ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM

The term "anti-intellectualism" refers to a perceived cultural bias in America against those dedicated to conceptual production and analysis rather than to pragmatic, practical industry. Much evidence suggests that this perception is an accurate one, even within institutions of higher learning—the oft-called "ivory towers"—when one looks simply at the appropriation of funds made within them. According to Richard Hofstadter (1916–1970), who authored Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963), one of the most important studies of this bias, the term itself was rarely heard before the 1950s, when McCarthyism made many people suspicious of thinkers and social critics. Despite the late usage of the term, however, the phenomenon itself goes back much further than the 1950s. Hofstadter is reluctant to define "anti-intellectualism," believing it a complicated phenomenon manifested in many forms; nevertheless, he writes: "The common strain that binds together the attitudes and ideas which I call anti-intellectual is a resentment and suspicion of the life of the mind and of those who are considered to represent it; and a disposition constantly to minimize the value of that life" (p. 7).

That this resentment and suspicion often went unnamed is perhaps accounted for by the relatively recent introduction of the word "intellectual." First coming into use in France in 1898, the term was soon used by William James (1842–1910) in an 1899 letter. James clearly sees the intellectual as one who stands in opposition to many social structures, an individual away from the herd. "We 'intellectuals' in America," writes James, "must all work to keep our precious birthright of individualism, and freedom from these institutions [church, army, aristocracy, royalty]. Every great institution is perforce a means of corruption—whatever good it may also do" (Hofstadter, p. 39). As Hofstadter notes, referring to oneself as one who stands outside the norms naturally leads to a backlash; those who accept traditional social structures view dimly those who stand outside and question or criticize those structures.

Though many historians of the 1960s and since have discounted Hofstadter's view of American intellectual history, arguing that he believed anti-intellectualism too pervasive in society, his study is still used in contemporary scholarship. Hofstadter provides a good basic framework with which to understand the roots and manifestations of anti-intellectualism in the United States. He clearly shows how it connects to American business, politics, religion, education, and, ironically, thought. Hofstadter writes that "anti-intellectualism is not the creation of people who are categorically hostile to ideas. . . . Few intellectuals are without moments of anti-intellectualism; few anti-intellectuals without single-minded intellectual passions" (p. 21). Hofstadter writes, for example, about the anti-intellectualism found in transcendentalism with its emphasis on feeling over reason, and of Benjamin Franklin's emphasis on practical success in the world, but he does not argue that the thinkers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Franklin are inherently anti-intellectual. Hofstadter states: "To be confronted with a simple and unqualified evil [antiintellectualism] is no doubt a kind of luxury; but such is not the case here." Rather, Hofstadter argues that anti-intellectualism is "a broadly diffused quality in our civilization" (p. 22), and he does a thorough job of demonstrating that point. The wide areas of his inquiry—business, politics, religion, and education—overlap in life and in literature and provide a useful framework to highlight works and events of the early twentieth century that exhibit anti-intellectualism.

THE ROOTS OF ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM

Following the notion of Van Wyck Brooks (1886–1963) that the prevailing influence on American culture is its Puritan origins, Hofstadter sees American anti-intellectualism as grounded in "the framework of our religious history" (p. 47). Hofstadter takes care, however, to note how important education was to a society that founded Harvard amidst the burdens of disease and war borne by the colonists, and that Harvard students studied not only theology but also the classics. One might assume that anti-intellectualism would stem from the Puritan values of practicality and industry, but Hofstadter sees it instead as a reaction to Puritanism. The initial appearance of anti-intellectualism coincided with the First Great Awakening, when American religion took a decided movement toward emotionalism and away from the self-restraint of Puritanism.

As is true of most social movements and forces, anti-intellectualism can be seen as a reaction to trains of thought that precede it. The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries brought Darwinism, Freudianism, and Marxism to the public eye, along with higher criticism (the study of sacred texts as literature) and a greater emphasis on scientific method. These ideas, associated with modernism, led to a psychological decentralization of humankind. If humanity was a product of evolution rather than special creation; if humanity was driven by unconscious instincts rather than guided by a benevolent creator; if human history was a product of class struggle, not the playing out of a divine comedy; if sacred texts were not inerrant and historically accurate—then large segments of humanity were left without the ways they had customarily thought of themselves. Thus, modernism was met with a reactionary zeal born out of psychological turmoil. In order to hang onto what they believed, many people found it necessary to fight new ideas with vehemence.

