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.