In the seven decades that have passed since the publication of The American Mind, the answers we have provided to these questions regarding education, leisure, morality, corruption, decadence, and vulgarization have been more negative than positive.
During April 2019 several pieces appeared on the HNN website dealing with the decreasing interest in the humanities, including history. One of them was entitled “US declining interest in history presents risk to democracy.” Commenting on President Trump’s poor knowledge of history, it observed that he “is a fitting leader for such times.” Another article, abridged from The New York Times, was “Is the U.S. a Democracy? A Social Studies Battle Turns on the Nation’s Values.” These essays stirred me to ask, “What is the connection, if any, between President Trump, the decline of the humanities, and U.S. values?”
Let’s begin with American values. While any generalizations present difficulties, they can at least help us get closer to important truths. A valuable indicator of American values, first published in 1950, is historian Henry Steele Commager’s The American Mind. Regarding “the nineteenth-century American,” he wrote, “Often romantic about business, the American was practical about politics, religion, culture, and science.” In the next several pages, Commager also generalizes that the average American’s culture “was material”; there “was a quantitative cast to his thinking”; “theories and speculations” disturbed him, and “he avoided abstruse philosophies of government or conduct”; his “attitude toward culture was at once suspicious and indulgent,” and he expected it (and religion) to “serve some useful purpose”; and “he expected education to prepare for life — by which he meant, increasingly, jobs and professions.” “Nowhere else,” the historian noted, “were intellectuals held in such contempt or relegated to so inferior a position.”
A dozen years after the publication of Commager’s book, Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1962) appeared. Over a year ago, I discussed that historian’s insights as they applied to present-day U. S. culture and President Trump. Hofstadter noted that “the first truly powerful and widespread impulse to anti-intellectualism” arose during the Jackson era. This anti-intellectualism was common among evangelicals and it was reflected in the popularity of the Horatio Alger rags-to-riches myth, the increasing emphasis on vocational training, the popularity of self-help gurus like Norman Vincent Peale, and the strong impact in the early 1950s of McCarthyism.