the affirmative that “God is dead.”62 Someone well versed in Emerson and Nietzsche might never mistake Emerson’s line from “Compensation,” “In general, every evil to which we do not succumb, is a benefactor,” with Nietzsche’s from Twilight of the Idols, “What does not kill me makes me stronger.”63 But at least it is worth noting that Emerson’s line in Nietzsche’s personal copy is heavily underlined.

Nietzsche was convinced that with Thus Spoke Zarathustra: Book One (Also Sprach Zarathustra), a prose poem he divined in ten days of feverish exhilaration in January 1883, he had finally realized the masterwork that would command an audience. In a letter enclosed with the manuscript, he assured his Leipzig publisher, Ernst Schmeitzner, that “my little work—not even a hundred pages” is “far and away the most serious and also the gayest of my products, and accessible to everyone,” trying to convince him that this book would surely have the broad appeal that had eluded his earlier works. More to the point, he assured Schmeitzner that he had penned the “fifth gospel.” Schmeitzner may have agreed, but he clearly thought the first four Gospels still took precedence over the fifth: The press temporarily shelved production of Zarathustra in order to print a rush job of 500,000 church hymnals in time for Easter. Not only did the announcement of God’s death have to wait until after the anniversary of his (re-)birth, but Nietzsche’s prediction that this would be his breakout book was wrong. A full year after publication, only 85 copies had been sold.

With few exceptions, the closest Nietzsche’s philosophy came to the academy was in the form of goods smuggled into the lecture hall. Charles Bakewell, a newly minted Harvard philosophy Ph. D. who had studied under William James, Josiah Royce, and George Santayana,19 later recalled his days as a postdoctoral student at the University of Berlin: “It was quite the usual thing to observe the German student enter the class room with a small volume under his arm, which he would open whenever the lecture failed to interest him. In every case, it was a volume of Nietzsche.”

So it was in Robert Reitzel’s radical weekly newspaper Der ArmeTeufel (The Poor Devil) that Emma Goldman first learned of Nietzsche.22 It was in the anarchist publisher and Manhattan bookstore proprietor Benjamin Tucker’s Unique Book Shop that the seventeen-year-old Eugene O’Neill first encountered Nietzsche.23 And it was through the literary critic James Huneker’s tireless promotion of Nietzsche in his Musical Courier articles and collections of essays that the young Baltimore newspaper reporter H. L. Mencken became acquainted with the thinker who would come to dominate his own intellectual biography.24 Although their political commitments varied, American anarchists, romantic radicals, and literary cosmopolitans celebrated Nietzsche’s philosophical assault on modern slavishness and his emphasis on the unfettered ego as a source of human progress.

Tucker saw Nietzsche himself as a philosophical anarchist and argued that anarchism, properly understood, was a philosophy of life, not a political program. He thus peppered the pages of Liberty with Nietzschean aphorisms that suggested anarchism as an intellectual movement: “We are entering upon the age of Anarchy: which is at the same time the age of the most intellectual and freest individuals. Immense mental force is being put in motion. The age of geniuses: hitherto delayed by custom, morality, etc.”38 In Nietzsche, Tucker recognized a fellow philosopher who understood freedom as a state of mind, as well as the power of the mind when freed from the state. Tucker insisted that anarchism was perfectly consistent with American ideals of freedom, and should be familiar to any “unterrified Jeffersonian Democrats” who understood that the only government which governed by the consent of the governed was no government at all.39

F. C. S. Schiller, a noted British-and American-trained German pragmatist who was a major early reviewer of Nietzsche, thought his claims to Polishness were plausible, given Nietzsche’s“obviously Slavonic name (niëzky)” and the significant population of people of Slavonic origins in eastern Germany where Nietzsche grew up. He also found it useful for explaining why “Nietzsche’s mind and temper” exhibited such passion and histrionics. It could only be due to his “undeniably Slavonic” inheritance.78 Others agreed, suggesting that Nietzsche’s philosophy bespoke the intellectual distemper of Polish nobility, unable to find their way, like the Anglo-Saxons, to a healthy balance between liberty and order.79 Nietzsche’s exotic “Polishness” took on a special significance for reviewers who were eager to show that Nietzscheism would not, and should not, flourish in America.

