culture was a function of affluence and leisure, then universal abundance, together with an ambitious program of popular education designed to instill appreciation of the classics, held out the best hope of cultural democracy. Once the masses enjoyed leisure, affluence, and education, they would become discriminating consumers of art, letters, and ideas. Museums, concert halls, circulating libraries, and the new technologies of cultural reproduction—phonograph records, cheap editions of books, photographic copies of famous paintings—would give ordinary people access to the "best that had been thought and done in the world." Matthew Arnold's familiar phrase summed up this particular conception of culture, which many progressives (unlike Arnold, who thought the "best" could be appreciated only by the few) now proposed to universalize in the expectation that this would not require any appreciable alteration of its content.

The second position, advanced by Thorstein Veblen, Frank Lloyd Wright, John Dewey, Randolph Bourne, Lewis Mumford, Van Wyck Brooks, and Waldo Frank, among others, rested on a very different idea of both culture and democracy. These writers distrusted the missionary impulse they detected in the progressives' program of cultural uplift. Instead of popularizing leisure-class values, they advocated a new set of values based on the dignity of labor. Their program derived from William Morris rather than from Arnold. They did not necessarily share Morris's enthusiasm for handicraft production, but they followed him in making a revival of craftsmanship the prerequisite of a democratic culture. In his influential essay "The Art and Craft of the Machine" (1901), Wright tried to show that craftsmanship could be reconciled with machine production. Veblen argued that exposure to machinery fostered an "iconoclastic" state of mind among workers. It taught them to think for themselves, to understand cause and effect, and to question received opinions and established cultural authorities. Modern industry made every man his own scientist, according to Veblen, and gave free play to the "instinct of workmanship."

Dewey thought of his educational reforms—the clearest expression of this prewar speculation about the democratization of culture—as another method of bringing about a rehabilitation of labor. Like Veblen, Dewey deplored the "cultured" contempt for honest labor—a legacy, as he saw it, from the aristocratic past. By emphasizing the connection between the

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