Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

Anti-intellectualism as romantic discourse

When I told friends that I was heading

off to a doctoral program in U.S. intel-
lectual history, they either seemed mys-
ti½ed–“Do we have an intellectual his-
tory?”–or found the entire proposition
somewhat funny: “American intellectu-
al history!? Isn’t that an oxymoron!?”
More skepticism awaited as I began my
studies. Classmates repeatedly subjected
me to playful, if remorseless, interroga-
tions about the wherefores and whithers
of this so-called history of the American
mind. I had to wonder what I was doing
studying a subject that people think does
not exist.

I might have dismissed this doubt-
ing American intellectual life as a curi-
ous national pastime until I experienced
½rsthand its transatlantic dimensions.
While teaching an undergraduate course
on “U.S. Intellectual History” as I was
writing my doctoral thesis in Germany,
I asked my students what drew them
to a course on American thought. They
confessed without a whiff of irony and
no intended disrespect: they simply
wanted to be in on the joke.

A curious thing happened as I got to
know my students and they got to know
American thinkers like Margaret Fuller,

Herbert Croly, and Cornel West. I came
to realize that my friends, classmates,
and students hadn’t said anything about
American culture that these very think-
ers hadn’t said themselves. Just as West
had lamented the “good American fash-
ion” of fostering a “truncated perception
of intellectual activity,” and Croly had
likened the “American intellectual hab-
it” to that of “domestic animals,” Fuller
had warned about an America devoid
of “intellectual dignity,” capable of only
cultural “abortions,” “things with forms
. . . but soulless, and therefore revolt-
ing.”1 Indeed our very own thinkers
have argued for a speci½cally American
version of the betrayal of the intellectu-
als: it is the intellectuals who have been
betrayed by a culture hostile or indiffer-
ent to their ideas.

The vision of American history as
one long durée of resistance to intellec-
tual pursuits received its classic formula-
tion in Richard Hofstadter’s 1963 study,
Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. The
suffocating political culture of the 1950s
following Adlai Stevenson’s defeats con-
½rmed Hofstadter’s view that “resent-
ment and suspicion of the life of the
mind and of those who are considered
to represent it” had been a de½ning fea-
ture of American life. In Hofstadter’s
text, “anti-intellectualism” takes on

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Jennifer
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many guises: the disavowal of rational-
ity and learning in early American Prot-
estantism; impatience with abstract
thought and preference for practical
knowledge on the frontier, in business,
and in progressive education; populist
hostility to the elitism of genteel re-
formers, monastic academics, and pol-
icy experts. According to Hofstadter,
though diverse, these sentiments in
nineteenth- and early-twentieth-cen-
tury American religious, political, and
economic life shared a general disre-
gard for intellect, making “anti-intel-
lectualism” an axiomatic expression
of the American experience.2

Anti-Intellectualism is a systematic
analysis of a cultural malady, but it is
also a history of a grievance; therefore,
even at its most restrained, it is a deep-
ly personal document. Hofstadter’s un-
usually quali½ed and tentative conclu-
sions signal what his scholarly critics
regarded as the book’s shortcomings
in conception and tone. Many took is-
sue with the elusiveness of Hofstadter’s
conceptualization of “anti-intellectual-
ism,” unsatis½ed with his apologia that
it “does not yield very readily to de½ni-
tion.”3 Rush Welter argued that anti-
intellectualism was at best “a protean
concept,” and used to articulate noth-
ing like a “national commitment so
much as a cluster of expressions and
activities that may or may not have
held the same meaning for all.” Cush-
ing Strout complained that the book
documents “[f]eelings” which are
“diverse, ambivalent, and no index to
social isolation.” While documenting
these feelings, Hofstadter exposed his
own, producing a confessional history
of a confession that “skates . . . on what
he knows to be thin ice.”4

If analytically imprecise “anti-intel-

lectualism” was also deeply felt, but
Hofstadter did not manufacture this

cultural attitude nor was he the ½rst to
identify it. Indeed his accomplishment
was the way in which he rehearsed a
complaint that, by 1963, had become
commonplace. Though the term “anti-
intellectualism” came into vogue in the
1950s, the image of American culture as
uniquely hostile to critical intellect
enjoyed a long and dynamic history in
American thought. It moved all along
the political and cultural grid, as parti-
sans from the left and right, and com-
mentators liberal and conservative,
pressed it into service. We come closest
to understanding Hofstadter’s argument
if we see its roots in a romantic critique
of American culture. His critique, like
many before him, is a romantic longing
for an America not yet achieved. By ex-
amining the romantic origins and pre-
history of the trope of American anti-
intellectualism, we can understand how
a culture purportedly hostile to ideas
cultivated a rather unappealing one
with enduring appeal.

