Anti-Intellectualism in American Life REVIEW Part I
“Buy the truth, and sell it not; also wisdom, and instruction, and understanding.” – Proverbs 23:23
Psychologists tell us that there is a part of the brain that has an incredible ability to work to understand truth. They also tell us that this part of the brain will grow lazy if it is not made to develop a work ethic. And, as with the individual brain, so also with an entire culture, for they too can value or devalue the work of truth-seeking. Most people go through life solving problems that they have to solve. This makes sense. Why wouldn’t they? If in the process of solving their problems, they learn something true, they are okay with that. There other people who go through life trying to discover the truth; and if those people (I will call them “intellectuals”) happen to solve an actual problem in the process, they are okay with that. Make no mistake, “intellectual” is not a term that describes “smart people” in contrast to everyone else who we might call “dumb.” The intellectual is merely someone whose intelligence finds itself less motivated by pragmatism and practicality than most intelligent people. An intellectual might, for example, spend hours and hours reading a fifty year old book about anti-intellectualism just because he finds the subject interesting – because he wants to know the back story to something that he notices in his present culture. The reward may hold no fiscal advantage to him or her whatsoever. Intellectuals are thus often driven and motivated by questions regardless of whether or not they are actual problems.
An intellectual may not make a dime from what he learns. The problems of his life will be there when he is done. She will have solved none of her real world problems by means of her intellectual effort. She will simply have learned something she finds interesting and that will help her to think better and more accurately about other interesting things. Perhaps the word “intellectual” is another word for “fool” for, being so good at knowing things, he or she may not know what is actually worth knowing. I can’t help but think of the young college philosophy graduate who cannot find a job and takes work at his father’s hardware store. On the first day, his father gives him a broom and a mop and tells him to clean the basement of the hardware store. “Dad?!” whines the graduate. “I have a college degree!”
“Oh … right,” says his father, “Let me show you how to use that.”
Hofstadter explains why many people find the intellectual to be a superfluous use of a community’s food supplies when he says:
“Whatever the intellectual is too certain of, if he is healthily playful, he begins to find unsatisfactory. The meaning of his intellectual life 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 well when he said that the intellectual is one who turns answers into questions.” Incidentally, this book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life won a Pulitzer Prize in 1964. Perhaps the Russian launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957 had made Americans realize that the study of space and physics and higher math was not as flighty an endeavor as they had supposed.[i]
This book takes about forty hours to read so it is not likely that many people will ever read it but nevertheless, it tells the story of anti-intellectualism in American life from its origins to 1962, the year I was born. If you were to read it, you would see clearly that just as America has had its economic boom and bust cycles, it has had its intellectual booms and busts as well. There have been times when the question asker has been greatly valued (and paid) and there have been extended times when the same individual has been mocked and derided for being so utterly “useless” to the masses. Hofstadter writes,
“Anti-intellectualism was not manifested in this country for the first time during the 1950’s [referring to McCarthyism]. 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 has not moved steadily downward and has not gone into a sudden, recent decline, but is subject to cyclical fluctuations.”
Hofstadter divides the book into chapters that concern different sources of anti-intellectualism in American history.
Among these, you will come across the following
- Threatened religious leaders who believe that study is a distraction when there is direct revelation and inspiration to be had whenever we wish to have it.
- Populist politicians who pander to masses comfortable in the belief that truths one cannot acquire while working in a factory or on a farm serve only to inflate the egos of those rich and lazy enough to care about them.
- Successful businessmen who think that using intellectual energy on subjects that make no profit is ludicrous and take away talent and energy from more necessary things.
- Educational leaders who are given the task of teaching masses of students who do not themselves see any reason to be concerned with any matter that does not fall into the category of “what matters to my life today or my career tomorrow?”
It is worth noting that Hofstadter is not incapable of seeing some criticisms of intellectualism as legitimate. Where intellectuals use their book knowledge to snobbishly assert their “betterness,” he notes it. Where they seek to create a vetting mechanism for tagging and excluding those less educated, he notes it. “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,” he says.
