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Redefining American History: Ethnicity, Progressive Historiography and the Making of Richard Hofstadter

David Brown
Elizabethtown College

THE DISTINGUISHED Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter possessed a scholarly imagination unusually open to fresh approaches to illuminating the past. In the seven years that separated the publications of American Political Tradition (1948) and The Age of Reform (1955), Hofstadter absorbed new intellectual insights that challenged the Progressive assumptions of his graduate training and borrowed heavily from modern social theory. This involved an effort not merely to reconstruct the course of political and economic transformation but also to recover the mental cultures that shaped and gave meaning to change. It presumed that collective psychology and seemingly irrational pressures provoked responses by historical actors that could not be explained by traditional research strategies. This article will show how, while under the spell of the social sciences, Hofstadter produced the most creative and controversial work of his impressive career. 1
      There is striking evidence of the contrast in Hofstadter's approach to historical writing before and after 1950. His first scholarly publications reflected the Left leanings of an academic generation that came of age in the thirties and his reliance on orthodox secondary source material proved equally uncontroversial. But at the century's mid-point Hofstadter began to assimilate into his work pioneering methodological strategies advanced primarily by European and American social theorists. He delved selectively into the "soft" sciences, finding in the fields of sociology, psychology and (to a lesser extent) anthropology disciplines that promised a more complete unveiling of the hopes, dreams, resentments, and emotional motives of historical actors. They further equipped Hofstadter with a complex interpretive framework and sophisticated vocabulary that emphasized the hitherto neglected roles of status anxiety, political paranoia and anti-intellectualism in American history. Progressive scholars had not been unfamiliar with the social sciences, indeed much of this generation's work—particularly that of Charles Beard—made something of a fetish of economic analysis. But the seminal works on social theory that made such an impact on postwar thinkers—the corpus of scholarship produced by Freud, Weber and Mannheim—was either unavailable or too novel to be fully absorbed by the Progressives. Although Hofstadter himself never adopted the techniques of social scientific research (the vogue of "quanto history" including statistical sampling and computer dependent studies did not influence his work), he incorporated its literature and more accessible insights into his scholarship. He never shied away from trading proof for insight, nor did he exchange a felicitous prose style for one encumbered by the requirements of "scientific" history. His most compelling models were superb writers—Edmund Wilson, H. L. Mencken and Lionel Trilling—and he remained committed to history as a literary art. 2
      Tracing Hofstadter's development as a thinker requires attention to the intellectual milieu at Columbia university in Morningside Heights. Daniel Bell remembers that "it was Hamilton Hall and in the Claremont Avenue, Riverside Drive, we used to call the Upper West Side Kibbutz" where the professors in the humanities and social sciences exchanged ideas.1 Like Bell and colleague Seymour Martin Lipset, Hofstadter was intensely receptive to the impressive outpouring of commentary that had begun to challenge traditional social scientific thought. His postwar introduction to the work of Mannheim, Weber, Robert Merton, and the Frankfurt School pointed to original efforts in the scholarly art of unveiling the irrational impulses of human activity. 3
      The anti-communist agitation of the postwar period further shaped Hofstadter's historical technique. His skeptical opinion of popular action—evident in private correspondence in the thirties—was exasperated by the war, the holocaust and finally by McCarthyism. "We knew about the concentration camps," Bell remembers, "it was a fear of mass action, a fear of too much activism to the extent there was a political set of attitudes which shaped the way we looked at the world. It was simply a wariness of mass movements and I think this was very important to Dick."2 In the social sciences Hofstadter discovered an ambitious framework that held out the promise both of discovering the roots of recent ideological unrest and of establishing a scholarly response to the McCarthyite challenge to academic freedom. 4
      The new methodology reflected further the increasing influence of Jewish scholars in the academy. David Hollinger reminds us that prior to the Second World War "Jews were suspect in academia partly because many Anglo-Protestants thought them socially crude and aggressive, and politically radical."3 Jewish professors were customarily ghettoized in the social sciences and barred from the culture transforming disciplines in the humanities. In the forties, however, these barriers were coming down and Hofstadter's American Political Tradition joined Alfred Kazin's On Native Grounds (1942) and Trilling's The Liberal Imagination (1950) as seminal works on American history, literature and aesthetics written by Jews or half-Jews. At Columbia—where Hofstadter and Trilling worked—the sociology department included prominent Jewish scholars Bell, Lipset, Merton, and Paul Lazarsfeld, and quickly established itself as the American avant-garde for social scientific thought. Its search for the authoritarian and anti-intellectual roots of gentile behavior influenced Hofstadter and nurtured his particular use of the social sciences. In this case, physical environment proved critical. It is difficult to imagine the intellectual communities in Progressive bastions such as Madison or Berkeley providing warm support for The Age of Reform or Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. "Columbia, so long resistant to the Jewish population in the city," Hollinger writes, became in the forties and the fifties "suddenly so responsive to many of the nation's most prominent Jewish scholars."4 5
      This was not the first time Columbia professors had redefined the historiographical landscape. In the first decades of the century Morningside Heights historians James Harvey Robinson, Charles Beard, James T. Shotwell and Lynn Thorndike had emphasized the importance of social, intellectual, and economic forces over the arid political and constitutional studies of their predecessors. The "New History" permitted scholars to move beyond legal documents and to seek fresh paths to the past that placed a premium on the creative skills of the historian. Frederick Jackson Turner supported the topical recasting of his profession, advising J. Franklin Jameson that "in order to bring our work into more vital touch with current interests and needs...we should enter the overlapping fields more—the borderland between history in its older conception, and economics, politics, sociology, psychology, geography, etc." 5 While Hofstadter and his Columbia colleagues responded to Turner's appeal by producing scholarship "in vital touch with current interests and needs," they veered sharply from the type of studies anticipated by the previous generation. Contrasts in ethnicity (Progressive historiography was largely written by gentiles while Jewish scholars were associated with the social sciences) and perspective (the older group accepted the primacy of economic issues, while their heirs were receptive to the nuances of psychological motives) ensured that the New History as conceived in 1900 would be dramatically different than that written a half-century later. 6
