America, Through a Glass Darkly (Page 3)

Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, the 1963 book that won Hofstadter his second Pulitzer Prize, was another attempt to identify the historical origins of what Hofstadter saw as the key threat to liberalism in his own time. The book enjoyed a revival in the Age of Reagan, and is cited today at a rate that seems to be increasing exponentially. But the book seems mistaken about the period in which it was published. Anti-intellectualism was hardly a major problem in the United States in 1964. American intellectuals in the early '60s had never had it so good: Universities were growing as never before, Congress provided lavish funding for elite institutions and professors like Hofstadter were highly paid and won big book contracts. Popular magazines followed the hot debates among intellectuals--Daniel Bell on the "end of ideology," David Riesman on "the lonely crowd," C. Wright Mills on "the power elite," Irving Howe on "the age of conformity," C. Vann Woodward on "the strange career of Jim Crow," Michael Harrington on "the other America." As Russell Jacoby argued in The Last Intellectuals, the 1950s were the golden age for liberal thinkers like Hofstadter. Yet something about that era was clearly troubling him.

In the book's first chapter, "Anti-Intellectualism in Our Time," Hofstadter explained what was on his mind: the defeat of Adlai Stevenson twelve years earlier, in 1952. Hofstadter had been a passionate supporter of Stevenson, whom he described in the book as "a politician of uncommon mind." Eisenhower's victory was an "apocalypse for intellectuals"--a typically striking phrase, but wildly off-base. Stevenson was intelligent and articulate, but he was no intellectual. He wasn't even especially liberal: He backed away from Truman's call for national healthcare; he supported the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act; and he was no friend of black people, choosing as his 1952 running mate Alabama Senator John Sparkman, a militant segregationist. (Hofstadter should have noticed, because he supported the civil rights movement and joined the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery march, as Sean Wilentz recently pointed out.) When it came to Stevenson, Hofstadter's vaunted skepticism and irony evaporated.

Anti-Intellectualism was another of Hofstadter's anxious searches for the roots of American fascism, finding it this time in the evangelical Protestants of the nineteenth century and then in the fundamentalists of the 1920s. Rereading it today, that search seems misguided: McCarthyism was not essentially a movement against intellectuals. True, there were loyalty oaths for professors and purges of faculty leftists, but the anti-Communists devoted much more energy to purging Hollywood radicals and the leftist union activists--a crucial base for New Deal politics. Yes, McCarthy targeted Harvard, but he spent more time attacking the State Department and then, notoriously, the Army. And Hofstadter's conclusion that the McCarthyite anti-intellectualism of the 1950s had its origins in the evangelical Protestantism of the nineteenth century was fundamentally mistaken. Hofstadter's friend Woodward, after reading the book, wrote to him privately, "Dick, you just can't do this."

Four years later, however, some readers of Anti-Intellectualism in American Life saw the book in a new light, against the backdrop of the 1968 student uprising at Hofstadter's Columbia. There, antiwar radicals occupied university buildings and denounced "university complicity in the war." Liberal intellectuals were horrified by the spectacle of students challenging the university, and they went so far as to liken the demonstrators to Brownshirts. They were decidedly less alarmed by Columbia's repressive response. The administration brought 1,000 cops on campus to clear the buildings; 712 students were arrested, 148 injured and nearly 400 filed police brutality complaints. Nothing like that had ever happened on an American campus, although much worse was to come at Kent State and other schools. It's not surprising that Hofstadter agreed to speak at the official Columbia commencement later that spring. Nevertheless, it's sad to picture him rising to give his speech, while forty uniformed policemen stood guard and 300 students walked out in protest to join 2,000 other people at an antiwar counter-commencement nearby.

In other ways, however, Hofstadter's response to the student uprising at Columbia in 1968 set him apart from the liberal critics who regarded the student movement as dangerously anti-intellectual. While his friends in Morningside Heights carried on about the students and saw themselves manning the barricades against the new barbarians, Hofstadter opened the door and invited his students in to talk with him about their goals and strategies. Eric Foner, one of those students, recalled that "his graduate students, many of whom were actively involved in the civil rights and antiwar movements, were having as much influence on his evolving interests and outlook as he was on theirs." Indeed, the year after Columbia '68, Hofstadter was rethinking his earlier work. He privately conceded that his critics had been right about The Age of Reform; in a letter he declared that the book's status thesis was (in Brown's paraphrase) "flawed and unusable" and that "nativism and anti-Semitism permeated American society in the 1890s." In another letter written the same year, he declared that his effort in Anti-Intellectualism in American Life to explain the present had (in Brown's paraphrase) "clearly missed the mark." Here was another surprising and unusual quality: a willingness to reassess his work and find its flaws.

The most remarkable of his relationships with students after the '68 events was with his research assistant, Michael Wallace (who went on to win the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Gotham, a history of New York City). In the spring of 1968, in the midst of the demonstrations, Wallace, a PhD candidate, had unlocked the door to Fayerweather Hall, the history building, so that his fellow student radicals could occupy it. A few months later, Hofstadter invited him to collaborate on a documentary history on American violence.

Thus the intellectual fruit of the trauma of '68 for Hofstadter was not a history of student radicals as Hitler Youth but rather a partnership with one of those radical students that produced a powerful exposé of American racial and class violence. In Foner's words, Hofstadter and Wallace's American Violence: A Documentary History "utterly contradicted the consensus vision of a nation placidly evolving without serious disagreements." This intellectual turn is the most surprising of all in the Hofstadter story. American Violence was the last book Hofstadter published before he died in 1970. He was only 54. (An unfinished work, America at 1750, was published posthumously in 1971.)

Michael Kazin recently warned against viewing Hofstadter as "an elegant ruin from a benighted age." Brown agrees, arguing that we need Hofstadter to understand the tormented politics of our time. In this view, Hofstadter may have been wrong about yesterday's Populists, but he was right about today's Republicans. The rise of George Bush is said to mark the return of status politics, because Republican majorities depend on the Evangelical Protestant "values voters" of the Midwest and South--former Populist areas! Facing economic decline, they blame their problems on the "liberal elite" and vote for prayer in schools and guns everywhere else.

That seems like a thin lesson to draw from a thick body of work. Hofstadter is worth reading in 2006 not so much because of his specific arguments but rather because of the spirit of his writing, which brings together anxieties about the dark side of American politics with a skeptical attitude toward conventional wisdom. That spirit, along with the lucidity and beauty of his prose, gives his work an enduring vitality.

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