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To this portrait of the American intellectual in 1956, Jacques Barzun is the living contradiction. If he is not the typical American intellectual—for no such person exists—he represents a growing host of men of ideas who not only have the respect of the nation, but who return the compliment. Born in France into a family of long academic tradition, he has known at firsthand the cultures of both the Old World and the New, and while still a student at Columbia University, he decided to cast his lot with the New. Today, standing in the front rank of U.S. historians, he has also won a reputation as a perceptive commentator on the American scene. As such, he poses a question that sheds light both on the intellectual's strange status in America and on America's position in history. "Can it be true," he asks, "that in attempting to keep open house for all mankind, we have lost our birthright, squandered our intellectual heritage, so that Americanization is tantamount to barbarization? Or is it possible that modern civilization is something new, incommensurable with the old, just like the character of the American adventure itself?"
Protest & Affirmation. That this sense of the American adventure has become something of a preoccupation is a telling characteristic of America's postwar men of ideas. Their 'tone may be subdued, but their apparent lack of passion does not mean any lack of concern for America's destiny. The Man of Protest has to some extent given way to the Man of Affirmation—and that happens to be the very role that the intellectual played when the nation was new. It was such American intellectuals as Jefferson and Franklin who wanted to put the age of reason into political practice. It was Poet Joel Barlow who sang of America: "Sun of the moral world! . . . here assume thy stand / And radiate hence to every distant land." It was Philosopher Emerson who urged the American scholar to fashion something new. "We have listened too long," said he, "to the courtly muses of Europe . . . We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds."
Mixing pride with blunt arrogance, America's early intellectuals wanted America to set an example for the whole world. And as they spoke and wrote, they themselves sounded the first notes of the theme of anti-intellectualism that was to run through all U.S. history. America, they declared, should be the land of the "common man." "If reason is a universal faculty," said Historian George Bancroft, "the universal decision is the nearest criterion of truth. The common mind ... is the sieve which separates error from certainty." The young nation had little appetite for theory, and the intellectuals had little desire to furnish it. "Books," said Emerson, "are for the scholar's idle times." What America should be concerned with, said Walt Whitman, was "the duties of today, the lessons of the concrete."
"O Remnant Enslaved!" In the land that he helped to build, the intellectual gradually began to feel that he was talking only to himself. The "duties of today" were taken over by the practical men, and the best that the nation could do officially for the intellectual was to send Washington Irving as minister to Spain,