REPRESENTATIVES OF BRITAIN IN AMERICA: TRAVEL NARROWS THE MIND

No systematic study exists on the social origins of scholarship boys.Footnote ¹¹ The notorious complexities of the class system in Britain, regional variations that complicate perceptions of status, and the evolving construction of gender make even sophisticated typologies of class seem inadequate registers of historical reality. Differences among British educational institutions, funding, culture and tradition further complicate the notions of “scholarship” that often depended upon inconsistently administered examinations lacking in substantive uniformity.Footnote ¹² Still, the memoirs and later recollections of scholarship boys born in the decade after the First World War reveal that most emerged from the lower middle classes and from the “respectable” elements of the working class. Both groups were acutely aware of the subtle distinctions that separated them from their neighbors. The working classes have long attracted scholarly attention: only in the past forty years have the lower middle classes in Britain become the object of scrutiny.Footnote ¹³ Lacking both the revolutionary potential of the laborers “beneath” them and the status of their social “betters,” the lower middle class found itself mocked for its social affectations.Footnote ¹⁴

A. H. Halsey was born in Kentish Town in 1923, one of eight children of a railway worker, himself a scholarship boy, gassed in the Great War. Raised in a house without electricity, Halsey never slept in a room of his own until he was an adult. His scholarship in 1933 introduced him to a new world in which “cleverness or performance was the measure.” Halsey learned to lead a double life in which the “the school was seen by me as a sustained cultural assault on my family.”Footnote ¹⁵ At Kettering Grammar School a charismatic wounded veteran taught him the value of English, but Halsey initially decided against pursuing scholarship and in late 1939 became a sanitary inspector's boy. The war changed everything. Halsey joined the RAF, though a series of training delays meant that he never saw combat. More important, he decided to go to university “determined to learn fast, not to waste time, especially chasing women.”Footnote ¹⁶ Throughout his life, even when unsure of his ambitions, he was infused by a sense of religious mission and a Puritan work ethic. Sociology allowed Halsey to blend his enthusiastic support for democratic socialism with his religious sense of vocation. Upper-class suspicion of the discipline made it all the more appealing.

The son of a steam train driver, Harold Evans was born in a two-up, two-down terraced house near Manchester. An often sickly child, Evans was encouraged by his ambitious mother, herself one of thirteen children, to pursue a better life. Describing his family as “self-consciously respectable working class,” Evans marveled at his father's mathematical skills that because of class prejudice never gained him advancement at work. Evans often pondered what his parents might have achieved “if they'd had a real chance.”Footnote ¹⁷ He also recalled hearing Neville Chamberlain's “posh” voice on the wireless. “The plummy announcers on the BBC had me acutely conscious of accents as an indicator of class, of ineluctable superiority.”Footnote ¹⁸ His entrance examination slotted him into an “intermediary school” where he thrived. He began working in journalism at the age of sixteen, served in the Royal Air Force after the war ended, and entered Durham University, where he edited the newspaper and graduated with honors. In 1952 he began working for the Manchester Evening News, where his journalistic skills rapidly drew wide attention.

J. F. C. Harrison was born in 1921, the son of a father who worked in the parcels office of a railroad, a job that offered white-collar status and reasonable pay. Harrison's family took pride in their ability to pay doctor's bills on time; their consumption of butter, not margarine; and their eventual move to a semidetached house located on a “road” not a “street” and graced with both a small garden and a front parlor large enough for a small piano. In his autobiography Scholarship Boy, Harrison frequently contests the snobbery and condescension that he argues permeated British culture and dogged his childhood. The Harrisons may never have heard of Bloomsbury nor served cocktails to their neighbors, but they enjoyed their quiet satisfactions. “Lower middle-class society between the wars was male-dominated, excessively class-conscious, and culturally starved. But its emphasis on security, respectability, family and home provided a modest material happiness for millions, and a base from which a few people like me might move outwards.”Footnote ¹⁹ Harrison gained a scholarship to Cambridge, where he earned a first in modern history before becoming an infantry captain during the Second World War.

