[Peace-discuss] The Kennedys' fake liberalism... [reformatted]

[C. G. Estabrook]

[David's usual careful reading leads him to remind us, in the particular 
case of Richard Hofstadter, of the complexities of US political history 
and ideology.  It's not a matter of good Kennedy liberals perennially 
facing nasty Nixonian conservatives.  Here Jon Weiner -- professor of 
history at the University of California, Irvine, and a Los Angeles radio 
host who wrote "Historians in Trouble: Plagiarism, Fraud, and Politics 
in the Ivory Tower" -- reviews David S. Brown, "Richard Hofstadter: An 
Intellectual Biography" (U. of Chicago Press, 2006), and indicates some 
of the complexities on display in the case of one 20th century American 
public intellectual. (And note the reference to Hedges.) I think Weiner 
is perhaps too generous in his interpretation of those complexities in 
his conclusion, where he praises "the spirit of [Hofstadter's] writing" 
and "the lucidity and beauty of his prose" as what "gives his work an 
enduring vitality": the rest is silence. --CGE]

	America, Through a Glass Darkly
	by JON WIENER
	[from the October 23, 2006 issue]

David Brown's biography of Richard Hofstadter has attracted an unusual 
amount of attention for a revised dissertation, riding the wave of 
nostalgia that surrounds the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and 
liberal icon of the 1950s and '60s. At the New York Times Book Review, 
the book was the subject of the longest review of the year, and one of 
the most admiring, written by the editor himself, Sam Tanenhaus, who 
declared Hofstadter "more relevant than ever." The New Republic ran an 
even longer piece by Bancroft Prize winner Sean Wilentz about 
Hofstadter's "enormous mystique today." That mystique reflects a deeper 
nostalgia for a time when historians who addressed the political issues 
of the day (among them Hofstadter, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and C. Vann 
Woodward) had immense intellectual authority and a wide readership, a 
time when essays written with style and grace were honored and a time 
when writing about great white men did not make you look obsolete or 
reactionary.

The Hofstadter nostalgia boom is also fueled by readers who find in his 
work a foreshadowing of their own anxiety about the irrationality of 
populist movements. His feeling that populism posed a danger to 
democracy seems to liberals and conservatives alike to speak to our own 
time--as indeed in many ways it does. Many writers seeking to understand 
the 2004 "red state" phenomenon turned to Hofstadter's essays on "status 
anxiety" and "the paranoid style in American politics"--especially after 
George W. Bush mobilized his supporters with a good-old-boy rhetoric 
that was proudly stupid.

There's no question that Hofstadter's writing was wonderful. But his 
understanding of the American past now seems narrow and flawed, and 
marked, inevitably, by the preoccupations of a generation that lived 
through Hitler and Stalin, by a gnawing anxiety that some kind of 
American fascism, a vicious right-wing movement coming out of the 
heartland, was not only possible but likely. (Such anxiety has not, to 
be sure, entirely dissipated among American liberals; early next year 
journalist Chris Hedges is publishing a book, American Fascists, about 
the Christian right.)

Hofstadter died in 1970, just as a new generation of historians was 
transforming the profession by turning away from the study of elites. 
Inspired by British historians of the working class like E.P. Thompson, 
and by American New Left historians like Herbert Gutman, they began 
exploring, and celebrating, how history was made by ordinary Americans: 
by working-class immigrants in the tenements, the taverns and the 
factories, and by African-Americans and other oppressed groups. This 
"history from below" represented a defiant challenge to Hofstadter's 
kind of history.

But if Hofstadter seems newly relevant today, it's not for the reasons 
imagined by Tanenhaus and others. Despite his fame and success, he was 
always more of an outsider than his establishment admirers have 
understood. He disdained the 1950s celebration of consensus; he was 
deeply skeptical of the liberal heroes, especially FDR; he was never 
much of an anti-Communist; and when the student antiwar movement 
excoriated the hypocrisies and failures of the universities, Hofstadter, 
virtually alone among his entire cohort, refused to condemn the students 
and agreed with them on some key issues, even as he rejected their 
militant tactics. Thus while Hofstadter was in some ways a predictable 
member of his generation, in others he was politically more complicated 
and intellectually more surprising. It is these elements, rather than 
his particular arguments, that make him significant for us today.