Though the notion of America either

as Edenic paradise or savage wilderness
has long animated European thinking
about America, the notion that it was
therefore either unburdened by or ill-
suited for intellectual rigor took on par-
ticular form in the romantic imagina-
tion. As James Ceaser has argued, the
romantics looked to the American dem-
ocratic experiment as a symbol of mo-
dernity and freighted it with their own
fantasies and fears about the “destiny
of the modern world.”5 Whereas eigh-
teenth-century European discourse
about America focused primarily on
the conditions of the natural environ-
ment, in the early nineteenth century
attention shifted to its forms of human
culture. Of special interest to German
romantics in particular was the notion
of the organic ties between a people,

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their relationship to the homeland,
and their styles of expression. Because
Americans were not a Volk, but a mix of
“races,” transplanted to rather than his-
torically rooted in the North American
continent, German romantics wondered
about the sources of aesthetic inspira-
tion and the qualities of the intellect of
people who were not a people, a nation
of af½liation but not of belonging, an
adopted homeland, but not an inherited
Fatherland. Fascinated with the intellec-
tual characteristics of what Nietzsche
would later refer to as the “new human
flora and fauna”6 taking shape in the
new world, they described these new
cultural types in oracular terms: were
they heralds of intellect at its dawn or
twilight? Models of mind unburdened
by hollow pieties, or aimless imagina-
tions without sail or ballast? For the ro-
mantics, American culture and the hu-
man qualities it produced served as a
powerful symbolic ½eld on which to
test their ideas about the organic rela-
tionship between the individual imagi-
nation and the soul of a people, a cul-
ture, and its environment, and the
prospect of a people politically liberat-
ed yet socially and psychically uni½ed.
The redemptive promise of Ameri-
can culture can be seen most vividly in
Goethe’s enthusiasm for the youthful
intellect of a people free from the en-
tombing memories of history. Goethe,
himself the living monument of Euro-
pean Kultur, long fancied that he would
steal away to America, experimenting
with his own ideas about emigrating
in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1796)
and again in The Travelings of Wilhelm
Meister (1821). Though he never traveled
to America in body, he journeyed there
in mind, devouring studies of its ethnol-
ogy, geology, politics, and economy,
and speculating about how the happy
circumstance of its location–both geo-

graphical and in the course of human
history–might help cultivate the liber-
ated spirit of its inhabitants. In 1819, he
envied “Northamericans” who can be
“happy” to have “[n]o ancestors and
no classical soil” and who were liber-
ated from the psychic weight of a now
parched and impotent feudal and clas-
sical past. In an 1827 poetic love letter
“[t]o the United States,” Goethe
effused:

America, yours is the better lot
Than is our continent’s, the old.
You have no ruined castles’ rot
Nor marbles cold.

Nor is your inner peace affected
In your present active life
By useless thought which recollected
Lead to useless strife.7

From across the Atlantic, Goethe imag-
ined a world that promised not the ab-
sence of intellect, but rather an “inner”
life returned to its right state: innocent,
sloughed free of encrusted traditions,
and liberated to know itself and the uni-
verse in terms of its own making.

Countering Goethe’s vision of Ameri-

can imaginative freedom and innocence
was the stronger romantic current that
viewed American intellectual and cul-
tural life as torpid, formless, and crude.
Some of the most potent denunciations
of American cultural apostasy came
from the Austrian romantic poet, Niko-
laus Lenau. Unlike most romantics, who
formed their strong views of American
intellect having never stepped foot on
the continent, Lenau made the transat-
lantic voyage for a six-month stay in
northwestern Pennsylvania from 1832–
1833. He came steeped in the romantic
longing for America shared by many
German-speaking liberals of his gener-
ation, who envisioned it as paradise of

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Dædalus Spring 2009

Jennifer
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untamed nature and untrammeled liber-
ties–the poet’s natural environment.
Almost immediately upon arrival,

however, Lenau’s exalted image of
America began to collapse. Expecting
a sublime landscape, he discovered a
dreary, monotonous, and cold country
gripped by winter. After just eight days
in America, Lenau concluded that such
an uninspiring environment could not
create a nation of poets, only a people
who lacked an eye for beauty and ear
for song:

The American has no wine, no nightin-
gale. . . . [T]hese Americans are incredibly
loathsome, small merchant souls. Dead,
stone-dead to the life of the mind are
they. . . . I think it seriously and extremely
signi½cant that America has no nightin-
gale. It seems to me like a poetic curse. A
Niagara voice is necessary to teach these
scoundrels that there are higher gods
than those that are struck off the mint.

