obsession needed to survive." The "sage of Concord ruled supreme in thoughtful circles," to the neglect of Whitman and Thoreau, because his "vague," "remote" idealism justified the "hypocrisy of the American who goes to church on Sunday and bleeds his brother Monday, who leads a sexually vicious life and insists on 'pure' books." As for pragmatism, it represented a "sublimated" form of pioneering. Frank echoed the charges Bourne angrily brought against Dewey, when Dewey's support of the war led Bourne to argue that pragmatism had degenerated into a cult of technique. Pragmatism had contributed to America's "liberation from the genteel," Frank thought, but the pressure of war had revealed its inadequacy for the task of "creating values of our own." The pragmatic philosophy now stood unmistakably revealed as a "mere extension of the pioneering mood."

Mumford repeated this argument in The Golden Day (1926), broadened to include James as well as Dewey. Having ignored his own "innermost wishes" and missed his calling as an artist, James became the philosopher of "acquiescence." Pragmatism gave philosophical sanction to the "newspaper platitudes" of the Gilded Age—the "supremacy of cash-values and practical results," the "gospel of smile." Its "compromises and evasions" betrayed the desire for a "comfortable resting place." Compared with Emerson, James was "singularly jejune." By treating Emerson himself as a "great poet," Mumford missed the religious interests that James and Emerson had in common. His contention that the "American mind ... had begun to find itself" in the "golden day" before the Civil War was unsupported by analysis of the substance of Emerson's thought, let alone that of Thoreau and Melville, whom Mumford rated more highly. Like Brooks, Mumford was concerned to illustrate the "broken rhythm of American life, with its highbrows and lowbrows, its Edwardses and Franklins, its transcendentalists and empiricists," and to show that "the gap between them widened after the Civil War."

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