Discussion post 2,3,4,5,6,7

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[ 3 ]

CHAPTER I

Anti-intellectualism

in Our Time u

A °1° LTBOUCR this book deals mainly with certain aspects of the re­ moter American past, it was conceived in response to the political and intellectual conditions of the 1950'5. During that decade the term anti­ lntel1.ectuaUsm, only rarely beard before, became a familiar part of our national vocabulary of self-recrimination and intramural abuse, In the past, American intellectuals were often discouraged or embittered by the national disrespect for mind, but it is bard to reca11 a time wben large numbers of people outside the intellectual community sbared their concern, or when self-eriticism on tbiscount took on the cbaracter of a nation-wide movement.

Primarily it was McCarthyism wbicb aroused the fear that the critica1 mind was at a ruinous discount in this country. Of course, intellectuals were not the only targets of McCarthy's constant detonations--he was after bigger game-but intellectuals were in the line of Bre, and it seemed to give special rejoicing to bis followers wben they were hit. His sorties against intellectuals and universities were emulated throughout the country by a bost of less exalted Inquisitors, Then, in the atmosphere of fervent malice and bumorless imbecillty stirred up by McCarthy's barrage of accusations, the campaign of 1952 drama­ tized the contrast between intellect and pbilistinism In the opposing candidates. On one side was Adlai Stevenson, a politician of uncom­ mon mind and style, wbose appeal to intellectuals overshadowed any­ thing in recent history. On the other was Dwight D. Eisenhower,

INTRODUCTION 4

conventional in mind, relatively inartieulate, harnessed to the unpalat­ able Nixon, and waging a campaign whose tone seemed to be set less by the general himself than by his running mate and the McCarthyite wing of bis party .

Eisenhower's decisive victory was taken both by the intellectuals themselves and by their critics as a measure of their repudiation by America. Time, the weekly magazine of opinion, shook its head in an unconvinciIIg-nnitätion of concern. Eisenhower's victory, it said, "dis­ closes an alanning faet long suspected: there is a wide and unhealthy gap between the American intellectuals and the people," Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in a mordant protest written soon after the election, found the intellecfual "in a situation he has not known for a genera­ tion." After twenty years of Democratic rule, during which the in­ tellectual had been in the main understood and respected, business had come back into power, bringing with it "the vulgarization which has been the almost invariable consequence of business supremacy." Now the Intellectual, dismissed as an "egghead," an oddity, would be governed by a party which had little use for or understanding of htm, and would be made the scapegoat for everything from the income tax to the attack on Pearl Harbor. "Anti-intellectualism," Schlesinger re­ marked, "has long been the anti-Semitism of the businessman. . . . The intellectual ... is on the run today in American society."l

All this seemed to be amply justißed when the new administration got under way. The replacement, in Stevenson's phrase, of the New Dealers by the car dealers seemed to make final the repudiation of intellectuals and their values-they had already been overshadowed by the courthouse politicians of the Truman years. The country was now treated to Charles E. Wilson's sallies at pure research, to stories about Eisenhower's fondness for Western fiction as reading matter, and to bis definition of an intellectual as a wordy and pretentious man. But during the Eisenhower administration the national mood reached a turning point: the McCarthyite rage, confronted by a Republican president, bumed itself out; the senator from Wisconsin isolated him­ self, was censured, and deHated. Finally, in 1957, the launching of.the Sputnik by the Soviets precipitated one of those periodic surges of self-conscious national reappraisal to which the American public is prone. The Sputnik was more than a shock to American national vanity: it brought an immense amount of attention to bear on the

1 Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. : "The Highbrow in Politics," Partisan RetXew, Vol. XX (March-April 1953), pp. 162-5; Time is quoted here, p. 159.

Anti-intellectualism in OUT Time5

consequences of anti-intellectualism in the school system and in Ameri­ can life at large. Suddenly the national distaste for intellect appeared to be not just a disgrace but a hazard to survival. After assuming for some years that its main concern with teachers was to examine them for disloyalty, the nation now began to worry about their low salaries. Scientists, who had been saying for years that the growing obsession with security was demoralizing to research, suddenly found receptive listeners. Cries of protest against the slackness of American education, hitherto raised only by a small number of educational critics, were now taken up by television, mass magazines, businessmen, scientists, politicians, admirals, and university presidents, and soon swelled into a national chorus of self-reproach. Of course, all this did not immedi­ ately cause the vigilante mind to disappear, nor did it disperse anti­ intellectualism as a force in American life; even in the sphere most immediately aHected, that oE education, the ruling passion of the public seemed to be for producing more Sputniks, not for developing more intellect, and some of the new rhetoric about education almost suggested that gifted children were to be regarded as resources in the cold war. But the atmosphere did change notably. In 1952 only intellec­ tuals seemed much disturbed by the specter of anti-intellectualism; by 1958the idea that this might be an important and even a dangerous national failing was persuasive to most thinking people.

Today it is possible to look at the political culture of the 1950's with some detachment. If there was then a tendency to see in Mc­ Carthyism, and even in the Eisenhower administration, some apoca­ lypse for intellectuals in public life, it is no longer possible, now that Washington has again become so hospitable to Harvard profess6rs and ex-Rhodes scholars. If there was a suspicion that intellect had become a hopeless obstac1e to success in politics or administration, it must surely have been put to rest by the new President's obvious interest in ideas and respect for intellectuals, his ceremonial gestures to make that respect manifest in affairs of state, his pleasure in the company and advice of men of intellectual power, and above an by the long, careful search for distinguished talents with which bis administration began. On the other hand, if there had ever been an excessive eon­ fidence that the recruitment of such talents would altogether trans­ form the conduct of our affairs, time has surely brought its inevitable disenchantment. We have now reached a point at which intellectuals can discuss anti-intellectualism without exaggerated partisanship or self-pity.

INTl\ODUCTION 6

• 2. •

The political ferment and educational controversy of the 1950's made the tenn anti-intellectual a central epithet in American seH­ evaluation; it has slipped unobtrusively into our usage without much definition and is commonly used to describe a variety of unwel­ come phenomena. Those who have suddenly become aware of it offen assume that anti-intellectualism is a new force in this or that area of life, and that, being a product of recent conditions, it may be expected to grow to overwhelming proportions. (American intellectuals have a lamentably thin sense of history; and modem man has lived so long un­ der the shadow of some kind of apocalypse or other that intellectuals have come to look upon even the lesser eddies of social change as though they were tidal waves.) But to students of Americana the anti­ intellectual note so commooIy struck during the 1950'ssounded not new at aII, but rather familiar. Anti-intellectualism was not manifested in this country for the flrst time during the 1950's.Our anti-intellectualism is, in fact, oider than our national identity, and has a long historical background. An examination of this background suggests that regard for intellectuals in the United States has not moved steadily downward and has not gone into a sudden, recent decline, hut is suhject to cyclical

.fluctuations; it suggests, too, that the resentment frorn which the in­ tellectual has suHered in our time is a manifestation not of a decline in bis position but of bis increasing prominence. We know rather little about all this in any systematic way, and there has not been very much historically informed thinking on the subject. A great deal has been written about the long-running quarrel between American intellectuaIs and their country, hut.such writings deal mainly with America as seen hy the intellectuals, and give ooIy occasional glimpses of intellect and intellectuals as seen hy America!

One reason anti-intellectualism has not even been clearly defined

I The only American historiaD, to my Icnowledge, who has concemed himseH extensive1y with the problem is Merle Curti, in his suggestive volume, Ameri­ can Paradu% (New Bnmswiclc, New Jersey, 1956) and in his presidential address beEore the American Historical Association. "IntellectuaIs and Other People ," Amerlcan Historical Review, Vol. LX (January 1955), pp. 259-82. Jacques Barzun, in The House ollnteUect (New Yorlc, 1959), has dealt with the subject largely in contemporary terms and 1argely with internal strains within the intel­ lectual and cultunil world. An entire number oE the Journal 01 Social lssues, Vol. XI, No. 3 (1955), was devoted to discussions oE anti-intellectualism by various wrfters.

Anff-intel.lectualism In Out Tbne1

is that its very vagueness makes it more serviceahle in controversy as an epithet. But, in any case, it does not yield very readily to definition. AB an idea, it is not a single proposition hut a complex of related propositions. AB an attitude, it is not usually found in a pure form but in ambivalence--a pure and unalloyed dislike of intellect or intel­ lectuals is uncommon. And as a bistorical suhject, if it can be called that, it is not a constant thread hut a force Huctuating in strength from time to time and drawing its motive power from varying sources. In these pages I have not held myseH to a rigorous or narrow definition, which would here be rather misplaced. I can see little advantage in a logically defensible hut bistorically arbitrary act of definition, which would demand singling out one trait among a complex of traits . It is the complex itseH Iaminterested in-the complex of historical rela­ tions among a variety of attitudes and ideas that have many points of convergence. The common strain that hinds together the attitudes and ideas which I call anti-intellectual is a resentment and suspicion of the life of the mind and of those who are considered to represent it; and a disposition constantly to minimize the value of that life. This admit­ tedly general formulation is as close as I find it useful to venture toward definition.'

Once this procedure is adopted, it will be clear that anti­ intellectualism cannot be made the suhject of a formal history in quite the same way as the life of a man or the development of an institution or a social movement. Dealing as I do with the milieu, the atmosphere, in which American thinking has taken place, I have had to use those impressionistic devices with which one attempts to reproduce a milieu or capture an atmosphere.

Before giving some examples of what I mean by anti-intellectualism, I may perhaps explain what I do not mean. I am not dealing, except incidentally, with the internal feuds or contentions of the American intellectual community. American intellectuals, like intellectuals else­ where, are often uneasy in their role; they are given to moments of self-doubt, and even of seH-hatred, and at times they make acidulous and sweeping comments on the whole tribe to which they belong. This internal criticism is revealing and interesting, hut it is not my main

'For an interesting exerelse in definition, see Morton White: "Reflections on Anti-Inte1lectualism," Daedalw (Summer, 1962), pp. 457-68. White makes a use­ ful distinetion between the anti-intellectual, who is hostile to intellectuals, and the anti·inte1lectualist, who is critical oE the claims of rational intellect in Icnowl­ edge and in life. He treats at some length the respective strategies oE the two, and their points oE convergence.

INTBODUCTION 8

concem. Neither is the ill-mannered or ill-considered criticism that one intellectual may make of another. No one, for example, ever poured more scom on the American professoriat than H. L. Mencken, and no one has portrayed other writers in fiction with more venom than Mary McCarthy; but we would not on this account dream of classing Mencken with William F. Buckley as an enemy of the professors nor Miss McCarthy with the late senator of the same name," The criticism of other intellectuals is, after all, one of the most important functions of the intellectual, and he customarlly performs it with vivacity. We may hope, but we can hardly expeet, that he will also do it with charity, grace, and precision. Because it is the business of intellectuals to he diverse and contrary-minded, we must accept the risk that at times they will be merely quarreIsome.

It is important, finally, if we are to avoid hopeless confusion, to be clear that anti-intellectualism is not here identified with a type of phüosophical doctrine which I prefer to call anti-rationalism. The ideas of thinkers like Nietzsche, Sorel, or Bergson, Emerson, Whitman, or William James, or of writers like William Blake, D. H. Lawrence, or Emest Hemingway may be ca11ed anti-rationalist; but these men were not characteristically anti-intellectual in the sociological and political sense in which I use the term. It is of course true that anti-intellectualist

4 These considerations serve as a forcible reminder that there is in America, as elsewhere, a kind of intellectuaI estahlishment that embraces a wide range of views. It is generaIIy Understood (although there are marginal cases] whether a particular ~rson is inside or outside thJs establishment. The establishment has a double standard for evaluating the critlclsm of the intellectuals: critlcism from withln is commonly accepted as having a baslcaIly benign intent and is more likely to be heard solelyon its merits; but critlcism from outside--even the same criticism -will be resented as hostile and stlgmatized as anti-intellectuaI and potentially dangerous. For example, some years ago many intellectuaIs were critical of the great foundations for devoting too much of their research money to the support of large-budget "projeets," as opposed to individual scholarship. But when the Reece Committee was hot on the triill of the foundations, the same inte1lectuals were not happy to see the same criticisin (among others more speclous) pressed by such an agency. It was not that they had eeased to believe in the critfclsm but that they Ilelther liked nor trusted the source.

OE course, not only inte1lectuals do thisö it is a common phenomenon of group llfe. Members of a political party or a minority group may invoke a slmilar double standard agalnst criticism, depending on whether it originates from inside or out­ side the ranks. Tbere is, moreover, some justi6cation for such double standards, in historkal fact jf not in logic, because the intent that lies behind critfcism unfortu­ nately becomes an ingredient in its applicability. Tbe inteIlectuals who critfcized thefoundatfons were doing so in the hope (as they saw it) of constructively modi­ fying foundation policies, whereas the line of inquiry pursued by the Reece Com­ mlttee mjght have led to crippling or destroying them . Agaln, everyone under­ stands that a joke, say, about Jews or Negroes has different overtones when it is told within the group and when it is told by outsiders .

