Nut Meg’s Reviews > Inventing the Egghead: The Battle Over Brainpower in American Culture > Status Update

"Whereas brainpower had been optimistically represented during the Depression as producing an expansion of democracy that might fulfill American dreams, the atomic city demonstrated how it could just as easily be used to mask the truly threatening, insidious work of dangerous minds."

During the 1930s "intellectualism shed many associations with embourgeoisment and elitism and instead began to be associated with liberal and radical politics."

"New Deal policies and initiatives advanced brainpower as a key component to solving the national crisis in three primary ways. First, the federal government promoted the accessibility of public institutions such as libraries to illustrate the similarly public nature of intelligence. Second the government became more involved in advocating workers education programs"

The Black education activist, Hubert Harrison, suggested that intelligence "moved beyond simply participating in the practices of the nation's educational institutions. In order to truly confront racism, intelligence was required, and this was only possible through the accretion of knowledge outside the self-perpetuating institutions of schools and colleges."

"Taking jabs at higher education offered another opportunity for ordinary women and men to imagine themselves as capable peers of the intellectual elite and to challenge the dominant assumption that college degrees, unavailable to most Americans, denoted intelligence. Less than 5 percent of eighteen to twenty-four year olds were enrolled in college before 1920."