My Favorite Revisionist

"A university is not a service station. Neither is it a political society, nor a meeting place for political societies. With all its limitations and failures, and they are invariably many, it is the best and most benign side of our society insofar as that society aims to cherish the human mind."

Richard Hofstadter (1916–1970)
Historian
Columbia PhD 1942
Columbia Faculty 1946–1970

I had forgotten Richard Hofstadter's revisionism of Populist historiography until I read Christopher Shea's thoughtful review of the most recent biography of my favorite historian. Hofstadter was a gifted aphorist; a university is not a service station indeed! The great bane of higher education in this century is the retail stablishment model that is the current fad in higher education. "The customer is always right" translated as "The student is always right. More importantly, Hofstadter foresaw the danger in the Neocon ascendancy. We are going to reap the whirlwind. If this is (fair & balanced snark, so be it.)

[x The Boston Globe]
Spirit of the age: Historian Richard Hofstadter's enduring appeal
By Christopher Shea

Richard Hofstadter's The American Political Tradition, originally published in 1948 when the author was 32, still sells 10,000 copies a year-an astonishing figure, especially for an essay collection lacking an overarching theme. Yet its sharp biographical sketches have struck generations of readers as revelatory: Hofstadter's Teddy Roosevelt is a bloodthirsty, sham progressive; his Abraham Lincoln a careful cultivator of his own legend as a self-made man. Hofstadter's revisionism is so aggressive, his pen so deft, that his publisher considered titling the volume Eminent Americans, after Lytton Strachey's famous hatchet job on British figures.

And that may not even be Hofstadter's most respected book. Alan Brinkley, a historian at Columbia University-where Hofstadter himself taught from 1946 until his untimely death from leukemia in 1970-has called Hofstadter's The Age of Reform (1955), his study of the Populist and Progressive eras, "the most influential book ever published on 20th-century America." And the title alone of The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1965) is one of the great intellectual memes of our time.

What was it about this scholar, the half-Jewish son of working-class parents in Buffalo, that caused his work to seem so emblematic of its age-among his generation of historians, perhaps only C. Vann Woodward and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. have similar reputations-and so vital that we still read it?

"Intellectual charisma and an eclectic mind," answers David S. Brown, author of Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography (Chicago, 2006), in an interview. Of course, lots of historian could be described that way. "It was also his good fortune," Brown adds, "to be very in tune with his times-knowing where the country was in psychological terms." As it happens, some of his themes seem presciently in tune with our times, too-tension between rural and urban America, grass-roots distrust of experts and intellectuals, democracy's vulnerability to demagoguery. All of which make Brown's biography, the first of Hofstadter, especially timely.

. . .

Hofstadter had a knack for picking topics that resonated with the present. In the late 1940s, Americans hungered to know how history had got them here-to the world of strong federal power and international influence-and The American Political Tradition offered a handy guide to some of the key turning points in, among other things, the evolving relationship between the national government and big business since the era of the Founders. Franklin Roosevelt had partly improvised the New Deal; now it was up to Americans to build a governing philosophy out of the welter of federal programs, he suggested.

In the 1950s, in the shadow of Nazism, scholars were freshly confronting the dark side of popular political movements. Having absorbed books like T.W. Adorno's The Authoritarian Personality, Hofstadter contributed Age of Reform, which took on the generation of historians, especially an influential group at the University of Wisconsin, who had idolized the American Populists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries as restorers of American democratic ideals, reasserting the rights of farmers against the Eastern political and financial elite.

Hofstadter, though, played up the Populists' distrust of immigrants and city life, their crypto-anti-Semitism ("You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold!" declared William Jennings Bryan in 1896), and their wholesale rejection of modernity. He and other Jewish intellectuals at Columbia tended to be a bit more skeptical than their Midwestern peers about mass movements made up of angry Anglo-Saxon men.

Some of the angriest white men in the `50s were anti-Communists, spreading alarm about treason on American campuses and in the diplomatic corps. When Hofstadter, in Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963) and then The Paranoid Style in American Politics, traced a direct line from the Know Nothing party of the 1850s to modern McCarthyite conservatives he earned himself the abiding enmity of the right.

William F. Buckley, who helped launch the modern conservative movement, famously complained that Hofstadter "analyzed" liberals but "diagnosed" conservatives. But Hofstadter, Brown reminds us, was also suspicious of many leftists (and they returned the favor). His criticism of the populist tradition led some historians on the left to brand him a neoconservative, in an early use of the term. He was no fan, either, of the trendy leftish educational theories taking over schools-his criticism of them was a precursor, Brown suggests, of attacks on "political correctness."

Brown argues that Hofstadter's attacks on anti-intellectualism "had as much to do with protection of the intellectual from the left" as from the right. Hofstadter had flirted with Communism as a graduate student at Columbia in the 1930s but was turned off by leftist intolerance. Yet in the 1950s and early 1960s (by which time he was an anti-Communist) he was preoccupied with the right: If Barry Goldwater, who wanted to jettison the New Deal, should win election in 1964, he wrote, it "will put the democratic process in this country in jeopardy." (Brown says he sounds a bit paranoid himself.)

To the end, Hofstadter thought of himself as speaking, even when critically, from within the liberal-progressive tradition. Even so, the late 1960s pushed him to the right, relatively speaking, and it's a fascinating question how far he might have drifted in that direction had he lived. He was depressed by the Vietnam War, yet also appalled by the violent protests of some student radicals. He was tapped to give the Columbia commencement address in 1968, the only person both right and left would listen to.

Hofstadter thought the conservative revolution died with Goldwater. He may have been wrong about that, but Brown writes that he was one of the first analysts to see that modern conservatism was a potent grass-roots social movement. Today, Brown writes, the Bush presidency "has resurrected the sharp division in American life between East and West, aristocracy and democracy," intellectuals and men of action-all the great Hofstadter themes.

Indeed, Brown hints that Anti-Intellectualism in American Life would make a good title for a chronicle of the Bush years-which answers the question, at least for Brown, of whether Hofstadter is still relevant.

Christopher Shea's column appears biweekly in the Ideas section of The Boston Globe.

Copyright © Globe Newspapers, Inc.

Get an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) Reader at no cost from Google at Google Reader. Another free Reader is available at RSS Reader.