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# 2025-05-24 - Anti-Intellectualism In American Life
# by Richard Hofstadter
Someone recommended this book to me in 2020 and said it was relevant
to the current political climate in the US. I found the book dry and
boring at times, and fascinating at others. The most surprising part
for me was the discussion of masculinity. I did not realize that it
was an academic subject in the 1950's. This book mentions the rise
of a hyper-masculine ethos after the Civil War, for example:
> Jesus Christ could go like a six-cylinder engine, and if you think
> Jesus couldn't, you're dead wrong.
>
> Lord save us from off-handed, flabby-cheeked, brittle-boned,
> weak-kneed, thin-skinned, pliable, plastic, spineless, effeminate
> ossified three-karat Christianity.
>
> I have no interest in a God who does not smite.
>
> --Billy Sunday
I found several other parts of this book surprising in the same way.
I remember an associate talking about how he hated hipsters in the
SFBA. I didn't realize that writers were using the term "hipster"
in the 1950's and making the same generalizations that we make today.
Evolution of the Hipster by Paste Magazine (2010)
> One of the qualities that has so readily subjected the beatniks to
> mockery in the mass media and the other literature of the squares
> is this distinctive uniformity--which the beatniks have carried to
> the point of having their own dress. They have created a new
> paradox: a conformity of alienation.
> ...
> The spokesmen of the beatnik, and the hipster, and the left have
> their own quarrels about the proper style of alienation and the
> limits of its expression; but they all share a common conviction
> that there is some proper style or stance or posture to be
> recommended which will somehow release the individuality and
> creativity of the artist, or sustain the capacities of the social
> critic and protect him from corruption.
Regarding the ironies of bigotry:
> Today's conspiracy theorists call migrants and refugees secret
> invaders when we are, in point of fact, the ones invading them. Not
> with engineers or strawberry-pickers but with bombs and military
> bases. Conspiracy theorists accuse their enemies of being secretly
> funded by billionaires when they're the ones on a payroll. Those who
> warn about secret invasions like to talk about how women are poorly
> treated under Islamic fundamentalism; coincidentally, these are the
> same people who also cry themselves to sleep over our feminist
> excesses (which, what are the odds, is also what the
> fundamentalists say they are protecting their societies from).
The Humanist magazine, Jul/Aug 2020
The book also discusses the history of US education at length.
I have already read about the US education system being based on
Prussia's. What i didn't know was that the Prussian example was the
only free common-school system available at that time to use as a
model.
> The Americans were the first other people in modern history to
> follow the Prussian example in establishing free common-school
> systems.
The book discusses the outcomes of the US education system. I have
read many opinions about children needing to be in the outdoors, to
have personal attention, and many other things not present in the
US education (Black Elk, Tagore, etc). Here is an interesting quote
by E. O Wilson comparing public schooled children to cattle in a
feed lot.
> The dire comparison I make is between children brought up in a
> totally humanized, artifactual environment, urban or suburban, and
> cattle brought up in a feedlot. When you see cattle in a feedlot,
> they seem perfectly content, but they're not cattle. It's an
> exaggeration, of course, to compare those with children, but
> somehow children can be perfectly happy with computer screens and
> games and movies where they get to see not only African wildlife
> but, lo and behold, dinosaurs. But they're just not fully
> developing their psychic energy and their propensities to develop
> and seek on their own.
>
> --E. O. Wilson
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/conversation-eo-wilson/
The book makes a distinction between intelligence and the intellect.
I have read many variations on this theme. Usually intelligence is
described as being merely clever like a fox, and intellectual
brilliance involves the creativity of an inventor.
By the way, i lost about half of my notes in Orgzly. I had way more
notes about the history of US education. I blame my data loss on
Android Go Edition. I suspect its limitations make it prone to
killing processes in a way that risks data loss. I will try remember
to commit new notes instead of leaving them open in Orgzly.
What follows are interesting quotes from the book.
# Chapter 1: Anti-intellectualism In Our Time
Primarily it was McCarthyism which, aroused the fear that the
critical mind was at a ruinous discount in this country. Of course,
intellectuals were not the only targets of McCarthy s constant
detonations he was after bigger game but intellectuals were in the
line of fire, and it seemed to give special rejoicing to his
followers when they were hit.
Finally, in 1957, the launching of the Sputnik by the Soviets
precipitated one of those periodic surges of self-conscious national
reappraisal to which the American public is prone. The Sputnik was
more than a shock to American national vanity; it brought an immense
amount of attention to bear on the consequences of
anti-intellectualism in the school system and in American life at
large. Suddenly the national distaste for intellect appeared to be
not just a disgrace but a hazard to survival.
