the new breed of "liberals" as the very essence of intolerance. More than any other single issue, prohibition symbolized the ascendancy of narrow‐ minded bigotry and popular "puritanism," opposition to which now served as the distinguishing mark of American liberalism.

Liberals agreed that ignorance, superstition, and intolerance posed a grave threat to freedom, but they disagreed about the causes of the postwar reaction and its implications. Some of them took the position that liberals had failed to create a public consensus in favor of liberal programs and would have to redouble their efforts. Others argued, as we have seen, that the public could not be expected to listen to reason. "Public opinion" was shaped almost entirely by emotional appeals, according to this second view. If liberals hoped to win a popular following, they would either have to master the new techniques of advertising and propaganda, used so effectively by their opponents, or seek to minimize the influence of public opinion on policy, to limit popular participation to broad questions of procedure, and to see to it that policy-making was conducted exclusively by experts.

The New Republic, under Herbert Croly's editorship, emerged in the twenties as the principal exponent of the first of these positions. According to Croly, liberals had neglected popular education in their eagerness to win elections. Attaching themselves first to Theodore Roosevelt and then to Woodrow Wilson, they had counted on strong leaders to sponsor liberal programs and to give liberals a controlling influence in national affairs. The debacle of Wilsonian liberalism showed the futility of this strategy. Without a solid basis in public support, even liberal administrations would always subordinate liberal purposes to the domestic and international purposes of the capitalist class. By 1920, Croly had come to the conclusion that liberals should side with the labor movement as the best hope of restoring a "wholesome balance of economic and social power in the American commonwealth." Their support of labor, however, had to be tempered by a continuing commitment to the "search for a liberating knowledge of human nature and society." Since this knowledge could emerge only in the process of political discussion and experimentation, public education had to be conceived as an end in itself, not just as a means whereby liberals could hope to acquire political power. Any power liberals managed to acquire would "depend upon a vitality of opinion, upon a translation of opinions into a nearer approximation to

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