Nietzsche’s spectacular influence abroad and his relative obscurity in the United States also became a way for observers to consider the comparative intellectual cultures of America and continental Europe. Though not all agreed that a “Nietzschean deluge” could mean only that “the very culture-philistines he … despised” had co-opted him, commentators roundly concurred that his radical ideas were an odd fit with the American mind.85 Though not all agreed that it was such a bad thing that America was less “sensitive to new ideas than modern Germany,”86 none questioned the sentiment.

Huneker’s fascination with Nietzsche’s insanity and his genius reflects what would become the dominant features of American commentary about Nietzsche. “Was Nietzsche a Madman or a Genius?”103 Nietzsche’s relevance for America hinged on the answer. His perceived mental endowments and deficits dominated his US coverage. Titles like that used for an 1898 New York Times article, “Interesting Revolutionary Theories from a Writer Now in a Madhouse,” helped establish the centrality of his mental state for assessing his philosophy.

Even liberal Protestants, like Unitarian Charles C. Everett, dean of Harvard’s nondenominational divinity school, normally eager to keep theology apace with developments in other arenas of moral and natural inquiry, argued that Nietzsche’s philosophy made things difficult for the would-be accommodating theologian. After all, Nietzsche was no run-of-the-mill atheist: “to deny the ideals of morality which have commanded the reverence if not the obedience of men for so many ages is something different.” Nietzsche’s troubling innovation was not his challenge to the notion that one people or religion has a lock on the “Absolute” —a notion which, given his sensitivity to interdenominationalism, he was predisposed to appreciate—but rather his challenge to the “Absolute” as such. “It is this recognition of an Absolute that allies philosophy with religion. The Absolute of the philosopher and the God of Religion are different forms of the same thing.”

Nietzsche’s problem, Johnson argued, was that he was shadowboxing with a fictive Christianity, a “caricature” of God and Christian ethics he inherited from “soulless externalities” of German higher criticism. Nietzsche rightly condemned his own tradition of intellectualized ethics apart from faith, but his mistake was to assume that the modernized Christianity of twentieth-century liberal Protestantism contained any of the truths of scripture. So while Johnson argued that “Nietzsche is the apostle of positive ungodliness,” he also saw in him a helpful “foe” to the “negative ungodliness” of “enlightened” modern ethics, preferring the German God-baiter to the latter.

The value of Nietzsche’s lesson, then, was to show Christians the slippery slope of modern thought, demonstrating once and for all why “the Church and the world should be clearly demarked.”

As Patton recognized, Nietzsche gladly “touch[ed] the ark without fear, and without reverence penetrate[d] into the holy of holies. He will not be repressed or silenced.” If modern Christianity hoped to weather his boundless assaults, then Nietzsche “must in the first place be understood, and not ignored or refuted.” Patton added, “Nietzsche himself says [that] ‘one refutes a thing by laying it respectfully on ice.…’ But one cannot refute Nietzsche by laying him respectfully on ice … [because] he has far too much vitality to freeze to death.”20 American ministers and theologians thus grudgingly agreed with Nietzsche’s assertion that “what does not kill me makes me stronger,” accepting his challenges to their faith as an opportunity to reinvigorate it.21 But they also agreed that the battle for the modern American soul was a zero-sum game: moderns would cleave their spirits and moral imagination either to Nietzsche or to Christ.

By hoisting will above Word, and by failing to appreciate human intellect as a finite and imperfect faculty, Luther had sent early modern theology along a dangerous course that led straight to Nietzsche. What they both failed to realize, and what the Roman Catholic Church had always stressed, is that true free will is not intellect unhindered but human will working in cooperation with God’s grace. Catholic interpreters thus felt compelled to highlight the Protestant roots of Nietzsche’s errors, employing his philosophy as evidence of the dangerous worldliness of the liberal Protestantism that dominated American public life during the Progressive Era.

