Rich Relations: The American Occupation of Britain, 1942-45 by David Reynolds

I first picked up this book for a course on Anglo-American relations from World War II to the end of the Cold War. I don’t normally look into military-type history, but I suppose it helped that this book happens to be more about military culture than on campaigns and battles.

Rich Relations: The American Occupation of Britain, 1942-45 by David Reynolds

The story of American GIs in Britain has two sides: that of the British military and civilian population, who often dismissed the GIs as ‘over-sexed, over-paid, over-fed, and over here’; and that of the GIs themselves, who returned the cutting remarks by claiming that the British military were ‘under-sexed, under-paid, under-fed, and under Eisenhower’. Some American soldiers got on very well with the British people they met, quite often with young British women whose heads were turned by the smartly-dressed Yanks. But the problems and conflicts between the British and the GIs created some very ugly incidents, especially when black GIs were involved. The official segregation of the American forces forced both the Americans and the British to go to extraordinary lengths to keep the races separate — because the sight of a white British woman and a black American soldier walking out together was all too often the spark for an explosive confrontation.

David Reynolds has done his research well for Rich Relations, and does his best to be balanced in interpreting the often conflicting information that comes out of official memos and personal recollections. He separates the book into sections devoted to the official information from the top brass and the collected experiences of the individuals involved. Some of the stories are funny and many are sad, but some are particularly touching — one black GI recalls how he became fast friends with an older British couple who lived near his base camp, including the birthday party they gave for him which featured a small iced cake they had baked from their meagre rations (no sugar in the cake, only in the icing). There are quite a lot of good stories of this nature, and the book is rich in detail and interesting to explore.

Rich Relations does suffers a little from repetition in certain parts — do we really need to be reminded four times in the space of about two hundred pages that the pre-war black population of Britain numbered around 8,000 people? I must also admit that I skimmed through the parts dealing with battles and troop mobilisations, the parts that a military historian or World War II buff would probably find more interesting. I would not have minded if the sections about the D-Day invasions had been trimmed slightly; after all, the book is supposed to focus on the experience in Britain, rather than on the Continent. Yet the book does its job extremely well, shedding light on a fascinating time in Anglo-American (or should that be ‘Yank and Limey’?) relations.

Letter from America by Alistair Cooke

I thought I’d posted this already, but it seems that I hadn’t yet. I need to start keeping closer track of the reviews I’ve posted compared to the ones I still need to post — now that I’ve cleared out a bit of my backlog, I may soon be able to start posting reviews of books I’ve read more recently.

Letter from America by Alistair Cooke

Depending on which side of the Atlantic Ocean you’re from, the name of Alistair Cooke conjures up a different set of sounds and images. For most people in the States, Cooke was the voice and image of PBS’s Masterpiece Theatre, his plummy tones borne through the television set on the regal trumpet fanfare of Jean-Joseph Mouret’s ‘Rondeau’. And because he hosted Masterpiece Theatre for the better part of two decades, to most Americans Cooke’s name is synonymous with high-brow costume dramas and classic British television imports. But for many British people, Alistair Cooke is best known for his ‘Letters from America’ — his weekly 15-minute broadcasts on Radio 4, a stunning 2,869 broadcasts in total that ran from March 1946 to March 2004. And it is these ‘letters’, or a good selection of them, that make up this book.

Five decades’ worth of broadcasts leaves a lot of material to choose from. Some of his letters had been published earlier, in books that are now out of print, but the letters from the 1990s and 2000-2004 had been uncollected previously. And it’s a sign of the editors’ skill in selection that there’s no sense of repetition in the selected letters, and that some of Cooke’s most powerful letters have their rightful place in this collection. His letters concerning the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy are masterful — particularly the latter, since Cooke was present in the hotel kitchen when the younger Kennedy was shot. He wrote about Vietnam and Watergate, about September 11th and the war in Iraq…but he also wrote about the beauty of Christmas in Vermont, about family holidays on Long Island, about life in America and how it changed in the years he lived there.

Letter from America is probably one of those books that you’d think to buy for someone else, or might see on a table in a bookshop and wonder if it’s worth purchasing or merely flipping through. But I’m glad to have purchased this book, because Alistair Cooke was, if nothing else, a cherished institution for Americans and Britons alike. And a collection of his broadcasts, even a partial one such as this, is fine reading material.

