Anti-Intellectualism in American Life

by Richard Hofstadter

The new social order also required exploration ...

The imperative business of national self-criticism stirred ideas into life. Partly as expert, partly as social critic, the intellectual now came back to a central position such as he had not held in American politics for a century.

Now, however, the claims of intellect were not based on the social position of the men who exemplified it, but on their usefulness in mobilizing and directing the restless, critical, reforming energies of the country.

Intellect was reinstalled not because of its supposed conservative influence but because of its service to change.

The Wisconsin experience is particularly instructive because it prefigured an entire cycle in the role of experts and intellectuals in politics which has by now become familiar: first, there was an era of change and discontent which brought a demand for such men; next, the intellectuals and experts became identified with the reforms they formulated and helped to administer; then, an increasing distaste for reforms arose, often in direct response to their effectiveness.

Legislative Reference Service, organized under another recent Wisconsin graduate student, the energetic Charles McCarthy.

In the age of the railroad, the telephone, the telegraph, and the insurance company, the problems of the state, he remarked, were growing so various and complex that vast amounts of information were necessary for legislators to deal with them intelligently. “The only sensible thing to do is to have experts gather this material.”

The commitment of the university to Progressivism had never been completely accepted within the institution itself.

more than this, many felt that the practical involvement of the university, regardless of its precise political shading, was itself a betrayal of the old-fashioned ideals of pure, disinterested intellectualism. J. F. A. Pyre, writing about the university in 1920, took issue with Van Hise’s view that the university should be conceived as “an asset of the state.” This, he said, was an excessively materialistic view of its function and downgraded the tradition of disinterested and autonomous learning, to the ultimate cost of the university.

This ferment of ideas, however, brought no social revolution; the old masters of America emerged,

But in matters of tone and style there was a powerful uplift, and tone and style are of first importance not only to scholars and men of letters, but to politicians as well. No one benefited more than the intellectuals, whether they were publicists like Walter Lippmann and Herbert Croly or academic scholars like John Dewey and Charles A. Beard. All their work was animated by the heartening sense that the gulf between the world of theory and the world of practice had been finally bridged.

He admired intellectual ability, just as he admired business ability, and, if anything, his admiration for intellect was firmer.8 But what he called “character” he unceasingly placed above both. Indeed, he embodied the American preference for character over intellect in politics and life, and the all but universal tendency to assume that the two somehow stand in opposition to each other.

by making use of theorists and professors as advisers and ideologists, the New Deal brought the force of mind into closer relation with power than it had been within the memory of any living man—closer than it had been since the days of the Founding Fathers.

The primary manifestation of the changed position of intellectuals was the creation of the brain trust, which was almost constantly in the news during the first few years of the New Deal.

From time to time the reputation and recognition of intellect in politics may vary, but the demand for expertise seems constantly to rise.

One of the difficulties in the relation of intellect to power is that certain primary functions of intellect are widely felt to be threatened almost as much by being associated with power as by being relegated to a position of impotence. An acute and paradoxical problem of intellect as a force in modern society stems from the fact that it cannot lightly reconcile itself either to its association with power or to its exclusion from an important political role.

No doubt there is a certain measure of inherent dissonance between business enterprise and intellectual enterprise: being dedicated to different sets of values, they are bound to conflict; and intellect is always potentially threatening to any institutional apparatus or to fixed centers of power.

Quite as important as the general grounds that make for enmity are the historical circumstances that have muted or accentuated it.

The values of business and intellect are seen as eternally and inevitably at odds: on the one side, there is the money-centered or power-centered man, who cares only about bigness and the dollar, about boosting and hollow optimism; on the other side, there are the men of critical intellect, who distrust American civilization and concern themselves with quality and moral values. The intellectual is well aware of the elaborate apparatus which the businessman uses to mold our civilization to his purposes and adapt it to his standards. The businessman is everywhere; he fills the coffers of the political parties; he owns or controls the influential press and the agencies of mass culture; he sits on university boards of trustees and on local school boards; he mobilizes and finances cultural vigilantes; his voice dominates the rooms in which the real decisions are made.

