Steve Reads

I’ve had the great fortune to have read two remarkable books about American history in a row. First was Anti-Intellectualism in American Life by Richard Hofstadter, which comes as a revelation; it’s been a very long time since a book has made so much of my mental picture of the world come into focus. Suddenly even little things like the low quality of American schools, and teachers’ low pay, fit into a bigger picture. And these things aren’t new: Americans have always hated their schools, and have always believed that “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.” All of this is rooted in some durable aspects of American culture, which may ultimately derive from the religious makeup of the Pilgrims. Put together in this way, modern American life seems a little less depressing: we may not be as screwed as it seems, because we’ve maybe always seemed this screwed. I will now read anything of Hofstadter’s that I can get my hands on, including The Paranoid Style in American Politics. Apparently the claim in the latter is that America has always been filled with conspiracy theories — be they Catholic, Mason, Jewish, Communist, or Rockefeller — and that this paranoid strain has been important throughout our history. I’m sure another large fraction of my brain will suddenly feel coherent after reading it.

(Incidentally, Hofstadter won the Pulitzer twice — once for The Age of Reform, in 1956, and once for Anti-Intellectualism, in 1964. Somehow he never won the Bancroft Prize, which puzzles me. Maybe I misunderstand what that prize is about.)

Next up was The Impending Crisis: 1848-1861 by David Potter. It tries very hard to get the reader’s mind into the time period when it takes place, so that we can strip off a few layers of folklore that have piled atop the Civil War. For one thing, Lincoln long ago ceased being a president and became instead a god; getting just through this is hard enough for Potter. But he does it admirably, and in the meantime introduced me to many characters from American history about whom I knew little: Zachary Taylor, Stephen Douglas, James Buchanan, and William Seward, among others.

Seward had appeared in Why The North Won The Civil War, as perhaps the reason why the British and French didn’t get involved in the War on the side of the Confederacy; here, in The Impending Crisis, he comes through as a consummate politician, who by the time of Fort Sumter stood a good chance of controlling the presidency from his seat as Secretary of State. Seward and Douglas in particular are fascinating characters, whom I’ll have to read about in subsequent months. In retrospect we want to view Douglas as the bad guy, for defending slavery against Lincoln in the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates. But Potter again politely dismantles that bias, showing us that Douglas was merely a principled defender of popular sovereignty and, in the end, one of the most ardent and hardworking defenders of the Union against the forces of secession.

I’ve added a number of books to my to-read list after reading Hofstadter’s and Potter’s books:

• Allan Nevins, The Emergence of Lincoln (2 vol.)
• Daniel Bell (ed.), The New American Right
• George Fort Milton, The Eve of Conflict: Stephen A. Douglas and the Needless War
• Glyndon G. van Deusen, Thurlow Weed: Wizard of the Lobby
• Glyndon G. van Deusen, William Henry Seward
• Leonard D. White, “The Federalists”
• Leonard D. White, “The Jacksonians”
• Leonard D. White, “The Jeffersonians”
• Leonard D. White, “The Republican Era 1869-1901”
• Oscar E. Anderson, Jr., The Health of a Nation: Harvey W. Wiley and the Fight for Pure Food
• Paul P. van Riper, History of the United States Civil Service
• Robert W. Johanssen, Stephen A. Douglas
• Roy F. Nichols, The Disruption of American Democracy
• W.G. McLoughlin, Jr., Billy Sunday Was His Real Name

And I’ll also need to read something by Charles and Mary Beard; they were apparently hugely influential to at least one generation of American historians, and I see them cited everywhere.

You see my dilemma: I read two books, and I add 14 to my to-read list.

In no particular order, inspired by many hours of time spent with only my own head for company in various airports:

1. Queso Valdeon — a blue cheese from Spain — is really unbelievably good. Thanks to Jamie for recommending it to me. Whole Foods has pretty bad cheese overall, but one thing they do well is blue cheese. And also Parmesan. And actually their raw-milk cheeses are good, so maybe the problem is less Whole Foods and more pasteurized cheese.

2. I get the feeling that some large quantity of book, movie, and television consumption has more to do with distraction than with the consumption of interesting content. People need some way to relax their brains after a hard day at work, so they turn on the TV or pick up the latest potboiler, or watch a movie with a lot of explosions, and then they go on with the rest of their days. I suspect that this explains something like 75% of media purchases.

3. More generally, I feel like there’s something kind of insulting to the human race, and insulting to God if you’re religious, about a large part of what Americans buy. I hate to be this much of a drama queen about it, but every time I look at a McDonald’s nowadays, I think, “Mankind is on this end of a few billion years of evolution; we are in some sense the pinnacle of a tower that started with proteins swimming in a sea of ammonia. We are the only species that’s capable — so far as anyone knows — of reflecting on its own place in the universe. And here we are, eating at McDonald’s.” It just doesn’t seem consistent with our station as a species. We’re the most intelligent and refined creatures ever to roam the planet, capable of producing astonishing works of beauty and grace, and this is really the best we can do?