I am disposed to believe that anti-intellectualism, though it has its
own universality, may be considered a part of our English cultural
inheritance, and that it is notably strong in Anglo-American
experience. A few years ago Leonard Woolf remarked that "no people
has ever despised and distrusted the intellect and intellectuals more
than the British."
# Chapter 2: On The Unpopularity Of The Intellect
Intelligence is an excellence of mind that is employed within a
fairly narrow, immediate, and predictable range; it is a
manipulative, adjustive, unfailingly practical quality--one of the
most eminent and endearing of the animal virtues. Intelligence works
within the framework of limited but clearly stated goals, and may be
quick to shear away questions of thought that do not seem to help in
reaching them. Finally, it is of such universal use that it can daily
be seen at work and admired alike by simple or complex minds.
Intellect, on the other hand, is the critical, creative, and
contemplative side of mind. Whereas intelligence seeks to grasp,
manipulate, re-order, adjust; intellect examines, ponders, wonders,
theorizes, criticizes, imagines. Intelligence will seize the
immediate meaning in a situation and evaluate it. Intellect evaluates
evaluations, and looks for the meanings of situations as a whole.
This distinction may seem excessively abstract, but it is frequently
illustrated in American culture. ... perhaps the most impressive
illustration arises from a comparison of the American regard for
inventive skill as opposed to skill in pure science. Our greatest
inventive genius, Thomas A. Edison, was all but canonized by the
American public, and a legend has been built around him. One cannot,
I suppose, expect that achievements in pure science would receive the
same public applause that came to inventions as spectacular and as
directly influential on ordinary life as Edison's. But one might have
expected that our greatest genius in pure science, Josiah Willard
Gibbs, who laid the theoretical foundations for modern physical
chemistry, would have been a figure of some comparable acclaim among
the educated public. Yet Gibbs, whose work was celebrated in Europe,
lived out his life in public and even professional obscurity at Yale,
where he taught for thirty-two years. Yale, which led American
universities in its scientific achievements during the nineteenth
century, was unable in those thirty-two years to provide him with
more than a half dozen or so graduate students who could understand
his work, and never took the trouble to award him an honorary degree.
Piety, then, needs a counterpoise, something to prevent it from being
exercised in an excessively rigid way; and this it has, in most
intellectual temperaments, in the quality I would call playfulness.
... Veblen spoke often of the intellectual faculty as
"idle curiosity" but this is a misnomer in so far as the curiosity of
the playful mind is inordinately restless and active. This very
restlessness and activity gives a distinctive cast to its view of
truth and its discontent with dogmas.
Whatever the intellectual is too certain of, if he is healthily
playful, he begins to find unsatisfactory. The meaning of his
intellectual life lies not in the possession of truth but in the
quest for new uncertainties. Harold Rosenberg summed up this side of
the life of the mind supremely well when he said that the
intellectual is one who turns answers into questions.
It is, in fact, the ability to comprehend and express not only
different but opposing points of view, to identify imaginatively with
or even to embrace within oneself contrary feelings and ideas that
gives rise to first-rate work in all areas of humanistic expression
and in many fields of inquiry.
I have suggested that one of the first questions asked in America
about intellect and intellectuals concerns their practicality. One
reason why anti-intellectualism has changed in our time is that our
sense of the impracticality of intellect has been transformed. During
the nineteenth century, when business criteria dominated American
culture almost without challenge, and when most business and
professional men attained eminence without much formal education,
academic schooling was often said to be useless. It was assumed that
schooling existed not to cultivate certain distinctive qualities of
mind but to make personal advancement possible.
There has always been in our national experience a type of mind which
elevates hatred to a kind of creed; for this mind, group hatreds take
a place in politics similar to the class struggle in some other
modern societies. Filled with obscure and ill-directed grievances and
frustrations, with elaborate hallucinations about secrets and
conspiracies, groups of malcontents have found scapegoats at various
times in Masons or abolitionists, Catholics, Mormons, or Jews,
Negroes or immigrants, the liquor interests or the international
bankers. In the succession of scapegoats chosen by the followers of
this tradition of Know-Nothingism, the intelligentsia have at last in
our time found a place.
