ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses The Intellectuals and The Discontented Classes (1955). During the New Deal days a group of intellectuals led and played lawyer for classes of discontented people who had tasted prosperity and lost it, and for a mass of underprivileged people who had been promised prosperity and seen enough mobility around them to believe in it. Texas demonstrates in extreme form the great shift in the character of American politics and political thinking since the Second World War. Detectable and decisive shifts of political mood can occur, of course, without affecting the majority. And this seems to be what has happened in this country. The high school and college training has had a further effect of strengthening the desire of the graduates to take some part in political life, at least by voting: we know that nonvoting and non-participation generally is far more common among the uneducated.
