Jackson Lears’s collection of essays and book reviews gets a few things right in its description of various kooks, oddballs, and mavericks who sometimes succeeded in moving history in their direction. But it gets far more wrong.
By Daniel Lazare
Conjurers, Cranks, Provincials, and Antediluvians is an example of a whole that is less than the sum of the parts. A collection of 22 essays and book reviews by the social critic Jackson Lears that were published between 1977 and 2021, it’s well written and entertaining in its description of various kooks, oddballs, and mavericks who sometimes succeeded in moving history in their direction. Lears, a Jeffersonian egalitarian who is skeptical of modernity and “scientism,” is a bit of a maverick himself. So it’s not surprising that he winds up defending people like Henry Adams, John Muir, and William Jennings Bryan, who had their reactionary sides, but who contributed to society in various quirky or back-handed ways.
Ironic, isn’t it? Yes. On the whole, however, it’s also tiresome and shallow. The problem is Lears’s handling of contradiction: instead of seeing it as an opportunity to probe and analyze, he chuckles and moves on. The results are bad enough when it comes to a monumental figure like Adams, since Lears never gets to the bottom of what makes this troublesome fin-de-siècle intellectual so important. While going on about his discomfort with modern technology, for instance, he says nothing about Adams’s writings about Jefferson and Madison or his essays on the Civil War that are far more powerful and compelling. But the results are even worse in the case of Bryan, a narrow-minded bigot whom Lears somehow thinks is worth emulating.
Bryan, of course, is the turn-of-the-century populist who ran for president three times on the Democratic ticket, served as secretary of state under Woodrow Wilson, and then made a world-class fool of himself defending biblical literalism in the 1925 Scopes “Monkey” Trial. We’ve all seen the 1960 movie Inherit the Wind, starring Spencer Tracy, Fredric March, and Gene Kelly, which depicts “Matthew Harrison Brady” as an ignorant buffoon in love with the sound of his own voice. Some think the film was unfair, but March in fact captured Bryan to perfection.
Despite it all, Lears tries to defend Bryan on the grounds that he was a religious progressive who “was prescient on nearly every policy matter of his time, from the progressive income tax and banking regulation to union rights and federally funded social insurance.” “Even his critique of evolutionary thought,” the critic argues, “however embarrassing to right-thinking secularists today, focused on the dubious and repellent social applications of Darwinian theory — eugenics and similar schemes for eliminating the ethnically ‘unfit.’”
This is actually untrue because Bryan’s closing remarks at the Snopes trial — which Clarence Darrow was able to prevent him from delivering — are easily available on the internet. Unsurprisingly, they amount to a straight-up defense of creationism that accuses “bloody, brutal” evolutionists of trying to crucify Jesus a second time around. Lears meanwhile snipes at Richard Hofstadter, the postwar historian who memorably eviscerated Bryan in his classic 1948 study, The American Political Tradition. The reason? Because he subjected Bryan to “secularist scorn” and because “Hofstadter and his contemporaries, proud of their participation in a culture of critical discourse, self-consciously cosmopolitan and tough-minded, wanted no part of sentimentality” — a quality that Bryan enjoyed in abundance. So Hofstadter is guilty of being all brain and no heart and therefore at odds with Bryan, who was the other way around. Bottom line:prairie populist good, Ivy League intellectual bad, rootless cosmopolitan worse.
Nonetheless, it’s Hofstadter who gets the better part of the argument. Lears allows that Bryan had his dark side. He was a racist, he backed Prohibition, and he stood for a kind of small-town Protestantism that played well in the Great Plains and the South, but left the rest of the country cold.
But Bryan more than made up for it, Lears insists, by “attack[ing] tariffs, trusts, and the gold standard” and speaking up in defense of the poor. “What gave a special energy to his Social gospel,” Lears writes, “was its emotional core: a yearning for regeneration at once person and social, moral and spiritual.” He quotes the Progressive journalist William Allen White to the effect that Bryan “boldly and unashamedly made his cause that of the poor and the oppressed.” And he can barely contain his excitement over the tumultuous scene at the 1896 Democratic national convention when Bryan delivered his “cross of gold” speech in Chicago: “You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold!”
“He stepped back from the podium and stretched his arms out to his sides, holding the Christ-like pose for five seconds,” Lears recounts. “There were a few moments of silence, and then ‘everybody seemed to go mad at once,’ the New York World reported.” Farmers were electrified, and the press ate it up. But industrial workers were left cold because they had nothing to gain from monetary manipulations that would spur inflation and devalue their wages.
A scene from the Marx Brothers comedy set during Florida’s land boom, 1929’s Coconuts.
