278
LEWIS COSER
hope for one tremendous cleansing upheaval, a spiritual Armageddon,
when absolute good will finally defeat absolute evil and the Children
of Light will utterly destroy the Children of Darkness. Hofstadter here
shows convincingly how the fundamentalist reference to the unspoiled
goodness of old-fashioned religion and its primitivistic concern with
the simple and natural life is counterposed to the spoiled sophistication,
learning, subtlety and cunning of the city-slickers, and nourishes the
appeals of the know-nothing demagogues of the extreme right.
In the chapter on the "Politics of Democracy," Hofstadter traces
a curve of development somewhat similar to that of American religion.
The Founding Fathers were intellectuals, in fact theirs is one of the
very few cases in which intellectuals have held power. But in the
nineteenth century the requirements of mass democracy soon forced the
gentleman intellectual from the political scene. As popular democracy
became ascendant, it stressed the superiority of inborn, natural, intuitive
and folkish wisdom and promoted distrust of the ratiocination of the
cultivated. Jacksonian democracy repudiated the learned guidance of
the sophisticated gentlemen, just as the evangelical reaction against
Puritanism had repudiated a learned religion in favor of the wisdom
of the heart and direct intuitive access to God. The cultivated elite
meanwhile retreated into a thin-blooded and genteel isolation from the
main stream of political events. Politics and mind began to be seen
as antithetical. The political scene was now dominated by men who
gloried in their lack of concern for things intellectual. Politics was
defined as hard, demanding, and masculine work; morals and ideas,
education and culture, on the other hand came to be regarded as
feminine.
The hard-driving politicians of the Gilded Age implanted
in
the popular mind the idea that educated men were at best impractic–
able reformers and effeminate dreamers somehow unsuited to the serious
business
of politics among plain and natural American males. This
image receded in tEe Progressive era and, again, during the New
Deal, yet it still retains a powerful appeal today.
The chapters which Hofstadter devotes to the anti-intellectualism
of American business, to its emphasis on hard-headed practicality and
its
concern
with
applied rather than theoretical problems are less
novel. Here Hofstadter goes over well-trodden ground without corning
up with much that is peculiarly new or illuminating. But the last few
essays dealing with American education are again of the highest ex–
cellence. In his fierce dissection of the ideology of
"life
adjustment"
among American educators
in
particular, Hofstadter is at his abrasive
best. The mindless philinistism that dominated until very recently most