9 Anti-inteUectuallsm in DurTirJUI

movements often invoke the ideas of such anti-rationalist thinkers (Emerson alone has provided them with a great many texts) ; but only when they do, and only marginally, is highbrow anti-rationalism a part of my story. In these pages Iameentrally concemed with wide­ spread social attitudes, with political behavior, and with middle-brow and low-brow responses, only incidentally with articulate theories. The .attitudes that interest me most are those which would, to the ex­ tent that they become effective in our affairs, gravely inhibit or im­ poverish intellectual and cultural life. Some examples, taken from our recent history, may put fleshon the bare bones of definition.

• 3 • We might begin with some definitions supplied by those most acutely dissatisfiedwith Americanintellectuals.

Erhibit A. During the campaign of 1952, the country seemed to be in need of some term to express that disdain for intellectuaIs which had by then hecome a self-conscious motif in American politics. The word egghead was originally used without invidious associations," but quicldy assumed them, and acquired a much sharper overtone than the tradi­ tional highbrow. Shortly after the campaign was over, Louis Bromfield, a popular novelist of right-wing political persuasion, suggested that the word might some day find its way into dictionaries as folIows: I

Egghead: A person of spurious intelleetual pretensions, often a professor or the protege of a professor. Fundamentally superficial. Over-emotional and feminine in reactions to any problem. Super­ cilious and surfeited with conceit and contempt for the experi­ ence of more sound and able men. Essentially confused in thought and immersed in mixture of sentimentality and violent evange­ lism. A doctrinaire supporter of Middle-European socialism as opposed to Greco-French-American ideas of democracy and liber­ alism, Subject to the old-fashioned phiIosophical morality of Nietzsche which frequently leads him into jail or disgrace. A seif­

e Tbe term was taken up as a consequence of a column by Stewart AIsop, in which that reporter reeorded a conversation with bis brother John. Tbe columnist remarked that many inteUi~ent people who were normally Republicans obviously admfred Stevenson. "Sure. sald WS brother, "all the egg-heads love Stevenson. But how many egg-heads do you think there are?" Joseph and Stewart Alsop: Ths Reporter', Troos (New York, 1958). p. 188.

e Louis Brom6eld: "Tbe Triumph of the Egghead," Ths FrB6fllQtl, Vol. m (December 1. 1952).P. 158.

INTRODUCTION 10

conscious prig, SO given to examining all sides of a question that he becomes thoroughly addled while remaining always in the same spot. An anemic bleeding heart.

"The recent election," Bromfield remarked, "demonstrated a number of things, not the least of them being the extreme remoteness of the 'egghead' from the thought and feeling of the whole of the people."

Exhibit B. Almost two years later President Eisenhower appeared to gtve officfal sanction to a similarly disdainful view of intellectuals. Speaking at a RepubIican meeting in Los Angeles in 1954, he reported a view, expressed to him by a trade-union leader, that the people, presented with the whole truth, will always support the right cause. The President added: T

lt was a rather comforting thought to bave this labor leader saying this, wben we bad so many wisecracking so-called intel­ leetuals going around and sbowing how wrong was everybody who don't happen to agree with them.

By the way, I beard a definition of an intellectual that I thought was very interesting: a man wha take« more words than are necessary to tell more than he knows .

Exhtbff C. One of the issues at stake in the controversies of the 1950'S was the old one about the place of expertise in poIitical Iife. Perhaps the high moment in the case against the expert and for the amateur occurred in 1957 when a chain-store president, Maxwell H. Gluck, was .nomtna ted to be ambassador to Ceylon. Mr. Gluck bad contributed, by bis own estimate, $20,000 or $30,000 to the RepubIican campaign of 1956, but, Iike many such appointees hefore him, was not known for having any experience in politics or diplomacy. Questioned by Senator Fulbrlght about bis qualifications for the post, Mr. Gluck bad some difficulty: 8

FULBlUCHT: What are the problems in Ceylon you think you can deal with?

GLUCI:: One of the problems are the people there. I believe I can-I think I can establish, unless we--again, un-

T Wbite House Press Release, "Remarlcs of the President at the Brealcfast Given by Varlous Republican Groups of Southern california, Statler Hotel, Los Angeles • • • September 24, 1954." p. 4; italics added. It is possible that the Presl­ dent bad heard something of the IdDd &om his Seeretary of Defense, Charles E . WiIson, who was quoted elsewhere as saying: "An egghead is a man who doesn't understand evel)'thlng he kaows," Richard and Gladys Harkness: "The Wit and Wisdom of Charlie Wilson," Readers D~est, "01. LXXI (August, 1957) , p. 191·

8 The New York T1mu, August 1,1957.

11 Anti-inteUectualf8m in Dur Tfrrur

less I run Into something that I have not run into before-a good relationsbip and good feeling toward the United States. . . .

FVLBlUCHT: Do you know our Ambassador to India? GLUCX: I know John Sherman Cooper, the previous Ambas­

sador. FULB1IIGlIT: Do you know who the Prime Minister of India is?

GLUCX: Yes, but I can't pronounce bis name. FULB1IIGlIT: Do you know who the Prime Minister of Ceylon is?

GLUCI:: His name is unfamiliar now, I cannot caIl it off.

Doubts about Mr. Gluck's preparation for the post he was to oc­ cupy led to the suggestion that be had been named because of bis contribution to the RepubIican campaign. In a press conference beld July 31, 1957, areporter raised the question, whereupon Presi­ dent Eisenhower remarked that an "appointment in return for cam­ paign contributions was unthinlcable. About bis nominee's competence, he observed: '

Now, as to the man's ignorance, this is the way he was ap­ pointed: he was selected from a group of men that were recom­ mended highly by a number of people I respect. His business career was examined, the F .B.I. reports on him were aIl good. Of course, we knew he bad never been to Ceylon. he wasn't thor­ oughly familiar with it; but certainly he can learn if he is the kind of character and kind of man we beIieve him to be.

It is important to add that Mr. Gluck's service in Ceylon was termi­ nated after a year by bis resignation.

ExhlbU D. One of the grievances of Amerlcan scfentists was their awareness that America's disdain for pure science was a handicap not only to investigation but also to the progress of research and develop­ ment in the Department of Defense. Examining Secretary of Defense Charles E. Wilson in 1954 before the Senate Committee on Armed Services, Senator Stuart Symington of Missourl quoted earIier testi­ mony in which the Seeretary had said, among other things, that if there was to be pure research it sbould be subsidized by some agency other than the Department of Defense, "I am not much interested," Secretary Wilson had testißed, "as a mlhtary project in why potatoes turn brown when they are fried.- Pressing Secretary WiIson, Senator Symington pointed to testimony that had been given about the Iack of

'Ibül

INTRODUCTION 12

suflicient money for research not on potatoes but on bombers, nuclear propulsion, electronics, missües, radar, and other subjects. The Seere­ tary repUed: 1

Important research and development is going on in all those areas ...•

On the other side, it is very difficult to get these men who are trying to think out ahead all the time to come down to brass tacks and list the projects and what they expect to get. . . . They would just like to have a pot of money without too much supervision that they could reach into, . . .

In the first place, If you know what you are dolng, why it iB not pure research.That complicates it.

Exhibit E. The kind of anti-intellectualism expressed in oHlcial circles during the 1950'S was mainly the traditional .businessman's suspicion of experts working in any area outside bis control, whether in scientific laboratories, universities, or diplomatie corps. Far more acute and sweeping was the hostiUty to intellectuals expressed on the far-right wing, a categorical foIlcish dislike of the educated classes and of any­ thing respectable, established, pedigreed, or cultivated. The right-wing crusade of the 1950'S was full of heated rhetoric about "Harvard pro­ fessors, twisted-thinking intellectuals . .. in the State Department"; those who are "burdened with Phi Beta Kappa keys and academic honors" but not "equally loaded with honesty and common sense"; "the American respectables, the socially pedigreed, the culturally ac­ ceptable, the certified gentlemen and scholars of the day, dripping with college degrees ... the 'best people' who were for Alger Hiss"; "the pompous diplomat in striped pants with phony British accent"; those who try to light Communism "with kid gloves in perfumed draw­ ing rooms", Easterners who "insult the people of the great Midwest and West, the hean of America"; those who can "trace their ancestry back to the eighteenth century-or even further" but whose loyalty is still not above suspicion; those who understand "the Groton vocabulary of the Hiss-Acheson group." 2 The spirit of tbis rhetorical facquerie was caught by an editorial writer for the Ereemam a

1 U.S. Congress, 84th Congress• snd session, Senate Committee on .Armed Serv­ ices: Hearing" Vol. XVI, pp. 174.2.1744 (July.2. 1956); ItaUC$ added,

211lis melange of Images Is taken from the more extended account of the scape­ goats of the 1950'S in Immanuel Wallersteln's unpubUshed MoA. essay: "McCarthy­ Ism and the Conservative," Columbla Unlverslty, 1954. pp. 46 fI.

a Freemtm, Vol. XI (November 5.1951). p. 7!1..

13 Anfi-inteUectualism in OurTime

The truly appalling phenomenon is the irrationality of the college-educated mob that has descended upon Joseph R. Mc­ Carthy.• •. Suppose Mr. McCarthy were indeed the cad the "respeetable" press makes him out to be, would this . . . justify the cataclysmic eruptions that, for almost a year now, have ema­ nated from all the better appointed editorial offices of New York and Wasbington, D.C.? ... It must be sometbing in McCarthy's personal makeup, He possesses, it seems, a sort of animal negative­ pole magnetism wbich repels alumni of Harvard, Princeton and Yale. And we think we know what it is: This young man is con­ stitutionally incapable of deference to social status.

McCarthy bimself found the central reasons for America's difficulties in areas where social status was most secure. The trouble, he said in the published version of bis famous Wheeling speech, lay in 4

the traitorous actions of those who have been treated so weil by this Nation. It has not been the less fortunate or members of minority groups who have been selling this Nation out, but rather those who have had aß the benefits that the wealthiest nation on earth has had to oHer-the finest homes, the finest college educa­ tion, and the finest jobs in Government we can give. This is glar­ ingly true in the State Department. There the bright young men who are born with süver spoons in their mouths are the ones who have been worst.

Exhibit F. The universities, particularly the better-known universities, were constantly marked out as targets by right-wing critics; but ac­ cording to one writer in the Freeman there appears to have been only an arbitrary reason for Ws discrimination against the Ivy League, since he considered that Communism is spreading in all our colleges: 5

Our universities are the training grounds for the barbarians of the future, those who, in the guise of learning, shall come forth loaded with pitchforks of ignorance and cynicism, and stab and destroy the remnants of human civilization. It will not be the subway peasants who will tear down the walls: they will merely do the bidding of our learned brethren . . . who will erase indi­ vidual Freedom from the ledgers of human thought. , . .

4 CongrBldcnal Becord, BISt Congress , snd sesslon, P: 1954 (February .20, 1950).

a Jack Schwartzman: "Natural Law and the Campus," Freeman, Vol. II (De­ ~ber3,1951),pp.149,152.

JI~"

INTRODUCTION 4

H you send your son to the colleges oE today, you will create the Executioner oE tomorrow. Tbe rebirth oE ideaIism must COIDe from the scattered monasteries of non-collegiate thought.

E%hant G. Right-wing hostility to universities was in part a question of deference and socfal status, but in part also a reflection of the old Jacksonian dislilce of specialists and experts. Here is a characteristic assertion about the equal competence of the common man (in this case the common woman) and the supposed experts, written by the amateur economist, Frank Chodorov, author of The Income T4%: The Root of AU Eva, and one of the most engaging of the right-wing spokesmen: •

A parcel of eminent economists, called into consultation by the RockefeIler Brothers Fund to diagnose the national ailment known as recession, came up with aprescription that, though slightly eon­ densed, covered the better part of two pages in The Neu> York Times. Tbe prominence of these doctors makes it presumptuous for one who has not "majored" in economies to examine the in­ gredients of their curative concoction. Yet the fact is that al1 of us are economists by necessity, since al1 of us are engaged in making a living, which is what economics is al1 about. Any literate housewife, endowed with a modicum of common sense, should be able to evaluate the specißcs in the prescription, provided these are extracted from the verbiage in which they are clothed.

E%hibit H. Although the following may weil be considered by dis­ criminating readers as anti-cu1tura1 rather than anti-intellectual, I can­ not omit some remarks by Congressman George Dondero of Michigan, long a vigilant crusader against Communism in the schools andagainst cubism, expressionism, surrealism, dadaism, futurism, and other move­ ments in art : f

Tbe art of the isms, the weapon of the Russian Revolution, fs the art which has been transplanted to America, and today, hav­ ing infiltrated and saturated many of our art centers, threatens to overawe, override and overpower the fine art of our tradition and inheritance. So-called modem or contemporary art in our

• "Shake Wen beIore Using," National Rl11>iew, Vol. V (June 7. 1958). p . 544. f Congressional Record. Brst Congress, 1Stsession, p. 11581. (August 16. 1949);

see also Dondero's address on "Communism in Our Schools, Congre8rionGl Reo­ ord. 79th Congress, snd session, pp. A. 3516-18 (June 14. 1946). and his speeeh, "CommunIst Conspiracy in Art Threatens American Museums," Congru8lonal Record, 8md Coagress, 2nd session, pp. 2423-7 (March 11. 19sa).

