DOCSLIB.ORG

A Measure of Detachment: Richard Hofstadter and the Progressive Historians

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
A Measure of Detachment: Richard Hofstadter and the Progressive Historians A MEASURE OF DETACHMENT: RICHARD HOFSTADTER AND THE PROGRESSIVE HISTORIANS A Thesis Submitted to the Temple University Graduate Board In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree MASTER OF ARTS By Wiliiam McGeehan May 2018 Thesis Approvals: Harvey Neptune, Department of History Andrew Isenberg, Department of History ABSTRACT This thesis argues that Richard Hofstadter's innovations in historical method arose as a critical response to the Progressive historians, particularly to Charles Beard. Hofstadter's first two books were demonstrations of the inadequacy of Progressive methodology, while his third book (the Age of Reform) showed the potential of his new way of writing history. i TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT.......................................................................................................................i CHAPTER 1. A MEASURE OF DETACHMENT..........................................................................1 2. SOCIAL DARWINISM IN AMERICAN THOUGHT………………………………………………26 3. THE AMERICAN POLITICAL TRADITION…………………………………………………………..52 4. THE AGE OF REFORM…………………………………………………………………………………….100 5. CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………………………………………139 BIBLIOGRAPHY…………………………………………………………………………………………………………..144 CHAPTER ONE A MEASURE OF DETACHMENT Great thinkers often spend their early years in rebellion against the teachers from whom they have learned the most. Freud would say they live out a form of the Oedipal archetype, that son must murder his father at least a little bit if he is ever to become his own man. Richard Hofstadter described himself as a product of America’s reform tradition and identified the Progressive historian Charles Beard as his most important influence. And yet his creation of a new way of doing history emerged as a critical response to Progressive historiography and particularly to Beard. Reading Beard’s Rise of American Civilization, one is struck by its tone of patriotic pride, not a traditional reverence towards the Framers or the hardy Anglo-Saxon pioneers who planted the seeds of democracy, but a feeling of satisfaction that America had finally outgrown its absurd belief that the founding generation’s choices embodied an eternal political wisdom. 1 Since its earliest days, said Beard, America was loyal to a Hamiltonian dream of laissez-faire , a myth that a beneficent and egalitarian social order would arise organically, if only the state would leave ordinary people alone while it fostered the interests of capital. America had been slow to grasp that for nearly everyone, the promise of entrepreneurial success had always vastly exceeded the possibility of its attainment. But with the closing of the frontier and the rise of 1 Beard’s iconoclastic work An Economic Interpretation of the Origin of the Constitution (1913) was a part of this awakening. Beard ridiculed the “Teutonic” seed theory of George Bancroft, the idea that America’s social order came from a natural proclivity to democracy of a “specially gifted race” and that Constitution was “the full fruition of their political genius” (p. 3). Like the muckraker he was, Beard dispensed with these rationalizations and gave us the “realistic” view: “our fundamental law was not the product of an abstraction known as ‘the whole people’ but of a group of economic interests which expected beneficial results from its adoption” (p. 17). 1 industrialization, the nation had finally seen that laissez-faire was the freedom of the wolf to roam freely among the sheep. There was a “profound movement of social forces that finally breached the philosophy of ‘Let us alone’.” 2 “Science” overturned the dogmatism of Adam Smith’s Natural Law, “challenging the intellectual patterns handed down from the age of the stagecoach.” 3 Democrats and Republicans, North and South, East and West: all agreed that regulation was not an impediment to progress but its precondition. “The system of acquisition was calling into being its own antithesis—forces that challenged its authority and called into question and required a reconsideration of its laws and ethics.” 4 The name of this antithesis was Progressivism. And how much these Progressives had achieved! Compensation for injured workers, protection of “national capital” in the form of public lands and resources, greater liberty for women, the right of workers to strike and unionize, a reformed civil service, direct primaries, the “Australian” secret ballot—all these were evidence that the “plutocracy was being curbed,” that “the sacred rights of property owners could be invaded with the object of compelling them to carry the burden of their own social wreckage.” 