With some variations of details suitable to social classes and historical circumstances, the excessive practical bias so often attributed only to business is found almost everywhere in America. 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. Practical vigor is a virtue; what has been spiritually crippling in our history is the tendency to make a mystique of practicality.

business is the most powerful and pervasive interest in American life. This is true both in the sense that the claims of practicality have been an overweening force in American life and in the sense that, since the mid-nineteenth century, businessmen have brought to anti-intellectual movements more strength than any other force in society.

The fear of mind and the disdain for culture, so quickly evident wherever the prior claims of practicality are urged in the literature of business, are ubiquitous themes. They rest upon 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.

America, as it is commonly said, has been a country without monuments or ruins—that is, without those inescapable traces of the ancestral human spirit with which all Europeans live and whose meanings, at least in their broadest outlines, can hardly be evaded by even the simplest peasant or workman.

America has been the country of those who fled from the past. Its population was selected by migration from among those most determined to excise history from their lives.

What was at stake was not entirely a technological or materialistic barbarianism which aimed merely to slough off all the baggage of history. Among other things, the American attitude represented a republican and egalitarian protest against monarchy and aristocracy and the callous exploitation of the people; it represented a rationalistic protest against superstition; an energetic and forward-looking protest against the passivity and pessimism of the Old World; it revealed a dynamic, vital, and originative mentality.

But by forgetting the past one loses sight of the impetus for seeking a new life and the positive aspects which were in that moment an aspiration, as well as why they were valued. Then one falls prey, at least in Western societies, of the dogma of pure pragmatism. An absolutist approach to the world as blinding and disarming of intellectual agency as any dogma or fundamentalism.

The more thoroughly business dominated American society, the less it felt the need to justify its existence by reference to values outside its own domain. In earlier days it had looked for sanction in the claim that the vigorous pursuit of trade served God, and later that it served character and culture. Although this argument did not disappear, it grew less conspicuous in the business rationale.

Modern students of social mobility have made it incontestably clear that 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.1 The topmost positions in American industry, even in the most hectic days of nineteenth-century expansion, were held for the most part by men who had begun life with decided advantages. But there were enough self-made men, and their rise was dramatic and appealing enough, to give substance to the myth.

the literature of self-help was not a literature of business methods or techniques; it did not deal with production, accounting, engineering, advertising, or investments; it dealt with the development of character, and nowhere were its Protestant origins more manifest.

The reader, who will be unlikely to think of the agricultural and mechanical colleges as pre-eminently centers of intellectualism, may question what was accomplished and what is being asserted here.

The essential point here is that 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.

It was not possible to develop labor leadership of the type that could finally succeed in creating permanent organizations in America until a curious dialectic had been gone through: first, the influence of intellectuals and their systematic critique of capitalism created an awareness of the necessity for and the possibilities of a labor movement; but then, in successive stages, this influence had to be thrown off before the labor movement could shed distractions and excrescences, devote itself to organizing job-conscious trade unions, and establish itself on a durable and successful footing.

Three pressures, in the main, seem to alienate the intellectual from the union milieu. The first, operative only for some, is a passion for reform, an ideological commitment that may have made the intellectual want to work for a union in the first place.

The second source of alienation is his professional feeling for research, his disinterested desire for the truth, which on occasion runs up against the necessities of the union as a militant organization or the personal imperatives of a leader.

Finally, there is a type of alienation which is simply personal, which arises from the education and in some cases the personal culture of the expert. He is out of place, he is not the right kind of man, he would not be sought after as a companion if his services weren’t needed.

As to the vast, inarticulate body of the American public, it is impossible to be certain exactly what it expected from the school system, other than an opportunity for the advancement of its children.

