David Austin Walsh responds to Chapter 7—The Opening of the American Mind (1945-1970) in Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s The Ideas That Made America: A Brief History.
Shock of the Familiar Unfamiliar
Why does the American intellectual landscape of the 1950s seem so alien to us today, nearly a quarter of the way through the twenty-first century? Part of the reason, no doubt, is simply the chasm of time—the past, as L.P. Hartley wrote in 1953, is a foreign country and they do do things differently there.[1] One of the biggest differences between intellectual life in the 1950s and the 2020s has to do with race, as Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen implicitly argues in her chapter on the “Opening of the American Mind.” Overwhelmingly, only white men counted as “serious” intellectuals at the time. Ratner-Rosenhagen mentions in the chapter approximately 60 people who were prominent intellectuals in the 1950s and 1960s—philosophers, sociologists, historians, theologians, novelists, and so on. Only seven are women. Only five, all of whom are male, are not white. The ranks of elite intellectuals in the United States, even in the 2020s, hardly reflect America as a whole, even to this day, but now elite intellectual life has become exponentially more diverse than in the 1950s. That lack of racial and gender diversity is the first shock of historical unrecognition in Ratner-Rosenhagen’s survey.[2]
Still, bearing in mind Hartley’s adage that the past really does things differently, we might look at Ratner-Rosenhagen’s cast of characters through the eyes of a social historian and see that, while by the standards of the twenty-first century American intellectual life was utterly dominated by white men, the 1950s was actually a moment of diversification. For decades prior, elite colleges and universities established strict quotas on the number of Jewish students admitted to their hallowed ranks. Yale University maintained an unofficial policy restricting the size of the Jewish student body until the 1960s. Jewish students and faculty who were admitted to US universities often faced significant discrimination from administrators. The University of Minnesota did not restrict the admission of Jewish students in the 1930s, but the administration closely surveilled Jewish students (and faculty) for “radical” political behavior and closely cooperated with local antisemitic activists.[3] The gatekeepers of the intellectual elite—university faculty, magazine editors, best-selling writers—were overwhelmingly comprised of white Protestant men.
As Ratner-Rosenhagen documents, many of the most prominent intellectuals in the 1950s, however, were Jewish: men such as Harvard sociologists David Riesman and Daniel Bell or Columbia historian Richard Hofstadter had made it through the quota system and secured affluent and prestigious positions for themselves at the commanding heights of American intellectual life. While it is important not to exaggerate the diversification of intellectual life in the 1950s, if we were to read the past solely through the lens of contemporary twenty first-century politics and focus on the shock of the unfamiliar in terms of racial and gender diversity, we would miss an important historical change in the composition of the intellectual elite.[4]
…note the shock of unrecognition when it comes to the material conditions of intellectual life and intellectual labor in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly for academics, journalists, and writers. These are utterly unrecognizable to people eking out a living in those fields in the 2020s.
Why does this matter? Not because it speaks to the particular history of Jewish-American intellectual and academic life—itself a highly contested space in the aftermath of Hamas’s October 7 massacre and the subsequent genocidal campaign conducted by Israel in Gaza—but rather to note the shock of unrecognition when it comes to the material conditions of intellectual life and intellectual labor in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly for academics, journalists, and writers. These are utterly unrecognizable to people eking out a living in those fields in the 2020s.
Back then, colleges and universities were expanding at a breakneck pace as, thanks to the GI Bill, more young men than ever before were enrolling in secondary education. The printed word was lucrative. American magazine publishing had entered its golden era, with middlebrow periodicals such as Time, Life, and Reader’s Digest boasting millions of subscribers. Regional American newspapers had foreign correspondents in Paris, Tokyo, and Saigon, a reflection of America’s new imperial role in the world and an important marker of prestige for midsized periodicals such as the Kansas City Star.
