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There was a premium on men who could keep touch with the common people and yet move comfortably and function intelligently in the world of political management and business enterprise.
Thurlow Weed, who used the violently egalitarian passions of anti-Masonry to ride into prominence, and who became one of the greatest of the Whig, and then Republican, party organizers.
Henry Clay, for his part, said privately that he “lamented the necessity, real or imagined … of appealing to the feelings and passions of our Countrymen, rather than to their reasons and judgments,” and then did exactly that.
By contemporary European standards of administration, Washington’s initial criteria for appointments to Federal offices, although partisan, had been high.
What emerged was what Leonard D. White has called a “dual system,” in which a patronage system and a career system existed side by side. Patronage clerks came and went, while a certain core of more permanent officers remained.
on the whole, Northerners of the patrician class rallied to the support of their country without asking whether the political culture they proposed to save was worth saving.
during the terrible fiasco of Reconstruction, it became clear that beyond the minimal goal of saving the Union nothing had been accomplished and nothing learned.
civil-service reform, the class issue of the gentleman, was a touchstone of American political culture.
Invoking a well-established preconception of the American male, the politicians argued that culture is impractical and men of culture are ineffectual, that culture is feminine and cultivated men tend to be effeminate.
The more recent attacks by Senator McCarthy and others upon the Eastern and English-oriented prep-school personnel of the State Department, associated with charges of homosexuality, are not an altogether novel element in the history of American invective.
If women invaded politics, they would become masculine, just as men became feminine when they espoused reform.
the businessman who objected to economic reformers as “philanthropists, professors, and Lady Millionaires.”
Intellect was reinstalled not because of its supposed conservative influence but because of its service to change.
The trial ground for the role of experts in political life was not Washington but the state capitals, particularly Madison, Wisconsin, which offered the first example of experts in the service of “the people” and the state.
The employment of experts, he said, would lead to the continuing encroachment of the university upon politics.
Politicians could not handle the issues raised by the depression; civil servants of the right type did not exist to cope with them; and most business leaders seemed worse than useless.
their basic fear, which was not a fear of the brain trust or the expert, but of the collapse of the world in which they had put their faith.
From time to time the reputation and recognition of intellect in politics may vary, but the demand for expertise seems constantly to rise.
conveys the general attitude of the intellectual community, which has been at various times populistic, progressive, or Marxist, or often some compound of the three.
Once great men created fortunes; today a great system creates fortunate men.
the extensive American devotion to practicality and direct experience which ramifies through almost every area of American life.
In itself, a certain wholesome regard for the practical needs no defense and deserves no disparagement, so long as it does not aspire to exclusiveness, so long as other aspects of human experience are not denigrated and ridiculed.
two pervasive American attitudes toward civilization and personal religion—first, a widely shared contempt for the past; and second, an ethos of self-help and personal advancement in which even religious faith becomes merely an agency of practicality.
the legendary American rags-to-riches story, despite the spectacular instances that adorn our business annals, was more important as a myth and a symbol than as a statistical actuality.
Religion has been supplanted, not, to be sure, by a consciously secular philosophy, but by mental self-manipulation, by a kind of faith in magic.
Protestantism at an early point got rid of the bulk of religious ritual, and in the course of its development in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries went very far to minimize doctrine. The inspirational cult has completed this process, for it has largely eliminated doctrine—at least it has eliminated most doctrine that could be called Christian.
the anti-intellectualism of the inspirational cults has been indirect: they represent a withdrawal from reality, a repudiation of all philosophies whose business is an engagement with real problems.
a receptive state of mind at least toward applied science would have been immensely useful to the farmers themselves.
Such hopes as the farmers may have had for agricultural education seems to have been overweighed by their fear that more schools would only mean more taxes.
Congress seems to have been more persuaded of the need for reform than the majority of farmers.
this much-needed fusion was achieved only after a century of agitation by agricultural reformers in the teeth of a widespread and extremely obstinate conviction among working farmers that theory has nothing to offer to practice.
whereas socialism may have taught such men the possibilities of a labor movement, the labor movement itself, once established, taught them the impossibility of socialism in America.
the 1930’s a number of American writers gave way to the fatally maudlin notion that the sufferings and the “historic mission” of the working class endow it with an immense inherent moral superiority over middle-class intellectuals.
it is amusing to see how, with a few changes in terms, the party code is similar to certain attitudes expressed by businessmen.
If I were in charge of a revolution, I’d get rid of every single artist immediately; and trust to luck that the fecundity of the earth would produce another crop when I had got some of the hard work done.
Henry Steele Commager, assessing the primary characteristics of the nineteenth-century American, remarks that “education was his religion”
The history of our educational writing poses a formidable challenge to those modern educational critics who yield too readily to nostalgia for good old days that apparently were never too good.
The American system of common schools was meant to take a vast, heterogeneous, and mobile population, recruited from manifold sources and busy with manifold tasks, and forge it into a nation, make it literate, and give it at least the minimal civic competence necessary to the operation of republican institutions. This much it did;
Mrs. Elson concludes, from an intensive analysis of these readers, that “anti-intellectualism is not only not new in American civilization, but that it is thoroughly imbedded in the school books that have been read by generations of pupils since the beginning of the republic.”
American faith in education as it was manifested during the nineteenth century. Perhaps the most touching aspect of this faith was the benevolent determination that education should not be exclusive, that it should be universally accessible.
From teachers children derive much of their sense of the way in which the mind is cultivated; from observing how their teachers are esteemed and rewarded they quickly sense how society looks upon the teacher’s role.
women teachers could be paid one third or one half as much as men. Here was one answer to the great American quest to educate everybody but to do it cheaply.
European countries experimented with the training of teachers for more than a century before the United States gave much thought to it.
The best estimates for 1919–20 indicate that half of America’s schoolteachers were under twenty-five, half served in the schools for not more than four or five years, and half had had no more than four years of education beyond the eighth grade.
The prevailing assumption was that everyone should get a common-school education, and on the whole this was realized, outside the South.
The search for cheap teachers was perennial. Schoolteachers were considered to be public officers, and it was part of the American egalitarian philosophy that the salaries of public officers should not be too high.
Many a farmer would pay a better price for shoeing his horse than he would “to obtain a suitable individual to mould and form the character of his child.”
The American masculine conviction that education and culture are feminine concerns is thus confirmed, and no doubt partly shaped, by the experiences of boys in school.
Presumably the labor market was somewhat different in England in the early nineteenth century, but the social and economic conditions of teachers in public education seem less enviable than that of Americans.
no one is likely to deny that the free secondary education of youth was a signal accomplishment in the history of education,
