OUR COUNTRY AND OUR CULTURE
591
times of change and danger," wrote Dos Passos, "when there is a
quicksand of fear under men's reasoning, a sense of continuity with
gener.ations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary
present." The intellectual, his fantasy life of the twenties tumbling
around him, sought ground to stand on. Hence the great move to
repossess the American past-a move led by such men as Van
Wyck Brooks who had previously done their best to discredit and
disown that past.
More than that, America rose to the crisis. The brilliant artistic
exuberance of the twenties was followed by the brilliant political
exuberance of the thirties. It is fashionable today among ex-liberal
intellectuals to forget the extraordinary revival of confidence and
recovery of nerve which the New Deal produced in this country.
These intellectuals should consult their own writings of the early
thirties to see how frantic was their fright, how deep their sense of
panic; and they might have the grace today to recognize how much
more correct Roosevelt and the New Dealers were in assessing the
resources of democracy.
The depression was the first impetus to a revaluation of America.
Then the rise of fascism abroad thrust the problem of American cul–
ture into a new dimension. Next to Himmler, even Babbitt began to
look good (see
The Prodigal Parents,
1938). For all its faults, the
United States was an open society, unfinished, with a plenitude of
possibilities, while fascism meant the death of culture.
We confront the same situation today. Since a live foe is always
more dangerous than a dead one, Communism appears to carry an
even more implacable threat to culture than fascism. The intellectual
knows now, as he did not know in the twenties, that the economic
and military foundations of life are insecure. He knows too that the
chief hope of survival lies in the capacity of the American govern–
ment and the strength of American society. Naturally he has changed
his
mind about American institutions.
Still, this has been primarily a political transformation. The
open society, at best, contains cultural
possibilities:
it guarantees
nothing. The first priority, even for the intellectual, is the survival
of the open society. But more complex problems lie beyond survival–
the problems of the fate of culture in "mass society."
The intellectual probably tends to approach these problems in
