Attack on the Faculties

Lauren Lassabe Shepherd responds to Chapter 8—The End of Universalism (1962-1990s) in Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s The Ideas That Made America: A Brief History.

Beyond Convulsions

In “The End of Universalism,” chapter eight of The Ideas that Made America, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen explores the collision of the American professoriate with postmodernism and, from there, the academic and political culture wars that ensued. Postmodernism, she explains, was only the next version of American anti-foundationalist ideas descended from William James’s Progressive Era anti-essentialism (152). To its Cold War critics, however, postmodernism was perceived as un-American: a French import that suspiciously coincided with the late 1960s international campus “convulsions” (a descriptor she borrows from Allan Bloom).[1] By the 1980s, the anti-universalist strand of postmodernism had added “fault lines to fault lines,” Ratner-Rosenhagen argues (166).

For hardened conservatives, the campus had long been a battleground.

The Ideas that Made America traverses only a few of the rifts that arose in academic thought after the 1960s, devoting one paragraph (162-163) to those who rejected the postmodern worldview. That particular fracture is worth further attention, however, because its story helps to explain a reactionary political movement focused on the college classroom. For hardened conservatives, the campus had long been a battleground. After the 1960s, however, it became a particular site of educational anxiety that transcended political identities to encompass both traditional conservatives and modern-day liberals who sought to weaponize universalism, not end it.

Ratner-Rosenhagen locates the rejection of late twentieth-century attacks on universalism in the figure of University of Chicago classics professor Allan Bloom and his treatise, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students. While the 1987 bestseller was written as a renunciation of postmodernism, as Ratner-Rosenhagen rightly characterizes it, it is perhaps better contextualized within a longer line of literature sounding the alarm about apparent excesses within the academy. This rhetorical lineage emerged from the political and cultural right in the immediate postwar era. As such, The Closing of the American Mind should be considered part of a genre of campus panic manifestos, one of a dozen intellectual derivatives of William F. Buckley’s 1951 God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of “Academic Freedom.”

To be more precise about the periodization of the genre, Bloom’s Closing was part of a barrage of popularly marketed books of the 1980s and 1990s financed by committed conservatives to first legitimize, then cash in on resulting fears about, an educational culture war that spanned kindergartens to quadrangles.

If we trace the genealogy of this literature before Bloom, we begin to glimpse a different perspective on US intellectual life after the 1960s, especially in the crucial decades of the 1980s and 1990s. The heyday of conservative ideas masquerading as liberalism did not erupt out of nowhere; rather, it developed over time to assert a new vision of universalism that in fact was not universal at all. Instead, it limited inclusion. The Closing of the American Mind, put in context of the ongoing tradition of the campus panic manifesto, reveals more a longing to close access to it, not prevent universalism from collapsing. In this sense it was a kind of end, but not exactly the neo-pragmatist one Ratner-Rosenhagen emphasizes.

A Communist Behind Every Lectern

From the advent of mass public schooling in the late nineteenth century, the American right has kept the classroom in its political crosshairs. From campaigns against teaching evolution to massive resistance against integration, public education has been a bête noir of US industrialists, religious fundamentalists, segregationists, and free marketeers. Following the second Red Scare of the postwar era, when the cultural right identified communists behind every lectern and on every cinema screen, conservative writers churned out a steady stream of panic literature about socialism’s conquest over elite spaces of cultural influence: the media, the law, and especially, the professorate.

Regarding the academy, these tales painted the college as a hotbed of godless collectivism, a place where unwitting parents paid great tuition costs only for their children to be corrupted and brainwashed by faculty subversives. That was the argument set forth in Buckley’s God and Man at Yale in 1951, but along the same theme came subsequent works such as E. Merrill Root’s Collectivism on the Campus and Russell Kirk’s Academic Freedom, both in 1955, followed by Felix Wittmer’s Conquest of the American Mind in 1961, and Stan Evans’s Revolt on the Campus in 1963.

For the most part, this literature stayed within rightwing circles during the 1950s and 1960s. Except God and Man at Yale, the rest of the titles rarely received a sympathetic readership beyond committed conservatives. Even God and Man at Yale received harsh reviews in more mainstream outlets. Nonetheless, these stories reflected and reinforced the right’s understanding of the university as an institution in need of continuous surveillance for its propensity to corrupt young minds.