Hofstadter was born in Buffalo in 1916 and came of age in the era of the 
Popular Front. He went to college at the University of Buffalo and 
became president of his university's chapter of the National Student 
League, a Communist-led antiwar organization that, according to a 
government report quoted by Brown, "attempted physical disruption of 
campus activities which led to arrest, suspensions and expulsions of its 
members" (foreshadowing his students at Columbia in '68). In his early 
twenties, he went to Mississippi with his passionate left-wing wife, 
Felice Swados, and visited black sharecroppers at Delta Cooperative, the 
subject of a famous series of photographs by Dorothea Lange for the Farm 
Security Administration. His 1938 master's thesis at Columbia was a 
fierce indictment of the New Deal's Agricultural Adjustment Act for 
supporting Southern planters rather than poor farmers.

The Spanish Civil War was raging during his graduate school days, and in 
October 1938 he responded, as many of his peers did, by joining the 
Communist Party--in his case, the CP unit at Columbia. "My fundamental 
reason for joining," he wrote his brother-in-law, "is that I don't like 
capitalism and want to get rid of it.... I join without enthusiasm but 
with a sense of obligation." (Brown does not quote the letter, which 
Eric Foner cites in a chapter on Hofstadter in his book Who Owns 
History?) Four months later, in February 1939, he quit the party. His 
reason, according to fellow student Kenneth Stampp (who later achieved 
renown with his history of slavery, The Peculiar Institution): "He 
couldn't stand the people." But even after that, in October 1939, he 
wrote his brother-in-law (in another letter not quoted by Brown): "I 
hate capitalism and everything that goes with it." In 1941 he got his 
first full-time job, directly as a result of anti-Communism: He replaced 
a faculty member forced out by City College because of alleged Communist 
Party ties: Jack Foner, father of Eric. (Eric would later fill the same 
chair at Columbia that Hofstadter had held. You might call that the 
irony of history.) Three years later Hofstadter published his first 
book, a blistering exposé of capitalist ideology, Social Darwinism in 
American Thought.

The turning point for Hofstadter was 1945: That year Felice died of 
cancer, depriving him of the most important leftist connection in his 
life, and Columbia hired him. He was 30 years old. The transformation 
from 1930s radical activist to 1950s liberal intellectual was under way.

The American Political Tradition, published in 1948 and widely regarded 
as Hofstadter's best book, is still selling briskly almost sixty years 
later: Recently it had an Amazon ranking of 4,400, which would be envied 
by most historians with books on the market today. (Brown's, for 
example, was at 22,000 on the same day.) Knopf's 1948 publicity marketed 
the book as a work of consensus history: "In this age of political 
extremism, this young and brilliant Columbia historian searches out the 
common ground among all American parties and factions." In fact the book 
was more subtle, and much more interesting, than that. Hofstadter wrote 
the book from a vantage point on the left. While others, like Daniel 
Boorstin, celebrated consensus, Hofstadter was openly critical. It opens 
with a description of an "increasingly passive and spectatorial" state 
of mind in postwar America, a country dominated by "corporate monopoly," 
its citizens "bereft of a coherent and plausible body of belief" and 
adrift in a "rudderless and demoralized state."

The book consists of twelve biographical portraits of key American 
political figures, ranging from the slaveholder John Calhoun to the 
abolitionist Wendell Phillips, from the free-market Republican Herbert 
Hoover to the welfare-state Democrat FDR, from Jefferson the patrician 
to Andrew Jackson the common man. Hofstadter's thesis was that all 
shared fundamental assumptions about the goodness of private property 
and the value of "progress." The archaic assumptions of The American 
Political Tradition are all too evident today. Hofstadter believed he 
was studying something called "the American mind" when he profiled 
American Presidents, and that their stories and those of other elite 
white men were representative of our political tradition. But while 
presidential biography may be of limited value--to the study, albeit not 
the marketing, of American history--several of Hofstadter's essays in 
The American Political Tradition remain compelling works of the genre 
that have seldom been surpassed.

