The Age of American Unreason

A measure of the glowing success of American historian and Columbia University professor Richard Hofstadter (1916–1970), beyond the numerous editions of his books, is the veneration that came from the New York Times, the New Republic, and the Chronicle of Higher Education when my colleague David Brown published a biography of Hofstadter two years ago. Although the biography was far from uncritical, readers and reviewers mostly took the opportunity to celebrate Hofstadter’s “liberal” achievement. Only two reviews known to me — one my own in the American Conservative and the other by Wilfred McClay in the Wall Street Journal — acknowledged that the biography offered harsh judgments as well as kind ones about its “renowned” subject. The consensus among his admirers was that Hofstadter had been more than simply a productive writer who had trained a future generation of well-placed establishment historians: He had, they suggested, pointed out the past failings of American society, a society whose politics had been polluted by rural populists and other alleged yahoos.Hofstadter had gone after those yahoos, albeit not for the first time, when he wrote “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life” (1963). Like “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” published one year later, “Anti-Intellectualism” played up the demagogic political streak in American history, which Hofstadter illustrated with references to Joe McCarthy and the American Right. This work recycled some of Hofstadter’s earlier work on the populists and the later Progressives: “Anti-Intellectualism” and “The Age of Reform” (1955), which both earned Pulitzer Prizes, claimed to uncover the right-wing, anti-Semitic, and racist strains of the American political tradition, even in that tradition’s supposed reform movements. In “The Age of Reform,” Hofstadter observes that American populism was as much about bigotry as the quest for economic justice; the author asserts, although his arguments are far from conclusive, that “a full history of modern anti-Semitism in the United States would reveal its substantial Populist lineage.” Hofstadter also draws a highly impressionistic, controversial parallel between the murals of the American artist of the frontier Thomas Hart Benton (1889–1975) and Italian fascist iconography; this comparison was apparently drawn from an equally impressionistic essay by the Marxist art historian Meyer Shapiro, published in Partisan Review in 1937.In “Anti-Intellectualism,” the leitmotif becomes “nativism,” and although Hofstadter takes to task some cultural and educational practices that may deserve to be criticized, such as vocational training as the basis for American education, the nativist charge here is heavily overworked. A more scrupulous study might have explored a genuinely nativist strain in American social history, but in Hofstadter’s work the concept is not so much an instrument of analysis as a term of abuse. It is simply applied to a wide variety of things that Hofstadter objected to, including such sources of offense as blue-collar values, what Hofstadter considered the neo-populism of democratic reformers in the 1950s, and Progressive education. In his idiosyncratic view, the educational nostrums of John Dewey became “nativist” by virtue of supposedly reflecting an old-fashioned American repugnance for real learning.One catches echoes, in these books and later ones, of Hofstadter’s longtime critical preoccupation with two older American academic idols: Frederick Jackson Turner, who had exalted the frontier as the defining context of American national identity, and Vernon Parrington, the Progressive literary historian, whose heart, according to Hofstadter, had never strayed far from the WASP American heartland. Hofstadter directed considerable literary energy toward exposing the residual intolerance of these and other historians of an earlier generation, underscoring how insensitive they were to the bigotry of those Americans, such as Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and their agrarian followers, whom they had misleadingly presented as “reformers.”Hofstadter contrasted to these earlier Americans the urban ethnics, whose transformation of the country he praised. True socioeconomic reform, he believed as a self-styled “liberal,” could only be carried forward with the support of those urban immigrant Americans, whose champion he imagined he had become. But some uncomfortable biographical details contradict the image that Hofstadter tried to project as a New York Jewish liberal intellectual: Despite the presence on his father’s side of Polish Jewish ancestors, he had been raised by his Protestant mother in Buffalo as a Lutheran; moreover, in his private correspondence, he reveals politically incorrect views on certain delicate subjects. Still, Hofstadter may be entitled to that persona he created for himself, and which comes through in his published works on the American political tradition, the Progressives, and American anti-intellectualism. Even for those who do not find his intention or politics particularly appealing (and I shall not pretend that I do), his writing style can be truly captivating. The reason his books have sold well over the decades may have as much to do with his prose as his politics.The success of his book on anti-intellectualism, for instance, does not owe much to his arguments, which are problematic to say the least. To begin with, Hofstadter grossly exaggerates the “anti-intellectualism” in the American past and present. For me — but clearly not Hofstadter — it is hard to consider a country that is full of libraries, concert halls, museums, and (justly or unjustly) world-renowned universities as being uniformly inimical to thought or the arts. I recall asking myself when I encountered his invectives in graduate school whether someone who disagrees with Hofstadter’s political opinions may nonetheless be considered an “intellectual.” Could “intellectuals,” for example, be found in the camp of Senator Joseph McCarthy, whom Hofstadter viewed, in the years before Goldwater, as the culminating figure in the American anti-intellectual tradition?The answer is of course “no” because, like the Frankfurt School cultural Marxists who influenced his thinking, Hofstadter associated intellectuals and intellectualism exclusively with the Left. How would he have categorized those European right-wingers who created literary and artistic modernism? Or the Southern Agrarians? In his view, both would have to be called pseudo-intellectuals. A collection of essays and commentaries on movements and trends that Hofstadter deemed “anti-intellectual,” his book ranges freely among such varied themes as John Dewey’s Progressive ideas about education, Southern Fundamentalism, and anti-Communism. What these themes have in common may be nothing more than being special objects of Hofstadter’s revulsion.But the same work has also served a positive function for its devotees, by justifying their siege mentality when confronted by an America that seems to embody their worst fears. It is indeed easy to blame one’s suspicion on outsiders and to see those outsiders as linked by hostility to one’s own group, while claiming for oneself and one’s friends the “intellectual” high ground. Hofstadter does this for his own preferred group while providing a historical narrative that justifies their urban, leftist provincialism. In “The American Political Tradition,” he famously refers to that defender of the Southern planters, John C. Calhoun, as the “Marx of the Master Class.” Ensconced in his sumptuous apartment near Columbia University, and speaking for a well-paid, clubby leftist intelligentsia, Hofstadter became exactly what he had called Calhoun. It is difficult to avoid the impression that this book itself typifies what Hofstadter would call the “paranoid style in American politics.”Mr. Gottfried is Raffensperger Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College and the author of “Conservatism in America: Making Sense of the American Right,” among other books.

The Age of American Unreason

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