When Donald Trump was elected president, many thought of the historian Richard Hofstadter’s book, “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life” (1963), for which he won his second Pulitzer Prize.
His immense book seemed to be a belated explanation of the McCarthyism of the 1950s and Eisenhower’s consecutive victories (1952 and 1956) against the Democratic candidate and intellectual Adlai Stevenson. To this end, the author examined what he identified as consensuses that permeated US history.
His distinction between intelligence and intellect is central to his overarching argument. The former is practical and refers to a sharp mind; it also necessarily serves a certain objective, such as repairing a machine. The latter is critical and analytical; that is, it unpacks and breaks and removes masks.
The opponents of intellect in the US are many, enough to give us the impression that the country has an anti-intellectual bent. A “practical culture” that opposed ideas and presented intellectuals as impractical began taking form in the 18th century. The 19th century, for example, saw the emergence of the “great awakening.” One of its figures was a famous Evangelist by the name of Dwight Moody, who was known for saying if a book does not help him understand the Bible, he wouldn’t read it.
However, demography, the mobility of the population, the expansion of education, and the flourishing of sciences that enhanced our understanding of the natural world drew religious fundamentalists to the secular academic world. In the framework of competition, the tendency to besiege the elites gained strength; the struggle then exploded in 1925 with the trial of John Scopes, who had been teaching Darwin in Tennessee.
However, since the time of the “founding fathers,” fusing the concepts of “equality” and “the self-made” presented intellectual distinction as a demand for undesirable exclusivity. Benjamin Franklin and George Washington embraced the machismo of the man who arrives in the US empty-handed and becomes, through hard work alone, a wealthy industrialist. As for Thomas Jefferson, some federal and clerical leaders derided him as a man fit to be a university professor, not president.
John Quincy Adams (the sixth president of the US and the son of John Adams) was the last intellectual to occupy the presidency before being defeated and replaced by the anti-intellectual Andrew Jackson. The latter, as a “representative of natural wisdom,” believed nature gave us more than education.
Besides Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, US presidential history has generally been marked by this propensity. Even when presidents were concerned with ideas, forces deeply rooted in “the American identity” stymied their efforts.
The presidency of Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1909) came with the “rise of the expert,” as the US had become a major industrial power, increasing its need to study the languages and cultures of the outside world. With the expansion of the Taylorist movement that called for increased specialization and efficiency in industrial production, the importance of experts who could identify problems and mitigate inefficiencies grew.
Despite the benefits of, and the need for, this development, it reinforced the distinction between expertise and abstract thinking. Over time, “common sense” appeared to support expertise against broadly discredited “theoretical speculation.” Although he had previously served as the president of Columbia University, Eisenhower claimed that “an intellectual is a man who takes more words than necessary to tell more than he knows.”
Then, in the 1960s, a cultural war broke out as “common sense” advocates repudiated the shifts engendered by the civil rights and women’s liberation movements, as well as opposition to war, which they saw as unpatriotic.
The capitalism of the ‘‘self-made” became afflicted with contempt for the past. The US is “a country without statues and ruins,” which cannot be said of Europe, a continent that is not to be emulated. Indeed, Europe “talks about history while we make history.”
Though money and wealth were associated with intelligence and genius, the ideal American remained a pious and devoted farmer. As for the skeptical intellectual, who does not accumulate wealth nor generate anything useful, he seemed to lack faith, determination and moral virtue.
Building on Tocqueville, Hofstadter argues that the veneration of business is the defining feature of the US value system. The country never had classes or systems of values that competed with business, as the US was never home to an old aristocracy and no ambitions went against the drive to accumulate wealth. Thus, business shaped society’s standards and everyone, including the clergy, imitated businessmen and sought to infuse the standards of their profession with those of the business world. This not only complicated intellectuals’ relationship with the rest of society, but also isolated and “feminized” culture, giving rise to a macho myth that men are not interested in ideas and books, which should be left to women.
Practical and the applied education broadly prevails over the theoretical and the abstract, “common sense” is given precedence over methodological concepts, and heart trumped reason. This was reinforced by the frontier mentality of the early settlers, for whom solidarity and attaining victory were the priority. Either you are with us or against us, while those who drivel on about culture and nuance are wasting their breath. Intellectual concerns are a “waste of time,” and education takes you nowhere but a path to class advancement that changes your dialect, habits, residence, and social environment.
By extension, the good student does not ask the question, but finds the answer. The educator does not push his students to think, but teaches them skills. This is what made the US a nation of inventors, not thinkers, and empowered its penchant for instrumentalism that yields swift returns.
Indeed, in the 20th century, American intellectuals flocked to Europe in droves while Jewish intellectuals fled in the opposite direction with the rise of Nazism, breaking America’s narrow cultural localism. Nonetheless, it is a testament to the strengths of the US that Hofstadter could critique the country while residing in it, teaching at its best universities, having his books issued by its most prominent publishing houses, and be awarded two Pulitzer Prizes for his efforts.
