CHAPTER I
Anti-intellectualism in Our Time

• 1 •

A LTHOUGH this book deals mainly with certain aspects of the remoter American past, it was conceived in response to the political and intellectual conditions of the 1950’s. During that decade the term anti-intellectualism , only rarely heard 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 hard to recall a time when large numbers of people outside the intellectual community shared their concern, or when self-criticism on this count took on the character of a nation-wide movement.

Primarily it was McCarthyism which aroused the fear that the critical 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 fire, and it seemed to give special rejoicing to his followers when they were hit. His sorties against intellectuals and universities were emulated throughout the country by a host of less exalted inquisitors. Then, in the atmosphere of fervent malice and humorless imbecility stirred up by McCarthy’s barrage of accusations, the campaign of 1952 dramatized the contrast between intellect and philistinism in the opposing candidates. On one side was Adlai Stevenson, a politician of uncommon mind and style, whose appeal to intellectuals overshadowed anything in recent history. On the other was Dwight D. Eisenhower, conventional in mind, relatively inarticulate, harnessed to the unpalatable 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 his 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 unconvincing imitation of concern. Eisenhower’s victory, it said, “discloses an alarming fact 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 intellectual “in a situation he has not known for a generation.” After twenty years of Democratic rule, during which the intellectual 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 him, and would be made the scapegoat for everything from the income tax to the attack on Pearl Harbor. “Anti-intellectualism,” Schlesinger remarked, “has long been the anti-Semitism of the businessman.… The intellectual … is on the run today in American society.” ¹

All this seemed to be amply justified 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 his 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, burned itself out; the senator from Wisconsin isolated himself, was censured, and deflated. 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 consequences of anti-intellectualism in the school system and in American 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 immediately cause the vigilante mind to disappear, nor did it disperse anti-intellectualism as a force in American life; even in the sphere most immediately affected, that of 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 intellectuals seemed much disturbed by the specter of anti-intellectualism; by 1958 the 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 McCarthyism, and even in the Eisenhower administration, some apocalypse for intellectuals in public life, it is no longer possible, now that Washington has again become so hospitable to Harvard professors and ex-Rhodes scholars. If there was a suspicion that intellect had become a hopeless obstacle 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 all by the long, careful search for distinguished talents with which his administration began. On the other hand, if there had ever been an excessive confidence that the recruitment of such talents would altogether transform 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.

• 2 •

The political ferment and educational controversy of the 1950’s made the term anti-intellectual a central epithet in American self-evaluation; it has slipped unobtrusively into our usage without much definition and is commonly used to describe a variety of unwelcome phenomena. Those who have suddenly become aware of it often 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 modern man has lived so long under 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 commonly struck during the 1950’s sounded not new at all, but rather familiar. Anti-intellectualism was not manifested in this country for the first time during the 1950’s. Our anti-intellectualism is, in fact, older 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, but is subject to cyclical fluctuations; it suggests, too, that the resentment from which the intellectual has suffered in our time is a manifestation not of a decline in his position but of his 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 intellectuals and their country, but such writings deal mainly with America as seen by the intellectuals, and give only occasional glimpses of intellect and intellectuals as seen by America. ²

One reason anti-intellectualism has not even been clearly defined is that its very vagueness makes it more serviceable in controversy as an epithet. But, in any case, it does not yield very readily to definition. As an idea, it is not a single proposition but a complex of related propositions. As an attitude, it is not usually found in a pure form but in ambivalence—a pure and unalloyed dislike of intellect or intellectuals is uncommon. And as a historical subject, if it can be called that, it is not a constant thread but a force fluctuating in strength from time to time and drawing its motive power from varying sources. In these pages I have not held myself to a rigorous or narrow definition, which would here be rather misplaced. I can see little advantage in a logically defensible but historically arbitrary act of definition, which would demand singling out one trait among a complex of traits. It is the complex itself I am interested in—the complex of historical relations among a variety of attitudes and ideas that have many points of convergence. The common strain that binds 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 admittedly general formulation is as close as I find it useful to venture toward definition. ³

Once this procedure is adopted, it will be clear that anti-intellectualism cannot be made the subject 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 elsewhere, are often uneasy in their role; they are given to moments of self-doubt, and even of self-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, but it is not my main concern. Neither is the ill-mannered or ill-considered criticism that one intellectual may make of another. No one, for example, ever poured more scorn 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. ⁴ The criticism of other intellectuals is, after all, one of the most important functions of the intellectual, and he customarily performs it with vivacity. We may hope, but we can hardly expect, that he will also do it with charity, grace, and precision. Because it is the business of intellectuals to be diverse and contrary-minded, we must accept the risk that at times they will be merely quarrelsome.

