tion, with its assault on the "Middletown spirit"—the "intense nationalism," the "united front against radicalism," the refusal to question the "adequacy of the reigning system," and the general fear of the outside world that seemed to have grown even stronger as a result of the Depression. The more the Lynds immersed themselves in Muncie, the more they fell into the point of view of alien intruders. Indignation gave way to a sort of bemused contempt.

Not that they became more conservative in their politics, as Mencken did. On the contrary, they became increasingly outspoken in their condemnation of capitalism, like many liberals in the thirties. But they saw no reason to revise their low opinion of the political capacities of ordinary Americans. In Knowledge for What? (1939), Robert Lynd cited a growing body of evidence to the effect that "liberal attitudes are correlated with intelligence." If that was the case, social change would presumably have to be engineered from above. The masses were creatures of habit, and modern society had grown too complex, in any case, to be governed by the rule of the majority. "Many public issues today are of a highly technical character that should not be disposed of by a show of hands." Public opinion could not be ignored, of course, but neither could it be guided by reasonable arguments or even by an appeal to enlightened self-interest. Advertisers and political demagogues understood the importance of emotional appeals even if liberals did not. The "stark manipulative rightness of modern advertising" lay in its skillful use of symbols, just as the "tactics of a Hitler" were "profoundly right" in recognizing the "need of human beings for the constant dramatization of the feeling of common purpose." Those who believed that capitalism was "bankrupt" and that "alternatives to capitalism" held out the only hope of social justice would have to master the propaganda techniques used so effectively by their rivals. Elsewhere Lynd dismissed the "high degree of rationality" in "consumer choices" as an unwarranted assumption. The consumer was better understood as a "hard-beset mariner willing to make for almost any likely port in a storm." Public opinion thus became "largely a question of whose signal lights can beckon to him" most "alluringly."

Knowledge for What? attacked the intellectual foundations of nineteenth-century liberalism as well as its laissez-faire economics. As a sociologist, Lynd inherited an intellectual tradition that had always given more weight to customs, habits, and emotions than to reason. Psychoana

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