His ½rsthand accounts, excessively styl-
ized and hastily spun as they may be,
present America as intellectually des-
olate and culturally grotesque, a study
in debased imagination and stunted in-
tellect “in all [its] frightful banality.”8
Lenau’s frightful Americans had no
nightingales flying above, but, making
matters worse, they had no ½rm ground
below. Using metaphors from nature–
“roots,” “soil,” and “earth”–Lenau em-
ployed a romantic vocabulary to ques-
tion the very grounds, or foundations,
of American cultural and intellectual
life. His objections were quite literal:
American soil failed to nourish a vi-
brant cultural ecosystem at its roots.
Whatever traces of culture existed
“have in no sense come up organically
from within,” he wrote. American cul-
ture was “groundless” [bodenlos], for
its people lacked the shared historical,
moral, and spiritual foundations vital

Dædalus Spring 2009

for collective imagination. Without
roots in collective memory and tribal
affections knitting the people to each
other and to a homeland, he insisted
that America was not a nation so much
as a contractual arrangement: “That
which we call fatherland is in America
nothing more than security for one’s
assets. The American knows nothing,
seeks nothing but money, he has no
ideas consequently the state is not a
moral and intellectual . . . Fatherland,
but merely a material convention.”
Americans’ single-minded pursuit of
the here and now made Lenau thank-
ful for the “Atlantic ocean” for provid-
ing an “isolating belt” protecting “the
spirit and all higher life” back home
from the deadening anti-intellectual-
ism of America, “the true sunset
land”–or, “mankind’s far west.”9
Critiques such as Lenau’s smart even

more when they come from our very
own Ralph Waldo Emerson. Though
celebrated for giving form to a distinct-
ly American intellectual tradition, Emer-
son also spent his career drawing atten-
tion to its shortcomings. He insisted
that the life of the mind was a life well-
lived and essential to a vibrant democ-
racy, but he worried that forces in Amer-
ican life worked against that vital intel-
lectual wealth. Drawing freely from ro-
mantic thought as he articulated his
own concerns about American intellec-
tual life, Emerson sought to make sense
of the conditions which had yet prevent-
ed, though one day might foster, the na-
tive, democratic genius.

“American Scholar” (1837), Emerson’s

most concise meditation on the Ameri-
can mind, is often exalted as our intel-
lectual declaration of independence, de-
spite the fact that it contains some of his
strongest terms for describing American
anti-intellectualism. Emerson expressed

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concern about a “people too busy [for]
letters”; a society that thinks of human
life in averages and aggregates, as if
men were “bugs,” “spawn,” and “‘the
herd,’”; the “sluggish and perverted
mind of the multitude,” which showed
regard only for “exertions of mechani-
cal skill” but no esteem for the reason
and revelation wrought by philosoph-
ical inquiry and speculation. He de-
scribes the American as caught up in
the immediacy of making a living,
while forgetting what makes life worth
living, settling for a life as Man Doing
rather than striving to be Man Thinking.
Even the scholar fails to marry the vita
contemplativa with the vita activa. Indeed,
Emerson’s most pointed criticisms are
not of the man in the mass, but of the
specialized intellect; even our thinkers
can’t get thinking right. According to
Emerson, the “delegated intellect” was
an enemy of intellect, a man in his “de-
generate state,” loving answers, not
questions. Emerson warned: “See al-
ready the tragic consequence. The
mind of this country, taught to aim
at low objects, eats upon itself.”10