Even at small magazines, the pay was generally decent. Hugh Kenner, a literary critic at the University of California, Santa Barbara, was a frequent contributor in the early 1960s to the conservative weekly National Review. The publication would not turn a profit until the 1990s. Nevertheless, Kenner wrote to his friend Guy Davenport, who then taught literature at Haverford College, encouraging him to write for the magazine because it paid “pretty well”—$50 for a book review (typically around 800-1000 words), $50 per page for a straight article, with up to a $150 limit. Adjusted for inflation, that means roughly $500 for a book review, and up to $1,500 for a featured article.[5]
In short, one could make a living by thinking and writing in the 1950s, which leads to questions pertinent to Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s chapter on the postwar era. How has the economy of intellectual life in the United States related, and continued to relate, to the intellectual aspects? Or put another way, what were the material conditions of production for making “the ideas that made America” in the postwar period?
Not Social Darwinism in American Thought
Examining the political economy of Richard Hofstadter’s early career can help shed light on this question. Hofstadter was born in 1916 to a middle-class immigrant family in Buffalo, New York. His father, Emil, was a furrier, who—as Hofstadter’s most recent biographer David S. Brown notes, was able to weather the economic downturn of the 1930s without experiencing extreme poverty and was even able to put his two children through college himself. College itself was cheaper at the time: Richard Hofstadter attended the University of Buffalo in 1933, winning a $100 tuition waver on the strength of his academic record (at the time, Buffalo Law School’s annual tuition was $250, meaning that a considerable portion of Hofstadter’s tuition was covered by his scholarship). He graduated with his bachelor’s degree in 1937 and enrolled in graduate school at Columbia University. Initially denied financial support for reasons that Hofstadter strongly suspected were tied to his Jewish background, by 1941 he had secured a major research grant and full-time employment as an instructor at City College before being recruited to the University of Maryland at College Park the following year with an assistant professorship.
Hofstadter’s salary was modest—less than $3,000 a year—but he supplemented his income through writing for the New York Times, New Republic, and other journalistic outlets, to the point where he seriously considered leaving academia for a more lucrative career in journalism before he was eventually snapped up for a professorship by Columbia, where he spent the rest of his career. The key point is that Hofstadter, like many of his mid-twentieth-century intellectual peers, came from a middle-class background, enjoyed access to a relatively cheap education, did not face the prospect of sustained un- or underemployment, and could avail himself of institutional support both within higher education and the broader world of letters.[6] For the author of Social Darwinism in American Thought, his own educational path was strikingly plausible: no survival of the fittest there.
The trends that defined Hofstadter’s path to academic success only accelerated after World War II. In September 1965, the economist David G. Brown submitted a report on the structure of the academic labor market to the US Department of Labor. The 400-page report, based on survey data obtained from 2,000 college presidents and 13,000 college faculty, sought to quantify the experiences of faculty across all disciplines who had just been hired by their respective employers. Brown offers a valuable portrait of the composition of the academy in the mid-1960s. He concluded that “the full-time members of the college teaching force are predominantly male, Ph.D.-qualified, less than 50 years old, and associate or full professors.” While the “academic labor market” itself was “nonexistent” due to the balkanization of the professoriate between the physical sciences, social sciences, and the humanities, in general “[t]he most acceptable method of finding a job is to do nothing”—which is to say wait to be recruited—or barring that, “proceed informally through a friend or former teacher.” The letters between literary critic Kenner and his fellow literature professor and friend Guy Davenport confirm this to be common practice. Kenner tried to get Davenport a position at Santa Barbara in 1960 through the old boys’ club, but in this case was unable to secure the funding.
The pay for recent PhDs varied from field to field, but even history—the least remunerative field for recent hires, according to the report—commanded a median salary of $7,209, or $71,468 adjusted for inflation. Nowhere in the report did the term “tenure track” appear. The phrase appears to be a neologism of the 1980s and the development of a two-tier academic system separating tenured and contingent faculty. In the 1960s, essentially all faculty positions were tenure-track.[7]
So, let us combine some of these data points found in the Department of Labor report and Davenport and Kenner’s letters and theorize what the social and material conditions of a hypothetical early-career academic in, say, 1963 might have been. He is a relatively young white man in his 30s or early 40s with a PhD and a job at a college he obtained without actively seeking it. The salary is in the neighborhood of $7,700 to $8,000 a year (around $75,000 adjusted for inflation), a full $1,000 more than the national median family income of $6,900 a year. He almost certainly is on the pathway to receiving tenure and thus long-term job security. In addition to his salary from an academic job, he can also find reasonably remunerative work writing for popular magazines. Let’s assume our academic is of a conservative bent and contributes to National Review. Let’s also assume that he has an output for the magazine similar to that of Kenner’s own, who in 1961 alone wrote three straight feature articles and two book reviews. That’s an additional $550 in income – or around $5,000 adjusted for inflation, simply from writing six-odd pages in a magazine!