“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.”
I found his sources fascinating. I have 27 pages of notes. I will spare you by supplying a representative sample.
Religious Anti-Intellectualism:
Hofstadter notes that democratization impacted all aspects of American life between the colonial era and the rise of Jacksonian democracy. Perhaps nowhere was it more pronounced in its influence than in religion where masses of people converted to denominations lead and taught by no few ministers who saw study as a potential hindrance to good preaching. “The various denominations responded in different ways to this necessity’” Hofstadter says of the geographical dispersal of millions of people across the West, all needing to be brought into the fold, “but in general it might be said that the congregations were raised and the preachers -were lowered.”
"’Without study too!’ Here we are close to one of the central issues of the Great Awakening. An error of ‘former times’ was now being revived, [Charles] Chauncy [a 17th Century clergiman and President of Harvard College] asserted, the error of the heretics and popular preachers who said that ‘they needed no Books but the Bible.’ ‘They pleaded there was no need of learning in preaching, and that one of them could by the SPIRIT do better than the Minister by his learning; as if the SPIRIT and Learning were opposites.’ This, Chauncy thought, was the fundamental error of the revivalists: Their depending on the Help of the SPIRIT as to despise Learning.”
Following are examples from sources that Hofstadter quotes:
Here is the Methodist circuit-rider, Peter Cartwright (1856):
“Suppose, now, Mr. Wesley had been obliged to wait for a literary and theologically trained band of preachers before he moved in the glorious work his day, what would Methodism have been in the Wesleyan connection today? ... If Bishop Asbury had waited for this choice literary band of preachers, infidelity -would have swept these United States from one end to the other. . . .
The Presbyterians, and other Calvinistic branches of the Protestant Church, used to contend for an educated ministry, for pews, for instrumental music, for a congregational or stated salaried ministry. The Methodists universally opposed these ideas; and the illiterate Methodist preachers actually set the world on fire (the American world at least) while they were lighting their matches! . . . I do not wish to undervalue education, but really I have seen so many of these educated preachers who forcibly reminded me of lettuce growing under the shade of a peach-tree, or like a gosling that had got the straddles by wading in the dew, that I turn away sick and faint. Now this educated ministry and theological training are no longer an experiment. Other denominations have tried them, and they have proved a perfect failure. . . .
I awfully fear for our beloved Methodism. Multiply colleges, universities, seminaries, and academies; multiply our agencies, and editorships, and fill them with all our best and most efficient preachers, and you localize the ministry and secularize them too; then farewell to itinerancy; and when this fails we plunge right into Congregationalism, and stop precisely where all other denominations started. . . . Is it not manifest that the employing of so many of our preachers in these agencies and professorships is one of the great causes why we have such a scarcity of preachers to fill the regular work? Moreover, these presidents, professors, agents, and editors get a greater amount of pay, and get it more certainly too, than a traveling preacher, who has to breast every storm, and often falls very far short of his disciplinary allowance. Here is a great temptation to those who are qualified to fill those high offices to seek them, and give up the regular work of preaching and trying to save souls. . . .
Perhaps, among the thousands of traveling and local preachers employed and engaged in this glorious work of saving souls, and building up the Methodist Church, there were not fifty men that had anything more than a common English education, and scores of them not that; and not one of them was ever trained in a theological school or Biblical institute, and yet hundreds of them preached the Gospel with more success and had more seals to their ministry than all the sapient, downy D.D’s [Doctor of Divinity] in modern times, who, instead of entering the great and wide-spread harvest-field of souls, sickle in hand, are seeking presidencies or professorships in colleges, editorships, or any agencies that have a fat salary, and are trying to create newfangled institutions where good livings can be monopolized, while millions of poor, dying sinners are thronging the way to hell without God, without Gospel. . . .