While the modern sciences had “made the colossal blunder of attempting to exile God,” Catholicism understood that “morality and social progress” must have their “foundation in religion, or they will have no foundation at all. And when I say religion, I do not mean a devitalized ‘natural’ religion [that is, “Christiano-pagan” Protestantism]. I mean faith in God and in a supernatural relationship between God and Man.” Nietzsche’s philosophy was therefore useful insofar as it provided Gillis with the perfect artillery as he railed against liberal Protestantism. He argued that the consistency with which Nietzsche denounced the church made him a worthier foe than Protestants who sought to dilute the gospel of Christ with their liberal, accommodationist sensibilities. Voicing a sentiment dominant among Catholic interpreters of Nietzsche, Gillis insisted that while Christ’s gospel of love pointed to the great eternal hereafter, Nietzsche’s life-denying paganism led inexorably to spiritual castration. The option for modern Americans, Gillis concluded, came down to a simple choice between “Christ … or Chaos.”

Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907), Walter Rauschenbusch likewise described Nietzsche’s philosophy as the “direct out-growth” of the social world of industrialization, speculating that there exists “an intimate causal connection between the industrial system which evolves the modern captain of industry and the philosophy of Nietzsche which justifies and glorifies him.” This was the only way Rauschenbusch could explain why the “philosophy of Nietzsche,” which “scouts the Christian virtues as the qualities of slaves” and “glorifies the strong man’s self-assertion which treads underfoot whatever hinders him from living out his life to the full,” was “deeply affecting the ethical thought of the modern world.”44 Reflecting on the consistent sentiment animating his theology and social activism, he argued that his “social point of view” and his “Christian social convictions” were “the direct negation of Nietzsche.”

It is because they viewed the Gospels as blueprints for social harmony that their critics have tended to dismiss their vision of the Kingdom of God as innocent and their faith as a form of despiritualized ethics. As H. Richard Niebuhr lamented, they offered “a God without wrath [who] brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.”46 However, in their efforts to address Nietzsche’s criticisms of their faith, the Social Gospelers exhibit a conscience more agonized than previously thought. Though they rejected Nietzsche’s advocacy of a self beyond the good and evil of his fellow men, they agreed with him that the test of religion is the human beings it produces, as well the social arrangements it informs.

If Nietzsche got his facts about evolution wrong—namely, that it works toward not an isolated human “type” but rather toward the creation of an elevated human “race” —then he was likewise mistaken in thinking that the moral exemplar is the isolated individual and not man in the aggregate. Though Abbott argued for a developmental model of ethics, he insisted that it is one guided by Jesus’s message of self-sacrifice and service. The ethics of nurturing others, not the ethics of tooth and claw, abides by the true laws of the universe. Such a message, he argued, is not only practicable in the modern world, it is the only ethics that fosters the development of a worthy race.

Rereading Nietzsche, “the familiar pages gain a new significance in addition to their old charm” for the clarity with which they helped her see the interdependence of Christianity and socialism. But the value of that mutuality Nietzsche got wrong. He failed to realize that the two together were a balm, not a poison, to the modern soul longing for a more meaningful spirituality. In isolation neither could inspire. But in loving tandem they showed what Nietzsche could not see: that “true liberty is positive, not negative, dealing less with the removal of restriction than with the imparting of power.” Had Nietzsche understood, to borrow Wordsworth’s phrase, that one is “free because imbound,” he would have realized that it is in “the socialist state we hope that the way will be open for all of us to become supermen, and we may advance on the road thither with solemn gayety [sic] equal to that of Zarathustra.”

Ministers who believed that Nietzsche aided Christians in their search for a more meaningful spirituality argued with Hardin that challenges to the faith from a critic of Nietzsche’s “intellectual caliber” could only be a “tonic in its effects.”62 In a series of sermons on Nietzsche for the First Unitarian Church of Milwaukee in 1919, Rev. Robert Loring preached that “Nietzsche is more like strong medicine than like pleasant food.… Like many old-fashioned tonics they often leave a bitter taste in the mouth. There seems, however, to be this difference; while the old-fashioned tonic had printed on the bottle, ‘Shake before Taking,’ in the case of Nietzsche you first take, and then you shake.”