5 To Hofstadter, Beard had debunked one dream only to replace it with another. He gave Beard credit for dispelling the aura of sanctity around the Framers. He acknowledged that Beard’s heresy opened the way for Oliver Wendell Holmes’ critique of legal formalism and for the new, pragmatic interpretations of the Constitution that made Progressive reform possible. 6 He saw 2 Beard, Charles and Mary. The Rise of American Civilization, p. 583. 3 Beard, Charles and Mary. The Rise of American Civilization, p. 538. 4 Beard, Charles and Mary. The Rise of American Civilization, p. 544. 5 Beard, Charles and Mary. The Rise of American Civilization, p. 542. 6 The Progressive Historians, p. 213. Hofstadter notes that Holmes disliked Beard’s book, which he referred to as “humbug”. For Holmes, as for Hofstadter, the insinuation that greed was the Framers’ principal motive was a gross simplification. 2 the accomplishments of the Progressive era, including Beard’s work, as great leaps forward. But to say, as Beard did, that “let it be” had been replaced by a widespread desire for “social democracy” was a vast exaggeration. Beard had indeed given us “relief from the revelation granted by God to Alexander Hamilton in 1787,” but was unable to subject his own synthesis to the same critical scrutiny. He, too, saw the saw the nation he wanted to see. His moral vision of a regenerative, reforming America blinded him to a nation that was unwilling to give up its traditional bourgeoise dreams. Hofstadter would play therapist to this Beardian fantasy. He never spoke of Beard with condemnation or reproof. But there is an unmistakable sense that to him, Beard had got it all wrong. He had let his utopian dreams taint his understanding of America’s past and inflate his hopes for its future. No therapist is the enemy of fantasy. 7 Dreams tie life together, they give sense and unity to its parts, and they give us hope. Like a Leibnizian theodicy, they reconcile human iniquity with our need to see the world as fundamentally good. But sometimes these fantasies stray into delusion and interfere with life. They foster magical thinking and the inevitable disappointments which follow once one sees that the magic does not work. Beard and the rest of the Progressive historians saw an America molting off its Hamiltonian myths, as a caterpillar sloughs its cocoon to become a butterfly. For Hofstadter, the cocoon was still very much intact. 7 Like Hofstadter, I use the terms “dream,” “myth,” and “fantasy” interchangeably but not pejoratively. I believe I follow his usage by treating “delusion” as having a genuinely negative connotation, not because delusions are fictional but rather because they cause harm to those who hold them. “A myth,” wrote Hofstadter in The Age of Reform, “is not an idea that is simply false but rather one that so effectively embodies men’s values that it profoundly influences their way of perceiving reality and hence their behavior” (p. 24). There is a great overlap, if not outright coextensionality, between myth and ideology. By the time he wrote Age of Reform, Hofstadter had read Karl Mannheim and was ready to discuss ideology with Mannheim’s analytic vocabulary. But he had been looking at ideology in Mannheim’s way for a long time already. The bootstrapping dream of bourgeoise liberalism was one sort of myth, and the Progressive belief that this consensus was waning was another. Challenging the latter myth, I argue, was the chief task of Hofstadter’s first two books. 3 He saw no great turning away from laissez-faire capitalism, no long struggle between the rich and the poor culminating in the victories of the Progressive era, no watershed moment when America had woken to a sense of communal responsibility. There had been labor violence but never a self-conscious working class. There had been radicals and dissenters, but not many, and those few had been easily marginalized. In terms of material power and productivity, the rise of American industrial capitalism had been flourishing success. “Societies that are in such good working order,” Hofstadter wrote, “have a kind of mute organic consistency. They do not foster ideas that are hostile to their fundamental working arrangements. Such ideas may appear, but they are slowly and persistently insulated, as an oyster deposits nacre around an irritant.” 