David S. Brown, Richard Hofstadter

Afro-Americans in New York Life and History, July, 2008 by Gary Marotta

In his The American Political Tradition and The Age of Reform he revealed his skepticism about liberal heroes and exposed the dark side of the populist and progressive reform movements, notably their racism and protofascist values. Hofstadter has been declared wrong on the populists and wrong again on their link to the politics of reaction, Joe McCarthy, and Barry Goldwater. His critics, claiming he was long on theory and short on evidence, argue that Hofstadter overreached. Yet the rise of movement conservatism, culminating with George W. Bush (playing McKinley to Karl Rove's Mark Hanna), is all about status politics and anti-intellectualism. Republican power is based on evangelical "value voters" of the Midwest and South--the former populist strongholds--in rebellion against the "liberal elite" of the Northeast. From this right-wing populist front the empowered plutocracy advances its interests and seeks to roll back the New Deal. Hofstadter's prescience, the reach and power of his theory, continues to illuminate our political culture.

When students in the 1960s rebelled against the Vietnam war and the hypocrisies of the universities, Hofstadter nearly alone among prominent intellectuals refused to condemn them and recognized many of their salient issues, even as he despised their militant tactics. Though shaken by the 1968 student takeover of Columbia and the repressive response of some 1,000 police to clear the campus, Hofstadter had agreed to give the commencement address that spring, declaring that the university "with all its limitations and failures.. .is the best and most benign side of our society insofar as that society aims to cherish the human mind." "It was moving, deeply moving," remembered Diana Trilling, "and I think I wasn't the only person who began to cry." Hofstadter continued to meet with his students--activists like Eric Foner and Michael Wallace.

He took a stand on the university, as he had on civil rights and social justice. Yet Hofstadter's colleagues and disciples have not appreciated his works on higher education. Anti-Intellectualism is, of course, celebrated, but nearly forgotten are The Development and Scope of Higher Education in the United States, The Development of Academic Freedom in the United States, and Higher Education: A Documentary History. His commitment to the life of the mind, his championing of an authentic and free discourse, was as an academic, and higher learning had a special meaning for him. The university and its values were worth his focused and sustained attention. He was aware of the frailty of that institution and recognized that the barbarians were in the classrooms, but he did not respond like, say, Allen Bloom. Instead, he retained a respect for his students and was intent on the triumph of liberal civilization, even though the cultural odds, by his own estimate, were against him.

We continue to discover Hofstadter, often to our delight. A younger colleague of mine, a specialist in African American history, had, in the winter of 2006, just completed reading Hofstadter's 1944 article, "U. B. Phillips and the Plantation Legend." My colleague was surprised that he had not learned of it before, that it was published in the Journal of Negro History while Carter Woodson served as editor, and that it was seminal. "Hofstadter's essay strikes me as one of the most forgotten essays on slave history," my colleague e-mailed me. "I am quite certain that it was Hofstadter's essay that prompted the works of Stamp, Elkins, Thorpe, Blassingame, Rawick and a host of others that followed." He could have added Lawrence Levine, and still been right. Perhaps it was that same excitement of discovery that found The American Political Tradition in John Lewis's knapsack in 1965, seventeen years after its publication. When we discover Hofstadter again, we refresh our enthusiasm about history. We remember a young Hofstadter who, because of his untimely death, never became a neoconservative, and probably, we suspect, never would have. It is the young Hofstadter with the discerning edge, always in a bowtie, who abides and continues to inspire.