Given that our junior academic is already making around $8,500 a year, it is safe to assume that, outside of unusually expensive specific real estate markets, our hypothetical academic owns his own home. The median home price in the United States in 1965 was around $20,000, or around $200,000 adjusted for inflation—a little bit under half the median home price of $399,000 registered in May 2022.[8] In short, provided that our hypothetical junior academic meets the racial, gendered, and ideological litmus test to become part of the faculty club, he can look forward in the 1950s and 1960s, regardless of their specific intellectual specialization, to a relatively lucrative and stable job that affords him both the time and the security to pursue his intellectual interests and allows him to purchase property and build wealth.
The Evisceration of the Professoriate
This is very much not how the academy, or indeed, virtually every other intellectual institution, works in the 2020s, but for comparative purposes, let us stick to the academy. Because I am most familiar with the state of the academic job market in history, I will focus on that. Brown wrote that the academic job market was “nonexistent” in 1965 in the sense that there was no unified job market across disciplines. The history job market in 2023 is nonexistent in a far more literal sense. There are, aside from a handful of trendy subdisciplines, simply no jobs. A recent study concluded that of all the PhDs who defended their dissertations from 2018-2021, only 10 percent have tenure-track jobs.[9] A significantly higher percentage still work in the academy on short-term contracts—postdocs, visiting assistant professorships, and non-tenure-track lectureships—that pay significantly less money and offer exponentially less long-term security.
…the material structures that made the work of both the Cold War liberals and, to a much lesser extent, their radical critics possible have been almost totally dismantled.
The evisceration of the professoriate has gone hand in hand with the slashing of state support for higher education and skyrocketing tuition. But it is not simply that salaries for intellectual workers are lower and working conditions less secure, it is also that the cost of living has exploded in the United States over the past generation. The median home price, adjusted for inflation, is now twice as much as it was in the 1960s, and the situation is often even worse in college towns, to the point where even tenure-track faculty are no longer able to afford homes. At the University of Virginia, for instance, an associate professor in the history department can expect to make around $90,000—but the median home listing price in Charlottesville, Virginia, where the university is located, is over $550,000.[10]
The stark contrast, in almost every possible way, between the material realities of intellectual life in the 2020s versus the mid-twentieth century, feeds into both the shock of encountering the unfamiliar and the paradoxical undercurrent of nostalgia for yesteryear. Aside from the most openly reactionary and bigoted intellectuals, and there is indeed an influential cadre of reactionaries and bigots in the modern American intellectual elite, few are nostalgic for a time when the ranks of the academy were closed to everyone except for white men. The shock of the unfamiliar stems at least as much from just how open and unrepentant the academy, and American intellectual life writ large, was about being explicitly an old boys’ club, which was tightly intertwined with the ascent of the American intellectual into comfortable, middle-class respectability.
