Fred Siegel’s The Revolt Against the Masses
“…liberalism was created by intellectuals and writers who were rebelling absent the failings of the rising middle class. They had a quarrel with the industry, immigration, and economic growth that produced unprecedented prosperity in the United States. They recoiled at what they saw as the ugly bustling cacophony of the urban masses loudly staking their claim to capitalism’s bounty.” ─ The Revolt Against the Masses, copyright © 2013 by Fred Siegel, Encounter Books, Page 1.
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“It was Charles Francis Adams’s brother Henry who, through his book The Education of Henry Adams (first published privately in 1907), became an inspiration to liberals. The Education described Henry Adams’s disappointment with an American society that did not pay him due deference. Adams’s disaffection created the model for much of what became left-wing intellectual life.” ─ The Revolt Against the Masses, copyright © 2013 by Fred Siegel, Encounter Books, Page 3.
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“Adams resented the new men ─ the economists, physicians, and chemists whose science-based authority had displaced literary men such as himself. H.G. Wells and the American architecture critic Herbert Croly, two of modern liberalism’s founders, shared Adams’s anti-capitalist sentiments. But Wells and Croly argued in their seminal works that the very experts Adams had despised had a crucial role to play: They could help displace the freewheeling capitalism the literary elites scorned.” ─ The Revolt Against the Masses, copyright © 2013 by Fred Siegel, Encounter Books, Page 4.