Bryan Magee grew up in Hoxton, one of the poorest areas of London during the interwar era. His father sold men's and boy's clothing; his mother never wanted children and made that clear to both Bryan and his sister. Magee loved his father and grandfather, who returned his affection. Plagued by claustrophobia, a fear of heights, and a powerful aversion to needle injections, he came to love classical music, which his father played on the gramophone.Footnote ²⁰ His isolation from others prompted him to ask foundational philosophical questions. He wondered about the beginning of time and the existence of God. Once when he closed he eyes and covered his ears, he became overwhelmed by the possibility of solipsism.Footnote ²¹ His high intelligence gained him a scholarship to Christ's Hospital, an elite institution founded in the sixteenth century. Magee would not pursue a conventional academic career. He wrote books about both music and philosophy, worked as a broadcaster, and became a Labour MP in the 1970s.

Malcolm Bradbury's father came from a working-class background, but rose to become an advertising specialist for a railroad, an occupation that he proudly considered lower-middle-class.Footnote ²² He believed in education as the best way to advance, but distrusted intellectuals, a trait not entirely missing from his son.Footnote ²³ Born in 1932, Malcolm Bradbury passed the his entrance examination to a secondary school during the war when the family lived in suburban London and suffered psychologically from the bombing. “It was terrifying and … children of my age … were very much affected by the experience.”Footnote ²⁴ Bradbury rejected Hoggart's characterization of the scholarship boy. “From the moment I appeared, in second-hand uniform, at the grammar school, I knew I'd been transferred into a world I liked.”Footnote ²⁵ A heart condition kept him out of National Service and “meant that I was irrevocably cast as a feminized intellectual.”Footnote ²⁶ His father's impatience with Bradbury's extended time in grammar school prevented him sitting for a scholarship at Oxford or Cambridge. He attended Leicester University, emerging in the 1950s as a provincial writer and academic precisely at the moment when such status was becoming more culturally acceptable.

Of all these scholarship boys, Richard Hoggart chronicled his life in most detail. As his contemporaries noted, The Uses of Literacy itself embodied a form of confessional sociology that helped legitimate working-class voices. Born in 1918, Hoggart lived with his grandmother after his parents died. She encouraged him to study hard and leave the “working-class life against which she always inwardly and sometimes outwardly raged.”Footnote ²⁷ The first to pass the entrance examination in his school's history, he attained one of the few scholarships offered by Cockburn High School to the students of south Leeds. Inspired by the poetry of Swinburne, Hoggart committed himself to the study of literature. Sensitive to the effects of poverty, he learned how to challenge the conventional understanding of both culture and society. More important, poetry and literature offered him an alternative world whose inner richness and evocative narratives departed radically from the inhibiting customs of his childhood and social class. Listening to conversations of workingmen, he became profoundly dissatisfied with their “limited enthusiasms and dismissals … the endless repetitive arguments about … royalty or sport or show biz … the equally endless and conventional sexual chit-chat” that seemed to define them. Although he claimed not to feel “superior or scornful” toward the men of his social class, he remained at best in tension with key elements of their identity.Footnote ²⁸

As they became more educated, scholarship boys transformed themselves. Like Hoggart, most shed the accents of their youth, a change they rarely commented upon except in passing.Footnote ²⁹ Harrison noted how quickly he assimilated the manners, style, and language of Cambridge, including clothes “that were to please my mother and impress people at home.”Footnote ³⁰ In one of his remarkably detailed memoirs, Magee chronicled how he assimilated a different ethical code as he climbed the social ladder. At Christ's Hospital, he learned how to tell the truth, keep his word, never cheat, and behave decently. When he returned to Hoxton, he quickly became an object of ridicule. “‘Blimey, ‘ark at ’im! Don’ e talk posh!’ … Everything I said sounded like something out of a comic, and they said so; housemasters, rugger, Latin, chapel, the incredible uniform.”Footnote ³¹ The assimilation of upper-class mores was never complete: meritocrats sought not to embarrass themselves in new surroundings while retaining allegiance to their original identity, especially in politics. Hoggart's portrait embodied an important truth: scholarship boys remained between “two worlds” and, as Lucky Jim amusingly demonstrated, a once-unfashionable class affiliation could both puncture upper-class pomposity and be exposed as disconcertingly gauche.Footnote ³² Americans would prove far less adept at detecting the transgressions of an acquired identity.

