The American Political Tradition, published in 1948 and widely regarded as Hofstadter's best book, is still selling briskly almost sixty years later: Recently it had an Amazon ranking of 4,400, which would be envied by most historians with books on the market today. (Brown's, for example, was at 22,000 on the same day.) Knopf's 1948 publicity marketed the book as a work of consensus history: "In this age of political extremism, this young and brilliant Columbia historian searches out the common ground among all American parties and factions." In fact the book was more subtle, and much more interesting, than that. Hofstadter wrote the book from a vantage point on the left. While others, like Daniel Boorstin, celebrated consensus, Hofstadter was openly critical. It opens with a description of an "increasingly passive and spectatorial" state of mind in postwar America, a country dominated by "corporate monopoly," its citizens "bereft of a coherent and plausible body of belief" and adrift in a "rudderless and demoralized state."

The book consists of twelve biographical portraits of key American political figures, ranging from the slaveholder John Calhoun to the abolitionist Wendell Phillips, from the free-market Republican Herbert Hoover to the welfare-state Democrat FDR, from Jefferson the patrician to Andrew Jackson the common man. Hofstadter's thesis was that all shared fundamental assumptions about the goodness of private property and the value of "progress." The archaic assumptions of The American Political Tradition are all too evident today. Hofstadter believed he was studying something called "the American mind" when he profiled American Presidents, and that their stories and those of other elite white men were representative of our political tradition. But while presidential biography may be of limited value--to the study, albeit not the marketing, of American history--several of Hofstadter's essays in The American Political Tradition remain compelling works of the genre that have seldom been surpassed.

The contrast with recent presidential biographies, like David McCullough's hagiographic book on Truman, could hardly be more stark. Hofstadter's gaze was intensely skeptical, especially when it was trained on the liberal icon of his own time, FDR: Hofstadter's chapter on him is titled "the patrician as opportunist." He objected to the portrait of Lincoln as a Christ-like figure who died for the sin of slavery, depicting him instead as the master of his own myth and as a canny politician, especially on the question of abolition. The Wendell Phillips chapter remains a revelation--even today, when the left famously dominates academia, who would have the chutzpah to put this abolitionist and socialist on the same plane as Jefferson, Lincoln and FDR? Here we see most clearly the traces of the radical sensibility of Hofstadter's youth. The essay is unique in its frank admiration for a voice of "resistance and rebellion," a champion of the oppressed whose refusal to compromise "forced him into a deeper and deeper isolation" as Reconstruction gave way to the Gilded Age. The chapter ends with an elderly Phillips invited to speak at Harvard, and taking the occasion not to heal the breach with his mainstream critics but rather to indict the assembled scholars for their moral cowardice. Hofstadter's admiration for this stance is unmistakable.

The American consensus that Hofstadter bemoaned in The American Political Tradition was turning more aggressive and suspicious the year the book was published, as redbaiting spread across America. Hofstadter refused an invitation to teach at Berkeley in 1950 because he opposed the loyalty oath imposed by the University of California Regents, but he also refused to condemn the firing of Communists at the University of Washington in 1949. His position was the mainstream liberal one: Communists opposed freedom, so they should be denied teaching jobs. This is problematic for his biographer, because Hofstadter himself had joined the Party as a student, and other people who had done the same, like Daniel Boorstin, were being subpoenaed, asked to name names and fired if they refused (Boorstin named his Harvard college roommates). The late James Shenton, a colleague of Hofstadter's at Columbia, told Brown that Hofstadter did not take a stand against firing Communists because "Dick was afraid at the time." It's still a mystery why Hofstadter was never subpoenaed--Brown sheds no light on that crucial question, although others speculate that the FBI may have missed him because he had been a Party member for all of four months.

McCarthyism loomed large in the background of Hofstadter's next book, The Age of Reform, published in 1955. There, Hofstadter searched the past for the roots of the "conspiracy theory" and "paranoid tendencies" that he saw in popular anti-Communism. The book won Hofstadter his first Pulitzer and remains, in Alan Brinkley's words, "the most influential book ever published on the history of twentieth-century America." The book's most enduring contribution, Sean Wilentz rightly argues, is its re-interpretation of the New Deal, not as part of the nineteenth-century reform tradition in America, as most historians saw it, but rather as an "outrageous departure" from it. The old reformers ended up with prohibition as their great achievement; the New Deal, by contrast, focused not on moral campaigns against evil but on pragmatic and practical aims. It eschewed ideology and focused on results--and the results included the welfare state, the Wagner Act for labor and Keynsian policy for the budget. It's still a bracing interpretation.

Hofstadter's argument that the historical roots of McCarthyism lay in the Populist tradition, on the other hand, is simply wrong. He argued that the Populist movement of the 1890s was deeply irrational and essentially proto-fascist. The Populists saw the principal source of injustice and economic suffering in rural America in what they called "the money power." In Hofstadter's analysis, this was evidence of irrational paranoia, of "psychic disturbances." Moreover, Hofstadter argued that these denunciations of "the money power" were deeply anti-Semitic. Alas, his evidence of Populist anti-Semitism was embarrassingly thin: a handful of lurid quotes from a few Populist leaders about the "House of Rothschild" and "Shylock," and an argument that Henry Ford's anti-Semitism came from his background as "a Michigan farm boy who had been liberally exposed to Populist notions."

The problem with this analysis, aside from the paucity of evidence, was that anti-Semitic rhetoric was hardly a monopoly of rural Midwestern Protestants in post-Civil War America. The Protestant elites in East Coast cities were probably more anti-Semitic, and Irish Catholic immigrants in Eastern cities had no love for Jews either. The larger problem stemmed from Hofstadter's theoretical framework. Today Hofstadter is regarded primarily as a great writer with a powerful personal vision. But he was engaged with the most advanced social science theory of his day, and he pioneered the application of theory to history--the move that many of his fans today consider the downfall of the profession. The Age of Reform was framed around the theory of "status politics," which came from an essay by German sociologist Max Weber, published in the United States by Hofstadter's Columbia colleague and friend the radical sociologist C. Wright Mills. Hofstadter's "status politics" thesis held that the Populists were driven to irrationality and paranoia by anxiety over their declining status in an America where rural life and its values were being supplanted by an urban industrial society. Populism, in this view, was a form of reactionary resistance to modernity. Here Hofstadter was the Jewish New York intellectual anxiously looking for traces of proto-fascism somewhere in middle America. He saw Joe McCarthy as a potential American Hitler and believed he had found the roots of American fascism among rural Protestants in the Midwest. It was history by analogy--but the analogy didn't work.

None of these problems escaped Hofstadter's critics at the time. In The Nation, William Appleman Williams argued that Hofstadter's conception of status politics defined opposition to the status quo as fundamentally irrational while the irrationalities of liberal capitalism went unexamined. In 1967 Michael Rogin published a powerful book, The Intellectuals and McCarthy: The Radical Specter, showing that the people who voted for McCarthy, by and large, were not former Populists but rather upper-middle-class suburban Republicans. And it was not just leftists like Williams and Rogin who questioned Hofstadter's "status politics" thesis. One of C. Vann Woodward's greatest essays, "The Populist Heritage and the Intellectual," insisted that the Populist program of the 1890s was far from irrational, that the Populists were not proto-McCarthyites, that many McCarthy supporters came from "college-bred, established-wealth, old family" sources. But if Hofstadter's argument was challenged effectively at the time, his anxiety about an American fascism stayed with him for the rest of his life.

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