“The Christian ethics and democracy,” Warbeke noted, “are one in this emphasis of the commonplace, the lame, the passable, the merely existing, the many-too-many.”74 Christian observers confessed their belief that the vital qualities of individuality, ingenuity, and intelligence were the very agents of human progress that were being sacrificed on the altar of democratic equality and solidarity. Nietzsche gave his religious readers reason to protest against, as Loring put it, this modern “half-hearted kind of world, half-hearted in work and thought and ideals.”

One way they took possession of Nietzsche’s philosophy was to smuggle his Übermensch out of the broader context of his thought and into Christian theology, and thus transform Jesus into the “Christian Superman” and the “Strong Son of God.”79 In addition, Nietzsche’s religious readers drew analogies between his philosophy and the original gospel of the historical Jesus. They argued that Nietzsche not only reformulated Jesus’s emphasis on the value of human personality but also wanted belief to be less rule-bound and yet more spiritually demanding.

Like Shaw and London, the socialist critic Max Eastman saw in Nietzsche’s Übermensch a prototype of the new individual who would lead in the radical reorganization of American political, economic, and social life. In all three interpretations, the enemies of the Übermensch were the retrograde aspects of modern life: laissez-faire economics, the American plutocracy, repressive sexuality and gender roles, and the “slave morality” of bourgeois culture. Although critical of the socialistic reading of Nietzsche, H. L. Mencken’s unashamed version of the unbounded immoralist Übermensch shared a similar vision of the individual who rails against convention.

He argued that “it is only the under-dog … that believes in equality. It is only the groveling and inefficient mob that seeks to reduce all humanity to one dead level, for it is only the mob that would gain by such leveling.” Once he had sufficiently dethroned Demos, he went on to attack Christian charity. According to Mencken, the Übermensch had the perspicacity to recognize, and the courage to accept, that Christian charity weakened the “race,” for it “maintain[ed] the useless at the expense of the strong.”

Paul Carus, for one, stressed that translation was no neutral affair, and that philosophical accuracy could not be subordinate to linguistic artistry. He thus sought to stop Tille’s “beyond man” dead in its tracks, insisting that “beyond means jenseits; and Nietzsche wrote über, i.e., superior to, over, or higher than, and the literal translation ‘overman’ appears to be the best.” He likewise rejected “superman” for its “barbaric combination” of Latin and Saxon words.13 However, Thomas Stockham Baker, a scholar of contemporary German literature and headmaster of a Maryland school for boys, found the construction “superman” appropriate precisely because it violated the traditional rules of linguistic construction: “It is convenient, it is even illogical … but inasmuch as the idea that it intends to convey has never had a name before, there is no great necessity for logic or a regard either for etymology or precedents.”14 Despite objections, the word superman gained traction in the American English vocabulary, and there it stayed, but not without controversy.

Sanger discovered in Nietzsche’s thought both a critical philosophy and an aspirational idea for achieving a woman’s right to bodily self-sovereignty. In her speeches and writings, she employed the Übermensch to critique the bankrupt Western morality that undergirded the repression of women by church and state as well as an image of a self worthy of idolatry once all idols were smashed. Feminine chastity, she argued, was an artifact of a desiccated “Christian … ascetic ideal,” which taught women to hide in shame from their earthly desires. The Übermensch, by contrast, offered an image of “life in its fullness and all that is high, beautiful, and daring.”19 In a 1914 speech on Nietzsche, Sanger argued that he had taught her that “the individual is the original source & constituent of all value.”