The contrast with recent presidential biographies, like David 
McCullough's hagiographic book on Truman, could hardly be more stark. 
Hofstadter's gaze was intensely skeptical, especially when it was 
trained on the liberal icon of his own time, FDR: Hofstadter's chapter 
on him is titled "the patrician as opportunist." He objected to the 
portrait of Lincoln as a Christ-like figure who died for the sin of 
slavery, depicting him instead as the master of his own myth and as a 
canny politician, especially on the question of abolition. The Wendell 
Phillips chapter remains a revelation--even today, when the left 
famously dominates academia, who would have the chutzpah to put this 
abolitionist and socialist on the same plane as Jefferson, Lincoln and 
FDR? Here we see most clearly the traces of the radical sensibility of 
Hofstadter's youth. The essay is unique in its frank admiration for a 
voice of "resistance and rebellion," a champion of the oppressed whose 
refusal to compromise "forced him into a deeper and deeper isolation" as 
Reconstruction gave way to the Gilded Age. The chapter ends with an 
elderly Phillips invited to speak at Harvard, and taking the occasion 
not to heal the breach with his mainstream critics but rather to indict 
the assembled scholars for their moral cowardice. Hofstadter's 
admiration for this stance is unmistakable.

The American consensus that Hofstadter bemoaned in The American 
Political Tradition was turning more aggressive and suspicious the year 
the book was published, as redbaiting spread across America. Hofstadter 
refused an invitation to teach at Berkeley in 1950 because he opposed 
the loyalty oath imposed by the University of California Regents, but he 
also refused to condemn the firing of Communists at the University of 
Washington in 1949. His position was the mainstream liberal one: 
Communists opposed freedom, so they should be denied teaching jobs. This 
is problematic for his biographer, because Hofstadter himself had joined 
the Party as a student, and other people who had done the same, like 
Daniel Boorstin, were being subpoenaed, asked to name names and fired if 
they refused (Boorstin named his Harvard college roommates). The late 
James Shenton, a colleague of Hofstadter's at Columbia, told Brown that 
Hofstadter did not take a stand against firing Communists because "Dick 
was afraid at the time." It's still a mystery why Hofstadter was never 
subpoenaed--Brown sheds no light on that crucial question, although 
others speculate that the FBI may have missed him because he had been a 
Party member for all of four months.

McCarthyism loomed large in the background of Hofstadter's next book, 
The Age of Reform, published in 1955. There, Hofstadter searched the 
past for the roots of the "conspiracy theory" and "paranoid tendencies" 
that he saw in popular anti-Communism. The book won Hofstadter his first 
Pulitzer and remains, in Alan Brinkley's words, "the most influential 
book ever published on the history of twentieth-century America." The 
book's most enduring contribution, Sean Wilentz rightly argues, is its 
re-interpretation of the New Deal, not as part of the nineteenth-century 
reform tradition in America, as most historians saw it, but rather as an 
"outrageous departure" from it. The old reformers ended up with 
prohibition as their great achievement; the New Deal, by contrast, 
focused not on moral campaigns against evil but on pragmatic and 
practical aims. It eschewed ideology and focused on results--and the 
results included the welfare state, the Wagner Act for labor and 
Keynsian policy for the budget. It's still a bracing interpretation.