15 Anti-lnteUectuallsm InOut Thne

own beloved country contains aß the isms of depravity, deca­ dence, and destruction, . • •

All these isms are of Eoreign origin, and truly should have no place in American art, • • • All are instruments and weapons oE destruction.

E%hlbit I. Since I shall have much to say in these pages about anti­ intellectualism in the evangelical tradition, it seems important to eite at least one survival of this tradltion.These brief quotations are taken from the most successful evangelist of our time, Bllly Graham, voted by the American public in a Gallup Poil of 1958 only after Eisenhower, Churchill, and Albert Schweitzer as "the most admircd man in the world": '

Moral standards of yesterday to many individuals are no stand­ ard for today unless supported by the so-called "intellectuals."

I sincerely believe that partial education throughout the world . is fu worse than none at all, if we only educate the mind without the soul. . . . Turn that man loose upon the world [who has] no power higher than bis own, he is a monstrosity, he is but halfway educated, and is more dangerous than though he were not edu­ cated at all.

You can stick a public school and a university in the middle oE every block of every eity in America and you will never keep America from rotting morally by mere intellectual education.

During the past few years the intellectual props have been knoeked out from under the theories of men. Even the average university professor is willing to listen to the voice of the preacher.

[In place of the Bible] we substituted reason, rationalism, mind culture, science worship, the working power of govemment, Freudianism, naturalism, humanism, behaviorism, positlvism, ma­ terialism, and idealism. [This is the work of] so-called intellec­ tuals. Tbousands of these "intellectuals" have publicly stated that morality is relative-s-that there is no norm or absolute stand­ ard. . . •

Exhibit ]. In the post-Sputnik furor over American education, one of the most criticized school systems was that of California, which had been notable for its experimentation with curricula. Wben the San Francisco School District commissfoned a number of professional

'Willlam G. McLoughIin, Jr.: Balg GNham : R811looltn in a Sec:ular Age (New YorJc. 1960). pp. Bg. 212, ~13; on the GallupPoD. seep.15.

INTRoDucrIoN 16

scholars to examine their schools, the committee constituted for this purpose urged areturn to firmer academic standards. Six educational organizations produced a sharp counterattack in which they criticized the authors of the San Francisco report for "academic pettiness and snobbery" and for going beyond their competence in limiting the pur­ poses of education to "inforrning the mind and developing the in­ telligence," and reasserted the value of "other goals of education, such as preparation for citizenship, occupational competence, successful family life, self-realization in ethical, moral, aesthetic and spiritual dimensions, and the enjoyment of physical health ," Tbe educationists argued that an especially praiseworthy feature of American education hadbeen 0

the attempt to avoid a highly rigid system of education. To do so does not mean that academic competence is not regarded as highly important to any society, but it does recognize that bis­ torically, education systems which stress absorption of accumu­ lated knowledge ior its own sake have tended to produce decadence . Tbose who would "fix" the curriculum and freeze edu­ cational purpose misunderstand the unique function of education in Americandemocracy.

Exhibit K.Tbe followingis an excerpt from a parent's report, originally written in answer to a teaeher's complaint about the lax standards in contemporary education. Tbe entire piece is worth reading as a vivid statement by a parent who identifies wholly with the non-acadernie child and the newer education. As we shall see, the stereotype of the schoolteacher expressedhere has deep historical roots.'

But kindergarten teachers understand children. Tbeirs is a child-centered program. School days were one continuous joy of games and music and colors and friendliness. Life rolled mer­ rily along through the first grade, the second grade, the third grade . . . then came arithmeticl Failure like a spectre arose to haunt our days and harass our nights. Father and mother began to attend lectures on psychology and to read about inferiority complexes, We dragged through the fourth grade and into the

o ]udglng and Improvlng the Schools: Curren: Issues (Burlingame, Cnlifomia, 1960), pp. 4, 5, 7, 8; italics added. The document under lire was William C. Bark et al. : Reporl 0/ the San Francisco Curriculum Suroey Commlttee (San Francisco, 1960).

1 Robert E. Brownlee : "A Parent Speaks Out," Progru.we Educatlon, Vol. XVII (October, 1940), pp. 4lW-41.

17 Anti-inteUectuolism In Dur Time

flfth.Something had to bedone, Even father couldn't solve all the problems. I decided to have a talk with the teacher.

There was no welcome on the mat of that school. No one greeted the stranger or made note of bis coming. A somber hall­ way presented itself, punctuated at regular intervals by closed doors. Unfamiliar sounds came from within. I inquired my way of a hurrying youngster and then knocked at the forbidding threshold. To the teacher I announced my name, smiling as pleassntly as I could. "Oh, yes," she said, as if my business were already known to her and reached for her classbook, quick on the draw like a moviegangster c1utchingfor bis gun.

The names of the pupils appeared on a roled page in neat and alpbabetical precision. The teacher moved a bloodlessfinger down the margin of the page to my daughter's name, After each name were little squares. In the squares were little marks, symbols that I did not understand. Her finger moved across the page. My child's marks were not the same as those of the other children. She looked up triumphantly as if there were nothing more to be said. I was thinking of the smalI compass into which she had eom­ pressed the total activities of a very lively youngster. I was in­ terested in a whole life, a whole personality; the teacher, merely in arithmetical ability. I wished I bad not come. lIeft uninforrned and uncomforted.

Exhibit L. Tbe following remarks have already been made famous by Arthur Bester, but they will bear repetition. Mter delivering and pub­ lishing the address excerpted here, the author, a junior high-school prlncipal in Illinois, did not lose caste in his trade but was engaged for a similar position in Great Neck, Long Island,a post wbich surely ranks high in desirability among the nation's secondary sehools, and was subsequently invited to be a visiting member of the faculty of the schoolof education of aMidwestern unfversity,"

Through the years we've built a sort of balo around reading, writing, and arithmetic. We've said they were for everybody .. . rieb and poor, brilliant and not-so-mentally-endowed, ones who

2 A. H. Lauchner: "How Can the Junior High School Curriculum Be Imf.rovedr' BuUetln 0/ the National A6soclatlon uf SecoiJdary-School PrlncIpals, Vo. XXXV (March, 1951), pp . 299-301. The three dots of elision here da not indicate omts­ sions but are the author's punctuation. The address was delivered at a meeting of this nssociation. See Arthur Bestor's comments in The Restoration uf Leamfng (New York, 1955), P:54.

INTRODUCTION 18

Iiked them and those who failed to go for them. Teaeher has said that these were something "everyone should Iearn." The principal has remarked, "All educated people know how to write, speIl, and read." When some child declared a dislike for a sacred sub­ ject, he was warned that, if he failed to master it, he would grow up to be a so-and-so.

The Three R's for All Children, and All Chüdren for the Three R'sl Thatwas it,

We've made some progress in getting rid of that slogan. But every now and then some mother with a Phi Beta Kappa award or some employer who has hired a girl who can't speIl stirs up a fuss about the schools . . . and ground is lost. . • .

When we come to the realization that not every child has to read, figure, write and speIl . . . that many of them either can­ not or will not master these chores . . . then we shall be on the road to improving the junior high curriculum.

Between this day and that a lot of selling must take place. But It's coming. We shall some day accept the thought that it is just as illogical to assume that every boy must be able to read as it is that each one must be able to perform on a violin, that it is no more reasonable to require that each girl shall speIl weIl than it is that each one shall bake a good cherry pie.

We cannot all do the same things. We do not like to do the same things. And we won't, When adults finally realize that fact, everyone will be happier • . . and schools will be nicer places in which to live. • . .

If and when we are able to convince a few folks that mastery of reading, writing, and arithmetic is not the one road leading to happy, suceessfulliving, the next step is to cut down the amount of time and attention devoted to these areas in general junior high-school courses. . . •

One junior high in the East has, after long and careful study, accepted the fact that some twenty percent of their students will not be up to standard in reading . . . and they are doing other things for these boys and girls. Tbat's straight thinking. Contrast that with the junior high which says, "Every student must know the multiplication tables before graduation."

These exhibits, though their sources and intentions are various, col­ lectively display the ideal assumptions of anti-intellectualism. Intel­

19 Anti-inteUectuaU8m in Our Time

lectuals, it may be held, are pretentious, eonceited, effeminate, and snobbish; and very Iikely immoral, dangerous, and subversive. The plain sense of the common man, especially if tested by success in some demanding line of practical work, is an altogether adequate substitute for, if not actually much superior to, formal knowledge and expertise acquired in the schools. Not surprisingly, institutions in which intel­ lectuals tend to be inßuential, like universities and colleges, are rotten to the core, In any case, the discipline of the heart, and the old­ fashioned principles of religion and morality, are more reliable gutdes to life than an education which aims to produce minds responsive to new trends in thought and art , Even at the level of elementary educa­ tion, a schooling that puts too much stress on the acquisition of mere knowledge, as opposed to the vigorous development of physical and emotional life, is heartless in its mode of conduct and threatens to produce social decadence.

• 4 . To avoid some hazards to understanding, it is perhaps necessary to sa,. that a work given single-mindedly to the exploration of such a thems as thismust inevitably have the efIect of highlighting its importance in a way that would not be warranted in a comprehensive history of American culture. I can only say that I do not suffer from the delusion that the complexities of American history can be satisfactorily reduced to a running battle between the eggheads and the fatheads. Moreover. to the extent that our history can be considered one of cultural and intellectual conBicts, the public is not simply divided into intellectual and anti-intellectual factions. Tbe greater part of the public, and a great part even of the intelligent and alert publie, is simply non­ intellectual; it is infused with enough ambivalence about intellect and intellectuals to be swayed now this way and now that on current cul­ tural issues. It has an ingrained distrust of eggheads, but also a gen­ uine yearning for enlightenment and culture, Moreover, a book on anti-intellectualism in America can hardly be taken as though it were meant to be a balanced assessment of our eulture, any more than a history of bankruptcies could be taken as a full history of our business life. Although I .am convinced that anti-intellectualism is pervasive in our culture, I believe that it can rarely be called dominant. Again and again I have noticed, as I hope readers will, that the more mild and benign forms of anti-intellectualism prove to be the most widespread,

-, .:. _ ..

. ,­

INTRODVCTION 1:0

whereas the most malign forms are found mainly among small if vociferousminority groups. Again, this is not, as it perhaps should be, a comparative study: my concentration on anti-intellectualism in the United States is no more than the result of a special, and possibly parochial, interest in American society. I do not assume that anti­ intellectualism does not exist elsewhere. I think that it is a problem of more than ordinary acuteness here, but I believe it has been present in some form and degree in most societies: in one it takes the form of the administering of hemlock, in another of town-and-gown riots, in another of censorship and regimentation, in still another of Congres­ sional investigations.I am disposed to believe that anti-intellectualism, though it has its own universality, may be considered apart of our English cultural inheritance, and that it is notably strong in Anglo­ American experience. A few years ago Leonard Woolf remarked that "no people has ever despised and distrusted the intellect and intellec­ tuals more than the British." 8 Perhaps Mr. Woolf bad not given sufficient thought to the claims of the Americans to supremacy in this respect (which is understandable, since the British have been tired for more than a century of American boasting); but that a British intellectual so long seasoned and so weIl informed on the cultural life of his own country could have made such aremark may weIl give us pause. Although the situation of American intellectuals poses problems of special urgency and poignancy, many of their woes are the common experiences of intellectuals elsewhere, and there are some compensat­ ing circumstances in American life,

This book is a critical inquiry, not a legal brief for the intellectuals against the American community. I have no desire to encourage the self-pity to which intellectuals are sometimes prone by suggesting that they have been vessels of pure virtue set down in Babylon. One does not need to assert this, or to assert that intellectuals should get sweeping indulgence or exercise great power, in order to insist that respect for intellect and its functions is important to the culture and the health of any society, and that in ours this respect has often been notably lacking. No one who lives among intellectuals is likely to idealize them unduly; but their relation as fallible persons to the vital function of intellect should remind us of the wisdom of the Church, which holds tbat although the priesthood is vulnera~le to the errors

8 "G. E. Moore," Encounte" Vol. XII (January, 1959), P: 68; the context, it should be said, suggests that Woolf was quite aware of the necessary qualilications to thfsremark.

1:1 Anti-lntellectualism in DurTime

and sins of the Besh, the Church itself remains holy, Even here, how­ ever, I do not forget that intellect itself can be overvalued, and that reasonable attempts to set it in its proper place in human aHairs should not be called anti-intellectual. One does not care to dissent when T. S. Eliot observes that "intellectual ability without the more human attributes Is admirable only in the same way as the brilliance of a chüd chess prodigy."· But in a world full of dangers, the danger that American soclety as a whole will overesteem intellect or assign it such a transcendent value as to displace other legitimate values is one that need hardly trouble us.