“It was the only time in the history of the Republic when a candidate ran for the presidency on the strength of a monomania,” Hofstadter observes of the “cross” speech a bit less enthusiastically. Instead of William Allen White, he quotes Oswald Garrison Villard, the longtime editor of the New York Evening Post and a founder of the NAACP, who said that Bryan was simply “the most ignorant” person he had ever met in more than 30 years of journalism. Where Lears observes that “Bryan’s moral vision informed the comprehensive critique of laissez-faire capitalism,” Hofstadter writes that his “heart was filled with simple emotions, but his mind was stocked with equally simple ideas.” These were that the people were always right, especially if they were white, native, and rural, and that utopia would arrive once silver and gold were valued at 16 to one. Hofstadter notes that western mining interests financed Bryan’s 1896 presidential campaign because they trusted him to force the US Treasury to load up on silver and thus make them rich — a detail that fails to make its way into Lears’s account.
Hofstadter goes on. He writes that Bryan once told a group of farmers that he was “tired of hearing about laws made for the benefit of men who work in shops” and declared in a letter, “It is time to call a halt on Socialism in the United States. The movement is going too far.” Lears portrays him as a sincere anti-imperialist, but The American Political Tradition points out that Bryan “was fully as aggressive as his Republican predecessors” as secretary of state in urging vigorous intervention in Latin America to “prevent revolutions, promote education, and advance stable and just government.”
By the 1920s, Bryan was “identified with some of the worst tendencies in American life — prohibition, the crusade against evolution, real-estate speculation, and the Klan.” Moving to Florida for his wife’s health, Hofstadter says that “his incurable vulgarity stood him in good stead” as a real-estate promoter during the Miami land boom. (See the Marxist masterpiece Coconuts.) Concentrating on religion as his political influence began to wane, he assured audiences, “No teacher should be allowed on the faculty of any American university unless he is a Christian.” Rather than an aberration, his role in the Scopes trial was the culmination of decades of know-nothing fundamentalism.
Is there any doubt as to whose depiction is more accurate? Conjurers, Cranks, Provincials, and Antediluvians is not without certain strengths. Lears’s Jeffersonian distaste for concentrated military and economic power serves him well when it leads him to attack Theodore Roosevelt as a “bully” who “relished physical struggle — and above all violence — for its own sake.” Ditto when it causes him to characterize the neocon columnist Anne Applebaum as “an ideologue in the service of a militaristic foreign policy.” Both judgments are entirely on the mark. And it serves him even better when it leads him to question the Democratic Party uproar over alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election — an uproar that proved to be just as unjustified as any of the other evidence-free conspiracy theories we’re regularly bombarded with.
Social critic Jackson Lears, a Jeffersonian egalitarian who is skeptical of modernity and “scientism.” Photo: YouTube
“If you question the received narrative in casual conversations, you run the risk of provoking blank stares or overt hostility — even from old friends,” Lears observed in the London Review of Books in 2018. Quite right: other dissidents reported precisely the same experience when they dared question Russiagate. Liberals, he notes, were shocked that anyone would take issue with the new gospel: Trump was a Russian puppet and that all would be well with the American system once he was locked up behind bars. But it just goes to show how intellectually feeble Democrats have become as well.
Otherwise, Lears’s judgments tend to be specious. A 2011 article on the “new atheists” goes radically awry when it attacks people like Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Richard Dawkins for their “positivist faith in science” and their attachment to “the Enlightenment master narrative of progress.” (Lears is going to miss the Enlightenment when, thanks to Trump, it’s gone.) A 20-page article on postwar American culture name-drops endlessly — Gramsci, de Beauvoir, Mary McCarthy, Philip Rieff, etc., etc. — and meanders seemingly endlessly as well. A 40-page article on foreign policy grows increasingly confused as it tries to chart a middle course between “military intervention” and “pacifist isolation” during the crucial period of 1938-41. He lauds the historian Charles Beard for calling for a policy of “Continental Americanism” in which the US would fortify itself in the Western Hemisphere and insists that the proposal “was far more empirically grounded and pragmatically flexible than the dualisms and determinations of the interventionists.”
“It had the added advantage of being rooted in the [American] republican tradition,” he goes on, “with its suspicions of imperial power at home and abroad.” But this is specious as well, because Beard had no concept of how aircraft carriers and long-range bombers would have made short work of America’s oceanic defenses had the Axis been left on its own to develop and grow. The fact that Lears continues to cite a discredited isolationist like Beard shows how unsound his thinking has become. Conjurers, Cranks, Provincials, and Antediluvians gets a few things right, but it gets far more wrong.
Daniel Lazare is the author of The Frozen Republic and other books about the US Constitution and US policy. He has written for a wide variety of publications including Harper’s and the London Review of Books.
