of any social project such as a proposed war, a new or old party, or some radical reforming agitation depends less upon the desirability of the particular end which the project seeks to achieve than upon the quality of the individual men and women which participation in it tends to bring to the surface."

But this educative dimension of politics would never come to the surface at all, Croly argued, unless the program makers were "kept conscious of the stumblings, the retreats, the misgivings, and the mistakes as well as of the long marches and the glorious victories of their expeditionary forces." Political activists and program makers needed "disinterested chroniclers and historians of their exploits," not propagandists, high‐ level strategists, or ideological masterminds. In retrospect, we can see that if intellectuals had been willing to settle for this "minor but still indispensable role," the subsequent history of the American left might have been very different.

Croly's confidence in public opinion and "virtuous social actors" struck most liberals by this time as old-fashioned and unsophisticated. They were more impressed by Walter Lippmann's analysis of the irrationality of public opinion and by H. L. Mencken's ridicule of democracy as the reign of the "booboisie." Mencken taught liberal intellectuals to think of themselves as a "civilized minority" and to wear unpopularity as a badge of honor. A man of intelligence and taste would always find himself "in active revolt against the culture that surrounds him." Praising Sinclair Lewis, Mencken laid it down as a dogma that "the artist is ... a public enemy; vox populi, to him, is the bray of an ass." The best thinking was always carried out in "conscious revolt" against the majority.

The postwar reaction made it easy for liberals to accept Mencken's low opinion of the average American. Not only liberalism but civilization itself, it seemed, had no future in America: such was the conclusion reached by most of the contributors to Harold Stearn's celebrated symposium, Civilization in the United States (1922). Another collaborative project, a state-by-state survey conducted by the Nation in the early twenties,

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