In using that word INTELLECTUAL, one lays himself liable to the accusation of having forsaken democracy. For all that, "fundamental brainwork" is behind every respect-worthy piece of writing, whether it be a lightsome lyric that seems as careless as a redbird's flit or a formal epic, an impressionistic essay or a great novel that measures the depth of human destiny. Nonintellectual literature is as nonexistent as education without mental discipline, or as "character building" in a school that is slovenly in scholarship. Billboards along the highways of Texas advertise certain towns and cities as "cultural centers." Yet no chamber of commerce would consider advertising an intellectual center. The culture of a nineteenth-century finishing school for young ladies was divorced from intellect; genuine civilization is always informed by intellect. The American populace has been taught to believe that the more intellectual a professor is, the less common sense he has; nevertheless, if American democracy is preserved it will be preserved by thought and not by physics. Editors of all but a few magazines of the country and publishers of most of the daily newspapers cry out for brightness and vitality and at the same time shut out critical ideas. They want intellect, but want it petrified. Happily, the publishers of books have not yet reached that form of delusion. In an article entitled "What Ideas Are Safe?" in the _Saturday Review of Literature_ for November 5, 1949, Henry Steele Commager says: If we establish a standard of safe thinking, we will end up with no thinking at all.... We cannot... have thought half slave and half free.... A nation which, in the name of loyalty or of patriotism or of any sincere and high-sounding ideal, discourages criticism and dissent, and puts a premium on acquiescence and conformity, is headed for disaster. Unless a writer feels free, things will not come to him, he cannot burgeon on any subject whatsoever. In 1834 Davy Crockett's _Autobiography_ was published. It is one of the primary social documents of America. It is as much Davy Crockett, whether going ahead after bears in a Tennessee canebrake or going ahead after General Andrew Jackson in Congress, as the equally plain but also urbane _Autobiography_ of Franklin is Benjamin Franklin. It is undiluted regionalism. It is provincial not only in subject but in point of view. No provincial mind of this day could possibly write an autobiography or any other kind of book co-ordinate in value with Crockett's "classic in homespun." In his time, Crockett could exercise intelligence and still retain his provincial point of view. Provincialism was in the air over his land. In these changed times, something in the ambient air prevents any active intelligence from being unconscious of lands, peoples, struggles far beyond any province. Not long after the Civil War, in Harris County, Texas, my father heard a bayou-billy yell out: