Politics & Power Quote by Van Wyck Brooks

Brooks lands a quiet provocation: Americans don’t grow up inside libraries so much as inside headlines and hymns. It’s a critic’s way of diagnosing the country’s intellectual bloodstream, and it carries a double edge. Newspapers mean speed, churn, and a public sphere built on novelty and urgency; the Bible means moral certainty, parable, and a rhetorical tradition that prizes conviction over nuance. Put together, they describe a culture trained to think in hot takes and sermons long before it learns to think in footnotes.

The comparison to the English is doing strategic work. England’s “formed by books” flatters a slower, institutional kind of literacy: canon, continuity, class-coded education. Brooks isn’t just praising Britain; he’s pointing at an American pattern where persuasion is mass-market and immediate, where argument arrives pre-packaged as either breaking news or eternal truth. The Sandburg attribution matters, too. Sandburg was the poet of the people, a journalist-flavored bard; invoking him lets Brooks sound observational rather than elitist, as if this is a fact of the national weather, not a scold from the ivory tower.

Contextually, Brooks is writing from the early 20th century, when mass circulation newspapers, revivalist Protestantism, and a burgeoning consumer public were reshaping “culture” into something scalable. The subtext is a critic’s anxiety: if your mental furniture comes from the daily press and Scripture, you may inherit America’s rhetorical gifts - moral clarity, narrative punch - along with its hazards: amnesia, sensationalism, and a tendency to treat politics as either spectacle or salvation.