8 Contrary to the paranoid view 9 of Progressives like Beard, this insulation was not the fruit of some malevolent, plutocratic design. Dissenters were marginal figures because there was so little support for their views among the middle and working class. Most Americans respected successful capitalists. They did not struggle against the system but rather fought to join its upper ranks. Support for capitalism was a constant in American history, a value system shared by the majority in all social classes in all historical periods. Hofstadter called this unwavering support for bourgeoise liberalism the American consensus. By insisting that consensus, not conflict, was the leading characteristic of America’s past, Hofstadter broke sharply with Progressive historiography, and thus also with his generation’s intellectual Left. 10 8 American Political Tradition, p. ix. 9 In The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Hofstadter infamously labeled the New Right as practitioners of the “paranoid style.” What is less appreciated, but important for grasping his response to Progressive historiography, is that he saw the Progressives (and the Populists) as practicing their own form of pathological, delusional, demonizing politics.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Unpopular Policies and the Theory of Representative Democracy Pierre Salmon
    Unpopular policies and the theory of representative democracy Pierre Salmon To cite this version: Pierre Salmon. Unpopular policies and the theory of representative democracy. [Research Report] Laboratoire d’analyse et de techniques économiques(LATEC). 1991, 25 p., ref. bib. : 2 p. hal- 01526994 HAL Id: hal-01526994 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01526994 Submitted on 23 May 2017 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. LABORATOIRE D'ANALYSE ET DE TECHNIQUES ÉCONOMIQUES UMR 5601 CNRS DOCUMENT DE TRAVAIL �I CENTRE NATIONAL DE LA RECHERCHE I SCIENTIFIQUE '1 UNIVERSITE DE BOURGOGNE Pôle d'Economie et de Gestion 2, boulevard Gabriel - 21000 DIJON - Tél. 03 80 3954 30 - Fax 03 80 39 54 43 ISSN : 1260-8556 9102 UNPOPULAR POLICIES AND THE THEORY OF REPRESENTATIVE DEMOCRACY Pierre SALMON* May 1991 Université de Bourgogne * I am grateful to the participants of the Fourth Villa Colombella Seminar, especially Ron Wintrobe, to Alain Wolfelsperger and to an anonymous referee for their helpful comments. The errors and shortcomings that remain are solely my responsability. INTRODUCTION: IS MOB RULE OUR IDEAL OF REPRESENTATIVE DEMOCRACY? Their platforms reflect concern with enhancing the probability of being elected, but some candidates often, or all candidates occasionally, voluntarily adept stances that reduce that probability.
    [Show full text]
  • The Paranoid Style in American History of Science *
    The Paranoid Style in American History of Science * George REISCH Received: 31.5.2012 Final version: 30.7.2012 BIBLID [0495-4548 (2012) 27: 75; pp. 323-342] ABSTRACT: Historian Richard Hofstadter’s observations about American cold-war politics are used to contextualize Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and argue that substantive claims about the nature of sci- entific knowledge and scientific change found in Structure were adopted from this cold-war political cul- ture. Keywords: Thomas S. Kuhn; The Structure of Scientific Revolutions ; Richard Hofstadter; “The Paranoid Style in American Politics;” Cold War; James B. Conant; Brainwashing. RESUMEN: Las observaciones del historiador Richard Hofstadter sobre la política americana en la Guerra Fría se uti- lizan para contextualizar La estructura de las revoluciones científicas de Thomas Kuhn y sostener que algunas afirmaciones fundamentales sobre la naturaleza del conocimiento científico y el cambio científico que se pueden hallar en La estructura fueron adoptadas de esta cultura política de la Guerra Fría. Palabras clave: Thomas S. Kuhn; La estructura de las revoluciones científicas ; Richard Hofstadter; “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”; Guerra Fría; James B. Conant; lavado de cerebro. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant. –Richard Hofstadter (1964, 4) 1. Introduction The conventional wisdom holds that Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions of- fered a revolutionary critique of existing scholarship about science. The book swept aside misconceptions wrought by three kinds of intellectuals—logic-chopping philos- ophers who confused their logical models and formulas with historical fact, Whiggish historians who viewed science’s past through the lenses of the present, and text-book writers whose brief, potted historical introductions obscured science’s dynamic, revo- lutionary history.