By the end of the 1960s, as “French” postmodern thought seeped into US philosophy seminars, the right’s claims about dissident professors began to trickle down to insurgent students. In particular, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI widened its investigations from faculty in the 1950s to graduate students and undergraduates in the 1960s.[2] At the same time, the broader public also began to look at students with suspicion in the context of antiwar and civil rights protests that grew increasingly militant in response to campus and state repression.

By the end of the decade, even Cold War liberals were growing concerned as the campus seemed to be a spawning ground for civil rights, anti-imperial protests, and other so-called radical activities. The right’s anticommunist saber-rattling about the college campus of decades prior was rebranded to appeal to concerned liberals through both actual radical developments and melodramatic portrayals of Black Power and antiwar strikes in popular news coverage. In addition to the frequency of such coverage, television and print media outlets overrepresented the dominance of radical militants in typical protests. In doing so, they made these movements seem vastly more threatening, uncritically if unwittingly accepting the right’s decades’ old claims with what seemed to finally be real evidence.[3] By the 1970s, following a quarter-century of unprecedented growth in funding, size, and prestige, the academy’s reputation was, for the first time since the dawn of the Cold War, under scrutiny by more than just the right.

In the 1980s and through the 1990s, what had started as an anticommunist campus panic began to expand into a larger culture war, particularly as a new constituency entered the political discourse: neoconservatives. Neocons were a cadre of former communists who had become staunch Cold War liberals. Mostly East Coast intellectuals, their ideological commitments took a right turn in reaction to perceived excesses of the youth New Left. Campus and urban rebellions of the 1960s and the developing notion of identity politics of the 1970s committed the neocons to their typewriters to pontificate. They panicked over so-called leftwing authoritarianism manifested in academic censorship and groupthink. Where the right had long warned of an ivory tower “gestapo,” the neocons now more politely dubbed them “thought police.” Old alliances between liberal and radical dating back to the New Deal were giving way to new perceptions, alignments of thought, and political coalitions.

Intellectuals such as Allan Bloom shared the right’s cultural pessimism but could communicate it in the cosmopolitan dialect of a tenured professor. In this way, the linguistic politesse between neoconservatives and other liberals was a politically useful bridge for the right. With Closing, Bloom successfully reopened Buckley’s earlier genre of the campus panic manifesto for new audiences. This time, unlike in the 1950s, the message resonated across the political spectrum.

A Blooming Campus Panic

With Reagan’s sweeping electoral victories in the 1980s, the right could use its so-called mandate to finally do something about the intelligentsia. Two infamous diagnostic reports about K12 schools and colleges led the way: the 1983 A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform, written by Reagan Secretary of Education Terrel Bell, a rightwing populist Marine veteran-turned-professor; and the 1984 To Reclaim a Legacy: A Report on the Humanities in Higher Education, penned by Reagan administration Chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, William Bennett. In the wake of these alarming reports, rightwing trusts such as the John M. Olin Foundation bankrolled the production of Bloom’s Closing and a half-dozen similarly themed campus panic titles. The purpose of the literary bombardment was to flood popular discourse with anecdotal evidence about a crisis in education, one that the public seemed primed to receive after Bell and Bennett.

The first of the two supposed exposés, Bell’s A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform, was an indictment of public schools, arguing that they failed to prepare American youth for work in an increasingly globalized economy. According to Republican Party ideologues in Washington, the nation’s elementary and secondary classrooms were leaving soon-to-be workers in the international dust. They did not mention the cause of deliberate deindustrialization, of course, only that globalization was suddenly here, and here to stay. At the time of its release in 1983, Americans were still recovering from the Reagan recession and were keen to do something about their children’s apparently underperforming schools, lest the next generation be sentenced to unthinkable downward mobility.

Terrel Bell, A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform, 1983. Source: Archive.org.

