Harper's Magazine editor Russell Lynes in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek essay on the workings of cultural distinction in America certainly painted a less than flattering picture of the highbrow jazz enthusiasts who embraced “genuine” jazz in the 1930s and 1940s. As editor of Harper's, he probably was aware of the conflict between traditionalists and modernists in the early years of the jazz art world. His magazine in 1947 published “The Jazz Cult” by jazz critic Ernest Borneman that addressed this very conflict. Lynes, however, was addressing the whole notion of cultural distinction and cultural legitimacy in America at mid-century. He suggested to his readers that America was divided into a world of highbrows, middlebrows, and lowbrows, a world in which middlebrows reigned in numbers and wealth while highbrows – few in number and declining in cultural influence – reigned mostly in their own pretentious imaginations.