Fashion is fickle even among historians. At the time of his death from leukemia in the fall of 1970, Richard Hofstadter was Columbia University’s DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History, a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize (for The Age of Reform in 1956 and Anti-Intellectualism in American Life in 1964), intellectual godfather to Eric McKitrick, Christopher Lasch, Linda Kerber, and Eric Foner, vice-president of the Organization of American Historians, and an oracle among American historians. Today, Hofstadter’s reputation is nearly as dead as Marley’s doornail. His books remain in print, but they tend to be read as period pieces, or as provocatively entertaining essays, rather than serious historical analysis. They are the sort of thing one assigns to undergraduates to perk up interest in an American history survey course, or to graduates in a seminar devoted to historical fashions.
Although Hofstadter died at the comparatively young age of 54, he was part of a generation, along with Arthur Schlesinger, Bernard De Voto, Daniel Boorstin, and Perry Miller, which still understood history writing to be a species of the humanities, in which felicity of style and a Continental broadness of interpretive reach were virtues. He had a vague identification with late 19th-century American thought, through The Age of Reform and Social Darwinism in American Thought (his first book, in 1944), but for all practical purposes, there was no specific “era” on which he hung his hat. In truth, Hofstadter was an editorialist of the American experience, and he was profoundly uninterested in either slogging monkishly through archives, or the people who worked in them (whom he described as “archive rats”). Conclusions rather than method, and bon mots rather than footnotes, were his long suit. “If one were to compare the proportion of time given to expression with that given to research,” he once remarked, “my emphasis is on the first.” Even though he filled the most prestigious chair among American university historians, people rarely read Hofstadter because he was an academic, nor did he care that most of his readership was itself not academic.
This was not the direction in which American history writing was headed in 1970. In that year, Michael Zuckerman, Philip Greven, and Kenneth Lockridge published three landmark studies of colonial New England which sent methodological shock-waves through the guild of American academic historians and stamped doom on history-writing in the epicurean style represented by Hofstadter. All three books—Zuckerman’s Peaceable Kingdoms, Greven’s Four Generations: Population, Land and Family in Colonial Andover, Massachusetts, and Lockridge’s A New England Town: The First Three Hundred Years—rested on exhaustive analysis, not just of archives, but of the minutiae of everyday life which had slipped the attention even of the archivists. They wallowed in probate inventories, tax lists, marriage and death records, county clerk records, all of which supported narratives which looked more like anthropology than history. What they offered was a picture of what Peter Laslett, one of the British pioneers of this “new” history, called “a world we have lost”—a pre-industrial world of “human size” in which “the whole of life went forward in the family” and “industry and agriculture lived together in some sort of symmetry.” In very short order, the new methods and the misty world of “pre-capitalism” would become an invitation to political romanticization; but in 1965, when Laslett wrote those words, the real point he wanted to make was that the life of the modern industrial world “makes us very different from our ancestors.”1 And, to the dismay of Richard Hofstadter, made it infinitely more difficult to write historical editorials based on the lives of people who turned out to be as incommensurate with modern experience as the rocks on Mars.
David Brown’s biography of Hofstadter describes him as an exemplar of “twentieth-century liberalism,” but in fact there was very little about Richard Hofstadter which could be called “liberal.” His father, a furrier, was a skeptical Jew from Buffalo, New York; his mother was an observant Lutheran who had young Richard baptized, but who died when the boy was ten, and as a result, Hofstadter grew up resentful, introverted, and never sure of belonging anywhere. Despite the onset of the Depression, Emil Hofstadter prospered, and was able to put both Richard and his sister through college. But like many of his generation, Hofstadter’s insulation from the ravages of the Depression imparted no sense of security; if anything, it only made him more hostile to the machinery of American commercial society which had kicked so many others in the American middle class down the rungs of the economic ladder. He was captivated by Charles Beard’s The Rise of American Civilization (1927) and its leering revelation that American history was really governed by corporate greed rather than Enlightenment idealism. And when in 1934 he met Felice Swados, a committed Marxist and rookie novelist, Hofstadter’s conversion to the Left became complete. He joined the National Student League (one of a bevy of talented radical Stalinist groups in the 1930s, alongside the Young Communist League, Young People’s Socialist League, and the Spartacus Youth League), married Felice, and enrolled as a law student at Columbia.