The Bell report thus sparked a national K-12 reform movement and drove hundreds of thousands of students into private and homeschools. This mass migration out of public schools was a resounding victory for the right, who had long despised public education and championed privatization. Unlike more recent emphases on individual rights, however, it was international issues of the Cold War that fed the domestic conservative interest in pushing back against what they insisted was oppressive liberalism at home. The Cold War hysteria of earlier conservative panics, which decried the classroom as a den of anti-American subversion and a site of socialist indoctrination had, by the 1980s, evolved into a panic about nationwide educational and economic failure.

Within a year of the Bell K-12 revelation, Reagan’s head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, William Bennett, seized the spotlight by translating similar fears over higher education. His 1984 diagnostic To Reclaim a Legacy: A Report on the Humanities in Higher Education placed the problems of American society as a whole at the feet of contemporary college faculty. They, Bennett argued, “present their subjects in a tendentious, ideological manner,” and teach their courses “on the basis of their relation to a certain social stance.” Faculty extremists rendered the study of “the West” irrelevant “because all meaning is subjective and relative to one’s own perspective. There is no longer agreement on the value of historical facts, empirical evidence, or even rationality itself.”[4] For Bennett, the History and English Department faculty, in particular, had institutionalized the radicalism of their own undergraduate years of the 1960s. Now they caved to the demands of militant students in the 1970s and 1980s who insisted on a more personalized, diversified curriculum.

William Bennett, To Reclaim a Legacy: A Report on the Humanities in Higher Education, 1984. Source: Archive.org.

This was, Bennett argued, the university’s version of John Dewey’s dangerous progressive approach to child centeredness.[5] American liberalism’s most famous philosopher had unleashed a plague of relativism, its pragmatic chickens coming home to roost in a university turned into an anything-goes pasture of radicalism. It was not the students’ responsibility to assert a role in their curriculum, he believed, but the adults in the room who were fluent in Matthew Arnold’s notion of education as a focus on “the best that has been thought and said.” Bennett extended the principle further: “the best that has been said, thought, written, and otherwise expressed about the human experience.”[6]

To reclaim the rightful legacy of the United States as the nation among nations, Bennett implored, the professoriate needed to recover an earlier curriculum by scrubbing Alice Walker off the syllabus and returning to Plato, Aristotle, and the greatest literature ever produced by so-called dead white men. This was, of course, largely a construction of the past of only recent vintage, about 100 years[7], but tapping into Cold War liberal fears, Bennett declared that it was time to restore the supposedly fundamental knowledge of Western civilization to university classrooms if the US wanted to maintain its power as a global hegemon.

In this way, Bennett linked the long-running conservative attack on liberal elites to a growing disenchantment with postmodernism among liberals themselves. To do so, however, required various sleights of hand. For instance, Bennett did not acknowledge that “Western Civilization” as a unit of study was itself a recent diplomatic invention, a way for “American curriculum builders [to hitch] the nation’s cultural fate to Europe” in the aftermath of a world war.[8] “Western Civ,” which first arose from late-nineteenth century conceptualizations of higher education by Harvard’s Charles Norton Eliot, among others, was not even abandoned in the 1960s, despite the tumult swirling around campuses.

It was subsumed by a new geopolitical curricular imperative, “area studies,” which grew out of the Cold War need for experts in foreign languages and cultures in order to do battle against worldwide communism. The student protestors’ contributions were to extend the focus on ethnic groups within the United States and non-US perspectives around the world. The exact phenomena Bennett (and soon Bloom) bemoaned had itself grown out of the goal of maintaining US global supremacy.

By design, To Reclaim a Legacy sought to disguise its conservative assault on higher education within seemingly liberal commitments. Bennett handpicked its contributing consultants from among faculty and administrators who seemed to represent diverse perspectives. Yet, while different constituencies, such as faculty at historically Black institutions, public state universities, and community colleges, were consulted as part of study groups that informed the report, it was the ideologue Bennett who produced its final draft.[9]

Bennett himself laid out necessary treatments for the removal of the academy’s supposed postmodernist, relativist cancer. His recommendations for “an education worthy of our heritage” included a required reading list that would satisfy any traditionalist thinker: Homer, Thucydides, Aristotle, and the Bible.[10] Other suggestions, like the works of Austen, Marx, and Twain, reflect that variation from traditionalist ideas was only acceptable when the authors were “Western.” Martin Luther King, Jr., an American Protestant evangelical, is the singular exception to the all-white reading list. And this was precisely when the radical dimensions of his ideas and activism were themselves in the process of being defanged into an insidious colorblind conservatism.[11]