The old school readers contained a considerable proportion of good literature, but even at their best the selections were hardly chosen because they would inculcate the values of creative intellect. As Mrs. Elson remarks, the primary intellectual value these books embodied was utility.

A similar pride was expressed that American colleges and universities, unlike those of Europe, were not devoted simply to the acquisition of knowledge but to the moral cultivation of their students. The American college was complacently portrayed as a place designed to form character and inculcate sound principle rather than to lead to the pursuit of truth.

The function of education in inculcating usable skills and in broadening social opportunities was always clear. The value of developing the mind for intellectual or imaginative achievement or even contemplative enjoyment was considerably less clear and less subject to common agreement.

They know that their teachers are ill-paid and they are quick to agree that teachers should be better paid. The more ambitious and able among them also conclude that schoolteaching is not for them.1 In this way, the mediocrity of the teaching profession tends to perpetuate itself. In so far as the teacher stands before his pupils as a surrogate of the intellectual life and its rewards, he unwittingly makes this life appear altogether unattractive.

Complaints such as those of Caldwell and Carter, men who hoped to work some educational reform, probably exaggerated the case; but if they did, they only reflected a stereotype of the teacher that had fixed itself in the mind of the country. A vicious circle had been drawn. American communities had found it hard to find, train, or pay for good teachers. They settled for what they could get, and what they got was a high proportion of misfits and incompetents. They tended to conclude that teaching was a trade which attracted rascals, and, having so concluded, they were reluctant to pay the rascals more than they were worth.

in America, where teaching has been identified as a feminine profession, it does not offer men the stature of a fully legitimate male role. 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. There are often not enough male models or idols among their teachers whose performance will convey the sense that the world of mind is legitimately male, who can give them masculine examples of intellectual inquiry or cultural life, and who can be regarded as sufficiently successful and important in the world to make it conceivable for vigorous boys to enter teaching themselves for a livelihood.

Toward the close of the nineteenth century, two contrasting views of the purposes of the public high schools were already competing for dominance.5 The original view, which remained in the ascendant until 1910 and continued to have much influence for at least another decade, might be dubbed old-fashioned or intellectually serious,

The high school, it was believed by those who held this view, should above all discipline and develop the minds of its pupils through the study of academic subject matter. Its well-informed advocates were quite aware that a majority of pupils were not being educated beyond high school; but they argued that the same education which was good preparation for college was good preparation for life.

Spokesmen of this school were intensely concerned that the pupil, whatever the precise content of his curriculum, should pursue every subject that he studied long enough to gain some serious mastery of its content. (In the continuing debate over education the ideal of “mastery” of subject matter dominates the thinking of the intellectualists, whereas the ideal of meeting the “needs” of children becomes the central conception of their opponents.)

The rhetoric of the commission’s report made it clear that the members thought of themselves as recommending not an educational retreat but rather an advance toward the realization of democratic ideals. The report is breathless with the idealism of the Progressive era and the war—with the hope of making the educational world safe for democracy and bringing a full measure of opportunity to every child.

The American mind seems extremely vulnerable to the belief that any alleged knowledge which can be expressed in figures is in fact as final and exact as the figures in which it is expressed.

Thorndike and his followers had shown, Prosser imagined, that there is no such thing as intellectual discipline whose benefits can be transferred from one study, situation, or problem to another.

Contrary, then, to what had been believed by exponents of the older concept of education as the development of intellectual discipline, there are no general mental qualities to be developed; there are only specific things to be known.

The usability and teachability of these things go hand in hand; the more immediately usable an item of knowledge is, the more readily it can be taught.

Politically the older education was conservative, in that it accepted the existing order of society and called upon the child to assert himself within its framework—which was largely that of nineteenth-century individualism. But it was also democratic in that it did not commonly assume, much less rejoice in the idea, that large numbers, from any class in society, were necessarily incapable by native endowment of entering with some degree of hope into the world of academic competition, mastery of subject matter, and discipline of mind and character.