ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM IN AMERICAN LIFE REVISITED* Robert Westbrook _______________________________________________

Anti-intellectualism is a staple of American cultural

history, and we would do well to remind ourselves of this lest we

exaggerate the peculiarities of our own moment or romanticize the

past. Last month, as I was rereading Richard Hofstadter's Anti-

Intellectualism in American Life (1963) and thinking about what I

might say on this occasion, an op-ed appeared in my local paper

by John Michael, a member of the English department at the

University of Rochester, entitled "When brains mattered: Once, we

pointy-headed intellectuals had an honored position."** In this

op-ed, Michael, ruefully reflecting on the story of Mark and

Charles Van Doren in Robert Redford's film, Quiz Show, argued

that the 1950s was a time, unlike our own, when "the people at

large possessed a degree of confidence in intellectuals . . .

that today seems surprising." He marveled that an English

instructor "could be packaged by television as a hot property,"

and contended that "the charisma that attached to both Van Dorens

was less the result of personal magnetism than it was the product

of a romantic vision of the egg-head widely (though certainly not

universally or unambiguously) shared by the general public."

*Paper presented at a conference on "The University in the Public Eye," Whitney Humanities Center, Yale University, 29 September 1995. Do not cite, quote, or copy without permission of the author. © 1995

**Democrat and Chronicle (Rochester, N.Y.), 22 August 1995.

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Reading Michael's commentary, I thought immediately of

Hofstadter's remark at the beginning of his book that "American

intellectuals have a lamentably thin sense of history," for

Michael was celebrating the very period that provoked Hofstadter

to investigate American anti-intellectualism.* Indeed, the book

opens with a sampling of anti-intellectual opinion from that

decade that would no doubt have struck Michael, as it did me, as

depressingly familiar--such things as the charge of one right-

wing critic in 1951 that "Our universities are the training

ground for the barbarians of the future, those who, in the guise

of learning shall come forth loaded with pitchforks of ignorance

and cynicism, and stab and destroy the remnants of human civili-

zation" (13). Rather than a decade when "pointy-headed intellec-

tuals had an honored position," the fifties was a decade like our

own in which, as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. said in 1953, the

intellectual was "on the run" (4).**

*Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Knopf, 1963), p. 6.

**Michael was wrong not only about the 1950s but about the Van Dorens. As my colleague Joan Shelley Rubin has demonstrated, Mark Van Doren was among the last of a dying breed of middlebrow critics and his son was celebrated more for his personal magne-tism than for his intellectualism. Quiz shows such as that on which Charles Van Doren earned fame, fortune, and infamy advanced a view of culture as "the acquisition and display of informa-tion," and Van Doren "captured the imagination of the public by exhibiting the mastery of information, earning money, and rede-fining culture as performance." Moreover, such quiz shows often appealed to the anti-intellectualism of their audiences, who most enjoyed those moments in which intellectuals, professors, and experts were "stumped" by ordinary men and women. Stumping experts was not a means of emulating them "but of repudiating their authority as irrelevant." See The Making of Middlebrow

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Since the turn of the century, as Hofstadter argued, intel-

lectuals have most affected the public mind when they have acted

in one of two capacities: as experts or as ideologues. As he

said, "In both capacities they evoke profound, and, in a measure,

legitimate fears and resentments. Both intensify the present

sense of helplessness in our society, the expert by quickening

the public's resentment of being the object of constant manipula-

tion, the ideologues by arousing the fear of subversion" (35).

Resentments directed at both experts and ideologues are, of

course, very much part of contemporary anti-intellectualism, but

as I say, we need remind ourselves that neither is particularly

new. Consider for example the familiar ring of the indictment of

experts offered by one congressman in 1946, objecting to the

inclusion of the social sciences in the National Science Founda-

tion:

The average American does not want some expert running around prying into his life and his personal affairs and deciding for him how he should live, and if the impression becomes prevalent in the Congress that this legislation is going to establish some sort of organi-zation in which there would be a lot of short-haired women and long-haired men messing into everybody's personal affairs and lives, inquiring whether they love their wives or do not love them and so forth, you are not going to get your legislation.

Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), pp. 318, 328, 320.

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On the whole, the intellectual as ideologue has been even

more resented than the intellectual as expert. As ideologues,

intellectuals have been identified with the forces of modernity,

a modernity that has brought social and cultural changes that

have been profoundly unsettling for many Americans. As Hofstad-

ter said, the intellectual is "felt to have played an important

part in breaking the mold in which America was cast, and in

consequence he gets more than his share of the blame" (43).

Yet if anti-intellectualism has long been a persistent

feature of American life, it has also had its ebbs and flows.