Over the next decade, a flurry of popular books from the right and supposed center would retroactively diagnose the ivory tower’s disease. The most famous came from a longtime academic insider: Allan Bloom. Unlike Bennett, whose deeply Catholic convictions and public pronouncements against affirmative action and in favor of Christian school curriculums placed him firmly on the cultural right, Bloom’s background was far less obviously conservative. After appointments at Yale, Cornell, and other elite colleges, he spent most of his career at his alma mater, the University of Chicago. Bloom was thus a useful Trojan horse for conservatives. A child of Jewish immigrants, the bespectacled intellectual did not present as a red-baiting McCarthyite. His gift was his identity and his pen. He was a Chicago professor of Classics who could repackage old grievances of the right in the eloquent style of enlightened liberalism, and in book form.

The Closing of the American Mind sold over one-million copies within the first few weeks of its release in 1987. Bloom’s arguments were incredibly seductive to educated audiences who longed to draw distinctions between themselves and conservatives on almost every other issue. Bloom allowed liberals to seriously consider that the Reaganites had a point about radical colleges after all. With Closing, centrist liberals could imagine themselves precariously wedged between leftist rock throwers and reactionary hard places. Author and readers alike could take up the mantle of college reform while positioning themselves as liberals, not rightwingers. Bloom gave readers classical liberalism anchored in European tradition while entertaining them with his caustic snobbery—after four hundred pages, readers would have no use for ideas divorced from Enlightenment “natural rights.”

For Bloom, there were plenty of cultural leaders to blame for the death of European-derived norms in favor of “openness,” which was his all-purpose descriptor for the ideological products of Mill, Emerson, James, and Dewey. For Bloom, openness had become institutionalized in America as early as 1919 when Oliver Wendell Holmes, writing for the majority in Schneck v. US, refused to regulate speech beyond a clear and present danger, a criterion so “imprecise” as to be “meaningless.” With Schneck, the devolution of inherited natural rights into what he described as a listless openness was codified by the highest court in a “political rebellion against nature’s last constraints.”[12]

To be sure, the collapsing of American law and culture into opacity was not the work of a singular court ruling issued in the emergency context of an international Great War. But according to Bloom, the problem was that Holmes’s openness only opened further. In the ensuing decades after Schneck, other institutions such as public schools embraced ideas from the dangerous trifecta of Mill, Dewey, and John Rawls, and “sexual adventurers like Margaret Mead.”[13] Consequently, the 1930s ushered in educational reforms against “fundamental primary learning” and the shameful removal of religion (only Judaism and Christianity, he seemed to mean) from public schools.[14]

Such conversions beget decades-more anti-foundational ideas: everything from Benjamin Spock’s tolerant parenting to Freud’s child psychoanalysis to Paulo Freire’s radical critical pedagogy. For Bloom, what appeared to be the culturati’s fuzzy-headed pursuit of social equity kickstarted a curricular revolution of the worst kind. A class of elitist intellectuals emerged who were, in his view, secular, pluralist, multicultural, and international. Transgressive in their thinking, they saw the world as contingent and unfixed. To Bloom, paradigmatic theories, deconstructed interpretations, and the left’s nefarious openness were betraying centuries of canon in favor of novel forms of area studies and identity politics. Like Bennett, Bloom gave no consideration to the fact that courses in new fields like Asian Studies existed primarily to serve Cold War military demands. He and other neocons were more compelled to attack an imagined army of nineteen-year-olds and radical professors hopped up on French postmodernism than the extant US empire.

Even if the actual scale of postmodernist thinking was minimal on the typical college campus, the pragmatist soil from which it sprang had deep roots, as Rattner-Rosenhagen spends much of her book explaining. Prior to the rise of area studies and the move away from a narrow classical European curriculum, the US had a homegrown tradition of a kind of proto-postmodernism since the nineteenth century, which Bloom never acknowledged. For Bloom, such relativism was as new as it was nihilistic. It generated a rootless epistemology foreign to American thinkers, he seemed to presume.

