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Featured Review
| David S. Brown. Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2006. Pp. xxiii, 291. $27.50.
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| Professional historians will find this book engaging, illuminating, and at times frustrating. David S. Brown carefully examines Richard Hofstadter's personal life, skillfully locates him in his changing cultural and political contexts, and provides fair-minded critical analysis of his brilliant and influential work. Given that Hofstadter's writings ranged over American history from 1750 to 1970 and challenged many prevailing interpretations, accurately characterizing and gauging the lasting significance of his contributions is no mean feat. Although specialists inevitably will quarrel with some of Brown's judgments, his wide-ranging research and judicious assessments make his study a solid guide to one of the twentieth century's most important historians. |
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Hofstadter (1916–1970) was born and raised in Buffalo, son of a Polish-born Jewish father and a mother of German Protestant descent. He was christened in her Lutheran faith, sang in the church choir, and gravitated toward Judaism only after his mother's death in 1926. In his own words, Hofstadter "spent a lot of years acquiring a Jewish identity, which is more cultural than religious" (p. 53). That identity remained murky to many in the American historical profession and even at Columbia University, where he earned his Ph.D. and taught for almost his entire career. Hofstadter grew to be at home in New York and refused numerous offers from other universities. Yet he remained suspicious of the city's cosmopolitan parochialism—of all American parochialisms among the most constricting because among the least self-conscious—and gently recommended trips west of the Hudson to those who railed against southern and western hayseeds. Many of his richest insights as a historian derived from his status as an outsider surprised to find, as the categories changed beneath his feet, that he had become an insider. He worked hard to achieve the intellectual independence that became his hallmark; his taste for irony came naturally. |
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Hofstadter's first experience of anti-intellectualism, a cultural malady he diagnosed and deplored in his most incisive critiques of American conservatism, came in the 1930s. As a student at the University of Buffalo, Hofstadter followed the lead of his future wife, the novelist Felice Swados, into labor radicalism and the interwar peace movement, then, in 1938, into the Communist Party. He left four months later, after the Moscow trials, she after the Nazi-Soviet Pact. The intolerance and intransigence of their erstwhile allies imparted a lasting skepticism about all forms of political fanaticism. |
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Family pressure led Hofstadter to study law; boredom led him to pursue doctoral studies in history. At Columbia his most enduring influences were Henry Steele Commager and Merle Curti, particularly the latter's course "The History of American Social Thought," which shaped Hofstadter's scholarly career. His undergraduate senior thesis had caused Hofstadter to doubt Charles Beard's account of the Civil War. His first experiences with independent research at Columbia, seminar papers on the New Deal and on Thomas Jefferson, disillusioned him about two of America's sacred cows. His dissertation, which became Social Darwinism in American Thought (1944), took on two others, individualism and capitalism. Hofstadter was already developing the independent critical spirit animating the book that established his reputation (and won him the first of his two Pulitzer Prizes) and for which he remains best known, The American Political Tradition (1948). A caustic dissection of long-honored figures ranging from Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, John C. Calhoun, and Abraham Lincoln to Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, and both Roosevelts, Hofstadter's essay collection has sold over a million copies and opened the eyes of generations of readers to personal foibles and ironic twists missed by earlier historians. Against hero worshippers who had lionized America's "great men," and against progressive historians who had embraced self-styled champions of "the people" against the villainous "interests," Hofstadter ventured a series of portraits rendered in subtle shades of gray. Like the satirist H. L. Mencken, whom he admired and sought consciously to emulate, Hofstadter preferred to puncture myths perpetuated by others. |
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