Making History

Before I discovered Richard Hofstadter, in the mid-fifties, most of what little I knew of American history had come from textbooks. At that time (at present, as well, in some quarters) textbooks were generally written by committee and were devoid of any trace of an individual voice or a personal point of view. They were balanced and prudent to the point of stolidity. So Hofstadter was a revelation. One glance at the table of contents of The American Political Tradition told me that Hofstadter was his own man. Seven of the twelve essays in that book are devoted to American presidents; among the others is an essay on John C. Calhoun subtitled "The Marx of the Master Class"—an epithet I was quite sure I had not encountered when I was taught South Carolina history in the sixth or seventh grade. Some of the other subtitles also suggested that matters political are not as clear-cut as I had been led to believe: "Thomas Jefferson: The Aristocrat as Democrat," "Theodore Roosevelt: The Conservative as Progressive," "Woodrow Wilson: The Conservative as Liberal." This was confusing—and exciting.

In his new biography of Hofstadter, David S. Brown, in a commendable effort to be objective and critical, dampens that excitement a bit; and in order to rekindle it the general reader may want to go back to Hofstadter's own work, which still has much to offer. Brown's account is perhaps most successful in placing Hofstadter's career in the larger contexts of time, place, and American historiography. Although he gives only minimal attention to his subject's personal life, he does make clear the lasting effects of Hofstadter's early years. He was born in Buffalo in 1916, his father a Polish Jew, his mother a German Lutheran; he was graduated from the University of Buffalo and then enrolled in the New York School of Law, but within a year he was taking courses at Columbia, initiating the vital relationships that lasted the rest of his life and that Brown chronicles persuasively. Among his colleagues and friends were Daniel Bell, Merle Curti, Peter Gay, Alfred Kazin, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Lionel Trilling, and C. Vann Woodward.

Hofstadter's first book, Social Darwinism in American Thought,1860–1915 (1944), grew out of his Ph.D. thesis at Columbia. In it he acknowledged his debt to the pioneers of American Pragmatism—Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. His second book, The American Political Traditionand the Men Who Made It (1948), met with phenomenal critical and popular success and made his name. Brown, to my mind, undervalues it a bit and overvalues The Age of Reform (1955), quoting (selectively?) other readers and historians to support his views, which are the views of traditional academic historians, economists, and social scientists. The average reader who savors the revisionist profiles of vivid American personalities in The American Political Tradition may find The Age of Reform as dry as the dust bowl, for it deals with ideologies, movements, issues—abstractions—whereas the former work concerns important living, breathing, thinking, acting people. In both, however—indeed in everything Hofstadter wrote—his style is a joy: lucid, subtle, graceful, incisive, witty. And in that regard he acknowledged debts to Edmund Wilson and H. L. Mencken. Brown is not similarly indebted.

Hofstadter believed strongly that the past has much to teach us about the present; and, although Brown occasionally applies that principle with regard to our present benightedness, I wish he had done so more often and less timidly. Especially pertinent and rich for such a purpose is Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963), which Brown calls "one of the most troubling criticisms of American democracy ever written." "Ours is a society," Hofstadter writes, "in which every form of play seems to be accepted by the majority except the play of mind." Although he rejected more than once the label of "conflict" historian, almost all of Hofstadter's books are governed—more in some cases, less in others—by significant continuing tensions: between...