Possibly the greatest hazard of this venture is that of encouraging the notion that anti-intellectualism is commonly found in a pure or unmixed state. It seems clear that those who have some quarrel with intellect are almost always ambivalent about it: they mix respect and awe with suspicion and resentment; and this has been true in many societiesand phases of human history. In any case, anti-intellectualism is not the creation of people who are categorically hostile to Ideas, Quite the contrary: just as the most eHective enemy of the educated man may be the half-educated man, so the leading anti-intellectuals are usually men deeply engaged with Ideas, often obsessively engaged with this or that outwom or rejected idea. Few intellectuals are without moments of anti-intellectualism; few anti-Intellectuals without single­ mlnded intellectual passions. In so far as anti-intellectualism becomes articulate enough to be traced historically or widespread enough to make itself feIt in contemporary controversy, it has to have spokesmen who are at least to some degree competent. These spolcesmen are in the main neither the uneducated nor the unintellectual, but rather the marginal intellectuals, would-be intellectuals, unfrocked or embittered intellectuals, the literate leaders of the semi-literate, full of seriousness and high purpose about the causes that bring them to the attention of the world. I have found anti-intellectualleaders who were evangelical Ininisters, many of them highly intelligent and some even leamed; fundamentalists, artfculate about their theology; politicians, inc1uding some of the shrewdest; businessmen or other spokesmen of the practi­ cal demands of American culture ; right-wing editors of strong in­ tellectual pretensions and convictions; various marginal writers (vide the anti-intellectualism of the Beatniks); anti-Communist pundits, of­ fended by the past heresies of a large segment of the intellectual com­ munity; and, for that matter, Communist leaders, who had much use

• NatatowDw the DefinI&n ofCultv,. (Lenden, 1948), p. S3.

INTRODl1CTION 2~

for intellectuals when they could we them, but the ubnost contempt for what intellectuals are concemed with. The hostility so prominent in the temper of these men is not directed against ideas as such, not even in every case against intellectuals as such. The spokesmen of anti-intellectualism are almost always devoted to some Ideas, and much as they may hate the regnant intellectuals among their living contemporaries, they may be devotees of some intellectuals long dead -Adam Smith perhaps, or Thomas Aqumas, or John Calvin, oi even ° KarlMarx.

It would also be mistaken, as weIl as uncharftable, to imagine that the men and women who from time to time carry the banners of anti­ intellectualism are of necessity committed to it as though it were a positive creed or a kind of principle. In fact, anti-intellectualism is usually the incidental consequence of some other intention, often some justißable intention. Hardly anyone believes himself to be against thought and culture. Men do not rise in the morning, grin at them­ selves in their mirrors, and say: "Ab, today I shall torment an in­ tellectual and strangle an ideal" Only rarely, and with the gravest of misgivings, then, can we designate an individual as being constitu­ tionally anti-intellectual. In any ease, it would be of little value in this enterprise----and certainly it is no concern of mine-to classify or stigmatize individuals; what is important is to estimate the historical tendency of certain attitudes, movements, and Ideas," With respect to these, some individuals will appear now on one side and now on an­ other. In fact, anti-intellectualism is often characteristic of forces dia­ metrically opposed to each other. Businessmen and labor leaders may have views of the intellectual class which are surprisingly similar. Again, progressive education has had its own strong anti-intellectual element, and yet its harshest and most determined Ioes, who are right­ wing vigilantes, manifest their own anti-intellectualism, which is, though different in style, less equivocaland more militant.

To be confronted with a simple and unqualified evil is no doubt a klnd of luxury; but such is not the case here; and if anti-intellectualism has' become, as I believe it has, a broadly diffused quality in our civilization, it has become so because it has often been linked to good, or at least defensible, causes. It first got its strong grip on our ways of thinking because it was fostered by an evangelical religion that

• As a case in point, I have found it desirable to discuss the anti-intellectual implications and the antl-intellectual consequences of some educational theories of John Dewey; but it would be absurd and impertinent to say, on this account, that Dewey was an anti-intellectual.

23 Anti-lntellectualism in Our Time

also purveyed many humane and democratie sentiments. It made its way into our politics because it became associated with our passion for equality. It has hecome formidable in our edueation partly because our educational beliefs are evangelically egalitarian. Hence, as far as possible, our anti-intelIectualism must be excised from the benevolent Impulses upon which it lives by constant and delieate aets of Intellee­ tual surgery whieh spare these impulses themselves. Only in this way can anti-intelIectualism be checked and contained; I do not say elimi­ nated altogether, for I believe not only that this is beyond our powers but also that an unbridled passion for the total elimination of this or that evil can he as dangerous as any of the delusions of our time.

[ 2'" ]

CHAPTER TI

On the Unpopularity

of Intellect o

·I·BEFORE attempting to estimate the qualities in our society that make inte11ect unpopular, it seems necessary to say something about what inte11ect is usually understood to be. When one hopes to under­ stand a common prejudice, common usage provides a good place to begin. Anyone who scans popular American writing with this interest in mind will be struck by the manifest difference between the idea of inte11ect and the idea of intelligence. The first is frequently used as a kind of epithet, the second never. No one questions the value of in­ telligence; as an abstract quality it is universally esteemed, and indi­ viduals who seem to have it in exceptional degree are highly re­ garded. The man of intelligence is always praised; the man of in­ te11ect is sometimes also praised, especially when it is believed that inte11ect involves intelligence, but he is also often looked upon with resentment or suspicion. It is he, and not the intelligent man, who may be ca11ed unreliahle, superHuous, immoral, or subversive; sometimes he is even said to be, for a11 bis inte11ect, unintelllgent,'

Although the difference between the qualities of inte11igence and inte11ect is more often assumed than deßned, the context of popular

1 I do not want to suggest that this distinction is made only in the United Stares, sinee it seems to be common wherever there is a dass that f1nds intellectuals a nuisanee and yet does not want to throw overboard Its own claims to Intelligence. Thus, in France, after the intellectuals bad emerged as a kind of social force, one lInds Mauriee Barres writing in 1902 : 'Td rather be intelligent than an intel­ Ieetual." Victor Brombert: The lntelleetual B61o: Studles In the F,ench Nooel, 188~1955 (Philadelphia, 1961), p. 25.

25 On the Unpopularity of InteUect

usage makes it possihle to extract the nuh of the distinetion, which seems to be almost universally understood: intelligence is an excel­ lence of mind that is employed within a fairly narrow, immediate, and predictable range; it is a manipulative, adjustive, unfailingly prac­ tical quality-one of the most eminent and endearing of the animal virtues. Intelligence works within the framework of limited hut clearly stated goals, and may be quick to shear away questions of thought that do not seem to help in reaching them. Fina11y, it is of such universal use that it can daily be seen at work and admired alike hy simple or complexminds.

Inte11ect, on the other hand, is the critical, creative, and contem­ plative side of mind. Whereas inte11igence seeks to grasp, manipulate, re-order, adjust, inte11ect examines, ponders, wonders, theorizes, criti­ cizes, imagines. Intelligence will seize the immediate meaning in a situation and evaluate it. Inte11ect evaluates evaluations, and looks for the meanings of situations as a whole. Intelligence can be praised as a quality in animals; inte11ect, belng a unique manifestation of human dignity, is both praised and assailed as a quality in men. When the difference is so defined, it becomes easier to understand why we sometimes say that a mind of admittedly penetrating intelli­ gence is relatively uninte11ectual; and why, hy the same token, we see among minds that are unmistakahly inte11ectual a considerahle range of intelligence.

This distinction may seem excessively abstract, hut it is frequently illustrated in American culture. In our education, for example, it has never been douhted that the selection and development of intelligence is a goal of central importance; hut the extent to which education should foster intellect has been a matter of the most heated contro­ versy, and the opponents of inte11ect in most spheres of public educa­ tion have exercised preponderant power. But perhaps the most im­ pressive illustration arises from a comparison of the American regard for inventive skill as opposed to skill in pure seience, Our greatest in­ ventive genius, Thomas A. Edison, was a11 hut canonized by the American public, and a legend has heen huilt around him. One can­ not, I suppose, expect that achievements in pure science would receive the same public applause that came to inventions as spectacular and as directly inßuential on ordinary life as Edison's, But one might have expeeted that our greatest genius in pure science, Josiah Willard Gibbs, who laid.the theoretical feundations for modern physical ehem­ istry, would have been a figure of some comparahle acclaim among

INTBODUCTION !l6

the educated public. Yet Gibbs, whose work was celebrated in Eu­ rope,lived out bis life in public and even professional obscurity at Yale, where he taught for thirty-two years. Yale, which led American uni­ versitles in its scientific achievements during the nineteenth century, was unable in those thirty-two years to provide him with more than a half dozen or so graduate students who could understand his work, and never took the trouble to award him an honorary degree,"

A special difficulty arises when we speak of the fate of intellect in society; this difficulty stems from the fact that we are compelled to speak of intellect in vocational terms, though we may recognize that intellect is not simply a matter of vocation. Intellect is considered in general usage to be an attribute of certain professions and vocations; we speak of the intellectual as being a writer or a critic, a professor or a scientist, an editor, journalist, lawyer, clergyman, or the like. As Jacques Barzun has said, the intellectual is a man who carries abrief case. It is hardly possible to dispense with this convenience; the status and the role of intellectuals are bound up with the aggregate of the brief-case-carrying professions. But few of us believe that a member of a profession, even a learned profession, is necessarily an intellectual in any discriminating or demanding sense of the word. In most profes­ sions intellect may help, but intelligence will serve weIl enough ~th­ out it. We know, for Instance, that all academic men are not intellec­ tuals, we often lament this fact. We know that there is something about intellect, as opposed to professionally trained intelligence, which does not adhere to whole vocations but only to persons. And when we are troubled about the position of intellect and the intellectual dass in our society, it is not only the status of certain vocational groups which we have in mind, but the value attached to a certain mental quality.

A great deal of what might be called the journeyman's work of our culture--the work of lawyers, editors, engineers, doctors, indeed of some writers and of most professors--though vitally dependent upon ideas, is not distinctively intellectual. A man in any of the leamed or quasi-leamed professions must have command of a substantial store of frozen ideas to do bis work, he must, if he does it weIl, use theni in­ telligently; but in bis professional capacity he uses them mainly as

2 111esituation oE Gibbs is oEten mentioned as a consequence oE American at­ titudes. For the general situation it symbolized, see Richard H. Shrvock: "Ameri­ can Indifference to Basic Science during the Nineteenth Century," Archives Inter­ natIonaleId'Hlnoire du Selene88, No. 5 (1948), pp. so-6S.

!l7 On the Unpopularity of InteUect

instruments . The heart of the matter-to borrow a distinction made by Max Weber about politics-is that the professional man lives off Ideas, not for them. His professional role, bis professional skllls, do not make him an intellectual. He is amental worker, a technician. He may happen to be an intellectual as weIl, but if he is, it is because he brings to his profession a distinctive feeling about ideas which is not required by his job. As a professional, he has acquired a stock of mental skills that are for sale. The skills are highly developed, but we do not think of him as being an intellectual if certain qualities are missing from his work-disinterested intelligence, generalizing power, free speculation, fresh observation, creative novelty, radical criticism. At horne he may happen to be an intellectual, but at his job he is a hired mental technician who uses his mind for the pursuit of ex­ temally determined ends. It is this element-the fact that ends are set from some interest or vantage point outside the intellectual process it­ self-which characterizes both the zealot, who lives obsessively for a single idea, and the mental technician, whose mind is used not for free speculation but for a salable end. The goal here is external and not self-determined, whereas the Intellectual life has a certain spon­ taneous character and inner determination. It has also a peculiar poise of its own, which I believe is established by a balance between two basic qualities in the intellectual's attitude toward ideas-qualities that may be designated as playfulness and piety.

To deflne what Is distinctively intellectual it is necessary to be able to determine what differentiates, say, a professor or a lawyer who is an intellectual from one who is not; or perhaps more properly, what enables us to say that at one moment a professor or a lawyer Is acting in a purely routine professional fashion and at another moment as an intellectual. The difference is not in the character of the ideas with which he works but in bis attitude toward them. I have suggested that in some sense he lives for ideas-which means that he has a sense of dedication to the life of the mind which is very much like a religious commitment. This is not surprising, for in a very important way the role of the intellectual is inherited from the office of the c1eric: it im­ plies a special sense of the ultimate value in existence of the act of comprehension. Socrates, when he said that the unexamined life is not worth living, struck the essence of it. We can hear the voices of various intellectuals in history repeating their awareness of this feeling, in accents suitable to time, place, and culture. "The proper function of the human race, taken in the aggregate," wrote Dante in De Mon­

INTRODUCTION ~

archia, "is to aetualize continually the entire eapacity possible to the intellect, primarily in specu1ation, then through its extension and for its sake, secondarily in action," Tbe noblest thing, and the closest pos­ sible to divinity, is thus the aet of knowing. It is only a somewhat more secular and activist version of the same commitment whieh we hear in the .6rst senten ce of Locke's Essay Conceming Human Under­ standing: "It is the understanding that sets man above the rest of sensible beings, and gives him all the advantage and dominion which he has over them." Hawthorne, in a passage near the end of The Bluhedale Romance, observes that Nature's highest purpose for man is "that of conscious intellectuallife and sensibility." Finally, in our own time Andre Malraux puts the question in one of bis novels: "How can one make the best of one's life?" and answers : "By converting as wide a range of experience as possible into conscious thought."

