In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

121 6 The Wages of Theory Isolation and Knowledge in the Humanities When conservatives like Allan Bloom and Roger Kimball try to make sense of the humanities’ decline, they blame the 1960s, which they see as a time of unbridled selfindulgence that overturned all standards of good judgment and good taste.1 In their nostalgia Bloom and Kramer seem to forget that the administered society, the edifice on which the modernist program reposed, was not a foreordained outcome of our social evolution but a fragile compromise between working Americans and their wealthy counterparts after a protracted era of violence. It was also quite short-lived. Even before modernism’s crowning moment, the election of John Kennedy, the edifice showed signs of strain. Returning black GIs did not share equally in the post–World War II affluence and they often found it difficult to reconcile America’s rhetoric of freedom overseas with the denial of genuine freedom at home. While young white Americans enjoyed a much higher level of wealth and opportunity than young blacks, they too felt a sense of disappointment, a factor often overlooked in accounts of the time. One way to understand the discontent of people like the Beats and later the hippies is to place it in the context of mass education and its consequences. The passing of the GI Bill made higher education a reality for many millions of Americans who would otherwise have never attended college, and the children of these GIs went to college in even larger numbers. Yet mass education did not produce any significant change in the political life of Americans, and although the middle class expanded during these years, upward mobility did not always bring the imagined satisfactions. People who might have worked in factories a generation earlier wound up moving paper in cubicles, and not necessarily for more money than their blue-collar counterparts. Books with titles like The Organization Man and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit reflect a vague sense of powerlessness in the midst of prosperity.2 And even that prosperity was imperiled. From the late 1960s on, the actual earning power of the American dollar began to erode, so that women were slowly but steadily pushed out of the house in order maintain an acceptable standard of living for their families.3 In a manner typical of the period, the experience of powerlessness was misinterpreted as a cultural development rather than a political or economic matter. The problem, as critics of the time tended to see it, was the banality of the nine-to-five job and the stifling pressures of conformity. This em- 122 The Wages of Theory phasis on culture reached a reductio ad absurdum in the mid-1970s with Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization, the bible of the Sexual Revolution, which proposed to overthrow capitalism by setting free the libidinous impulses of the masses.4 Nevertheless, for just a moment Kennedy’s Camelot promised to bestow on the humanities the glory they had always coveted. Kennedy himself toyed with the role of a man of letters and had even written two bestselling histories, Why England Slept and Profiles in Courage, while Jackie made a reputation for herself as a gracious patron of the fine arts. The liberal historian James Schlesinger Jr. was a visible presence in the President’s brain trust along with other academics like the economists John Kenneth Galbraith and Walt Whitman Rostow, in addition to the former Harvard dean McGeorge Bundy. The poet Robert Frost read “The Gift Outright” at Kennedy’s inauguration, and Frost became an unofficial spokesman for the administration, even talking politics with Khrushchev during a visit to the Soviet Union.5 The choice of Frost was not primarily a matter of the President’s personal tastes, which leaned in the direction of Frank Sinatra. Arguably, no other writer of the time was more widely identified with American values and American culture, rough hewn, deeply rooted, and rock-ribbed, a scion of Old New England (although Frost was born in San Francisco). Suddenly culture had become a national asset like bauxite or oil. As Kennedy once told a New York Times reporter, “I think it tremendously important that we regard music not just as part of our arsenal in the Cold War, but as an integral part of free society.”6 This was the logic, two years later, behind the founding of the National Council...

Share