What has a learned ministry done for the world, that have studied divinity as a science? Look, and examine ministerial history. It is an easy thing to engender pride in the human heart, and this educational pride has been the downfall and ruin of many preeminently educated ministers of the Gospel. But I will not render evil for evil, or railing for railing, but will thank God for education, and educated Gospel ministers who are of the right stamp, and of the right spirit. But how do these advocates for an educated ministry think the hundreds of commonly educated preachers must feel under the lectures we have from time to time on this subject? It is true, many of these advocates for an improved and educated ministry among us, speak in rapturous and exalted strains concerning the old, illiterate pioneers that planted Methodism and Churches in early and frontier times; but I take no flattering unction to my soul from these extorted concessions from these velvet-mouthed and downy D.D’s; for their real sentiments, if they clearly express them, are, that we were indebted to the ignorance of the people for our success.”
Here is a manifesto from a group of revivalist ministers from the early 19th Century
“That every brother that is qualified by God for the same has a right to preach according to the measure of faith, and that the essential qualification for preaching is wrought by the Spirit of God; and that the knowledge of the tongues and liberal sciences are not absolutely necessary; yet they are convenient, and -will doubtless be profitable if rightly used, but if brought in to supply the want of the Spirit of God, they prove a snare to those that use them and all that follow them.”
Here is the great Second Great Awakening revivalist preacher, Charles Finney:
“I had read nothing on the subject except my Bible; and what I had there found upon the subject, I had interpreted as I would have understood the same or like passages in a law book. Again; I found myself utterly unable to accept doctrine on the ground of authority. ... I had no where to go but directly to the Bible, and to the philosophy or workings of my own mind. . .” As to literature: "I cannot believe that a person who has ever known the love of God can relish a secular novel.” "Let me visit your chamber, your parlor, or wherever you keep your books. What is here? Byron, Scott, Shakespeare, and a host of triflers and blasphemers of God."
“Even the classical languages, so commonly thought necessary to a minister, were of dubious benefit,” according to Finney. Students at Eastern colleges would spend,
"four years ... at classical studies and no God in them."
And upon graduation,
"such learned students may under stand their hie, Juiec, hoc, [Latin] very well and may laugh at the humble Christian and call him ignorant, although he may know how to win more souls than five hundred of them. . . . The race is an intellectual one. The excitement, the zeal, are all for the intellect. The young man . . . loses the firm tone of spirituality. . . . His intellect improves, and his heart lies waste."
These opinions are all from Finney s Memoirs, chapter 7, "Remarks Upon Ministerial Education," pp. 8597; cf. Finney’s Lectures on Revivals of Religion, pp. 176-8.
Here is the famous Protestant evangelist, D.L. Moody
"It makes no difference how you get a man to God, provided you get him there."
Hofstadter writes:
“Although he had no desire to undermine the established ministry or its training, he cordially approved of laymen in religious work and felt that seminary-educated ministers ‘are often educated away from the people.’ [Moody] denigrated all education that did not serve the purposes of religion for secular education, he said, instead of telling men what a bad lot they are, flatters them and tells them ‘how angelic they are because they have some education. An educated rascal is the meanest kind of rascal.’ Aside from the Bible, he read almost nothing. ‘I have one rule about books. I do not read any book, unless it will help me to understand the book.’ Novels? They were ‘flashy. ... I have no taste for them, no desire to read them; but if I did I would not do it.’ The theater? ‘You say it is part of one’s education to see good plays. Let that kind of education go to the four winds.’ Culture? It is ‘all right in its place,’ but to speak of it before a man is born of God is ‘the height of madness.’ Learning? An encumbrance to the man of spirit: ‘I would rather have zeal without knowledge; and there is a good deal of knowledge without zeal.’” Bradford: Moody, pp. 24, 25-6, 30, 35, 37, 64,
“I have heard of reform, reform,” wrote Moody,
“until I am tired and sick of the whole thing. It is regeneration by the power of the Holy Ghost that we need.”
As a consequence, says Hofstadter, ”Moody showed no patience for any kind of sociological discussion. Man was, and always had been, a failure in all his works. The true task was to get as many souls as possible off the sinking ship of this world.”
Here is the nationally known evangelist, Billy Sunday from the 1920’s.