Hofstadter quickly became bored with law; instead, he wrote a master’s thesis on the Agricultural Adjustment Act, and set to work on a doctoral program under Merle Curti. At the same time, he and Felice joined the Young Communist League, and then formally attached themselves to the Communist Party in 1938. Felice loved the CP; Richard was less enthusiastic, especially after the news of the Stalin show-trials gradually became public, and even more after rubbing shoulders with the CP leadership, Earl Browder and Max Schachtman. Hofstadter had discovered that he loved history more than he loved the working class—or rather, that he had never loved the working class at all, and had no confidence that a dictatorship of the proletariat would be much easier to live with than fascism. “The Communist Party,” he would later write, “wanted no writers who would not subject themselves to its characteristic rigid discipline,” and that discipline was dominated by a “cult of proletarianism” which Hofstadter loathed.2
Hofstadter won his PhD in 1942, and took a job teaching at the University of Maryland, where he made common radical cause with three other newly hired faculty, Kenneth Stampp, Frank Freidel, and C. Wright Mills. He was still oozing Marxist hostility to the New Deal, but it was tempered by a suspicion of any mass movements, or anything which grabbed for power in the name of political righteousness. Then, in 1944, Felice was diagnosed with cancer (she died in July of 1945), and—armed with the urge to escape from the blandness of life in Maryland—Hofstadter leapt at an offer to fill Curti’s professorship at Columbia, and began teaching there in 1946. He dropped away from the CP, and from almost everything else in his past.
It may be a misnomer to say that Hofstadter taught at Columbia, since he actually found teaching onerous and students boring. Brown’s interviews with Hofstadter’s one-time students and advisees routinely turned up a portrait of a man who was distant, aloof, and defensive of his own time, even with his own colleagues. His passion was writing. “I’m not a teacher,” he explained to Eric Foner, “I’m a writer.” The urge to distance himself from people extended to his histories of popular movements. The Age of Reform, which won him the 1956 Pulitzer in History, was a savage questioning of the bona fides of the Progressives, in which the reformist urges of Theodore Roosevelt, William Jennings Bryan, and the other happy warriors of Bull Moose persuasion were defrocked of their benevolent intentions and exposed as incubators of “status-anxiety,” a disease which impelled those who felt power slipping from their control to try to regain it by demagoguery. The sardonic pleasure Hofstadter displayed in exposing the rage, the nativism, and the anti-Semitism that seethed beneath the surface of the American Midwestern heartland angered both the Left (who liked to coo, in homoerotic socialist-realist fashion, over the Tom Joads of the plains) and the Right. Hofstadter did not care. He had come to see the place of the intellectual—by which he meant, himself—as an endangered cosmopolitan pocket in a sea of mass rural idiocy.
Feeling the hypocrisy became a cultural habit for Hofstadter, and his writing oozed a kind of schadenfreude about the failures and limitations of American politics (which he characterized as a compound of anti-intellectualism, paranoia, and self-delusion) and American democracy. In The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (1948), Hofstadter offered a series of semi-biographical vignettes (of Jefferson, Jackson, Calhoun, Lincoln, Bryan, Wilson, Hoover, and both Roosevelts) which clawed away the comfortable heroism enwrapping each of them and left the reader wondering if American democracy had any genuineness at all. (His comment on the Emancipation Proclamation became one of the most memorable one-liners in American historiography: “The Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, had all the moral grandeur of a bill of lading”3). In 1964, he won his second Pulitzer (this time in general nonfiction) for Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, in which he attacked evangelicalism, capitalism, and “our persistent, intense and sometimes touching faith in the efficacy of popular education” for promoting faith-based stupidity and a cavalierly instrumental attitude toward the life of the mind. The rebirth of conservative intellectualism in the 1960s agitated him even more, since he saw in the Goldwater Right nothing but another menacing upsurge of populist fascism.
Yet, contemptuous as he was of American democracy, Hofstadter also saw that the great conundrum for American intellectuals was that they could not live without politics (whether for protection or for access to resources) and could not live with it (because of its inherent corrupting force). This was a dangerous moment for Hofstadter, and for two reasons. First, a critical politics which loses all confidence in how to deal prudentially with power risks a fatal descent into irony and cheap rib-nudging. And the truth was that much of Hofstadter’s coruscating denunciations of progressivism, emancipation, and mass democracy could easily be read as history done with a smirk, as though H.L. Mencken and Sinclair Lewis had collaborated on a new narrative of the American past.
