intimidation; but although their hearts went out to the victims of injustice, they did not completely trust the American people as a whole. Indeed their feelings about the people more nearly approximated Mencken's than Sandburg's.

Thus it was Thurman Arnold, the quintessential New Dealer, who raised political satire à la Mencken to a new level of urbanity and sophisticated cynicism in The Symbols of Government (1935) and The Folklore of Capitalism (1937). Mencken read the second of these tracts in manuscript and must have been pleased to find that Arnold shared his contempt for democracy and his belief in the futility of public debate. But Arnold went on to advocate positions that Mencken himself loudly opposed: government regulation of industry, redistribution of income, welfare programs—in short, a more radical version of the New Deal. He went so far as to defend Roosevelt's unpopular plan to pack the Supreme Court. That liberals joined conservatives in denouncing the plan proved the bankruptcy of old-fashioned liberalism, in his view—its infatuation with abstractions and with symbolic or "theological" modes of thought. Like Mencken, Arnold saw cultural history as a long struggle of science against superstition. He tried to view American "folkways" as they would appear to an anthropologist or a "man from Mars." The view from outside led him to question economic superstitions as well as the more obvious fundamentalist superstitions ridiculed by Mencken. This appropriation of Mencken's "anthropological" technique of social satire by an ardent New Dealer marked a new stage in the history of American liberalism. ^*

A law professor at Yale before entering the Roosevelt administration in the mid-thirties, Arnold had become increasingly critical of the Supreme Court's dogmatic defense of laissez-faire, specifically of its use of the Fourteenth Amendment to protect corporations from regulation. The

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"Thurman Arnold," wrote Richard Hofstadter in The Age of Reform, "wrote works of great brilliance and wit and considerable permanent significance—better books, I believe, than any of the political criticism of the Progressive era." These books, in Hofstadter's judgment, exemplified the "pragmatic temper" of the New Deal, its attack on the "moralism" of the prewar progressives. They represented the "theoretical equivalent of FDR's opportunistic virtuosity in practical politics."

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