Metro Maps of the World, 2nd Edition by Mark Ovenden

I freely admit to being something of a trainspotter. Not in the sense that I write down engine numbers in little books, but in the sense that I admire the organisation involved in the smooth running of public transportation. I do hope that this review doesn’t make me sound a complete anorak.

Metro Maps of the World, 2nd Edition by Mark Ovenden

I’m fond of maps, and the development of maps and map design. The ways in which we display information intended for public use is a particularly fascinating subject, bringing together all kinds of aspects of semiotics, information management, graphic design, and overall aesthetics. So Mark Ovenden’s Metro Maps of the World sets my heart a-fluttering in a way that rather defies its status as a book that seems to be meant for display on a coffee table.

The book shows the development of underground/metro systems in cities all over the world, and more specifically, the development of their mapping systems. Due reverence is paid to Harry Beck, the Englishman who revised the way that metro maps were created — instead of showing how the London Underground lines really looked to scale with a London street map, he simplified the design into a cleaner, more readable format that is more of a diagram than a proper map. (Here’s an image of Beck’s revised Tube plan from the early 1930s; compare it to one of the pre-Beck maps.) But Metro Maps of the World covers more than just London. Ovenden’s book compiles historical maps of the world’s major metro systems, from the Moscow Metro to the New York City subway, from Berlin’s U-bahn to Tokyo’s TRTA/TOEI system. There are sections in the book devoted to smaller systems that are no less intricate in design, as well as metro systems whose construction is still being planned.

Gorgeously illustrated and rich in detail, Metro Maps of the World is utterly fascinating to anyone who has attempted to navigate the metro system of a major city. And if you plan to visit any major city in the near future, the book might also be terribly useful from a practical standpoint. Better to get an idea of how the maps work when you’re still at home, after all — it certainly beats standing in front of a metro map and feeling panic rising in your stomach when you realise that you’ve no idea how to get where you want to go.

1973 Nervous Breakdown: Watergate, Warhol, and the Birth of Post-Sixties America by Andreas Killen

Sometimes I come across books with attractive and interesting titles that just don’t seem to pan out to my liking. Here’s a review of one of them.

1973 Nervous Breakdown: Watergate, Warhol, and the Birth of Post-Sixties America by Andreas Killen

It’s a mildly redundant cliche to talk about any year as an ‘eventful year’, but 1973 had its fair share of noteworthy events, particularly for Americans. From the Roe vs Wade decision (22 January) to the release of the film Deep Throat (ruled ‘irredemably obscene’ by a New York judge on 1 March), and from the start of the televised Watergate hearings (17 May) to the first shots of the Yom Kippur War (6 October) and the subsequent oil embargo by the OPEC members of the Middle East, 1973 was by any account a year of social and political upheaval. The sights and sounds of that year continue to haunt the American consciousness into the present day — President Richard Nixon’s insistence that he wasn’t a crook, prisoners of war returning from Vietnam, even a controversial new ‘reality TV’ show (An American Family, broadcast on PBS). Add to those events the well-publicised increase in the number of religious cults and airplane hijackings, which would culminate a year later in the iconic figure of newspaper heiress Patty Hearst in the fatigues of the Symbionese Liberation Army, and it might not seem so strange that 1973 was also the year in which The Exorcist made film-going audiences sick in theatres across the country. But why was 1973 so seemingly crazy a year?

Andreas Killen takes the title of his book from a review that rock critic Lester Bangs wrote about the Rolling Stones’ album Goat’s Head Soup, in which Bangs essentially said that the Stones had reduced themselves (or been reduced by their long period of rock-stardom) to a band that was merely going through the motions. But Killen uses ‘nervous breakdown’ in another context to points out what he sees as a number of neurotic undercurrents in American society, revealing a country still shaken by the redefinition of the social landscape that happened in the 1960s. If America as a country really was having a nervous breakdown in 1973, what were the causes? Killen points to a belief that American youth were under assault from corrupting moral influences in films and television, with cults and communes as particular symptoms of their fragile grip on reality. Connected to this is a deep sense of paranoia, exemplified by Richard Nixon’s audio tapes but covering a wide range of fears about America’s position in the world and a powerful feeling of self-doubt — a feeling that would continue to have repercussions on American politics and culture through the rest of the 1970s and into the 1980s.