In his effort to assimilate Nietzsche’s vision of self-sovereignty into American moral discourse, Royce highlighted the similarities between the Übermensch and the tradition of “ethical Titanism” so central to Western literature and philosophy. As one of the few early twentieth-century American interpreters who observed affinities between Emerson and Nietzsche (though he was unaware of Emerson’s influence on Nietzsche), he argued that Nietzsche’s aphoristic writings revealed his philosophical inclination to overcome the warring instincts within the self—not by suppressing them but by allowing them their full play. Drawing out the romantic strain in Nietzsche’s philosophy, Royce noted, “Like both Emerson and Walt Whitman, Nietzsche feels perfectly free to follow the dialectic of his own mental development, to contradict himself, or, as Walt Whitman said, ‘to contain multitudes.’” He argued that Nietzsche’s Übermensch also shared qualities with Goethe’s Faust and Shelley’s Prometheus in perceiving life as a contest between the autonomous individual and the “world of convention, of tradition, or of destiny.”

In his unpublished notes on ethics, James considered the rivalries between what he referred to as individual “high mindedness” and social “prudence.” While both make their contributions to society, he wondered whether it is a particular “high minded” type who ultimately propels humanity forward. He described him as the solitary, restless, immoderate “gentleman” who marries his private visions with personal sacrifice and social reality. James wrote,“We stumble on; the übermenschen plant a foot where there is no certain hold; & in the struggle that follows, the whole of us get dragged up after a fashion to the advanced position.” James justified this by explaining that what seems immoderate in one age may be the very idea that brings humanity along in the next: the private ideal becomes public good. He recognized that with high mindedness inevitably goes cruelty and hardness. But, often as they appear (and in the individual are) features of defect, mere brutal lacks of sensibility, yet they have religious significance; and the servile admiration we all have for the [high-minded] gentleman with the reckless absoluteness of his demands, is a conclusive proof that he is genuinely superior.

James gravitated toward the image of the Übermensch, but it nevertheless carried with it disturbing associations of the philosopher whose temperament gave it form. Nary a reference to Nietzsche crops up in James’s (at least) ten-year contact with his ideas that does not invoke his sickness. Such references are at their most colorful and generous in Varieties, where James described “the mood” of Nietzsche (and Schopenhauer) as marked by “an ennobling sadness,” but also by a “peevishness running away with the bit between its teeth.” Their “sallies … remind one, half the time, of the sick shriekings of two dying rats.”47 Nevertheless, James expressed his sympathy for Nietzsche’s unsympathetic attack on asceticism as a moral ideal. And, though halting and uncertain, his descriptions of an Übermensch—the immoderate striver, who can plant a foot in an antifoundational universe where there is no certain hold—indicate the resonance of this image of a higher humanity for him.

Royce did not see the possibilities that James did in the Übermensch’s potential for advancing the progress of the human race. But according to Royce, Nietzsche’s concern was the moral “perfection, not of society, not of the masses of men, but of the great individual.” In other words, “the great problem of reconciling the unique individual with the world-order is simply not Nietzsche’s problem.” Royce argued that Nietzsche’s philosophy of the Übermensch expressed beautifully the struggle of man in his personal quest to discover what his individuality means for himself. He argued that those searching for a systematic solution to the tension between the free individual and the world of social obligations, conventions, and traditions would have to look elsewhere.

Moreover, Babbitt asserted that restless moderns’ rejection of a moral center resulted in the modern temper of “self-parody” and inescapable “ennui.” He accepted Nietzsche’s argument that those who would try to live without a clear moral vision and higher ideals would be left with a persistent longing and nostalgia for the psychological security of fixed belief, as well as a newfound irony that mocks their own desire for such comfort. Echoing Nietzsche’s 3 man to seek certainty, Babbitt observed that “the affinity of certain romantic converts for the Church is that of the jelly-fish for the rock.” From Rousseau down to Schlegel, romantics had boomeranged away from and back to ritual and authority, but their return to faith was inevitably colored by this mix of ironic distance and self-mockery. Foreshadowing what over a half century later would emerge as a stock idea of postmodernism, Babbitt argued that the (romantic) Nietzschean celebrated his ironic pose as the most exalted of all temperaments.

Romantic irony, Babbitt maintained, thus made an unwholesome reversal of the classical model of virtue. Whereas the Greeks understood that man “should think lightly of himself but should have some conviction for which he is ready to die,” the “romantic ironist” is “morbidly sensitive about himself, but is ready to mock at his own convictions.”