    [Show full text]
  • Preventing Mob Rule
    In a democracy, the people rule. This means that if a majority of HANDOUT: the public demands a law or public policy, elected leaders have an obligation to seriously consider that demand. However, sometimes the majority demands a law or public policy Preventing that could trample the rights of minorities. The phenomena of the majority wanting to trample the rights of a minority is also known as Mob Rule: ochlocracy, or mob rule. Passing a Law To keep ochlocracy at bay, liberal democracies spread power amongst several institutions. The separate powers of the Senate, the House of Commons, and even the Queen illustrate how the power to create and enact laws is spread amongst different institutions in Canada. Each institution can act as a check on the power of the others. By having power spread across institutions, the law-creation process can be more reasoned and less mob-like. There are more opportunities to consider positions, consult experts, and ask questions. This helps temper emotions, protect minority rights, and promote reason when creating laws. The Path to Creating a Law In Canada, the federal government cannot simply declare a law, without a debate and without that law being subjected to reviews and consideration. The rule of law requires that there are open and established processes to guide the creation of laws. The process below outlines the steps to creating most federal laws in Canada. The process for creating laws at the provincial level is similar, except that there is no Senate review of provincial laws. Three Readings When a proposed law—also known as a bill—is first introduced in the House of Commons, it must pass a series of three votes.
    [Show full text]
  • Spooked by the Demos: Aristotle's Conception of the Good Citizenry
    Problematique Issue 11 (Spring) 2007 Bell: Spooked by the Demos Spooked by the Demos: Aristotle’s Conception of the Good Citizenry Against the Mob Colleen Bell This article addresses two aspects of Aristotle’s The Politics.1 The first concerns his conception of the good citizenry and the second concerns the character that he attributes to a politically active demos. At times, Aristotle refers to this latter category as the ‘mob’ which serves as the citizenry’s disruptive counterpart.2 I explore how the ideas of rationality, virtue and excellence are used to characterize the good citizenry, while the mob, driven by passion, moral depravity and irrationality, is represented as its alterity. The relationship between the good citizenry and the mob, I argue, is critical to the image that Aristotle casts of the best possible constitution; one designed to be largely invulnerable to revolution and to the formation of an active, democratic polity. His awareness of the potential for the demos to transform into a form of ‘mob rule’ leads him to compromise the ideal constitution, composed of a wholly ‘rational’ and ‘virtuous’ citizenry, by extending citizenship rights to a limited and select portion of the demos in order to minimize the likelihood of mob driven revolution. Aristotle provides the classical account of the citizen as one who has both the knowledge, and the ability to rule and be ruled. 3 Key is the idea that while ‘man’ is distinguished by reason, not all ‘men’ posses sufficient reason to warrant citizenship. 4 In holding that not all of humanity has the capacity to rule, essential to his conception of the good citizen is the willful exclusion of women, slaves, immigrants, and children from both political subjectivity and participation.