Foundations afforded scholarship boys the opportunity to travel within the United States. The Harkness family sponsored one of the oldest of these programs, in 1918 creating the Commonwealth Fund that allowed promising British students to study in the United States.Footnote ³³ Harold Evans won such a fellowship, as did Bryan Magee, who discovered that the pound's diminishing value limited the money he could spend.Footnote ³⁴ Malcolm Bradbury made multiple trips to America during the 1950s, sponsored by the English Speaking Union and Fulbright Travel Grants.Footnote ³⁵ J. F. C. Harrison was invited to teach at the University of Wisconsin and also won a Fulbright for travel. Richard Hoggart spent at year at the University of Rochester; A. H. Halsey received many invitations from American universities and on one trip attained a grant from the Ford Foundation.Footnote ³⁶ Such financial support was never entirely altruistic. Just as Cecil Rhodes created scholarships to promote British imperial values, the Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller Foundations pursued their own ideological agendas.Footnote ³⁷ The development of American studies in Britain, as Richard Pells demonstrates, depended heavily on money from the United States.Footnote ³⁸

Yet, as Chesterton famously declared, travel narrows the mind. Scholarship boys interpreted their American experiences from within their own backgrounds and subjectivities. Like any travellers, they noticed obvious social and cultural differences that helped define their own social identities. Hoggart, for example, found American college women “especially disconcerting.” Deploying the autobiographical sociology that made Uses of Literacy so distinctive, he charted in detail how these female undergraduates differed from those he knew at home. They were not “prim or coy but in some respects were almost boyish and asexual in appearance and manner.”Footnote ³⁹ They chewed gum and traveled in pairs like nuns. These innocent young women conformed to unchallenged political norms and remained “caught up in the American dream and its rightness … Few flashes of self-doubt had yet crossed faces such as those.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Yet, like his other students, they were remarkably open and friendly. Invoking Henry James, Hoggart observed that when confronted by new experiences American girls “tend to have exclamation-marks between their eyebrows.”Footnote ⁴¹

In Britain the working- and lower-middle-class origins of scholarship boys marked them no matter how well they mastered the accents, manners, and prejudices of the elites they joined. Oblivious to these social distinctions, Americans simply regarded them as English and, especially among the Anglophile upper middle classes, treated them with special respect and deference. Harrison enjoyed the status that his nationality conveyed. “The British accent was still sufficiently novel to attract attention and at times we exploited it shamelessly.”Footnote ⁴² Marcus Cunliffe noted how an English accent served him well, especially among Ivy League Anglophiles.Footnote ⁴³ Malcolm Bradbury was amused that Americans hired English secretaries to bolster the prestige of their institutions.Footnote ⁴⁴ To scholarship boys accustomed at home to an equivocal social status, Americans affirmed their legitimacy as members of the British elite.

Yet scholarship boys recoiled from the “professional Englishmen” they frequently encountered. In Stepping Westward, his autobiographical novel about his year at a mid-western university, Malcolm Bradbury offered a portrait of “Henry Wilkins,” a lower-middle-class librarian from the provinces who in England dressed shabbily and smelled of bacon fat. Wilkins emigrated to America, where he transformed himself. He wore smart English clothes, drove a Triumph Spitfire, and spoke “in his more English than English voice, now devoid of its Bulwell twang.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Howard Temperley, another scholarship boy, wrote in his autobiography that he often encountered professional expatriates in America, including one who “retained the disconcerting habit of adding an interrogative ‘what?’ at the end of sentences, as in ‘Jolly good party this, what?’”Footnote ⁴⁶ The British Empire had been full of such figures but America in the 1950s was different. Professional Englishmen in America represented an exaggerated form of the traditional gentleman that gradually disappeared after the Second World War. They embodied a residual social construction of upper-class masculinity that, as Praseeda Gopinath recently argued, could not be sustained after the precipitous decline of empire.Footnote ⁴⁷