“What do I care if some puff-eyed little dibbly-dibbly preacher goes tibbly-tibbling around because I use plain Anglo-Saxon words? I want people to know what I mean and that’s why I try to get down where they live.”
Literary preachers, he said, tried "to please the highbrows and in pleasing them miss the masses.” According to Hofstadter,
“The language used by Moody, simple though it was, lacked savor enough for Sunday. Moody had said: ‘The standard of the Church is so low that it does not mean much.’ Sunday asserted: ‘The bars of the Church are so low that any old hog with two or three suits of clothes and a bank roll can crawl through.’ Moody had been content with: ‘We don’t want intellect and money-power, but the power of God’s word.’ Sunday elaborated: ‘The church in America would die of dry rot and sink forty-nine fathoms in hell if all members were multimillionaires and college graduates.’” McLoughlin: Billy Sunday, pp. 164, 169.
“With Sunday it was quite another matter. He brooked no suggestion that fundamentalism was not thoroughgoing, impregnable, and tough. He turned his gift for invective as unsparingly on the higher criticism and on evolution as on everything else that displeased him. ‘There is a hell and when the Bible says so, don’t you be so black-hearted, low-down, and degenerate as to say you don t believe it, you big fool!’ Again: "Thousands of college graduates are going as fast as they can straight to hell. If I had a million dollars I’d give $999,999 to the church and $1 to education.’ ‘When the word of God says one thing and scholarship says another, scholarship can go to hell!’
Here is William Jennings Bryan "If we have to give up either religion or education, we should give up education."
Here is Billy Graham
“You can stick a public school and a university in the middle of every block of every city 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 knocked 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 government, Freudianism, naturalism, humanism, behaviorism, positivism, materialism, and idealism. [This is the work of] so-called intellectuals. Thousands of these ‘intellectuals’ have publicly stated that morality is relative that there is no norm or absolute standard.” Billy Graham William G. McLcmghlin, Jr.; Billy Graham: Revivalist in a Secular Age (New York, 1960)]
Political Anti-Intellectualism:
Democratization also stimulated a metastasizing of anti-intellectualism in political life as well as religious life.
A good deal of the Federalist attack on Jefferson, for example, was directed at his bookish intellectualism.
“The Federalist writer, Joseph Dennie, saw in [Jefferson] a favorite pupil of the ‘dangerous, Deistical, and Utopian’ school of French philosophy. ‘The man has talents,’ Dennie conceded, “but they are of a dangerous and delusive kind. He has read much and can write plausibly. He is a man of letters, and should be a retired one. His closet, and not the cabinet, is his place. In the first, he might harmlessly examine the teeth of a non-descript monster, the secretions of an African, or the almanac of Banneker. . . . At the seat of government his abstract, inapplicable, metaphysico-politics are either nugatory or noxious. Besides, his principles relish so strongly of Paris and are seasoned with such a profusion of French garlic, that he offends the whole nation. Better for Americans that on their extended plains ‘thistles should grow, instead of wheat, and cockle, instead of barley,’ than that a philosopher should influence the councils of the country, and that his admiration of the works of Voltaire and Helvetius should induce him to wish a closer connexion with Frenchmen.”
With the defeat of John Quincy Adams by the populist, Andrew Jackson, college educations went out of style in political life entirely. No longer did Jefferson, Adams, Hamilton, and Madison own the regard of the public like the tobacco farming, Indian-killing, pistol dueling, self-made military “Gaston” who now found himself President of the country. “The first truly powerful and widespread impulse to anti-intellectualism in American politics,” says Hofstadter,
“was, in fact, given by the Jacksonian movement. Its distrust of expertise, its dislike for centralization, its desire to uproot the entrenched classes, and its doctrine that important functions were simple enough to be performed by anyone, amounted to a repudiation not only of the system of government by gentlemen which the nation had inherited from the eighteenth century, but also of the special value of the educated classes in civic life.”
“Adams was the last nineteenth-century occupant of the White House who had a knowledgeable sympathy with the aims and aspirations of science or who believed that fostering the arts might properly be a function of the federal government.”