      In light of the methodological upheaval reshaping the profession, Hofstadter renewed his critical dialogue with the Progressive historians. In "Beard and the Constitution: The History of an Idea" (American Quarterly, 1950), Hofstadter applauded Beard's efforts to broaden the interpretive framework of the field by producing a more creative, critical, and complex history. However, he was less sympathetic to Beard's peers who, he insisted, had failed to build upon the impressive insights of the pre-eminent figure in their profession. Had Beard's "technique been seized upon by his own generation and refined and applied systematically to the major events and movements in American history," Hofstadter wrote, "the resulting contribution to historical understanding would have been immense. Historical writing today—and I refer here not to the narrative art but to the great body of monographic investigation whose tradition is that of the social 'sciences'—is still wanting in method, in no small part because of a curious failure to explore the vistas opened by Beard."6 Had Progressive thinkers embraced the findings of sociologists, psychologists, and anthropologists, Hofstadter continued, they would have incorporated the effects of social pressures and the impact of fluctuations in status on the human psyche thus going far beyond Beard's illuminating—but simplistic—economic determinism. They would, in other words, have ascended the scholarly high-ground occupied by the post World War I generation. 7
      Though a critical effort, "Beard and the Constitution" conceded the path-breaking quality of the best Progressive scholarship and reflected Hofstadter's admiration for Beard. The same cannot be said of his skillful dismantling of Frederick Jackson Turner. In the 1949 essay, "Turner and the Frontier Myth," Hofstadter dismissed the Wisconsin historian's sectional paradigm of the past as a pseudo-scholarly expression of the Bryan campaigns. Hofstadter argued that Turner's frontier thesis sought to overturn the then dominant view of history popularized by Herbert Baxter Adams' insistence that American political institutions were products of Anglo-Saxon civilization, and that democratic instincts were genetically passed along the Northern-European/North American lines of colonization. Hofstadter noted that Adams' "germ theory," had employed language evocative of his generation's post-Darwinian efforts to associate its work with contemporary trends in the sciences—not unlike his own post-Freudian turn toward a social scientific vocabulary. He then went on to examine what happened when Adams' dominance in the field gave way to Midwestern scholars who expressed an interest in regional rather than racial interpretations of American identity. These scholars were convinced that a residue of pioneer-like conditions—presumed to encourage democratic institutions—combined with the rise of the great Eastern monopolies proved that democracy owed more to geography than genes. But Hoftadter contended that in repealing Adams' explicitly racial theory Turner and his disciples replaced it with one implicitly so. The Wisconsin historians' thesis authenticated the democratic credentials of Anglo, German, and Scandinavian Americans who had pushed into the nation's interior. Concurrently, it implied that immigrants living in the East—this included Slavic peoples, Italians and Jews—were somehow less American than those residing on the "frontier." 8
      Hofstadter further noted that aside from a crude racial determinism, Turner's work unwittingly aided the captains of industry. The frontier thesis—born of "the Western agrarian revolt" and informed by a "Populist edge"—eventually "became identified with a complacent nationalist romanticism" absorbed by agrarian apologists and the promoters of industry, empire, immigration restriction, and the anti-labor bloc. Ideologically the frontier thesis and its scholarly legacy served the right-of-center "appealing to the common desire to root native history in native soil."7 Hofstadter thus conclued that the spirit of Turner's work offered less of a revision than a re-emphasis of Adams' assertion that the traditions and institutions of new Americans were implicitly un-democratic. 9
      In some quarters of the profession, Hofstadter's critique of Progressive historiography signaled his retreat from the "radical" promise he had exhibited in his first two books and a growing support for neoconservatism. Merle Curti, who held the Frederick Jackson Turner Chair of history at Wisconsin and was a personal friend of Charles Beard, regretted his former student's attack on the Progressive heritage. Hofstadter assured Curti that whatever interpretive differences he had with his historical fathers, he respected Beard's intellectual contributions—but not Turner's:
I think the economic interpretation business has been over-done, that we have grown too sophisticated to make it as central as [Beard] did in 1913, but it seems to me to have been the most refreshing and air-clearing influence in the history of Am. historical writing. [F]ar better influence, for example, than the Turner frontier obsession, which seems to me to have a pound of false-hood for every few ounces of truth in it."8
 However, Hofstadter's warm feelings for Beard did little to alleviate Curti's concern that his most gifted student had abandoned an informed radical approach to the past. Wisconsin doctoral candidate, Richard Kirkendall, ratified Curti's disenchantment with the retreat of reform-minded historians: "Your observation about Hofstadter's relationship to neo-conservatism is certainly true...among the younger generation liberalism is all but dead. These people share many liberal values, but liberalism to them connotes first of all naiveté—tender mindedness—a failure to recognize the 'sinfulness of men.'"9		 10
      Kirkendall's comments address a cultural shift in American intellectual life. The views once held by midwestern progressives were now attacked as racist, xenophobic and culturally parochial. "The central weakness of Turner's thesis," Hofstadter insisted, "was in its intellectual isolationism" reflecting his generation's failure to assess "immigration and ethnic heterogeneity."10 While Curti and Wisconsin colleagues Fred Harvey Harrington, William B. Hesseltine and Howard K. Beale remained committed to the progressive faith, Hofstadter's skeptical opinion of popular democracy as a force for constructive social change distanced him from the radicalism of his young manhood. 11
      Ironically, the abandonment of old historiographical allegiances permitted Hofstadter to take advantage of the social scientific strategies suggested by the Progressives. The materialist model that informed the older school, however, mattered less to Hofstadter then non-economic factors of historical activity. He gleaned from the sharp political battles of the thirties that a hard Left analysis emphasizing the prominence of economic motives could not adequately explain the decade's dramatic ideological divisions. Rather, Hofstadter found himself attracted to the irrational behavior of historical figures in their quest to develop "social mythologies" as a prelude to sustaining popular beliefs. "For many of us," Hofstadter wrote
an interest in studying the formation and development of ideologies was a natural intellectual response to the conflict waging around us. But to a detached observer these ideologies were far more interesting for their extraordinary appeal to various types of individuals than they were for their rational or philosophic content. I found myself, therefore, becoming interested in individual and social character types, in social mythologies and styles of thought as they reveal and affect character, and in politics as a sphere of behavior into which personal and private motives are projected."11
 The ideological turmoil that sharpened partisan activity in the thirties did not subside with the conclusion of the Second World War but rather intensified during the early years of the Cold War. The policy of containment directed towards the Soviet Union and the search for internal enemies at home established the character of political culture in the fifties. As the full import of McCarthyism made itself felt, Hofstadter once again discovered "social character types" projecting their "personal and private motives" upon the political stage.		 12
