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 Do not cite, quote, or copy without permission of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.

2
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 rightwing 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 civilization" (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 magnetism 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 information," and Van Doren "captured the imagination of the public by
exhibiting the mastery of information, earning money, and redefining 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

Since the turn of the century, as Hofstadter argued, intellectuals 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 manipulation, 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 Foundation:
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 organization 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.

4
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 commitment 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

5
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 effective 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 rhetoric, 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-

6
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 illfated 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 pressure in the elite intelligentsia to be anti-American, to despise

7
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 bureaucracy 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 resentment."

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 Republicanpopulist 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, "Revenge 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.

8
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 government 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 presidential 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. 1213.

9
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 liberalism.

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" conservatives 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.

10
transcendent ideals of the West rather than the word of God,
under which march the much more numerous and significant battalions of fundamentalist Christianity.
At the same time that anti-intellectualism has become more
central to conservative politics, intellectuals have been rendered particularly vulnerable to its effects by their nearwholesale 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 speculation, 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-intellectual attack--much more vulnerable than the marginal, "bohemian,"
institutions that largely sustained intellectual life on starva-

11
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 politics.

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 children.

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 Imprimis, 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.

12
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 difficult position--particularly if they think of themselves as
radical critics of the existing social order--of not only defending their right to air their subversive views but of demanding
that those wedded to that social order pay them to do so.
even demand that they be well-paid to do so.

Some

As Russell Jacoby

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

the new academics establish hierarchical institutes where they
attack hierarchy.
ter.'

They found academic centers where they 'decen-

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.

13
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-intellectual 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 "antiintellectualism 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

14
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 antiintellectualism 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.

15
of truth," Mills wrote, "is the only realistic politics of consequence 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.