Emerson believed that the democrat-
ic mind could aim higher only by culti-
vating a new style of thinking organic
to American experience. This required
that it free itself from the bullying
thoughts of foreign traditions. Emer-
son surveyed the American intellectu-
al landscape and was chagrined to ob-
serve that the American Revolution had
brought a political break with England,
but not a cultural one with Europe. This,
he argued, was possible only once Amer-
ican intellect ended its “long apprentice-
ship to the learning of other lands” and
stopped feeding on the “remains of for-
eign harvests.”11 For Emerson, all truths
are achieved, not inherited–prospec-
tive, never retrospective. According to
Emerson, it is only the “plain old Adam,

the simple genuine self” with no history
at his back, who enjoys an original re-
lationship with the universe.12

This is the Adamic Emerson–both
herald and exemplar–of the new Man
Thinking. And yet it’s hard not to hear
his lyrical celebration of the impious
mind as him shouting down his inher-
itance. Though Emerson spent his life
hoping to capture the intellectual prom-
ises of American independence, he rec-
ognized the centrality of European influ-
ences on American culture. He himself
drew inspiration from Goethe speci½cal-
ly in his quest for the self-begotten intel-
lect, and from the European romantics
generally in his aspiration for organic
thought. His writings are saturated in
ambivalence about America’s intellec-
tual and cultural stature compared to
Europe’s. Indeed all of his examples of
genius in “The American Scholar” are
European, and even after thirteen years
of a continual quest for American intel-
lectual distinction, he seems to have
come up empty-handed, for none of
the great men he classi½ed in his Repre-
sentative Men (1850) was American.

This was Emerson’s dilemma: Amer-
ican thinking was only American think-
ing in its Adamic form; and yet by his
own example, his longing for newness
was intimately bound up in what Harold
Bloom has identi½ed as the romantics’
anxiety of belatedness. “The romance-
of-trespass, of violating a sacred or
daemonic ground,” Bloom writes, is
caught in a dilemma of its own design,
for “meaning . . . cleaves more closely
to origins the more intensely it strives
to distance itself from origins.”13 In
his quest for literary and philosophical
originality, and his zeal to break the ves-
sels of European intellectual authority,
Emerson continually reestablished Eu-
rope as the outsized measure of under-
sized American intellectual life by per-

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sistently insisting that it is not. Emer-
son’s dialectic between America as focus
of a re-centered cultural map and Ameri-
ca as “mankind’s far west” and between
the American thinker as the ½rst man of
a new intellectual history and a deriva-
tive mind in its “sunset,” became the in-
terpretive ½eld upon which subsequent
discourse about American anti-intellec-
tualism would take place.

Over the course of the nineteenth

century, the specter of America as native
grounds for anti-intellectualism contin-
ued to haunt Americans’ thinking about
homegrown intellect. Gilded Age liber-
al critics, editors, and educators–the
New England born-and-bred reformers
whom Hofstadter identi½ed as the pur-
veyors of “mugwump culture”–argued
that while Americans had poured their
energies into conquering a continent,
they drained vital resources away from
conquering the higher regions of the
mind. The mugwumps viewed their role
as custodians of culture, which, proper-
ly conceived and realized, was a correc-
tive to, rather than coextensive with,
economic and social life. They dedicat-
ed themselves to establishing intellec-
tual institutions and journals of opin-
ion, thus fostering an expansive literary
public sphere to elevate the postbellum
mind. Yet their writings testify to their
persistent doubts that an Enlighten-
ment republic of letters could ever
compete with the growing American
marketplace of goods.

In his 1874 critique of American
“Chromo-Civilization,” Nation edi-
tor E. L. Godkin offered what would
become the classic formulation of the
mugwumps’ diagnosis of American
anti-intellectualism: the smug, pecu-
niary “pseudo-culture” of the Amer-
ican bourgeoisie, which mistook the
trappings of wealth for the accom-

plishments of culture. He argued that
industrial democracy led to the mind-
less commercialization of American in-
tellectual life. Though salutary in prin-
ciple, the rise of small colleges and the
common schools, the proliferation of
popular educational institutions, and the
expansion of print culture for middle-
class audiences had vulgarized ideas
and debased the process of their ac-
quisition. This yielded a “smattering
of all sorts of knowledge” that neither
informed nor enlightened, but simply
flattered “a large body of slenderly
equipped persons” with the conceit
of culture. According to Godkin, Amer-
ican chromo-civilization created a “so-
ciety of ignoramuses” who substituted
the accumulation of facts for the assim-
ilation of real knowledge, and the con-
sumption of goods for the cultivation
of character. A perfect distillation of the
capitalist environment from which it
came, pseudo-culture viewed knowledge
as commodity and understood material
and moral progress as coextensive.14

