acquisition"—on the collection and appreciation of masterpieces. Arnold's ideas discouraged "spontaneous taste" and had the "unpleasantly undemocratic" effect of separating "highbrows" from "lowbrows." In America, they perpetuated a slavish dependence on European models. The United States needed arts of its own, civic arts that would surround everyday life with order, beauty, and dignity. Bourne was oppressed by the "dishevelled and barbaric streets" of American towns and by the shabbiness of their "civic clothing." Instead of constructing a pleasant and convivial environment to live in, Americans ransacked Europe for its cultural treasures and enshrined them in museums carefully secluded from ordinary working life.

Lewis Mumford too saw the museum as a symbol of the divorce between art and life. In 1918, he drew on Ruskin, Morris, and Patrick Geddes, the leading advocate of city planning, to support his attack on the leisure-class culture institutionalized in the museum. He too wanted to put art at the disposal of the whole community and to restore "to the artist the opportunity for public service which disappeared with the decline of the Middle Ages." Many years later, Mumford said that this essay, with its plea for the reintegration of art and work, "struck the essential chord of the rest of my intellectual life."

The most vigorous, witty, and irreverent assault on the ornamental conception of culture came from Van Wyck Brooks, whose bold little book America's Coming-of-Age achieved the status of a manifesto for the prewar generation of literary intellectuals. According to Brooks, Americans had always made too sharp a division between business and what they thought of as culture—between "high ideals and catchpenny realities." "Desiccated culture at one end and stark utility at the other have created a deadlock in the American mind, and all our life drifts chaotically between the two extremes." The work of pioneering had absorbed most of the national energy. Business became the great American adventure, and

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