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PARTISAN REVIEW
the years in a series of political disappointments and felt that they
could never respond again, found welling up within new reserves
of political emotion and energy. Still others, who had never before
strayed from the strict sectarianism of third-party politics, now voted
with enthusiasm for a major party candidate.
No doubt, intellectuals being intellectuals, the involvement took
some absurd extremes. One activist of the
Scrutiny
circle proposed
after the election that such people as Leavis, Djuna Barnes and Cecil
Beaton make up a package of their books, appropriately inscribed
to the Governor, in order to help relieve in some amiable way the
painful tension of defeat. But this very gesture from the avant-garde,
surely unprecedented in the history of American presidential politics,
reveals the special feeling evoked by the Stevenson candidacy among
even the most attenuated of the intellectuals.
Writers have been involved in politics enough-perhaps too
much-in the recent past. But the Stevenson involvement was qual–
itatively different from the others-from the sordid liaisons of Pop–
ular Front days, for example, or from the hearty propaganda of the
Writers' War Board. Those involvements had primarily served
political ends. The Stevenson involvement, retaining an innocence,
even perhaps a purity, of its own, primarily served humane and
artistic ends. The intellectuals desired Stevenson's victory, not to
attain public objectives or even to affect public policy, but to affirm
an interior sense of admiration and of belief.
This passion of the intellectuals for Stevenson, while not to
be
a major factor in the outcome, could not escape due notice in the
heat of the campaign. The Republicans became considerably irritated
by what appeared to be a closing of the literary and academic ranks
behind the Democratic candidate. Anti-intellectualism is always epi–
demic in the business community; and the campaign of Senator
McCarthy and his associates, as well, doubtless, as past excesses of
the intellectuals themselves, had spread the infection through much
of the country. In the last weeks of the campaign, the Republicans
made a calculated effort to rouse and exploit this accumulating
exasperation.
It was
in
the course of this effort that the word "egghead"
entered a new phase of its evolution. What had started out as an
affable and friendly term now began to acquire uglier connotations.