Like Emerson, the mugwump critics
were literary cosmopolitans with nation-
al aspirations, and yet for them the prob-
lem with American intellect was that it
was all-too-native to the culture. They
argued that the material conditions of
the country shaped the character and
quality of the American mind in an in-
verse relation: the history of abundance
of material resources had depleted the
American intellect. In his 1888 survey
of “The Intellectual Life of America,”
Charles Eliot Norton offered a gloomy
diagnosis of the growing disparity be-
tween the country’s material wealth and
its capacity for independent thought. As
Norton saw it, while civilization is a nec-
essary precondition for an elevated intel-
lectual life, overcivilization is its death
knell. In its short history, Norton ar-
gued, America had acquired with rela-

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tive ease the material comforts and pros-
perity that other civilizations strove for
centuries to achieve, and this “unbur-
dened existence” had created an easygo-
ing people, pleasant but too facile to cre-
ate or even appreciate the higher arts.15
Political liberty and material plenty had
produced little depth of spirit or subtle-
ty of mind.

Drawing on romantic ideals of cul-
ture as human cultivation, and republi-
can notions of thrift and restraint, mug-
wump critics stressed that true knowl-
edge could only be fostered from within,
not acquired from without. However,
if their theology preached that the king-
dom of culture is within you, their litur-
gy suggested that it, in fact, came from
Europe. Their cosmopolitan familiarity
with and delight in the artistic and liter-
ary accomplishments of Europe both in-
spired and frustrated them. They viewed
their role as critics to be cultivators of a
still-fledgling American mind, to bring
it out of the nursery and into the wider
world. By now, the persistent character-
ization of American intellectual life as
forever “young” was no Goethean cele-
bration of intellectual curiosity and nov-
elty, but an embarrassed assessment of
an adolescent people unwilling to grow
up. The mugwumps shared Emerson’s
longing for a distinctly American cul-
ture–as well as his doubts that Ameri-
ca would ever be able to pull it off. Un-
like Emerson, though, they felt they had
no option but to hold European arts and
letters as the measure for America’s. If
modernity propelled America toward a
“chromo-civilization,” the mugwumps
felt no anxiety–indeed they welcomed
–cleaving to European origins and tak-
ing refuge in belatedness.

At the turn of the last century, Ameri-

can intellectual life had plenty of critics,
but not all agreed that the culture of cap-

italism was the source of American’s in-
tellectual transgressions. Harvard phi-
losopher George Santayana knew Amer-
ican intellectual life had its problems,
but none so damaging as the very solu-
tions proposed by the mugwump critics
themselves. He argued that the notion
that culture affords a mental altitude
from which to critique shallow commer-
cialism was an evasive and regressive re-
sponse to the intellectual challenges of
modernization. If there was a problem
with American thought, it was the prob-
lem of not viewing culture as a condition
of daily life, and only as a corrective to it.
In his 1911 essay, “The Genteel Tradi-
tion,”16 Santayana argued that Ameri-
cans did have an intellectual tradition,
albeit a “genteel” one, and therefore
one ill-be½tting its way of life and its
people. It drew in part from a native
source: a despiritualized Calvinism
that bequeathed a lust for order and
stringent moralizing, but no longer
the “agonized conscience” and “sense
of sin” that gave primitive Protestant-
ism its form. The second and more
dominant source, however, was the
early-nineteenth-century European
import, transcendentalism, which en-
dorsed a subjective view of knowledge
and an aggrandized conception of self.
In Santayana’s genealogy, these two in-
tellectual legacies crossed paths in the
nineteenth century and consolidated
their capital in the form of the genteel
tradition: a moralistic and evasive in-
tellectual temperament, suffused with
light but no shadows, an unthreatened
and unthreatening view of the universe
and man’s place within it.

Santayana’s complaint with the gen-
teel tradition was not only that it made
an easy peace with the universe, but also
that it took the universe on terms for-
eign to the American experience. The
problem wasn’t that Americans had too

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little regard for intellect and ideas, but
rather too much. Americans loved their
ideas, so long as they weren’t their ideas,
but inherited ones, preferably from Eu-
rope and preferably with no life left in
them. He characterized American intel-
lect as “old wine in new bottles,” and
“a young country with an old mental-
ity,” arguing that America never had to
wait to create its own intellectual insti-
tutions and culture of arts and letters:
it simply brought them over from Eu-
rope. He viewed Americans as intellec-
tual latecomers with minds “belated,
inapplicable.” However, unlike Emer-
son who suffered its bad conscience,
Santayana’s latecomers welcomed in-
tellectual belatedness as a mark of their
arrival, taking pride in the fact that they
refused to “let the past bury its dead.”17
Esteem for traditions remote from ex-
perience, though, signaled no genuine
feeling for ideas; custodianship, he ar-
gued, resists the life of the mind.