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. 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. Once the validity of these antagonisms is
accepted, then the case for intellect, and by extension for the
intellectual, is lost. Who cares to risk sacrificing warmth of
emotion, solidity of character, practical capacity, or democratic
sentiment in order to pay deference to a type of man who at best is
deemed to be merely clever and at worst may even be dangerous? 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. Neither in the development of the individual character nor
in the course of history are problems posed in such a simple or
abstract fashion. For the same reason it would be pointless to accept
the form in which the challenge is put and attempt to make a defense
of intellect as against emotion or character or practicality.
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.
In America primitivism has affected the thinking of many men too
educated and cultivated to run with the frontier revivalists but
sympathetic to their underlying distrust for civilized forms. It is
visible in Transcendentalism which sometimes set itself up as the
evangelicalism of the highbrows.
All this is hardly surprising: America was settled by men and women
who repudiated European civilization for its oppressiveness or
decadence, among other reasons...
# Chapter 3: The Evangelical Spirit
As the English religious reformers became convinced that the
Reformation had not gone far enough to meet the social or spiritual
demands of their followers, successive waves of Millennarians,
Anabaptists, Seekers, Ranters, and Quakers assailed the established
order and its clergy, preached a religion of the poor, argued for
intuition and inspiration as against learning and doctrine, elevated
lay preachers to leadership, and rejected the professional clergy as
"null and void and without authority." At the time of the Puritan
revolution, the preachers of the New Model Army were unsparing in
their anti-professional and anti-intellectual broadsides against the
clergy, the university teachers, and the lawyers.
# Chapter 5: The Revolt Against Modernity
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 percent 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 fundamentalist morality. The one-hundred percenter, who
will tolerate no ambiguities, no equivocations, no reservations, and
no criticism, considers his kind of committedness an evidence of
toughness and masculinity. One observer remarked of Sunday that no
man of the time, "not even Mr. Roosevelt himself, has insisted so
much on his personal, militant masculinity." Jesus was a scrapper,
and his disciple Sunday would destroy the notion that a Christian
must be "a sort of dishrag proposition, a wishy-washy sissified sort
of galoot that lets everybody make a doormat out of him." ...he
summed up his temper when he confessed: "I have no interest in a God
who does not smite."
He brooked no suggestion that fundamentalism was not thoroughgoing,
impregnable, and tough. He turned his gift for invective as
unsparingly on the higher criticism and on evolution as on everything
else that displeased him. "Thousands of college graduates are going
as fast as they can straight to hell. If I had a million dollars I d
give $999,999 to the church and $1 to education. ... When the word of
God says one thing and scholarship says another, scholarship can go
to hell!"
In 1926 Hiram W. Evans, the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan,
wrote... "The Klan does not believe that the fact that it is
emotional and instinctive, rather than coldly intellectual, is a
weakness. All action comes from emotion, rather than from
ratiocination. Our emotions and the instincts on which they are based
have been bred into us for thousands of years; far longer than reason
has had a place in the human brain. ... They are the foundations of
our American civilization, even more than our great historic
documents; they can be trusted where the fine-haired reasoning of the
denatured intellectuals cannot."
The Georgia assemblyman who said: "Read the Bible. It teaches you how
to act. Read the hymn-book. It contains the finest poetry ever
written. Read the almanac. It shows you how to figure out what the
weather will be. There isn't another book that it is necessary for
anyone to read, and therefore I am opposed to all libraries." may
seem too obscure to be worth notice; but one can hardly say the same
of a former Secretary of State and three-time candidate for the
presidency who could proclaim, as Bryan did in a speech before
Seventh-Day Adventists in 1924: "All the ills from which America
suffers can be traced back to the teaching of evolution. It would be
better to destroy every other book ever written, and save just the
first three verses of Genesis."
Both quotations are in Maynard Shipley: The War on Modern Science
(New York, 1927), pp. 330, 254-5, Such remarks are in the main
tradition of evangelicalism, but they reflect its increasing
shrillness in this period.
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 Communism, which, as
everyone knows, is atheism. ... It is not concerned with the
realities of power with the fact, say, that the Soviets have the bomb
but with the spiritual battle with the Communist, preferably the
domestic Communist, whose reality does not consist in what he does,
or even in the fact that he exists, but who represents, rather, an
archetypal opponent in a spiritual wrestling match.
# Chapter 6: The Decline of the Gentleman
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: and within this elite men of intellect moved freely
and spoke with enviable authority. Since it was an unspecialized and
versatile age, the intellectual as expert was a negligible force; but
the intellectual as ruling-class gentleman was a leader in every
segment of society at the bar, in the professions, in business, and
in political affairs. The Founding Fathers were sages, scientists,
men of broad cultivation, many of them apt in classical learning, who
used their wide reading in history, politics, and law to solve the
exigent problems of their time.