    [Show full text]
  • The Democratic Party and the Transformation of American Conservatism, 1847-1860
    PRESERVING THE WHITE MAN’S REPUBLIC: THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF AMERICAN CONSERVATISM, 1847-1860 Joshua A. Lynn A dissertation submitted to the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of History. Chapel Hill 2015 Approved by: Harry L. Watson William L. Barney Laura F. Edwards Joseph T. Glatthaar Michael Lienesch © 2015 Joshua A. Lynn ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT Joshua A. Lynn: Preserving the White Man’s Republic: The Democratic Party and the Transformation of American Conservatism, 1847-1860 (Under the direction of Harry L. Watson) In the late 1840s and 1850s, the American Democratic party redefined itself as “conservative.” Yet Democrats’ preexisting dedication to majoritarian democracy, liberal individualism, and white supremacy had not changed. Democrats believed that “fanatical” reformers, who opposed slavery and advanced the rights of African Americans and women, imperiled the white man’s republic they had crafted in the early 1800s. There were no more abstract notions of freedom to boundlessly unfold; there was only the existing liberty of white men to conserve. Democrats therefore recast democracy, previously a progressive means to expand rights, as a way for local majorities to police racial and gender boundaries. In the process, they reinvigorated American conservatism by placing it on a foundation of majoritarian democracy. Empowering white men to democratically govern all other Americans, Democrats contended, would preserve their prerogatives. With the policy of “popular sovereignty,” for instance, Democrats left slavery’s expansion to territorial settlers’ democratic decision-making.
    [Show full text]
  • Theorizing Three Cases of Otherness in the USA: Hofstadter, Foucault, and Scott
    University of New England DUNE: DigitalUNE All Theses And Dissertations Theses and Dissertations 5-1-2017 Theorizing Three Cases Of Otherness In The SU A: Hofstadter, Foucault, And Scott Austin Coco University of New England Follow this and additional works at: http://dune.une.edu/theses Part of the Political Science Commons © 2017 Austin Coco Preferred Citation Coco, Austin, "Theorizing Three Cases Of Otherness In The SAU : Hofstadter, Foucault, And Scott" (2017). All Theses And Dissertations. 136. http://dune.une.edu/theses/136 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at DUNE: DigitalUNE. It has been accepted for inclusion in All Theses And Dissertations by an authorized administrator of DUNE: DigitalUNE. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Austin Coco Dr. Ahmida PSC 491 4/18//17 Theorizing Three Cases of Otherness in the USA: Hofstadter, Foucault, and Scott Austin Coco Coco|1 Dr. Ahmida PSC 491 4/18//17 Theorizing Three Cases of Otherness in the USA: Hofstadter, Foucault, and Scott Introduction This essay examines three cases of otherness: the Italian other in the 1920s, the Communist other during the Red Scare of the 1950s, and the Muslim other in post-2001. The similarities and differences of these cases will be analyzed through Richard Hofstadter’s analysis of the production of otherness for what he calls the paranoid style, Foucault’s analysis of power relations, and James Scott’s analysis of power relations and language. This essay will assess the theoretical methods behind “otherness” that Hofstadter, Foucault, and Scott use, the three cases of “otherness”, and the similarities and differences between the cases and how the theoretical mechanisms apply.
    [Show full text]
  • What Kind of Book Is the Ideological Origins of the American Revolution?
    What Kind of Book is The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution? eric nelson first read Bernard Bailyn’s The Ideological Origins of the I American Revolution when I was a nineteen-year-old stu- dent in the Harvard History Department’s sophomore tutorial. The text was assigned by my late friend and teacher Mark Kish- lansky, who began our discussion of the book by posing the same deceptively simple question that he asked about each his- toriographical masterwork on the syllabus: “What kind of book is this?” I remember thinking rather smugly that, in this case at least, the question had an obvious and straightforward answer: surely, Ideological Origins was a work of intellectual history— and, more specifically, a contribution to the history of early American political thought. But it now strikes me that this an- swer, while not incorrect, was, and is, quite beside the point. Mark was not asking us a banal question about the genre to which Bailyn’s monograph belonged, but rather a deep one about how Bailyn understood that genre. To present Ideological Origins as a history of political thought is, implicitly, to defend a particular conception of what sort of thing “political thought” is and what its history looks like. What, Mark wished us to pon- der, is that conception? I found myself asking this question with a renewed sense of urgency more than fifteen years later as I grappled witha I am indebted to Bernard Bailyn, Richard Bourke, Jonathan Gienapp, James Hank- ins, Michael Rosen, and Quentin Skinner for extremely helpful comments on this essay.
