Sorry Triumph

The thesis of Horace Coon’s Triumph of the Eggheads (Random House, $4) is that the United States is periodically saved by incursion of intellectuals into politics. Well, so be it; nothing is ever saved for very long by the absence of brains. But Mr. Coon gets his brainy folk and his fools all mixed up. What Mr. Coon seems to miss is that no man becomes a true intellectual by act of mere self-certification. A man may be a Ph.D. and still not know enough to come in when it rains; he may call himself an intellectual, but this fact does not automatically grant him intelligence. And it is the mark of the true “egghead” that intelligence is the one thing that is totally absent from his make-up whatever his pretensions to scholarship.

Mr. Coon ducks the issue—and ignores the popular origin of the term —by defining egghead to suit himself. An egghead, he says, is “an adult who believes in intelligence as an instrument for social change, who believes in reason and rationality as a test for evaluating political issues.” Don’t we all! But Mr. Coon’s own qualifications for recognizing an intelligent man are about as dubious as his talent for lexicography. Before going on to his schematization of American history—which amounts to saying that Jefferson, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt and Adlai Stevenson represent 14-karat gold where all else save Abraham Lincoln and George Washington is dross—I would like to do a little textual analysis of some of his sentences, and also pay my respects to some of his mistakes. This way of beginning a review is perhaps unfair, but when a man sets himself up as an arbiter of intelligence, it is only natural to ask for his credentials. And Mr. Coon’s credentials, on the face of it, aren’t very convincing.

JC

About the Author

John Chamberlain

John Chamberlain (1903–1995) was an American writer.

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The thesis of Horace Coon’s Triumph of the Eggheads (Random House, $4) is that the United States is periodically saved by incursion of intellectuals into politics. Well, so be it; nothing is ever saved for very long by the absence of brains. But Mr. Coon gets his brainy folk and his fools all mixed up. What Mr. Coon seems to miss is that no man becomes a true intellectual by act of mere self-certification. A man may be a Ph.D. and still not know enough to come in when it rains; he may call himself an intellectual, but this fact does not automatically grant him intelligence. And it is the mark of the true “egghead” that intelligence is the one thing that is totally absent from his make-up whatever his pretensions to scholarship.

Mr. Coon ducks the issue—and ignores the popular origin of the term —by defining egghead to suit himself. An egghead, he says, is “an adult who believes in intelligence as an instrument for social change, who believes in reason and rationality as a test for evaluating political issues.” Don’t we all! But Mr. Coon’s own qualifications for recognizing an intelligent man are about as dubious as his talent for lexicography. Before going on to his schematization of American history—which amounts to saying that Jefferson, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt and Adlai Stevenson represent 14-karat gold where all else save Abraham Lincoln and George Washington is dross—I would like to do a little textual analysis of some of his sentences, and also pay my respects to some of his mistakes. This way of beginning a review is perhaps unfair, but when a man sets himself up as an arbiter of intelligence, it is only natural to ask for his credentials. And Mr. Coon’s credentials, on the face of it, aren’t very convincing.