Richard Hofstadter (6 August 1916 – 24 October 1970) was an American
public intellectual of the 1950s, an
historian and DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History at
Columbia University. In the course of his career, Hofstadter became the “iconic historian of postwar liberal consensus” whom twenty-first century scholars continue consulting, because his intellectually engaging books and essays remain pertinent to illuminating contemporary history.
His most important works are
Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860–1915 (1944);
The American Political Tradition (1948);
The Age of Reform (1955);
Anti-intellectualism in American Life (1963), and the essays collected in
The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964). He was twice awarded the
Pulitzer Prize; in 1956 for
The Age of Reform, an unsentimental historical analysis of
Populism in the 1890s and
Progressive Movement of the early 20th century; and in 1964 for the cultural history,
Anti-Intellectualism in American Life.
Biography
Richard Hofstadter was born in
Buffalo, New York, in 1916 to a
Polish Jewish father and a
German American Lutheran mother; when he was ten years old, his father died. He attended the
Fosdick-Masten Park High School (
City Honors School), then studied philosophy and history at the
State University University of New York, at Buffalo in 1933, under the
diplomatic historian Julius Pratt. As he intellectually matured, he culturally identified himself primarily as a Jew, rather than as a Protestant Christian, a stance that might have cost him professorships at
Johns Hopkins University and the
University of California, Berkeley, because of the contemporary institutional
antisemitism of the 1940s.
The Communist
As a man of his time, Richard Hofstadter was a Communist, and a member of the
Young Communist League at university, and later progressed to Communist Party membership. In 1936, he entered the
doctoral program in history at
Columbia University, New York City, where
Merle Curti demonstrated how to write books by synthesizing intellectual, social, and political history based upon secondary (published) sources rather than primary-source archival research. In 1938, he joined the
Communist Party of the USA, yet realistically qualified his action: “I join without enthusiasm, but with a sense of obligation. . . My fundamental reason for joining is that I don’t like capitalism and want to get rid of it. I am tired of talking . . . The party is making a very profound contribution to the radicalization of the American people. . . . I prefer to go along with it now”. In late 1939, he ended the Communist stage of his life, because of the Soviet–Nazi
Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact; yet remained anti-capitalist: “I hate capitalism and everything that goes with it”.
In 1942, he earned his doctorate in history, and in 1944 published his
dissertation Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860–1915, a pithy and commercially successful (200,000 copies) critique of late nineteenth-century American
capitalism and the
men who espoused its ruthless “dog-eat-dog” economic competition — justified as
Social Darwinism, identified by
William Graham Sumner; none the less,
conservative critics, such as Irwin G. Wylie and Robert C. Bannister, disagree with his interpretation.
Charles Beard’s influence
In the 1940s, as an historian, Richard Hofstadter acknowledged that: “. . .
Beard was really the exciting influence on me”, specifically the social-conflict model of US history as the struggle among competing economic groups — primarily farmers, Southern slavers, Northern industrialists, and the workers — wherein abstract political rhetoric meant little in practice; that historians must search for the hidden self-interest and financial goals of the economic belligerents. As such, Charles Beard perceived the
American Civil War (1861–65) as a South-to-North transference of political power, progressing from
slavery to industrial capitalism, because neither the Union nor the Confederacy was truly interested in resolving the cultural and Constitutional contradictions of American slavery’s existence.
Consensus historian
After 1945, Hofstadter philosophically broke with
Charles Beard, and moved to the right wing in his leadership of the “consensus historians”. In 1946, he joined the Columbia University faculty; in 1959, he became the
DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History.
In 1948, he published
The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It, incisive interpretive studies of twelve major American political leaders from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. Besides critical success, the book sold nearly a million copies at university campuses, where it was used as a history textbook; critics found it “skeptical, fresh,
revisionary, occasionally ironical, without being harsh or merely destructive” . Although, as Bruce Kuklik notes, it still "owed much to Hofstadter's leftist background", it was ironic and paradoxic in dealing with political leaders from the Revolution to the present. Each chapter title illustrated a paradox:
Thomas Jefferson is “The Aristocrat as Democrat”;
John C. Calhoun is the “Marx of the Master Class”; and
Franklin Roosevelt is “The Patrician as Opportunist”.
As a consensus historian, Hofstadter rejected Beard’s interpretation of history as a succession of socio-economic group conflicts. He thought that all historical periods could be understood as an implicit consensus, shared by antagonists, explaining that the generation of Beard and
Vernon Louis Parrington had:
. . . put such an excessive emphasis on conflict, that an antidote was needed. . . . It seems to me to be clear that a political society cannot hang together, at all, unless there is some kind of consensus running through it, and yet that no society has such a total consensus as to be devoid of significant conflict. It is all a matter of proportion and emphasis, which is terribly important in history. Of course, obviously, we have had one total failure of consensus, which led to the Civil War. One could use that as the extreme case in which consensus breaks down.
Later works
As an historian, Hofstadter’s
historiographic ground-breaking came in using social psychology concepts to explain political history. He explored
subconscious motives such as
social status anxiety,
anti-intellectualism, irrational fear, and paranoia — as they propelling political discourse and action in politics.
