Anti-Intellectualism in American Life

by Richard Hofstadter

his bullying was welcomed because it satisfied a craving for revenge and a desire to discredit the type of leadership the New Deal had made prominent.

the heartland of America, filled with people who are often fundamentalist in religion, nativist in prejudice, isolationist in foreign policy, and conservative in economics, has constantly rumbled with an underground revolt against all these tormenting manifestations of our modern predicament.

As European antagonisms withered and lost their meaning on American soil in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the new nation came to be conceived not as sharing the ideologies which had grown out of these antagonisms but as offering an alternative to them, as demonstrating that a gift for compromise and plain dealing, a preference for hard work and common sense, were better and more practical than commitments to broad and divisive abstractions.

It is as if America needs an external antagonist, or at least a large part of the nation's inhabitants do. That would be the economically obsessed class of Americans who loath thinking and esteem acting on impulse. They revere their hunches, though could hardly articulate any motive force other than profit or victory.

The irony is that Americans now suffer as much from the victory as from the defeat of their aspirations. What is it that has taken root in the world, if it is not the spirit of American activism, the belief that life can be made better, that colonial peoples can free themselves as the Americans did, that poverty and oppression do not have to be endured, that backward countries can become industrialized and enjoy a high standard of living, that the pursuit of happiness is everybody’s business?

The case against intellect is founded upon a set of fictional and wholly abstract antagonisms. Intellect is pitted against feeling, on the ground that it is somehow inconsistent with warm emotion. It is pitted against character, because it is widely believed that intellect stands for mere cleverness, which transmutes easily into the sly or the diabolical.7 It is pitted against practicality, since theory is held to be opposed to practice, and the “purely” theoretical mind is so much disesteemed. It is pitted against democracy, since intellect is felt to be a form of distinction that defies egalitarianism.

These are all Manichean values, or dichotomies, like good and evil or black and white, which make it easier to demonize without putting facts and details into context to present nuance which even the least critical mind has a difficult time ignoring.

Once the validity of these antagonisms is accepted, then the case for intellect, and by extension for the intellectual, is lost.

Of course the fundamental fallacy in these fictional antagonisms is that they are based not upon an effort to seek out the actual limits of intellect in human life but rather upon a simplified divorce of intellect from all the other human qualities with which it may be combined.

Intellect needs to be understood not as some kind of a claim against the other human excellences for which a fatally high price has to be paid, but rather as a complement to them without which they cannot be fully consummated.

Since the time of Tocqueville it has become a commonplace among students of America that business activism has provided an overwhelming counterpoise to reflection in this country. Tocqueville saw that the life of constant action and decision which was entailed by the democratic and businesslike character of American life put a premium upon rough and ready habits of mind, quick decision, and the prompt seizure of opportunities—and that all this activity was not propitious for deliberation, elaboration, or precision in thought.

Except in a few older communities, there were no countervailing classes or sets of values—no aristocracy to marry into, no formidable body of national aspirations outside business aspirations. Business not only appealed to vigorous and ambitious men but set the dominant standards for the rest of society, so that members of the professions—law, medicine, schoolteaching, even the ministry—aped businessmen and adapted the standards of their own crafts to those of business.

The final segments of this book, though necessarily fragmentary as history, will show how this educational force has been built upon widely accepted premises in our thinking—a narrowly conceived preference for utility and “science,” a false variety of egalitarianism, and a primitivist view of the child.

whereas the established churches thought of art and music as leading the mind upward toward the divine, enthusiasts commonly felt them to be at best intrusions and at worst barriers to the pure and direct action of the heart

Like most intellectual groups, the Puritan ministry had serious faults, and these became dangerous when the ministers wielded power. But what is significant for us—and it may serve as a paradigm of the situation of the intellectual in America—is that the Puritan ministry is popularly remembered almost entirely for its faults, even for faults for which it was less culpable than the community in which it lived.

The burning of books and the baiting of colleges, to be sure, were examples not of the characteristic behavior of the awakeners, but of their excesses.

But the Great Awakening, even in New England, revealed the almost uncontrollable tendency of such revivals toward extremes of various kinds.