Hofstadter's argument that the historical roots of McCarthyism lay in 
the Populist tradition, on the other hand, is simply wrong. He argued 
that the Populist movement of the 1890s was deeply irrational and 
essentially proto-fascist. The Populists saw the principal source of 
injustice and economic suffering in rural America in what they called 
"the money power." In Hofstadter's analysis, this was evidence of 
irrational paranoia, of "psychic disturbances." Moreover, Hofstadter 
argued that these denunciations of "the money power" were deeply 
anti-Semitic. Alas, his evidence of Populist anti-Semitism was 
embarrassingly thin: a handful of lurid quotes from a few Populist 
leaders about the "House of Rothschild" and "Shylock," and an argument 
that Henry Ford's anti-Semitism came from his background as "a Michigan 
farm boy who had been liberally exposed to Populist notions."

The problem with this analysis, aside from the paucity of evidence, was 
that anti-Semitic rhetoric was hardly a monopoly of rural Midwestern 
Protestants in post-Civil War America. The Protestant elites in East 
Coast cities were probably more anti-Semitic, and Irish Catholic 
immigrants in Eastern cities had no love for Jews either. The larger 
problem stemmed from Hofstadter's theoretical framework. Today 
Hofstadter is regarded primarily as a great writer with a powerful 
personal vision. But he was engaged with the most advanced social 
science theory of his day, and he pioneered the application of theory to 
history--the move that many of his fans today consider the downfall of 
the profession. The Age of Reform was framed around the theory of 
"status politics," which came from an essay by German sociologist Max 
Weber, published in the United States by Hofstadter's Columbia colleague 
and friend the radical sociologist C. Wright Mills. Hofstadter's "status 
politics" thesis held that the Populists were driven to irrationality 
and paranoia by anxiety over their declining status in an America where 
rural life and its values were being supplanted by an urban industrial 
society. Populism, in this view, was a form of reactionary resistance to 
modernity. Here Hofstadter was the Jewish New York intellectual 
anxiously looking for traces of proto-fascism somewhere in middle 
America. He saw Joe McCarthy as a potential American Hitler and believed 
he had found the roots of American fascism among rural Protestants in 
the Midwest. It was history by analogy--but the analogy didn't work.

None of these problems escaped Hofstadter's critics at the time. In The 
Nation, William Appleman Williams argued that Hofstadter's conception of 
status politics defined opposition to the status quo as fundamentally 
irrational while the irrationalities of liberal capitalism went 
unexamined. In 1967 Michael Rogin published a powerful book, The 
Intellectuals and McCarthy: The Radical Specter, showing that the people 
who voted for McCarthy, by and large, were not former Populists but 
rather upper-middle-class suburban Republicans. And it was not just 
leftists like Williams and Rogin who questioned Hofstadter's "status 
politics" thesis. One of C. Vann Woodward's greatest essays, "The 
Populist Heritage and the Intellectual," insisted that the Populist 
program of the 1890s was far from irrational, that the Populists were 
not proto-McCarthyites, that many McCarthy supporters came from 
"college-bred, established-wealth, old family" sources. But if 
Hofstadter's argument was challenged effectively at the time, his 
anxiety about an American fascism stayed with him for the rest of his life.

Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, the 1963 book that won Hofstadter 
his second Pulitzer Prize, was another attempt to identify the 
historical origins of what Hofstadter saw as the key threat to 
liberalism in his own time. The book enjoyed a revival in the Age of 
Reagan, and is cited today at a rate that seems to be increasing 
exponentially. But the book seems mistaken about the period in which it 
was published. Anti-intellectualism was hardly a major problem in the 
United States in 1964. American intellectuals in the early '60s had 
never had it so good: Universities were growing as never before, 
Congress provided lavish funding for elite institutions and professors 
like Hofstadter were highly paid and won big book contracts. Popular 
magazines followed the hot debates among intellectuals--Daniel Bell on 
the "end of ideology," David Riesman on "the lonely crowd," C. Wright 
Mills on "the power elite," Irving Howe on "the age of conformity," C. 
Vann Woodward on "the strange career of Jim Crow," Michael Harrington on 
"the other America." As Russell Jacoby argued in The Last Intellectuals, 
the 1950s were the golden age for liberal thinkers like Hofstadter. Yet 
something about that era was clearly troubling him.

