Putting innovation and open minds at risk

Battles over spending and policy grow from rising anti-intellectualism, a common American ailment

A 19th-century innovation in horseshoe production presents a warning for 21st-century America. (Photo by Benigno Hoyuela on Unsplash)

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A couple of miles from our place, a waterfall that once powered a massive factory tumbles down a hillside, the site overgrown by a couple centuries of progress elsewhere and neglect here. Some locals claim, with admitted parochialism, that it was in this place that the Civil War was won. Beyond its history, though, the abandoned industrial site presents a warning against a current in today’s America that puts us at risk globally.

First, the history: It was here in the 1820s, on a creek draining into the Hudson River, that a Scottish immigrant named Henry Burden began to build a massive factory turning out nails, railroad spikes and rivets. The Burden Iron Works employed 1,400 people at its peak, some of them eventually working on one of Burden’s most important inventions: a machine that could mass-produce horseshoes.

Until Burden came along, blacksmiths had to make each horseshoe individually. Burden’s machine, though, could turn out up to 3,600 shoes per hour. When the Civil War came, Burden, a fierce proponent of the Union, shipped those shoes from his factory to Northern troop staging areas. The Confederacy, frustrated at lacking access to the patented technology, hired spies who tried to figure out how to replicate Burden’s machine, and then sent raiding parties to commandeer wagon trains bearing horseshoes. But the rebel troops never could match the abundance of horseshoes that kept the Union’s riding horses, mules and draft horses healthy and on the move. Burden’s invention enabled the Union troops to strike more quickly and then retreat to safety – a key battlefield advantage.¹

That story came back to me last week when the National Science Foundation reported that inventors in China had for the first time surpassed those in the United States in the number of international patents filed. Axios observed that the statistic marks “a key indicator of science and technology prowess – and the economic and national security strength that comes with it.”

As recently as 2015, the U.S. had twice as many patent applications as China. But in 2022, the last year for which data was available, China sought roughly one-fifth more patents than the United States. That shift “should be a wake-up call,” said Robert Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. “The competitive environment for tech innovation is way tougher than it was” a decade ago, he told Axios.²

Is that change a glitch, one that might be reversed by the billions of dollars that the Biden Administration brags it has invested in new technology? Or are we about to be consigned to the sort of technological disadvantage that helped defeat the Confederacy? In either case, you have to wonder how we got here.

The patent report poses the sort of dilemma that makes thoughtful people uneasy. On the one hand, the world would be better if we didn’t view every other nation’s advance as a threat to our own society – which is true not only in science and technology, but also in economic progress, education and the arts. There’s a tradition in that, of course: In the 1980s, we were terrified that Japan’s economy would overrun ours (they bought Rockefeller Center!), and before that we focused on post-war German growth. In that view, the patent numbers, like a lot of analysis of that sort, support a troublesome political agenda: We don’t need to further stoke the anti-China sentiment that fueled Donald Trump’s rise, and that slides so easily from fears about a competing nation’s political and military ambitions to jingoism and outright racism.

On the other hand, our nation’s slippage from unquestioned technological supremacy could be viewed as a warning that we’re failing to invest enough in new industry and in education. And if that’s so, there’s a more troublesome matter to weigh, because it would seem to be one more bit of anecdotal evidence of the resurgence of anti-intellectualism in America. That virus, which rises and falls but never lets go, could rob us of the economic power that has long underlaid our political stability.

Anti-intellectualism has always been an aspect of our national life, but it has clearly been gaining ground over the past decade. You sense it in the chatter about higher education not really being worth the investment, which is laced with hostility toward the whole idea of intellectual achievement. That attitude is part of an enrollment crisis for higher education: Over the past dozen years, the percentage of 18- to 24-year-olds choosing to attend college has dropped, and the number of traditional college-aged students will peak next year and then decline dramatically for several years.³

This isn’t just bad news for financially troubled colleges, nor for the communities that will be hit with economic decline as more of those institutions fail. The hazard is broader: Growing anti-intellectualism puts us at risk of losing a manner of thought that is fundamental to our democracy.

The very word “intellectual” is suspect in much of the world, often associated with a sort of smug and rigid attainment of a body of knowledge that people who haven’t achieved such learning infer leaves them trailing in disrespect. That sort of thinking tends to produce caricatures of a world more or less divided into eggheads and dolts – some people who can’t really do anything but think, and others who can’t think but can do stuff.

That ugly and simplistic notion isn’t what we’re talking about, though. We need to think instead of anti-intellectualism as a current that constantly challenges us to do better. That’s what emerges from the work of the historian Richard Hofstadter, whose Pulitzer-winning book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life was published in 1963. Hofstadter described intellectualism not in the context of somebody being intelligent; rather, he discussed a habit of mind – one that “accepts conflict as a central and enduring reality… shuns ultimate showdowns and looks upon the ideal of total partisan victory as unattainable, as merely another variety of threat to the kind of balance with which it is familiar.”⁴

That open-minded attribute of intellectualism is essential to a functioning American society. That’s what is at risk right now.