“Jackson, it was said, had been lucky enough to have escaped the formal training that impaired the ‘Vigor and originality of the understanding.’ Here was a man of action, ‘educated in Nature’s school’ who was ‘artificial in nothing’; who had fortunately ‘escaped the training and dialectics of the schools’; who had a ‘judgement unclouded by the visionary speculations of the academician’; who had, ‘in an extraordinary degree, that native strength of mind, that practical common sense, that power and discrimination of judgement which, for all useful purposes, are more valuable than all the acquired learning of a sage’; whose mind did not have to move along ‘the tardy avenues of syllogism, nor over the beaten track of analysis, or the hackneyed walk of logical induction,’ because it had natural intuitive power and could go ‘with the lightning’s flash and illuminate its own pathway.’
“George Bancroft, who must have believed that his own career as a schoolmaster had been useless, rhapsodized over Jackson s unschooled mind:
‘Behold, then, the unlettered man of the West, the nursling of the wilds, the farmer of the Hermitage, little versed in books, unconnected by science with the tradition of the past, raised by the will of the people to the highest pinnacle of honour, to the central post in the civilization of republican freedom. . . . What policy will he pursue? What wisdom will he bring with him from the forest? What rules of duty will he evolve from the oracles of his own mind?’
Against a primitivist hero of this sort, who brought wisdom straight out of the forest, Adams, with his experience at foreign courts and his elaborate education, seemed artificial. “A group of Jackson s supporters declared that the nation would not be much better off for Adams’ intellectual accomplishments:
“That he is learned we are willing to admit;” Jackson’s followers offered about Quincy Adams, “but his wisdom we take leave to question. . . , We confess our attachment to the homely doctrine: thus happily expressed by the great English poet:
‘That not to know of things remote
From use, obscure and subtle,
but to know- That which before us lies in daily life,
Is the prime wisdom.’ ‘
That wisdom we believe Gen. Jackson possesses in an eminent degree.’
“Most of the Brahmin world found itself unable to embrace Jackson as President,” Hofstadter writes,
“Harvard did award him an honorary degree of Doctor of Laws at its 1833 commencement, but Adams refused to attend. ‘I -would not be present’ he wrote, "to see my darling Harvard disgrace herself by conferring a Doctor’s degree upon a barbarian and a savage who can scarcely spell his own name."
Bemis: op. cit., p. 250; see also Adams s Memoirs, Vol. VIII (Philadelphia, 1876), pp. 546-7.
If Jackson’s Presidency unleashed a wave of anti-intelectualism in American life, the famous frontiersman, Davy Crocket rode it all the way to Congress.
“It was Crockett s pride to represent the native style and natural intuition. In his autobiography, published in 1834, Crockett boasted of the decisions he handed down from the Tennessee bench at a time when he ‘could just barely write my own name.’ ‘My judgments were never appealed from, and if they had been they would have stuck like wax, as I gave my decisions on the principles of common justice and honesty between man and man, and relied on natural born sense, and not on law learning to guide me; for I had never read a page in a law book in all my life.’ This ingenuous confidence in the sufficiency of common sense may have been justified by Crockett’s legal decisions, but he was not content to stop here: he had a considered disdain for the learned world. At one point in his Congressional career, Crockett reported: ‘ ‘There were some gentlemen that invited me to go to Cambridge, where the big college or university is; where they keep ready-made titles or nicknames to give people. I would not go, for I did not know but they might stick an LL.D. on me before they let me go; and I had no idea of changing ‘Member of the House of Representatives of the United States’ for what stands for ‘lazy lounging dunce,’ which I am sure my constituents would have translated my new title to be, knowing that I had never taken any degree, and did not own to any, except a small degree of good sense not to pass for what I was not. . . .”
Anti-Intellectualism in American political life may have reached maturity under the guiding hand of Tammany Hall in New York City where the famous George Washington Plunket asserted that an education was a handicap for all young men wishing to enter politics.