      The anti-Communist crusade concerned scholars who had once confidently presumed that the New Deal inaugurated a cultural shift in American attitudes favorable to political, social and intellectual pluralism. Hofstadter was among those profoundly disturbed by the rapid change in political climate, and his colleague, William Leuchtenburg, remembers that the curtailment of civil liberties and attack on academic freedom that darkened the era "led Dick to distrust the mass mind and systems."12 Frank Freidel points out that McCarthyism "was traumatic with Hofstadter as it was with all of us.... All the values, everything we'd stood for; all the groups that we'd been involved in in the 1930s were now being attacked."13 13
      While the struggle to preserve civil liberties overwhelmed some academics, it inspired others. Within a span of three years (1952–55) Hofstadter co-authored two books on education, (The Development and Scope of Higher Education in the United States with C. DeWitt Hardy and The Development of Academic Freedom in the United States with Walter Metzger), wrote the Pulitzer Prize winning Age of Reform, and published two ground-breaking essays, "Democracy and Anti-Intellectualism in America" and "The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt," that anticipated two other books. Combined, this body of work vigorously challenged the majority's right to dictate educational, economic and cultural terms to a high-brow minority. Hofstadter "fought back on behalf of the intellectuals," Freidel noted. "I think [he] more effectively than anyone else was able to engage in this...thoughtful backfire."14 14
      The Development and Scope of Higher Education in the United States is perhaps Hofstadter's least appreciated work. Sponsored by the Commission on Financing Higher Education, it responded to two critical issues then facing the universities: declining public support for professorial autonomy and the democratization of academe initiated by the GI Bill's financial support of World War II veterans. Hofstadter's contribution—essays on the pre-Civil War college and university, graduate and professional training, and the weaknesses of higher-learning in America—appeared to break fresh ground for a scholar preeminently interested in political culture and the history of ideas. But Hofstadter saw in the broad outlines of the project the opportunity to explore the historical roots of McCarthyism and the anti-intellectual bias he detected in American life. In these important respects, the work constituted its author's initial immersion in the material of ideas that led to Age of Reform and its more ambitious offspring Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. 15
      Americans, Hofstadter wrote in Development and Scope, were predominantly concerned with the pragmatic rather than the cultural content of education. He blamed this practical preference on the undiluted egalitarianism that Americans cherished and extended into their private and professional lives—including higher-learning. Hofstadter interpreted the democratization of the college curriculum as a depressing symbol of educational decline declaring "that as the mass of students has grown larger, the proportion who come to college with genuine intellectual and cultural goals has grown smaller." Standards suffered, he continued, as publicly funded universities adopted policies to "admit all graduates of state high schools who have academic records that can be examined without shuddering, with the consequence that an unholy proportion of the freshman classes in these institutions consists of sheer excess baggage. This is 'democracy' with a vengeance."15 16
      One wonders if Hofstadter may have projected his own sense of decline in occupational prestige in Development and Scope. Referring to the college instructor, Hofstadter writes "something in the cultural milieu has steadily deprived him of status gratifications." The American professor could never expect to attain the elevated rank of the mandarin, the Talmudic scholar or the Oxford don. "All these men of knowledge," Hofstadter explained,
have been shown great deference, equal or superior to that given the richest businessmen, high political officials, and high-ranking military officers. In the United States a severely attenuated form of this respect is perhaps granted to a few eminent professors at a few great centers of learning; but even among them it is a dilute affair, and the status gratifications of the stereotyped assistant professor of English at Podunk College are negligible."16
 In its attack on the egalitarian underpinnings of academia, Development and Scope refused to bow to the leveling wind. If the Commission on Financing Higher Education anticipated building good-will between the pedagogues and the public—essential if universities were to fend off red-baiting and defend their appeals for state funding—Hofstadter's pessimistic essay undermined that mission. "One emerges from reading this book," New Republic reviewer Stringfellow Barr wrote, "wondering just how the teaching profession, so weakly organized as a profession, can hope to protect itself and the American people from the know-nothing anti-intellectualism that parades for the moment as anti-Communism."17 In fact Hofstadter was less concerned with teaching as a profession than with the fate of ideas and the men who developed and nurtured them. In linking a history of anti-intellectualism in the schools with disruptions in status, Development and Scope stands as Hofstadter's first tentative attempt to develop a social scientific understanding of the past.		 17
      While working on the higher-education books, Hofstadter contributed to the American Committee for Cultural Freedom's (ACCF's) investigation of intellectual life in America. In 1953 he and Nathan Glazer agreed to edit a manuscript on "Intellectualism in the United States," and though the work never materialized, its proposed themes—"a chapter might be done on the A-I [anti-intellectualism] of...the right.... There might be a chapter on anti-intellectualism in business and labor.... There might be a chapter...on the significance of anti-intellectuals in a popular democracy"—were fully developed by Hofstadter a decade later in Anti-Intellectualism in American Life.18 ACCF members interested in the project—Hofstadter, Glazer, Bell, Sol Stein, Irwin Ross, and Melvin Arnold—considered the study of status deprivation critical for understanding the prevalent antipathy to ideas. While Daniel Boorstin and many other consensus historians praised the pragmatic and intellectually simple roots of the republic, Hofstadter and his ACCF peers interpreted the American suspicion of the thinking-class as a sign of psychological discomfort and drafted a statement declaring that "anti-intellectualism is an aspect of...our inferiority complex." Plans for ACCF activities extended into 1954 when Hofstadter agreed to serve as chairman of a Cultural Freedom forum on "Anti-Intellectualism and the Intellectuals." The discussion, which never occurred, was to include speakers W. H. Auden, James T. Farrell, and Max Eastman.19 18
      Though ACCF efforts bore little fruit, Hofstadter profitably pursued the anti-intellectual theme in his own scholarship. In the spring of 1953 he delivered a paper at Barnard College on the "History of the Conflict of Ideas," later published in the Michigan Alumnus Quarterly Review under the title "Democracy and Anti-Intellectualism in America." In this essay he insisted that the tension between intellectuals and their society betrayed a political rather than pedagogical problem. "Intellectual" had become a synonym for "creeping socialism" and the "betrayal" at Yalta. For Americans disenchanted with the new liberalism or the then military stalemate in Korea, the "egg-head," Hofstadter explained, served as a convenient scape-goat. Anti-elitism suffused the McCarthyite pogrom against the expert class which in turn inspired Hofstadter's own considerable efforts to strike a blow for the professors. "The intention of this piece—aside from its explanatory function," he wrote to Kenneth Stampp, "was to boost the morale and psychic autonomy of the intellectual."20 19