To be perfectly honest, I didn’t enjoy 1973 Nervous Breakdown. Other reviews I’ve read have pointed out that trying to shove the ‘end of the 1960s’ into one single year forced Killen to jam together a number of narrative threads in a way that didn’t do proper justice to any of them. But what bothered me most about the book is the fact that Killen’s analysis seemed to just skim the surface of the year and the time period as a whole. It’s terribly U.S.-centric, which might not seem that big of a flaw in a book about post-1960s America — but to me, that line of thought just seems to reinforce why the book didn’t satisfy. There’s very little sense of a deeper connection to other things that were happening in the world, other trends and and other events that had more of an impact on America in the 1970s than Killen describes in the pages of the book. The general destabilisation of American society that led to many of the events in the 1970s was not purely the result of various social changes and political happenings at home. While Killen did a fairly good job of highlighting many of the symptoms of the 1973 nervous breakdown, in my mind he fell more than a little bit short of diagnosing the causes. For all of the talk about how the culture wars of the 1970s are still being fought today, it’s a shame that a book that tries to explain the ‘why’ leaves out more than a few key contributing factors along the way.

The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control by John Marks

I first picked up this book after taking a class on the culture of the Cold War, which also had a film component. The Manchurian Candidate was one of the films featured and discussed in the class, and I happen to be working on a review of a more recent book about The Manchurian Candidate for a film studies journal. Perhaps posting this review will give me the impetus I need to finish the last 500 words of the other book review?

The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control by John Marks

If you’ve never seen The Manchurian Candidate, a brief summary will suffice. The original 1962 film version stars Laurence Harvey as the ‘Manchurian candidate’ — Sergeant Raymond Shaw, an American soldier who was captured while serving in Korea and brainwashed by the Communists to become the perfect assassin. Under the influence of hypnosis, he would take orders to kill people and then would have no memory of who gave those orders or what those orders were. Angela Lansbury also stars in a chilling role as the soldier’s manipulative mother, the wife of a Joseph McCarthy-type senator who is running for the vice-presidency but is greedy for higher office. The film seems a little on the campy side if you try to treat it as a straight-up espionage thriller, but it’s a fascinating film to watch from the perspective of a Cold War historian.

John Marks’ book draws on the image of the ‘Manchurian candidate’ as an appropriate description of an often-ignored aspect of Cold War history in America. The Central Intelligence Agency apparently spent much of the 1950s and 1960s trying to determine if such a scenario was possible — if a man could actually be brainwashed to become a ‘Manchurian candidate’ who could be programmed to kill, or if certain combinations of drugs could be used as ‘truth drugs’ or other useful chemical weapons in the intelligence officer’s arsenal. Marks shares stories of how CIA researchers experimented on each other with mind-altering drugs like LSD, even to the point of slipping chemicals in each other’s coffee or cigarettes and waiting to see what kind of reaction the drugs would produce. Researchers and field agents went to disturbing lengths in their attempts to produce some sort of truth serum or indeed any substance that would dramatically change an individual’s behaviour.

The Search for the Manchurian Candidate also postulates an intriguing theory about the CIA’s influence on the growth of the drug counterculture in America in the 1960s. Vaguely, the theory is that the CIA latched onto Sandoz, a Swiss pharmaceutical firm that had first synthesised LSD, because the drug’s potential use for intelligence activities was of great interest to behavioural researchers. So in order to test the properties of LSD and other psychedelic drugs, the CIA distributed LSD prototypes and synthetic chemicals to scientists and research professors at major universities, who passed it on to graduate students and student volunteers, who then passed it on to undergraduate students, who brought it into the mainstream of college life…and so on. With teachers influencing their students and upperclassmen doing the same to underclassmen, the drug spread around the country — but someone had to influence the teachers first. By this theory, the CIA was at the top of the LSD distribution system and of the ‘tune in, turn on, drop out’ counterculture of the 1960s.

Even if you’re willing to dismiss Marks’ theory as conspiracy claptrap, his book nonetheless provides a different perspective on the darker side of American espionage during the Cold War. The Search for the Manchurian Candidate is sometimes funny and sometimes unsettling, but it’s certainly informative.

In Confidence by Anatoly Dobrynin

Politicians’ memoirs usually aren’t the easiest books to carry around and read. They’re often only available in heavy and bulky hardback editions, and they tend to require a more consistent focus than some other history books — not the sort of thing you can put down and pick up again at random. But occasionally there are memoirs that I’d be more than willing to lug around, and today’s review happens to focus on one of them.