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 philosophical 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 Ernest Hemingway may be called 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 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 I am centrally concerned with widespread 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 extent that they become effective in our affairs, gravely inhibit or impoverish intellectual and cultural life. Some examples, taken from our recent history, may put flesh on the bare bones of definition.

• 3 •

We might begin with some definitions supplied by those most acutely dissatisfied with American intellectuals.

Exhibit A . During the campaign of 1952, the country seemed to be in need of some term to express that disdain for intellectuals which had by then become a self-conscious motif in American politics. The word egghead was originally used without invidious associations, ⁵ but quickly assumed them, and acquired a much sharper overtone than the traditional 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 follows: ⁶

“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 give official sanction to a similarly disdainful view of intellectuals. Speaking at a Republican 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: ⁷

Exhibit C . One of the issues at stake in the controversies of the 1950’s was the old one about the place of expertise in political life. 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 nominated to be ambassador to Ceylon. Mr. Gluck had contributed, by his own estimate, $20,000 or $30,000 to the Republican campaign of 1956, but, like many such appointees before him, was not known for having any experience in politics or diplomacy. Questioned by Senator Fulbright about his qualifications for the post, Mr. Gluck had some difficulty: ⁸

Doubts about Mr. Gluck’s preparation for the post he was to occupy led to the suggestion that he had been named because of his contribution to the Republican campaign. In a press conference held July 31, 1957, a reporter raised the question, whereupon President Eisenhower remarked that an appointment in return for campaign contributions was unthinkable. About his nominee’s competence, he observed: ⁹

It is important to add that Mr. Gluck’s service in Ceylon was terminated after a year by his resignation.

Exhibit D . One of the grievances of American scientists 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 development 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 Missouri quoted earlier testimony in which the Secretary had said, among other things, that if there was to be pure research it should be subsidized by some agency other than the Department of Defense. “I am not much interested,” Secretary Wilson had testified, “as a military project in why potatoes turn brown when they are fried.” Pressing Secretary Wilson, Senator Symington pointed to testimony that had been given about the lack of sufficient money for research not on potatoes but on bombers, nuclear propulsion, electronics, missiles, radar, and other subjects. The Secretary replied: ¹

Exhibit E . The kind of anti-intellectualism expressed in official circles during the 1950’s was mainly the traditional businessman’s suspicion of experts working in any area outside his control, whether in scientific laboratories, universities, or diplomatic corps. Far more acute and sweeping was the hostility to intellectuals expressed on the far-right wing, a categorical folkish dislike of the educated classes and of anything respectable, established, pedigreed, or cultivated. The right-wing crusade of the 1950’s was full of heated rhetoric about “Harvard professors, 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 acceptable, 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 fight Communism “with kid gloves in perfumed drawing rooms”; Easterners who “insult the people of the great Midwest and West, the heart 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 this rhetorical jacquerie was caught by an editorial writer for the Freeman: ³

McCarthy himself 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 his famous Wheeling speech, lay in ⁴

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

Exhibit G. Right-wing hostility to universities was in part a question of deference and social status, but in part also a reflection of the old Jacksonian dislike 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 Tax: The Root of All Evil , and one of the most engaging of the right-wing spokesmen: ⁶

Exhibit H . Although the following may well be considered by discriminating readers as anti-cultural rather than anti-intellectual, I cannot omit some remarks by Congressman George Dondero of Michigan, long a vigilant crusader against Communism in the schools and against cubism, expressionism, surrealism, dadaism, futurism, and other movements in art: ⁷

Exhibit I . Since I shall have much to say in these pages about anti-intellectualism in the evangelical tradition, it seems important to cite at least one survival of this tradition. These brief quotations are taken from the most successful evangelist of our time, Billy Graham, voted by the American public in a Gallup Poll of 1958 only after Eisenhower, Churchill, and Albert Schweitzer as “the most admired man in the world”: ⁸

Exhibit J . 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. When the San Francisco School District commissioned a number of professional scholars to examine their schools, the committee constituted for this purpose urged a return 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 purposes of education to “informing the mind and developing the intelligence,” 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.” The educationists argued that an especially praiseworthy feature of American education had been ⁹

Exhibit K . The following is an excerpt from a parent’s report, originally written in answer to a teacher’s complaint about the lax standards in contemporary education. The entire piece is worth reading as a vivid statement by a parent who identifies wholly with the non-academic child and the newer education. As we shall see, the stereotype of the schoolteacher expressed here has deep historical roots. ¹

Exhibit L . The following remarks have already been made famous by Arthur Bestor, but they will bear repetition. After delivering and publishing the address excerpted here, the author, a junior high-school principal in Illinois, did not lose caste in his trade but was engaged for a similar position in Great Neck, Long Island, a post which surely ranks high in desirability among the nation’s secondary schools, and was subsequently invited to be a visiting member of the faculty of the school of education of a Midwestern university. ²

