INVENTING THE EGGHEAD: The Battle over Brainpower in American Culture by Aaron Lecklider (review)

In a sense, there are two differing aspects to Lecklider’s book. On the one hand, he is making a grand argument in which he explores “representations of intelligence in twentieth-century American culture,” particularly popular culture (4). He views this as a crucial project because “rethinking the history of brainpower in American culture as the history of an organic intellectual tradition forces us to rethink narratives that diminish the voices of ordinary women and men in intellectual conversations,” (226) and that popular culture is the crucial site of contestation because “the relationship between intelligence and social power informed the emerging popular culture of the twentieth century” (225). Lecklider argues that from 1900 until the 1950s, popular culture presented an ever-widening range of definitions of intelligence embodied in a range of Americans, always inflected by differences around race, class, and gender. This is key for his larger argument that the intellectual historians of the 1960s, including Richard Hofstadter with Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963) and Christopher Lasch with The New Radicalism in America (1965), were fundamentally misconstruing the role of the intellectual because they were arguing against the characterization of the intellectual as “the egghead,” which was a construct of the late 1950s with a decided right-wing slant and that “bracketed off intellect from the brainpower of ordinary women and men and divorces intelligence from working-class cultural politics” (222). The intellectual these thinkers were defending was, then, only one variation on the theme.

This is an interesting and provocative argument that can in fact lead to a rethinking of many questions in American intellectual and cultural history. While the arch of this larger argument is visible in the introduction and epilogue, it is not always as directly connected to the close readings of a variety of evidence that make up the central chapters of the work. Here Lecklider includes material as various as the Chautauqua circuit, scientific displays at Cony Island, the portrayal of Albert Einstein in the American press, and popular songs about college students in the 1920s. He develops his arguments about the possession of brainpower by ordinary men and women thorough examinations of the Bryn Mawr Summer School for women workers, the underlying agreement of DuBois and Booker T. Washington that “the surest way to achieve racial equality was by promoting brainpower,” and close reading of works of the Harlem Renaissance (95-96). In the 1930s, he considers WPA library posters, the reception of Roosevelt’s Brain Trust, and proletarian literature. Fears of intellectuals reemerge, and are focused entirely on men, in the postwar period, particularly around the “Atomic City” of Oak Ridge, TN.

Most of these close readings are sturdy; though I think recent scholarship has indicated that Chicago’s Bronzeville was seen more as the center of African American culture in the 1930s than was Harlem. The very breadth of the scope works against closely aligning the examples with the larger argument. However, Inventing the Egghead opens myriad questions that can and should be explored in more depth making more direct connections between individual developments and the overarching scope of twentieth-century American intellectual life.