The era of the Great Depression was a watershed in intellectuals' conceptions about the mass culture. At this time, mass culture achieved national penetration and provided the Americans with a chance to forget their economic difficulties. The word "m ...

The era of the Great Depression was a watershed in intellectuals' conceptions about the mass culture. At this time, mass culture achieved national penetration and provided the Americans with a chance to forget their economic difficulties. The word "mass" and "culture" became commonly together in English from this time. In observing these phenomena, intellectuals began to show a growing appreciation of the mass culture. Among them were the New York Intellectuals, a small group of liberal and radical intellectuals clustered around the Partisan Review, who almost singly vitalized the critique of mass culture during and after the 1930s.
As the second generation of Jewish immigrants, Marxists and Cosmopolitans, they tried to develop a rigorous discourse of authenticity in American culture and society, and commented on the mass culture as means of expressing their ideas and of finding their own identity as intellectuals. While they identified themselves as radicals, they broke from the orthodox Marxsim, rejected the Popular Front, and embraced high modernism as an alternative to the philistinism of Left or Right.
The New York Intellectuals' critique of mass culture came from several angles. They regarded mass culture as unreal and was mass produced for profit. They also warned that mass culture would destroy both human and intellectual qualities. They also despised what was known as middlebrow culture as they regarded it as a pretender to serious culture, which was more subversive and detestable than mass culture. Among most of the New York Intellectuals, all of these arguments combined in their animosity to mass culture.
However, the concept of 'mass' has never been congenial to the group. As intellectuals at heart, they always felt it better to have the masses led by the more talented and perceptive. That appreciation for a vital distance from the people was what underlined the group's identities as intellectuals. The New York Intellectuals regarded themselves as avant-garde intellectual cadre to protect high culture. In that way, they became a group of high culture elitism. Dwight MacDonald, for instance, hoped for the development of "a clearly defined cultural elite here" so that the masses could settle into their kitsch and the classes could relax with their high culture.
However, as the New York Intellectuals had not understood mass culture, they had allowed their argument to become an undemocratic satire against popular taste. Furthermore, their allegiance to their intellectual identities was stronger than their commitment to their political identities. Instead of focusing on mass culture as a problem of capitalist politics and economics, they described it as a dangerous undermining of free intellectual culture. Instead of supporting the rise of the people (or the mass), they chose to break with it over the importance of correct intellectual culture. Their cultural elitism and undemocratic attitude toward mass culture indicate the extent to which their increasing conservatism had been a part of their larger orientation as intellectuals since the 1930s.