We often hear the lament that the role of the intellectual in American public life is waning; similarly our contemporary political and social discourse lacks “real ideas” and “artists,” complain scholars, citizens, and pundits alike. 'Twas always thus, explains Robert Vanderlan in his illuminating, intensively researched, and important new study Intellectuals Incorporated. He also shows, however, that these invocations of a feared declension in American intellectual life have varied in tone and, of course, in context. Vanderlan's study examines a unique moment – from the 1930s through the 1950s – when America's perennial intellectual decline, while bemoaned, did not seem inevitable.
By exploring an array of prominent intellectuals who worked in and around Time Inc. the book reveals that the changing/declining public role of the intellectual, while perhaps omnipresent over the last three-quarters of a century or more, haunted the Depression era and postwar world of American mass culture in particularly poignant and transformative ways. The book interweaves the lives, thoughts, and activities of a group of what Vanderlan terms “interstitial intellectuals” – including the luminaries Archibald MacLeish, Dwight Macdonald, James Agee, John Hershey, Daniel Bell, William Whyte, and Walker Evans – into a tapestry of American intellectual life from the 1930s through the 1950s.
Intellectuals Incorporated sheds new light on the complicated and contested process of maintaining intellectual commitments while working within the orbit of mass-culture corporations. It delves deeply into questions of the role of editorial and artistic control; transitions in the appeal of high-, middle-, and lowbrow writing; and the tensions that emerged at times between a need for capital (often through advertisements for the periodicals and simply in terms of making a living for writers) and the competing aims of editors, authors, and publishers. While there has been much work on Henry Luce, including Alan Brinkley's recent superb biography, the wider contours of his “media empire” have remained relatively unexplored. Intellectuals Incorporated is centrally concerned with the wider network of writers and editors “who pursued intellectual commitments while working for mass culture corporations,” specifically Luce's (4). Through a series of interwoven mini-biographies Vanderlan shows how these figures helped make Luce's papers and magazines so successful, yet always seemed to have an ambivalent attitude about their involvement in the Time Inc. world. Vanderlan's work aims to illustrate how and why intellectual commitments “became increasingly difficult to sustain as intellectuals embraced independence and scorned institutions in the years following World War II” (4).
Moving seamlessly from individuals like MacLeish to institutional settings such as Time and Fortune, Vanderlan reveals the conflicted and sometimes hotly disputed ways in which intellectuals could operate within Luce's world. Agee, for example, produced much great work within the Luce media orbit yet he pulled one of his most renowned works, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, from Fortune (though Vanderlan explains that this came only after it had been rejected); Macdonald, Hershey, Whyte, Bell, and others all accomplished some of their most insightful and intrepid work away from Time, Life, and Fortune. Indeed, Whyte's Organization Man, which in many ways defines the era's conformity and elucidates the period's cultural triad of mass production, consumption, and organization, was written and produced far from Luce's corporate empire.
As Vanderlan traces these developments, we come to understand how difficult it became for Time Inc. intellectuals to negotiate their own “interstitiality.” Chapter 5 of the book brilliantly sums up this dilemma. A new publication to be known as Magazine X, conceived in 1945 and cancelled in 1948, held great promise for intellectuals. Yet it was brought down by the gradually more heavy-handed and anti-intellectual bent of the Luce machine, the loss of liberal-intellectual editorial control (T. S. Matthews and Russell Davenport), and the need for artists and thinkers to trumpet their own independence. Even in this example of “defeat,” Vanderlan insightfully demonstrates a counterpoint to the conventional wisdom: the intellectual life, at least briefly, could be and was supported by “the Man,” with great mid-century thinkers, photographers, and editors working as part of mass, for-profit organizations. Ultimately this gives Vanderlan hope. While this past cannot be reconstructed,
the values that drove their work – an insistence on engaging a wide public, an awareness that we are all enmeshed inside the culture of mass circulation magazines speak to (and seek to speak for), a dedication to speaking in their own voice despite the obstacles, a commitment to the goals of journalism united with a stern dissent from their present pursuit – are worth rehabilitating. (306)
Perhaps the end is not as near as the declensionists would have us believe.
Intellectuals Incorporated is that rare work of intellectual history that simultaneously sheds new historiographical light on a well-studied period while doing justice to more than the development and flow of ideas. The book vividly evokes the individual lives and decisions that come together to constitute the lived experience of intellectual history while also giving us a deeper and longer-term view of the viability of intellectual discourse in an increasingly fast-paced and abbreviated media landscape.