In the short run, and in the restrained milieu of the New England churches, the friends of the Awakening were probably right; but their opponents divined more correctly what the inner tendency and future direction of such revivals would be—especially when revivalism got away from the traditions and restraints of New England into the great American interior.

it “demonstrated the feasibility of and made fashionable a fervent evangelism without intellectual discipline,” and observes that “the discrediting of ‘human learning,’ characteristic of only a minority during the Awakening, later became typical of a majority of Protestantism.”6

by achieving a religious style congenial to the common man and giving him an alternative to the establishments run by and largely for the comfortable classes, the Awakening quickened the democratic spirit in America;

by telling the people that they had a right to hear the kind of preachers they liked and understood, even under some circumstances a right to preach themselves, the revivalists broke the hold of the establishments and heightened that assertiveness and self-sufficiency

Moreover, the impulse given to humanitarian causes—to anti-slavery and the conversion of slaves and Indians—must also be chalked up ...

As the people moved westward after the Revolution, they were forever outrunning the institutions of settled society; it was impossible for institutions to move as fast or as constantly as the population.

Those who undertook the hard task of bringing religion westward, as it were, in their saddlebags, would have been ineffective had they been the sort of pastors who were appropriate to the settled churches of the East. They would have been ineffective in converting their moving flocks if they had not been able to develop a vernacular style in preaching, and if they had failed to share or to simulate in some degree the sensibilities and prejudices of their audiences—anti-authority, anti-aristocracy, anti-Eastern, anti-learning.

So fluid had been the conditions of American life toward the end of the eighteenth century, and so disorganizing the consequences of the Revolution, that perhaps as many as ninety per cent of the Americans were unchurched in 1790. In

what the layman chose was a religious denomination already molded by previous choices and infused with the American’s yearning for a break with the past, his passion for the future, his growing disdain for history. In the American political creed the notion prevailed that Europe represented corruptions of the past which must be surmounted.

It was commonly believed that the historical development of Christianity was not an accretion of valuable institutional forms and practices but a process of corruption and degeneration in which the purity of primitive Christianity had been lost. The goal of the devout, then, was not to preserve forms but to strike out anew in order to recapture this purity.

Since there need be only a shadow of confessional unity in the denominations, the rational discussion of theological issues—in the past a great source of intellectual discipline in the churches—came to be regarded as a distraction, as a divisive force.

Therefore, although it was not abandoned, it was subordinated to practical objectives which were conceived to be far more important.5 The peculiar views or practices of any denomination, if they were not considered good for the general welfare or the common mission enterprise, were sacrificed to this mission without excessive regret.6 And the mission itself was defined by evangelism. In a society so mobile and fluid, with so many unchurched persons to be gained for the faith, the basic purpose of the denominations, to which all other purposes and commitments were subordinated, was that of gaining converts.

Long before pragmatism became a philosophical creed, it was formulated, albeit in a crude way, by the evangelists. For the layman the pragmatic test in religion was the experience of conversion; for the clergyman, it was the ability to induce this experience. The minister’s success in winning souls was taken as the decisive evidence that he preached the truth.

The Puritan ideal of the minister as an intellectual and educational leader was steadily weakened in the face of the evangelical ideal of the minister as a popular crusader and exhorter.

Among the evangelical groups, the strongest intellectual tendencies were shown by the Presbyterians,

their view of learning was extremely instrumental; and instead of enlarging their intellectual inheritance, they steadily contracted it.

There is a militant type of mind to which the hostilities involved in any human situation seem to be its most interesting or valuable aspect; some individuals live by hatred as a kind of creed, and we can follow their course through our own history in the various militant anti-Catholic movements, in anti-Masonry, and a variety of crank enthusiasms.

My concern here is with the militants, who have thrown themselves headlong into the revolt against modernism in religion and against modernity in our culture in general.

The two new notes which are evident in a most striking form in Billy Sunday’s rhetoric, the note of toughness and the note of ridicule and denunciation, may be taken as the signal manifestations of a new kind of popular mind. One can trace in Sunday the emergence of what I would call the one-hundred per cent mentality—a mind totally committed to the full range of the dominant popular fatuities and determined that no one shall have the right to challenge them.

