Inventing the Egghead: The Battle Over Brainpower in American Culture

by Aaron Lecklider

Throughout the twentieth century, pop songs, magazine articles, plays, posters, and novels in the United States represented intelligence alternately as empowering or threatening. In Inventing the Egghead , cultural historian Aaron Lecklider offers a sharp, entertaining narrative of these sources to reveal how Americans who were not part of the traditional intellectual class negotiated the complicated politics of intelligence within an accelerating mass culture.

Central to the book is the concept of brainpower --a term used by Lecklider to capture the ways in which journalists, writers, artists, and others invoked intelligence to embolden the majority of Americans who did not have access to institutions of higher learning. Expressions of brainpower, Lecklider argues, challenged the deeply embedded assumptions in society that intellectual capacity was the province of an educated elite, and that the working class was unreservedly anti-intellectual. Amid changes in work, leisure, and domestic life, brainpower became a means for social transformation in the modern United States. The concept thus provides an exciting vantage point from which to make fresh assessments of ongoing debates over intelligence and access to quality education.

Expressions of brainpower in the twentieth century engendered an uncomfortable they diminished the value of intellectuals (the hapless egghead, for example) while establishing claims to intellectual authority among ordinary women and men, including labor activists, women workers, and African Americans. Reading across historical, literary, and visual media, Lecklider mines popular culture as an arena where the brainpower of ordinary people was commonly invoked and frequently contested.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, American History

296 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 18, 2013

Reviews

[P · Rating 4 out of 5]

[Typed on e- reader,
to be edited]

the writing leaves a
lot to be desired. The chapter conclusions
especially are unnecissarily confusing. By that I mean run-on
sentences, ambiguous pronouns, and Nonsense sentence
structure.

As an typical example (by No means the
worst):
The occlusion of the
origins of the student movement in the 1930s
Labor Movement through the erasure of the
Student League for Industrial Democracy when
the organization became Students for a Democratic
Society in 1960 points to a broader social
trend: the disrespect given 1960s intellectuals, closely aligned with the success of the
radical intellectuals Who
inspired young activists and the
calcification of intellectuality from a set
of practices into a
marginalized identity, was reimagined during the decade as
characterizing a lengthy disregard for intellectuals
in us history, a revision that drew
ON the construction of the 1950 s egghead as a precedent


Like, is this meant to be
a list? Which parts? Why's the
list starting to sound like its
OWN sentence? Why am l
spending 90% of my time re-re-reading these
sentences just to understand What they mean? Did the editor just
bow out for the conclusions?
Does this author mistake the confusion borne
from Nonsense sentence Structure
for difficulty grasping profound concepts?

Another gripe is that often (especially in the
later chapters),
the author does Not really clarify why a certain
example (this ad, that book) is being used. Is it representative?
Very popular? Are we meant to
believe that the conclusions drawn from it are generally true of mass culture
as a whole? I guess I ended the book feeling that some of the
conclusions were suspect
because of this

Overall l did enjoy the contents of this
book and ended up convinced about most of it, and
l definitely have a much
better understanding of the history of brainpower in the USA. This book has given
Me insights into how My OWN and others' "brainpower"
has been (mis)represented, how class gender sexuality and race has impacted those representations
as well as insights into
current events (as this also touches ON populism, elitism,
experts, popular representations
of scientists, it's easy to think of COVID)

[Nut Meg · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although the introduction touches on 21st attitudes regarding intelligence in the US, Lecklider's focus is in fact on contradicting certain claims about the history of intelligence in American culture posited in the 1960s, by historians such as Richard Hofstadter, author of Anti-intellectualism in American Life. While Lecklider documents the frequent exoticization and othering of intellectuals over the decades between 1900-1960, he explores the "expansion of brainpower across class, race, and gender lines that had both informed and been shaped by popular culture" that 1960s scholars ignores. To this end, Lecklider goes decade by decade, detailing the historical context of "ordinary" people's relationship with intellectualism in the early and mid-twentith century, from the explosion of popular interest in the theory of relativity, and by extension Albert Einstein, to the budding progressive political associations throughout the 20s and 30s which ultimately led to the marginalization of intellectuals during the Red Scare, following the unsettling associations with the Manhattan Project. Though Lecklider makes interesting points, he unfortunately spends far too much time over-analyzing fictional portrayals of intellectuals during these periods, not to mention his extended discussion of New Deal promotional posters for libraries which could have been left out entirely. This is a very niche topic, and given the frequent inaccessibility of the writing, it's no surprise that this work is out of print.

[Loveliest Evaris · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is an overview of the contradictory history of the perception of intellectuals, professionals, and academics in American culture. While America had championed itself as the place of intellectual and economic booms, great swaths of the population remained rural, uneducated, and skeptical of 'book learning', favoring instead folk wisdom or the popularly labelled 'common sense'. The reason as to why this enduring narrative of uplifting and demeaning intelligence has remained even to this day is what this book explores. I found it a very fascinating read.