He recounts the derision of historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and economist John Kenneth Galbraith - Cambridge neighbors after the war - for Harry Truman, the onetime haberdasher and member of veterans’ groups and service clubs.
For a moment, idealization of the working man, but not the middle-class striver, came into vogue.īut in the postwar years, what Siegel calls “the political and cultural snobbery” of liberals returned. During the Great Depression, many liberals became Communists, proclaiming themselves tribunes of a virtuous oppressed proletariat that would have an enlightened rule. This contempt for ordinary Americans mostly persisted in changing political environments. These 1920s liberals idealized the “noble aspiration” and “fine aristocratic pride” in an imaginary Europe, and considered Americans, in the words of a Lewis character, “a savorless people, gulping tasteless food,” and “listening to mechanical music, saying mechanical things about the excellence of Ford automobiles and viewing themselves as the greatest race in the world.” Mencken and the literary criticism of Van Wyck Brooks heaped scorn on the vast and supposedly mindless Americans who worked hard at their jobs and joined civic groups - Mencken’s “booboisie.” The novels of Sinclair Lewis, the journalism of H.L. And progressivism was repudiated in the landslide election of Warren Harding in 1920, at which point disenchanted liberal thinkers turned their ire against middle-class Americans who, in the Roaring ’20s, were happily buying automobiles, refrigerators, radios and tickets to the movies. Progressive projects included women’s suffrage and prohibition of alcohol.īut the many pro-German Progressives were appalled when Woodrow Wilson led America into World War I and by Wilson’s brutal suppression of civil liberties. He depicts the Progressives as Protestant reformers, determined to professionalize institutions and tame the immigrant and industrial masses. And he argues that literary figures contributed as much to the liberal mindset - maybe more - than policy wonks. Siegel says it’s more complicated than that. The standard account is a linear story: Government expansion starts with the Progressives of a century ago, accelerates through the New Deal and the Great Society, follows up with the Obama stimulus and ObamaCare. That’s the thesis of Fred Siegel’s revealing new book, “The Revolt Against the Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class.” The roots of American liberalism are not compassion, but snobbery.
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