For Santayana, America economical-

ly and technologically lunged toward
the future, while intellectually it looked
timidly to the past. He insisted that, un-
til it made a home of modern America,
intellect would never ½nd a home in
modern America. Despite his persistent
criticism of the romantic imagination,
Santayana drew heavily from romantic
discourse to make his point. His writings
are awash in organic metaphors of “soil”
and “roots,” and he consistently argued
that a vital culture must grow in its “na-
tive” environment and cultivate forms
expressive of its own “thundering, push-
ing life.” The American imagination
needed to make peace with its skyscrap-
ers and corporations and make friends
with their raw, energetic condensation
in human form: the modern American.
But even Santayana expressed doubts
about how arable the soil of modernity
might be:

[I]t is not easy for native [intellects] to
spring up, the moral soil is too thin and
shifting, like sand in an hourglass, always
on the move; whatever traditions there
are, practical men and reformers insist
on abandoning; . . . nothing can take root;
nothing can be assumed as a common af-
fection, a common pleasure; no re½ne-
ment of sense, no pause, no passion, no
candour, no enchantment.

Dynamism has its own perils, and in a
culture of business vitalism, all “theo-
retical passions” are either “sporadic”
and ½zzle out, or are indifferent from
overstimulation.18 A hectic, bodenlos
culture creates an intellect after its own
form, either too ½tful or too blasé to
sustain itself.

Santayana’s strongest verdict against

American intellectual life came in ac-
tions, not words, when he gave up his
tenured professorship at Harvard in
1912 and left America for Europe for
good. Before he left, though, his views
of American anti-intellectualism made
strong impressions on many talented
Harvard students and their cohort–
including Walter Lippmann, T. S. Eliot,
and John Reed–themselves aspiring
writers and thinkers who shared his
chastened view of early-twentieth-cen-
tury American culture. Their grievance
started out personal: they wanted to
make a living from the life of the mind,
and felt the normal pangs of doubt and
frustration as they saw few appealing
career options. They surveyed Ameri-
can intellectual life and perceived forces
hostile to the critical intellect not only
in the worlds of business and commerce,
but also within the university. Indeed
their harshest criticisms were directed
at the academy, which they viewed as
too implicated in a business culture; the
imperative for specialization and pro½t

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had strangled the life out of learning.
They saw themselves as “intellectuals,”
which at the turn of the last century en-
tered American English political and
cultural discourse, quickly becoming a
crucial term of self-de½nition among
the young writers and thinkers eager
to make sense of their roles in modern
society. Instrumental to this new self-
concept was the image of what mod-
ern thinkers were up against: a broad-
er culture unwilling or unable to appre-
ciate their service. They were sufferers,
“bear[ing] the brunt of our America”
and the “mass of dolts,” as Ezra Pound
put it.19

If the intellectual as social type was
new, the notion that she had to suffer
fools was not. In their assessments of
American culture, the young critics
merely provided new terms for an old
way of thinking. While H. L. Mencken
introduced the convention-hugging,
fear-mongering “booboisie,” and Sin-
clair Lewis the American “Babbitt,”
for whom the plump, smooth, mass
culture of mediocrity was his native
habitat, Emma Goldman was one of
many radical thinkers who rediscov-
ered the wrathful “Puritan,” who po-
liced free thought and hounded liber-
ated spirits. Few critics, however, gen-
erated as many terminologies for and
genealogies of American anti-intellec-
tualism as Van Wyck Brooks, whose
most influential work was his 1915
analysis of the inner civil war between
the “Highbrow” and “Lowbrow” in
American thought. He characterized
“Highbrow” as an isolated, abstract,
otherworldly, and effete style of thought
and relationship to ideas. It viewed cul-
ture as something disciplinary and dec-
orative, and therefore, remote from the
messy problems of daily life. The “Low-
brow,” by contrast, represented a style
of thought that was very much of this