      The defensive position of contemporary American thinkers led Hofstadter on a search for the origins of anti-intellectualism. He presumed that "populistic democracy" bore chief responsibility for the devaluation of higher-learning. This naturally turned into a critique of egalitarianism which, he wrote, "is government by or through the mass man, disguised behind the mask of an easy sentimentalization of the folk. It is the idea that anything done in the name of the people is ipso facto legitimate."21 Rather than furthering the interests of the mind, democracy, Hofstadter believed, displayed a dreary habit of striking out at intellect for its elitist nature. Militant democrats—or McCarthyite demagogues—demanded "that a university ought to cater to the needs of anybody who comes out of or pretends to represent the folk, whether or not he has any real need for or interest in the use of ideas."22 20
      Pushing his point further, Hofstadter maintained that education historically enjoyed its most consistent support under undemocratic regimes. "Two of the greatest periods in university history," he explained, "that of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and that of the German universities in the nineteenth century, occurred in societies that were not notably democratic." The foundation for the modern American university, laid between 1870 and 1910, "was for the most part an age of political and economic oligarchy." Conversely, periods of egalitarian upsurge and romanticism of the folk produced democratic figures—Jackson, Bryan, McCarthy—hostile to intellect.23 Hofstadter concluded that despite massive federal subsidies for higher education in recent years, the proliferation of the postwar professoriate and the mandarin-like status enjoyed by faculty at elite institutions (a status that Hofstadter himself enjoyed), the situation was bleak: "I am not optimistic enough to believe that in any calculable future the rest of society can be brought to recognize that intellectuals have their own rights and interests."24 While the communal mentality of the nation celebrated the spirit of egalitarianism, Hofstadter remained aloof and pronounced a pox upon the democracy boosters. 21
      Hofstadter's second monograph on higher education, The Development of Academic Freedom in the United States (1955), continued its author's investigation of the problematic relationship between higher-learning and democracy. Dividing the writing chores with co-author Metzger, Hofstadter wrote on "The Age of the College" concluding with the American Civil War. But his point of reference clearly identified with the contemporary suspicion of universities as breeding grounds for communist organizations. Colleague Richard B. Morris complemented the manuscript for "talk[ing] not only about academic freedom but the broad issue of intellectual freedom."25 Freidel applauded Hofstadter's timely defense of academic privilege: "I have read [Development of Academic Freedom]...with...enthusiasm...because of your quite barbed generalizations, so applicable in this age of McCarthy."26 These criticisms crystallized into an attack on progressive education aptly summed up by Sidney Hook in The New York Times Book Review: "A hundred years ago academic freedom was nonexistent in this country despite the democratic vitality of our political institutions."27 Hofstadter's work suggested that academic freedom was non-existent as a result of the nation's democratic vitality. 22
      While liberals applauded Hofstadter's labors on behalf of the intellectuals, scholars on the Left read into his work a swipe at democracy and public education. After reading Academic Freedom, Curti wrote to Hofstadter,
I find myself somehow a bit disappointed.... [Some] may feel that you have been a bit influenced, if inconspicuously, by the neo-conservatism that is now so pervasive in academic and non-academic circles alike. So I throw out for you to think about the suggestion that you point up a bit more the positive and constructive accomplishments in the development of...academic freedom...that you try to show more clearly and explicitly that human efforts were involved, that human judgments were also of importance; that at least on occasion personal and group interests could be, and were transcended.28
 If Curti is correct, then Hofstadter's "neo-conservatism" played a pivotal role in reshaping his historical orientation. The catalyst for this change, as Bell noted, included the fusion of Hofstadter's nascent fear of popular action with the rise of authoritarian regimes in the thirties. In the wake of the Allied victory in World War II, new ideological lines were being drawn and this exacerbated rather than eased his concerns.		 23
      Some scholars detected in the subterranean recesses of McCarthyism a reproach to the rising status of American Jews in the postwar period. Historians have correctly emphasized that McCarthy himself was not anti-Semitic. His targets included the WASP gentry and his top aid, Roy Cohn, was Jewish. Yet in its suspicion of the professoriate, tirades against the New Deal, and hostility toward the Eastern establishment, the New Right laid siege to the professions, institutions and political culture that had provided opportunities for ethnic Americans.29 This antipathy predated the fifties, of course, and prior to McCarthyism, Jewish intellectuals had begun to investigate the relationship between popular discontent and anti-Semitism. The Frankfurt School of Social Research, founded in 1923 and housed at Columbia University before the war, quickly took the lead in this effort. Frankfurt scholars Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer were among the principal intellectuals involved in the School's most ambitious endeavor, the five volume Studies in Prejudice, which explored the historical roots of gentile hostility toward Jews. 24
      The Frankfurt School offered an alternative to orthodox Marxism by creating social-psychological indicators for determining political behavior. Marxism—like Progressive historiography—seemed incapable of making sense of the ideological upheaval of the 1930s. In place of economic determinism the Frankfurt School emphasized the importance of culture, ethnicity and pathology in developing popular attitudes toward state power. For Horkheimer and Adorno, evolutionary psychologist Kevin MacDonald writes, "the fundamental shift from the sociological to the psychological level that occurred during the 1940s was motivated by the fact that in Germany the proletariat had succumbed to fascism and in the Soviet Union socialism had not prevented the development of an authoritarian government that failed to guarantee individual autonomy or Jewish group interests."30 Hofstadter was favorably impressed by the Frankfurt scholars' critical assessment of mass culture, and his subsequent work on populism and the Radical Right bear the School's imprint. Similar to the Studies in Prejudice scholars, Hofstadter concluded that prejudice betrayed signs of mental illness. The remedy, he insisted, required replacing the "authoritarian personality" with a liberal personality that accepted ethnic pluralism as the key to undermining social conflict. 25