The rural ethos
The Age of Reform (1955) analyzes the
yeoman ideal in America’s sentimental attachment to
rural life, “a kind of homage that Americans have paid to the fancied innocence of their origins”, however, to call it a myth does not imply falsity, because it effectively embodies the rural values of the American people, profoundly influencing their perception of the correct
values, hence their political behavior. In this matter, the stress is upon the importance of Jefferson’s writings, and of his followers, in the development of agricultural
fundamentalism in the US, as establishing the agrarian myth, and its importance, in American life and politics — despite the rural and urban industrialization that rendered the myth moot.
Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963) and
The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1965) describe the
provincialism in American society, warning it contains much
anti-intellectual fear of the
cosmopolitan city, presented as wicked by the
xenophobic and
anti-Semitic Populists of the 1890s. They trace the direct political and ideological lineage between the Populists and
anti-communist Senator
Joseph McCarthy and
McCarthyism, the political paranoia manifest in his contemporary time. His dissertation director
Merle Curti noted about Hofstadter that: “His position is as biased, by his urban background . . . as the work of older historians was biased by their rural background and traditional agrarian sympathies”.
Irrational fear
The Idea of a Party System (1900) describes the origins of the
First Party System as reflecting fears that the
other political party threatened to destroy the
republic.
The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington (1968) systematically analyzes and criticizes the intellectual foundations and historical validity of Charles Beard’s
historiography; the book “signalled a growing support for neoconservatism”. In the event, Turner, said that, as an historian, Richard Hofstadter, no longer was a useful guide, because his ideas were too-isolationist, and too often had “a pound of falsehood for every few ounces of truth”.
The Conservative
Consequent to the
radical politics of the 1960s, and especially because of the student occupation and temporary closing of Columbia University in 1968, Hofstadter became more
conservative; friend
David Herbert Donald said: “He was appalled by the growing radical, even revolutionary, sentiment that he sensed among his colleagues and his students. He could never share their simplistic, moralistic approach”. Moreover, he was “extremely critical of student tactics, believing that they were based on irrational romantic ideas, rather than sensible plans for achievable change, that they undermined the unique status of the university, as an institutional bastion of free thought, and that they were bound to provoke a political reaction from the right”. Despite strongly disagreeing with their radical political methods, he invited his students to discuss goals and strategies with him. In the event, he employed one,
Mike Wallace, to collaborate with him on
American Violence: A Documentary History (1900); about the book, Hofstadter student
Eric Foner said that it “utterly contradicted the consensus vision of a nation placidly evolving without serious disagreements”.
Death
Richard Hofstadter had planned to write a three-volume history of American society, but at his death from
leukemia in 1970, he had only completed part of the trilogy’s first volume,
America in 1750: A Social Portrait (1971).
Criticism
The sharpest criticism of
Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860–1915 exposed one of Hofstadter’s major weaknesses as an historian: he did little research of manuscripts, newspapers, archival, and unpublished sources. Instead, he primarily relied upon his wide-ranging interdisciplinary imagination, producing very well-written theories upon a slight base of evidence drawn from secondary sources. As an
academic, Hofstadter directed more than one hundred finished doctoral dissertations, but gave his graduate students only cursory attention; that academic latitude enabled them to find their own models of history. Some adopted
New Left perspectives that he rejected, among them were
Herbert Gutman,
Eric Foner,
Lawrence Levine,
Linda Kerber, and
Paula Fass, while others, such as
Eric McKitrick and
Stanley Elkins, were more conservative than he; hence, Prof. Hofstadter had few disciples and founded no school of history writing.
Conservative commentator
George Will called Richard Hofstadter “the iconic public intellectual of liberal condescension”, who “dismissed conservatives as victims of character flaws and psychological disorders — a ‘paranoid style’ of politics rooted in ‘status anxiety’, etc. Conservatism rose on a tide of votes cast by people irritated by the liberalism of condescension.” A dismissal confirming the accuracy of Hofstadter's 1964 essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”, which articulates this partly psychological characterization of the thinking of the
radical right.
Published works
- "The Tariff Issue on the Eve of the Civil War," The American Historical Review Vol. 44, No. 1 (Oct., 1938), pp. 50-55
- "William Graham Sumner, Social Darwinist," The New England Quarterly> Vol. 14, No. 3 (Sep., 1941), pp. 457-477
- "Parrington and the Jeffersonian Tradition," Journal of the History of Ideas Vol. 2, No. 4 (Oct., 1941), pp. 391-400
- "William Leggett, Spokesman of Jacksonian Democracy," Political Science Quarterly Vol. 58, No. 4 (Dec., 1943), pp. 581-594
- "U. B. Phillips and The Plantation Legend," The Journal of Negro History Vol. 29, No. 2 (Apr., 1944), pp. 109-124
- (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1944); 1992 edition with preface by Eric Foner
- "Beard and the Constitution: The History of an Idea," American Quarterly Vol. 2, No. 3 (Autumn, 1950), pp. 195-213
- The Development of Academic Freedom in the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955). (with Walter P. Metzger)
- The United States: the History of a Republic (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.,: Prentice-Hall, 1957), college textbook; several editions; coauthored with Daniel Aaron and William Miller
- The Progressive Movement, 1900-1915 (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1963). edited excerpts
- * Harper's Magazine (1964)
- The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington (New York: Knopf, 1968).
- The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the United States, 1780-1840 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969).
- American Violence: A Documentary History. co-edited with Mike Wallace (1970)
- America at 1750: A Social Portrait (1971)
- , Columbia University Press, 1955, 1961.