This is to say nothing of the endemicity of sexual abuse of students by faculty, to the point where sexual access to young women was simply seen as a perk of the job (not so respectable that!). In letters to Kenner in 1962, for instance, Guy Davenport, then 34, related how he found himself in a love triangle with two women, one of whom—his student—was only 19 years old. Nonetheless, within its highly racialized and gendered terms, white men with PhDs could get the jobs for which they had trained. They could own houses. One could make a living—perhaps even a very comfortable living!—as a staff writer for a magazine, or even working freelance. Housing was cheap, and so was education: the average tuition and fees at a four-year college in 1963 was $508, meaning that an enterprising young student could theoretically put themselves through college solely by writing part-time for National Review.[11]
The world described by Ratner-Rosenhagen no longer exists. This is a triumph in terms of the diversification of the professoriate, but the “opening” of American intellectual life also went together with the dismantling of its economic underpinnings. Multiple scholars have made this point: when a profession becomes more diverse, its political and economic prestige diminishes. The reverse is also true. Jennifer Light has shown that computer programming was a low-prestige job primarily done by women until the mid-twentieth century, and became a high-paying, high-status occupation as men entered the field. The STEM turn in American education culture in the twenty-first century, with higher education being increasingly dominated by the social and political influence of technical fields, which tend to be dominated by men, has underwritten these shifts (meanwhile, then-Harvard president Larry Summers suggested in 2005 that women were underrepresented in STEM fields in part because of “intrinsic aptitude”).[12] In part because of these shifts, the material structures that made the work of both the Cold War liberals and, to a much lesser extent, their radical critics possible have been almost totally dismantled. Indeed, the few reliable sources of funding for humanistic inquiry that remain in the 2020s come largely from right-wing philanthropic foundations and think tanks.[13]
As bleak as the situation is, it is still liable to get worse. Legislative assaults on tenure by conservative governments in states such as Wisconsin and Texas over the past decade can be largely dismissed because tenure is a dead letter anyway, thanks to a generation of university hiring practices. No need in the end for reactionary forces; neoliberals did just fine, thank you very much. That said, systematic attempts by right-wing activists and their allies in government to take over university boards, purging faculty for supposed political unreliability, and even outright banning subjects such as race in American history are far more alarming. With the re-election of Donald Trump in 2024, federal education policy is increasingly being directed by open reactionaries and outright white nationalists like Christopher Rufo and Richard Hanania. Yet unlike the McCarthyites in the 1950s, this latest generation of far-right anti-intellectuals is attacking a system that is already collapsing under the weight of its own material contradictions—and they know it.
Intellectual History Without the Luxury (or the Racism and Patriarchy)
While the destruction of the last desiccated remnants of these intellectual institutions is surely lamentable, there remains the prospect of vibrant intellectual life—albeit heavily constrained by precarity—in twenty-first-century America. To put another way, Ratner-Rosenhagen writes that modern commentators “typically view postwar American intellectual life as a period of staid traditionalism, stifling uniformity, complacency, and consensus,” and while the purpose of her chapter is to illustrate that the Cold War consensus was significantly more lively and vibrant than this reputation suggests, it nevertheless remains “surely warranted.” Postwar American intellectuals were, by and large, institutional men whose intellectual agendas were shaped by sitting atop powerful institutions in the global capitalist hegemon. The apocryphal quote attributed to the CEO of General Motors in the early 1950s—”what’s good for GM is good for America”—might well as easily be applied to Columbia University (and it is no coincidence that General Dwight D. Eisenhower served as the 13th president of Columbia from 1948 to 1953 before becoming president of the United States). The intellectual limits of scholars such as Richard Hofstadter, Daniel Bell, and Alfred Kazin were the intellectual limits of people who had made it. Reading Hofstadter’s writings about the Populists and the “paranoid style” in the 2020s and one cannot help but be struck by the similarities in perspective to the lofty editors at the surviving legacy institutions still nervously trying to understand the uncouth MAGA phenomenon today.
…mid-twentieth-century Cold War intellectuals believed in the promise of America because America worked for them. The United States of that era allowed intellectuals to enjoy a level of material security through the support of various institutions—universities, newspapers, magazines, even the federal government—that themselves possessed cultural hegemony at the time.
Given that these institutions by and large no longer exist, however, twenty-first-century intellectuals no longer have the luxury—or the naiveté —of identifying their own interests with mainstream institutions. What’s good for Columbia University is not only no longer what’s good for America, it’s also not good for the students and the non-tenure-track faculty there as well (to say nothing of the brutal suppression of student protests by the Columbia administration in the spring of 2024). The material precarity of the now may make us nostalgic for a time when that was not the case. One might even stipulate, critically, that the security of the 1950s intellectual as a middle-class white man was predicated on the exclusion of others. Yet precisely because of this fact, today’s intellectual is not beholden to those structures. Unlike the Cold War liberals, we can—and we must—embrace a liberational and emancipatory intellectual agenda for all, not simply a defense of extinct structures that benefited a few.
