Independent intellectuals in the United States, 1910-19451992

A new intellectual community came together in the United States in the 1910s and 1920s. This community was unique because it existed outside the established centers of intellectual life, the universities, and the professions. Independent Intellectuals in the United States, 1910-1945 is a cultural history of freelance critics and an exploration of their collective effort to construct a viable public intellectual life in the United States. It explores the assumptions upon which the independent intellectual community was formed, presents a picture of the personal, vocational, generational, institutional (and anti-institutional) ties that bound it together, and analyzes some of the problems and tensions that it encountered over time. Biel is concerned with critics whose hostility to boundaries and specialties compelled them toward a self-conscious generalism. Their criticism itself was diverse, ranging in subject matter from literature and the fine arts to politics, economics, sociology, education, history, urban planning, and national character. Beginning around 1910, these critics began to challenge both the genteel tradition and the growing division of intellectual labor. The community with which this work is concerned emerged as an adversarial, anti-professional community which refused to surrender the future entirely to the academic disciplines and their esoteric specialties. While Biel recognizes that there were differences and conflicts between individual thinkers, he maintains that a broader picture has been obscured by attempts to classify intellectuals according to political or ideological persuasions. The reconstruction of American intellectual life that began in the 1910s allowed for a range of personalities and critical positions, yet was communal in its guiding purpose of making a place in American society for independent and socially engaged intellectuals. Independence and social engagement were the terms of self-definition and the aspirations that bound together a broad range of critics, including Randolph Bourne, Max Eastman, Crystal Eastman, Walter Lippmann, Margaret Sanger, Van Wyck Brooks, Floyd Dell, Edmund Wilson, Mabel Dodge, Paul Rosenfeld, H. L. Mencken, Lewis Mumford, Malcolm Cowley, Matthew Josephson, John Reed, Waldo Frank, Gilbert Seldes, and Harold Stearns