This is a book about “brainpower” more than about “eggheads,” who appear only very late in the story (essentially the last chapter). “Eggheads,” it turns out, are more the exception than the rule in American popular culture in the first half of the twentieth century. That term reflected a Cold War context where working-class people, for a variety of reasons, no longer participated as incisively as they once had in a popular discourse about the values and virtues of intelligence. By these lights, Richard Hofstadter's classic history of popular suspicions about the mind, Anti-intellectualism in American Life (1963), comes off as a bit overdetermined. Hofstadter, it seems, decrying the marginalization of the intellect, marginalized people who did their thinking in different spaces than those occupied by intellectuals. In other words, anti-intellectualism is only one side of the story. With a wider array of sources in tow (adverts, novels, cartoons, songs, posters, etc.), Lecklider aims instead to show that working-class people, through the medium of mass culture, often imagined their own brainpower in relation to intellectual elites in complex and dynamic ways, effectively challenging the idea that universities or laboratories (for example) were the only fit sites for the exercise of the mind. This one is for the autodidacts and organic intellectuals.

“Brainpower,” it follows, does rangy conceptual work in the text, such that it can reflect a variety of attitudes about knowledge or education, science, expertise, or notions of genius. Thoughts about Hofstadter linger here again, especially considering how precise that eminent historian was about defining what he meant by “intellect” as distinct from “intelligence.” The former referred to a contemplative cast of mind that could be pursued for its own sake while the latter had more a practical, praxis-oriented character. Pretty much everyone could get behind intelligence, while intellect could be dubious. Lecklider ignores such distinctions, which makes good sense given that Hofstadter's characterization of “intellect” inevitably made that quality the business of intellectuals as a (rather beleaguered) class. Yet one good thing about Hofstadter's “intellect” was that it described a specific kind of impulse and isolated the people against whom it was focussed. In the present case, with a concept as capacious as “brainpower” at the heart of things, Inventing the Egghead proves as good as the richness of its source materials and the readings that the author draws out of them.

When the sources are interesting (which is much more often than not) insightful and clever turns abound. Early on in the text, Coney Island attractions at the turn of the twentieth century occasion a penetrating look into the mechanisms of class and mass culture, where the working class exposed elite pretensions and combated exploitation all while expressing desires for education and refinement. The chapter that follows on Einstein's image becomes a site for astute observations about gender, nationality, and foreignness. The book also features some genuinely inventive readings of novels in different parts of the text, particularly Claude McKay's Home to Harlem (1928) (refuses the standard tropes of the slumming novel by eliding distinctions between mind and body), Tess Slesinger's The Unpossessed (1934) (homoeroticism in the novel reconciles the desire for ideas with bodily desire), and Richard Wright's Native Son (1940) (Bigger Thomas emerges as proletarian intellectual and speaks through Boris Max, rather than the latter speaking for him). Late in the text, a case study on Oak Ridge, Tennessee and the Manhattan Project marks a critical historical turn where the intellectuals working on the atomic bomb emerged as a class who resembled average bourgeois American families and yet invariably existed apart from the rest of society, the result of their potentially subversive role amidst the inscrutabilities of the developing military–industrial complex during the Second World War. On the other hand, a chapter on women and labor education in the 1920s, deploying mostly institutional records, lacks the same luster, lapsing into truisms about education as empowerment and the sloughing off of provincial prejudices and the like. This is a small quibble, though. On the whole Inventing the Egghead is a fascinating and valuable intervention into an ongoing debate about the value of intelligence and intellect that shows little sign of abating in American culture any time soon.