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

[John W.]

I think anyone who diligently reads this mailing list should get university 
credit.  :-)



At 12:20 PM 2/1/2008, C. G. Estabrook wrote:

>[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