The press release from the New York Public Library announcing the library’s acquisition of the papers of Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. portrays the historian as an ardent leftist. It reports that the papers include a draft of anti-war Democrat George McGovern’s 1972 presidential nomination acceptance speech. It says that Schlesinger “is often referred to as the only advisor of President Kennedy who opposed the Bay of Pigs Cuban invasion.” It quotes a letter of Schlesinger’s cautioning against American involvement in Vietnam and claiming that “the purpose and moral[e] of the Vietnamese who oppose us are so much firmer and better than the purpose and morale of the Vietnamese [who] are on our side.”

But there was another side of Schlesinger that was obscured in the release — one that, like the best of the Kennedy-era Cold War liberals, was clear-eyed about the nature of the enemy threat. We were reminded of this while reading an address Schlesinger made in 1979 to the Massachusetts Historical Society. Then the Schweitzer Chair in the Humanities at the City University of New York, he asked the Society to consider what he called “the plight of Soviet historians.” Schlesinger pronounced himself “ashamed” that the American Historical Association “has not uttered a word about the persecution of our colleagues in the Soviet Union — Amalrik, Medvedev, Moroz, Solzhenitsyn (whose Gulag Archipelago is an historical work of great importance) — preferring instead to arrange colloquia with docile Soviet historians, thereby expressing its solidarity with the historians the regime approves rather than with those the regime persecutes.”

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Schlesinger went on, “Yet contemporary history written by approved Soviet historians bears about the same relation to history as, say, Goebbels did to Ranke.” He criticized the University of Chicago Press for bringing out a book, “Russia and the United States,” “by two alleged Soviet historians of America” that omitted mention of Trotsky and barely mentions Khrushchev. “As a work of history, this book is beneath contempt. Even as propaganda, it is crude and vulgar,” he said.

One of the benefits of the New York Public Library’s acquisition of the nearly 300 linear feet of Schlesinger papers is that it will allow scholars to study in Schlesinger not only strands of the pacifistic defeatism that is unfortunately all too common on today’s left but also his understanding of the evil of America’s enemies, an understanding that is, just as unfortunately, all too rare on the contemporary left. That Schlesinger had gained the understanding is one of the elements of his stature.

Another of the benefits of the acquisition is that it may provide scholars insights into Schlesinger’s views on multiculturalism, which, we learned from a speech he gave to the Massachusetts Historical Society on October 16, 1991, at the 200th anniversary dinner of the Society, were also at odds with much of the contemporary left. The bow-tied historian railed against the twin threats of the deconstructionism imported to the American academy from literary critics of France and “militant multiculturalism,” which, he warned, “has placed the idea of a common culture in jeopardy.”

“When multicultural education means, as the zealots insist, that our public schools should teach subjects like history and literature not as intellectual disciplines but as emotional therapies, multiculturalism becomes a different matter. When it means the assumption that ethnicity is the defining experience for all Americans, that the point of education is to make people feel good about their ancestors, that we must discard the idea of a common culture and instead celebrate, reinforce, and perpetuate separate ethnic and racial communities, then multiculturalism not only betrays history but undermines the theory of America as one people,” he warned. “Multicultural history in this militant vein promotes fragmentation, segregation, ghettoization.”

His critique of multiculturalism was echoed in one of his columns for Robert Bartley’s editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, one of the places where Schlesinger made one of his homes, no doubt because, though he didn’t always agree with the editorials, he understood and appreciated quality. To the Massachusetts Historical Society Schlesinger also made the point that documentation “is not the end of history, but … the beginning.” The acquisition of the papers by the New York Public Library provides a chance for historians to begin to get a better understanding of a man who has much yet to teach us.