Hofstadter does not single out evangelicalism alone as the sustainer of anti-intellectualism: "If evangelicalism and primitivism helped to plant anti-intellectualism at the roots of American consciousness," writes Hofstadter, "a business society assured that it would remain in the foreground of American thinking" (p. 49). The quick-thinking and aggressive—these people were what spurred America forward, not the contemplative. These traits became so pronounced in the American character that the standards of business influenced the professions, leading to a greater "egalitarian spirit . . . still more effective in politics and education" (p. 50). Similar ideas can be found in the writings of the historian Frederick Jackson Turner (1861–1932), whose "frontier hypothesis"—first voiced in "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" (1893)—emphasized the individualism and self-reliance of the American character rather than its intellectual exploits. Indeed, Hofstadter claims that the "first truly powerful and widespread impulse to anti-intellectualism in American politics was, in fact, given by the Jacksonian movement" (p. 155). Jacksonian democracy "is founded in the democratic institutions and egalitarian sentiments of this country," which leads to "the vulgarization of culture which that society constantly produces" (p. 407).

THE HIGHBROWS AND THE LOWBROWS

It was this kind of vulgarization that led Van Wyck Brooks to bemoan the "highbrow" and the "lowbrow" in American literature and culture in America's Coming-of-Age (1915). He was not alone in feeling this distinction. By the 1940s it had worked its way into popular culture via Cab Calloway's "Foo a Little Bally-Hoo," in which the singer optimistically intones that "the highbrows are swinging with the lowbrows." Frederick Lewis Allen (1890–1954), in Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the Nineteen-Twenties (1931), writes of what he calls "The Revolt of the Highbrows," a period in which a diverse group of intellectuals "rose in loud and bitter revolt" (p. 190). Allen says, "their revolt against the frock-coated respectability and decorous formality of American literature had been under way for several years; Theodore Dreiser, Willa Cather, Carl Sandburg, Edgar Lee Masters, Robert Frost, Vachel Lindsay, Amy Lowell, and the Imagists and exponents of free verse had been breaking new ground since before the War [World War I]" (p. 191).

In Civilization in the United States (1922), a collection compiled by American intellectuals, the consensus opinion was that "the most amusing and pathetic fact in the social life of America today is its emotional and aesthetic starvation" (Allen, p. 191). Though Civilization in the United States appeared later than 1920, the complaint existed prior to that date. One example of this "emotional and aesthetic starvation" is found in the 1905 short story "Paul's Case" by Willa Cather (1873–1947). It focuses on a Pittsburgh high school student who is afflicted with an educationally based torpor and a bleak existence at home. He is expelled from school, forbidden entrance to the theater he dearly loves, and put to work. Shortly after entering the world of commerce, Paul absconds with a sum of money and travels to New York, leaving behind his father's dull apartment, where Paul's bedroom is decorated with portraits of George Washington and John Calvin. On the stolen money, Paul lives a brief life of luxury and excess, perhaps starved by earlier emotional deprivations. When he learns that his father is coming to New York to retrieve him, Paul jumps to his death in front of a locomotive, becoming a symbol of the individual constrained by society, the locomotive signifying the force and power of the society that accepts no variations.

Though "Paul's Case" can be read as a story of an aesthete confronting a barren society, the story also suggests that Paul is homosexual. In the context of anti-intellectualism, this is noteworthy because, as Hofstadter asserts, intellectuals have often been labeled as effeminate or homosexual within American society, perhaps suggesting to the homophobic mind that intellectualism is a perversion. This kind of charge is leveled at Wing Biddlebaum in Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small Town Life (1919) by Sherwood Anderson (1876–1941). Wing was a dedicated teacher who was lashed out of his town after a simple-minded schoolboy falsely accused him of sexual molestation. After later settling in Winesburg, Wing lives an isolated life, victimized by a public who believes the worst of one who seeks to enlighten its youth. Wing is not the only sufferer in Winesburg. The reader continually encounters characters suffering from a variety of emotional deprivations, living lives of quiet desperation unless they, like Winesburg's George Willard, somehow manage to escape from the tiny community to a place where they might be able to live fuller lives away from the stultifying effects of commerce, religion, and provincialism.

Though Frederick Lewis Allen's Only Yesterday concerns the decade of the 1920s, which is outside the scope of this volume, it is noteworthy that both he and Hofstadter identify the journalist H. L. Mencken and the novelist Sinclair Lewis as among the most important figures to speak out against the anti-intellectualism they saw in American society. In 1925 Mencken (1880–1956) covered the Scopes "Monkey Trial," perhaps one of the most famous twentieth-century instances of modernism colliding with religious fundamentalism. Mencken, however, had ample preparation prior to 1920 for covering that case, being known for his criticism of America and its "booboisie" as a writer for the Baltimore Sun.

