Anti-Intellectualism in American Life

by Richard Hofstadter

An excessive, rampant individualism had prevented the formation of a collective spiritual life. The pioneering spirit, coarsely bent on acquisition and conquest, had fostered a materialism which was hopelessly opposed to the skeptical or creative imagination; and it had been reinforced by Puritanism, the ideal philosophy for the pioneer, a philosophy whose contemptuous view of human nature simultaneously released the acquisitive side of men and inhibited their esthetic impulses. American business, as it developed in the atmosphere of the pioneer spirit, Puritanism, and frontier opportunities, had indeed become more adventurous and attractive than business elsewhere, but by this very fact it had absorbed and diverted all too much of what was good in the American character. What one had, then, was a society of sorts, but virtually no “organic native culture,” and it could hardly be surprising that “our orthodox literary men, whatever models they place before themselves, cannot rise above the tribal view of their art as either an amusement or a soporific.”