Editor's Note
For nearly two decades, I’ve taught an undergraduate Honors Course at the University of Oklahoma built around the readings in Hollinger & Capper’s The American Intellectual Tradition. As part of LD Burnett’s series of posts rereading Hollinger & Capper, I’m doing a series of posts exploring what it’s like to teach the volumes in an undergraduate, honors setting. In my first post, I said a few general things about Perspectives on the American Experience: American Social Thought, the course (or actually courses) in which I use The American Intellectual Tradition. When I began this course, The American Intellectual Tradition was in its 3rd edition. Unless otherwise noted, I’ll be blogging about the most recent edition of the books, the 7th. In this seventh post in my series, I discuss teaching Volume II, Part Two, entitled “Social Progress and the Power of Intellect.” For more on Volume II, Part Two, see LD’s post on it. I’ll be blogging about a new section every two weeks as LD works her way through the book, though this particular post arrives a week late. In these posts, I am generally am not attempting to provide a comprehensive description of what I do with Hollinger & Capper in the classroom. Instead, I will usually be highlighting an aspect or two of my approach to each section. Please feel free to use the discussion thread for more general comments or questions about teaching this particular part of The American Intellectual Tradition.
Detail from Diego Rivera’s “Man at the Crossroads” (1934), originally painted at Rockefeller Center in 1933.
As LD nicely put it in her post on Volume II, Part Two, we are now in the “heart of the batting order.”[1] It is also where the The American Intellectual Tradition begins to cover material that I’ve worked on as well as taught. This is actually one of the challenges for me of teaching Volume II, especially Parts Two to Four. All that my students know of this period of American thought will be what we read in class. My greater knowledge of the broader intellectual context is, of course, a good thing. But in certain ways it makes me have to work harder to meet my students in the space where they experience this material. I need to be more actively aware of what my students don’t know.
More than earlier sections of these volumes, I’m also very aware of what isn’t included, of things that Hollinger and Capper might have included, but didn’t. And I also find myself second guessing how they have organized the material.
One of the things that used to frustrate me about Volume II is the way in which the Great Depression and the New Deal are divided between Parts Two and Three. Part Two ends with John Crowe Ransom’s “Reconstructed but Unregenerate” (1930), a selection from Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture (1934), and Sidney Hook’s “Communism without Dogmas” (1934). Part Three opens with Clement Greenberg’s “Avant Garde and Kitsch” (1939) and a selection from David Lilienthal’s TVA: Democracy on the March (1944). To me, these readings fit together and the division between them does not make immediate sense.
In older iterations of the course, when I taught selections from both volumes in a single semester, I would, in effect, reedit this material, putting together a week of readings from the 1930s and early 1940s, some from Part II and others from Part III. But when I reworked my course, teaching only Volume II (and all of Volume II), I decided to follow the divisions in the volume…and naturally this changes the way my students and I deal with this material.
I no longer spend a week focused on the way the Great Depression and the New Deal inflected American social thought (though of course those issues still come up in passing). And when I organized the material of Part Two into three similarly-sized thematic weeks, I found myself even separating the 1930s material within Part Two:
Week 6 (of the semester):
Jane Addams, “The Subjective Necessity of Social Settlements” (1892)
Woodrow Wilson, “The Ideals of America” (1902)
W.E.B. DuBois, Selection from The Souls of Black Folk (1903)
Madison Grant, Selection from The Passing of the Great Race (1916)
Randolph Bourne, “Trans-National America” (1916)
Ruth Benedict, Selection from Patterns of Culture (1934)
Week 7:
William James, “What Pragmatism Means” (1907)
Randolph Bourne, “Twilight of Idols” (1917)
Walter Lippmann, Selection from Drift and Mastery (1914)
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., “Natural Law” (1918)
John Dewey, “Philosophy and Democracy” (1918)
Week 8:
Thorstein Veblen, Selection from The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899)
H.L. Mencken, “Puritanism as a Literary Force” (1917)
Joseph Wood Krutch, Selection from The Modern Temper (1929)
John Crowe Ransom, “Reconstructed but Unregenerate” (1930)
Sidney Hook, “Communism without Dogmas” (1934)
As you can see, Ruth Benedict ends up in Week 6, which concerns race and ethnicity in American culture. I sometimes think of this material as multiculturalism and its discontents.
I put Ransom and Hook in Week 8, which ends up focusing on modernity and its impact on culture, society, and politics (Mencken is just a bit of an outlier here, but I find it helpful to put his critique of “service” in conversation with Ransom’s). As you’ll see, modernity is a theme that I continue in the first week covering Part III.
In between, Week 7 is largely concerned with the legacy of pragmatism, to which my students were introduced a few weeks earlier in Volume II, Part One. Here the outlier is Lippmann. I ended up putting him here because he can very profitably be read alongside Holmes and, especially, Dewey. I ask my students to compare Holmes, Lippmann, and Dewey on the questions of truth and action: how do we know the world and on what basis do we choose to act?
I’m still not entirely convinced by where Hollinger and Capper put the division between Parts Two and Three of Volume II. But I’ve come to appreciate the pedagogical advantages of teaching Benedict, Ransom, and Hook with the rest of the material in Part Two.
Notes
[1] As I write this, LD’s Giants and my A’s are playing their first of six games against each other this season. And for once, both teams are having pretty good seasons. Let’s Go Oakland!
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