Rabindranath in America 2nd times ( Introduction)

During his next visit in 1916, Sir Rabindranath Tagore was well known to the American people as the first man of the orient to win the Nobel prize for literature. His poems, plays as well as his biographies were already in circulation. But during this trip, when the Great War (WW I) was raging in Europe, Tagore was extremely critical of the western nations as well as of America. But one of the primary reason of his criticism was because he felt that it was only in America where his appeal for humanity hold the best chance of being heard. He said, “This is a beautiful country. I believe it has a great future. America is unhampered and free to experiment for the progress of humanity. Of course, she will make mistakes, but out of these series of mistakes she will come to some higher synthesis of truth and be able to hold up the banner of Civilization. She is the best exponent of Western ideals of humanity.” He had high hopes for America. In New York he said, “America has the figure of youth and all that is best in Western civilization will eventually find lodgment here.” But his criticisms did not make him many friends in America, and the press lashed out at him on several occasions. He knew that he was being too harsh sometimes, and he said, “I am out of place here, I know, and I maybe judging you harshly. I felt I must come to bring the message of the East… This is my only happiness in America - the thought that this country can be the meeting place of the two (the East and the West).” Overall this trip was very successful for Tagore and he had high regards for President Woodrow Wilson. He wanted to dedicate his book “Nationalism” to President Wilson. However President Wilson’s office declined the offer on the advice of Sir William Wiseman, Britain’s special liaison agent in the United States, who reported that Tagore had “got tangled up in some way” with the Indian revolutionaries in America who were conspiring with Germany to overthrow British rule in India


2. ‘$700 Per Scold’
By his second trip in 1916, Tagore was a Nobel Laureate and a worldwide literary star. He was booked for lectures in twenty-five American cities, many of them at university campuses. He gave talks organized by a professional lecture agency associated with his publisher (Macmillan), and received impressively hefty fees ($700-$1000 a pop – a huge sum in those days). He was lecturing, essentially, against western materialism and for a kind of universal spiritual awareness. There was of course an irony in getting paid very well for criticizing materialism, and the Minneapolis Tribune called him on it:

Half-way through the tour the Minneapolis Tribune called Tagore ‘the best business man who ever came to us out of India’: he had managed to scold Americans at $700 per scold’ while pleading with them ‘at $700 per plead’. (Dutta and Robinson, 204)

(Of course, Tagore wasn’t scolding Americans for his own benefit. By this point he had begun planning for his university at Shanitiniketan, and all of the money he earned would go to that cause.)
Tagore was, not surprisingly, speaking out against militarism a great deal during this lecture series (you can get a flavor for his perspective in the lectures collected in Nationalism). Here he was lucky in his timing; he managed to leave for home just before the U.S. entered World War I