SOURCE: Duggan, Francis X. “Humanism and Naturalism.” In Paul Elmer More, pp. 133-42. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1966.

In the following excerpt, Duggan explores More's association with the New Humanists, focusing on the attack on his ideas in C. Hartley Grattan's The Critique of Humanism.

The New Humanism

Throughout the first three decades of the century Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More had been attracting a number of disciples and supporters who, despite their differences, were sufficiently united in principles and general aims to be known by and to acknowledge a common designation. These were the New Humanists of the 1920's and 1930's.¹

Babbitt's influence came principally from his teaching at Harvard; More's from his editorship of the Nation and from his writings, although to some extent from his teaching too. Their three-decade denunciation of modernism had also provoked antagonism, both from the naturalists and from others who for...