Scholarship boys frequently commented upon the nature of class and social hierarchy in American life. Halsey wrote that “America was liberating for Englishmen of my age and class because it released discourse from the trammels of status and freed people from the aristocratic embrace.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Harrison discovered a country where “The Label” did not matter.Footnote ⁴⁹ Magee declared that “the absence of class-consciousness is the greatest cleavage in social outlook that exists between Englishmen and Americans.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Hoggart was astonished by the American lack of social restraint: “they fetched cans of beer openly, cooked steaks in their backyard, called out to one another across the vestigial boundaries between houses, walked easily into each other's kitchens.”Footnote ⁵¹ Yet scholarship boys remained alert to other forms of social differentiation. Hoggart recalled a grand dinner in New York where Diana Trilling quietly provided him with a detailed commentary on the social status of each guest. “Jane Austen … would have relished it.”Footnote ⁵² Race especially drew their attention. Evans traveled extensively in the South, “tormented by the contradiction” of how kindly whites treated him and how they regarded African Americans.Footnote ⁵³ Magee met a friendly and hospitable expatriate English couple in the South who liked everybody except “‘negroes out of their place’ and ‘dirty little socialists.’”Footnote ⁵⁴

Yet, for all its social injustices, America could also inspire English radicals. A. H. Halsey's residence at Stanford in 1956 and his subsequent visits to California exposed him to a dynamic educational system that might serve as a model for Britain.

Halsey was especially inspired by the plans of Clark Kerr, who devised a system of higher education for the state of California that Halsey believed could be imitated nationally in Britain. Yet, as Michael Shattock recently detailed, few of these ambitious policies gained traction in Britain. Entrenched cultural differences, dissimilar states of educational development, and other frustrations meant that Kerr's Master Plan found few echoes in the Robbins Report that helped shape the expansion of British higher education.Footnote ⁵⁶

America also provided scholarship boys with the confidence to pursue intellectual interests frowned upon in Britain. Magee's early interest in philosophical questions while growing up in Hoxton differentiated him from his mates, but he became dismayed by the formal study of philosophy at Oxford. In his intellectual autobiography Confessions of a Philosopher, Magee relates how the logical positivism at Oxford grounded its methodological rigor on a misunderstanding of science and also sneeringly dismissed the larger metaphysical and ontological questions that preoccupied thinkers since Plato. Magee's tutors proved “militantly analytic” in their opposition to any speculation not grounded in narrow linguistic analysis. Magee's attempts to discuss foundational issues were deemed “vulgar” and “disreputable intellectually, low-grade, brash, tasteless (‘like a chain of Odeon cinemas’).” At Yale, Magee enrolled in seminars that embraced larger philosophical questions. “Exchanging Oxford for Yale had been like stepping out of a dark cellar into the sunlight.” He found himself among peers who understood science, especially mathematical physics, and who debated seriously “such contemporary thought-systems as existentialism, Marxism, and Freudianism.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Yale liberated Magee to be himself intellectually. He would later pioneer a form of television where he interviewed prominent philosophers on fundamental questions.Footnote ⁵⁸

In Malcolm Bradbury's Stepping Westward, James Walker also discovers his English identity as a visiting academic in the United States. Bradbury's satire, first published in 1965, depicts a provincial, lower-middle-class novelist unexpectedly invited to teach in an American university, named with characteristic silliness “Benedict Arnold.” Walker confronts the usual cultural differences and comic misunderstandings involving language, manners, and romance. At an institution where the Union resembles King's College Chapel and “Ye Bookshop” looks like Anne Hathaway's cottage, the Anglophiles within the department value him for gentlemanly restraint, though some on the faculty had hoped for an Angry Young Man. As he settles in, he feels “the robe of Englishness” as “little shivers of nationality, almost of patriotism,” envelop him. Walker's “bland, uncreative British liberalism” becomes easily manipulated by academic politics when he refuses to sign a loyalty oath. Walker returns to England “most intact, wrapped in his prejudices, confirmed in his doubts, bundled up in his own self.”Footnote ⁵⁹

Malcolm Bradbury became a prominent figure in American studies in Britain. Like Bryan Magee, he became attracted to America in part because it enriched intellectual pursuits sparked in his youth. In his essay “How I Invented America” published in 1980, he provided a complex and detailed intellectual autobiography that charted his journey from scholarship boy in the provinces to his successes as a writer and literary critic. Two aspects of America especially appealed to him. First, it reinforced his concern for “the internationality of writing” during a period when Americanization was not the product of a single country but described the deep structural forces of consumerism and egalitarianism that would shape the later twentieth century.Footnote ⁶⁰ These forces eroded traditional English social and cultural hierarchies but also legitimated meritocrats like himself. Outsiders were becoming insiders and gradually assuming the mantle of authentic “Englishness.” Second, America in the 1950s offered a culture of liberal humanism that invigorated the “moral seriousness” Bradbury acquired in his youth from writers such as E. M. Forster. American writers made literature “urgent, necessary, fundamental – a voice of complexity and stress.”Footnote ⁶¹ Bradbury notes how these preoccupations would disappear in the late 1960s and the 1970s, a period when his own fiction reflected the awkward quarrel between liberal humanists and their radical detractors.Footnote ⁶²

