The Intellectual Role from the Progressives to the 1920s

The Intellectual Role from the Progressives to the 1920s

Henry Adams says in “The Dynamo and the Virgin” that he has his, “neck broken by the sudden irruption of forces totally new.” There was a palpable challenge at the turn of the twentieth century that there needs to be a new place for the intellectual whose genteel neck has been broken by the new forces in American society. In response, the progressive movement moved away from the old romanticism towards James’s pragmatism and Dewey’s instrumentalism. However, the tidy and prodding progressivism was tested as the First World War and the jazz age again shifted contextual factors where intellectuals could spring not just from a scientific background, but also from the new distinctive post-war culture. There seems to be three phases or groups around this period that are influenced by different factors and view the role of the intellectual in different ways. The first are Henry Adams and George Santayana who confront a modern world with no matching intellectual process. The second are the progressive intellectuals of Du Bois, Dewey, and Lippmann who answer the call with varying forms of sentimental scientific instrumentalism to improve society. The final group is the 1920s disillusioned, independent and rebellious intellectuals like Bourne and Krutch who are more critical of society and less focused on institutional change than calling for a personal poetic vision.

The idea proposed by Santayana in “The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy,” is that “the American Will inhabits the sky-scraper; the American Intellect inhabits the colonial mansion.” Calvinism and Transcendentalism are the American intellectual traditions, but to keep “them alive they required, one an agonized conscience, and the other a radical subjective criticism of knowledge. When these rare metaphysical preoccupations disappeared—and the American atmosphere is not favorable to either of them,” a disjunctive worldview is created. In...