This ought not to be simply another battlefield in the American war of Trumpism versus everybody else, because the intellectual mindset Hofstadter describes isn’t solely the province of liberals. It’s true that psychologists say comfort with uncertainty tends to be an attribute of the liberal mind, a notion that’s backed up by physiology. That is, brain science experiments have shown that liberals typically have greater anterior cingulate volume, while conservatives have larger amygdalas – which might mean, they conclude, that liberals can greet uncertainty with more grace but conservatives are more adapted to confronting fearful or threatening situations. It’s an evolving area of science.⁵

But as Hofstadter looked through American history, he saw two key forces that supported anti-intellectualism: evangelical religion and business boosterism. On the other side of the ledger, he wrote that what most helped to develop the kind of open-mindedness that is the essential quality of intellectualism is, of course, education.

Nicholas Lemann, the journalist and former Columbia Journalism School dean, explored Hofstadter’s work in a thoughtful 2014 Columbia Journalism Review article. “Education, the main institutional countervailing force to anti-intellectualism, has been continually invaded by anti-intellectual ideas, especially the idea that practical training should take precedence over book-learning, and the idea that schools should attend more closely to the emotional well-being of their students than to their instruction,” Lemann wrote. “Of course, both these ideas are still very much with us today.”⁶

Indeed, in the decade since Lemann’s article was published, the forces of Christian fundamentalism have grown ever more powerfully into a political movement, and have turned their attention to schools as a way of combatting what they view as a drift of America toward a liberal society. We’re most aware of this trend in Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis tried to fuel his presidential campaign with such talk. DeSantis and other red state leaders around the country have succeeded in imposing limits on what schools could teach – books that should be stricken from school library shelves, and topics that shouldn’t be discussed (sexual and gender identity) or should be taught with an ideological twist (the history of slavery in America).

We’re beginning to see the result of this anti-intellectualism. Recently I spent some time in Florida with a leader who helms a workforce that employs highly-trained and intelligent people. He was having trouble hiring, he said, because among his best prospects were parents of school-aged children, who said they were reluctant to raise their children in what they consider the repressive atmosphere of Florida, with schools that don’t encourage robust discussion and honest questioning. As Florida-style restrictions take effect in other states, you have to wonder if the intellectual and economic development of those places will suffer, and drag down all of America with it.

Education has always been the key to opening minds. But the political assault on education at all levels that is underway puts not only the survival of a lot of colleges and universities at risk, but also the sort of curious and flexible mindset that good education encourages – and that gives a nation resiliency in the face of conflict.

There’s the practical value of education, of course, which a lot of politicians who are threatened by open minds are trying to dismiss. Polling by Gallup and The Wall Street Journal reveals that confidence in the value of a college education is falling, even though the wage gap between recent college and high school graduates has been widening for decades, and grew even more last year. So even if the only reason you can imagine to pursue higher education is to make more money, you ought to invest in education.⁷

But that’s not what conservative politicians are saying. The House Republican leadership wants to upend education funding that has been in place for two generations – eliminating support for economically disadvantaged schools and students, cutting need-based financial aid for college students and wiping out funding for youth workforce development. That’s part of the seemingly unending fight over federal spending that sputters along in Washington. It’s why those spending decisions are so important.⁸

Immigration reform, too, is captive to anti-intellectual forces. Among the challenges faced by higher education is the reality that the thousands of students from other countries who annually achieve American degrees can’t then get work visas to fill jobs here – even though employers are desperate for their expertise. So other nations poach those graduates, and a growing share of students who might have chosen American institutions are instead going elsewhere. That’s a brain drain we cannot afford.⁹

We can’t simply dismiss the push to disinvest in education as a result of the election of dumb people to Congress – although listening to the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tommy Tuberville could persuade you that what the House and Senate most need is a minimum IQ standard. But DeSantis, who so advanced the anti-intellectual cause at the state level, is a product of Harvard and Yale, and there are plenty of others pushing ideas that will disable educational institutions who have benefited from their vitality in the past.

For what really fuels the anti-intellectual fever is a fear of open minds. The rising support for authoritarianism in politics – yes, the continuing popularity of Donald Trump – is a leading indicator of the disease’s presence. We must treat it as though we are confronting a political pandemic, not least because it is putting at risk America’s ability to advance the sort of 21^st-century innovation that might have the sort of impact today that Henry Burden’s horseshoe machine gave America almost two centuries ago. It’s not a risk we ought to tolerate.

1. https://www.americanfarriers.com/articles/12850-how-horseshoes-helped-win-the-civil-war

2. https://www.axios.com/2024/03/01/china-us-patents-science-tech

3. https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/views/2023/10/16/managing-other-enrollment-cliff-opinion#:~:text=By%20now%20we%20all%20know,ago%20and%20continues%20to%20decline.

