An historian's tale: Richard Hofstadter and the rise and fall of American liberalism

Washington Monthly, Sept, 2006 by Jacob Heilbrunn

Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography By David S. Brown University of Chicago, $27.50

A biography of a historian seems fated, more often than not, to be a rather boring affair. Unless the historian has played a leading role in great events, it's hard to imagine what even the most diligent biographer can uncover. That his subject read a lot of books, took copious notes, visited libraries and archives, and sat behind a desk, or, these days, computer screen, for a good part of the day?

Somehow David S. Brown has surmounted these obstacles to produce a biography of Richard Hofstadter, the historian and author (The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life), that is not only a revelation, but also a fascinating read. Brown, an associate professor of history at Elizabethtown College, has written an account worthy of Hofstadter himself: wry, humane, and illuminating. In Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography, Brown perceptively uses Hofstadter's life as a lens through which to view the rise and fall of liberalism. It becomes clear from this book that Hofstadter, was the first great historian of American conservatism, understanding like few on the left, the grievances that have always animated America's right wing. Indeed, his writings eerily presaged the ascendance of the far right in America well before George W. Bush came to power.

One of the most renowned historians of the past century, Hofstadter taught for much of his life at Columbia University where he twice won the Pulitzer Prize for his writings on American history and politics. Hofstadter was born in Buffalo, N.Y., in 1916, to a Polish-Jewish father and his German-Lutheran wife. His mother died when he was a little boy, a trauma that left a permanent mark on him; Hofstadter's son, Dan, later described him as a "cheerful melancholic." Hofstadter, as he would do later on when his first wife died, plunged into his work, becoming class president and valedictorian in high school. During his years at the University of Buffalo, Hofstadter dabbled in radical politics. His energetic and charismatic girlfriend and future wife, Felice Swados, was a staunch leftist. As a graduate student at Columbia during the Great Depression, he attended meetings of the Young Communist League with her: "While Felice's commitment to party discipline led her to the edge of intellectual surrender," writes Brown, "Hofstadter's radicalism was of a more cerebral, critical, and pessimistic kind." Still, Hofstadter joined the Columbia graduate unit of the CP for a few months, abandoning it in February 1939 out of repugnance for the Moscow show trials. Hofstadter's first tussles against anti-intellectualism, Brown observes, were against the left. Indeed, Hofstadter was anything but a fan of the New Deal, which he, like many on the left, viewed as a poor substitute for sweeping reforms that would directly attack powerful industrialists. According to Brown, Hofstadter's "most visceral memories were of the weaknesses and inconsistencies of the old liberalism; its failure to end the Depression, contain fascism, condemn racism, or develop a productive intellectual system to counter native veneration for the yeoman and frontier."

Hofstadter, who landed a job at the University of Maryland during World War II, was determined to write his way into the big time. And he did. The books and essays poured forth from his typewriter. Like many successful academics, Hofstadter knew that it took a ritualized schedule that was never deviated from to crank out the necessary words. All his life, Hofstadter followed it. He published a critique of Social Darwinism at age 28 that was well-received; but it was his first whack at the struts of the Progressive school, in his wildly popular The American Political Tradition, that made his name. Pungent, whimsical, and searching, it consisted of a collection of 10 biographical sketches of notable Americans from Jefferson to FDR, along with group portraits of the Founding Fathers and the robber-barons of the 1920's. Hofstadter dispensed with the pieties of earlier generations and depicted flesh-and-blood human beings whose motives were sometimes less than lofty. Never much interested in archival research, Hofstadter offered something else--lively prose, irreverent asides, and sweeping judgments. He had a special flair for bringing characters to life, portraying Theodore Roosevelt as a kind of closet fascist who wanted "stern dedication to nationalism, martial values, and a common spirit of racial identity and destiny," writes Brown. Lincoln was as much opportunist as great emancipator. Jefferson an egalitarian? In truth, he was an aristocrat. Or was he? Where Hofstadter was concerned, reputations existed to be overturned, but it was a necessary corrective to decades of pious historical interpretations. Besides, as he himself said, he was an admirer of H.L. Mencken and wanted to infuse his writing with more than a pinch of wit and buffoonery. He did. Fifty years after its publication, The American Political Tradition still sells thousands of copies a year.