For scholarship boys America was both an escape from class and a curious reassertion of it. After a decade of living in the United States, Harrison returned to Britain in part because “there was no great future for British history in the USA … The old Anglophilia of the Ivy League universities was no longer the potent force it had once been.”Footnote ⁶³ Hoggart said he loved America but that it only reinforced his view that his place was in England: “I am too immersed in, too much of, one culture.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Halsey returned to England at one-quarter the salary that he was offered, in part because he “recoiled from what it would be like to die with American children.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Their experience in the United States eased the anxieties of social class that Hoggart recorded in his analysis of scholarship boys. It also buttressed a renewed sense of their own national identity that Americans helped clarify.

PROFESSIONALS: DISINTEREST AND ABUNDANCE

In The Rise of Professional Society, Harold Perkin chronicled the growth of two middle classes in twentieth-century Britain. The business sector attracted talent wedded to capitalist incentives and mistrustful of government interference in the market. They accepted the premises of classical liberalism and embraced the pursuit of economic self-interest without apology. They enunciated an “entrepreneurial ideal” that emerged during the Industrial Revolution, withstood the challenges of socialism and, by their reckoning, triumphed under Thatcherism. Government and education created another class of individuals that Perkin calls “professionals,” who earned their living on salaries and fees apart from the profit motive. They saw themselves as public servants dependent upon government and private institutions with worthy civic intentions. This group expanded rapidly in number after the postwar expansion of the welfare state and the growth of higher education following the Robbins Report in 1963.Footnote ⁶⁶ The scholarship boys who traveled to the United States in the 1950s and 1960s pursued a “professional ideal” that America would subtly help alter.

The scholarship boys who became professionals believed in objectivity and detachment. Their own upward social mobility began with an examination that measured intelligence and knowledge, not birth and social connections. They embraced the notion of disinterested research that served the public good. Halsey became a distinguished empirical sociologist who believed that objective research would expose social injustices that fair-minded politicians would surely correct. He was particularly interested in the social implications of education, a subject that British sociology had previously ignored. “The emphasis was … on egalitarian analysis of social inequality but … consciously carrying on the tradition of political arithmetic – marrying a value-laden choice of issue with an objective method of data collection and analysis.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Halsey believed that his methodology separated him from Marxists, who deployed biased research to confirm ideological presuppositions. He argued that their radical assault on positivism discredited sociology as an academic discipline.Footnote ⁶⁸

In 1956, Harold Evans won a fellowship from the Commonwealth Fund to study American media at the University of Chicago. His specific research topic concerned the biases and stereotypes that American newspapers and magazines perpetuated about Britain. The Chicago Tribune, owned by Robert McCormick, was notorious for its loathing of Evans's native land. An isolationist, McCormick opposed the United States helping Britain during the war and his colorful Anglophobia made Chicago an excellent location for study. An editorial writer for the Tribune began his interview with Evans with the words “Let's face it, Britain is finished.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Yet, as Evans researched the newspaper he discovered many paradoxes about McCormick, including his defense of press freedom and his willingness to put journalistic standards above profit. The Suez crisis in the fall of 1956 offered Evans a pertinent case study for his project. “Did the press report the public statements fairly, fully, and accurately? … Did it publish speculation as fact? Did a newspaper's opinion page color its reporting?”Footnote ⁷⁰ To his astonishment, Evans found that the Tribune's editorial opinions did not distort its news coverage. Indeed newspapers in general proved far less biased and stereotypical than American magazines, particularly Time. Evans returned to England impressed by the objectivity of American newspapers. His own dedication to the ideal would later be tested greatly by working for Rupert Murdoch.Footnote ⁷¹

