The legacy of American pragmatism for mid-century intellectuals was the project of promoting an Emersonian culture of creative democracy by means of critical intelligence and social action. The major proponents of this project and legacy were no longer white Yankees but rather two second-generation Jewish Americans, Sidney Hook and Lionel Trilling; a second-generation American of German extraction, Reinhold Niebuhr; an Irish Southwesterner, C. Wright Mills; and a fifth-generation American of African descent, W. E. B. Du Bois. Unlike Emerson, Peirce, James, and Dewey, they neither were born and bred in the world of the northeastern highbrow culture and bourgeois society nor took for granted its privileges and opportunities. American pragmatism had gone native in new and diverse ways.