Having a Beef (whatever that is) with Louis Menand

Last week I was at one of those small town diners you hear about on NPR, enjoying a hamburger steak piled with mushrooms, black coffee, and an increasingly grease-stained paperback edition of Louis Menand’s The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021). Late in the meal I came across this bit in Chapter Three:

After marking it, I stared at it for a minute. The server came over and chided me for not getting very far in my book. I showed her the bit about the cattle truck bit and she agreed with me that “cattle truck” seems about as self-explanatory on the page as it apparently did to Jean-Paul Sartre (who, by the way, spoke no English. Perhaps Menand took issue with “le wagon à bestiaux,” which comes out more like “livestock cart” than anything else. How else could Sartre express it? L’auto les bovins?) in his offhand description of American cinema.

I shouldn’t let the aside bother me, but it stood out from an otherwise delicious section about Sartre like a big sore thumb. Menand’s clearly trying to make fun of Sartre’s fantasies of celluloid masculinity, but his wagging display of (dig this phrase y’all) conspicuous insouciance (i.e., “whatever THAT is”) rubbed me the wrong way. I mean, dude, the phrase cattle truck pretty much speaks for itself, why be conspicuously insouciant just to sound like a jerk? It’s hard to walk away from the page without feeling like Menand has taken a gratuitous swipe against the entire dirty finger-nailed agricultural means of production for no good reason.

For the sake of full disclosure, let me mention that I’m a fan who clips&saves every Menand essay from the New Yorker in a time when a lot of my friends are giving up on it and publications like it. I devoured his American Studies and The Metaphysical Club. I missed an opportunity to hear Menand speak about a decade ago, but for reasons I think he’d approve.[1] I’m the kind of fan who remains a fan despite understanding why others might not be.

So I’m more than willing to give benefit of doubt. Suppose he honestly doesn’t know what “cattle truck” means (and, for the record, I understand it to be a large automobile designed for the commercial transport of live moo cows- although nothing prevents you from using it for taking other barnyard friends to market). This would potentially indicate a very unsettling hole in a very educated person’s knowledge of basic supply chains. Or, for that matter, cinema: has Menand never seen Hud? Or The Misfits? Both flicks have some serious cattle truck action.

At this point I should include some quote from Wendell Berry or Michael Pollan about the distance between our edible means of production in the countryside and our places of consumption in the towns and cities, especially now that the stockyards and slaughterhouses have been moved from the cities out to the countryside (the Chicago Bulls and Green Bay Packers have outlived their economic namesakes by nearly a century now). In Sartre’s Paris, let alone the smaller towns where he spent his childhood, the stomping, mooing, defecating source of le bœuf would’ve been in plain sight on certain streets (probably on the back of a large truck, so we’re back). Cities were more country back when Chicago was hog butcher for the world. And, for that matter, actual tandem livestock trucks designed specifically for transporting large livestock are rare in the US nowadays, and most cattle are transported in trailers pulled by multi-purpose road tractors. Strictly speaking, cattle truck is as archaic as Sartre’s Hermès steamer trunk.

But I’m sure Menand is well aware of where food comes from, and I’m sure he’s basically aware cattle are no longer subject to open range cattle drives like John Wayne and Montgomery Clift do in Red River. He might be a vegetarian, so for him means by which beef makes it to his local grocery is moot- although as a very informed citizen he should be just as concerned about the food industry. And I bet he is. It’s not like a firm knowledge of farm machinery’s gonna make him better at explaining Dorothy Parker or James Baldwin.

So why does it matter if Menand doesn’t know what a cattle truck is, or considers the very concept contemptible? Is this a ruralist communitarian paean inspired by my recent relocation to a small town? Should I have submitted this to Front Porch Republic?

If I did that, I’d likely be framing Menand’s snide dig as an unprovoked attack on the working class by a loosely-defined body called the “cultural elite.” It’s an old concept, dating back to the 19^th century or earlier, but it’s taken some definitional twists&turns since those days, and often overlapped with the overtly waspish “Eastern Establishment,” (Menand is the descendant of a deep-rooted New York family) weaponized as the furtively anti-Semitic “coastal elite,” or, perhaps neutrally, the intelligentsia. It’s a malleable concept with a grab-bag of historical contributors (for the purposes of this essay I’m mainly focusing on academia). Perhaps there are elements of the Jacksonian attack on privilege in the 1830s. Mix in the intellectuel engage of Emile Zola in the wake of the Dreyfus Affair which established Zola and those like him as a class apart, almost obligated (and certainly inclined) to stand in permanent opposition to societal statuses quo as a matter of course. Top it off with the happily snobbish journalist and critic H.L. Mencken, who allegedly wrote off the work of Willa Cather by saying “I don’t care what happens in Nebraska,” (before declaring her a great author) and, by the time he got around to covering the Scopes Monkey Trial a few years later, put more spittle-tinged conspicuous insouciance on the page than Menand could muster in a career.[2]