These exhibits, though their sources and intentions are various, collectively display the ideal assumptions of anti-intellectualism. Intellectuals, it may be held, are pretentious, conceited, effeminate, and snobbish; and very likely 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 intellectuals tend to be influential, 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 guides to life than an education which aims to produce minds responsive to new trends in thought and art. Even at the level of elementary education, 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 say that a work given single-mindedly to the exploration of such a theme as this must inevitably have the effect 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 conflicts, the public is not simply divided into intellectual and anti-intellectual factions. The greater part of the public, and a great part even of the intelligent and alert public, 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 cultural issues. It has an ingrained distrust of eggheads, but also a genuine 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 culture, 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, whereas the most malign forms are found mainly among small if vociferous minority 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 Congressional investigations. I am disposed to believe that anti-intellectualism, though it has its own universality, may be considered a part 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 intellectuals more than the British.” ³ Perhaps Mr. Woolf had 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 well informed on the cultural life of his own country could have made such a remark may well 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 compensating 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 that although the priesthood is vulnerable to the errors and sins of the flesh, the Church itself remains holy. Even here, however, I do not forget that intellect itself can be overvalued, and that reasonable attempts to set it in its proper place in human affairs 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 child chess prodigy.” ⁴ But in a world full of dangers, the danger that American society 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 societies and 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 effective 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 outworn or rejected idea. Few intellectuals are without moments of anti-intellectualism; few anti-intellectuals without single-minded intellectual passions. In so far as anti-intellectualism becomes articulate enough to be traced historically or widespread enough to make itself felt in contemporary controversy, it has to have spokesmen who are at least to some degree competent. These spokesmen 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-intellectual leaders who were evangelical ministers, many of them highly intelligent and some even learned; fundamentalists, articulate about their theology; politicians, including some of the shrewdest; businessmen or other spokesmen of the practical demands of American culture; right-wing editors of strong intellectual pretensions and convictions; various marginal writers ( vide the anti-intellectualism of the Beatniks); anti-Communist pundits, offended by the past heresies of a large segment of the intellectual community; and, for that matter, Communist leaders, who had much use for intellectuals when they could use them, but the utmost contempt for what intellectuals are concerned 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 Aquinas, or John Calvin, or even Karl Marx.

It would also be mistaken, as well as uncharitable, 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 justifiable intention. Hardly anyone believes himself to be against thought and culture. Men do not rise in the morning, grin at themselves in their mirrors, and say: “Ah, today I shall torment an intellectual and strangle an idea!” Only rarely, and with the gravest of misgivings, then, can we designate an individual as being constitutionally anti-intellectual. In any case, 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. ⁵ With respect to these, some individuals will appear now on one side and now on another. In fact, anti-intellectualism is often characteristic of forces diametrically 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 foes, who are right-wing vigilantes, manifest their own anti-intellectualism, which is, though different in style, less equivocal and more militant.

To be confronted with a simple and unqualified evil is no doubt a kind 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 also purveyed many humane and democratic sentiments. It made its way into our politics because it became associated with our passion for equality. It has become formidable in our education partly because our educational beliefs are evangelically egalitarian. Hence, as far as possible, our anti-intellectualism must be excised from the benevolent impulses upon which it lives by constant and delicate acts of intellectual surgery which spare these impulses themselves. Only in this way can anti-intellectualism be checked and contained; I do not say eliminated 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 be as dangerous as any of the delusions of our time.

---

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

2 The only American historian, to my knowledge, who has concerned himself extensively with the problem is Merle Curti, in his suggestive volume, American Paradox (New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1956) and in his presidential address before the American Historical Association, “Intellectuals and Other People,” American Historical Review , Vol. LX (January 1955), pp. 259–82. Jacques Barzun, in The House of Intellect (New York, 1959), has dealt with the subject largely in contemporary terms and largely with internal strains within the intellectual and cultural world. An entire number of the Journal of Social Issues , Vol. XI, No. 3 (1955), was devoted to discussions of anti-intellectualism by various writers.

3 For an interesting exercise in definition, see Morton White: “Reflections on Anti-Intellectualism,” Daedalus (Summer, 1962), pp. 457–68. White makes a useful distinction between the anti-intellectual, who is hostile to intellectuals, and the anti-intellectualist, who is critical of the claims of rational intellect in knowledge and in life. He treats at some length the respective strategies of the two, and their points of convergence.

