Anti-intellectualism as romantic discourse

Daedalus, Spring 2009 by Ratner-Rosenhagen, Jennifer

Like others before them, the young intellectuals turned to Europe in their quest for a distinct American culture. Spurred by a thirteen-month postgraduate tour in Europe, Brooks's fellow critic, Randolph Bourne, argued that the American mind couldn't be cultivated until it reappraised its relationship 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 museum 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 experience. 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 standard references, the same romantic discourse of "barren soil" unable to "fertilize" "native" intellect at its "roots." They also revived the Lenauian images of a bodenlos imagination and the wayward intellect's yearning for home. This longing for intellectual grounds continued to animate their imaginations after the war, and many joined the postwar exodus to Europe, enabling them to experiment with the intellectual life they thought still impossible in America. They formed the "lost generation," as Gertrude Stein called them, the prodigals 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 political, economic, and military hegemony, 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 stimulated the development of its intellectual and cultural infrastructure at a pace and on a scale unprecedented. With the massive postwar expansion of higher education, the proliferation of think tanks and artistic foundations, and the continued growth of federal agencies in need of policy experts and political analysts, intellectuals had opportunities for institutional affiliation as never before. American intellectual life became a growth industry, and so, too, intellectuals' interest in assessing the promises of these new alignments.

In the 1952 symposium devoted to the intellectual "reaffirmation and rediscovery of America," the editors of Partisan Review asked prominent American intellectuals to consider the source of and inspiration for intellectual life "now that they can no longer depend fully on Europe 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 intellectuals might at long last break bread with American culture. Surveying recent history, Lionel Trilling noted, with some astonishment, that "[f]or the first time in the history of the modern American intellectual, America is not to be conceived 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 shallowest."22 Time magazine captured the widespread feelings that a truce was in order on its June 11, 1956, cover: "America and the Intellectual : The Reconciliation," with a portrait of Jacques Barzun and the lamp of learning burning bright ; inside the issue one could read an affirmation of the newfound mutual affection between America and her native intellect.23