and practice, undercuts the very possibility of social criticism, while the refusal of loyalty, on the grounds that the intellectual's only allegiance is to truth and justice in the abstract, renders it harmless and irrelevant.

Considered in the light of this contrast between connected social criticism and sociological satire, the Nation's survey of the United States leaves a somewhat ambiguous impression. Though most of the contributors struggled to see America from an outsider's point of view, few of them regarded it with "icy indifference." They could not quite bring themselves to regard democracy, as Mencken did, purely as an endlessly engaging spectacle for the connoisseur of popular stupidity. Their indignation implied a residual belief in the American people's capacity for self-government, even though their disparaging account of American society did not give much support to that belief.

The same ambiguity appeared in contemporary reactions to the much‐ discussed study of Muncie, Indiana, by Robert and Helen Lynd—the first in a long line of community studies in which sociology served as a mode of social criticism. Mencken was delighted with Middletown—a book that showed, he said, "how far short of libel Sinclair Lewis fell in 'Main Street' and 'Babbitt.' " He commended the authors for adopting a position of complete detachment from their own culture. They "went to Middletown precisely as W. H. R. Rivers and Bronislaw Malinowski went to Melanesia," without preconceptions or a "thesis to prove." They studied their subjects "as an anthropologist anatomizes a savage tribe." To John Dewey, on the other hand, Middletown seemed to accuse Americans of not living up to their own ideals—quite a different indictment from one that merely dismissed their "unbelievable stupidities," as Mencken put it. What the Lynds discovered, according to Dewey, was the contradiction between "institutions" and "creeds," "practice" and "theories." Their most distressing finding concerned the debasement of religion. "The glorification of religion as setting the final seal of approval

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