In Confidence by Anatoly Dobrynin

Anatoly Dobrynin, born in 1919, served as Soviet ambassador to the United States from 1962 to 1986 — which I believe makes him the longest-serving ambassador in Russian history. In those twenty-four years, he went through the Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon (and Kissinger), Ford (and Kissinger), Carter, and Reagan administrations…and on the other side, the Krushchev, Brezhnev (and Kosygin), Andropov, Chernenko, and Gorbachev years. Ambassador Dobrynin outlasted any number of lesser diplomats, and his unbroken record of service and his status as an outsider makes him an interesting choice to report on the history of US/Soviet relations during the tempestuous years of the Cold War.

And report he does. At nearly 700 pages long, In Confidence covers Dobrynin’s entire career. He began, interestingly enough, as an engineer who had never considered himself to be a political person. He was selected for the diplomatic corps during World War II almost against his will, and spent a good deal of time studying American history and working in Moscow before he was sent to the embassy in Washington DC as a foreign affairs attache in the early 1950s. By 1962, he had risen to become ambassador, and his long career as the Soviet government’s representative in America began.

Dobrynin’s memoirs are probably not a good starting point for anyone who isn’t at least familiar with basic Cold War history, particularly the Ford and Carter years where American foreign policy tended to be muddled and contradictory. But there is a wealth of information about how Soviet leaders viewed their American counterparts, much of which comes from Dobrynin’s firsthand experiences and conversations; he spoke fairly fluent English, so on many occasions he was the only translator during talks between Soviet and American higher-ups. Dobrynin’s impressions of different political figures and their attitudes toward US/Soviet relations are rather fascinating — he’s not kind to Jimmy Carter or Gerald Ford, for example, and even though he does seem to respect Henry Kissinger’s attempts at detente he quietly slams Kissinger for being inconsistent on how detente was put into practice. One remarkable passage that sticks out in my memory was Dobrynin’s account of Richard Nixon’s final days in office before the resignation…and how Leonid Brezhnev sent Nixon a personal message of support, saying that even though he did not fully understand the nature of the domestic political problems that Nixon was facing, he believed that Nixon’s attempts to improve US/Soviet relations were what his country would truly remember from his presidency. I actually got a little choked up at that part — the thought that possibly the only kind words Nixon had during his final days as President came from the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union appeals to my sense of bittersweet irony. And Dobrynin manages to capture this incident and many more without being too quick to blame one side or the other for the policy failures and setbacks.

In Confidence, like many political memoirs worth reading, is not the kind of book that can be read straight through in one sitting. But it’s a refreshing perspective on a strange and often nerve-wracking era in history, and Dobrynin is articulate and possessed of a dry wit that crackles through the pages and makes his anecdotes all the more intriguing.

History Lessons: How Textbooks from Around the World Portray U.S. History by Dana Lindaman and Kyle Ward

More of what I tend to call ‘metahistory’, in this book review.

History Lessons: How Textbooks from Around the World Portray U.S. History by Dana Lindaman and Kyle Ward

The history you learn in school is the history that tends to stick with you when you’re older. For most citizens of a country, the history taught by teachers and textbooks is all the history they will ever really study and all the history they will remember in the future — the foundation for a sense of national identity based on a common past. So naturally, governments tend to take a great interest in the history that ends up in schools. Some countries have national review boards that vet history textbooks for use in schools, or publish a specific list of approved books that must be used by teachers. Other countries simply cut out the middlemen and write the history textbooks themselves. So understandably, there are times when the teaching of history is an extremely touchy subject. It’s the basis of the ongoing Japanese history textbook controversy, and the concern that’s been aired in books such as James Lowen’s book Lies My Teacher Told Me. The history that most Americans would consider purely ‘American History’ did not happen in a vacuum…so how do other countries view events that end up being taught in American classrooms?

In History Lessons: How Textbooks from Around the World Portray U.S. History, the editors have examined a slew of history textbooks from different countries and pulled passages that show different perspectives on historical events frequently found in American history books. In what context do British (and Canadian) textbooks place the American Revolution? Do children in other countries learn anything about the American Civil War? What is included or carefully omitted in different accounts of incidents surrounding the Boxer Rebellion or the beginning of World War I? And what passes for history in countries like Saudi Arabia and North Korea, where the government control over textbook publication is stricter than most anywhere else in the world? All of these historical events and many more are spread out across the pages of History Lessons, with multiple perspectives (where available) for each historical event or time period.