In the book's first chapter, "Anti-Intellectualism in Our Time," 
Hofstadter explained what was on his mind: the defeat of Adlai Stevenson 
twelve years earlier, in 1952. Hofstadter had been a passionate 
supporter of Stevenson, whom he described in the book as "a politician 
of uncommon mind." Eisenhower's victory was an "apocalypse for 
intellectuals"--a typically striking phrase, but wildly off-base. 
Stevenson was intelligent and articulate, but he was no intellectual. He 
wasn't even especially liberal: He backed away from Truman's call for 
national healthcare; he supported the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act; and 
he was no friend of black people, choosing as his 1952 running mate 
Alabama Senator John Sparkman, a militant segregationist. (Hofstadter 
should have noticed, because he supported the civil rights movement and 
joined the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery march, as Sean Wilentz recently 
pointed out.) When it came to Stevenson, Hofstadter's vaunted skepticism 
and irony evaporated.

Anti-Intellectualism was another of Hofstadter's anxious searches for 
the roots of American fascism, finding it this time in the evangelical 
Protestants of the nineteenth century and then in the fundamentalists of 
the 1920s. Rereading it today, that search seems misguided: McCarthyism 
was not essentially a movement against intellectuals. True, there were 
loyalty oaths for professors and purges of faculty leftists, but the 
anti-Communists devoted much more energy to purging Hollywood radicals 
and the leftist union activists--a crucial base for New Deal politics. 
Yes, McCarthy targeted Harvard, but he spent more time attacking the 
State Department and then, notoriously, the Army. And Hofstadter's 
conclusion that the McCarthyite anti-intellectualism of the 1950s had 
its origins in the evangelical Protestantism of the nineteenth century 
was fundamentally mistaken. Hofstadter's friend Woodward, after reading 
the book, wrote to him privately, "Dick, you just can't do this."

Four years later, however, some readers of Anti-Intellectualism in 
American Life saw the book in a new light, against the backdrop of the 
1968 student uprising at Hofstadter's Columbia. There, antiwar radicals 
occupied university buildings and denounced "university complicity in 
the war." Liberal intellectuals were horrified by the spectacle of 
students challenging the university, and they went so far as to liken 
the demonstrators to Brownshirts. They were decidedly less alarmed by 
Columbia's repressive response. The administration brought 1,000 cops on 
campus to clear the buildings; 712 students were arrested, 148 injured 
and nearly 400 filed police brutality complaints. Nothing like that had 
ever happened on an American campus, although much worse was to come at 
Kent State and other schools. It's not surprising that Hofstadter agreed 
to speak at the official Columbia commencement later that spring. 
Nevertheless, it's sad to picture him rising to give his speech, while 
forty uniformed policemen stood guard and 300 students walked out in 
protest to join 2,000 other people at an antiwar counter-commencement 
nearby.

In other ways, however, Hofstadter's response to the student uprising at 
Columbia in 1968 set him apart from the liberal critics who regarded the 
student movement as dangerously anti-intellectual. While his friends in 
Morningside Heights carried on about the students and saw themselves 
manning the barricades against the new barbarians, Hofstadter opened the 
door and invited his students in to talk with him about their goals and 
strategies. Eric Foner, one of those students, recalled that "his 
graduate students, many of whom were actively involved in the civil 
rights and antiwar movements, were having as much influence on his 
evolving interests and outlook as he was on theirs." Indeed, the year 
after Columbia '68, Hofstadter was rethinking his earlier work. He 
privately conceded that his critics had been right about The Age of 
Reform; in a letter he declared that the book's status thesis was (in 
Brown's paraphrase) "flawed and unusable" and that "nativism and 
anti-Semitism permeated American society in the 1890s." In another 
letter written the same year, he declared that his effort in 
Anti-Intellectualism in American Life to explain the present had (in 
Brown's paraphrase) "clearly missed the mark." Here was another 
surprising and unusual quality: a willingness to reassess his work and 
find its flaws.