Goodness and virtue had to be universal, Bloom contended, anchored in the moral heritage of the West alone. He was incredulous about indiscriminate curiosity for the cultural other. “Openness” was an “indefensible” position students held because they did not actually understand the world. Instead, they had been “indoctrinated” into accepting cultural relativism as truth. Openness, in this strange analysis, originated from a kind of close-mindedness. Resting this logic on a mythological past, Bloom insisted the nation was founded on homogenization of immigrants from the Old World to the New, for instance, but the ideology of openness rejected such conformity, preferring “all kinds of men, all kinds of life-styles, and ideologies.”[15] This, he held, was a threat to the public good, the very social contract that made the US function, and the foundation upon which the nation’s political existence rested.

The danger of the colleges was that their new curricular requirements for courses in non-Western cultures thinly masked a “dogmatic intention” of the left. Sounding quite like a John Bircher of decades earlier, Bloom insisted that this international turn threatened the US itself. “Such requirements,” he wrote of courses on non-Western topics, “are part of the effort to establish a world community and train its member [as a] person devoid of prejudice.”[16] For Bloom, “The mind that has no prejudices at the outset is empty.”[17] What students really needed to learn was that ethnocentrism is good, prejudice worthwhile, and discrimination very natural for the way that such impulses reveal a nation’s historic standards. Only Western cultures were so naively heady as to be democratic when it came to knowledge. The very civilizations professors would have their students study, especially those undergoing decolonial revolution and which students condescended to with their interest in “helping” as a “disguised form of a new imperialism” through their “Peace Corps mentality,” held their own views of cultural superiority.[18] In other words, the non-aligned nations not only did not reciprocate an interest in American culture but were themselves ethnocentric. That US students should learn the languages of, or read the literature from, or appreciate the art created by those cultures was worse than futile; it was a betrayal of inheritance to ignore the much greater works of the West.

Of course, the boundaries around and the very contents of these various traditions were entirely constructed, but this was immaterial for Bloom. Openness, which emerged in the Westernized culture of the Anglo-dominated United States, was Western civilization’s own worst enemy and needed to be constrained for the future’s sake. The only solution to “the closing of the American Mind” was to close it differently than around a philosophy of relativism, which Bloom argued had gutted it from the inside out. Bloom’s Closing was fascinating for the ways in which it both loved and loathed what American culture, and Western civilization by way of the United States, had become in the conservative imagination. The tome was elitist and eloquent, if contemptuous. By offering an analysis—almost a deconstruction—of how openness had closed the American mind, Bloom attracted liberals to the conservative cause alongside more straightforward reactionaries. By making the rejection of postmodernism a sophisticated endeavor, Closing made conservatism appealing, lending it a veneer of intellectualism.

Classroom Panic Into Cultural Power

Bell, Bennett, Bloom, and subsequent writers working in the campus panic genre that followed bent the popular understanding of “what was (supposedly) happening on college campuses” to a parallel crisis in K-12 education. The themes of To Reclaim a Legacy and those reproduced in The Closing of the American Mind and its successors proposed that a deterioration of academic standards of excellence was underway through the abandonment of Western wisdom. Understanding how both the Bell and Bennett jeremiads caught the national imagination, and witnessing the incredible sales of Bloom’s Closing, conservative ideologues tapped into their think-tank network to gin up more opinions, and even pseudoscience, on the topic. Conservative political donors funded a volley of popular publications to undergird both reports’ politicized claims, reopening Buckley’s postwar campus panic genre for the neoliberal era. This produced an effective feedback loop between faux-scandalous publications and public outrage that gained enough currency to help reshape educational policy.

