14 FEBRUARY 1964, Page 21

BOOKS

Know-Nothings and Eggheads

By EDWARD SHILS

TTinrelations between philosophers and kings in American politics have long lived in what Saul Bellow has called the 'long john' tradition. The long john is a homely woollen undergarment of rustic provenience. It covers everything from the ankles to the wrists, and the culture of which it is a part is a motley masculine culture of feet On the desE, Pullman car stories, cigar-chewing, poker - playing, whisky - drinking, Wednesday evening men's Bible Class, 'what's good enough for the ordinary man is good enough for me,' and the florid rhetoric of July 4. It is a tradition which leads those who live in it to assert the value of 'our way of life.' It is suspicious of foreigners and foreign ideas and of their American allies and agents. It is a tradition of distrust of the 'Reds in the State University,' of 'men who never met a payroll.' It is a tradition which snorts at the thought of 'intellectuals,' of those who pro- duce or care about works of literature and art, of 'theorists,' of 'art for art's sake.' But it is quite compatible with the widespread employment of economists, statisticians, and sociologists as expert advisers in governments and business enterprises; it is compatible with great deference to bespectacled, brief-case-carrying 'Doctors,' and the voting of vast funds for State universities and for the purest of pure research to be carried on in universities private and State. It is perfectly compatible with radical concern for justice. It finds manifold outlets in vulgar jocularity, homely amiability, and rough-tongued rancour. It extends into all classes of American society. American politics are its natural platform.

The politicians and the journalists, clergymen, farmers, physicians, lawyers, and businessmen who have been associated with the politicians in the cultivation of the least agreeable elements of this long john tradition had their last great fling at the intellectuals in the days of McCarthy. All these extremely unpleasant, often brutish, and rarely necessary goings-on intimidated many American intellectuals, especially those of the middle and younger generation, those in lesser universities and colleges, and those who had made themselves particularly vulnerable. They reinforced the century - old belief of the best American intellectuals that the style of American Political life was the most uncongenial of that of nY modern democratic State to the influential Participation of intellectuals. While all this was going on, there was also occurring a profound reconciliation between intellectuals and govern- ment such as the country had never seen before. Natural and social scientists, even in the worst Phase of the McCarthy period, were filling Positions of importance in military, economic and foreign policy. In historical perspective McCarthyism was no more than the rearguard action of the American know-nothings, the fundamentalists, the xenophobes. the populists, the small - town puritans against the already evident victory of modern urbane culture.

The emergence of John Kennedy, first as candidate and then as President. appeared to bring the transcendence of long-iohnism to its fulfilment. President Kennedy went further. than Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower. They could not get along without the distinguished economists, law teachers, statisticians, physicists and mathematicians of the great universities. Kennedy did this too, but he also brought literary men, scientists and artists to his dinner table.

This would appear to favour the critical intel- lectual. But, if every response to the world is as good as any other, then any one man's response is as good as any other man's. So it is with social classes. The responses of the poor are as good as those of the rich, the responses of those who have not been to university are as good as those who have been, the responses of those who have not read many books or seen many paintings are as good as those who have. The simple are as good as the complex, the ordinary are as good as the exceptional. This, however, is only one side and the simpler side of populism. Man—the American Adam as well as any other man—is an ambivalent creature. American society is equalitarian in mood but the natural distribution of talents and propensities, the exigencies of political and economic organisation and the unexpungability of the appreciation of inequality which they constantly renew mean that America cannot be a completely equalitarian society. The result is an increasing conflict be- tween these two tendencies in the American out- look and in American social structure. So it is that populism, more free to express itself and more widely diffused in American society than in any other society, conducts this perpetual war against the inevitable.

Thanks to the productivity of the American economy and the no less deeply rooted utili- tarianism and, individualism of American culture, the intellectuals of the United States and above all the academic intellectuals enjoy a great many advantages. They are also sometimes targets of the populism which sees in them the adherents of a hierarchical social tradition, of an attach- ment to foreign things. The. American intellect- uals of recent years are also the victims of the older conflicts between the Boston Irish and Harvard, and of parallel conflicts between the Middle West and the frontier on the one side and of the Eastern seaboard on the other. They are the victims of their own best traditions of muni- cipal reform, of cosmopolitanism, of a complex sense of affinity with Britain and the Continent and of their own sense of justice, intermixed with political naIvetd. American intellectuals, by .their origins, traditions and inherent necessities, can- not be completely assimilated into populism. However much they have assimilated populism, populism cannot assimilate them.

To the notable body of literature of the past decade in which the main lines of the foregoing analyses have been developed, Professor Richard Hastadter• has now added a very good book. Anti-Intellectualism ill American Life* does not deepen the now established analysis but it does enrich it with a profuse and well-prescribed

documentation. The great value of his contribu- tion lies in the vivid way in which he has pre- sented the historical background of the praise of the common man, expressing his own virtuous essence in religion and politics and of the practical man expressing his merits in economic activity, both in enterprise and in the trade unions. The history of American religion has been well treated in recent years and Professor Hofstadter, who is always abreast of the best of scholarship, has shown the relationship be- tween populism and the religion of enthusiasm in a most satisfactory manner. The same may be said for his treatment of the fortunes of the Jacksonian revolution and its heirs in American politics. His treatment of the relationship of the business classes to intellectuals is skimpier than the rest of his book and contributes less to an already well-treated subject.

The fourth major section of his book is devoted to American educational doctrine and practice. The burden of the analyses is a criti- cism of education as training for adjustment. His observations about the American attitude to- wards education—insistence on universality and indifference about content—might be read in this country with cautionary benefit. When he comes to education, Professor Hofstadter's book shifts into a new subject, namely the attitude of the intellectuals towards intellectual activity and the extent to which the populism of American culture has infiltrated into the intellectual classes. Professor Hofstadter fails at this point to see how far this turning goes. American populism is so persuasive that its victories are not all the victories of groups in American society over what he calls, in a rather unsatisfactory first chapter, the 'life of the intellect.' One of its major victories lies in the way in which so many American intellectuals have become so unthink- ingly possessed by the postulates of populism that they, too, harm the intellectual life of the country as much as its demagogues and its low- brow journalists. The educationalists who dominate the elementary and secondary schools of the United States by the provision of principles and personnel have certainly harmed. American intellectual life by helping to destroy. the generally educated public. But could they have done so if the teachers of undergraduates in the United States in the great State Universities and in most of the liberal arts colleges had ever since the early 1920s and especially since the end of the Second World War themselves not turned away in such large numbers from the 'life of the intellect' and accepted the view that their charges were not in attendance for intellectual purposes? The waste of the undergraduate years of American higher education is only an extension of the waste of the years at secondary school.

A great deal of this we owe to the populistic conception of education among the intellectuals, and it is accentuated unfortunately and para- doxically by the growing emphasis on the best feature of. American university education which is postgraduate work. The existence of a widely educated and responsive public is a ner:essity of intellectual life and the thinness of the public is one of the disturbing things in the United States today. The combination of populism and specialisation has diminished the small intel- lectual public-- which is not the same as the audience for specialised professional works of science and scholarship and it is at present a more dangerous enemy of the things which are esteemed by Professor Hofstadter than coarse politicians, Billy Graham-like preachers and all the other heirs of the long john.

* Cape, 45s.