Intellectualism, though by no means conflned to doubters, is often the sole piety of the skeptic. Some years ago a colleague asked me to read a brief essay he had written for students going on to do advanced work in his ßeld. Its ostensible purpose was to show how the life of the mind could be cultivated within the framework oE bis own dis­ cipüne, but its effect was to give an intensely personal expression to his dedication to intellectual work. Although it was written by a eor­ rosively skeptical mind, I felt tbat I was reading a piece of devotional üterature in some ways comparable to Richard Steele's The Trades­ man's CaUing or Cotton Mather's Essays to Do Good, for in it the in­ tellectual task had been conceived as a caUing, much in the fashion of the old Protestant writers.:His work was undertaken as a kind of devotional exercise, a personal discipline, and to think of it in this fashion was possible because it was more than merely workmanüke and professional: it was work at thinking, work done supposedly in the service of truth. The intellectual life has here taken on a kind of primary moral signißcance. It is this aspect of the intellectual's feeling about ideas that I call bis piety. The intellectual is engage-he is pledged, committed, enlisted. What everyone else is willing to admit, namely that ideas and abstractions are of signal importance in 'human life, he imperatively feels.

Of course what is involved is more tban a purely personal discipline and more than the life of contemplation and understanding itself. For the life of thought, even though it may be regarded as the highest form of human activity, is also a medium through which other values are reßned, reasserted, and realized in the human community. CoI·

119 On the Unpopularity uf InteUect

lectively, intellectuals have often tried to serve as the moral antennae of the race , anticipating and if possible clarifying fundamental moral issues before these have forced themselves upon the public conscious­ ness, The thinker feels tbat he ought to be the special custodian oE values like reason and justice which are related to his own search for truth, and at times he strikes out passionately as a public .6gure 00­ cause his very identity seems to be threatened by some gross abuse. ODethinks here of Voltaire defending the Calas family, of Zola speak­ ing out for Dreyfus, of the American intellectuals outraged at the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti.

It would be unfortunate if intellectuals were alone in their concern for these values, and it is true that their enthusiasm has at times mis­ carried. But it is also true that intellectuals are properly more re­ sponsive to such values than others; and it is the historie glory of the intellectual class of the West in modern times that, of all the classes which could be called in any sense privileged, it has shown the largest and most consistent concern for the well-belng of the classes which lie below it in the social scale, Behind the intellectual's feeling of com­ Initment is the belief that in some measure the world should be made responsive to bis eapacity for rationality, bis passion for justice and order: out of this conviction arises much of bis value to mankind and, equally, much of bis ability to do mischief.

• 2. •

The very suggestion that the intellectual has a distinctive capacity for mischief, however, leads to the consideration that his piety, by itself, is not enough. He may live for ideas, as I have said, but something must prevent him from living for one tdea, from becoming obsessive or grotesque. Although there have heen zealots whom we may still regard as intellectuals, zealotry is a deEect of the breed and not of the essenee. When one's concern for ideas, no matter how dedicated and sincere, reduces them to the service oE some central liInited precon­ ception or some wholly external end, intellect gets swallowed by fanatieism. If there is anything more dangerous to the life oE the mind than having no independent commitment to ideas, it is having an excess of commitment to some special and constricting idea. The effect is as observable in politics as in theology: tbe intellectual Eunction ean he overwhelmed by an excess of piety expended within too contracted a frame of reference.

INTRODUCTION P

Piety, then, needs a counterpoise, something to prevent it from being exercised in an excessively rigid way; and this it has, in most intel­ lectual temperaments, in the quality I would call playfulness. We speak of the play of the mind; and certainly the intellectual relishes the play of the mind for its own sake, and finds in it one of the major values in life. What one thinks of here is the element of sheer delight in intellectual activity. Seen in this guise, intellect may be taken as the healthy animal spirits of the mind, wbich come into exercise when the surplus of mental energies is released from the tasks required for utility and mere survival. "Man is perfectly human," said Schiller, "only when he plays." And it is this awareness of an available surplus beyond the requirements of mere existence that his maxim conveys to us. Veblen spoke often of the intellectual faculty as "idle curiosity"­ but this is a misnomer in so far as the curiosity of the playful mind is inordinately restless and active. This very restlessness and activity gives a distinctive cast to its view of truth and its discontent with dogmas.

Ideally, the pursuit of truth is said to be at the heart of the in­ teIlectuaI's business, but this credits bis business too much and not qulte enough. As with the pursuit of happiness, the pursuit of truth is itself gratifying .whereas the consummation often turns out to be elusive. Truth captured loses its glamor; truths long known and widely be­ lieved have a way of turning false with time; easy truths are abore, and too many of them become half-truths. Whatever the intellectual is too certain of, if he is healthily playful, he begins to find unsatisfac­ tory. The meaning of bis intellectuallife lies not in the possession of truth but in the quest for new uncertainties. Harold Rosenberg summed up this side of the life of the mind supremely weIl when he said that the intellectual is one who turns answers into questions.

This element of playfulness infuses products of mind as diverse as Abelard's Sie et Non and a dadaist poem. But in using the terms play and playfulness, I do not intend to suggest any lack of seriousness; quite the contrary. Anyone who has watched children, or adults, at play will recognize that there is no contradiction between play and seriousness, and that some forms of play induce a measure of grave concentration not so readily called forth by work. And playfulness does not imply the absence of practicality. In American public discus­ sion one of the tests to wbich intellect is constantly submitted when it is, so to speak, on trial is this criterion of practicality. But in prin­ ciple intellect is neither practical nor impractical; it is extra-practical.

31 On the Unpopularity of InteUect

To the zealot overcome by bis piety and to the joumeyman of ideas concemed only with bis marketable mental skills, the beginning and end of ideas lies in their efficacywith respect to some goal external to lntellectual processes, The intellectual is not in the Brst instance con­ eerned with such goals. This is not to say that be scorns the practical: tbe intrinsie intelleetual interest of many practical problems is utterly absorbing. Still less is it to say that he is impractical; he is simply concemed with something else, a quality in problems that is not de­ fined by asking whether or not they bave practical purpose. The notion that tbe intellectual is inherently impractical will harelly bear analysis (one can think so readily of intellectuals who, like Adam Smith, Tbomas Jefferson, Robert Owen,Walter Rathenau, or [ohn Maynard Keynes, have been eminently practical in the politician's or businessman's sense of the term). However, practicality is not the essence of bis interest in ideas. Acton put this view in rather an extreme form when he said: "I think our studies ought to be all but purposeless. They want to be pursued with chastity, like mathematies."

An example of the intellectual's view of the purely practical is the response of James Clerk Maxwell, the mathematician and theoretical physicist, to the invention of the telephone. Asked to give a leeture on the workings of this new instrument, Maxwell began by saying how difficult it had been to believe, when word first came about it from America, that such a thing bad actuaDy been devised. But then, he went on, "when at last this little instrument appeared, consisting, as it does, of parts, every one of wbich is familiar to us, and capable of being put together by an amateur, the disappointment arising from its humble appearance was only partially relieved on finding that it was reaDy able to talk," Perhaps, then, this regrettable appearance of simplicity might be redeemed by the presence somewhere of "some recondite physical principle, the study of wbich might worthily occupy an hour's time of an academic audience," But no; Maxwell had not met a single person who was unable to understand the physical proc­ esses involved, and even the science reporters for the daily press had almost got it rigbtl 3 The thing was a disappointing bore; it was not recondite, not difficult, not profound, not complex; it was not intel­ lecrually new.

Maxwell's reaction does not seem to me to be entirely admirable. In looking at the telephone from the point of view of a pure scientist,

3 W. D. Niven, ed.: The Scientjfic Papers 01 [ames Clerk MaxweU (Cambridge, 1890 ), Vol. H, p. 742.

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INTRoDUCTloN 3~

and not as a bistorian or a sociologist or even a householder, he was restricting the range of bis faney. Commercially, bistorically, humanly, the telephone was exciting; and its possibilities as an instrument of communication and even of torture surely might have opened vistas to the imagination. But within bis self-limited sphere of ooncem, that of physics, Maxwell was speaking with a certain stubbom daring about the intellectual interest in the matter. For him, thinking as a physicist, the new instrument oifered no possibilities for play.

ODe may well ask if there is not a certain fatal contradiction be­ tween these two qualities of the intellectual temperament, playfulness and piety. Certainly there is a tension between them, but it is any­ thing but fatal: it is just one of those tensions in the human charaeter that evoke a creative response. It is, in fact , the ability to compre­ hend and express not only different but opposing points of view, to identify imaginatively with or even to embrace within oneself contrary feelings and ideas that gives rise to Brst-rate work in all areas of humanistic expression and inmany Belds of inquiry. Human beings are tissues of contradlctions, and the life even of the intellectual is not logic, to borrow from Holmes, but experience. Contemplate the in­ tellectuals of the past or those in one's neighborhood: some will come to mind in whom the note of playfulness is dominant; others who are conspicuously pious. But in most intellectuals each of these character­ istics is qualißed and held in check by the other. The tensile strength of the thinker may be gauged by bis ability to keep an equipoise between these two sides of bis mind. At one end of the scale, an exeess of playfulness may lead to triviality, to the dissipation of intel­ lectua1 energies on mere technique, to dilettantism, to the failure of creative eifort. At the other, an excess of plety leads to rigidity, to fanaticism, to rnessianism, to ways of life wbich may be morally mean or morally magnißeent but whieh in either case are not the ways of

inteIlect.' Historlcally, it may be useful to faney playfulness and piety as belng

'It was part of the indlctment by Julien Benda In La Trah/son cl& ClerC& ( 1927) that so many modem intellectuals bad glven themselves over to this lcind of messlanlc poUtics to the grave loss of Intellectual values: "Today, If we mentlon Mommsen, Treltschke, Ostwald, Bruneti~re , Barräs, Lemaltre, Peguy, Mannas, d'Annunzlo, KJpllng, we have to admlt that the 'clerks' now exerclse political pas­ slons with all tbe charaeterlstfcs of passlon-the tendency to action, the thirst for immediate results, the excluslve preoccupation wlth the desIred end, the scom for argument, the excess, the hatred, the fixed Ideas." (Translated by Rlchard Aldlng­ ton as The Betrayal ofeheImelleetlUJu, Boston, 1955, p. 32· )

33 On the Unpopularity of InteUect

the respective residues of the aristocratie and the priestly backgrounds of tbe intellectual function , The element of play seems to be rooted In the ethos of the leisure dass, wbich has always been central in the history of creative imagination and humanistie learning. The element of plety is reminiscent of the prlestly inherltance of the intellectua1s: the quest for and the possession of truth was a holy office. As their legatee, the modem intellectual inherits the vulnerability of the aristo­ crat to the animus of puritanism and egalitarianism and the vulner­ ability of the priest to anticIerlcalism and popular assaults upon hierarchy. We need not be surprised, then , if the intellectual's position has rarely been comfortable in a couotry which is, above all others, the horne of the democrat and the antinomian.

It is a part of the intellectual's tragedy that the things he most values about himseH and bis work are quite unlike those society values in him. Society values him because he can in fact be used for a variety of purposes,.from popular entertainment to the design of weapons. But It can hardly understand so weIl those aspects of bis temperament which I have designated as essential to bis intellectualism. His play­ fulness, in its various manifestations, is likely to seem to most men a perverse luxury; in the United Stätes the play of the mlnd is perhaps the only form of play that is not looked upon with the most tender indulgenee. His piety is likely to seem nettlesome, if not actually dan­ gerous. And neither quality is considered to contribute very much to the practieal business of life.

• 3 • I have suggested that one of the first questions asked in Amerlca about intellect and inteI1eetuals concems thelr practicality. One reason why anti-intellectualism has changed in our time is that our sense of the impractieality of intellect has been transformed. During the nineteenth century, when business crlterla dominated Amerlcan euIture almost without ehallenge, and when most business and professional men at­ tained eminence without much formal edueation, academie schooling was often said to be useless. It was assumed that schooling existed not to cultivate certain distinctive qualities of mind but to make per­ sonal advancement possible. For this purpose, an immediate engage­ ment with the practical tasks of life was held to be more usefully educative, whereas intellectua1 and cuItural pursuits were called UD­

INTRODUCTION 34

worldly, unmasculine, and impractical. In spite of tbe coarse and philistine rhetoric in which tbis contention was very often stated, it had a certain rude correspondence to the realities and demands of American life. This skepticism about formally eultivated inte11ect lived on into the twentietb century. But in our time, of course, American society has grown greatly in complexity and in involvement with the rest of the world. In most areas of life a formal training has become a prerequisite to success. At the same time, the complexity of modem life has steadily wbittled away the functions the ordinary citizen can intelligently and comprehendingly perform for himself. In the origi­ nal American populistic dream, the omnicompetence of the common man was fundamental and indispensable. It was believed that he could, without much special preparation, pursue the professions and run the government. Today he knows that he caanot even make bis ' breakfast without using devices, more or less mysterious to him, wbich : expertise has put at bis disposal; and when he sits down to breakfast and looks at bis morning newspaper, he reads about a whole range of ' vital and intricate issues and acknowledges, if he is candid with . bimself, that he bas not acquired competence to judge most of them.