The regard for intellectuals, Hofstadter observed, "is subject to

cyclical fluctuations" (6). In the last one hundred years these

fluctuations have coincided closely with the fate of the American

left, which is hardly surprising since, as Hofstadter said (and

survey research has repeatedly confirmed), "the political commit-

ment of the majority of the intellectual leadership in the United

States has been to causes that might be variously described as

liberal, progressive, or radical. . . . If there is anything

that could be called an intellectual establishment in America,

this establishment has been, though not profoundly radical (which

would be unbecoming in an establishment) on the left side of

center" (39).

Hence, living as we do in an era in which the American left

is in full retreat, the periods of the past that seem most

foreign to us when thinking about anti-intellectualism are not

those like the early 1950s but those like the early 1960s when

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Hofstadter wrote his book--an era of liberal ascendancy. These

were years in which liberal intellectuals such as Schlesinger

stopped running and moved into the corridors of political power.

Here the "best and the brightest" shaped public policy, basked in

the reflected glow of the Kennedy presidency, and practiced the

craft of the artful public lie. Hofstadter's book ends with a

lengthy meditation on the temptations of power for liberal

intellectuals which describes a world that now seems long ago and

far away.

As painfully familiar as the anti-intellectualism of the

fifties is, I think it is important to point up some important

differences between that period and our own. In the immediate

postwar decade, anti-intellectualism was tightly bound up with

anti-communism--a once powerful combination no longer as effec-

tive as it once was. Today's anti-intellectualism is much more

direct and various in its concerns; where diverse sorts of

subversive thinking were once pursued under the singular banner

of anti-communism, they are now targeted in their own right along

a much broader front. I also think anti-intellectualism is a

much more essential--even necessary--component of conservative

politics today than it was in the early postwar period. It is no

longer a minor but a major chord in Republican political rheto-

ric, and there are no longer any liberal Republicans around to

offer counterpoint. As it now stands, any Republican politician

wishing to be taken seriously by the party's core constituencies

has to establish his or her credentials as a confirmed anti-

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intellectual. Thus, in his widely-publicized recent speech to an

American Legion convention in Indiana, Robert Dole--himself a

politician of unusual intelligence and wry wit--devoted his

entire address to a stale assault on "intellectual elites" in an

effort to win the support of those in the party concerned that he

may be insufficiently sound on the "values" issues. Such intel-

lectual elites, whom Dole termed "the Embarrassed-to-be-American

crowd," are, he said, undermining the foundations of American

unity:

What we see as opportunity they see as oppression. Where we see a proud past, they see a legacy of shame. What we hold as moral truth, they call intolerance. They have false theories, long dissertations, and endless studies to back them up. But they know so much they have somehow missed the fact that the United States of America is the greatest force for good the world has ever known.

Dole made a point of singling out my own branch of the elite for

special condemnation, targeting the Smithsonian Institute's ill-

fated commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the dropping

of the atomic bomb on Japan and the now-abandoned National

History Standards, which Dole said offered a version of the

nation's past which "threatens us as surely as any foreign power

ever has." In this he followed the party's leading anti-intel-

lectual, Speaker Newt Gingrich, who earlier argued that the

Smithsonian exhibition reflected "the enormous underlying pres-

sure in the elite intelligentsia to be anti-American, to despise

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American culture, to rewrite history and to espouse a set of

values which are essentially destructive."*

Anti-intellectualism has become an essential component of

conservative politics because of the important place it holds in

the pseudo-populist strategy upon which Republican political

ascendancy rests. This strategy, which has targeted two key

voter groups, white, ethnic (often Catholic) northern voters and

working-class white southerners, has succeeded in portraying the

Democratic party as a new establishment intent on imposing an

alien--elitist and liberal--racial and cultural agenda on these

voters. Over the course of the last thirty years, as Thomas

Edsall has shown, the GOP has been "increasingly able to define

the Democratic party, its intellectual allies, and the bureaucra-

cy that enforced redistributive laws, as a new left elite--an

effective alternative target, as [George] Wallace had shown [in

1968] to the 'fat cat' business class which, between 1929 and

1964, had reliably attracted the lion's share of popular resent-

ment." Exploiting the issues of race and taxes, Republicans

offered themselves as guardians of the working man against the

intrusions of "big government," and "at the core of Republican-

populist strategy was a commitment to resist the forcing of

*Senator Robert Dole, "Remarks Prepared for Delivery at the American Legion Convention, Indianapolis, Indiana, September 4, 1995," pp. 4, 5. Newt Gingrich as quoted in Fred Barnes, "Re-venge of the Squares," New Republic (13 March 1995): 23. Like nearly every conservative critic who has attacked the National History Standards, Dole appears not to have read them. Every particular assertion he makes about the standards is false.