      Aside from developing a theoretical framework to assess mass behavior, the Frankfurt School equipped Hofstadter with a new lexicon. In The Authoritarian Personality essay "Contrasting Ideologies of Two College Men," Nevitt Sanford introduced the concept of pseudo-conservative (ultra right) behavior—soon to be appropriated by Hofstadter. Sanford wrote, "It has frequently been remarked that should fascism become a powerful force in this country, it would parade under the banners of traditional American democracy.... Is it possible to define pseudo-conservatism in objective terms, to diagnose it in the individual and to estimate its strength within a population? Is it really true that pseudo-conservatism is generally to be found...associated with ethnocentrism?"31 Hofstadter responded that Sanford's observations linking authoritarian attitudes with traditional American institutions were essentially correct, and he asked, "was the Ku Klux Klan [which] had a membership of...4,500,000 persons at its peak in the 1920s, a phenomenon totally dissimilar to the pseudo-conservative revolt?"32 He also agreed with the Frankfurt scholar's presumption that ethnic prejudice triggered hostile attitudes among Anglo-Americans, stating that "pseudo-conservatism is in good part a product of the rootlessness and heterogeneity of American life," adding, "Because we no longer have the relative ethnic homogeneity we had up to about eighty years ago, our sense of belonging has long had about it a high degree of uncertainty."33 While it is difficult to measure the full impact of Frankfurt School thought on Hofstadter, the overlap in language and intellectual assumptions makes considerable influence clear. MacDonald concludes that "Adorno's concept of the 'pseudo-Conservative' was used by...Hofstadter to condemn departures from liberal orthodoxy in terms of the psychopathology of 'status anxiety.'"34 26
      The work of Max Weber further shaped Hofstadter's intellectual development in the post World War II period. "Weber had become rather important at the time for us," remembers Daniel Bell, "it was basically Weber's influence on status politics which Marty Lipset picked up, I picked up and Dick very quickly took the lead."35 The first English translations of Weber's writings began to appear in the 1940s and Hofstadter early adopted the German sociologist's insights on status politics. Weber believed that Marx's emphasis on materialism did not offer a sufficiently complex approach to class relations because his own understanding of the psychological linkage between Protestantism and capitalism led him to conclude that laborers were eager to work for emotional as well as economic rewards. Weber had not dismissed consumer interests but he defined class identification (a la Hofstadter in Age of Reform) as an issue primarily of status concerns rather than matters of material regard. 27
      Similar to the Frankfurt School, Weber employed clinical language to undermine the public's heroes, saints and prophets. Dramatic personalities often produced militant styles of leadership including the "berserker" who endured spells of "manic passion," the shaman "subject to epileptical seizures," and any number of authority types "with a reputation for therapeutic...wisdom" or deference "resting on magic power."36 Weber's attention to the emotional-side of popular culture, to the exploitation of charisma, and to the deconstruction of the myths civilizations employed to further their interests offered Hofstadter a radically different interpretation of social development than that presented by Progressive scholars. 28
      Weber's work encouraged Hofstadter to read more deeply in the social sciences and made him receptive to the ideas of the distinguished sociologist Karl Mannheim who argued in Ideology and Utopia (1929) that social positioning determined one's perception of the world. Knowledge, Mannheim demonstrated, reflected not merely a scientific method of observation and experimentation, but also attention to class-based interests, values and biases. Groups developed dogmas, Mannheim continued, as a means of expressing concerns unique to their station. Lower-strata interests were attracted to utopian world views that promised future material or psychological relief, while higher-strata groups defended their esteemed positions by employing ideologies that rationalized their ambitious accumulation of resources. Mannheim's hypothesis employed a complex understanding of human thought and action that, like the Frankfurt School, advanced beyond Marxist materialism and the simple "liberal-conservative" dichotomy favored by Progressive thinkers. 29
      In his search for a new intellectual tradition, Hofstadter read Mannheim with great interest, embracing the hypothesis that fictions (ideologies) and wish-dreams (utopias) revealed the subconscious desires of historical actors and played a significant role in explaining behavior. "For me," Hofstadter wrote in the late fifties, "Mannheim provided the link I had been seeking between ideas and social situations."37 His Age of Reform confirms this testimony, for in key ways it parallels Mannheim's Ideology and Utopia. The latter responded to the chaotic interplay of multiple political traditions clashing in the aftermath of the First World War. Hofstadter's book analyzed ideologies in flux as the American reform tradition of the agrarians gave way to the New Deal. These two developments, one in recent European and the other in American history, each succumbed to conservative reactions. Further, Hofstadter shared Mannheim's distrust of conventional ideologies, presuming that irrationality was a common, rather than anomalous feature of mass behavior. 30
      To analyze this further, Hofstadter believed that defenders of the agrarian tradition embraced a utopian vision of pastoral life in order to reinforce their psychic well-being. Thus, even after the farm's eclipse by the factory, the yeoman ethic still penetrated deep into the American consciousness. But Hofstadter turned the tables on the "in-group," insisting that the reform pose struck by agrarians (and progressives) cloaked an acute sense of regional inferiority as well as both occupational and ethnic decline. He believed that the historian, operating along the lines of a cultural anthropologist, could study a society below its materialistic surface and interpret the styles and symbols of groups. "Mannheim's ideas "of cultural configuration...and of political style," he explained, "are filled with significance for the historian."38 31
      Hofstadter paid particularly close attention to Mannheim's assertion that once-dominant classes invested heavily in myths to shore up their fading traditions and influence. Mannheim had written
it has become extremely questionable whether, in the flux of life, it is a genuinely worthwhile intellectual problem to seek to discover fixed and immutable ideas or absolutes. It is a more worthy intellectual task perhaps to learn to think dynamically and relationally rather than statically. In our contemporary social and intellectual plight, it is nothing less than shocking to discover that those persons who claim to have discovered an absolute are usually the same people who also pretend to be superior to the rest.39
 Hofstadter's Age of Reform examines the sacred cows of agrarianism and laissez faire. For generations these traditional ideologies had solidified the farmer's hold on the American imagination and made the yeoman the hero of the textbooks. But in time the industrial-class came to predominate and the language of laissez-faire accommodated the appetites of the trusts. Populists believed in mass organization as an instrument to preserve egalitarianism in an age of corporate centralization, but Hofstadter argued that the parochial nature of farmer radicalism betrayed an odd attachment to an acadian-like past that sustained popular resentment to the new urban order.		 32
