Blue Collar Intellectuals: When the Enlightened and the Everyman Elevated America [Hardcover]

Daniel J. Flynn (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 6, 2011

Stupid is the new smart—but it wasn’t always so

Popular culture has divorced itself from the life of the mind. Who has time for great books or deep thought when there is Jersey Shore to watch, a txt 2 respond 2, and World of Warcraft to play?

At the same time, those who pursue the life of the mind have insulated themselves from popular culture. Speaking in insider jargon and writing unread books, intellectuals have locked themselves away in a ghetto of their own creation.

• It wasn’t always so. Blue Collar Intellectuals vividly captures a time in the twentieth century when the everyman aspired to high culture and when intellectuals descended from the ivory tower to speak to the everyman. Author Daniel J. Flynn profiles thinkers from working-class backgrounds who played a prominent role in American life by addressing their intellectual work to a mass audience. Blue Collar Intellectuals tells the fascinating story of:he unschooled hobo who migrated from skid row anonymity to White House chats with the president and prime-time TV specials.
• he scandalous teacher-student romance that spawned a half-century labor of love in writing the history of the world.
• he Ivy League Ph.D. who held neither a high school nor college degree, and fittingly launched a renaissance in reading the great books outside of formal schools.
• The scholarship student who experienced the free market firsthand waiting tables and peddling socks, and who became one of capitalism’s most influential exponents.
• The impoverished outcast who became the poet of the pulps, elevating millions of readers along with heretofore marginal genres.

Guiding us through a world now vanished, Flynn causes us to look anew at our own digital age and its nostrums: Video gaming is just a new form of literacy, Reality shows . . . Challenge our emotional intelligence, and Who cares if Johnny can’t read? The value of books is overstated. Blue Collar Intellectuals shows us how much everyone intellectual and everyman alike has suffered from mass culture’s crowding out of higher things and the elite’s failure to engage the masses.

 

Praise for Blue Collar Intellectuals

 “This book is not only an exciting story; it also corrects a terrible cultural mistake—the mistake of treating high culture, Great Books, and other canon-making visions of tradition as exploitative and spurious. Previous generations of intellectuals believed that our great cultural inheritance belonged to everyone, rich and poor, black and white and brown. Daniel Flynn’s profiles revive that belief, and they mark a vital alternative to the complacent relativism of contemporary cultural stewards.”

—Mark Bauerlein, best-selling author of The Dumbest Generation

 

“Flynn’s case histories of a wonderful—and uniquely American—tradition of bringing learning to the masses offers us a morality tale in these times of spiraling tuition, esoteric publication, and an insular academia mostly cut off from wider society. The fascinating portraits here remind us how not so long ago an interest in making knowledge known beyond the campus was not antithetical to learning but the very essence of the true intellectual.”

—Victor Davis Hanson, coauthor of Who Killed Homer? and The Bonfire of the Humanities

 

“Back in the middle decades of the twentieth century, millions of Americans supped at the table of high culture, learning history, philosophy, and economics from intellectual entrepreneurs like Will and Ariel Durant, Mortimer Adler, and Eric Hoffer. Daniel Flynn tells their story inBlue Collar Intellectuals—and tells us why we miss them today.”

—Michael Barone, senior political analyst at the Washington Examiner, coauthor of The Almanac of American Politics

 

“Blue Collar Intellectuals powerfully evokes the lost era when the ‘everyman’ aspired to higher things and the defenders of high culture spoke and wrote in clear, accessible language. Flynn’s deft historical profiles remind us that popular culture and the life of the mind need not be adversaries.”

—Brian C. Anderson, editor of City Journal and author of South Park Conservatives

 

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Daniel J. Flynn is the author of A Conservative History of the American Left and Intellectual Morons: How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall for Stupid Ideas. A popular radio guest and frequent speaker on college campuses, he writes a weekly column for HumanEvents.com and blogs at www.flynnfiles.com. He lives in Massachusetts with his wife and two children.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 200 pages
• Publisher: Intercollegiate Studies Institute; 1 edition (December 6, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1610170202
• ISBN-13: 978-1610170208
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.9 x 8.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #913,859 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 32 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Easy to Understand and to the Point! January 20, 2012

By D_shrink VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

This is a very non-PC book that tells it like it is rather than how we would like it to be.

The author's definition of a BLUE COLLAR INTELLECTUAL is a thinker who hails from a working class background and whose intellectual work targets, in part or whole, a mass audience.