The Closing of the American Mind was paid for by the John M. Olin Foundation, as was Bloom’s salary as co-director of the million-dollar Olin Center at the University of Chicago, an institute dedicated to nurturing the right’s counterintelligensia. After Closing‘s success as a best-seller, the Olin Foundation, American Enterprise Institute, the Earhart Foundation, and other rightwing trusts funded a rapid succession of campus panic books: Charlie Sykes’s Profscam (1988) and The Hollow Men (1990), Roger Kimball’s Tenured Radicals (1990), Dinesh D’Souza’s Illiberal Education (1991), Peter Sacks and Peter Thiel’s Diversity Myth (1995), and Lynne Cheney’s Telling the Truth (1996). Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s The Bell Curve (1994) is perhaps the most infamous example of race pseudoscience to come from this deluge of books. These, along with dozens of other magazine features and opinion editorials, made for a torrent of higher education crisis literature in the last decade of the twentieth century. Bloom’s Closing was the first to do so novelly, if deviously, by linking conservative ends to liberal attitudes through an insider-style, almost postmodern, mode of argument.

By the 1980s and through the 1990s, conservatives were thus able to develop the mainstream notion that the humanities—and by extension the academy itself—required inspection and overhaul. With the help of strategic reports, deep-pocketed donors, and a new constituency of neocon liberal-whisperers, the right served up a variety of rhetorical defenses and junk science to millions of concerned readers. Since the 1980s, the teamwork of neoconservatives and concerned liberals has seen the campus panic lexicon evolve from concerns over identity politics to other topics: speech codes, political correctness, cancel culture, wokeness, transphobia, and now, campus antisemitism. Affirmative action anxieties have become Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) panics. After nearly a century of fearmongering about campus radicalism, stereotypes that were once dismissed as the tirades of rightwing cranks are now taken for granted by today’s cultural commentators as reasonable criticisms of faculty and students.

If we trace the story of these ideas about the college, modern bestsellers like Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff’s Coddling of the American Mind in 2018 become more clearly understood as re-debuts of Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind in 1987, and, before that, Felix Witmer’s Conquest of the American Mind in 1956. More broadly, we begin to glimpse a different perspective on US intellectual life after the 1960s. This was not so clearly an era of the “end of universalism” at all, but rather the beginnings of a fiercely reactionary attack on the emancipatory possibilities of higher education as a path to democratic openness, particularly in the crucial decades of the 1980s and 1990s, when conservative cultural propaganda about the campus transformed classroom panic into cultural power.

About the Author

Lauren Lassabe Shepherd is a historian of US higher education. She is the author of Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars in Modern America (University of North Carolina Press, 2023) and host of the American Campus podcast.

Notes

[1] Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), 314.

[2] Gregg L. Michel, Spying on Students: The FBI, Red Squads, and Student Activists in the 1960s South (Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 2024).

[3] On battles over press objectivity and protest movements of the 1960s, see Christine Acham, Revolution Televised: Prime Time and the Struggle for Black Power (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); Say Burgin, “‘The Trickbag [of] the Press”: SNCC, Print Media, and the Myth of an Antiwhite Black Power Movement,” Journal of Civil and Human Rights, 8, 1 (2022): 1–27; Bonnie Dow, Watching Women’s Liberation, 1970: Feminism’s Pivotal Year on the Network News (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017); Todd Gitlin, The Whole World Is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left (1972; reprint, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Sage Goodwin, Making the News: Network Television and the Black Freedom Struggle (Forthcoming, Chicago: University of Chicago Press); Nicole Hemmer, Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018); Heather Hendershot, When the News Broke: Chicago 1968 and the Polarizing of America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022); Matthew Pressman, On Press: The Liberal Values That Shaped the News (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018); Jane Rhodes, Framing the Black Panthers: The Spectacular Rise of a Black Power Icon (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017).

[4] William Bennett, To Reclaim a Legacy: A Report on the Humanities in Higher Education (Washington, DC: National Endowment for the Humanities, 1984), 34.

[5] Bennett, 39-41.

[6] Bennett, 16.

[7] See Tim Lacy, The Dream of a Democratic Culture: Mortimer J. Adler and the Great Books Idea (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

[8] Andrew Hartman, A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars (2015; 2nd ed., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 229.

[9] Bennett, 11.

[10] Bennett, iv.

[11] Hajar Yazdiha, The Struggle for the People’s King: How Politics Transforms the Memory of the Civil Rights Movement (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2023).

[12] Bloom, 29.

[13] Bloom, 33.

[14] Bloom, 56-60.

[15] Bloom, 27.

[16] Bloom, 36.

[17] Bloom, 43.

[18] Bloom, 34.

Want to respond? Write us.