J. F. C. Harrison helped pioneer the study of social history. Like other key figures in the field such as E. P. Thompson, he began his career in adult education. The head of Leeds Extra-mural Department, S. G. Raybould, taught him that “the work should be training in ‘disinterestedness’ or ‘impartiality’ – in the capacity to see things as they are, and not as our hopes and fears might prompt us to see them.” A committed socialist, Harrison understood the Marxist critique of objectivity “as bourgeois ideology which served only to blunt working-class consciousness.”Footnote ⁷² But like Halsey he remained convinced that detachment, no matter how aspirational, rendered historical writing more reliable, persuasive, and enduring. Harrison wrote influential studies of “common people” not unlike his own family.Footnote ⁷³ Social history expanded the scope of the discipline and provided outside groups with a past worthy of academic scrutiny. Like other social historians of the working and lower middle classes during this period, Harrison prefigured the agenda, if not always the methodology, of identity politics, whose partisans resurrected a past for women, gays, and subalterns outside the traditional power structure. Even his own autobiography sought to place his subjective narrative within an objective context. “I see myself as a social atom, one of several million youths from lower middle-class homes in the late 1930s and 1940s.”Footnote ⁷⁴

A methodology of detachment and impartiality embodied its own tensions and historical anomalies, as Peter Novick demonstrated in an exhaustive study of the question among American historians.Footnote ⁷⁵ The allegiance of scholarship boys to progressive politics undermined claims to objectivity, though even a partisan figure such as E. P. Thompson never relinquished his commitment to a rigorous empirical methodology.Footnote ⁷⁶ However hopeful and even naive, the quest for impartiality clearly separated itself from the open pursuit of economic self-interest that classical liberalism and the business sector endorsed as socially beneficial. Scholarship boys saw their research as serving interests beyond themselves. The private satisfaction, occupational honors, job security, and economic support that they received for such work remained secondary considerations, at least not in private.Footnote ⁷⁷ For academic humanists and social scientists, especially in Britain, it was bad form to dwell upon the economic and cultural perquisites of their professionalism.

Scholarship boys who rose in the public sector also eschewed the consumerism that capitalism promoted. As Victoria de Grazia recently detailed, this left-wing predisposition to austerity evolved from complex traditions not always consistent or coherent and often difficult to trace.Footnote ⁷⁸ Socialist egalitarianism borrowed from Christian teachings that valued the body over the flesh, the spiritual over the material. Both Halsey and Harrison proclaimed themselves Christian socialists who understood these priorities. Socialist and liberal humanism incorporated elements of aristocratic disdain for a preoccupation with money and costs. Art, beauty, and knowledge embodied intrinsic rewards that enriched the spirit, not the pocketbook. In the 1950s the broad influence of F. R. Leavis buttressed these values. Though never his student, Bradbury assimilated Leavis's faith in the humanistic vitality of great literature and his disdain for commercialism and market forces. Hoggart, in particular, reinforced these moralistic tendencies in his controversial attacks on contemporary youth culture. Yet he was also a founder of cultural studies, an emerging discipline in the 1960s that undermined traditional elitism by adopting a more anthropological definition of culture – “a whole way of life,” as Raymond Williams famously defined it. The personal habits and cultural preferences of the working classes ought not be disparaged. Yet the market mechanism, commercial media, and unapologetic consumerism remained deeply suspect.Footnote ⁷⁹

Scholarship boys confronted this ambivalence when they traveled to America, a country like no other since it had inhabited their imagination since childhood. Eric Hobsbawm, himself a scholarship boy of a distinctive sort, wrote that “America did not have to be discovered: it was part of our existence.”Footnote ⁸⁰ In his youth Bryan Magee became completely absorbed in American popular culture. “Films fed almost narcotically into my inner life … My fantasies about my future derived more from cinema than from any other source.”Footnote ⁸¹ Halsey recalled how “the past was naively depicted as cowboy heroics, the present as normal in clean, freshly painted suburbs, unbroken and prosperous families and all-American adolescents at high school commencements.”Footnote ⁸² Before he ever set foot in America, Evans felt “the pull of the mythic America … to walk into a small-town diner in a Norman Rockwell painting; to follow Raymond Chandler in a roadster up Sunset Boulevard.”Footnote ⁸³ The actual experience of America became a blend of an immediate lived world inflected by a previously imagined one embedded in consciousness.

