The Functions of Intelligence
Aaron Lecklider, Inventing the Egghead: The Battle Over Brainpower in American Culture
University of Pennsylvania Press, 286pp, £29.50, ISBN 9780812244861
reviewed by Nick Witham
When I teach a special subject on the American ‘culture wars’ to final-year undergraduates, I make a specific effort to combat the disparaging attitudes they often hold about their counterparts across the Atlantic. As we discuss contemporary US thinking on issues such as abortion, gun control, gay rights and the place of religion in public life, my students often resort to declarations that Americans are ‘stupid’ or ‘crazy’, as if these designations somehow explain the strongly held sentiments with which they disagree. Part of my job is to guide them towards a more nuanced understanding of the roots of contemporary social attitudes in recent American social and political history. Indeed, by the end of the course I hope that they are less likely to resort to such simplistic explanations of why Americans think the way they do.
However, when they question the mental faculties of those who oppose tighter controls on gun ownership, or resist legislation that aims to provide federally funded healthcare for working-class Americans, my students echo a longstanding tradition within the intellectual and cultural history of the United States, albeit without knowing it. Following in the footsteps of Richard Hofstadter and Christopher Lasch, a range of scholars, critics and journalists have decried the anti-intellectualism of American public discourse and the attendant trivialisation of cultural life, resorting to descriptions of reactionary or populist political sentiment as irrational. Accordingly, Americans are often characterised as fundamentally sceptical of intellectuals, regardless of whether they function, in Hofstadter’s terms, as ‘experts’ or ‘ideologues’, or work inside or outside of institutions of higher education.
In his brilliant new book Inventing the Egghead, Aaron Lecklider seeks to complicate this prevalent understanding of American attitudes towards intelligence by documenting the way that ‘brainpower’ functioned as a contested terrain during the first half of the 20th century, and was, in a variety of unlikely circumstances, used as the basis for opposition to the social and political status quo by marginalised groups such as African Americans and working-class women. In presenting this case, Lecklider makes an important contribution to American historiography, but also proposes ideas about the function of scientific and humanistic knowledge that extend beyond narrow geographic or temporal limits and have a direct contemporary relevance.
The book opens with a discussion of developing attitudes towards brainpower at the turn of the 20th century. This was the era of the emergence of mass culture, and it soon became apparent that access to intelligence could function as a kind of commodity. In order to be allowed to keep their Coney Island theme parks open on Sundays, imaginative entertainers re-branded their amusements as ‘educational institutions’. They argued that as working-class patrons went about their leisure pursuits, they were able to learn from performers about disciplines as diverse as natural science, history and religion. In doing so, these early proponents of mass culture ‘eliminated dividing lines between popular entertainment, education, and edification.’ Working-class communities used the access to brainpower offered by popular amusements to resist the strictures of middle-class reformers, who believed that theme parks, silent movies and dime novels poisoned the minds of their un-educated audiences. As Lecklider thoughtfully points out, even at this early stage there was a paradox at work in cultural representations of intelligence, which, as it became associated with working-class militancy, was staunchly opposed by bourgeois communities, who deemed it a threat to the status quo and therefore somehow ‘un-American’.
This process was cemented during the American public’s encounter with Albert Einstein in the 1920s. The physicist’s theory of relativity became the subject of intense interest in US popular culture, as ordinary people proved keen to comprehend the complexity of both its mathematics, and its implications for everyday understandings of the world. But again, paradoxes were at work. Lecklider suggests that in magazine reports, poetry and comic strips, Einstein appeared as both ‘a foreigner and a fellow citizen; a dangerous enemy and a beloved friend.’ Popular appreciation of his theories helped to break the boundary between elite and everyday knowledge, but his argument that ‘all ordinary intelligence’ was essentially false proved unsettling, and his status as a foreigner played into the xenophobic thinking of the period. If American popular culture’s engagement with intelligence proved that it was by no means inherently anti-intellectual, this did not mean that it avoided ambivalent representations of specific intellectuals who did not fit the ‘norm’.
Through careful and considerate treatment of a range of cultural sources, Lecklider charts the subsequent fate of brainpower as a popular concept in the Harlem renaissance, the labour politics of the Depression period, and the post-World War II era of nuclear politics. His chapters make for compelling reading, and one of the most interesting stories connecting them is that of the changing designations used by Americans to refer to intellectuals. The term ‘long hair’ gained currency during the 1920s to refer to brainy aesthetes operating at a remove from mainstream culture, and emerged again in the 1940s to describe the inhabitants of Oak Ridge, the ‘atomic city’ in Tennessee that housed the uranium enrichment facilities necessary for American production of nuclear weapons. ‘Negro genius’ was another commonly used descriptor to signify the apparently distinctive characteristics of a new class of African American intellectuals in Harlem. But it is the figure of the ‘egghead’ that Lecklider suggests best exemplifies Americans’ ambivalent relationship towards the world of ideas. Eggheads were celebrated for their intellectual superiority, but at the same time deemed ‘repellent’ and ‘transgressive’ because of the ways their arguments and identities chipped away at established political, racial and gender norms. This stereotype was reinforced again and again on the covers of magazines, as well in novels and plays, to the extent that it operated as a ‘brooding foil to those who presumed brainpower could be employed to lead the charge of liberation.’ Closeted from interaction from the real world, the egghead symbolised the manifold insecurities of the early Cold War period.