      Mannheim had insisted that declining groups erected ideological defenses to protect their position. "This cannot be done," he asserted, "without resorting to all sorts of romantic notions and myths [that]...distort, pervert, and conceal the meaning of the present."40 For Hofstadter, historiographically speaking, U.B. Phillips's paternalistic Old South and Turner's ethnically-homogeneous frontier were lucid examples of Progressive sympathy for the old Wasp order. The legend of the virtuous farmer pervaded the scholarship of Midwestern historians and remained a compelling totem into the twentieth-century. The relevant Mannheim belief was that "an ontology handed down through tradition obstructs new developments, especially in the basic modes of thinking, and as long as the particularity of the conventional theoretical framework remains unquestioned we will remain in the toils of a static mode of thought which is inadequate to our present stage of historical and intellectual development."41 Hofstadter's critical mood in both American Political Tradition and Age of Reform upended a traditional ontology favoring popular democracy and the property-rights orientation. Before the new departure could begin, he argued, the cumbersome baggage of laissez-faire dogma needed to be jettisoned. 33
      At Columbia several scholars applied social-psychological insights, literary criticism and psychoanalytic theory in their work. Leuchtenburg remembers that the intellectual climate at Morningside Heights nurtured the new approach—"we were all thinking in that direction, it was in the water."42 Daniel Joseph Singal writes that Hofstadter's Columbia colleagues proved especially influential at this juncture: "Lionel Trilling, whose symbolic interpretations of literary texts suggested a similar approach to political rhetoric; C. Wright Mills, who in White Collar (1951) detailed the status anxieties and aspirations of the new corporate middle class; and Robert K. Merton, whose sociological concept of 'latent function' permitted an analyst to construe in rational terms behavior that at first sight appears highly irrational."43 Of the three Columbia influences, Merton's was perhaps the most important. His Social Theory and Social Structure (1949) furthered Hofstadter's education in the sociology of symbolism, distinguishing "manifest functions" (actions producing intended consequences) and "latent functions" (behavior which may appear inexplicable but serve a therapeutic purpose). Merton maintained that conduct deemed extraordinary by some civilizations, including adherence to certain superstitions, customs and conventions, often contained benefits obvious only to the groups that practiced them. The Hopi rain ceremony, he noted, is best understood by latent rather than manifest functions. The apparent purpose of the rain dance is to produce precipitation and the uninitiated are struck by its survival in an age of modern meteorology. "But with the concept of latent function," Merton writes, "ceremonials may fulfill the...function of reinforcing the group identity by providing a periodic occasion on which the scattered members of a group assemble to engage in a common activity."44 34
      Merton's work demonstrated that fruitful historical investigation could be pursued in the assessment of seemingly non-rational communal behavior. As Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick have written:
what functional analysis did for receptive historians was not so much to provide a specific methodology as to encourage and ratify an altered style of thought, a re-ordered intellectual economy. It made room for complexity and paradox, and put a high premium on subtlety. Hofstadter, for one, never adopted functional analysis in any self-conscious way as a formal theoretical system; he simply absorbed it into his literary habits.45
 		35
      The milieu of modern social theory research at Columbia was further thickened by a "University Seminar on the State" program in the early fifties that brought together several scholars experimenting with the concept of status deprivation. It proved a perfect opportunity for Hofstadter to selectively organize the insights of Merton, Mannheim, Weber and Adorno into an exploration of the social-psychological underpinnings of McCarthyism. Hofstadter's contribution to the seminar, "Dissent and Non Conformity in the Twentieth Century," synthesized his intensive reading in the area of symbolic analysis and applied it to the temperament of his times.46 The lecture was published in The American Scholar (1955) as "The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt" and reprinted in The New American Right (1955), a collection of essays critical of political fundamentalism edited by Daniel Bell with contributions from Glazer, Lipset, David Riesman, Talcott Parsons and Peter Viereck. The essay resurfaced a decade later in The Paranoid Style of American Politics, and its popularity prompted Hofstadter to comment late in his career, "I have written nothing else of comparable brevity that aroused more attention or drew more requests for quotation or reprinting."47 36
      "The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt" stood the customary conservative/liberal formula on its head as Hofstadter denied far Right accusations that the New Deal undermined "traditional" American values. Rather, he insisted, the efficacy of postwar liberalism produced a new status quo—a progressive Democratic political class hoping to conserve its advances in its struggle with the Right. "After twenty years," Hofstadter wrote, "the New Deal liberals have quite unconsciously taken on the psychology of those who have entered into possession. Moreover, a large part of the New Deal public...still have the emotional commitments to the liberal dissent with which they grew up politically, but their social position is one of solid comfort. Among them the dominant tone has become one of satisfaction, even a kind of conservatism."48 Pseudo-conservatives, fixated on the crusade against communism at home and hostile to the liberal swing in American politics, opposed the New Dealers. Borrowing the language of the Frankfurt School—"clinical," "thematic apperception," "status," "possession," "identity," "projected," "complexes," "disorder," and, of course, "pseudo-conservative"—Hofstadter explained that opponents of the liberal consensus exhibited mental instability resulting in "a profound if largely unconscious hatred of society."49 37
      Throughout the long fifties (1950–65) the social science model played an indispensable role informing Hofstadter's scholarship. The books that emerged during this period—The Age of Reform, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life andThe Paranoid Style in American Politics—are among its author's most celebrated and controversial works and they constitute the "middle period" of Hofstadter's scholarship, sandwiched between the earlier neo-progressive studies and three final monographs—The Progressive Historians, Idea of a Party System and America at 1750. In these, social psychological categories (and vocabulary) are conspicuously absent. The stunning Age of Reform in particular forced those practicing history to marvel at the new interpretive vistas opened by the fresher school of thought. "Thirty years after its publication," Columbia historian Alan Brinkley declared that "even its critics recognized Age of Reform as the most influential book ever published on the history of the twentieth-century in America."50 38
      An elegant and ambitious interpretation of political activism in the half-century preceding the Second World War, the book broke new ground by offering a searching and critical commentary on the mental universe of the reform tradition. It remains in our own day a remarkable achievement in historical analysis, widely read, provocative and persuasive. In seven seamless chapters that read more like an extended essay than a text, Age of Reform staked out a compelling position advancing far beyond simple political/economic dualism to reveal the unspoken and unconscious ambitions of its subjects. Rather than dwell on the material grievances of the agrarians, the book emphasized the pathos, ethnocentricity and fluctuating status of its subjects. More provocatively, Hofstadter rejected two generations of pro Populist-Progressive historiography in his insistence that the defining characteristics of popular reform in pre New Deal America included parochialism, a tincture of racism and a moralist strain that enlivened a host of unfortunate nativist reflexes. Age of Reform's enrichment of the historians' craft provides an important clue to its remarkable and enduring appeal among scholarly and lay audiences alike. Its insights offered an original path to the past that culminated in new ways to discover history. 39