Comparative history fascinates me on so many levels, so I picked up this book expecting both entertainment and enlightenment — and that’s essentially what History Lessons provided. Nothing exactly earth-shattering, but certainly nothing boring or unworthy of note. (It would take too much room to post large chunks of the quotations that interested me most, but if anyone reading this is interested in specific events then I’m more than willing to do a little transcribing in comments.) Looking at how different countries write their history is an intriguing sliver of insight into someone else’s way of thinking. Something that might warrant an entire chapter in one history book gets only part of a paragraph in another book. It definitely prompted me to think back on the history I learned in school, and how I felt when I first learned that the things my teachers said were only a tiny (and blurry) part of a far greater picture. But even so, there were some passages that made me rather thankful that I didn’t grow up learning a history that had a very specific government agenda — History Lessons includes some extremely disturbing passages from actual North Korean junior and senior high school textbooks. (When the history textbooks actually use ‘bastards’ as the term most often employed when speaking of Americans and other enemies of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea…well, that takes revisionist history to an entirely new level.)

History Lessons doesn’t preach, really. It certainly doesn’t claim that all American history texts should be consigned to the shredder, or that other countries have a ‘better’ perspective on history that’s more worthy of study. But I would really like to see this book assigned to upper-level students in the United States, those taking high school or even introductory college level history classes. It’s a book I’d assign, if I ever taught a survey US history course. Even a handful of different perspectives can be worth any number of classroom hours slogging through names and dates and vocabulary lists. What’s the point of learning history if you don’t learn that your view of history is not necessarily the ‘right’ one?

Failed Illusions: Moscow, Washington, Budapest, and the 1956 Hungarian Revolt by Charles Gati

A little less than a year ago, I attended a talk organised by the Cold War International History Project at the Woodrow Wilson Center. The subject of that talk was a recently published book about the October-November 1956 Hungarian crisis, where the Soviet Union sent troops into Hungary to crush an escalating series of protests by anti-government and anti-Soviet demonstrators. I picked up a copy of the book when I was there, and the review came surprisingly easily for a book on a subject that’s not really in my area of expertise.

Failed Illusions: Moscow, Washington, Budapest, and the 1956 Hungarian Revolt by Charles Gati

The violence and brutality of the Soviet action in crushing the 1956 Hungarian rebellion shook the faith of many left-leaning individuals outside of Soviet bloc — but at the same time, Soviet action also punctured the lofty rhetoric of ‘rollback’ and ‘liberation’ that American political leaders had favoured when speaking of Western policy towards the Soviet satellites. With the fiftieth anniversary of the Hungarian revolt occurring this past year, historians have been looking back at this major incident in the early Cold War in an attempt to figure out what happened to make things go so wrong so quickly. And Charles Gati’s point in his new book is essentially this: in Hungary in the autumn of 1956, everyone screwed up — everyone.

Attempting to summarise the full course of events in October 1956 is a bit beyond me, so I’ll do my best to summarise why things went so catastrophically wrong. There were many illusions in Hungary in late 1956. Hungarian Prime Minister Imre Nagy, the only Hungarian politician who had any real credibility with the people, was under the impression that he could keep hold of the situation even when his version of reformed communism was overtaken by events. The Hungarian demonstrators were under the impression that they could expel Soviet forces from Hungary all in one go — dreams further promoted by irresponsible agit-prop from Hungarian-language broadcasters at Radio Free Europe — and were also under the impression that the Western democracies would not let the Soviet Union get away with murder. The Soviet leadership in Moscow had been feeding their Hungarian comrades mixed messages for ages, but they were under fewer illusions than the other players involved. The only decisive message left for them to send was the one that involved tanks. And in America, President Eisenhower was facing re-election plus troubles in the Suez plus a complete lack of any actual military/intelligence plans to support an anti-Soviet revolution in Central Europe. American illusions that anti-Communist rhetoric would be sufficient to keep the Soviets out of Hungary were quickly destroyed. By the time the smoke cleared and all the illusions vanished, a new Soviet-backed Hungarian government had suppressed all political opposition and reasserted control over the country. Time magazine might have made the Hungarian revolutionary its ‘Man of the Year’ in 1957, but by then the revolutionaries were dead, imprisoned, or in exile. And Imre Nagy, who had fled to the Yugoslavian Embassy in search of sanctuary, would later be tricked out of hiding to face a secret trial and the hangman’s noose.

