Anti-Intellectualism in American Life

by Richard Hofstadter

The mugwump mind, in which the influence of New England was again decisive, inherited from the Puritans a certain solemnity and high intent, but was unable to sustain their passion. From the Founding Fathers and the American Enlightenment it inherited in a more direct and immediate way a set of intellectual commitments and civic concerns. In the mugwump ambience, however, the intellectual virtues of the eighteenth-century republican type dwindled and dried up, very largely because mugwump thinkers were too commonly deprived of the occasion to bring these virtues into any intimate or organic relation with experience. It had been essential to the culture of the Founding Fathers that it was put to the test of experience, that it was forced to cope with grave and intricate problems of power; it was characteristic of mugwump culture that its relation to experience and its association with power became increasingly remote.