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The original was posted on /r/askhistorians by /u/BackgroundDisaster11 on 2023-09-08 02:28:12+00:00.

Original Title: In Democracy in America, Tocqueville discusses how in 19th century America, there is “no class exists that honors intellectual work and in which the penchant for intellectual pleasures is handed down with affluence and hereditary leisure.” Why was this the case, and what changed?

America seemed to have an intellectual-gap in the early 19th century. The 18th century had Jefferson, Hamilton, Frank, etc while the more notable American-bred academics seem to only come about later in the 19th or early 20th (Alfred Russell Wallace, Thorstein Veblen, JS Mill, and John Dewey come to mind). Why did the most prominent American academics seem to come about in the late 19th century (decades after Democracy in America was published in the 1930s).