In the practical world of affairs, then, trained intelligence has come to be recognized as a force of overwhelming importance. What used to be a joeular and usua11y benign ridicule of inte11ect and formal " training has turned into a malign resentment of the inte11ectual in bis capacity as expert. Tbe old idea of the woo11y-minded inte11ectual, so aptly caught in the stereotype of the absent-minded professor, still , survives, of course; but today it is increasingly a wishful and rather

or

,: wistful defense against a deep and important fear. Once the intel- ' lectual was gently ridieuled because he was not needed; now he is fiercely resented because he is needed too much. He has become all too practical, all too eHective. He is the object of resentment beeause , of an improvement, not a decline, in bis fortunes. It is not bis ab-: straetness, futility, or helplessness that makes him prominent enough " to inspire virulent attacks, but bis achievements, bis inHuence,bis real 0;; eomfort and imagined luxury, as well as the dependence of the com- ] munity upon bis ski11s. Intellect is resented as a form of power privilege.

It may be said at once that what we rea11y have in mind here is not so much the intellectual as the expert; that many intelleetuals are not experts with an important roIe in public life and that many of

35 On the Unpopularlty of InteUeet them do not impinge very forcefully upon the publie consoiousness," This is beyond argument; but my point is that the prevailing attitude toward intellectuals is set largely by those intellectuals who do so Impinge. In the main, intelleetuals aHeet the public mind when they act in one of two capacities: as experts or as ideologues. In both ca­ pacities they evoke profound, and, in a measure, legitimate , fears and resentments, Both intensify the prevalent sense of helplessness in our society, the expert by quickening the public's resentment of being the object of constant manipulation, the ideologue by arousing the fear of subversion and by heightening all the other grave psycbic stresses that have come with modernity.

For almost thirty years anyone even moderately infonned about publie affairs has bad to become aware of the machinery through which the expert was making bimself felt. At first, during the New Deal the weIl-publicized brain trust and a11 the ramifying agendes of control were set up to cope with the depression, and during the war there were the Officeof Strategie Services and the Office of Scientific Research and Development. Today the C.I.A., the A.E.C., the Rand Corporation, the President's Council of Economic Advisers, and All the agencies that conduct research on the instruments and strategy of war deal with issues which are beyond the reach of the ordinary man's scrutiny but which can, and often do, determine bis fate. A large seg­ ment of the public willingly resigns itself to political passivity in a world in wbich it cannot expect to make well-founded judgments. But In the management of publie aHairs and private business, where small politicians and small businessmen used to feel that most matters were within their control, these men have been forced, since the days of F.D.R., to eonfront better educated and more sopbisticated experts, to their continuing frustration. Along with the general public, such men now take part less vitally and less knowledgeably in the making of Important decisions; the less they understand the inner world of power, the more apt they are to share and arouse popular suspicions of the uses to wbieh power is put. The small-town lawyers and busi-

B A great deal of Interaal dlseussion is heard in the intelleetual community as to whether the development of expertise is not also dangerous for intelleetuals. The question has been asked whether the intelleetual's position as an expert does not in fact destroy bis intellcctual function by reducin j; hirn to a rnere mental technician. See, for example, H. Stuart Hughes: "18 the Intellcctual Obsolete?" in An Ap­ proach. to Peace and Other Essays (New York, ~g62), chapter ao, I shall return to thisproblem in my final ehapter.

INTBODUCTION 36

nessmen who are elected to Congress cannot hope to expropriate the experts from their central advisory role, but they can achieve a kind of revenge through Congressional investigation and harassment, and, understandably, they carry on this task full of a sense of virtuous mis­ sion. There have been, after all, innumerable defeats and failures of expert-initiated policy, and these failures 100m in the eyes of millions as the consequences not simply of human error but of cold and cynical manipulation, conspiracy, even treason. The public careers of Alger Hiss and others have given them symbols to wbich this feeling can be attached, and a few spectacular instances of demonstrated espionage involving scienti6c knowledge seem to substantiate their image oE a world run by the power of secrets and swarming with the stealers of secrets,"

The advice of experts in the physica1 sciences, however suspect many of these experts may 00, is accepted as indispensable. Expertise in the social sciences, on the other hand, may be rejected as gratuitous and foolish, if not ominous. ODe Congressman objected in these words to iocluding the social sciences in the National Science Foundation: T

Outside of myself, I think everyone else thinlcs he is a social scientist. I am sure that I am not, but I think everyone else seems to believe that he has some particular God-given right to decide what other people ought to do. . . . The average American does not want some expert running areund prying into his life and bis personal affairs and deciding for him how he should live, and if the impression becomes prevalent In the Congress that this legislation is going to establish some sort of an organization in wbich there would be a lot of short-haired women and long-haired men messing ioto everybody's personal aHairs and Iives, inquiring whether they love their wives or do not love them and so forth, you are not going to get your legislation.

From the politician's point of view, experts were irritating enough in the time of F.D.R., when they seemed to have free access to the White House while the President kept the politicians at arm's length. The situation has grown worse in the age of the cold war, when mat­

oThe atmosphere in which popuIar poUticians confront experts has been ex­ plored wlth much insight by Edward Shils: The TonneN qf SecreclJ (Glencoe, DUnois, 1956) .

T Testimony before a subcommittee of the Commlttee on Interstate and Forelgn Commerce, House of Representatives, 79th Congress, znd session, May 28 and 29. 1946, pp. 11. 13.

37 On the Unpopularity 0/InteUect

ters of the highest public interest are susceptible to judgment only by speciallsts, All this is the more maddening, as Edward Shils has pointed out, in a populistic culture which has always set a premium on government by the common man and through the common judg­ ment and which believes deeply in the sacred character of publicity. Here the polltician expresses what a large part of the public feels. The citizen cannot cease to need or to be at the mercy of experts, but he can acbieve a kind of revenge by ridiculing the wild-eyed profes­ sor, the irresponsible brain truster, or the mad scientist, and by ap­ plaudmg the politicians as they pursue the subversive teacher, the suspect scientist, or the allegedly treacherous foreign-policy adviser. There has always been in our national experience a type of mind wbich elevates hatred to a kind of ereed, for this mind, group hatreds take a place in politics similar to the dass struggle in some other mod­ ern societies. Filled with obscure and ill-directed grievances and frustrations, with elaborate hallucinations about secrets and con­ spiraeies, groups oE malcontents have found scapegoats at various times In Masons or abolitionists, Catholics, Mormons, or Jews, Negroes or Immigrants, the liquor interests or the international bankers, In the succession of scapegoats chosen by the followers of this tradition of Know-Nothingism, the intelligentsia have at last in our time found a place,

If some large part of the anti-intellectualism of our time sterns from the public's shock at the constant insinuation of the intellectual as ex­ pert ioto public aHairs, much of the sensitiveness of intellectuals to their reputation as a class sterns from the awkward juxtaposition of their saered and profane roles, In bis sacred role, as prophet, scholar, or artist, the intellectual is hedged about by certain sanctions-im­ perfectly observed and respected of course, but still eHective: he has his privacy, perhaps bis anonymity, in the interstices of modem ur­ ban civilization; he commands a certain respect for what seem to be bis self-denying qualities; he beneflts, if he is an academic, from the im­ perfectly established but operative principle of academic freedom; he has foundations, libraries, publishiog houses, museums, as weIl as uni­ versities, at bis service. There is a certain measured and genteeI dig­ nity about bis life. If, in bis capacity as expert, he assurnes a profane role by mixing in public affairs, he may be horrified to realize that, having become a public Bgure, he too is vulnerable to the low ethics of controversy which prevail in our politics and the low regard for privacy wbich governs our entire society. He may even forget that

INTRODUCTION ~

the malice and slander to which he is exposed are not peculiarly dl- .

­

rected against him or bis kind but are of the same order as almost any ; working politician of prominence may experience; even some of our : greatest statesmen-among them Jefferson, Lincoln, and Franklin D. Roosevelt-were not immune. As Emerson once asked: "Is it not the first attribute and distinction of an American to be abused and slan­ dered as long as he is heard of?" 8

• 4 • Compared with the intellectual as expert, who must be accepted even when he is feared, the intellectua1 as ideologist is an object of un- ' qualified suspicion, resentment, and distrust. The expert appears as a threat to dominate or destroy the ordinary individual, but the Ideolo­ gist is widely believed to have already destroyed a cherished Americanj society. To understand the background of this belief, it is necessary to recall how consistently the intellectual has found himself ranged in politics against the right-wing mind. This is, of eourse, no peculiarity . of American politics. The modem idea of the intellectuals as con­ stituting a class, as aseparate social force, even the term inteUectual . itself, is identified with the idea of political and moral protest. In the l broadest signiflcation of the term, there have always been intellectuals, but until the emergence of industrial society and of a kind of market place for Ideas, there was little sense of the separateness of the in­ tellectuallife as a vocation, and relatively little need for the solidarity, much less for the mobiIization, of the intellectuals. Thus, for all that] they did in the mid-nineteenth century to prepare the way for the ' Revolutions of 1848, the liberation of the serfs in Russia, orof the slaves in America, there was still at that time no device widely in use in English to account for them as a group.

The term inteUectual first came into use in France. It was soon ex­ ported-at the time of the Dreyfus case, when so large a part of the intellectual community was aroused to protest against the anti-Dreyfus conspiracy and became involved in an ideological holy war on the French reactionaries.· At that time the term came to be used by both

8Journals (Boston, 19O9-1914), Val. IX (July 1862), p. 436. • On the precursors of the tenn InteUectual, and its early use in France, see

Victor Brombert: The IntelIectual Hero, chapter 2. The correspondfng Russian term, InteUlgentria, which came lnto use after the middle of the nineteenth een­ tury, originally meant members of the free professions, but it, too, 800n took on the . connotation of an opponent of the regime. See Hugh Seton-Watson: "The Russian ! IntellectuaIs," Encounte1 (September, 1955), pp. 43-50. ,

39 On the Unpopularlty uf InteUect .Ides-by the right as a kind of insult, by the Dreyfusard intellectuals A' a proud banner. "Let us use thisword," wrote one of tbem in 18gB, "slnce it has received high consecration." In the following year William James wrote, in a letter referring to the role of the French intellec­ tuals in tbe Dreyfus affair: "We 'intellectua1s' in America must all work to keep our precious birthright of individualism, and freedom from these institutions [chureh, army, aristocracy, royalty] . Every great in­ Itltution is perforce a means of corruption-whatever good it may also do, Only in the free personal relation is fuII ideality to be found," 1 It I. significantin our own history that this early use of the term-s-the first In America of which I am aware--should have been made in the context of just such a "radical," utopian, and anti-institutional state­ ment of purpose. At least from the Progressive era onward, the politi­ cal commitment of the majority of the intellectual leadership in the United States has been to causes that might be variously described as liberal (in the American use of that word), progressive, or radieal," (Of course the American political spectrum is rather foreshortened, and its center lies considerably to the right of that of France, but the position of the intellectuals in relation to the center has been similar.) I am not denying that we have had a number of conservative intel­ lectuals and even a few reactionary ones, but if there is anything that could be called an intellectual establishment in America, this estab­ lishment has been, though not profoundly radical (which wouId be unbecoming in an establishment), on the left side of center. And it has drawn the continuing and implacable resentment of the right, which has always liked to blur the distinetion between the moderate progressiveand the revolutionary.

As long as the progressivism of the intellectual community remained more or less in harmony with a spirit of protest widely shared by the general public, as it did notably during the Progressive era and the New Deal, its vulnerability to the extreme right has been small. Hut the allegiance of a large part of the intellectual community to Com­ munism and fellow-traveling in tbe 1930'S gave hostage to its right­ wing enemies, Here it is important to do justice to a signal element of reality in the anti-intellectuals' case. It will not do to say that the

1 The Lett6f'8cfWilUam ]amu (Boston, 1920) , Vol. 11, pp. 100-1. IOn this commitment and its effecbl, see Seymour M. Lipset : "American Intel­

lectuaIs: Thelr Politics and Status," Daedalw (Summer, 1959), pp. 460-86. Llpset has many pertinent remarks on the position of American intellectuals, but I am not persuaded by bis argument that their status can be described, wlthout qualifl.. cation, as high.

~'-~~- - ' ..

INTRoDUCTloN 40

vulnerability of the intellectuals on this count has already been vastly overexploited in right-wing propaganda; or that the extent of Com­ munist sympathies among the intellectuals of the 1930's has been exag­ gerated; or even that the most decisively inßuential intellectuals of the past generation were not Communists or fellow travelers. All these propositions are true, but the case that has been so insistently made against the intellectuals rests on the fact that the appeal of Commu­ nism during the 1930's was stronger among intellectuals than among any other stratum of the population; and that in a few spectacular in­ stances faith in Communism led to espionage. One must begin, I believe, with the awareness that the intellectual and moral incon­ sistencies of Communism and fellow-traveling not only put into the hands of the anti-intellectuals a powerful weapon, but that the sense , of shame over past credulity and of guilt over past political involve­ ments induced in many intellectuals a kind of paralysis that caused ' them to be helpless in the face of the Great Inquisition of the 1950'S and even at times to indulge in bitter mutual recriminations. One re­ members, for example, with some pain and difficulty, that in August 1939, on the eve of the Nazi-Soviet pact, some four hundred liberal intellectuals appended their signatures to a manifesto denouncing the "fantastic falsehood that the U.S.S.R. and the totalitarian states are " basically alike," and describing the Soviet Union as a Dulwark" of peace. This document was reproduced in the Nation the week that the Hitler-Stalin pact was signed," Intellectuals thus caught out were not in the best historical, moral, or psyehologieal position to make a vigor- ' ous response to McCarthyism.