In spite of this pessimistic conclusion, Lecklider does not repeat the accusation that serious ideas exist only at the margins of American political debate. Instead, he makes clear that his case studies should help readers to envision intelligence as ‘a shared commodity across social classes.’ In a moment when higher education of one type or another is an increasingly common experience on both sides of the Atlantic, but is at the same time becoming deeply and troublingly commodified through increased tuition fees and unsuitable quantification of research ‘outputs’, Lecklider’s argument is tremendously instructive. It shows that intelligence need not only function in the service of the powerful, nor in increasingly specialised corners of academe, but also as an expansive, democratic tool that can disrupt the everyday flow of information and challenge the political and economic status quo in a range of unexpected ways.
However, when they question the mental faculties of those who oppose tighter controls on gun ownership, or resist legislation that aims to provide federally funded healthcare for working-class Americans, my students echo a longstanding tradition within the intellectual and cultural history of the United States, albeit without knowing it. Following in the footsteps of Richard Hofstadter and Christopher Lasch, a range of scholars, critics and journalists have decried the anti-intellectualism of American public discourse and the attendant trivialisation of cultural life, resorting to descriptions of reactionary or populist political sentiment as irrational. Accordingly, Americans are often characterised as fundamentally sceptical of intellectuals, regardless of whether they function, in Hofstadter’s terms, as ‘experts’ or ‘ideologues’, or work inside or outside of institutions of higher education.
In his brilliant new book Inventing the Egghead, Aaron Lecklider seeks to complicate this prevalent understanding of American attitudes towards intelligence by documenting the way that ‘brainpower’ functioned as a contested terrain during the first half of the 20th century, and was, in a variety of unlikely circumstances, used as the basis for opposition to the social and political status quo by marginalised groups such as African Americans and working-class women. In presenting this case, Lecklider makes an important contribution to American historiography, but also proposes ideas about the function of scientific and humanistic knowledge that extend beyond narrow geographic or temporal limits and have a direct contemporary relevance.
The book opens with a discussion of developing attitudes towards brainpower at the turn of the 20th century. This was the era of the emergence of mass culture, and it soon became apparent that access to intelligence could function as a kind of commodity. In order to be allowed to keep their Coney Island theme parks open on Sundays, imaginative entertainers re-branded their amusements as ‘educational institutions’. They argued that as working-class patrons went about their leisure pursuits, they were able to learn from performers about disciplines as diverse as natural science, history and religion. In doing so, these early proponents of mass culture ‘eliminated dividing lines between popular entertainment, education, and edification.’ Working-class communities used the access to brainpower offered by popular amusements to resist the strictures of middle-class reformers, who believed that theme parks, silent movies and dime novels poisoned the minds of their un-educated audiences. As Lecklider thoughtfully points out, even at this early stage there was a paradox at work in cultural representations of intelligence, which, as it became associated with working-class militancy, was staunchly opposed by bourgeois communities, who deemed it a threat to the status quo and therefore somehow ‘un-American’.
This process was cemented during the American public’s encounter with Albert Einstein in the 1920s. The physicist’s theory of relativity became the subject of intense interest in US popular culture, as ordinary people proved keen to comprehend the complexity of both its mathematics, and its implications for everyday understandings of the world. But again, paradoxes were at work. Lecklider suggests that in magazine reports, poetry and comic strips, Einstein appeared as both ‘a foreigner and a fellow citizen; a dangerous enemy and a beloved friend.’ Popular appreciation of his theories helped to break the boundary between elite and everyday knowledge, but his argument that ‘all ordinary intelligence’ was essentially false proved unsettling, and his status as a foreigner played into the xenophobic thinking of the period. If American popular culture’s engagement with intelligence proved that it was by no means inherently anti-intellectual, this did not mean that it avoided ambivalent representations of specific intellectuals who did not fit the ‘norm’.
Through careful and considerate treatment of a range of cultural sources, Lecklider charts the subsequent fate of brainpower as a popular concept in the Harlem renaissance, the labour politics of the Depression period, and the post-World War II era of nuclear politics. His chapters make for compelling reading, and one of the most interesting stories connecting them is that of the changing designations used by Americans to refer to intellectuals. The term ‘long hair’ gained currency during the 1920s to refer to brainy aesthetes operating at a remove from mainstream culture, and emerged again in the 1940s to describe the inhabitants of Oak Ridge, the ‘atomic city’ in Tennessee that housed the uranium enrichment facilities necessary for American production of nuclear weapons. ‘Negro genius’ was another commonly used descriptor to signify the apparently distinctive characteristics of a new class of African American intellectuals in Harlem. But it is the figure of the ‘egghead’ that Lecklider suggests best exemplifies Americans’ ambivalent relationship towards the world of ideas. Eggheads were celebrated for their intellectual superiority, but at the same time deemed ‘repellent’ and ‘transgressive’ because of the ways their arguments and identities chipped away at established political, racial and gender norms. This stereotype was reinforced again and again on the covers of magazines, as well in novels and plays, to the extent that it operated as a ‘brooding foil to those who presumed brainpower could be employed to lead the charge of liberation.’ Closeted from interaction from the real world, the egghead symbolised the manifold insecurities of the early Cold War period.
In spite of this pessimistic conclusion, Lecklider does not repeat the accusation that serious ideas exist only at the margins of American political debate. Instead, he makes clear that his case studies should help readers to envision intelligence as ‘a shared commodity across social classes.’ In a moment when higher education of one type or another is an increasingly common experience on both sides of the Atlantic, but is at the same time becoming deeply and troublingly commodified through increased tuition fees and unsuitable quantification of research ‘outputs’, Lecklider’s argument is tremendously instructive. It shows that intelligence need not only function in the service of the powerful, nor in increasingly specialised corners of academe, but also as an expansive, democratic tool that can disrupt the everyday flow of information and challenge the political and economic status quo in a range of unexpected ways.