the Alleged Breakdown of Liberalism in America," Current Opinion 68 (April I920): 520-22; "The Eclipse of Progressivism," New Republic, 27 Oct. 1920, 210-16; "Organizing the Intellectuals," a pamphlet bound into the Nation, 28 Feb. 1920; "Programs and Periodicals," New Republic, 22 Oct. 1924, 191-93; "Liberalism Today," New Republic, 25 Nov. 1925, 3-6; and "Obstreperous Liberalism," New Republic, 23 Dec. 1925, 122-24. Many of these articles also document the New Republic's cogent analysis of liberals' failure to create a public consensus in favor of their policies; see also Herbert Croly, "The Outlook for Progressivism in Politics," New Republic, 10 Dec. 1924, 60-64. Harold Stearns, Liberalism in America (1919), provides perhaps the most vivid evidence of liberals' growing sense of themselves as an endangered species.

Mencken's statement about the artist's "active revolt" against his society appeared in the Baltimore Sun (1921) and is quoted in Fred C. Hobson, Jr., Serpent in Eden: H. L. Mencken and the South (1974). His description of the artist as a "public enemy" comes from his famous attack on the South, "The Sahara of the Bozart," in Prejudices, Second Series (1920). The type of social criticism inspired by this point of view is exemplified by Harold Stearns's collection, Civilization in the United States (1922), and by most of the contributors to the Nation's series, "These United States," which ran from 1922 to 1925. The Nation was not the only journal to undertake such a survey in the twenties. The New Republic ran a similar series on cities, while Mencken's American Mercury published a large number of articles on various cities and states, vastly inferior, for the most part, in their undiluted contempt, to the more nuanced articles that ran in the Nation. The tone of the American Mercury's commentary on America was unmistakably established by Charles Angoff's contribution, "Boston Twilight," American Mercury 6 (1925): 439‐ 44: "What is most depressing about the town is its complete lack of what might be called a civilized minority."

Michael Walzer first explored the difference between "disembodied" and "connected" social criticism in an essay contrasting Sartre and Camus, "Commitment and Social Criticism," Dissent 31 (autumn 1984): 424-32. He pursued this contrast in Interpretation and Social Criticism (1987) and The Company of Critics: Social Criticism and Political Commitment in the Twentieth Century (1988). Middletown, by Robert and Helen Lynd (1929), wavered between these two kinds of criticism, while Middletown in Transition (1937) fell more clearly into the "disembodied" category. For Lynd's background in the social gospel and his ambivalent feelings about the Middle West, see Richard Fox, "Epitaph for Middletown," in the collection of essays edited by Fox and Jackson Lears, The Culture of Consumption (1983). Mencken's review of Middletown, "A City in Moronia," appeared in American Mercury 16 (March 1929): 379-81; Dewey's "The House Divided against Itself," in New Republic, 24 April 1929, 270-71. Robert Lynd's Knowledge for What? (1939) shows how easily "anthropological" criticism of society, even when it was launched from a left-wing point of view, led to a cult of the expert.

Thurman Arnold's two major works, The Symbols of Government (1935) and The

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