In an essay first published in the New York Evening Mail (13 November 1917), Mencken took on what he saw as the intellectual poverty of the American South. His essay, "The Sahara of the Bozart," is not an example of eastern elitism; instead, it laments the loss of intellectual greatness that the South once presented: "The New England shopkeepers and theologians never really developed a civilization; all they ever developed was a government. They were, at their best, tawdry and tacky fellows, oafish in manner and devoid of imagination; one searches the books in vain for mention of a salient Yankee gentleman" (Mencken, "The Sahara of the Bozart," p. 159). Noting a few exceptions, such as James Branch Cabell, Mencken sees no artists, historians, sociologists, philosophers, theologians or scientists in the area between the "Potomac mud-flats and the Gulf." Mencken attributes this lack to a decline of southern aristocracy, a class that had the leisure to establish a culture, and to the "poor white trash" (Mencken, "The Sahara of the Bozart," p. 159) that came into power after the aristocracy faded. This less sophisticated group brought with it a lower-class philistinism and fundamentalism. Mencken thus outlines what Hofstadter identifies as an ironic product of democratization of society overall and, of course, the educational opportunities afforded by that society. Democracy, in one sense, leads to anti-intellectualism, simply because it elevates groups naturally antithetical to and suspicious of the intellectual. The effect of this is a strengthening of an anti-intellectual element within American culture and a further isolation of the intellectual. Such was the state of American culture and of the "booboisie" that defined it in popular terms.

SINCLAIR LEWIS AND MAIN STREET

Such was also the culture that Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) dramatized in Main Street (1920), one of his many novels that anatomized American mainstream society. He did the same thing in Babbitt (1922), from which the words "Babbitt" and "Babbittry" entered the English language, signifying those who unthinkingly support an anti-intellectual status quo. Main Street tells the story of Carol Kennicott, an easterner who moves to Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, and futilely attempts to bring higher culture to the small midwestern town. Hofstadter has pointed out that anti-intellectuals are not necessarily stupid, as Carol learns when she discovers that "outside of tracts, conservatives do not tremble and find no answer when an iconoclast turns on them, but retort with agility and confusing statistics" (p. 276). Carol later wonders of her small-town companions, "when will they have me on the scaffold?" (p. 372), perhaps not only noting the pettiness of bourgeois society but also speculating on the fate, literal or figurative, of those who try to change it.

CONCLUSION

Anti-intellectualism is not a distinctly American phenomenon, nor did it come into existence suddenly and with a name. Nor did the revolt against it prior to and during the 1920s put an end to it. It did not go into remission when the term first came into common usage in the 1950s, nor did the use of that term check it. Anti-intellectualism still figures strongly in twenty-first-century America. One need look no further for evidence of the conflict than a daily newspaper or a cable news network, or to a situation comedy or "reality" show. Though people may disagree on who is the anti-intellectual, the phenomenon is characterized by doctrinaire thinking and by appealing to the lowest common denominators of the public taste. As H. L. Mencken famously said in his "Notes on Journalism," "No one in this world, so far as I know . . . has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people."

See alsoGenteel Tradition; Literary Criticism; Pragmatism

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Anderson, Sherwood. Winesburg, Ohio. 1919. New York: Viking, 1960.

Brooks, Van Wyck. America's Coming-of-Age. 1915. Garden City, N.Y: Doubleday, 1958.

Cather, Willa. The Troll Garden. Edited by James Woodress. Lincoln: Published by the University of Nebraska Press for the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, 1983.

Lewis, Sinclair. Main Street. 1920. New York: Signet, 1961.

Mencken, H. L. "Notes on Journalism." Chicago Tribune, 19 September 1926.

Mencken, H. L. "The Sahara of the Bozart." In The American Scene: A Reader, edited by Huntington Cairns, pp. 157–168. New York: Knopf, 1977.

Secondary Works

Allen, Frederick Lewis. Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the Nineteen-Twenties. 1931. New York: Harper, 1957.

Hofstadter, Richard. Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. New York: Knopf, 1963.

Turner, Frederick Jackson. Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner: The Significance of the Frontier in American History, and Other Essays. Commentary by John Mack Faragher. New York: Holt, 1994.

Tim Sougstad