George Santayana, Harvard philosopher and former doctoral student of Josiah Royce’s, turned Nietzsche-bashing and anti-German sentiment into an art form in his 1916 study, Egotism in German Philosophy. Although his book was published during wartime, Santayana said that it was the “fruit of a long gestation.”63 A Spanish-born Catholic atheist, Santayana identified himself “as an outsider” who had “chafed for years under the pressure of a prim, academic idealism,” a subjective “egotism,” which he believed derived from German intellectual history and had thoroughly saturated American thought and culture. As Santayana put it, he was sickened by the “aroma of German philosophy that has reached my nostrils,” a philosophy that privileged “subjectivity in thought and willfulness in morals.”

Christian commentators argued that what W. H. Griffith Thomas, writing for Bibliotheca Sacra, referred to as “German moral abnormality” was evident long before the war.82 A writer for the Atlantic Monthly argued that the path from the earlynineteenth-century historicist biblical criticism, to Nietzschean philosophy of power, to German imperialism and militarism was unmistakable: “The inference is inevitable, that, when the leaders of a nation’s life in theology and philosophy play skittles with every claim to Divine interest in the affairs of mankind… they are not likely to base national conduct upon the immutable and eternal foundations of righteousness.”83 However, it wasn’t enough to point fingers, for the despiritualized view of human affairs that produced the Übermensch and a culture of militarism was also the very culture of rigorous biblical scholarship and training which for generations had been the Rome for American Protestant theologians. The specter of a Teutonized militaristic Übermensch forced liberal theologians not only to reassess their relationship to developments in modern thought but to see how modern thought itself was emblematic of German “moral abnormality.” Thomas noted, “It is well known that there is not a single critical position adopted by British, American, and Canadian scholars which did not emanate from Germany.” Quick to see the connections between theological naturalism and Nietzschean antifoundationalism, Christian commentators argued that ...

Interpreting the war through the new lens of modern psychology, Hall suggested that it represented a therapeutic release from the psychosocial “tensions” brought on by the civilizing process. In their turn toward war as in their romance with Nietzsche’s primitive Übermensch, Germans were aching to shed “the superficial veneer of culture” and regress to “things racially old” as a means of moral and spiritual regeneration.

Though Gladden’s view of Nietzsche as a Hebrew prophet was not unfamiliar to liberal Protestants, now, during the war, it ran counter to the growing perceptions of him as a prophet of German egotism, primitivism, and militarism. However, it exemplified the tendency among readers to comprehend the philosopher in terms familiar to the American moral imagination. Nietzsche’s transformation from a Polish aristocrat, to a modern-day Jesus, to a blood-and-iron imperialist testifies to the creative ways in which American interpreters naturalized his Übermensch into American thinking. Thus, while wartime speculations about Nietzsche’s Germanness had the immediate effect of establishing him as a German thinker in the American mind, they demonstrated how American interpreters appropriated Nietzsche by making him both radically Other and crucially important for articulating the problems of modern thought and morality. To Each His Own Übermensch

But in all Darrow’s efforts to show the boys as victims of Nietzsche’s philosophy, to suggest that it “destroyed” their lives, he intimated that it was their innocent mistake to think that they were what Nietzsche had in mind. “Nathan Leopold is not the only boy who has read Nietzsche. He may be the only one who was influenced in the way that he was influenced.”101 Though he argued that they were victims, they were so because when they read Nietzsche, they could not help but think that they were reading themselves. Darrow was on to something. For early twentieth-century Americans, the Übermensch was a hazy vision, but it was one they used to see clearly the problems and possibilities of themselves as they came to terms with their modern America.

Expressing the sentiments shared by a generation of early twentieth-century American literary radicals and political reformers, the novelist and popular lecturer John Cowper Powys described his lingering romance with Friedrich Nietzsche: “I cannot see a volume of Nietzsche in any shelf without opening it, and … [I] cannot open it without feeling, just as [I] did at first, the old fatal intoxication.”1 Preferring imagery more suggestive than mere alcohol, Isadora Duncan likened her first encounter with the nineteenth-century German philosopher to the voluptuous joys of the flesh when she recalled that “the seduction of Nietzsche’s philosophy ravished my being.”2 Others described their experience of Nietzsche’s philosophy in spiritual terms. Jack London and Eugene O’Neill were two of the many who referred to Nietzsche as their “Christ” and Thus Spoke Zarathustra as their “Bible.”