4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-intellectualism_in_American_Life

5. https://medicalhealthhumanities.com/2020/09/01/your-brain-on-politics-what-neuroscience-reveals-about-political-orientation-and-sense-of-humor/

6. https://archives.cjr.org/second_read/richard_hofstadter_tea_party.php

7. https://www.axios.com/2024/03/04/college-graduates-median-annual-wage-difference

8. https://www.americanprogress.org/article/house-republican-budget-threatens-public-education-and-opportunity-for-young-people/

9. https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2023/06/26/why-so-many-u-s-educated-foreign-students-dont-stay-for-work

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NEWSCLIPS FROM THE UPSTATES

Dispatches from our common ground *

Wherein each week we look around what we call the nation’s Upstates — those places just a bit removed from the center of things — to find illuminating news and intriguing viewpoints, which you might not otherwise see.

This week, we share reporting published here:

• Burlington, Vt. (Burlington Free Press, burlingtonfreepress.com)

• Montgomery, Ala. (Montgomery Advertiser, montgomeryadvertiser.com)

• Lubbock, Tex. (Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, lubbockonline.com)

• Peoria, Ill. (Peoria Journal-Star, pjstar.com)

NOTE: The complete “Newsclips from the Upstates” section, and The Upstate American Midweek Extra Edition, which is sent to email boxes on some Wednesdays, are available only to paid subscribers. Thanks for your support!

VERMONT

The interconnected woes of a healthcare system

Over the past year, there have been only a handful of days when Vermont’s leading hospital, the University of Vermont Medical Center, wasn’t backed up with more patients needing beds than the hospital had available. Dan D’Ambrosio in the Burlington Free Press lays out the challenge in one state that confronts healthcare across America. UVM, he notes, can’t free beds by moving patients to nursing homes because there’s not enough room there, either — because low federal Medicare and Medicaid rates have slowed needed growth in nursing home beds. And while long-term care at home is considered more efficient, agencies that provide support in home confront the same shortage of caregivers as hospitals and nursing homes. "We're all losing money, and it's not sustainable," one healthcare administrator told the newspaper.

ALABAMA

Legislature aims to criminalize helping people vote

Alabama legislators are moving forward with a bill that would make it a felony for helping somebody to vote absentee. Alex Gladden and Victor Hagan report in the Montgomery Advertiser that a bill making its way to the desk of Gov. Kay Ivey targets so-called “ballot harvesting” by making it illegal to pay or receive payment for assisting voters in completing an absentee ballot application or absentee ballot. But a spokeswoman for Stand Up America, a digital progressive organization, characterized the proposal as “a prime example of MAGA voter suppression at work… cruel and anti-democratic.” The governor has already indicated she will sign the bill into law.

TEXAS

Public broadcasting serving vast area of Texas is financially imperiled

The economic problems facing America’s mass media as a result of the digital revolution and other factors aren’t limited to commercial outlets. Case in point: Significant restructuring is ahead for the public radio and TV stations that serve 1.4 million households in northern and western Texas, according to reporting in the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal by Alex Driggars. The PBS television stations in Lubbock and El Paso and NPR-affiliated public radio stations in Lubbock and San Angelo are licensed to Texas Tech University, which ordered layoffs due to fund-raising shortfalls. The cuts will affect local programming on the stations, reporting indicates. The university released a statement promising to “streamline our operations, focusing on optimizing efficiency,” but a faculty report warned that the layoffs could jeopardize hundreds of thousands dollars in Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) grants — federal funds that cover the cost of NPR and PBS programming — because the stations may fall short of CPB's staffing requirements.

ILLINOIS

Warning to the Land of Lincoln: the cicadas are coming

Cicadas emerge every year in the Midwest, but Dean Muellerleile reports in the Peoria Journal-Star that Illinois may well be the cicada capital of the United States this spring, when millions of the large, loud insects emerge from the ground in an event unseen since 1803. Periodical cicadas emerge in 17- and 13-year cycles, but the two groups that will be found in Illinois this rise together only every 221 years, and occur adjacently only in a handful of counties in west-central Illinois. Cicadas are large, winged insects with bulbous eyes, and they are among the loudest insects in the world.

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IF YOU’RE A READER who wants to hear more of Rex Smith’s views, check www.wamc.org for his weekly on-air commentary aired by Northeast Public Radio. Here’s a link to the latest essay. And if your interest is specific to American media, you can download the podcast of The Media Project, the 30-minute nationally-syndicated discussion that Rex leads each week on current issues in journalism. In the states where Northeast Public Radio is heard, the program airs at 3 p.m. each Friday, and is rebroadcast at 6 p.m. Sunday. You can tune in live, too, at www.wamc.org. It has been called “a half-hour of talk about finding and telling the truth.” It’s often worth your time!

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Thanks for reading The Upstate American, and for supporting this work that explores *our common ground, this great land.”  And if you’d like to learn how to write opinion essays — for newspapers, audio or digital platforms — check out the live class Rex co-teaches, that is offered by The Memoir Project. Click below for information. Our first class of 2024 is coming up on Thursday, April 11, at 7 p.m. Eastern. Lots of our students have been well published — and you can be, too. Join us!

-REX SMITH