      The interpretive technique pioneered by Age of Reform carried over to Anti-Intellectualism which, in terms of chronological coverage, conceptual framework and intellectual assumptions, is a close companion piece to the preceding work. Its author's most contentious book, Anti-Intellectualism promises a far-ranging meditation on the history and reception of ideas in America, focusing on the thinking class's relationship to spiritual expression, civic activism, commerce and pedagogy. A careful reading of the text, however, reveals a less capacious and more particular slant. Hofstadter presumed that the conventional Anglo-American cosmology—evangelical Protestantism, democratic politics, practical-minded business culture and egalitarian education—empowered contemporary resentment to the new intellectual tradition emerging from the minds and experiences of the children of immigrants. In the contest between competing cultures, Hofstadter clearly favored the values, moral codes and mental initiatives forged on the foundations of secularism, the social planning of the New Deal and the insights of Freud and scientific relativity. His great concern for the survival of this new intellectual style in the face of contemporary popular disapproval (the McCarthyite harangue against elites) played an important role in defining his scholarship. Anti-Intellectualism defended the values and privileges Hofstadter most revered and, as such, pushed the edge of partisanship. "This work is by no means a formal history," he conceded, "but largely a personal book, whose factual details are organized and dominated by my views."51 40
      Considering the accolades garnered by The Age of Reform and Anti-Intellectualism in American Life—both books won Pulitzer Prizes—the decision by their author to virtually abandon the social scientific apparatus that shaped each study is intriguing and reveals much about the changing nature of Hofstadter's (and the historical profession's) thinking in the sixties. As the decade advanced, the profession grew increasingly friendly to fresher insights and more current methodologies including computer generated studies (quanto-history), psychological investigations (psycho-history) and attention to ecology (environmental history). Amidst this flux of changing intellectual styles, Hofstadter struggled to maintain the scholarly relevancy that seemed to come as an effortless attachment to his earlier books and essays. The work he produced in the fifties struck a responsive chord with a satisfied and self-assured audience sympathetic to a confident, ironic, urbane and witty style of expression. More than merely capturing a mood, Hofstadter's probing critiques of popular democracy were both refreshing and useful to liberals caught between the politics of the old populist Left and the McCarthy Right. Yet by the sixties historical irony (and its accompanying array of such descriptive contrivances as ambiguity, burlesque, paradox, contradiction and absurdity) had become unfashionable, a conceptual casualty of the younger generation's self-seriousness and what Hofstadter caustically described (in the wake of the student rebellion at Columbia in the spring of 1968) as its devotion to the politics of "self-expression and style."52 41
      Hofstadter's final books, The Progressive Historians (1968) and Idea of a Party System (1969), are defensive in nature and subject to their author's need to explain his generation's historical instincts and liberal preferences. New Left scholars emphasized a more visceral program of criticism than the dominant consensus archetype favored by their historical fathers. Progressive Historians took shape within the context of this debate, for the neo-Progressivism of the younger generation made Hofstadter profoundly uneasy. Its high-level of emotional commitment and appeal to the moral consciousness of scholars reminded him of the manichean liberal versus conservative dichotomy that had marred the works of Turner, Beard and Parrington. Hofstadter agreed that the protest culture of the sixties demonstrated the need to reemphasize the importance of conflict in the American past, but not at the expense of the considerable interpretive advances initiated by his own generation. The postwar historians introduced a healthy complexity to the profession Hofstadter insisted, yielding an awareness of social-psychological motives and multiple causation that had escaped the attention of the conflict historians. With the rich bounty of recent scholarly writing as a model, Hofstadter regretted the New Left's rejection of its historical fathers even as he, in an equally sincere exercise in intellectual pruning, had rejected his own. 42
      The final pages of Progressive Historians promoted a "vital kind of moral consensus" that encouraged scholars to compete meritoriously in the market-place of ideas. The New Left's rejection of its historical fathers struck Hofstadter as a denial of the open contestation of interpretive techniques necessary for sustaining historical debate. His plea that "contending interests have a basic minimal regard for each other: one party or interest seeks...to avoid crushing the opposition, denying the legitimacy of its existence or values," led naturally to Idea of a Party System, a study of pluralism in the early republic informed by the sharp polarization of social, cultural, generational and racial attitudes that plagued America in the late sixties.53 Hofstadter had a knack for writing timely books and Party System's investigation of the overcoming of anti-party attitudes in the nation's past offered a provocative rejoinder to those who pronounced mass political organizations no longer relevant to current needs. At a time when the future of the party system seemed uncertain—in one poll a majority of respondents claimed no allegiance to either Republican or Democratic coalitions—Hofstadter's book offered a reminder of the important relationship that existed between pluralism and parties. 43
      In many ways Party System seems to bear little resemblance to its more famous predecessors. While Age of Reform and Anti-Intellectualism reflected their author's mid-century interest in the methodological insights pioneered by the social sciences, Party System offers a more traditional and less polemical style of expression. But this perhaps says more about the times than about substantive interpretive change on Hofstadter's part. Barry Goldwater's defeat in the 1964 presidential election and the nation's (momentary) embrace of the Great Society encouraged intellectuals to believe that liberalism had carried the day. For years the Far Right had given meaning to Hofstadter's work—his salient and biting assessments of pseudo-conservatism and anti-intellectualism presumed a perpetual opposition from conservative fundamentalists—but the decline of the radicals' fortunes caught the historian unawares and in the wake of the Goldwater debacle he felt drawn to redefine his work. 44
      Intellectually Hofstadter had come a long way. A student of Beardian materialism in the thirties, he traded his youthful devotion to the Left for the fresher field of group analysis. Maturation as a scholar, attention to the particular ideological milieu of Morningside Heights, and the political climate of McCarthyism led Hofstadter into the social sciences. But the immersion was more fluid than fixed and his latter books offered insightful commentary on the evolution of his intellectual commitments. "In short," David Potter wrote in an unpublished statement, "historians are the lenses through which we read the past. The first past which Hofstadter read was the one which he saw through the lenses of [the Progressive historians]. He cannot reckon with the past as he reads it now, without finding out why he no longer reads it as once he did."54 45


