omnicompetent individuals could manage everything for themselves. Americans could no longer indulge themselves in that illusion, any more than they could afford to believe in the "mind," "soul," and "will" of humankind.

By the time Lynd published Knowledge for What?, liberals and social democrats had returned to power under the New Deal; but their doubts about Americans' capacity for self-government, hardened by political adversity in the twenties, did not break up in the Democratic landslide of the thirties. The voters overwhelmingly supported Franklin Roosevelt in 1936, but it was not clear that they endorsed the New Deal, let alone the comprehensive social engineering favored by liberals and social democrats. The New Deal itself represented an alloy of welfare liberalism, old-fashioned laissez-faire liberalism, and sheer opportunism. Led by a man who courted popularity at the expense of programmatic consistency and coherence, it had no sense of purpose or direction. Dedicated New Dealers like Rex Tugwell—those who advocated an all-out assault on the theory and practice of competitive individualism—often despaired of the New Deal. They suspected that Roosevelt owed his victories at the polls to his charm rather than to any widespread enthusiasm for his principles, such as they were. Although some of the New Dealers joined the left-wing celebration of the American people and the American past that reached its climax in the Popular Front culture of the late thirties, most of them remained curiously aloof. They trusted programs, not people, and they found the new mood of affirmation—"the people, yes," in Carl Sandburg's cloying phrase—more than a little embarrassing. They had plenty of compassion; they grieved over the hard lot of the sharecropper, as documented by the photographers made famous by the Farm Security Administration; they learned the workers' protest songs, defended their right to strike, and condemned employers who resorted to violence and

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