    [Show full text]
  • Imperialism, Racism, and Fear of Democracy in Richard Ely's Progressivism
    The Rot at the Heart of American Progressivism: Imperialism, Racism, and Fear of Democracy in Richard Ely's Progressivism Gerald Friedman Department of Economics University of Massachusetts at Amherst November 8, 2015 This is a sketch of my long overdue intellectual biography of Richard Ely. It has been way too long in the making and I have accumulated many more debts than I can acknowledge here. In particular, I am grateful to Katherine Auspitz, James Boyce, Bruce Laurie, Tami Ohler, and Jean-Christian Vinel, and seminar participants at Bard, Paris IV, Paris VII, and the Five College Social History Workshop. I am grateful for research assistance from Daniel McDonald. James Boyce suggested that if I really wanted to write this book then I would have done it already. And Debbie Jacobson encouraged me to prioritize so that I could get it done. 1 The Ely problem and the problem of American progressivism The problem of American Exceptionalism arose in the puzzle of the American progressive movement.1 In the wake of the Revolution, Civil War, Emancipation, and radical Reconstruction, no one would have characterized the United States as a conservative polity. The new Republican party took the United States through bloody war to establish a national government that distributed property to settlers, established a national fiat currency and banking system, a progressive income tax, extensive program of internal improvements and nationally- funded education, and enacted constitutional amendments establishing national citizenship and voting rights for all men, and the uncompensated emancipation of the slave with the abolition of a social system that had dominated a large part of the country.2 Nor were they done.
    [Show full text]
  • Than Faith: Latter-Day Saint Women As Politically Aware and Active Americans, 1830-1860 Kim M
    CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk Provided by Western Washington University Western Washington University Western CEDAR WWU Graduate School Collection WWU Graduate and Undergraduate Scholarship Spring 2017 More Than Faith: Latter-Day Saint Women as Politically Aware and Active Americans, 1830-1860 Kim M. (Kim Michaelle) Davidson Western Washington University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://cedar.wwu.edu/wwuet Part of the History Commons Recommended Citation Davidson, Kim M. (Kim Michaelle), "More Than Faith: Latter-Day Saint Women as Politically Aware and Active Americans, 1830-1860" (2017). WWU Graduate School Collection. 558. https://cedar.wwu.edu/wwuet/558 This Masters Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the WWU Graduate and Undergraduate Scholarship at Western CEDAR. It has been accepted for inclusion in WWU Graduate School Collection by an authorized administrator of Western CEDAR. For more information, please contact [email protected]. More Than Faith: Latter-Day Saint Women as Politically Aware and Active Americans 1830-1860 By Kim Michaelle Davidson Accepted in Partial Completion of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts Kathleen L. Kitto, Dean of the Graduate School ADVISORY COMMITTEE Chair, Dr. Jared Hardesty Dr. Hunter Price Dr. Holly Folk MASTER’S THESIS In presenting this thesis in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a master’s degree at Western Washington University, I grant to Western Washington University the non- exclusive royalty-free right to archive, reproduce, distribute, and display the thesis in any and all forms, including electronic format, via any digital library mechanisms maintained by WWU.