For many scholarship boys, American abundance triggered a kind of exhilaration. When he first arrived, Malcolm Bradbury stayed with an acquaintance in New York whose kitchen contained a marvel. Sensing his curiosity, the host took a whole frozen chicken from the refrigerator and “thrust it down the Disposall [sic]. I stared at the gurgling hole as it slowly ate the entire chicken and flushed it away; and then I knew that I had seen America, and it worked.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Howard Temperley lay awake at night after a party, “listening to machines quietly switching themselves on and off, the central heating, the clothes dryer, the deep freeze, the refrigerator, the dishwasher.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Harold Evans could not

The frequent association of these quotidian goods with the future stood in counterpoint to Lincoln Steffens's original exclamation about the Soviet Union after the Revolution. Steffens saw a more equal society based upon government policy: in America, as Hoggart shrewdly observed, an aspirational sense of “possibility” united citizens of different means “however much the dream and the ideal might have been tarnished.”Footnote ⁸⁷

Scholarship boys also experienced the cross-currents of British and American political discourse. They discovered that the same political labels often meant quite different things. An American conservative was only superficially like a British Tory whose aristocratic political origins lay in the defense of monarchy and an Established Church.Footnote ⁸⁸ Liberalism was even more bewilderingly complex. From the British point of view, “liberal” often meant the economic and political doctrines stemming from John Locke and the classical economists, particularly Adam Smith.Footnote ⁸⁹ A free-market, antigovernment Republican like Barry Goldwater was a classical liberal, though moderate Republicans like Nelson Rockefeller sometimes embraced tenets of early twentieth-century New Liberalism in Britain. Still, the progressive and left-wing politics of most scholarship boys was not entirely lost in translation. In the late 1950s, Hoggart's Uses of Literacy meshed well with the alienation from consumer culture and the mass media by American liberal intellectuals.Footnote ⁹⁰ Bradbury's self-confessed ineffectual British liberalism became invigorated by his exposure to American culture and intellectual discourse. Writing about himself in the third person, he noted how “he had put down his Leavis and put on his levis. His desk was stacked with McLuhan, Norman O. Brown, Marcuse, Wilhelm Reich.”Footnote ⁹¹ Harrison's courses on British social history at the University of Wisconsin drew radical students eager to discover a genealogy for their own political instincts. A strong supporter of the Labour Party in Britain, Harrison participated in antiwar demonstrations, though he was not always comfortable with the counterculture. His desire to retain high academic standards meant that “to my students I think I must have appeared no more than a pink liberal.”Footnote ⁹²

Scholarship boys lived well in America and they became accustomed to a standard of living that quietly eroded the moral high ground of austerity that separated the professional from the business elite in Britain. Of the three things that most impressed J. F. C. Harrison about his years living in America, he listed first its “amenities of daily life.” “Never again could I tolerate the dirt, inefficiency, and labour of coal fires after a year of living in a centrally-heated house.” When he and his family returned to England, he immediately ordered the installation of such a system in his house. “The wallpaper peeled off, the floorboards shrank, the furniture creaked, and the house shriveled up. But we were warm.”Footnote ⁹³ The University of Wisconsin paid Harrison twice the salary that he received at Leeds and he earned additional money teaching summer school. Other scholarship boys also received lucrative offers from American universities, though not all took them, as Halsey and Hoggart demonstrated. Yet both Halsey and Hoggart would find other opportunities in Britain and abroad to raise substantially their standard of living.Footnote ⁹⁴

The assimilation of American consumerism had another impact as well. Professionals turned out to be good providers for their family, an element of traditional masculinity. Scholarship boys and other meritocrats often defied stereotypes about gender roles and prefigured a version of postindustrial masculinity that proved more multidimensional than residual clichés about “feminized boys.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Once again, Richard Hoggart explored this dimension of his life in his lengthy autobiography. “I never fail to be surprised and pleased that, though not at all wealthy, we have a bit of a buffer against sudden shocks, and some available to help others.” Unlike in his childhood, he could now easily afford to buy what he needed, though he still shopped for bargains. More important, “it is good to know that the children and their children are well-fed and decently clothed; that their styles in dress and their accents are neither working-class nor middle-class.”Footnote ⁹⁶

