Assailing the Dream: U.S. Social Critics Quiz

Quiz Answer Key and Fun Facts

1. In a hilarious essay entitled "An Intellectual Experiment," who skewered intelligentsia and lowbrows alike by reading an issue of the "New York Review of Books," watching network television, and then comparing these two cultural undertakings?

Answer: P. J. O'Rourke

Gleaned by O'Rourke from NYRB: "Colette was a self-obsessed ratchet-jaw"... "Berlioz's music either stinks or it doesn't."... "Communism is bad when Russians have anything to do with it." Gleaned from TV: "Meat comes from dead animals"... "Small-town folks are behind the times"... "It's fun to trick others." O'Rourke concludes by hypothesizing in part that "Intelligence is, in this case, slightly preferable to stupidity, because it is, well, more intelligent."

2. In his incisive book "Class", author Paul Fussell argued, focusing on one particularly egregious example, that "large assets or high income" do not necessarily "confer high class". Whom did he use as his example?

Answer: C. V. Whitney

Whitney had apparently written a little volume about himself called "Live a Year with a Millionaire", redolent of mental midgetry. "Not to put too fine a point on it," Fussell writes, "the banality, stupidity, complacency and witlessness of this author can remind a reader only of characters in Ring Lardner or in such satires by Sinclair Lewis as "The Man Who Knew Coolidge."

3. Barbara Ehrenreich authored a work of non-fiction suggesting in part that at present in the US, social mobility out of the low-wage classes may be drastically limited by circumstance and that "bootstrapping" one's way up from poverty may be a relic of a bygone age. On what was this interesting if profoundly disturbing book based?

Answer: The author's attempt to survive on low-wage, low-end service sector jobs.

Ehrenreich, who swings a little to the left but who is never boring, wrote "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America," detailing her attempts to survive on meager wages as, among other things, a waitress, a hotel maid and a cleaning woman.
Describing in excruciating detail the toll which these deceptively difficult jobs exact, and the rather desperate lifestyle attendant to them, this harrowing and moving book, published in 2001, is already a muckraking classic.

4. Which somewhat alienated observer of American life coined the terms "conspicuous consumption", "invidious comparison" and "parodic display"?

Answer: Thorstein Veblen

Veblen, of Norwegian extraction, may have been the greatest of all the social critics on this side of the pond. Long after his death in 1929, his sharp-eyed take on the habits of an often self-satisfied and philistine American leisure class continues to hit the target with amazing accuracy.

He was long-winded and can be difficult to plod through, but he is a worthwhile read. Given the nature of today's consumerist culture, one can only marvel at Veblen's prescience.

5. This somewhat unlikely social critic has theorized that Washington, D.C. "was built on a stagnant swamp some 200 years ago, and very little has changed; it stank then and it stinks now..", that the rumored death of a noted pop icon may have been because he "realized how shallow the pursuit of money was and took his own life", and that parents push their kids into sports competition "to compensate for their own failed dreams of glory"?

Answer: Lisa Simpson

(Just wanted to make sure you weren't sleeping). Seriously, Lisa S., as a cartoon character, can give strong voice to criticisms of the American social order that would never pass muster on TV dramas or most of the sitcoms. It is probably a left-handed compliment, but a compliment nonetheless, to say that "The Simpsons" may well be the most subversive show on American TV today. (The pop icon was Richie Rich).

6. Perhaps a better sociologist than writer, this midwesterner so memorably portrayed a vulgar, ignorant, small-minded, Mammon-worshipping middle American businessman that the character's name remains a part of the American vernacular. Who was he?

Answer: Sinclair Lewis

Lewis had infinite scorn for those who subscribed to Coolidge's doctrine that "the business of America is business" and arranged their personal and inner lives accordingly. From his George Babbitt we get "Babbittry" -- probably referred to more today than it was in the 20's and 30's. Lewis did win the Nobel Prize for literature (in character, he refused to accept it), but he hit the bottle rather ferociously and some of his later works were of a lesser calibre than "Babbit" and "Main Street", et al.

7. He wrote not only that "the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation", but also that "most of the luxuries... of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind." Who was he?

Answer: Henry David Thoreau

One of Veblen's spiritual forebears, and a man who coined so many memorable phrases one loses count. Emerson is the one who came to visit Thoreau when he was jailed (albeit briefly) for failing to pay his taxes. Thoreau found himself (posthumously, of course) with an unlikely defender in the 1980's, when Don Henley, former Eagle and no stranger to luxury himself, fought to protect Walden Pond from encroachment by developers. (Several of the cuts on Henley's "End of the Innocence" album sound a stridently anti-materialist note).

8. The protagonist of this writer's most famous book describes the Grangerfords, a family of "well born" hereditary aristocrats who are involved in a feud with another aristrocratic family, the Shepherdsons. The reader discovers that all the aristos are murdering thugs, albeit with a code of honor. Who was the writer?

Answer: Mark Twain

Twain had no small disdain for humanity in general, and his contempt level tended to rise in conjunction with the social position of his target. With the possible exception of Sherburn's defiance of the lynch mob, nothing in "Huckleberry Finn" more devastatingly demonstrates the depth of Twain's digust for the hypocritical conventions of "genteel" society than his portrayal of the Grangerfords.

9. What great muckraker wrote "The Jungle", concerning the exploits of Lithuanian immigrant Jurgis Rudkus, and graphically detailing the grim plight of the blue-collar worker (and the appallingly unsanitary practices) in the Chicago stockyards at the turn of the 20th century?

Answer: Upton Sinclair

Sinclair, a socialist who later ran for office in California, apparently intended the work to be a bit of an allegory, as well as a cri du coeur. His book so disgusted Washington that legislators shortly thereafter passed the Pure Food and Drug Act, leading Sinclair to complain, famously, that he had aimed at the country's heart and by accident hit its stomach.

10. Perhaps the grandaddy of all critics of U.S. corporate culture and conformity, this author's book, "The Organization Man," published in 1956, is still considered a classic nearly a half-century later. Who was he?

Answer: William H. Whyte

Whyte, who argued in essence that corporations had become bureaucratized, often fossilized institutions and bastions of mindless conformity, died in 1999, at age 81. (He thus missed the Enron debacle by only a couple of years). C. Wright Mills, who wrote "White Collar" and "The Power Elite" (also during the 50's), explored similar themes, and no doubt many Soc 101 students have confused the two in key essays. (Remember: Mills was the tall guy who rode a motorcycle).

Source: Author coolupway

This quiz was reviewed by FunTrivia editor nerthus before going online.
Any errors found in FunTrivia content are routinely corrected through our feedback system.

For a nation perceived by much of the rest of the world as insufferably self-satisfied and smug, we Yanks have turned out a fair number of cynical and interesting social critics.

NEXT>

NEXT>

NEXT>

NEXT>

NEXT>

NEXT>

NEXT>

NEXT>

NEXT>