4 These considerations serve as a forcible reminder that there is in America, as elsewhere, a kind of intellectual establishment that embraces a wide range of views. It is generally understood (although there are marginal cases) whether a particular person is inside or outside this establishment. The establishment has a double standard for evaluating the criticism of the intellectuals: criticism from within is commonly accepted as having a basically benign intent and is more likely to be heard solely on its merits; but criticism from outside—even the same criticism—will be resented as hostile and stigmatized as anti-intellectual and potentially dangerous. For example, some years ago many intellectuals were critical of the great foundations for devoting too much of their research money to the support of large-budget “projects,” as opposed to individual scholarship. But when the Reece Committee was hot on the trail of the foundations, the same intellectuals were not happy to see the same criticism (among others more specious) pressed by such an agency. It was not that they had ceased to believe in the criticism but that they neither liked nor trusted the source.
Of course, not only intellectuals do this; it is a common phenomenon of group life. Members of a political party or a minority group may invoke a similar double standard against criticism, depending on whether it originates from inside or outside the ranks. There is, moreover, some justification for such double standards, in historical fact if not in logic, because the intent that lies behind criticism unfortunately becomes an ingredient in its applicability. The intellectuals who criticized the foundations were doing so in the hope (as they saw it) of constructively modifying foundation policies, whereas the line of inquiry pursued by the Reece Committee might have led to crippling or destroying them. Again, everyone understands 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.

5 The term was taken up as a consequence of a column by Stewart Alsop, in which that reporter recorded a conversation with his brother John. The columnist remarked that many intelligent people who were normally Republicans obviously admired Stevenson. “Sure,” said his brother, “all the egg-heads love Stevenson. But how many egg-heads do you think there are?” Joseph and Stewart Alsop: The Reporter’s Trade (New York, 1958), p. 188.

6 Louis Bromfield: “The Triumph of the Egghead,” The Freeman , Vol. III (December 1, 1952), p. 158.

7 White House Press Release, “Remarks of the President at the Breakfast Given by Various Republican Groups of Southern California, Statler Hotel, Los Angeles … September 24, 1954,” p. 4; italics added. It is possible that the President had heard something of the kind from his Secretary of Defense, Charles E. Wilson, who was quoted elsewhere as saying: “An egghead is a man who doesn’t understand everything he knows.” Richard and Gladys Harkness: “The Wit and Wisdom of Charlie Wilson,” Reader’s Digest , Vol. LXXI (August, 1957), p. 197.

8 The New York Times , August 1, 1957.

9 Ibid.

1 U.S. Congress, 84th Congress, 2nd session, Senate Committee on Armed Services: Hearings , Vol. XVI, pp. 1742, 1744 (July 2, 1956); italics added.

2 This mélange of images is taken from the more extended account of the scapegoats of the 1950’s in Immanuel Wallerstein’s unpublished M.A. essay: “McCarthyism and the Conservative,” Columbia University, 1954, pp. 46 ff.

3 Freeman , Vol. XI (November 5, 1951), p. 72.

4 Congressional Record , 81st Congress, 2nd session, p. 1954 (February 20, 1950).

5 Jack Schwartzman: “Natural Law and the Campus,” Freeman , Vol. II (December, 1951), pp. 149, 152.

6 “Shake Well before Using,” National Review , Vol. V (June 7, 1958), p. 544.

7 Congressional Record , 81st Congress, 1st session, p. 11584 (August 16, 1949); see also Dondero’s address on “Communism in Our Schools,” Congressional Record , 79th Congress, 2nd session, pp. A. 3516–18 (June 14, 1946), and his speech, “Communist Conspiracy in Art Threatens American Museums,” Congressional Record , 82nd Congress, 2nd session, pp. 2423–7 (March 17, 1952).

8 William G. McLoughlin, Jr.: Billy Graham: Revivalist in a Secular Age (New York, 1960), pp. 89, 212, 213; on the Gallup Poll, see p. 5.

9 Judging and Improving the Schools: Current Issues (Burlingame, California, 1960), pp. 4, 5, 7, 8; italics added. The document under fire was William C. Bark et al.: Report of the San Francisco Curriculum Survey Committee (San Francisco, 1960).

1 Robert E. Brownlee: “A Parent Speaks Out,” Progressive Education , Vol. XVII (October, 1940), pp. 420–41.

2 A. H. Lauchner: “How Can the Junior High School Curriculum Be Improved?” Bulletin of the National Association of Secondary-School Principals , Vol. XXXV (March, 1951), pp. 299–301. The three dots of elision here do not indicate omissions but are the author’s punctuation. The address was delivered at a meeting of this association. See Arthur Bestor’s comments in The Restoration of Learning (New York, 1955), p. 54.

3 “G. E. Moore,” Encounter , Vol. XII (January, 1959), p. 68; the context, it should be said, suggests that Woolf was quite aware of the necessary qualifications to this remark.

4 Notes towards the Definition of Culture (London, 1948), p. 23.

5 As a case in point, I have found it desirable to discuss the anti-intellectual implications and the anti-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. gXw6p4n5JV2CnzeQG7uWi/Gx8mNQMZwxkZVtQFANWn/T+GOxNU4c4MDBUBJ1kpiY