Introduction: The uselessness of American intellectuals -- Be free!: globalism and democratic pedagogy in Henry James and Henry Adams -- World War I and the origins of the national security state: Mary Antin, Randolph Bourne, and Emma Goldman -- Mary McCarthy's swizzle sticks: food, drink, and consumerism in the American depression -- Herman Melville's Cold War: re-reading C. L. R. James's mariners, renegades, and castaways -- Turning poetry into bread: Langston Hughes, travel-writing, and the professionalization of African-American literary production -- Legacies of the new left: Paul Goodman, C. Wright Mills, and Angela Davis -- Conclusion: Thought during wartime: American public intellectuals in the twenty-first century.