For almost fifty years, Lerner would continue to comment on the social issues of his time, both in short genres and in once-famous books such as It Is Later Than You Think (1938), a study of liberalism that popularized the title phrase. Like any biographer faced with a play-by-play of so prolonged an intellectual life, Lakoff struggles valiantly to capsulize Lerner's views.

He recounts Lerner's prominence as a spokesman for Popular Frontism before World War II and his activism in favor of early US involvement against fascism. (Lerner spent a day with Roosevelt at Hyde Park in 1941, talking philosophy and urging a tough stand toward Nazi Germany.) Lakoff shows Lerner becoming a "Walter Lippmann of the democratic Left" in the forties, suffering criticism for supporting our wartime alliance with the Soviet Union for too long (Walter Winchell referred to him as "Marx Lerner"), then suffering further criticism in the fifties for becoming a "centrist liberal," backing pro-UN internationalism, collective security and containment.

Lakoff continues to hover closely as Lerner becomes "the spokesman for liberal New York opinion" in the sixties and seventies through his New York Post column. He examines Lerner's attacks on the New Left and the hippie values that offended him, and he follows his man into the seventies, when Lerner began his celebration of "eros" with Hefner, whom he exalted as a great American "guilt killer" ("I teach him sex," Lerner joked, "and he teaches me politics"). Steadfast to the end, Lakoff finally scrutinizes Lerner's least attractive years, in the eighties, when the columnist became more routinely centrist, denounced political correctness, clung to an image of priapic virility and obsessed over illness and immortality.

Amid his subject's almost suffocating avalanche of commentary, Lakoff rightly centers Lerner's claim for enduring importance on his triumph, America as a Civilization. If, as various speakers suggested at a Manhattan tribute to Alfred Kazin last fall, that Jewish son of Yiddish-speaking immigrants invigorated the reading of American literature by thinking "with his whole body," Lerner achieved something similar for US intellectual history. Lakoff accurately describes America as a Civilization as "a prodigious and extremely ambitious effort of synthesis, ranging over the country's social history, natural setting, literary and popular culture, economics, and politics, as well as its national character and style--all in an effort to define what was unique about the country and to analyze the factors that accounted for its development."

Lerner, writing in the Toynbee era, which saw America as a marginal nation-state, insisted that America was a new civilization, not a spinoff of European predecessors. He argued that American character comprised two key elements, thumbnailed by Lakoff as "self-reliance, coupled with endurance, friendliness, a democratic informality," and "a sharp aggressiveness, coupled with an organizing capacity, a genius for technology, a sense of bigness and power." Together, they'd fused into an American character that produced the "archetypical man of the West." Against an ugly view of American imperialism driven by hegemonic capitalism, Lerner maintained that America practiced "the imperialism of attraction," winning other people's hearts and feet through the appeal of ideas and accomplishments.

As such a précis suggests, Lerner utterly unburdened himself in America as a Civilization of lingering radical impulses. He clearly decided, Lakoff writes, that "radicals could not compete with liberal reformers in concrete programs." He became "Galbraithian" in that he "saw the managed economy of the affluent society as a reasonable approximation of the democratic collectivism he had earlier advocated."

Ultimately keeping to Veblen's evolutionary view of society, Lerner saw America as a civilization protected from Rome's exhaustion by a central virtue: the "access" it provided to its elite structure, albeit often only after social battles. "In America as a Civilization," writes Lakoff, Lerner "rejected as incomplete all the formulaic explanations of America's success, such as the frontier, natural abundance, isolation, and ideology, both religious and secular. Instead, he argued that the key to understanding the civilization Americans had created is its special capacity for innovation and adaptation"--what he called "American dynamism." In sidestepping hints of reductionism in the genre of American intellectual history--whether Charles Beard's economic constitutionalism, Vernon Parrington's eternal battle between democracy and elitism or Perry Miller's elaboration of the Puritan mindset--Lerner teased out pragmatic veins in that genre and realigned it with American common sense.

• « Previous
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• Next »

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 75 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.