While the young radicals enlisted Nietzsche’s antifoundationalism in their assaults on what they considered a decrepit bourgeois worldview, they also understood that tearing down false idols was no endgame for the serious intellect. The ruins of a toppled past, they learned from Nietzsche, were breeding grounds for despair but no refuge for the modern free spirit. Breaking old idols with the one hand and feverishly gluing them back together with the other was no answer either. The task of the modern thinker instead was to balance the deconstructive with the regenerative, to apply the acids of intellect on debilitating beliefs while employing a playful imagination to contemplate ideals that enliven the spirit. Nietzsche’s “gay science” presented these aspiring intellectuals with a new genre of critical philosophy that balanced analytic vivisection with aesthetic creation. Likewise, in Nietzsche’s aphorisms, extended essays, and poetic verse, they witnessed a new species of writing that blended the philosophical with the artistic, the sociological with the prophetic, and a hard intellectual hit with a light literary touch. Nietzsche’s philosophy became, for them, a model of both literary self-expression and the social efficacy of ideas.

The writers described their nights reading Nietzsche as preludes to a budding relationship with the philosopher that continued to grow and develop over time. When he was eighteen years old, Eugene O’Neill was introduced to Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Liberty publisher and anarchist Benjamin Tucker at Tucker’s Manhattan bookshop. According to O’Neill,“Zarathustra …has influenced me more than any book I’ve ever read… . I’ve always possessed a copy since then and every year or so I reread it and am never disappointed, which is more than I can say of almost any other book.”

Goldman had first read selections from Nietzsche in Reitzel’s Arme Teufel, and although she was very intrigued, it was not until studying in Vienna in 1895 that she had a chance to systematically read his works. She reveled in her discovery of the “magic of [Nietzsche’s] language, the beauty of his vision, [which] carried me to undreamed-of heights.” She wanted to share with Brady her “raptures over Nietzsche.” But Brady mocked her fascination with “the great poet-philosopher,” unwilling to concede that his aristocratic radicalism might have anything to offer philosophical anarchism. They fought over Nietzsche despite Brady’s protests that “Nietzsche is not worth it.” Feeling “wounded to the heart,” Goldman responded, “It isn’t Nietzsche, it is you.” Brady’s failure to understand her intellectual kismet with the German philosopher suggested that he could not understand her, thus bringing their tumultuous relationship to a precipitous end.

John Cowper Powys’s characterization of reading Nietzsche helps to explain many of the writers’ attraction to his prose. According to Powys, “the final impression one carries away, after reading Nietzsche, is the impression of ‘distinction,’ of remoteness from ‘vulgar brutality,’ from ‘sensual baseness,’ from the clumsy compromises of the world.” Contact with his words, then, provided these radical writers with a new imaginative apparatus, a new range of apprehension.“It may not last, this Zarathustrian mood,” conceded Powys. “It lasts with some of us an hour; with some of us a day—with a few of us a handful of years! But while it lasts, it is a rare and high experience. As from an ice-bound promontory stretching out over the abysmal gulfs, we dare to look Creation and Annihilation, for once, full in the face.”

After the two talked about the philosopher who had meant so much to them, Förster-Nietzsche provided the young cultist with the rare chance to thumb through books in her brother’s personal library. “Imagine what I felt when this devoted lady showed me the dead man’s books …! There was, I remember, … a [French idealist] I had never heard of; but against some eloquent passage of his, in praise of ‘the resolute pursuit of the higher truth,’ Nietzsche had written in pencil in the margin, several times over, the words: ‘in vain’ . .. ‘in vain’ … ‘in vain.’”33 Powys traveled on to Rome, his thoughts now accompanied by a stowaway: Nietzsche’s protest against idealism. His marginalia vexed Powys, leaving him despondent and distracted. The very author who had lifted him to the promontory of his Alpine imagination could just as easily send him tumbling down its slopes. Here he had reached the exquisite capital of Western art, yet the notion that the museums and cathedrals housed representations of universal truth and beauty now seemed like empty idealism: “In vain, in vain, in vain!” rang Nietzsche’s voice in his

