Notes
Notes Notes to NIEBUHRISMS AND MYRDALERIES: THE INTELLECTUAL ROOTS OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT RECONSIDERED by David L. Chappell 1. This is particularly evident in Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom, Americain Black and White (NewYork: Simon and Schuster, 1999), and Dinesh D'Souza, The End of Racism (New York: Free Press, 1995), which credit the erosion of discrimination before the mid-1960s to a blend of natural economic progress and limited liberal reformism. Gavin Wright, Old South, New South (NewYork: Basic, 1986), has a somewhat different emphasis on government policy and pressure from protesters together liberating the labor market so that it could realize its natural tendency to break down artificial distinctions such as race. John Egerton, Speak Now against the Day:The Generation before the Civil Rights Movement in the South (NewYork: Knopf, 1994), sees the South movinginexorably away from tradition towards a more modern system of race relations. Patricia Sullivan, Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era (Chapel Hill: Universityof North Carolina Press, 1996), somewhat more moderately sees antiracist "implications" in the general trend of the New Deal. All these have in common a belief that moving forward through time means moving away from a racist past. 2. Tension between liberalism and Christianity is a major theme of the history of liberalism . Many studies, from J.B. Bury's A History of Freedom of Thought (New York: Henry Holt, 1913) to Guido de Ruggiero's History of European Liberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1927) to Pierre Manent's An Intellectual History of Liberalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), see the origins of liberalism as essentially anti-Christian. A different tradition, from Christopher Dawson's TheJudgment of Nations (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1942) to William Aylott Orton's The Liberal Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1945), sees liberalism as deriving from a specific land of Christianity, while noting that liberals denied or were unaware of their Christian roots. 3. There are other waysto see liberalism. Peter Berkowitz, for example, in Virtue and the Making of Modern Liberalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), ambitiously attempts to rescue liberalism from post-Rawls critics who claim it takes for granted and/or contributes to the atrophy of virtues and obligations on which a humane and decent life depends. Berkowitz establishes that what he calls "extraliberal" virtues were in fact on the minds of the great liberal thinkers. Far from defending liberalism against charges of shallow short- sightedness, however, he proves that the best liberals always understood they had to look outside liberalism for whatever qualities may redeem liberalism . 4. The prophetic tradition is elaborated in H. Richard Niebuhr, The Kingdom of God in America (NewYork, 1937), and in Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (London , 1957). 5. Richard Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr: a Biography (NewYork: Pantheon, 1985). 6. See notes 29 and 30, below. 7. John Kirby's Black Americansin the Roosevelt Era (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1980), along with Harold Cruse's old warhorse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York: Morrow, 1967), are useful correctives to the treatments of the 1930s by Pat Sullivan and John Egerton, cited above, note 1, who seem to me to view the New Deal era too whiggishly as a period of advance towards a true confrontation with racial issues. 8. Alan Brinkley's The End of Reform (NewYork: Knopf, 1995) makes this point about post-World War II liberalism, though he sees bold hopes begin to ebb after 1937. Richard 171 172 Notes to pages 5-6 Hofstadter observed in 1948 that liberals had been in a "rudderless and demoralized state" since FDR's death. The American Political Tradition (NewYork: Knopf, 1948), vii. 9. Even then, individual rights more often meant civil liberties—the largely selfinterested defense of open political debate against right wing attack—than the kind of individual rights whose guarantee would have structural economic consequences in the South and many of the major cities. R. Alan Lawson, The Failure of Independent Liberalism (NewYork: Putnam, 1971), 172; Brinkley, The End of Reform. 10. Liberals always understood their program to be based on faith that human reason could solve the "problems" of human society. Yetthe deepest believers in reason sensed that reason was not enough. The Pragmatist philosopher who gave American Liberalism its distinctive cast in the Progressive Era, William James, memorablyexpressed the need for an irrational crusade to inspire the sacrifices that reason could not inspire in "The Moral Equivalent ofWar" (1910). James,the scientific...
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