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racial, cultural and social liberalism on recalcitrant white,

working and middle-class constituencies."*

Not only have liberal Democrats offerred little effective

opposition to this Republican strategy, they have enhanced its

effectiveness by aligning themselves with the court-mandated and

enforced "rights revolution" that extended new rights to racial

minorities and other "outsiders"--affirmative action in govern-

ment contracts, college admissions, and employment and promotion

in both the public and private sectors, reproductive rights for

women, constitutional protections for the criminally accused,

relaxed immigration restrictions, and free-speech rights for

pornographers. At the same time, the Democrats reformed their

party procedures, making them a vehicle both for increased

visibility within the party for women, African-Americans, and

other minorities and for the ascendancy in party councils of an

upper-middle class, college-educated, culturally liberal elite.

Both these developments took place largely at the expense of

those key voter constituencies to which GOP "populism" appealed.

Thus, as Edsall says, the Democratic Party found itself trapped

in a dilemma: "the dominant faction in control of the presiden-

tial nomination had made a moral decision to commit the party and

its nominee to work in behalf of an expansion of legal and

citizenship rights to those who had been on society's margins.

*Thomas Edsall, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics (New York: Norton, 1992), pp. 12-13.

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In making such a commitment, the liberal wing of the national

party guaranteed that the field on which presidential politics

were fought--the field of majoritarian public opinion--would tilt

in favor of the Republican party."*

Anti-intellectualism is a central feature of the rhetoric of

Republican pseudo-populism. Attacking intellectuals as experts

well serves the conservative effort to dismantle the modest

American welfare and regulatory state. Attacking intellectuals

as ideologues well serves the conservative appeal to those

"traditional values" undermined by racial and cultural liberal-

ism. Taking a lesson from George Wallace's broadside at Demo-

crats as "a select elite cult" comprised of "some professors,

some newspaper editors, some preachers, some judges, and some

bureaucrats," Republicans from Spiro Agnew to Newt Gingrich have

assailed the "counterculture" of "pointy headed intellectuals,"

"bearded professors," "nattering nabobs of negativism," and other

"radical liberals."* The criticism directed at the university is

thus but a part of the wider anti-intellectualism of our time,

and only a minor theater in the greater "culture wars" conserva-

tives are waging--a theater of operations consigned largely to

"highbrow," secular, neo-conservative battalions who invoke the *Edsall, Chain Reaction, p. 96. Edsall goes on to say that "This course of action raised a second, more complex, moral issue: at what point in a two-party system does a political party abdicate its responsibility to seek power in behalf of its constituents; and at what point--if ever--does its commitment to a substantive moral position supersede its obligation to win?"

*Edsall, Chain Reaction, pp. 78, 85.

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transcendent ideals of the West rather than the word of God,

under which march the much more numerous and significant battal-

ions of fundamentalist Christianity.

At the same time that anti-intellectualism has become more

central to conservative politics, intellectuals have been ren-

dered particularly vulnerable to its effects by their near-

wholesale incorporation into the American university. This is

not to say that all academics are intellectuals--far from it. As

Hofstadter suggested, intellectuals are best thought of not as a

particular vocational group but, quite the contrary, as those who

live for rather than off ideas, those whose thinking is marked by

"disinterested intelligence, generalizing power, free specula-

tion, fresh observation, creative novelty, radical criticism"

(27). Above all, intellectuals are those who find nothing more

satisfying than the pursuit of truth and nothing more boring than

truths that no longer remain elusive. As Harold Rosenberg put

it, "the intellectual is one who turns answers into questions"

(30). We might speculate on how many academics meet these strict

criteria, but few, I think, would venture a high estimate.

Nonetheless, in achieving a measure of greater security by

finding a place within the university among non- (even anti-)

intellectual academics they once despised, intellectuals have

somewhat ironically provided themselves with an infrastructure

for their work that is particularly vulnerable to anti-intellec-

tual attack--much more vulnerable than the marginal, "bohemian,"

institutions that largely sustained intellectual life on starva-

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tion rations prior to World War II. Universities--even private

universities--are heavily dependent on the material support of

the state and hence especially subject to the vagaries of poli-

tics. Although scientists and social scientists are generally

more aware of this than humanists, the recent effort to close

down the NEH and the NEA has made the latter all too aware of

their vulnerability. Estimates are that the NEH provides nearly

two-thirds of the research funding available to American scholars

in the humanities.* In addition, because nearly all intellec-

tuals are now college teachers, they open themselves to the

particularly powerful rhetoric of counter-subversion directed at

those charged with the care and nurturing of the nation's chil-

dren. A public willing to let intellectuals have their say in

little magazines has often proved more wary of giving them a free

hand in a classroom in front of impressionable young minds. To

offer but one example of this: witness the recent ad for Impri-

mis, the newsletter of Hillsdale College, a Michigan bastion of

conservative right-mindedness, which has run in the first issues

of the new conservative magazine, The Weekly Standard. Headlined

"It's Amazing What You Can Do to Your Child for $20,000," the ad

features a photo of a loving father and his little girl and a

warning to parents that most colleges and universities are a

waste of their hard-earned money and a threat to the intellectual

*Robert Hughes, "Pulling the Fuse on Culture," Time (7 August 1995): 67. Hughes cites a 1991 study by the American Council of Learned Societies.