world: starkly practical, materialistic,
uninspired by and incapable of specu-
lative thought. Though the two tenden-
cies rarely overlapped, they did meet
in the form of a joint-stock conspiracy
against the critical, engaged intellect.
For Brooks, the spectacle of these dual
tendencies revealed a history of the
American mind rendered “stagnant
from disuse,” unable to contemplate
“the mature potentialities and justi½-
cations of human nature.” Brooks be-
moaned, “[W]e have no Goethe in
America and . . . we have no reason to
suppose we are going to get one.”20
Like others before them, the young
intellectuals turned to Europe in their
quest for a distinct American culture.
Spurred by a thirteen-month postgrad-
uate tour in Europe, Brooks’s fellow
critic, Randolph Bourne, argued that
the American mind couldn’t be culti-
vated until it reappraised its relation-
ship with European cultures. Echoing
Emerson, Bourne worried that the
American mind was “parasitical” and
“lazy”; it reinforces its own “cultural
humility” by slavishly appropriating
“alien intellect,” he wrote. And yet the
cultures of Europe should continue to
serve American intellectual life, he
maintained, but not as a giant muse-
um or poaching ground, but, rather,
as an example of living cultures that
dialectically take the shape and give
form to their particular experiences
and environment. According to Bourne,
European cultures viewed the life of
the mind as a way of life; they valued
experience, not the fruits of experi-
ence. Bourne admitted that abroad he
enjoyed “the feeling of at-homeness
which makes intelligible the world”21
as yet impossible at home.

In trying to devise a new approach to
American intellectual life and their role
in it, the young intellectuals repeated the

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standard references, the same romantic
discourse of “barren soil” unable to “fer-
tilize” “native” intellect at its “roots.”
They also revived the Lenauian images
of a bodenlos imagination and the way-
ward intellect’s yearning for home. This
longing for intellectual grounds contin-
ued to animate their imaginations after
the war, and many joined the postwar
exodus to Europe, enabling them to ex-
periment with the intellectual life they
thought still impossible in America.
They formed the “lost generation,” as
Gertrude Stein called them, the prodi-
gals and pilgrims who thought it better
to be lost among the ruins of Europe
than at home in an American wasteland.

The dramatic political realignments of

the postwar era emboldened American
intellectuals to rethink their narrative.
America’s victory, and its newfound po-
litical, economic, and military hegemo-
ny, suggested that the old mental map,
with Europe at the center and America
at the periphery, needed to be redrawn.
America’s new superpower status stimu-
lated the development of its intellectual
and cultural infrastructure at a pace and
on a scale unprecedented. With the mas-
sive postwar expansion of higher educa-
tion, the proliferation of think tanks and
artistic foundations, and the continued
growth of federal agencies in need of
policy experts and political analysts, in-
tellectuals had opportunities for institu-
tional af½liation as never before. Ameri-
can intellectual life became a growth in-
dustry, and so, too, intellectuals’ interest
in assessing the promises of these new
alignments.

In the 1952 symposium devoted to the
intellectual “reaf½rmation and rediscov-
ery of America,” the editors of Partisan
Review asked prominent American intel-
lectuals to consider the source of and in-
spiration for intellectual life “now that

they can no longer depend fully on Eu-
rope as a cultural example and a source
of vitality.” With guarded optimism,
respondents including Margaret Mead,
C. Wright Mills, Reinhold Niebuhr,
and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. considered
the conditions under which intellectu-
als might at long last break bread with
American culture. Surveying recent his-
tory, Lionel Trilling noted, with some
astonishment, that “[f]or the ½rst time
in the history of the modern American
intellectual, America is not to be con-
ceived of as a priori the vulgarest and
stupidest nation of the world.” Sidney
Hook argued that it was time to give up
on the lament of “anti-intellectualism,”
“the most popular conception of the
alienated artist in America and the shal-
lowest.”22 Time magazine captured the
widespread feelings that a truce was in
order on its June 11, 1956, cover: “Amer-
ica and the Intellectual: The Reconcilia-
tion,” with a portrait of Jacques Barzun
and the lamp of learning burning bright;
inside the issue one could read an af½r-
mation of the newfound mutual affec-
tion between America and her native
intellect.23

