That same year, Kallen was personally hired by future American President Woodrow Wilson, then Princeton University's president, to become the first Jew to ever teach at the university.[2] But after teaching English at Princeton for two years, his contract was not renewed, and he returned to Harvard for graduate study and worked as Santayana's assistant.[3] In 1908, Kallen received his doctorate and was awarded a Sheldon Travelling Fellowship to study at Oxford University.[4] He was also a lifetime friend of Alain Locke, whom he met at Harvard and who was the first African-American Rhodes Scholar; and would remain the only one until the 1960s.
He lectured in philosophy at Harvard from his graduation until 1911, occasionally working as a logic instructor at Clark College in Worcester, Massachusetts. In 1911, he moved to teach philosophy at the University of Wisconsin–Madison until 1918, when he was named a professor at The New School in New York City as a founding member, where he remained for the rest of his career.[5] By 1933, Kallen and his colleague Sidney Hook were serving on the ACLU's academic freedom committee.[6]
A pluralist, Kallen opposed any oversimplification of philosophical and vital problems. According to Kallen, denying complications and difficulties is to multiply them, as much as to deny reality to evil would aggravate evil. Kallen advanced the ideal that cultural diversity and national pride were compatible with each other and that ethnic and racial diversity strengthened America. Kallen is credited with coining the term cultural pluralism.[7]
Kallen married Rachel Oatman van Arsdale in 1926.[8] He died, aged 91, on February 16, 1974, in Palm Beach, Florida.[1]
Blasphemy case
In 1928, Kallen spoke at a memorial service for Sacco and Vanzetti in Boston, during which he stated that if Sacco and Vanzetti had been anarchists, then so was Jesus. An arrest warrant was subsequently filed against him on charges of blasphemy under a 17th-century law;[9] however, a judge ruled that his statement had not been criminal.[10]
^Gilbert, James (1997). Redeeming Culture: American Religion in an Age of Science, University of Chicago Press. ISBN0-226-29320-3. Chap. 8, Two Men of Science, p. 175, namely Harlow Shapley and Kallen.
Fishman, Donald A. "Mainstreaming Ethnicity: Horace Kallen, the Strategy of Transcendence, and Cultural Pluralism," Southern Communication Journal 69 (2), 2004.
Kaufman, Matthew J. "Horace M. Kallen's Use of Evolutionary Theory in Support of American Jews and Democracy," Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science 52 (4), December 2017.
Konvitz Milton, Ridvas, ed. The Legacy of Horace M. Kallen, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1987.
Kronish, Ronald. "John Dewey and Horace M. Kallen on Cultural Pluralism: Their Impact on Jewish Education," Jewish Social Studies 44 (2), Spring 1982.
Maxcy, Spencer J. "Horace Kalien's Two Conceptions of Cultural Pluralism," Educational Theory, 29 (1), January 1979.
Pianko, Noam. "'The True Liberalism of Zionism': Horace Kallen, Jewish Nationalism, and the Limits of American Pluralism," American Jewish History 94 (4), December 2008.
Ratner, Sidney. "Horace M. Kallen and Cultural Pluralism," Modern Judaism 4 (2), May 1984.
Schmidt, Sarah. Horace M. Kallen: Prophet of American Zionism, Brooklyn: Carlson Pub., 1995.
Toll, William. "Horace M. Kallen: Pluralism and American Jewish Identity," American Jewish History 85 (1), March 1997.
