Gillis Harp | Forum: Richard Hofstadter's The Age of Reform after Fifty Years: Hofstadter's The Age of Reform and the Crucible of the Fifties | Journal of Gilded Age and Progressive era, 6.2

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Gillis Harp | Forum: Richard Hofstadter's The Age of Reform after Fifty Years: Hofstadter's The Age of Reform and the Crucible of the Fifties | Journal of Gilded Age and Progressive era, 6.2 | The History Cooperative

Forum: Richard Hofstadter's The Age of Reform after Fifty Years

Hofstadter's The Age of Reform and the Crucible of the Fifties

by Gillis Harp, Grove City College

In December 1954, the United States Senate voted 67–22 to censure the junior senator from Wisconsin. Joe McCarthy had been drawing increasing criticism for his bullying tactics in ferreting out alleged communists and communist sympathizers within the federal civil service and elsewhere. In the wake of the Army-McCarthy hearings of the preceding spring (and especially after the dramatic televised confrontation with Army counsel Joseph Welch), the tide of public opinion finally turned against McCarthy. Still, his demagogic campaign had ruined the careers of scores of American citizens, from civil servants to artists, and had raised disturbing questions about room for political dissent within a democracy during the height of the Cold War.	1
Five months later, on April 21, 1955, Jerome Lawrence and Robert Lee's Inherit the Wind opened at the National Theatre on Broadway to very favorable reviews. The play was a fictionalized portrayal of the famous legal confrontation over the teaching of Darwinian evolution in Tennessee public schools. The playwrights had been waiting for the right moment to produce the drama and clearly believed the story of the 1925 Scopes Trial spoke to the broader contemporary issues raised by McCarthyism, demagoguery, and the dangers of popular bigotry in a democratic polity. Their portrait of Matthew Harrison Brady (based closely upon William Jennings Bryan) was especially negative; the "Great Commoner's" religious views were cast as dangerously anti-intellectual.¹	2
Across town, 1955 witnessed another literary event, the publication by Alfred A. Knopf of Richard Hofstadter's The Age of Reform: Bryan to F.D.R. Alan Brinkley declared in 1985 that "thirty years after its publication, even its critics recognized The Age of Reform as the most influential book ever published on the history of the twentieth-century in America."² "During the 1950s and 1960s," observes Michael Kazin, "there was no more admired historian in the United States."³ The rising young Columbia University history professor had already shown himself in his previous published work to be an unsentimental critic of the American political tradition, and his unflinching portrait of the Populist and Progressive movements in this new volume attracted considerable attention both inside and outside the academy. Its favorable reception is attributable in part to Hofstadter's engaging prose and poignant insights. But Hofstadter also struck a chord because his book addressed many of the same concerns raised by McCarthyism and the blinkered backwoods Fundamentalism skewered in Inherit the Wind. Writing in the Saturday Review, John D. Hicks noted how Hofstadter connected Populism to "some aspects of the cranky pseudo-conservatism of our time."⁴ Similarly, the reviewer for the New York Times praised the book's "high degree of contemporary utility." He commended Hofstadter for his "acute" observation that "McCarthyism has deep rural roots. The agrarian rebels like Tom Watson were, in modern jargon, often 'Fascist-minded.'"⁵ In addition, Hofstadter's method was innovative, as he broke with the sometimes simplistic economism of the Progressive school. George Mowry wrote in the Mississippi Valley Historical Review that The Age of Reform was "a brilliant foray into the psychology of reform groups and as such leans heavily upon the techniques and sometimes the vocabulary of social anthropology and social psychology."⁶	3
How Hofstadter arrived at this fresh critical perspective on the reform tradition and how his methodology was shaped by developments within the social sciences offers instructive insights into New York's intellectual life between the thirties and the fifties (and told ably by David Brown and others whose work I have drawn upon liberally throughout this paper).	. . .

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