Blue Collar Intellectuals:
When the Enlightened and the Everyman Elevated
America
by Daniel J. Flynn
(ISI Books, 224 pages, $27.95)
It took your humble scribe two goes to get through
Blue Collar Intellectuals, Daniel Flynn’s latest uneven
but ultimately quite good work of Americana. Usually I’ve found
it’s best to treat book intros as one might treat movie trailers.
If the trailer is any good, there’s a decent chance the film will
be worth watching. If the trailer is not so good? Best pick a
different venue to munch popcorn.
There are exceptions. Some perfectly good movies have
perfectly lousy trailers — and vice-a verse-a! as the Italians
might say. Likewise, book intros can fail to do justice to the
material to follow. So it was with Blue Collar
Intellectuals. Flynn’s intro left me cold for reasons of
temperament. The author is a confirmed declinist where I am not so
sure. His first utterance is “Stupid is the new smart.” “Pop
culture is a wasteland,” begins the next section. The third carries
the subhead “I Don’t Read Books,” which called forth the reply,
“Not this one, anyway!”
That was not a remotely fair assessment, and I feel a
little sheepish about it. The thing that annoyed so was not that
Flynn fails to land good shots against neo-Philistines, clueless
book-learning-is-obsolete tech optimists, and all manner of liberal
rotters. He does, and his prose is even less of a barrier to entry.
There may be a few irksome sentences in this volume but there are
no laborious ones.
“It’s just,” I wondered, chronological snob that I can be,
“haven’t we heard this all before?” Conservative critics have been
sounding the alarm about cultural rot since roughly the paleolithic
era. It might be a good and virtuous thing to do so yet again but…
such a boring one. Fortunately I found out when I started it again
that the bulk of “Blue Collar Intellectuals” is not that kind of a
book. I skipped ahead and read the fifth and final chapter first
and was hooked.
That chapter, “Poet of the Pulps,” is a short biography of
Ray Bradbury. In it, we learn that Bradbury was born poorer than
dirt. How dirt poor? “In 1938, Ray graduated from high school
wearing his only suit, which his uncle had been wearing when
murdered by a stick-up man six years earlier. It still sported the
bullet hole.”
We learn a lot of other things about Bradbury as well. As
a kid, he did good Hitler and W.C. Fields impressions and was
ostracized by the local science fiction club. He lost his virginity
to a “fleshy redheaded prostitute.” When he first moved to L.A., he
was a dedicated and slightly crazed autograph hound. Flynn
explains, “Hoping to get George Murphy’s attention, [Bradbury once]
hung upside down from a tree like a monkey outside the actor’s
house.”
Alongside the brief biography of Bradbury is Flynn’s
close, mercifully concise reading of his works. Take the
book/movie/teleplay/radio broadcast that everybody knows Bradbury
for, Fahrenheit 451. Flynn grasps the most important
thing, that it is not really a book about censorship. “Despite the
arresting imagery conveyed by a title referring to the temperature
at which paper burns, the threat to the life of the mind comes not
as much from people who burn books as from people who don’t read
them,” he writes.
Flynn quotes Fire Captain Beatty’s famous defense of
literary immolation (“Colored people don’t like Little Black Sambo.
Burn it. White people don’t feel good about Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Burn
it.”) and reminds us that in the world of Fahrenheit,
“Book burning…is not an exercise in nihilism. It has a social
function: harmony, civility, unity.” Bradbury uses this
post-literate world to explore what happens to a society that
ceases care about learning.
In Bradbury’s case, that learning was overwhelmingly
self-directed. Having no money to go to college or buy a lot of
books, he “went to the library instead for three days a week —
later loudly proclaiming the Los Angeles Public Library as his alma
mater.” Indeed, in Flynn’s telling, intense self-education is
something Bradbury shares in common with all of the writers and
thinkers, those blue collar intellectuals, that make up this
book.
Eric Hoffer was an “unschooled hobo” turned “longshoreman
philosopher.” Great Bookie Mortimer Adler got a Ph.D. from
Columbia, true. He also skipped high school, all undergraduate and
masters studies, and most of his doctoral classes. Though,
thankfully, Adler decided to give his seminar on the classics a
fair shot. Will and Ariel Durant studied the history of
civilization by going to historical places, reading and taking
copious notes. This Johnny-on-the-spot routine caused Will to lose
a few admirers when he came back from the Soviet Union enraged and
tore it a new one. Milton Friedman earned degrees from both Rutgers
and the University of Chicago, yet Flynn locates Friedman’s real
economic education, and thus his ability to connect to the
everyman, to his hustles to pay for school.
The connection between these intellectuals is tentative
but, Flynn insists, important. They may have been more redneck or
more elitist in their personal tastes. (Adler wore expensive suits.
Hoffer didn’t own a tie.) Their creeds and ideologies and party
affiliations overlapped rarely and only by accident. Their
intellectual wares were championed by a truly diverse
non-collection of politicians, pressmen and publishers. But they
were all, by inclination, small-d democrats. These American
originals wanted to reach the masses and lift them up.
Their broadmindedness didn’t always endear them to
critics, or even to one another. Hoffer refused to meet with
Friedman, though they lived only miles apart in San Francisco.
Adler penned a nasty, nose-turning-up review of Will Durant’s
The Story of Philosophy in the Nation, and came
to deeply regret it. Critics savaged their efforts at mass
education as tacky and vulgar and futile. Flynn chronicles some of
these attacks but he does not go far enough for this reader’s
taste. For his next book, I would like to suggest a title:
“Snobbery: A History.” Tell me you wouldn’t want to read
that?