The most remarkable of his relationships with students after the '68 
events was with his research assistant, Michael Wallace (who went on to 
win the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Gotham, a history of New York City). In 
the spring of 1968, in the midst of the demonstrations, Wallace, a PhD 
candidate, had unlocked the door to Fayerweather Hall, the history 
building, so that his fellow student radicals could occupy it. A few 
months later, Hofstadter invited him to collaborate on a documentary 
history on American violence.

Thus the intellectual fruit of the trauma of '68 for Hofstadter was not 
a history of student radicals as Hitler Youth but rather a partnership 
with one of those radical students that produced a powerful exposé of 
American racial and class violence. In Foner's words, Hofstadter and 
Wallace's American Violence: A Documentary History "utterly contradicted 
the consensus vision of a nation placidly evolving without serious 
disagreements." This intellectual turn is the most surprising of all in 
the Hofstadter story. American Violence was the last book Hofstadter 
published before he died in 1970. He was only 54. (An unfinished work, 
America at 1750, was published posthumously in 1971.)

Michael Kazin recently warned against viewing Hofstadter as "an elegant 
ruin from a benighted age." Brown agrees, arguing that we need 
Hofstadter to understand the tormented politics of our time. In this 
view, Hofstadter may have been wrong about yesterday's Populists, but he 
was right about today's Republicans. The rise of George Bush is said to 
mark the return of status politics, because Republican majorities depend 
on the Evangelical Protestant "values voters" of the Midwest and 
South--former Populist areas! Facing economic decline, they blame their 
problems on the "liberal elite" and vote for prayer in schools and guns 
everywhere else.

That seems like a thin lesson to draw from a thick body of work. 
Hofstadter is worth reading in 2006 not so much because of his specific 
arguments but rather because of the spirit of his writing, which brings 
together anxieties about the dark side of American politics with a 
skeptical attitude toward conventional wisdom. That spirit, along with 
the lucidity and beauty of his prose, gives his work an enduring vitality.

This article can be found on the web at
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20061023/wiener

David Green wrote:
> [4] "People like Lippmann and Hofstadter would be viewed as pinkos in 
> today's media right-wing discourse."
> 
> I agree with Carl about Lippmann, and the biography written of him by 
> liberal journalist Ronald Steele is a great insight (although 
> unintended) into the cage of liberal doctrine which confined Lippmann 
> and made his later life rather pathetic. But it should be noted, and is 
> very instructive, that this great liberal shaper of American propaganda 
> and public opinion was marginalized for his relatively early opposition 
> (on realist grounds) to the Vietnam war, as was George Kennan, proving 
> that even the most venerated elder statesmen are casually and coldly 
> dispensed with even when they differ only on the tactics that the U.S. 
> should use to rule the world, on who we should kill and when.
>  
> I'd like to revisit Hofstader in order to feel that any of the following 
> is more than speculation. His Social Darwinism in American Life and The 
> American Political Tradition remain classics, the latter particularly 
> remarkable. I believe some have speculated that Hofstadter, who died in 
> 1970, was in the process of becoming a neocon. At the risk of offering 
> an analogy to Kennedyesque wishfulness, I would like to think not. His 
> essay on the "paranoid style" is a classic in its own right, but also 
> misdirected (or perhaps opportunistically directed) liberals into a 
> facile equation between populism and anti-Semitism (also done in The Age 
> of Reform), and over-simplifed the whole problem of "right-wing 
> populism," William Jennings Bryan, etc. This could be seen as going down 
> the slippery slope into neocon land, and was probably exploited by 
> Kristol senior, Podhoretz, et al. in their response to the New Left, 
> criticism of Israel (however tepid in the late 60s), etc.
>  
> In spite of my admiration for Hofstadter, and my wish not to think of 
> him as becoming a neocon, I can't imagine him ever being anything more 
> or less than a version of Cold War liberal, although one with a lot more 
> integrity than, say, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. It would be intresting to 
> know where Hofstatder stood on Vietnam, and when.
>  
> DG