The author's writing is sharp, crisp, and to the point. He sets the tone for the rest of the book from page one with lines as "Stupid is the new smart." This is followed on page two with "Something important generates interest only when it's reduced to its most trivial aspect." Yet most people who would dare challenge the idea of reality TV in no way representing reality would immediately be castigated as not being modern or having tastes too different from society as a whole to be considered relevant.

To make his points, the author gives five examples of brilliant intellectuals who all achieved fame and all grew up in poverty and only achieved fame as adults and of their own making.

The five examples he uses are:
1. Will and Ariel Durant - [as a couple, since they wrote together for much of their adult life]. Their relationship was strange in that he grew up in a devout catholic home, while she born Chaya Kaufman, nee Ariel, in a Ukrainian Jewish Ghetto. He was much older than she; yet their marriage lasted 68 years with her predeceasing him by about two weeks. The author said of the couple "For Will, the Jesuits imparted knowledge and wisdom; for Ariel, Will did." Short and right to the point, as was all the writing in the book. "The Story of Philosophy" remained on the ten best seller list for 4 out of 5 years from 1926-1930, while it was the top selling hardback in 1927. They won the Pulitzer Prize for their book "The Story of Civilization. Simply reading about them as a couple makes one want to read their prized works.
2. Mortimer Adler - he devised the GREAT BOOKS movement still used by some colleges. It was about four times as long and a competitor to THE HARVARD CLASSICS.
3. Milton Friedman - my favorite economist and who like Will Durant credits his wife Ruth with helping him transform his words into language the average person could relate to. Friedman's most famous book FREE TO CHOOSE was later made into a TV series in 1980 and as with Durants' works are available on Amazon. For those not having seen the original series on PBS, it is well worth the price to see it today, as the examples are still relevant.
4. Eric Hoffer - The Longshoreman Philosopher, who got a PH.D. without ever officially graduating high school. He is one of the best examples of an autodidact that I can think of. At the time of his most important success in writing he was the favorite of both Dwight D. Eisenhower and Lyndon B. Johnson, which pretty much indicates his universal appeal. His writing, like the author's was sharp and to the point as witnessed by lines like "Rudeness is the weak man's imitation of strength," and "Mass movements act as the religion for people who resist religion...[while] Hatred unifies the mass movement in a way love cannot." That could pretty well describe the Occupy this or that movements of today.
5. Ray Bradbury - another genius and hard scrabble short story and TV script writer. Ray grew up so poor that he and his brother had to share a pull-out sofa bed in the living room until he left home. Ray worked diligently to get his stories across and resubmitted them to different magazines when turned down by the first, sometimes even after being accepted by the first. Ray was one of Alfred Hitchcock's favorite writers and feelings between the two men was mutual.

This is a short book of only 200pp of which the body is only 150pp, the rest being copious notes and an index. It's a great book with well thought out ideas for the serious minded.

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars When Every Man Thought The Everyman Was Educated February 19, 2012

By Euthyphro

Format:Hardcover

One Book, Two Books, or Five?
Blue Collar Intellectuals: When the Enlightened and the Everyman Elevated America is primarily a book covering the intellectual history of America. It is also a criticism of the current state of affairs. While been both this and that it is also a collection of five biographical vignettes of the eponymous blue collar intellectual. That the book succeeds in being all these things without overwrought affectations and without exceeding two hundred pages is a testament to the concision and narrative prowess of the author.

The introduction cuts right to the matter. Here in a mere fifteen pages the author tears down the sand-founded edifice of American pulp culture. Flynn's critique is astute and precise. His short description of the maladaptive society strikes the reader by its sheer obviousness, the sort that begs a cliche mention of noses and whats under them: "One can reference The Simpsons or Anchorman or an Eminem lyric with the understanding that an educated audience will know what one is talking about. Try doing that with The Odyssey or Moby Dick even. What is means to be an educated person has changed for the worse." That such statements are equal part condemnation and observation only adds to the power of introduction.

The book is more than its introductory remarks--they are strong enough to earn such a lengthy mention, but there is more. The book moves directly into the biographies of intellectuals who the author describes as being both blue collar and intellectuals. But what sets them apart is not either blue-collarness or intellectualism but their egalitarian take on knowledge, and more than this their evangelism of higher things for the very cut of society more often viewed as bereft of intelligence. These are not Will Hunting savants but intellectual Saint Paul's, not apostle to the gentile, nor to the genteel, but to the docksman, the farmer, the factory worker and the everyman.