What I believe is important, however, to anyone who hopes to un­ derstand the impulse behind American anti-intellectualism is that this grievance against intellectuals as ideologues goes far beyond any reproaches based on actual Communism or fellow-traveling. The prac­ tical intellectuals of the New Deal-Rexford Guy Tugwell is the best i' example-who had nothing to do with the Communists were as ob­ jectionable as the fellow travelers. And today, when Communism has been reduced to a negligible quantity in Ameriean domestic life, the 'cry for a revival of this scapegoat is regularly heard in the land, and investigators who are unable to turn up present Communist affiliations have resorted to stirring up the dead husks of fellow-traveling memo­ ries or to obseuring as completely as possible the diHerences between I

8 Nation, Val. 149 (August 19. 1939), p. 228.

41 On the Unpopularity of InteUect

liberals and Communists. The truth is that the right-winger needs bis Communists badly, and is pathetically reluctant to give them Up.4 The real function of the Creat Inquisition of the 1950'S was not any­ thing so simply rational as to turn up spies or prevent espionage (for which the police agencies presumably are adequate) or even to expose actual Communists, but to discharge resentments and frustrations, to punish, to satisfy enmities whose roots lay elsewhere than in the Com­ munist issue itself. This was why it showed sueh a relentless and in­ diseriminate appetite for victims and why it seemed happier with re­ speetable and powerful targets than with the occasional obscure Bol­ shevik it turned up. The McCarthyist fellow travelers who announced that they approved of the senator's goals even though they disap­ proved of bis methods missed the point: to McCarthy's true believers what was really appealing about him were his methods, since bis goals were always utterly nebulous. To them, his proliferating multiple ac­ eusations were a positive good, because they widened the net of sus­ picion and enabled it to catch many victims who were no longer, or had never been, Communists; his bullying was welcomed because it satisfled a craving for revenge and adesire to discredit the type of leadership the New Deal had made prominent.

Had the Great Inquisition been directed only against Communists, ft would have tried to be more precise and discriminating in its search for them: in fact, its leading practitioners seemed to care littIe for the difference between a Communist and a unieom. Real Communists were usually too insigniflcant to warrant lengthy pursuit; McCarthy dld not trouble hirnself much over an obscure radical dentist promoted by the army when he could use the case to strike at the army itseH, and beyond the army at the Eisenhower administration. The inquisi­ tors were trying to give satisfaction against liberals, New Dealers, re­ formers, intemationalists, intellectuals, and flnally even against a Re­ publican administration that failed to reverse liberal policies. What was involved, above a11, was a set of political hostilities in which the New Deal was linked to the welfare state, the welfare state to social­ 15m, and socialism to Communism. In this erusade Communism was not the target but the weapon, and it is for this reason that so many of the most ardent hunters of impotent domestic Communists were

4 This reluctance has been nowhere more candidly and ingratiatingly expressed than by Senator Barry Goldwater, who aflirmed in July 1959: "I am not willing to aecept the idea that there are no Communists left in this country; 1 thfnk that If we lift enough rocks, we will ßnd some." Quoted by James Wechsler: HefIec­ '"'"' of4ft Angry Mlddle-Aged Editor (New York, 1960), p. 44.

INTBODUCTION 4~

altogether indifferent to efforts to meet the power pf international Communism where it really mattered-in the arena of world politics. '

The deeper historical sources of the Great Inquisition are best re­ vealed by the other enthusiasms of its devotees: hatred of Franklin D. Roosevelt, implacable opposition to New Deal reforms, desire to banish . or destroy the United Nations, anti-Semitism, Negrophobia, Isolation­ ism, a passion for the repeal of the income tax, fear of poisoning by Huoridation of the water system, opposition to modernism in the ] churches. McCarthy's own expression, "twenty years of treason," sug- ~ gested the long-standing grievances that were nursed by the crusaders, j though the right-wing spokesman, Frank Chodorov, put it in better perspective when he said that the betrayal of the United States had really begun in 1913 with the passage of the income-tax amendment,

Clearly, something more is at stake for such people than the heresies of the 1930'S and the security problems of the cold war-something more even than the terrible frustration of the Korean War: the Mc­ Carthyist era brought to a head several forces engaged in a long­ standing revolt against modernity. The older America, until the 18g0'S and in some respects until 1914, was wrapped in the security of COD­ tinental Isolation, village society, the Protestant denominations, and a Hourishing industrial capitalism. But reluctantly, year by year, over several decades, it has been drawn into the twentieth century and forced to cope with its unpleasant realities: first the incursions of cos­ mopolitanism and skepticism, then the disappearance of American iso­ lation and easy military security, the colJapse of traditional capitalism and its supplementation by a centralized welfare state, finally the UD­ relenting costs and stringencies of the Second World War, the Korean ' War, and the cold war. As a consequence, the heartland of America, filled with people who are often fundamentalist in religion, nativist in prejudice, isolationist in foreign policy, and conservative in economics, has constantly rumbled with an underground revolt against all these tormenting manifestations of our modem predicament. .'

ODe cannot, even if one does not like their responses, altogether. withhold one's sympathies from the plight of a people, hitherto so pre­ occupied with internal material development and in many ways so simple, who have been dragged away from their "normal" concerns, tbrost into an allen and demanding world, and forced to try to leam so much in so short a time. Perhaps the truly remarkable thing about the most common American response to the modem world has been its patience and generosity. Within only two generations the vtllage

43 On the Unpopularlty of Intellect

Protestant individualist culture still so widely observable before the First World War was repeatedly shocked by change. It had to confront modernism in religion, literature, and art, relativity in morals, racial equality as a principle of ethics and public law, and the endless sexual titillation of our mass communications. In rapid succession it was forced to confront Darwinism (vide the Scopes trial), Freudianism, Marxism,and Keynesianism, and to submit in matters of politics, taste, and conscience to the leadership of a new kind of educated and cosmopolitan American.

The intellectual as ideologist, having had a leading role in purveying to the country each innovation and having frequently hastened the country into the acceptance of change, is naturally feIt to have played an important part in breaking the mold in which America was cast, and In oonsequence he gets more than his share of the blame. In earlier days, after all, it had been our fate as a nation not to have ldeologies hut to be one. As European antagonisms withered and lost their mean­ fng on American soil in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the new nation came to be oonceived not as sharing the ideologies which had grown out of these antagonisms but as offering an alternative to them, as demonstrating that a gift for compromise and plain dealing, a preference for hard work and common sense, were better and more practical than commitments to broad and divisive abstractions. The great American failure, in this respect, the one capitulation to divisive convietions, resulted in the Civil War; and this had the effect of con­ Bnning the belief that it was better to live without too much faith in political abstractions and ideological generalities. Americans eon­ tinued to congratulate themselves on their ability to get on without the beneflt of what are commonly called "foreign isms," just as they had always congratulated themselves on their ability to steer clear of Euro­ pean "corruption" and "decadence,"

But in the past few decades the American public has become pain­ fuUy aware that the breakdown of political and military isolation en­ tails a breakdown of intellectual isolationism, that there are at large in the world powerful forces called ideologies whose consequences we cannot escape, that milIions of people are everywhere set in motion by eonvictions about colonialism, racism, nationalism, imperialism, social­ lsm, communism, and fascism. In all this there is a certain irony that we are ill-equipped to appreciate. The original American hope for the world-in so far as the older America thought about the world at all -was that it might save itself by emulating the American system­

INTRODUCTION ~

that is, by dropping formal ideologies, aceepting our type of democ­ racy, applying itself to work and the arduous pursuit of happiness, and by following the dictates of common sense. The irony is that Americans now suffer as much from the victory as from the defeat of their aspira­ tions. What is it that has taken root in the world, if it is not the spirit of American activism, the belief that life can be made better, that eolonial peoples can free themselves as the Americans did, that poverty and oppression do not have to be endured, that backward countries can hecome industrialized and enjoy a high standard of living, that the pursuit of happiness is everybody's business? The very I' colonial countries that belligerently reject our leadership try to follow our example, and the Russians themselves in the midst of their chal­ lenge to American power have not ceased to admire American indus­ trialization. But this emulation has hecome tinted with ideologies we do not recognize and has brought consequences we never anticipated. . The American exampleof activism has been imitated: what we oall ] the American way of life has not.

To the most insular type of American mind it seemed that only peoples blinded by abstractions and dead to common sense could fall to see and appropriate all the virtues of the American system, and that some fatal complex of moral weaknesses has prevented the systems of ; foreign societies from working, not least of these heing the acceptance . of sinister Ideologies. But the persistent strength of the Soviet Union, capped by the Sputnik and other triumphs in space, has given a rode . shock to this confidence, for the United States is now confronted by a material power strong enough to pose a perpetual and indestroctible challenge. What is more, this material power has unrnistakably grown up under the stimulus of one of those fatal foreign isms. The American, so ill at ease in this strange, threatening, and seemingly gratuitous world of ideology, suspects the intellectual for being at home in it. The intellectual is even Imagtned to have called it into being-and in a certain sense he has. Inevitably, he has been made to bear some share of the irritation of those who cannot believe that the changes of the twentieth century are consequences of anything but a sinister cam­ paign of manipulation and design, or at the very least of aseries of fatally stupid errors. Perhaps it is he who has shom us of the qualities upon which our former strength depended. Certainly he has become a figure in the world just at the time when all these unhappy changes have taken place. If he is not exactly guilty, he will still bear watching.

On the Unpopularlty of InteUect45

• 5 • To those who suspect that intellect is a subversive force in society, it will not do to reply that intellect is really a safe, bland, and emollient thing. In a certain sense the suspicious Tories and militant philistines are right: intellect is dangerous. Left free, there is nothing it will not reconsider, analyze, throw into question." "Let us admit the case of the conservative," John Dewey once wrote . "If we onee start thinking no one can guarantee what will be the outcome, except that many objects, ends and institutions will be surely doomed. Every thinker puts some portion of an apparently stable world in peril, and no one can wholly predict what will emerge in its place," 6 Further, there is no way of guaranteeing that an intellectual class will be disereet and restrained in the use of its inHuence; the ooly assurance that can he given to any community is that it will be far worse off if it denies the free uses of the power of intellect than if it permits them. To be sure, intellectuals, contrary to the fantasies of cultural vigilantes, are hardly ever sub­ versive of a society as a whole. But intellect is always on the move against something: some oppression, fraud, illusion, dogma, or Interest 15 constantly falling under the serotiny of the intellectual dass and be­ coming the object of exposure, indignation, or ridicule.

In the course of generations, those who have suffered from the opera­ tions of intellect, or who have feared or resented it, have developed a kind of counter-mythology about what it is and the role it plays in society. These who have made their case against intellect in our time have not found it necessary to originate a single new argument, since this mythology is deeply rooted in our historical experlence. The chap­ ters that follow illustrate in some detail how this mythology has grown and perpetuated and expressed itself in the United States. But here I should like to state briefly and in general terms what are the perenoial assumptions of the anti-intellectualist case, and in what light I think Itought to be regarded.

The case against intellect is founded upon a set of flctional and wholly abstract antagonisms. Intellect is pitted against feeling, on the

" And even, It appears, when not leh Iree; witness the conslderable intellectual underground that seems to have grown up in the Soviet Union and Its Eastern European satellItes.

·Character.rand ECJent8 (New Yorlc, 1929), p. n.

. - . _ _ . _ . p . - - _.. .. _ . ==.,

INTRODUCTION 46

ground that it is somehow inconsistent with warm emotion . It is pitted against character, because it is widely believed that intellect stands for mere clevemess, which transrnutes easily into the sly or the diabolieal," It is pitted against practicality, since theory is held to be opposed to practice, and the "purely" theoretical mind is so much disesteemed. It is pitted against democracy, since intellect is feit to be a form of distinction that defies egalitarianism. Once the validity of these antago­ nisms is accepted, then the case for intelleot, and by extension for the intellectual, is lost. Who cares to risk sacrißcing warmth of emotion, solidity of character, practicaI capacity, or democratic sentiment in order to pay deference to a type of man who at best is deemed to be merely clever and at worst may even be dangerous?

