Anti-Intellectualism in American Life by Richard Hodstadler is a fifty-pager—and that was pushing it. Being at the core an egghead, I had high hopes for the book, particularly since as a country we've been led by a man with whom the majority of voters would like to have a beer, that being, IMHO, an example of anti-intellectualism at its best.
So what went wrong? Disenchantment surged when I saw the book had won the 1964 Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction—not there's anything wrong with the 1960s. I was simply expecting a more recently published book. Actually, it's even a bit more dated than that. Hofstadter's aim is to explain anti-intellectualism in the sixties by studying, among other things, McCarthyism of the fifties. Now based on the little I read, the book appears to be well researched and Hofstadter's point carefully—nay, meticulously—explained, but it's hard reading, and I'm just not in the mood. Maybe later I will be. Of course, we're talking years, maybe even decades, later.
I do, however, have a question about documentation for any scholarly types out there. I noticed that when Hofstadter reaches footnote number nine, the next footnote is one. I ran through two plas one-through-nines before page fifty. Now I was writing theses and stuff at the same time Hofstadter was working on this book. If I'd tried that, some professor would have, at a minimum, sent me back to the drawing board. Has anyone else ever run into this truly bizarre, IMHO, form of documentation?
