Fred Siegel’s The Revolt Against the Masses
“But it was only in the 1920s that this [Liberal] contempt for the bourgeoisie [middle-class], and with it a hostility to America as the quintessential middle-class, democratic, and capitalist nation ─ was brought to a wide readership on these shores by a new generation of [America hating] writers, including Sinclair Lewis, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and H.L. Mencken.”
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“…while the Progressives had hoped to redeem America’s virtue, the mass-culture critics of the 1920s hoped to remake America in the image of Europe. The leading literary critic Van Wyck Brooks, who idealized Europe, decried the growing separation between highbrow and lowbrow cultures, A self-styled socialist, Brooks yearned for “organic” society and scorned the common man as a “simple moron” who needed the leadership of artists and writer [men, of course, like himself!].” ─ The Revolt Against the Masses, copyright © 2013 by Fred Siegel, Encounter Books, Page 44.
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“In the 1920s, the first decade in which women could vote, what looked like freedom and progress to most white Americans was an affront to liberal intellectuals, who were cultivating their own alienation. Increasingly conscious of themselves as a group, liberal writers and intellectuals, though more widely read than at any time in the past, experienced the Twenties as a time when their art was stymied by American philistinism. The public mood of the decade was upbeat, buoyed by prosperity and also by the dramatic arrival of electricity, the automobile, and the radio, which brought classical and commercial music to the masses. To the intellectual coterie, this mood was a Calvary. The creative class was being crucified, asserted Mencken, by the inferior breeds of humanity who had presumptuously betrayed their proper role as peasants by crossing the Atlantic from Europe and breeding each other into New World idiocy.” ─ The Revolt Against the Masses, copyright © 2013 by Fred Siegel, Encounter Books, Page 45.