Of course the fundamental fallacy in these fictional antagonisms is that they are based not upon an eHort to seek out the actual limits of intellect in human life but rather upon a simplified divorce of intellect from all the other human qualities with which it may be combined. Neither in the development of the individual character nor in the course of history are problems posed in such a simple or abstract fashion. For the same reason it would be pointless to accept the form in which the challenge is put and attempt to tnake a defense of intellect as againstemotion or character or practicality. Intellect needs to be understood not as some kind of a claim against the other human excellences for which a fatally high price has to be paid, but rather as a complement to them without which they cannot be fully consum­ mated. Few rational men care to deny that the exercise of intellectual power is one of the fundamental manifestations of human dignity or that it is at the very least a legitimate end among the other legitimate ends of life. If mind is seen not as a threat but as a guide to emotion, if intellect is seen neither as a guarantee of character nor as an inevitable danger to it, if theory is conceived as something serviceable but not

T 'We always preferred an ignorant bad man to a talented one," wrote B. R. Hall 01 early Indiana society, "and hence attempts were usually made 10 rum the moral character 01 a smart candidate; since unhappily smartness and wickedness were supposed 10 be generally coupled, and Incompetence and goodness." Bay­ nard R. Hall: The Neu: Purehase. or Seven and a Half Year,f in the Far West (1843; ed. Prineeton, 1916) , p. 170. This occurred even among the Puritans, for all their rationalism and Intellectual ism. Cf. lohn Cotton: "The more learned and witty you bee, the more 6t to act for Satan will you bee. . .. Take off the fond doting . .. upon the learning 01 the ]esuites, and the glorie of the Eplscopacy. and brave estate of the Prelates. I say bee not deceived with these pampes, and empty shewes, and faire representations of a goodly condition hefore the eyes of flesh and blood, bee not taken with the applause of these persons ," The Powring Out of the Seven Vials (London, 1642), The Sixth Vial, pp . 39-40.

41 On the Unpopulmity af Intel1ect

necessarily subordinate or inferior to practice, and if our democratic aspirations are deflned in such realistic and defensible terms as to ad­ mit of excellence, all these supposed antagonisms lose their force, Posed in these rather general terms, this fact may seem obvious; but historically it bas been obvious to all too few; and the purpose of this book is to trace some of the social movements in our history in which intellect has been dissevered from its co-ordinate place among the human virtues and assigned the position of a special kind of vice.

In the first instance, anti-intellectualism must be sougbt out in the framework of our religious history. This is not simply because there is a constant historical tension between rationalism and the requirements of faith-though this in itself is an enduring human problem-but be­ cause the patterns of modem thought, both religious and secular, are prefigured in our earlier religious history. To the extent that it becomes accepted in any culture that religion is largely an aHair of the beart or of the intuitive qualities of mind, and that the rational mind is irrelevant or worse, so far will it be believed that the rational faculties are barren or perhaps dangerous. And to the extent that a society is suspicious of a learned or professtonal clergy, so far will it be disposed to repudiate or deprive its intellectual dass, whether religious or secular. In modem culture the evangelicaI movement has been the most powerful carrier of this kind of religious anti-intellectualism, and of its antinomian impulse. Of course, America is not the on1y society whose culture has been aHected by evangelicalism. But in America religious culture has been largely shaped by the evangelical spirit, for here the balance of power between evangelicalism and formal religion was long ago overwhelmingly tipped in the direction of the former. To see how much this was true one need on1y compare the historical development of religion in Britain, where the Establishment was pre­ pared to absorb and domesticate a large part of the evangelical move­ ment, with that of America, where the evangelicals rapidly subverted, outstripped, or overwhelmed the older liturgical churcbes.

Akin to the spirit of evangelicalism in its eHects has been a kind of primitivism which has won extraordinarily wide credence in America and which requires special attention here, in part because I have not dealt with it in this book as a separate force. Prlmitivism bas bad Its links on one side with Christianity and on another with paganism; and perhaps some of its pervasive appeal may be attributed to the fact that through priinitivism one may be a Christian and enjoy the luxury of a touch of paganism; or, contrarywise, that the basically pagan mind may

INTRODUCTION 48

flnd in primitivism a eonsoling element of faith. Primitivism has dis­ played itself in some quarters as a quest for the spirit of primitive Christianity, but also as a demand to recover the powers of "nature" in man; with it one may be elose to Nature or to God-the difference is not always wholly clear, But in it there is a persistent preference for the "wisdom" of intuition, which is deemed to be natural or God-given, over rationality, which is cultivated and artiflcial.

In various guises primitivism has been a constantly recurring force in Western history and in our own national experience. It is likely to become evident wherever men of the intellectual dass itself are disap­ pointed with or grow suspicious of the human yield of a rationally ordered life or when they seek to break away from the routine or apathy or reflnement that arise with civilization. In America primitiv­ ism has affected the thinking of many men too educated and cultivated to run with the frontier revivalists but sympathetic to their underlying distrust for civilized forms. It is visible in Transcendentalism-wbich sometimes set itself up as the evangelicalism of the highbrows," It is a

8 Cf. George Ripley In his attaek oE 1839 on Unitarianism and the Harvard faeulty of divinity: "1 have known great and beneBeial effeets to arise from the simple exhibition of the truth of the Gospel to the heart and eonselence, by earnest men, who trusted to the intuitive/ower of the soul, for the perception of lts divinity. . . . Much as 1 value a soun logle in lts proper place, 1 am sure it Is not the instrument which is mlghty through God to the pul1lngdown of the strong holds of sin. It may deteet error; but It eannot give so much as a glimpse of the glory of Christ. It may refute fallacies; but It cannot bind the heart to the love of holiness. . .. You maintain, that 'extensive leaming' is usually requisite for those who would inßuence their fellow men on religious subjeets. But Jesus certalnly did not take this into conslderatlon In the seleetion of the twelve from the mass of the disciples; he committed the promulgation of his religion to 'unleamed and ignorant' men; the sublimest truths were entrusted to the most common rninds; and, in this way, 'God made foolish the wisdom of the world,' ... Christ . . . saw that the parade of wisdom, whieh books impart, was as nothing before 'the light that enlighteneth every human mlnd.' The whole course of his nation's history was an illustration of the fact 'that poor mechanies are wont to be God's great ambassadors to mankind,' . . . Christ established no college of ApostIes; he did not revive the sehool of the prophets whleh had died out; he paid no distlnguished respect to the pride of leaming; indeed, he sometimes intimates that lt Is an obstacle to the pereeption of truth; and thanks God, that while he has hid the mysterles of the klngdom of Heaven from the wise and prudent, he has made them known to men as ignorant as babes of the lore of the schools.' "The Latest Form of Infldelity Examlned," Letters on the Latest Form of InfidelUy (Boston, 1839) , pp. 98-g, 111, 112-13.

The argument in this passage is similar to that commonly used by the evangeli­ cals. One begins with the hardly contestable proposition that religious falth is not, In the main, propagated by logic or learning. One moves on from this to the Idea that it is best propagated (in the judgment of Christ and on historreal evidence ) by men who have been unleamed and ignorant. It seems to follow from this that the kind of wisdom and truth possessedoy such men Is superior to what learned . and cultivated minds have. In fact, leaming and cultivation appear to be handicaps

49 On the Unpopulanty 01 InteUect powerful force in our historical wr"iting from Parkman and Bancroft to Turner," It is a persistent theme in the attitude of American writers to­ ward Indians and Negroes. It runs through the popular legend of frontier flgures such as Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett down to the heroes of modem Western stories and detective fiction-embracing all those lonely adventurers whose cumulative mythology caused D. H. Lawrence to say, in one of bis harsh, luminous hyperboles, that the essential American soul is "hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer." As a sexual mystique, it has become a powerful moving force in American Ietters, taking its most exaggerated form in recent years among those writers who have been impressed by the theories of Wilhelm Reich. It has been a force in American politics, and its effects have been visible in the public images of flgures as diverse as Andrew Jackson, John C. Fremont, Theodore Roosevelt,and Dwight D. Eisenhower.

All this is hardly surprising: America was settled by men and women who repudiated European civilization for its oppressiveness or decadence, among other reasons, and who found the most striking thing on the American strand not in the rude social forms that were taking shape here but in the world of nature and of savages. The es­ cape from civilization to Arcadia, from Europe to nature, was perpet­ uated in repeated escapes from the East to the West, from the settled world to the frontier. Again and again the American mind turned fretfully against the encroachments of organized society, which were feIt to be an effort to reimpose what bad been once thrown off; for civilization, though it could hardly be repudiated in its entirety, was stillbelieved to have something pernieious about it.

If evangelicalism and primitivism helped to plant anti-inteIlectualism at the roots of American consciousness, a business society assured that it would remain in the foreground of American thinking. Since the time of Tocqueville it has become a commonplace among students of America that business activism has provided an overwhelming counter­

in the propagation of falth. And since the propagation of faith is the most im­ portant task before man, those who are as "ignorant as babes" have, in the most fundamental virtue, greater strength than men who have addicted themselves to logie and learning. Accordlngly, though one shrinks from a bald statement of the conelusion, humble ignorance is far better as a human quality than a 'oultivated mind. At bottom, this proposition, despite aIIthe.difilculties that attend it, has been eminently congenial both to Amerlean evangelicalism and to American democ­ racl'

On prirnitivism In Turner, see the penetrating final chapter of Henry Nash Smith: V/rgin Land (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1950) ; there are valuable gleanings on American primltivism in Charles L. Sanford: The Quest for Paradl8e (Urbana, I1linois, 1961).

INTRODVCTION ~

poise to reflection in this country. Tocqueville saw that the life of constant action and decision which was entailed by the democratic and businesslike character of American life put a premium upon rough and ready habits of mind, quick decision, and the prompt seizure of op­ portunities-and that all this activity was not propitious for delibera­ tion, elaboration, or precision in thought.'

Tbe overwhelming demands of the task of winning a continent and establishing its industries drew men from pursuits where profits and honors were less available. But there was more to it than this: business in America at its highest levels appealed not merely to greed and the lust for power but to the imagination; alluring to the builder, the gamester, and the ruler in men, it offered more sport than hunting and , more power than politics . As Tocqueville remarked: "In democracies nothing is greater or more brilliant than commerce," and its devotees engaged in it, "not only for the sake of the profit it holds out to them, but for the love of the constant excitement occasioned by that pur­ suit," 2 Except in a few older communities, there were no countervail- .' ing classes or sets of values-no aristocracy to marry into, no formidable body of national aspirations outside business aspirations. Business not only appealed to vigorous and ambitious men but set the dominant i standards for the rest of society, so that members of the professions- j law, medicine, schoolteaching, even the ministry-aped businessmen and adapted the standards of their own crafts to those of business. It has in fact been one of the perennial complaints of intellectuals in America that they cannot have much rapport with the professional classes as such, because these have been swung into the business orbit. It was business, finally, that isolated and feminized culture by estab­ lishing the masculine legend that men are not concerned with the events of the intellectual and cultural world. Such matters were to be left to women-all too often to the type of women of whom Edith Wharton said that they were so afraid to meet culture alone that they

hunted it in packs . Both our religion and our business have been touched by the per­

vasive and aggressive egalitarianism of American life, but the egali­ tarian spirit is still more effective in politics and edueation," What we

1 DemoC1'acy in Amerlca, Vol. II, pp. 525-6. 2 Ibid ., pp. 642-3. a Observers of American aeademla have often asked wlth some bittemess why <I

athletie distinetion Is almost unlversally admired and encouraged whereas intel­ lectual distinetion Is resented. 1 thlnk the resentment is in fact a kind of b..ck- . handed tribute demoeraey pays to the Importance of intelleet in our aHairs. Ath- ':,

51 On lhe Unpopularity ofInleUect

loosely call Jacksonian democraey completed the disestablishment of a patrician leadership that bad been losing its grip for some time. At an early date, literature and learning were stigmatized as the prerogative oE useless aristocracies-and the argument was not pressed any the less ßrmly because a large part oE the American intellectual dass actually supported democratic causes. It seemed to be the goal of the common man in America to build a society that would show how much could be done without literature and leaming-c-or rather, a society whose litera­ ture and learning would be largely limited to such elementary things as the common man could grasp and use. Hence, early nineteenth­ century America was more noted for a wide range of literacy and for the unusual amount of information, independence, self-respect, and public concern possessed by the ordinary eitizen than it was for the en­ couragement of first-rate seience or letters or for the creation of Brst­ rate universities.

Agam and agam, but particularly in recent years, it has been noticed that intellect in America is resented as a kind of excellence, as a claim 10 distinction, as achallenge to egalitarianism, as a quality which al­ most certainly deprives a man or woman of the common touch. Tbe phenomenon is most impressive in education itself. American educa­ tion can be praised, not to say defended, on many counts; but I believe ours is the only educational system in the world vital segments of which have fallen into the bands of people who joyfully and militantly proclaim their bostility to intellect and their eagerness to identify with children who show the least intellectual promise. The ßnal segments of this book, though necessarily fragmentary as history, will show how this educational force has been built upon widely accepted premises in our thinking-a narrowly conceived preference for utility and "sei­ ence," a false variety of egalitarianism, and a primitivist view of the child.

letie skill is recognized as being translent, special, and for most oE us unlmportant In the serious business of life; and the tribute given the athlete is considered 10 be eamed because he entertains. Intellect, on the other hand, Is neither ontertalning (to most men) nor lnnoeent; since everyone sees that it can be an Important and permanent advantage in life, it creates agalnst itself a Idnd oE uni­ versal fratemity oE commonplaee mlnds.