The Home Front
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
THE HOME FRONT The Drive Against The Intellectuals By William E. Bohn One current aspect of American politics is a battle against brains. For a long time. I have been noting signs of this...
...But the Harvard men were not that fortunate...
...Pegler has brought in Alger Hiss, Lee Pressman, Felix Frankfurter and Nathan Witt as typically subversive Harvard men...
...Opposed to him are all the Democrats who went to Harvard...
...President Eisenhower, as well as ex-President Truman, has served to introduce an element of confusion into this ready classification of our public figures...
...His implication is that a young chap can attend their university without learning too much, without being lifted too far above the common level...
...Rude fellows, on the contrary, users of vulgar speech, employers of good, hearty, masculine cuss-words, can be depended on to love their country and fight the Communists without being too utterly scrupulous about observing all the rules...
...It is obviously his idea that a cultivated accent, a careful choice of language, the avoidance of swear-words indicate effeminacy, weakness and immaturity...
...Senator McCarthy's training at Marquette University does not cause our essayist too much difficulty...
...He is frankly introduced as the representative of the lowbrows...
...Harvard men, men of careful speech and good manners, are subversive, unpatriotic, given to softness toward Communists...
...But Columbia is, after all, a great Eastern university...
...But words which are proof of high virtue in the mouth of Joe McCarthy apparently contribute nothing to the credit of the man from Independence, Missouri...
...The members of the Society, he says, "are not invariably fastidious, sometimes descending to earthy terms to illustrate a moral or other important point to students...
...The school is, he says, "run by the priests of the Society of Jesus, otherwise known as Jesuits, a learned order whose members impart education in an atmosphere of piety...
...His subject is Joe McCarthy...
...The President's foreign policy follows the general lines developed by the Truman-Acheson administration...
...Though he commanded the biggest army ever assembled in all history, the General was at first accepted as a simple Kansas farm boy...
...He has proved often enough that he has a flair for the juicy and low-down word...
...So Joe, fortunately for the world, escaped from the academic halls without losing the vulgar and profane flavor of his speech and thought...
...In that case, McCarthy would presumably have been able to represent the common, honest and unsophisticated majority of citizens with less of the corruption which inevitably scrapes off on the honest student during his contact with the highbrows...
...By now, the writers on the McCarthy-Pegler side talk of the Eisenhower Republicans as if they were little better than over-educated jailbirds...
...But Mr...
...And then he goes on to call the man who was four times elected to the Presidency a "mama's boy" and a "Fauntleroy...
...At this point, our philosopher offers a description of the members of the Society of Jesus to which they may well object...
...By some oversight, he neglects to mention Dean Acheson...
...And then the other day Westbrook Pegler came up with a column which has many features of the thing neatly wrapped up in one package...
...Before he gets to the end of his column, Mr...
...So it has been discovered that Eisenhower was for a time the president of Columbia University...
...Harry S. Truman, it is true, is far from being a Harvard man...
...But, as time passed, this picture has changed...
...I have been noting signs of this campaign, but there was usually not much on which I could base a comment...
...In his addresses, he has used dignified speech and has outlined policies which go far beyond the ken of the isolationists...
...But the general classification is clear enough...
...That may not be as bad as a connection with Harvard...
...Pegler takes the Milwaukee institution in his stride and makes it fit into his theory of the Wisconsin Senator's biography and status...
...The unschooled and the unspoiled could, presumably, align themselves behind him without danger of betrayal...
...You can't trust such a character...
...His task would have been simpler had his hero jumped posthaste from elementary school into the Senate...
...He has appointed a Lodge from Harvard as head of the American delegation to the UN...
...The general implication is that men who use a common or vulgar style of speech are good fellows, honest and decent...
...Roosevelt," reports our historian, "was such a sissy that, when he used an ordinary dirty term which would roll unnoticed from the lips of any reasonably worldly male, the effect was one of dramatic striving, causing shock...
...Joe, from the start, has been the idol of the anti-intellectuals...
...On the other hand, men who are meticulous in the use of language, who have a New England accent, who are able to express themselves without profanity, are nothing but pantywaists...
Vol. 37 • July 1954 • No. 30