And yet a funny thing happened on
the way to the altar. These postwar af-
½rmations of American intellectual
life appeared precisely at the moment
when the sentiment of America as na-
tive ground hostile toward critical in-
tellect enjoyed a renaissance, and when
“anti-intellectualism” became the stan-
dard term for expressing these feelings.
The 1950s vogue for the term was new,
though the term itself and the image of
America it represented were not. The
old romantic conception of America, al-
ternately exalted or debased by its con-
ditions for the cultivation of native in-
tellect, proved ineluctable. Reviving the
notion of American anti-intellectual-
ism as a salutary protest against all

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limits and doctrine, Barzun argued that
the American suspicion of theory helped
shield it from totalitarian political doc-
trines: “‘It is attention to practice and
indifference to overarching beliefs that
guarantee our innocence. . . . We are in-
nocent because we have been–we still
are–too busy to brood.’”24 Likewise
many Partisan Review commentators ar-
gued that it was time now for America
to get over her “adolescent embarrass-
ment” of her intellectual stature, and to
take on the role of “protector of West-
ern civilization.”25

Though the political map of the West-

ern world had been redrawn, the old
narratives about America’s intellectual

role were not. America was now a super-
power, Western Europe its economic
and political bene½ciary, but, as Philip
Rahv confessed, “It is hard to believe
that western Europe has lost its cultur-
al priority for good.”26 The prehistory
makes clear that anxieties, like those
espoused by Rahv, about American
“anti-intellectualism” more proper-
ly belong to an idealized, romantic vi-
sion of America. Yet Rahv’s estimation
makes equally clear the enduring dif½-
culty in shedding romance for reality in
how we think about both the American
intellect and the American intellectual.

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ENDNOTES
1 Cornel West, “The Dilemma of the Black Intellectual,” in The Cornel West Reader (New
York: Basic Books, 1999), 305; Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life (New York:
Macmillan, 1912), 420; Margaret Fuller, “American Literature,” in Papers on Literature
and Art (New York: John Wiley, 1848), 124.
2 Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Vintage, 1963), 7.
3 Ibid.
4 Rush Welter, review of Anti-Intellectualism, by Richard Hofstadter, Journal of American
History 51 (1964): 482; Cushing Strout, review of Anti-Intellectualism, by Hofstadter, Jour-
nal of Southern History 29 (1963): 544–545.
5 James Ceaser, Reconstructing America: The Symbol of America in Modern Thought (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 1.
6 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974),
356.
7 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, as quoted in Christian Melz, “Goethe and America,” The
English Journal 38 (1949): 248.
8 Nikolaus Lenau, Werke und Briefe: 1812–1837, Band 5 (Vienna: Öbv, 1989), 230–231, 247.
9 Ibid., 247, 244, 247, 244, 246.
10 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “American Scholar,” Ralph Waldo Emerson: Selected Essays, Lectures,

and Poems, ed. Robert Richardson, Jr. (New York: Bantam, 1990), 95, 86, 82–83, 99.

11 Ibid., 82.
12 R. W. B. Lewis, The American Adam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), vi.
13 Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 35, 62.
14 E. L. Godkin, “Chromo-Civilization,” in Reflections and Comments: 1865–1895 (New York:

Scribner’s, 1895), 201–203.

Dædalus Spring 2009

Jennifer
Ratner-
Rosenhagen

15 Charles Eliot Norton, “The Intellectual Life of America,” New Princeton Review 6 (1888):

314.

16 George Santayana, Santayana on America, ed. Richard Colton Lyon (New York: Harcourt

Brace & World, 1968).
17 Ibid., 36–37, 188, 183.
18 Ibid., 188, 190, 204.
19 Ezra Pound, “To Whistler, American,” Poetry 1 (1912): 7.
20 Van Wyck Brooks, Three Essays on America (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1934), 151, 144,

174.

21 Randolph Bourne, “Impressions of Europe, 1913–14,” History of a Literary Radical (New

York: Biblo and Tannen, 1969), 265.

22 “Our Country and Our Culture,” as reprinted in America and the Intellectuals: A Symposium

(New York: Partisan Review, 1953), 5, 111, 47.
23 “Parnassus, Coast to Coast,” Time, June 11, 1956.
24 Jacques Barzun, as quoted in “Parnassus, Coast to Coast,” 70.
25 Reinhold Niebuhr, America and the Intellectuals, 80; “Editorial Statement,” America and the

Intellectuals, 3.

26 Philip Rahv, America and the Intellectuals, 90.

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Dædalus Spring 2009
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