But the “cultural elite” as it stands in our own time is more a manufactured image than it is a definable group of people, an image manufactured by late Cold War politics just as the know-it-all cosmopolitan intellectual was formed around Emile Zola after the Dreyfus Affair. In fact it was even more manufactured considering that the Reagan era didn’t really have a Zola analog, except perhaps a popular sitcom character named Murphy Brown who was in the midst of a post-modern feud with US Vice President Dan Quayle. Quayle (with dubious help from Pat Buchanan, who officially declared a “culture war” after challenging Quayle’s running mate for the Republican nomination) fought his culture war poorly, conflating Brown with real-life intellectuals but also the entertainment industry, and overplayed his hand enough to draw sharp criticism from the centrist Newsweek a month before Bush/Quayle lost the election to the allegedly “left” combination of Bill Clinton and Al Gore.[3] “In most nations (except, say, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge), it’s rare to attack someone for going to a prestigious university. Not in the United States. When Yale man George Bush condemns [1988 presidential candidate] Michael Dukakis for being part of “the Harvard Yard boutique,” and Bill Clinton for going to Oxford, only a few ‘egg-heads’ (the 1950s term of derision) find it peculiar.”[4]

But even if Bush/Quayle lost the battle in 1992 they didn’t necessarily lose the war. Attacks on real or imagined “cultural elites” have reared up occasionally ever since, and have come to define American politics to the detriment of pocketbook issues like wages and health care. The stock of the “egghead” class has unsurprisingly gone down alongside the sinking monetary value of a college degree over the least three decades- a bachelor’s degree is no longer a golden ticket into the candy factory. For this to happen during de-industrialization is an unfortunate co-incidence that’s bound to create undue resentment from the middle class. “Don’t think we ought to give college degrees to anyone who can’t run a table saw…or overhaul a truck engine out in the backyard,” a character by bestselling novelist Robert James Waller opined not long after the 1992 election. More recently, attacks on the “cultural elite” has developed into a multi-state attack on education itself. It’s hard to see this development as accidental.

So even if Menand has absolute contempt for all things rural, working class, and non-aesthetic, this essay is my conspicuously insouciant announcement that I’m not gonna take the bait. I’m a long way from Harvard, but I’m in the same line of work as Menand, and I know that giving credence to these sort of divisions. His work, and my work, are too important to jeopardize with nonsense.

Perhaps the respective interests of rural toilers and urban intellectuals aren’t mutually symbiotic, but they aren’t antithetical either. It may be out in the cattle truck parts of the country where they are banning books and firing librarians, but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily because of the cows. That’s why, sure, digs at the truck, or remarks that can be misconstrued as such (like I probably did) may not help matters. But they are hardly among our biggest problems.

Also, snobbery toward the rural is hardly a crime specific to those in the very top of the Ivory Tower. Indeed, it’s usually people a few floors down who’re more likely to punch down, the frustrated intelligentsia who had their taste of the metropole in grad school but now find themselves fifty or more miles from a store that sells organic kumquats. I was working at a rough&ready state land grant when someone with vague knowledge of my rural background asked if my parents wear shoes. It was a colleague at my current school (a much smaller state regional in central Appalachia) who referred to town locals as “natives” in a way that didn’t scream egalitarianism. Profs who actually express elitism often have the least to back it up.

But that’s inside baseball of the most inside kind; snobbery between academics is a falling tree that definitely makes no sound outside of the woods. As unfortunate as it is, it’s about personalities, not ideas. So I’m not going to worry about it.

The real battle, even for (seemingly?) apolitical intellectuals like Menand, or avidly partisan eggheads such as myself, is one described sixty-five years ago by a figure mentioned briefly in The Free World. “A tension,” wrote John Kenneth Galbraith, “has also long existed between businessmen and intellectuals,” a tension often expressed by exaggeration of the alleged “social radicalism of intellectuals….” But in actuality, “[s]cientists, writers, professors, artists are also important competitors of the businessmen for public esteem.”[5] Intellectuals like Menand are armed only with ideas, while figures like George Soros and Elon Musk (just to name two familiar examples who emerged from what Galbraith called a “New Class”) are armed with capital, and more than happy for pocketbook issues to lose attention to culture war shadow puppets.[6]

If the “public esteem” of businessmen was palpable in 1958 it’s overwhelming in 2023 (people who avow hating Soros and Musk sure do talk about them a lot), while the slander and censorship of scientists, writers, professors, and artists is ongoing. Even as I write this, my state’s flagship university is dismantling its own humanities curriculum with directions from a private sector consulting firm that arranges “strategic partnership opportunities.”

Cultural elites like Menand and Galbraith (who died in 2006) have no more power than is granted them by people who choose to listen and possibly agree. With economic elites it’s another matter. Their influence is pervasive. They own the cattle trucks. They have influence over government and society whether people listen to them or not. You’d think they’d have nothing to worry about. And yet their politicians seem to see some danger in the modest “public esteem” of intellectuals. As it happens, that’s a big part of what Menand brings to the table in The Free World (Although, for a book about the Cold War, his attention to the power of capital is a bit lacking. Menand is no materialist).

We, if we are members of some ephemeral intellectual class, can’t let those people win. If some of our intellectuals develop a donnish attitude, it’s a small concern, certainly less dangerous than a happily anti-intellectual billionaire who wears a mask of populism for the sake of economic and political gain. Perhaps they’ll win through sheer force. But if we can prevent that, if we win it will be by allowing ideas to live or die according to their own merit without resorting to ad hominem- whatever that is.