To make an implicit theme running throughout this essay explicit: mid-twentieth-century Cold War intellectuals believed in the promise of America because America worked for them. The United States of that era allowed intellectuals to enjoy a level of material security through the support of various institutions—universities, newspapers, magazines, even the federal government—that themselves possessed cultural hegemony at the time. One could make a living thinking. But this was a highly specific historical moment reliant on a number of different political, intellectual, and technological crosscurrents that are unlikely to repeat themselves. Thanks, in no small part, to the depredations of neoliberalism and reaction, intellectuals in America can no longer afford to believe in an America that no longer works for most Americans.
This ultimately offers new intellectual possibilities that speak to precisely these concerns. Intellectual life in twenty-first-century America must move beyond either defenses of power or reflexive critiques of power and instead seek to articulate an affirmative democratic vision for social and intellectual life in America. As Karl Marx said, the point is not simply to understand the world, but to change it. Yet in doing so, we must remember that the past is the past. It cannot be a guide to the structures of the present. We cannot and should not understand ourselves and our material world to be the same as that of the 1950s, and we should remember to never divorce material analysis from intellectual history.
About the Author
David Austin Walsh is a historian and the author of Taking America Back: The Conservative Movement and the Far Right. He is a College Advising Fellow at the University of Virginia.
Notes
[1] L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1953).
[2] Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, The Ideas That Made America: A Brief History (New York: Oxford University Press), 133-151.
[3] Riv-Ellen Prell, “Antisemitism without Quotas at the University of Minnesota in 1930s and 1940s: Anticommunist Politics, the Surveillance of Jewish Students, and American Antisemitism,” American Jewish History 105, 1/2 (January/April 2021): 157-188.
[4] On the quota system, see Jerome Karabel, The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005).
[5] Edward M. Burns, ed. Questioning Minds: The Letters of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2018), 31.
[6] David S. Brown, Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 9-27.
[7] David G. Brown, Academic Labor Markets (Washington, D.C.: Office of Manpower, Automation, and Training, US Department of Labor, 1965), https://archive.org/details/ERIC_ED016135/page/n1/mode/2up?view=theater, accessed 1 June 2023. On “tenure-track,” see Google N-Gram.
[8] Inflation figures drawn from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI Inflation Calculator, https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm, accessed 1 June 2023. On median home prices, see “Median Sale Price of Houses Sold for the United States,” St. Louis Fed, https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS, accessed 1 June 2023.
[9] Jon K. Lauck, “Introduction: The Ongoing History Crisis,” Middle West Review 9, 1 (Fall 2022): vii-xii.
[10] Housing figures from Realtor.com, https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-search/Bozeman_MT/overview and https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-search/Charlottesville_VA/overview, accessed 1 June 2023.
[11] Cristobel de Brey, Thomas D. Snyder, Anlan Zhang, and Sally A. Dillow, Digest of Education Statistics, 2019 (Washington, D.C.: NCES, 2021), 364.
[12] On teaching, see Elizabeth Boyle, “The Feminization of Teaching in America,” MIT Program in Women’s and Gender Studies. On computing, see Jennifer S. Light, “When Computers Were Women,” Technology and Culture 40, 3 (July 1999): 455-483. See also Ruth Oldenziel, Making Technology Masculine: Men, Women, and Modern Machines in America, 1870-1945 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999). Lawrence H. Summers, “Remarks at NBER Conference on Diversifying the Science & Engineering Workforce,” 14 January 2005, https://web.archive.org/web/20080130023006/http://www.president.harvard.edu/speeches/2005/nber.html, accessed 17 February 2025.
[13] David Austin Walsh, “Literature Review: Conservative Philanthropy in Higher Education,” Urban Institute, June 2019, https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/100448/literature_review_conservative_philanthropy_in_higher_education_1.pdf, accessed 1 June 2023.