    [Show full text]
  • Uncovering the Reformation Roots of American Marriage and Divorce Law
    Uncovering the Reformation Roots of American Marriage and Divorce Law Judith Areent INTRO D UCTIO N ............................................................................................... 30 I. SIXTEENTH CENTURY EUROPEAN MARRIAGE AND DIVORCE LAW R EFO R M .............................................................................................. 34 A. Luther Advocates Civil Marriage and Fault-Based Divorce .......... 35 B. Zwingli Inspires Zurich to Enact the First Modem Marriage and D ivorce Law ....................................................................... 44 C. Calvin's Geneva Adopts a Civil Marriage and Divorce O rdinance .................................................................................. 49 II. REFORMATION IN ENGLAND ............................................................... 53 A. Henry VIII Opposes Divorce ..................................................... 53 B. Archbishop Cranmer Proposes the Reformatio Legum Ecclesiasticarum....................................................................... 54 C. The Rise of Godly Puritans and Support for Marriage and D ivorce Reform ......................................................................... 59 III. MARRIAGE AND DIVORCE LAW IN COLONIAL AMERICA .................... 61 A. Civil Marriage in Plymouth Plantation ...................................... 61 B. Civil Marriage and Divorce in Massachusetts Bay Colony ........... 64 C. Civil Marriage, but No Divorce, in the Colonies Outside New E ngland ...................................................................................
    [Show full text]
  • Under the Direction of Professor David A
    ABSTRACT MEDLIN, ERIC PATRICK. The Historian and the Liberal Intellectual: Power and Postwar American Historians, 1948-1975. (Under the direction of Professor David A. Zonderman.) Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Richard Hofstadter, and Daniel Boorstin were three of the most influential American historians of the post-World War II period. They sold millions of books, influenced historiographic debates, and filled prominent positions in society and government. Schlesinger spent two years as a special adviser to President Kennedy, Hofstadter served on the board of the forerunner to PBS, and Boorstin became the first historian to be appointed Librarian of Congress. Over the past five decades, historians have characterized these writers as conservative academics who focused on consensus and agreement in American history. My work challenges that notion. In this thesis, I analyze the writings, speeches, and personal correspondence of Schlesinger, Hofstadter, and Boorstin between 1945 and 1975. My study focuses on both their political ideas and their roles in society. I look at how their work articulated different arguments for and ideas about liberalism during this period. I argue that their positions and roles in society changed in response to their ideas about what society needed from intellectuals. I also argue that the experiences and successes of these figures a provide a template for contemporary public intellectuals who desire both academic and public relevance. © Copyright 2017 by Eric Patrick Medlin All Rights Reserved The Historian and the Liberal Intellectual: Power and Postwar American Historians, 1948-1975 by Eric Patrick Medlin A thesis submitted to the Graduate Faculty of North Carolina State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts History Raleigh, North Carolina 2017 APPROVED BY: ____________________________ ____________________________ Julia E.
    [Show full text]
  • The Age of Reform After Fifty Years
    Downloaded from https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537781400001961 FORUM: RICHARD HOFSTADTER'S THE AGE OF REFORM AFTER FIFTY YEARS https://www.cambridge.org/core [Note: The following two essays are revised versions of presentations made by Robert Johnston and Gillis Harp at the annual meeting of the British American Nineteenth Century Historians (BrANCH) in Cambridge, England, in October 2005. BrANCH invited SHGAPE to help organize the conference. Based on a suggestion by Robert Johnston, SHGAPE con- tributed a session commemorating Richard Hofstadter's book on the Populist and Progressive movements, first published in 1955 and much-acclaimed and much-criticized since. While Professor Johnston had the assignment of assessing The Age of Reform in retro- . IP address: spect, Gillis Harp attempted to put the book within its contemporary intellectual context. Beyond evaluating this noteworthy book, the session had the intention as well of prompting memories from a few people in attendance who knew Hofstadter as a friend and colleague. 170.106.35.229 In this, the session succeeded, reminding those present that The Age of Reform reflected the personality of its author and is more than a historiographic interpretation against which one measures one's own views.! , on 25 Sep 2021 at 06:23:25 The Age of Reform: A Defense of Richard Hofstadter Fifty Years , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at On* Robert D. Johnston, University of Illinois at Chicago When we attend academic history conferences, it has become common to hold sessions honoring important books of the moment. This makes con- siderable sense, as authors get to engage with thoughtful critics in a process that, we hope, advances the discipline.
    [Show full text]