Notes

1.  Daniel Bell interview with author.

2.  Ibid.

3.  David Hollinger, Science, Jews, and Secular Culture: Studies in Mid-Twentieth-Century American Intellectual History (Princeton, 1996), 25.

4.  Ibid., 136.

5.  Frederick Jackson Turner to J. Franklin Jameson, 23 January 1910, American Historical Association Papers, box 276, quoted in Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, 1988), 90.

6.  Hofstadter, "Beard and the Constitution: The History of an Idea," American Quarterly, Fall 1950, 204.

7.  Hofstadter, "Turner and the Frontier Myth," American Scholar, October 1949, 435.

8.  Hofstadter to Curti, n.d., internal evidence suggests 1948, Merle Curti Papers, (MCP).

9.  Richard Kirkendall to Merle Curti, 17 December 1955, MCP, quoted in Novick, That Noble Dream, 346.

10.  Hofstadter, "Turner and the Frontier Myth," 438.

11.  Hofstadter, "History and the Social Sciences," in Fritz Stern, ed., The Varieties of History: From Voltaire to the Present (New York, 1956), 361.

12.  William Leuchtenburg interview with author.

13.  Frank Freidel, Richard Hofstadter Project, (RH Project), #939, Oral History Research Office Columbia University.

14.  Ibid.

15.  Hofstadter and C. DeWitt Hardy, The Development and Scope of Higher Education in the United States (New York, 1952), 107.

16.  Ibid., 121.

17.  Stringellow Barr, New Republic, 6 April 1953, 29.

18.  Sol Stein to Richard Hofstadter, Nathan Glazer, Irwin Ross, Melvin Arnold, Daniel Bell, n.d., internal evidence suggests 1953, American Committee for Cultural Freedom Papers, box 12, Tamiment Library, (TL).

19.  Daniel Bell to Messers Hook, Farrell, Pitzele, Beichman, Stein, 14 January 1954, ACCFP, box 9, TL.

20.  Hofstadter to Kenneth Stampp, n.d., internal evidence suggests March-July 1954, letter in possession of Kenneth Stampp.

21.  Hofstadter, "Democracy and Anti-Intellectualism in America," Michigan Alumnus Quarterly Review, Summer 1953, 286.

22.  Ibid.

23.  Ibid.

24.  Ibid., 295.

25.  Richard B. Morris to Hofstadter, 3 June 1953, box 34, Richard Hofstadter Papers, (RHP).

26.  Freidel to Hofstadter, 8 October 1953, box 34, RHP.

27.  Sidney Hook, New York Times Book Review, 30 October 1955, 6.

28.  Curti to Hofstadter, 20 November 1953, box 34, RHP.

29.  Marc Dollinger writes that the New Deal underwrote a period of prosperity during which "Jews rocketed to the top of American social life.... As a religious minority often persecuted by Old World government authorities, Jews looked favorably upon the U.S. government's promise of civil protection. They fashioned many of the twentieth century's most important social welfare programs and proved instrumental in the transformation of modern American liberalism. Jews stood at the crossroads of twentieth-century American political change and helped direct the nation toward a vision of democracy rooted in tolerance, pluralism, and the rule of law. Dollinger, Quest for Inclusion: Jews and Liberalism in Modern America (Princeton, 2000), 3.

30.  Kevin MacDonald, The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements (Connecticut, 1998), 159.

31.  T.W. Adorno, et. al., The Authoritarian Personality (New York, 1950), 50.

32.  Hofstadter, "The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt," The American Scholar (Winter 1954–55), 16.

33.  Ibid., 17.

34.  MacDonald, Culture of Critique, 195.

35.  Bell interview.

36.  Max Weber, "Charismatic Authority," in Talcott Parsons, ed., Max Weber: The Theory of Social and Economic Organization (New York, 1947), 359.

37.  Stern, Varieties of History, 361–2.

38.  Ibid., 362.

39.  Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge (New York, 1985 reprint), 87.

40.  Ibid.

41.  Ibid., 89.

42.  Leuchtenburg interview.

43.  Daniel Joseph Singal, "Beyond Consensus: Richard Hofstadter and American Historiography," American Historical Review (October 1984), 986.

44.  Robert K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure (New York, 1949), 118–9.

45.  Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, eds., The Hofstadter Aegis: A Memorial (New York, 1974), 319.

46.  University Seminar on the State, box 24, RHP.

47.  Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics (New York, 1965), 41.

48.  Hofstadter, "The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt, The American Scholar, Winter 1954–55, 9.

49.  Ibid., 10.

50.  Alan Brinkley, "Richard Hofstadter's The Age of Reform: A Reconsideration," Reviews in American History 13, (September 1985), 462.

51.  Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York, 1963), viii.

52.  Hofstadter and Michael Wallace, eds., American Violence: A Documentary History (New York, 1970), 33.

53.  Hofstadter, The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard and Parrington (New York, 1968), 454.

54.  Marginalia on advanced proofs of David Potter's "Conflict, Consensus, and Comity: A Review of Richard Hofstadter's The Progressive Historians," New York Review of Books, 5 December 1968, 46–48, box 18, David Potter Papers.

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