(3 of 10)
James Russell Lowell to England and Hawthorne as consul in Liverpool. The Robber Barons, who were the modern Medici, imported European treasures by the boatload, but Henry Adams found America "mortgaged to the railways." Henry James fled to Europe, and in 1913 Ezra Pound gloomily wrote of America's artists: "O helpless few in my country, 0 remnant enslaved!"
After World War I some of the enslaved looked for emancipation abroad. "You are all," Gertrude Stein said, "a lost generation." But even the sober homebodies found reason to feel disenchanted. There they were, says Philosopher Arthur E. Murphy of the University of Washington, fighting for The People against the Vested Interests, and the people blandly sent Warren G. Harding to the White House.
It was not until the '303, when the practical men fell from their high place with such a thud, that the intellectual seemed to come into his own. But war and prosperity brought the practical men back, and the nation's band of intellectuals seemed to be tuning up for another song of despair. While Joe McCarthy was running amuck, a few did lose their heads, but the McCarthy flurry only tended to obscure one central fact. Far from repeating the attitudes of the '205, the American intellectual stayed at home and even found himself feeling at home. His perennial problem has been to reconcile himself to a society that has always refused to accord him—or anyone else—the special regard given his European counterpart. "This," says Chairman Leslie Fiedler of Montana State University's English department, "is a period of recapitulation, a summing up. The intellectual is taking stock of himself."
The Sinister Ones. What are some of the problems that the intellectual now faces? The most obvious is the vast complexity of modern knowledge itself. Today's thinkers speak in many tongues, not always understood by each other. This is a part of the intellectual's plight, for, says Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, "if people can't tell what learned folk are up to, they may regard them as sinister." Unlike France, America has no intellectual cafe society, no small "mandarin" coteries to look to. "There is," says Philosopher Theodore Greene, "no headquarters and no head, no corporate momentum or cooperation among intellectuals. We haven't had a philosopher who pretended to know all there was to know since Hegel. The only adequate successor to Hegel would be a committee."
In other nations the problem of communication is not so acute. In England, says British Historian D. W. Brogan, "everybody above a certain level knows everyone else. Perhaps 100,000 people or less hold all the great jobs. They are all intellectuals. There is a unified group at the top. Everyone gravitates to London."