4The replacement, in [Adlai] Stevenson's phrase, of the New Dealers by the car dealers seemed to make final the repudiation of intellectuals and their values--they had already been overshadowed by the courthouse politicians of the Truman years.
34But in our time, of course, American society has grown greatly in complexity and in involvement with the rest of the world. In most areas of life a formal training has become a prerequisite to success. At the same time, the complexity of modern life has steadily whittled away the functions the ordinary citizen can intelligently and comprehendingly perform for himself. In the original American populistic dream, the omnicompetence of the common man was fundamental and indispensable. It was believed that he could, without much special preparation, pursue the professions and run the government. Today he knows that he cannot even make his breakfast without using devices, more or less mysterious to him, which expertise has put at his disposal; and when he sits down to breakfast and looks at his morning newspaper, he reads about a whole range of vital and intricate issues and acknowledges, if he is candid with himself, that he has not acquired competence to judge most of them.
159Jackson, it was said, had been lucky enough to have escaped the formal training that impaired the "vigour and originality of the understanding." Here was a man of action, "educated in Nature's school," who was "artificial in nothing"; who had fortunately "escaped the training and dialectics of the schools"; who had a "judgment unclouded by the visionary speculations of the academician"; who had, "in an extraordinary degree, that native strength of mind, that practical common sense, that power and discrimination of judgment which, for all useful purposes, are more valuable than all the acquired learning of a sage"; whose mind did not have to move along "the tardy avenues of syllogism, nor over the beaten track of analysis, or the hackneyed walk of logical induction," because it had natural intuitive power and could go "with the lightning's flash and illuminate its own pathway."
199Progressivism moved from local to state levels to national politics. It was in the state governments that the new agencies of regulation first went into operation and that a substantial place for experts in legislation was first created. The trial ground for the role of experts in political life was not Washington but the state capitals, particularly Madison, Wisconsin, which offered the first example of experts in the service of "the people" and the state. In its successes and failures, in the very antagonisms it aroused, the La Follette experiment in Wisconsin was a bellweather for national Progressive politics and a historical prototype for the New Deal.
212Only by 1916, in response to the recent achievements of the New Freedom and Wilson's success in keeping out of war, did liberal intellectuals swing wholeheartedly to his support. The war itself, ironically, raised many of them to heights of influence as no domestic issue could. Historians and writers were mobilized for propaganda, and experts of all kinds were recruited as advisors. Military Intelligence, Chemical Warfare, and the War Industries Board swarmed with academics, and Washington's Cosmos Club was reported to be "little better than a faculty meeting of all the universities." In September 1919 Colonel House organized for Wilson the group of scholars known as The Inquiry (which already had its counterparts in Great Britain and France). At one time the expert personnel of The Inquiry numbered 150 persons--historians, geographers, statisticians, ethnologists, economists, political scientists--and these, with their assistants and staffs, brought the number of the whole organization to several hundred. Kept secret until the Armistice, The Inquiry was then revamped as the Intelligence Division of the American Commission to Negotiate Peace, and its staff accompanied Wilson to Paris, where it played a part of no small importance. There was a certain amount of amused comment about this group in the press, and a certain skepticism among old-school diplomats about this tribe of political amateurs, with their tree army truckloads of documents.
238With their minds fixed on the future, Americans found themselves surrounded with ample land and resources and beset by a shortage of labor and skills. They set a premium upon technical knowledge and inventiveness which would unlock the riches of the country and open the door to the opulent future. Technology, sill--everything that is suggested by the significant Americanism, "know-how"--was in demand. The past was seen as despicably impractical and uninventive, simply and solely as something to be surmounted.
255Self-help was discipline in character. The self-help literature told how to marshal the resources of the will--how to cultivate the habits of frugality and hard work and the virtues of perseverance and sobriety. The writers of self-help books imagined that poverty in early life was actually a kind of asset, because its discipline helped to produce the type of character that would succeed.
The conception of character advocated by the self-help writers and the self-made men explicitly excluded what they loosely called genius. No doubt there was a certain underlying ambivalence in this--who does not desire or envy "genius"? But the prevailing assumption in the self-help literature was that character was necessary and remarkable talents were not; still more, that those who began by having such talents would lack the incentive or the abilitytoot develop character. The average man, by intensifying his good qualities, by applying common sense to a high degree, could have the equivalent of genius, or something much better.
256Eighty years after Beecher's characterization of genius, an article appeared in the American Magazine under the title, "Why I Never Hire Brilliant MEn." The writer identified brilliance in business with mercurial temperament, neuroticism, and irresponsibility; his experience as an entrepreneur with men of this type had been disastrous.
339 Good context for understanding early 20th century ideas about prevailing intelligence among workers.The American mind seems extremely vulnerable to the belief that any alleged knowledge which can be expressed in figures is in fact as final and exact as the figures in which it is expressed. Army testing in the First World War is a case in point. It was very quickly and widely believed that the Army Alpha tests had actually measured intelligence; that they made it possible to assign mental ages; that mental ages, or intelligence as reported by tests, are fixed; that vast numbers of Americans had a mental age of only fourteen; and that therefore the educational system must be coping with hordes of more or less backward children.
422Their paradoxical creed [the Beats] of mass disengagement and group inaction is reminiscent of the unforgettable words of an undergraduate in a solemn paper on modern culture: "The world will never be saved until the individual comes out of the group en masse.