This type of mentality is a relatively recent synthesis of fundamentalist religion and fundamentalist Americanism, very often with a heavy overlay of severe fundamentalist morality.1

Here is the crux of the matter: the juncture between populistic democracy and old-fashioned religion. Since the affairs of the heart are the affairs of the common man, and since the common man’s intuition in such matters is as good as—indeed better than—that of the intellectuals, his judgment in matters of religion should rule. Where there appeared to be a conflict between religion and science, it was the public, Bryan believed, and not “those who measure men by diplomas and college degrees,” who should decide. As Walter Lippmann observed, the religious doctrine that all men will at last stand equal before the throne of God was somehow transmuted in Bryan’s mind into the idea that all men were equally good biologists before the ballot box of Tennessee. In effect, Bryan proposed to put the question of evolution to the vote of Christians, and the issue was metamorphosed into a question of the rights of the majority.

The evolution controversy and the Scopes trial greatly quickened the pulse of anti-intellectualism.

No doubt, the militant fundamentalists were a minority in the country, but they were a substantial minority; and their animus plainly reflected the feelings of still larger numbers, who, however reluctant to join in their reactionary crusade, none the less shared their disquiet about the trend of the times, their fear of the cosmopolitan mentality, of critical intelligence, of experimentalism in morals and literature.

Their heightened sense of isolation and impotence helped to bring many of the dwindling but still numerically significant fundamentalists into the ranks of a fanatical right-wing opposition to the New Deal. The fundamentalism of the cross was now supplemented by a fundamentalism of the flag.

One reason why the political intelligence of our time is so incredulous and uncomprehending in the presence of the right-wing mind is that it does not reckon fully with the essentially theological concern that underlies right-wing views of the world. Characteristically, the political intelligence, if it is to operate at all as a kind of civic force rather than as a mere set of maneuvers to advance this or that special interest, must have its own way of handling the facts of life and of forming strategies. It accepts conflict as a central and enduring reality and understands human society as a form of equipoise based upon the continuing process of compromise. It shuns ultimate showdowns and looks upon the ideal of total partisan victory as unattainable, as merely another variety of threat to the kind of balance with which it is familiar. It is sensitive to nuances and sees things in degrees. It is essentially relativist and skeptical, but at the same time circumspect and humane. The fundamentalist mind will have nothing to do with all this: it is essentially Manichean; it looks upon the world as an arena for conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, and accordingly it scorns compromises (who would compromise with Satan?) and can tolerate no ambiguities. It cannot find serious importance in what it believes to be trifling degrees of difference: liberals support measures that are for all practical purposes socialistic, and socialism is nothing more than a variant of C...

The issues of the actual world are hence transformed into a spiritual Armageddon, an ultimate reality, in which any reference to day-by-day actualities has the character of an allegorical illustration, and not of the empirical evidence that ordinary men offer for ordinary conclusions.

the way of the Catholic intellectual in this country has been doubly hard. He has had to justify himself not only as a Catholic to the Protestant and secular intellectual community but also as an intellectual to fellow Catholics, for whom his vocation is even more questionable than it is to the American community at large.

But it will serve as background for a more central point: a great many Catholics have been as responsive as Protestant fundamentalists to that revolt against modernity of which I have spoken, and they have done perhaps more than their share in developing the one-hundred per cent mentality.

one of the most striking developments of our time has been the emergence of a kind of union, or at least a capacity for co-operation, between Protestant and Catholic fundamentalists, who share a common puritanism and a common mindless militancy on what they imagine to be political issues, which unite them in opposition to what they repetitively call Godless Communism.

WHEN THE United States began its national existence, the relationship between intellect and power was not a problem. The leaders were the intellectuals. Advanced though the nation was in the development of democracy, the control of its affairs still rested largely in a patrician elite:

As popular democracy gained strength and confidence, it reinforced the widespread belief in the superiority of inborn, intuitive, folkish wisdom over the cultivated, oversophisticated, and self-interested knowledge of the literati and the well-to-do.

Jefferson was simply expressing a conventional idea of eighteenth-century thinking: the idea that God had given man certain necessary moral sentiments.

Furious menaces and bellowing exaggeration take the place of calm and dignified debate; the halls of the capitol often present scenes which would disgrace a bear-garden; and Congress attains the unenviable fame of being the most helpless, disorderly, and inefficient legislative body which can be found in the civilized world.

Of necessity, the functions of government would become more complex; and as they did so, experts would be in greater demand.

The tension between democracy and the educated man now seemed to be disappearing—because the type of man who had always valued expertise was now learning to value democracy and because democracy was learning to value experts.