Failed Illusions is quite a solid history book. Granted, it isn’t always easy to keep the names of the historical figures straight even if you’re familiar with them from other sources, and I would have greatly appreciated a dramatis personae either at the front or the back of the book for quick reference and reminder. But even though Gati writes with the passion of one who is personally involved in the history being written (he had witnessed the turmoil as a young reporter in Budapest and was one of over two hundred thousand Hungarians to flee the country in 1956-57), he is able to keep the standard romanticised account of the rebellion at arm’s length. He examines the crisis from four different perspectives — the Hungarian government, the Hungarian people, the Soviet leaders and the American politicians and broadcasters — and manages to blend the perspectives together while still preserving the distinct motives and reasons behind the differing actions. It might not be the ‘definitive’ history of the failed revolution in Hungary, but the information Gati provides and the wealth of resources he refers to have laid out more than enough for future scholars of this time period to be getting on with.

The American Political Tradition and Anti-Intellectualism in American Life by Richard Hofstadter

Doubling up on the reviews again, with two books by American historian and Columbia University professor Richard Hofstadter.

The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It by Richard Hofstadter

Richard Hofstadter published The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It in 1948, combining twelve interlinked essays about the development of American history and politics from the early days of the Republic to the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt. He focused on key political figures in the context of their time — and in many ways used the book as an attempt to move away from the standard image of American history as a political tradition based on pure democratic ideals.

Looking over the book for reviewing purposes, I found myself wishing that I’d had this book when I was first examining aspects of American history in school. It is a nice compact introduction to some basic historical themes, ones that tend to be glossed over by standard history textbooks because of lack of space. Hofstadter does manage to avoid the temptation to be overly whiggish in his interpretation of how American politics has changed in the years since 1776. He stresses the effect of pragmatism on decision-making, doing his best to present a more realistic picture of different political climates and the men who came to exemplify their political eras. Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, William Jennings Bryan, Theodore Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover — Hofstadter does his best to put them into the context of their times instead of setting them apart (or ignoring them completely in favour of broader economic-based arguments about history). He doesn’t actively set out to deconstruct or destroy the various myths about the Founding Fathers or Abraham Lincoln or Teddy Roosevelt. Rather, he carefully picks and teases them apart, separating individual strands of historical argument before setting them out as neatly as he can.

In general, I don’t think that The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It is meant to be read as a be-all, end-all history text. Certainly, it ignores the history of the American public in favour of a far more top-down approach to American political philosophies. But as far as introductory texts go, though it’s well-written and for the most part concise. Quite a lot of American history texts don’t even manage that much. A book worth examining, at any rate, and I’m glad I picked it up when I did.

Anti-Intellectualism in American Life by Richard Hofstadter

When I first read this book, it took me several weeks to figure out the best way to approach it with reviewing in mind. It’s no secret that Hofstadter’s book is meant to be controversial — it was controversial when it won the 1964 Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction, and many of the statements he makes in it have attracted supporters and detractors ever since. And while the very title might be enough to put some off reading it, I found it intriguing enough to pick it up and see if Hofstadter’s conclusions still hold true thirty years later.

Anti-Intellectualism in American Life seeks to uncover the origins of some of the anti-intellectual attitudes that Hofstadter believed were severely damaging American society. He points to McCarthyism, to the Soviet Union’s advances in mathematics and science, to perjorative slang terms like ‘egghead’, and to the presidential victory of Dwight Eisenhower over Adlai Stevenson as possible examples of an unconscious, pervasive anti-intellectual sentiment in American life. In searching for the roots of this anti-intellectualism, Hofstadter goes back to the earliest years of the American colonies, and traces a path through the decades — from the evangelical religious movements (the ‘Great Awakenings’, as they tend to be called) in the colonial times through the Jacksonian egalitarianism of the pre-Civil War years, from the rise of the business culture in the end of the 19th century through the progressive attitudes toward public education in the early years of the 20th century. And one of the conclusions he draws in his book is that current (for his day) expressions of intellectualism like the ‘beat’ culture appear to be a kind of twisted, angry response to mainstream America’s attempts to thwart its individual intellectuals at every turn.

This book falls into a category I’ve come to appreciate in the last few years — books whose arguments you might not wholly accept, but which you should read anyway. I’m not so certain I agree with some of Hofstadter’s arguments, but his historical exploration of the roots of anti-intellectualism was rather ground-breaking for his time. It turned quite a lot of conventionally received wisdom on its head, and in many ways the examples and arguments that Hofstadter puts forward are still points of debate in this day and age. I think it bears a second reading to see if my thoughts have changed since I last looked at it a few months ago, but I’ll certainly look forward to reading it over again.