It is ironic that the United States should have been founded by
intellectuals; for throughout most of our political history, the
intellectual has been for the most part either an outsider, a
servant, or a scapegoat.
# Chapter 7: The Fate of the Reformer
The central idea of the reformers the idea--which they all agreed
upon and which excited their deepest concern was the improvement of
the civil service, without which they believed no other reform could
be successfully carried out. The ideal of civil-service reform
brought into direct opposition the credo of the professional
politicians, who put then--faith in party organisation and party
rewards and the practice of rotation in office, and the ideals of the
reformers, who wanted competence, efficiency, and economy in the
public service, open competition for jobs on the basis of merit, and
security of tenure. The reformers looked to various models for their
proposals to the American military services, to bureaucratic systems
in Prussia or even China; but principally this English-oriented
intellectual class looked for inspiration to England, where
civil-service reorganization had been under way since the publication
of the Northcote-Trevelyan Report in 1854. The English civil-service
reformers had designed their proposals in full awareness of the
organic relation of the civil service to the class structure and to
the educational system. They had planned a civil service which, as
Gladstone observed, would give the gentlemanly classes "command over
all the higher posts" and allot to members of the lower classes the
positions that could be filled by persons with more practical and
less expensive training.
The politicians and bosses found their answer in crying down the
superior education and culture of their critics as political
liabilities, and in questioning their adequacy for the difficult and
dirty work of day-to-day politics. As the politicians put it, they,
the bosses and party workers, had to function in the bitter world of
reality in which the common people also had to live and earn their
living. This was not the sphere of morals and ideals, of education
and culture: it was the hard, masculine sphere of business and
politics. The reformers, they said, claimed to be unselfish; but if
this was true at all, it was true only because they were alien
commentators upon an area of life in which they did not have to work
and for which in fact they were unfit. In the hard-driving,
competitive, ruthless, materialistic world of the Gilded Age, to be
unselfish suggested not purity but a lack of self, a lack of capacity
for grappling with reality, a lack of assertion, of masculinity.
# Chapter 9: Business And Intellect
For at least three quarters of a century business has been
stigmatized by most American intellectuals as the classic enemy of
intellect; businessmen themselves have so long accepted this role
that by now their enmity seems to be a fact of nature. 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. But this enmity, being qualified by a certain
mutual dependence, need not take the form of constant open warfare.
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.
# Chapter 10: Self Help And Spiritual Technology
As the mercantile ideal declined, it was replaced by the ideal of the
self-made man, an ideal which reflected the experiences and
aspirations of countless village boys who had become, if not
millionaires, at least substantial men of business. 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. 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 idea of the self-made man was not new. It was a historical out
growth of Puritan preachings and of the Protestant doctrine of the
calling. Benjamin Franklin had preached it, but it is significant
that his own later life was not lived in accordance with his
catchpenny maxims.
Irvin G Wyllie, in his illuminating study, The Self-Made Man in
America, points out that 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.
> for I am mediocre. But . . . business and life are built upon
> successful mediocrity; and victory comes to companies not through
> the employment of brilliant men, but through knowing how to get the
> most out of ordinary folks.
>
> Why I Never Hire Brilliant Men by Anonymous
> American Magazine, Feb 1924
> Volume 97, Page 170
Why I Never Hire Brilliant Men by Anonymous
# Chapter 12: The School and the Teacher
The Americans were the first other people in modern history to follow
the Prussian example in establishing free common-school systems.
Among their earliest statutes were land ordinances setting aside a
portion of the public domain to support school systems. Their rapidly
proliferating schoolhouses and libraries testified to their concern
for the diffusion of knowledge, and their lyceums and Chautauquas
showed that this concern, far from ending with the school years,
extended to the education of adults.
That something has always been seriously missing in our educational
performance, despite the high promise of our rhetoric, has been
evident to the educators who have taken our hopes most seriously.
That American teachers are not well rewarded or esteemed is almost
universally recognized in contemporary comment.
The unenviable situation of the teacher can be traced back to the
earliest days of our history. The educational enthusiasm of the
American people was never keen enough to dispose them to support
their teachers very well.
author: Hofstadter, Richard, 1916-1970
detail: gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/Anti-intellectualism_in_American_Life
LOC: E169.1 .H74
tags: book,history,non-fiction,political
title: Anti-Intellectualism In American Life
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