Christopher Lasch, sensing this in 1965, complained of his mentor that Hofstadter had sold his store to a cheap leftist snobbery—or, as Brown puts it, that Hofstadter was himself suffering from “status-anxiety.” But the other danger for Hofstadter was posed in the mid-Sixties by a New Left which was utterly and unapologetically intoxicated by the prospect of power. The New Left was fully as impatient as Hofstadter with the dull embourgeoisement of the American classes, and accepted the call of Herbert Marcuse to university students to constitute themselves as the revolutionary vanguard by overthrowing capitalism in its real fortress, the citadel of bourgeois morality. But they turned their attack first on the university, which they saw as the processor of capitalist enculturation and not (as Hofstadter did) as a safe-house for the mind. The campus shut-downs of 1964-65 and the “occupation” of Columbia’s classrooms by Students for a Democratic Society in April, 1968 infuriated Hofstadter, who regarded sds (despite its lineal descent from the National Student League) as the newest enemy of academic freedom. “I was raised in the 1930s, on a more severe brand of Marxism,” Hofstadter sniffed, “What you have, in place of revolutionaries, are clowns like Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin.”
The wind was still blowing from the Left in Hofstadter’s mind, but it was very much the wind of the Old Left of the 1930s. When Hofstadter delivered the commencement address at Columbia that spring, offering a dogged defense of the integrity of uncoerced intellectual life, over three hundred Columbia students stood up and walked out.
Brown has not had an enviable task in writing a biography of Richard Hofstadter. Beatrice Hofstadter (his second wife, who died in 1986) kept a protective watch over her husband’s papers, and even for this book, Brown was refused permission to quote from Hofstadter’s letters and manuscripts. Nor was Hofstadter one of those colorful academic eccentrics who, like Noel Annan’s The Dons, splayed bizarre but noteworthy behavior behind himself like the wake of a ship. He was a man without hobbies, without passions, and without drinking buddies. Brown has compensated for this absence of the remarkable by mining the papers of Hofstadter’s colleagues and students, especially Kenneth Stampp, Eric McKitrick, and Alfred Kazin, and teasing important material out of interviews with over thirty others who knew Hofstadter. The result makes an impressive shape of a life which might otherwise have appeared consumed by the innately uninteresting humdrum of academia.
What we miss in this, however, are two things. First, Brown offers us remarkably little political context for understanding Hofstadter, especially at the crucial nexus in the late 1940s which split the New Left from the Old Left. Hofstadter was a Leftist without any hope or faith in revolution, and a democrat who regretted that democracy had to include the booboisie, and that makes for a very fuzzy picture indeed if we have no understandings of where the ideological lines were drawn among New York intellectuals in the post-World War II decades. Not to have a clear sense of what first attracted him to the CP in the 1930s, or to have a thorough definition of his subsequent position in contrast to, say, Wright Mills (who embraced the New Left) or Sidney Hook (who repudiated it) is a serious flaw in this book.
Second, Brown tends to see the resurgence of the Right as an intellectual movement largely through Hofstadter’s eyes, as alarming in volume but philosophically insignificant by unit. This underestimation of the hitting power of Right intellectuals has been one of the chronic failures of the American Left; and as Hofstadter’s own attitude demonstrates, there is no real cure for this failure, since the logic of Left politics actually requires that intellectuals on the Right be defined, ipso facto, as an impossibility. Brown remarks pretty sharply that whether it was “out of fear, anger or fantasy, the Far Right inspired Hofstadter to write some of the most original studies of American political culture ever produced.” But “the Left never provoked such a productive reaction.” Hofstadter preferred “to instruct radicals, not—as he had conservatives—to diagnose their mental tics.”
So, despite the fact that Hofstadter lived his entire life “in an era dominated by liberal politics,” he insisted on describing himself as “politically alienated.” And from what, exactly? Born to the modest privileges of the urban upper-middle-class, he treated peace, plenty, and truth as the normal setting of human life, and intolerance, hypocrisy, and inequality as intolerable aberrations, when the norm of human history has been exactly the other way around. While making a university subsidized apartment on the upper East Side his home and a place on Cape Cod his summer retreat, and bathing in book contracts worth $1.3 million dollars at the time of death, Hofstadter nonetheless had never a good word to say about the nation, the politics, or the economic system which guaranteed his entitlements to these things. And despite the Andes of corpses which “a more severe brand of Marxism” piled up around the world in the 20th century, it was not the abominations of Stalin but the infelicities of Abraham Lincoln’s prose which summoned forth his most vivid malediction. The vital power of Richard Hofstadter’s oeuvre lay in the grace and color of his writing. But it was an almost entirely negative power, in the service of a freedom he wanted for himself, but not necessarily for anyone else.
Allen C. Guelzo is Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era and director of the Civil War Era Studies program at Gettysburg College. He is at work on a book about the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858.
1. Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost: England Before the Industrial Age, 2nd ed. (Scribners, 1971), pp. 17, 22.
2. Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (Knopf, 1963), pp. 291-292.
3. Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (Knopf, 1948), p. 131.
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