Anti-intellectualism as romantic discourse

Daedalus, Spring 2009 by Ratner-Rosenhagen, Jennifer

Dynamism has its own perils, and in a culture of business vitalism, all "theoretical passions" are either "sporadic" and fizzle out, or are indifferent from overstimulation.18 A hectic, bodenlos culture creates an intellect after its own form, either too fitful or too blasé to sustain itself.

Santayana's strongest verdict against American intellectual life came in actions, 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-century 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 American 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 profit had strangled the life out of learning. They saw themselves as "intellectuals," which at the turn of the last century entered American English political and cultural discourse, quickly becoming a crucial term of self-definition among the young writers and thinkers eager to make sense of their roles in modern society. Instrumental to this new selfconcept was the image of what modern thinkers were up against : a broader culture unwilling or unable to appreciate 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 Sinclair 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 rediscovered the wrathful "Puritan," who policed free thought and hounded liberated spirits. Few critics, however, generated as many terminologies for and genealogies of American anti-intellectualism 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 culture as something disciplinary and decorative, and therefore, remote from the messy problems of daily life. The "Lowbrow," by contrast, represented a style of thought that was very much of this world : starkly practical, materialistic, uninspired by and incapable of speculative thought. Though the two tendencies 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 justifications of human nature." Brooks bemoaned, " [W] e have no Goethe in America and ... we have no reason to suppose we are going to get one."20