According to Cook, Nietzsche pushed his mind toward insanity knowingly and willingly. His madness was no accident, it was martyrdom. Nietzsche “would have been willing to pay the price had he known in advance that it was to be the loss of reason,” Cook wrote. He knew that a new world of ideas worth living for would also be worth dying for; mental death was the price. According to Cook, the penalty of madness has always been central to religious mysticism, and it would remain so for secular moderns who struggled against inherited forms but longed for the sense of transcendence they provided.58 For radicals like Cook, the lesson of Nietzsche’s madness was not simply that mental suffering is an occupational hazard for the modern intellect, but that such suffering has a greater purpose.

James Huneker provided one of the earliest articulations of this idea when, in 1910, he exclaimed, “Alas! The pathos of Nietzsche’s reality. Reality for this self-tortured Hamlet-soul was a spiritual crucifixion and a spiritual tragedy.”62 The image of Hamlet that emerged in this interpretation often resembled the Hamlet that Nietzsche described in The Birth of Tragedy. Nietzsche rejected the traditional view of Hamlet as an overly introspective dreamer who drowns in the excess of his own possibilities. “Not reflection, no,” Nietzsche argued, it was “true knowledge, an insight into the horrible truth” of a “world that is out of joint,” that brought about Hamlet’s morbid insanity.63 Thus, Nietzsche’s version of Hamlet’s madness and, by extension, the critics’ version of Nietzsche’s madness emphasized the mental and spiritual costs of fearless moral inquiry.

Funny, Huneker likened Baudelaire to Hamlet too (not unconvincingly). Wonder if that was a "thing" with him.

Though Nietzsche thought awareness of the truth, not the inability to act, was the root of Hamlet’s insanity, the radicals seemed uneasy about Hamlet’s psychic paralysis, because it confirmed their concerns about the ineffectual intellectual. They worried about irrelevance as they sensed a gulf between their knowledge of social and economic problems and their ability to transform their knowledge into intelligent action. “We are all Hamlets,” Randolph Bourne confessed to a friend, indicating the uneasy kinship he and his friends felt with Shakespeare’s character.64 Van Wyck Brooks agreed that his generation, burdened by the feeling of “internal anarchism,” was turning into a “race of Hamlets.”

Durant argued that Nietzsche’s“sick” biography was crucial here, not because it appealed to readers’ voyeurism but because it helped explain why he went wrong. Nietzsche was a “man sick to the very roots—if you will let me say it, abnormal in sexual constitution; a man not sufficiently attracted to the other sex, because he has so much of the other sex in him.” Plenty of authors throughout the century would speculate about Nietzsche’s sexuality—his orientation and his undercharged virility—in order to explain why he wrote a compensatory “martial” philosophy, or how his displaced energies fueled his breathless intellectual production. However, Durant’s version stressed its particular object “lessons” for young intellectuals. Nietzsche’s example demonstrated the effeminacy of the socially passive intellectual: better to have callused palms from manual labor than the neurasthenia of prissy intellectualism. Nietzsche’s problem was that he was “abnormally weak in the social instincts,” which are crucial for connecting ideas to real world problems, the critical intellectual to community.

Perhaps none of the radicals embodied Nietzsche’s conception of the dangerous thinker more than Goldman. Certainly, given her 1917 incarceration and subsequent deportation to Russia, none were penalized more harshly for their ideas. Her critique of wartime patriotism as yet another iteration of the masses’ slave morality elicited the very response of public morality as weapon of terror that she spent her career protesting. She insisted that patriotism was another manufactured notion of affiliation and obligation that turned one’s homeland into a sentimental idol while demanding that the individual submit his labor, if not his life, for the state’s aggrandizement.