THE HIGHBROW IN POLITICS
159
Senator McCarthy, while avoiding the word, devoted two nation–
wide broadcasts to attacks on the Stevenson advisers, a sinister crew
of people which included two Pulitzer Prize historians, one of them
a former editor of the
Saturday Review of Literature
J
as well as a
Bollingen Prize poet and former Librarian of Congress. Others
seized with relish on the new word itself. "There has come a won–
derful new expression," exulted Louis Bromfield, a McCarthy ad–
mirer, on October 26, "to define a certain shady element of our
American population. Who conceived the expression, I do not
know. . . . It seems to have arisen spontaneously from the people
themselves."
Mr. Bromfield went on to offer a voluble and excited defin–
ition-"a person of intellectual pretensions, often a professor or the
protege of a professor ... superficial in approach to any problem ...
feminine . . . supercilious . . . surfeited with conceit . . . a doc–
trinaire supporter of middle-European socialism ... a self-conscious
prig ... a bleeding heart"-166 hot words pouring out in a con–
fused stream an interesting collection of Mr. Bromfield's own resent–
ments and rancors.
If
Stevenson were to be elected, he sternly con–
cluded, "the eggheads will come back into power and off again
we will go on the scenic railway of muddled economics, Socialism,
Communism, crookedness and psychopathic instability."
It was this approach which set the tone for much of the post–
dection discussion. The returns were hardly in before
Time
Magazine,
recounting the tribulations of the Eisenhower crusade, observed
that it had survived "the egghead rebellion, the desertion . . . by
scores of intellectuals, journalists, Hollywoodians and other opinion
makers." From this fact
Time
drew ominous conclusions. "The final
victory discloses an alarming fact, long suspected: there is a wide
and unhealthy gap between the American intellectuals and the
people."
This theory of the gap instantly commended itself to all those
seeking to discipline the intellectuals. It soon received a more com–
prehensive exposition under formidable religious auspices. In an
article late in November in the Protestant weekly the
Christian Cen–
tury,
Rev. Dr. Robert
A.
Fitch, a graduate of Yale, Union Theo–
logical Seminary, Columbia and the Sorbonne, a member of the
American Philosophical Association, and currently dean of the