As Britain evolved from an industrial to a service economy that placed a premium on education and the ability to manipulate information, the youthful inadequacies of one era might be transformed into the instrumental advantages of another. Bookishness lost its stigma when educational opportunity expanded and the service economy offered prestigious jobs for clever fellows at high pay. Bradbury contrasted the past, when serious writing provided marginal economic and social rewards, with the present, where “the critic … is almost certainly a member of a critical salariat, living on a campus … The balance of power has changed quite remarkably.”Footnote ⁹⁷ In this emerging society, male toughness and self-discipline expressed itself mentally as well as physically. Mastery and dominance might be applied to an academic subject or a quest for relevant information rather than a physical contest on a muddy pitch. Even the presumed inferiorities and indignities of working- and lower-middle-class affiliation might on occasion be deployed advantageously. Scholarship boys could draw upon the authenticity of their background to counter the “effete” upbringing of the traditional upper classes. Academic research, mocked as frivolous and irrelevant by instrumentalists, might also be considered an aggressive, even heroic, struggle against social oppression. Evans prided himself on the investigative journalism that exposed corruption in high places; Halsey provided the statistical evidence that buttressed social reform. Stereotypes about gender and class occasionally camouflaged the compensatory adjustments made by scholarship boys as they forged their identities over time.Footnote ⁹⁸

Yet the assimilation of consumerism also exposed meritocrats to criticism from within their own ranks. Marxists challenged their claims to detachment and objectivity when they argued that humanists served the interests of the ruling classes. Empirical sociology lost favor in the late 1960s and that 1970s as more theoretical approaches emerged. In his History of Sociology in Britain, Halsey characterized this development bitterly: “epistemological nihilism and moral relativism removed respectability from all but the totally committed opponents of capitalist society.”Footnote ⁹⁹ Malcolm Bradbury's influential novel The History Man, published in 1975, and its television adaptation broadcast six years later, satirized a young radical sociologist that resulted in damaging the entire discipline itself. Bradbury always claimed that he never intended such an outcome but found his own liberal humanism savaged by the Marxist literary critic Peter Widdowson.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Disciples of Friedrich von Hayek offered their critique of professional society from an emergent neoliberalism transforming the Conservative Party in Britain. As Perkin details, these academics, often economists and business school professors, considered many within the professional sector to be “freeloaders on the productive system” and “moralizing critics who opposed enterprise and economic growth.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ Even those on the left noted the privileges that academic egalitarians enjoyed.Footnote ¹⁰²

These developments in the turbulent late 1960s and the 1970s, culminating in the election of Mrs. Thatcher in 1979 and the radical transformation of the public sector during the 1980s, underscore the relative brevity of the “meritocratic moment” in mid-twentieth-century Britain.Footnote ¹⁰³ For a select number of scholarship boys, the United States played a role in this moment. America offered them an enhanced social status not always fully assured in the land of their birth, where the hidden injuries of class persisted long after their apparent disappearance. At least for some scholarship boys, Hoggart's narrative of trauma in The Uses of Literacy became qualified by experiences in America. The United States also provided a model of a professionalism that offered economic incentives for disinterested research and a comfortable standard of living for progressive social engagement. Traditions of austerity and a distrust of materialism quietly eroded among scholarship boys inspired by the civic good. Stark differences between professionals and the business elite remained, as the debates over Thatcherism vividly demonstrated. Yet each in their own way shared an appreciation of material prosperity.

Two other aspects of this narrative might be suggested by way of conclusion. First, this episode demonstrates once again how the twentieth-century Anglo-American relationship remains a moving target, resistant to broad generalization. A select group of males from within a particular generation of Britain's working and lower middle classes experienced the United States in a historically unique manner. Their subjectivities were fashioned by lived worlds that contrasted markedly with an America and a Britain of a decade earlier or even a few years later. Their aspirations, experiences, and memories remained embedded within an ephemeral generational circumstance. Second, and related, the story of British scholarship boys in mid-twentieth-century America contributes to yet another version of hybrid identities and the transatlantic experience. Meritocratic competence both transcended national boundaries and helped reinforce cultural differences. Scholarship boys celebrated their class allegiances while masking them at the same time. Self-interest and social interest became amalgamated in a manner distinct from classical liberalism. For at least a brief period, the exchange value of professionalism remained high, but, unlike the entrance examination to secondary school, immeasurable.