Expertise and Disbelief

Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 2015 Expertise and Disbelief: Post-1945 American Attitudes Toward the Authority of Knowledge Terry Wagner Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations Part of the History Commons Recommended Citation Wagner, Terry, "Expertise and Disbelief: Post-1945 American Attitudes Toward the Authority of Knowledge" (2015). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 1976. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/1976 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please [email protected]. EXPERTISE AND DISBELIEF: POST-1945 AMERICAN ATTITUDES TOWARD THE AUTHORITY OF KNOWLEDGE A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of History by Terry Wagner B.A., Rice University, 2002 M.A., Louisiana State University, 2010 August 2015 “The thunder and lightning strike us, And then we’re shocked to see the likeness Between us and the things we’ve hated for a long, long time.” The Godz “Dirty Windows” 1973 ii Acknowledgements The historians and graduate students at Louisiana State University have been, for me, a genuine community. My graduate advisor, David Culbert, told me the first time I met him that, if I came to LSU and worked with him, I would research and write about my own interests. He has been true to that pledge, and this freedom has helped enable any insights among disparate topics made in this dissertation. His long experience as an editor refining ideas and prose has been indispensable. Charles Shindo has been sharing his time and knowledge since before this project was conceived, guiding me through basics of film theory when the right classes were not available. When the dissertation felt unwieldy, he made a crucial suggestion that if I were most interested in critiques of expertise, I should spend time and space on those critiques and not attempt to summarize the whole tortuous history of experts themselves. Andrew Burstein is often more interested in students’ newest ideas than they might be themselves. His reading of early scribblings gave me my first sense of what I was actually communicating, and what was staying locked in my head. Zevi Gutfreund has reminded me of the importance of dissertation work, even when it occasionally slowed my work for him as a teaching assistant. Even more, I thank him for stepping in to read and comment on the dissertation despite his own voluminous work as young faculty. iii Geoffrey Cunningham, Spencer McBride, and Andrew Wegmann have for almost a decade been a central part of what has made LSU feel like community. Special thanks to Geoff for interest in reading chapters and for his historiographical insight and humor. Great gratitude is due to Allen Matusow, my undergraduate advisor. The first historian whose work I could discuss with the author, Matusow encouraged my cultural readings of 20th- century American history and iconoclasm toward quickly-sanctified understandings of the recent past. My mother Desley was my first writing teacher and has always been among my most insightful editors. My father Robert has an instinct to aid and assist at his very core. Apologies to both for the pauses, stumbles, and outright hiatuses that must have made them wonder if I would finish. To Julia, my wife, who has endured living apart much of the time and my bizarre work schedules when we have been together, thank you. iv Table of Contents Acknowledgements……………..………………………………………………………………………iii Abstract………………...……………………………………………………………………………….……vi Chapter 1. Introduction……………………………………..………………………..………………….1 2. Proclaim The Progressive Promise of Expertise.…….……………..……………………...17 3. Testify Kennedy, Johnson, and the Brains………………………………..………….…….57 4. Revolt The New Right and the Intellectual Oppressors….....……………………...82 5. Catastrophize The Unreasonable Liberals………………….………………………………………...108 6. Exit The Irrational Counterculture…….………..…………….…………………...…….154 7. Let Go Evangelicals and the Mastery of God……………….…………….……………...198 8. Conclusion…………………..…………………………………………………..………….…237 Bibliography……………………………………………………..…………………………….…………..242 Vita……………………………………………………………………..………………………….………..…250 v Abstract “You can’t beat brains,” said President John Kennedy of the intellectuals and technicians he assembled in his cabinet. Kennedy was perhaps the greatest political champion for the virtues of expertise. However, all over America during the 1960s and ‘70s, diverse groups voiced doubts about how much experts, such as social scientists, policy specialists, and others, actually improved life. This dissertation examines how movements on the political left and right, and spiritual ruptures such as the rise of ‘60s counterculture and of evangelicalism, spoke in different language to express a similar point: human mastery over the world is profoundly limited. Many believed, as a result, that rational planning too should be limited. In this regard, the dissertation is part of the historiography of the decline of American liberalism, and its foundation, expert management. The dissertation is foremost a cultural and intellectual history – locating for its sources the artifacts of mass culture – and, to a lesser extent, political. A reading of American cinema produced from the 1950s through the 1970s, as well as of songs, sermons, presidential rhetoric, and popular nonfiction, demonstrates the tense relationship Americans had with experts. The study pays especially close attention to several of the films of Henry Fonda, and the symbolic meaning of some of his characters as idealized rational humanists. Through the rhetoric of psychedelic music, presidential speeches, anti-war rallies, and evangelical nonfiction, this dissertation locates the sources of hostility toward those who justify their authority by appealing to expertise. vi Chapter 1. Introduction Our attitudes toward knowledge are complicated. The numerous meanings of the word rationalize, since its first appearance in the 17th century, are instructive. In its earliest use, the Oxford English Dictionary tells us, rationalize meant “to make conformable to reason.” Examples of the term’s usage include finding logic in abstract notions such as happiness, or making plausible a philosopher’s utopian dreams. In such usage, rationalizing was often salubrious, as in Herbert Spencer’s 1883 assertion that science’s rationalization of life could lead people to take better care of their health and bodies. An expanded meaning of rationalize, in the 1930s Encyclopedia of Social Science, states that the aim of sociologists, psychologists, and economists was to find universal principles in the chaos of human life. Rationalizing, to that writer, was nothing less than explaining the mysteries of human thoughts and actions.1 Explaining mysteries can introduce problems. A usage of rationalize, which first appeared in the mid-1800s, suggested that applying rational assessment to the world robbed life of mystery. In 1855, a British writer described his distaste for rationalization: “Away all the wonders, till we make them at last impossible, and give up caring to believe them.”2 This “explaining away” through knowledge what had before seemed miraculous bothered some. When Walt Whitman published Leaves of Grass, also in 1855, he included the poem “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer.”3 The work was short and the sentiment direct: 1 Oxford English Dictionary, online, “rationalize,” definition 1a. 2 Ibid., 2b. 3 Walt Whitman, “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer,” accessed http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174747. When I heard the learn’d astronomer, When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me, When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them, When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room, How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick, Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself, In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars. The proofs and figures, the charts and diagrams, and the spirit-crushing columns and arithmetic of the lecture-room combined to make Whitman sick, wandering off in mystical silence. To many, “perfect silence” is the appropriate reaction to the majesty of the cosmos. The idea that people should end or challenge scientific study before scientists ruined our vision of the world resonated in the mid and late 20th-century among disparate groups: hippies, moon-landing commentators, back-to-the-landers, humanities professors, and evangelical Christians. For psychologists in the 1920s, “rationalize” took on another negative meaning, one distinct from Whitman’s sense. These scientists of the mind used the term “rationalize” as a word that meant “to explain or justify . with plausible but specious reasons.”4 In 1925, a Freudian noted that a “patient’s consciousness . puts forward a sect of secondary motives . rationalizes them, in short.” Such a form of rationalization did not require pathology. Rationalizing to assuage

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