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and moral well-being of their children. "Instead of learning to

reason and analyze," the ad intones, "they learn to uncritically

accept fashionable theories and 'politically correct' dogmas."**

Because American intellectuals have become so thoroughly

ensconced in the university, they find themselves in the diffi-

cult position--particularly if they think of themselves as

radical critics of the existing social order--of not only defend-

ing their right to air their subversive views but of demanding

that those wedded to that social order pay them to do so. Some

even demand that they be well-paid to do so. As Russell Jacoby

has acidly observed, "Firing away at the assumptions of society,

the new academics establish hierarchical institutes where they

attack hierarchy. They found academic centers where they 'decen-

ter.' They celebrate authors who deride authorship. From

chaired positions at elite universities they assail domination."

Under these circumstances, as he says, the defenses that

academic intellectuals have offered for themselves too often seem

like little more than "insular claims of guild privilege." And

more often than not, as if sensing the ironic situation of

radical professors, anti-intellectuals have not attempted to

silence them overtly, which would win little public support, but

to "defund" them.*

**The Weekly Standard (18 September 1995): 60.

*Russell Jacoby, Dogmatic Wisdom (New York: Doubleday, 1994), xvi.

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Mention of The Weekly Standard brings to mind another

distinctive feature of contemporary anti-intellectualism: the

emergence of a substantial, well-funded coterie of anti-intellec-

tual publicists who, thanks to the largesse of conservative

foundations and corporate sponsors, have set themselves up in

plush bunkers outside the infrastructure of the university and

from there they have taken the lead in lobbing shells into the

better academic neighborhoods--particularly the humanities

departments of elite universities. These critics have gained a

wide hearing for their views, much wider than that of those

academics who have made some feeble efforts to respond to their

assault on the university. Of course, these critics present

themselves as conservative intellectuals, and one must be careful

not to deny this claim to those who are entitled to make it.

Yet conservative intellectuals are no less susceptible than their

radical opponents to what Christopher Lasch called the "anti-

intellectualism of the intellectuals," which in their case

usually takes the form of mandarin aspirations couched in a

defense of hackneyed "transcendent truths." Many of these

publicists--Lynn Cheney and Dinesh D'Souza come immediately to

mind--seem to me to fit quite nicely Hofstadter's description of

the typical spokesmen for anti-intellectualism, those who "are in

the main neither the uneducated nor the unintellectual, but

rather the marginal intellectuals, would-be intellectuals,

unfrocked or embittered intellectuals, the literate leaders of

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the semi-literate, full of seriousness and high purpose about the

cause that bring them to the attention of the world" (21).

Finally, it should be said that just as liberal Democrats

have given conservative Republicans plenty to work with, so too

have some academic intellectuals given aid and comfort to anti-

intellectualism by promoting a radical skepticism that amounts to

an act of unilateral disarmament in the culture wars. For truth

is often the only and always the best weapon that intellectuals

have had against anti-intellectualism. All of the steam escapes

from Noam Chomsky's motto for the embattled intellectual if you

render it: "It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak

the 'truth' and to expose 'lies.'" As historian Fred Siegel has

quipped, intellectuals once talked of speaking truth to power,

but now they speak power to truth. Whatever one thinks of this

development theoretically, it has been a strategic disaster in

the struggle against anti-intellectualism.*T

My own view--pragmatist that I am--is that intellectuals can

question the smug certainties of their critics without giving up

the search for truth or, as John Dewey would have it, "warranted

assertibility." Thus, I myself have taken refuge amidst the

anti-intellectualism of our time in the conviction voiced in an

earlier dark hour by another pragmatist, C. Wright Mills, in an

essay tellingly titled "The Decline of the Left." "The politics *Noam Chomsky, "The Responsibility of Intellectuals" in American Power and the New Mandarins (New York: Vintage, 1969), p. 325; Fred Siegel, "The Skeptic," Reviews in American History 21 (1993): 142.

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of truth," Mills wrote, "is the only realistic politics of conse-

quence that is readily open to intellectuals."**

**C. Wright Mills, "The Decline of the Left" (1959) in Mills, Power, Politics, and People (New York: Oxford, 1963), p. 235.