The first to be studied is Will and Ariel Durant popular intellectuals. Will began, appropriate for this work, writing vignettes of the philosophers but his life was spent writing the history of the world with his wife. Next is Mortimer Adler who wrote the brilliant little book How to Read a Book, but here the focus is on the gargantuan task he took up of popularizing the great books. Next we have Milton Friedman the Chicago school economist whose life work was in popularizing the mysticism that is modern economics for the common. Then Eric Hoffer an autodidact longshoreman and hobo who wrote good sense in a era of senselessness and won the ear of multiple presidents. Finally Flynn closes with Ray Bradbury who was more the example than the evangelist, the Timothy to the Saint Paul of Adler and Durant. Bradbury of course is the brilliant short story and science fiction writer whose writing cannot be capture by a single medium or format.

The Good
The writing throughout is tight and engaging, the subject matter various and yet the same, the narrative swift; the reader is never ready for any one vignette to be completed but paradoxically excited to be starting the next. I am a slow, slow, slow reader. I do not possess the equipment needed to gulp a book; I sip, I savor, I chew. For me Blue Collar is the perfect balance of heft and brevity. There is no doubt that I would gladly read a full biography of any of the persons included, that is if it were written by Flynn; however, the very shortness of each illustration compels the reader forward into the next so that I was hardly able come up from the book to sleep or eat or work.

The Bad
What is bad? That there were not ten vignettes instead of five. Worry not Mr. Flynn has written other works and one can look forward to reading them after this one is over.

5/5

Propter Sanguinem Agni,
RS

This book was provided to me free of charge by the publisher. They asked only for my honest opinion. Nothing weird or anything like that. I am only disclosing this information because it is illegal if I don't. I'm pretty sure that I would go to prison, probably for life, seeing how reviewing a product you are given for free under the guise of having purchased it yourself is similar to murder. O laws, like whitewashed tombs!

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Everyday Enlightenment March 29, 2012

By James Henderson

Format:Hardcover

I have neither the patience nor the political wonkism to view C-SPAN on a regular basis, but I am a frequent viewer of their cultural programming called BOOKTV on CSPAN2 weekends. It was there that I saw Daniel J. Flynn lecture on the topic of his enlightening book, Blue Collar Intellectuals. Inspired, I acquired the book and was not disappointed with his stories of five intellectuals, outsiders with uncommon backgrounds, who reached out to "blue collar" people everywhere.
I first encountered one of the five intellectuals included in Flynn's book during my teen years reading science fiction. One of my favorite authors was Ray Bradbury and his tales, especially those of Humans and Martians collected in The Martian Chronicles. Flynn tells of Bradbury's impoverished family background as he grew up in the 1920s and his early reading of Edgar Allan Poe (also a favorite of mine since my pre-teen years) and others like Edgar Rice Burroughs. Even after he became famous for his own fantastic stories Bradbury was considered an outsider in traditional publishing circles, but maintained popularity with everyday folk. Time magazine labelled Bradbury "poet of the pulps" that seemed to sum up the cognoscenti's opinion of him.
My next encounter with the intellectuals that Daniel Flynn depicts did not begin until I was on my way to college at the University of Wisconsin in the summer of 1967. Required reading for all incoming freshmen was a short book by Eric Hoffer, The True Believer. This was my introduction to one of Flynn's "Blue Collar Intellectuals" and to a book that is as relevant today as it was forty-five years ago. While distant from Hoffer in his political philosophy, Milton Friedman shared similar blue collar background and an ability to explain complex ideas of economics to the readership of Newsweek magazine and also to the viewers of PBS through his multi-part series "Free to Choose". In that same year of 1967 as a freshman student in "Honors Economics" I read Friedman's most famous book, Capitalism and Freedom, and in it found some of the principles that I hold dear to this day. These two experiences with blue-collar intellectuals belie somewhat Flynn's claim that these writers were all completely excluded from the realms of the cognoscenti, but they do not deflate his claim that they all had a special ability to communicate with the common man.
Also included in the book are sections on Will Durant, who went from anarchist speaker to become a popularizer of history both of philosophy and civilization, and while I have not read the eleven volumes of Will & Ariel Durants' History of Civilization from cover to cover, I have dipped in to sections of the books from time to time. Finally, he tells the story of Mortimer Adler who founded the "Great Books" movement and wrote many books explaining the ideas in those books. I, too, was inspired by the lure of great books and have spent more than twenty years of my adult life reading them in the Basic Program of Liberal Education at the University of Chicago. These form the foundation for my reading and my participation in the search (see The Moviegoer by Walker Percy).
In his book Daniel Flynn is able to clearly and succinctly elucidate the inspirational achievements of these blue collar intellectuals and how they shaped an era in which popular culture included a significant place for serious ideas. One of the most important lessons imparted by the lives of these intellectuals is how they inspired readers like myself to continue to read and learn and love the search for ideas in books.