“If Tammany leaders were "all book worms and college professors,” Plunkitt declared,
“Tammany might win an election once in four thousand years. Most of the leaders are plain American citizens, of the people and near to the people, and they have all the education they need to whip the dudes who part their name in the middle. ... As for the common people of the district, I am at home with them at all times. When I go among them, I don t try to show off my grammar, or talk about the Constitution, or how many volts there is in electricity or make it appear in any way that I am better educated than they are. They wouldn’t stand for that sort of thing.” “Some young men think they can learn how to be successful in politics from books, and they cram their heads with all sorts of college rot. They couldn’t make a bigger mistake. Now, understand me, I ain’t sayin nothin against colleges. I guess they have to exist as long as there’s bookworms, and I suppose they do some good in certain ways, but they don’t count in politics. In fact, a young man who has gone through the college course is handicapped at the outset. He may succeed in politics, but the chances are 100 to 1 against him.” William L. Riordon: PLunkitt of Tammany Hall (1905; ed. New York, 1948), pp. 601.
In his footnote to Plunkitt’s advice to budding NY politicians, Hofstadter writes:
“One is reminded here of the techniques of the delightful Brooklyn Democratic leader Peter McGuiness. Challenged for the leadership of his district during the early 1920’s by a college graduate who maintained that the community should have a man of culture and refinement as its leader, McGuiness dealt with the new comer with a line that is a favorite of connoisseurs of political strategy. At the next meeting McGuiness addressed, he stood silent for a moment, glaring down at the crowd of shirtsleeved laborers and housewives in Hoover aprons until he had their attention. Then he bellowed, ‘A11 of yez that went to Yales or Cornells raise your right hands. . . . The Yales and Cornells can vote for him. The rest of yez vote for me.’ Richard Rovere: "The Big Hello in The American Establishment” (New York, 1962), p. 36.
If Plunkit was the archbishop of anti-intellectualism, Hiram Evans, the imperial wizard of the Klu Klux Klan in 1926 may have been the Pope. According to Hofstadter, Evens,
“wrote a moving essay on the Klan s purposes, in which he portrayed the major issue of the time as a struggle between ‘the great mass of Americans of the old pioneer stock’ and the ‘intellectually mongrelized Liberals.’ All the moral and religious values of the ‘Nordic Americans,’ he complained, were being undermined by the ethnic groups that had invaded the country, and were being openly laughed at by the liberal intellectuals. ‘We are a movement,’ Evans wrote, ‘of the plain people, very weak in the matter of culture, intellectual support, and trained leadership. We are demanding, and we expect to win, a return of power into the hands of the everyday, not highly cultured, not overly intellectualized, but entirely unspoiled and not de-Americanized, average citizen of the old stock.
Our members and leaders are all of this class the opposition of the intellectuals and liberals who hold the leadership, betrayed Americanism, and from whom we expect to wrest control, is almost automatic. This is undoubtedly a weakness. It lays us open to the charge of being ‘hicks’ and ‘rubes’ and ‘drivers of second-hand Fords.’ We admit it. Far worse, it makes it hard for us to state our case and advocate our crusade in the most effective way, for most of us lack skill in language. . . .
Every popular movement has suffered from just this handicap. . . .
The Klan does not believe that the fact that it is emotional and instinctive, rather than coldly intellectual, is a weakness. All action comes from emotion, rather than from ratiocination. Our emotions and the instincts on which they are based have been bred into us for thousands of years; far longer than reason has had a place in the human brain. . . . They are the foundations of our American civilization, even more than our great historic documents; they can be trusted where the fine-haired reasoning of the denatured intellectuals cannot.’”
"The Klan s Fight for Americanism," North American Review, Vol. CCXXIII ( March- April-May, 1926), pp. 38 ff.
Evans’ screed may well be the “Bull Unum Sanctum moment” at the apex of anti-intellectualisms political power in America but there certainly have been no shortage of revivals since. In Progressive Wisconsin for example, the college and university friendly politician Robert Lafollette was eventually replaced by a backlash candidate that swore to “clean house” with respect to intellectual meddling in the State’s affairs.