4. It’s also disheartening to me that so much of modern culture is meant to be consumed and disposed of within a few hours. I don’t know the history, so this may not be a new creation, but I suspect it is. If we look at the sales curve on most books, we probably find that there’s an initial spike and then a very quick drop-off; most books, I suspect, are actually out of print within a decade, though I’d like to see numbers on this. Likewise most movies: a movie like Notting Hill, for instance, probably isn’t expected to live much past its DVD release. It’s just not expected that people will think about this stuff for very long. I want very much — in my own life — to avoid the impermanence of mass culture. For one thing, I think taking a longer view of culture — reading books that have been around for centuries, watching movies that have been considered the peak of their craft for decades — reveals just how little new material there is in modern mass culture. Most of it was done better long ago.

Pardon the superciliousness here. I’m just frustrated by seeing nothing but Dan Brown books on my various flights, and hearing the continuous blare of the TV in LaGuardia. Modern mass culture is all about throwing images at people as quickly as possible, and giving them as little time to think about things as possible. I want very much to turn down the volume knob on mass culture in my own life, be more reflective, and gain a longer-term perspective on the world I live in. Mass culture is also all about destroying history as quickly as it’s created. I’m finding that reading books about American history (Hofstadter’s book was a miracle, which I’ve not adequately reviewed yet) is making it much easier to live in a world inhabited by George Bush; maybe, just maybe, the world has seen people like him before, and maybe we’re not so screwed. Maybe.

Speaking of AIIAL, I found a piece from the Chronicle of Higher Ed in which Todd Gitlin invoked it to attack pundits. I include it below the fold. It’s actually one of the more insightful things I’ve heard said about pundits. Gitlin is a well-known liberal historian who was, among other things, a member of the Students for a Democratic Society in the ‘60’s.

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I’m reading Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism In American Life right now. My first thing to note about it is that “Intellectualism” will hereby be abbreviated “i10ism” in keeping with i18n and l10n. Actually, maybe I’ll just call the whole book AIIAL. Yes. Yes I will. It’s my own goddamned blog, goddamnit.

Anyway, it’s great. Hofstadter tries to track down where anti-i10ism in American life comes from, and finds that its roots lie at least in the perennial conflict between religious scholarship and religious enthusiasm (sense 3). Here he is quoting Charles Chauncy’s Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in New England:

Their depending on the Help of the SPIRIT as to despise Learning. To this it is owing, that so many speak slightly of our Schools and Colleges; discovering a Good-Will, were it in their Power, to rase them to their Foundations. To the same Cause it may be ascrib’d, that such Swarms of Exhorters have appear’d in the Land, and been admir’d and run after, though many of them could scarce speak common Sense  . . .  and to the same Cause still it must be attributed that so many Ministers preach, not only without Book, but without Study; and justify their doing so, lest, by previous Preparation, they should stint the Spirit.

To the exponent of a religion of the book, for whom a correct reading of the Bible was a vital concern, this was the ultimate heresy: that one who was possessed of the Spirit could, without study and without learning, interpret the word of God effectively enough to be an agent of the salvation of others. And here we have the nub of the difference between the awakeners and the spokesmen of establishments: whether it was more important to get a historically correct and rational understanding of the Book — and hence of the word of God — or to work up a proper emotion, a proper sense of inner conviction and relation to God.

As Hofstadter summarizes it in his introduction:

The case against intellect is founded upon a set of fictional and wholly abstract antagonisms. Intellect is pitted against feeling, on the ground that it is somehow inconsistent with warm emotion. It is pitted against character, because it is widely believed that intellect stands for mere cleverness, which transmutes easily into the sly or the diabolical. It is pitted against practicality, since theory is held to be opposed to practice, and the “purely” theoretical mind is so much disesteemed. It is pitted against democracy, since intellect is felt to be a form of distinction that defies egalitarianism. Once the validity of these antagonisms is accepted, then the case for intellect, and by extension for the intellectual, is lost. Who cares to risk sacrificing warmth of emotion, solidity of character, practical capacity, or democratic sentiment in order to pay deference to a type of man who at best is deemed to be merely clever and at worst may even be dangerous?

In a society where being a successful businessman is more or less the pinnacle of achievement, it makes some sense that intellectuals would be scorned. And at least since Adlai Stevenson, they have not been especially good at winning elections.

Hofstadter has thus far reserved his acid for Senator Joseph McCarthy:

What I believe is important, however, to anyone who hopes to understand the impulse behind American anti-intellectualism is that this grievance against intellectuals as ideologues goes far beyond any reproaches based on actual Communism or fellow-traveling  . . .  The truth is that the right-winger needs his Communists badly, and is pathetically reluctant to give them up. The real function of the Great Inquisition of the 1950’s was not anything so simply rational as to turn up spies or prevent espionage (for which the police agencies presumably are adequate) or even to expose actual Communists, but to discharge resentments and frustrations, to punish, to satisfy enmities whose roots lay elsewhere than in the Communist issue itself.  . . .  [McCarthy’s] bullying was welcomed because it satisfied a craving for revenge and a desire to discredit the type of leadership the New Deal had made prominent.

Had the Great Inquisition been directed only against Communists, it would have tried to be more precise and discriminating in its search for them: in fact, its leading practitioners seemed to care little for the difference between a Communist and a unicorn.

When Hofstadter decides to turn a phrase, it turns on a dime. But even his workaday sentences are brisk, come to comforting closes, and pull you along to the next ones effortlessly. Better yet, I get the sense that this book is going to help me understand why liberals keep losing elections. And maybe put American history into some perspective will make the Bush administration seem less horrifying.