Things I don’t know about the 1930s
I’m trying to think a lot about what the big differences are between 2026 and 1936 in intellectual, political, and professional life. Obviously, there are many ways that we could measure the differences. By intellectual life, I don’t mean what people thought, but how people who thought of themselves as intellectuals considered their role and purpose. By political life, I don’t mean how political behavior might have differed, but how the institutions were ordered. By professional life, I don’t mean how a particular profession might have differed from today but how the system of professions was organized. What “I don’t mean” in the preceding list is every bit as interesting as what I do mean; for now, I’m trying to keep just one set of differences in view.
In intellectual life, I think the category of “intellectual” was smaller. I should probably revisit the Thomas Bender book Intellect and Public Life to help me answer this question. I think people who considered themselves “intellectuals” were probably more engaged with what they considered public life. Or maybe a better way to put it is that the world of intellectuals and would-be intellectuals was so much smaller that it seemed like they were public figures. To try and say it even more precisely: intellectuals constituted one another’s public, and because they participated in their own public it felt every bit as vibrant and vital as they themselves did. So, when they oriented their work and energy toward “public engagement,” that seems much more legible then than it does today. I’m not sure if that’s true, but it does seem as if our elite are more fractured today, and the mechanisms of opinion-formation more fragmented. Does it really make sense for an intellectual today to make a claim to be part of shaping elite opinion? Is that something an “intellectual” does, or is that the job of a “thought-leader” or “influencer”? My sense is that today, in 2026, intellectuals feel more adrift than intellectuals did in 1936.
As for political life, I think that’s where I have the most uncertainty relative to what is knowable. It’s more complex than the intellectual or professional questions because there are just so many more institutions that might have operated differently than they do today. In 1936, the U.S. state was significantly smaller as a matter of number or complexity of institutions. The relationship between executive, legislative, and judicial power was arranged differently. The parties were different as a matter of substantive policy demands and procedural rules. Here is where I’d like to focus my next bit of reading. I basically know where to go to do this reading; I just don’t know the scholarship well because I’ve been focused on the pre-World War I period for my previous project. The New Deal period is, of course, interesting here as an interface between the intellectual life and the political life. I still have my public schooling concept of “brain trust” as part of the furniture in my mental model of the period. But, what was happening? And how much of what happened changed the qualities of “stateness” and how much was just additive?
Professional life feels a little bit more knowable to me than the question of institutions. It’s really questions of managerial work, informational work, clerical work, and the kind of “white collar” work that C. Wright Mills obsessed over. What were the consequences, basically by 1936, of (for example) Elihu Root’s bureaucratic modernization efforts? There are some interesting references to Root in Craig Robertson’s history of the filing cabinet that got me thinking about changes to work after the Progressive Era. It’s at least a concrete question and one that I can try and pin down, even if the answer to it proves the question malformed or yields an unexpected answer. Part of the impetus to this question comes from the observation I shared with a colleague about the number of women working on Rockefeller Foundation-sponsored war communications projects at the Department of Justice in the run-up to the United States’ entry into World War II. Most of the women were concentrated in one of the organizational units. Why? What does that tell us about the world of white-collar, bureaucratic work in the period? That’s essentially the question I feel like I need answered to really achieve the kind of mind-meld with this time period that I find so exciting and invigorating. And, of course, it’s the one that connects this project to my previous one. What was the politics that the Progressive politics of work helped to deliver?