“The anti-intellectuals defeated La Follette’s Progressive successor,” says Hofstadter, “and returned to power with Emanuel L. Philipp, a railroad and lumber man. In his campaign Philipp featured anti-intellectualist denunciations of university experts, and called for a reduction in taxes, retrenchment in the university, and an end to its political ‘meddling.’ There must be, he said, a thorough house-cleaning at the university; socialism was gaining ground there, and ‘many graduates are leaving with ideas that are un-American.’
Still, Hofstadter reserves a space for his finest specimen of anti-intellectualism in political life by quoting Senator Lawrence Sherman of Illinois “who launched a long and ferocious diatribe against the expansion of governmental powers during the war, and particularly against ‘a government by professors and intellectuals.’” “This remarkable speech is replete with the clichés of anti-intellectualism, “says Hofstadter, “and though it can hardly be imagined to have had much influence at the time, it must be taken as a landmark in anti-intellectualist oratory.”
"... a coterie of politicians gilded and plated by a group of theorizing, intolerant intellectuals as wildly impractical as ever beat high heaven with their phrase-making jargon. . . . They appeal to the iconoclast, the freak, the degenerate . . . essayists of incalculable horsepower who have essayed everything under the sun ... a fair sprinkle of socialists. . . . Everything will be discovered. . . . Psychologists with X-ray vision drop different colored handkerchiefs on a table, spill a half pint of navy beans, ask you in a sepulchral tone what disease Walter Raleigh died of, and demand the number of legumes without counting. Your memory, perceptive faculties, concentration, and other mental giblets are tagged and you are pigeonholed for future reference. I have seen those psychologists in my time and have dealt with them. If they were put out in a forest or in a potato patch, they have not sense enough to kill a rabbit or dig a potato to save themselves from the pangs of starvation. This is a government by professors and intellectuals. I repeat, intellectuals are good enough in their places, but a country run by professors is ultimately destined to Bolshevism and an explosion."
Congressional Record. 65th Congress, and session, pp. 9875, 9877 ( September 3, 1918).
No anthology of anti-intellectualism in American political life would be complete without a reference to Joseph McCarthy who never seems to have met an intellectual that he could not call a communist.
“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.”
And yet there is more. Hofstadter moves on to a lengthy discussion of anti-intellectualism in the American business community.
Commercial Anti-Intellectualism:
It is not difficult to hear echoes of things said today in the views of business leaders a hundred years ago, though on the whole, the makers of money have come to see the value in reaping benefits from the seekers of truth, particularly when it is technological in nature. But here is just one example of what commercial anti-intellectualism looks like from a hundred years ago.
"What we are opposed to, and what we appeal to you for protection against is a bill that will put our business in the hands of theorists, chemists, sociologists, etc., and the management and control taken away from the men who have devoted their lives to the upbuilding and perfecting of this great American industry” Chicago packer, Thomas E. Wilson, pleading before a Congressional committee in 1906
I will provide more on commercial anti-intellectualism when covering anti-intellectualism in education as the two are so closely related.
Educational Anti-Intellectualism: Perhaps one of the biggest ironies of the history of American anti-intellectualism is just how pervasive it is within the educational system itself. This part of the book was particularly fascinating. “What sort of educational reformer would be against the use of American schools for developing budding intellectuals?” I wondered.
“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.
“Through the years we’ve built a sort of halo around reading, writing, and arithmetic. We’ve said they were for everybody . . . rich and poor, brilliant and not-so-mentally-endowed, ones who liked them and those who failed to go for them. The teacher has said that these were something ‘everyone should learn.’ The principal has remarked, ‘All educated people know how to -write, spell, and read.’ When some child declared a dislike for a sacred subject, 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 Children for the Three R’s! That was 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 spell 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 spell . . . that many of them either cannot 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 someday 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 spell well 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, successful living, 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. That’s straight thinking. Contrast that with the junior high which says, ‘Every student must know the multiplication tables before graduation.’
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. Hofstadter has much more to say about anti-intellectualism in education but this post is long as it is and thus, I will simply devote a second blog post to the topic.
[i] “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.”
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