No Substitute for History

...The historian has no trouble about McCarthyism He would name the Korean War as the detonating factor, suggesting that the frustrations generated by this war transformed McCarthy's anti-Com-munist crusade from an eccentric sideshow, hke that carried on by Martin Dies in the '30s, into a dangerous popular movement When Communists were killing Americans in Korea, it became easy to make alleged Communists a target in the United States McCarthyism took off when we got into the Korean War, and it went into decline when the Korean War ended Yet in their 40 pages on McCarthyism these authors mention the Korean War only twice, and then in passing Nor do they provide, so far as I can find, any alternative explanation as to why McCarthyism should have happened to erupt at the moment that it did Because status insecurity accounts with equal ease both for thesis and antithesis, it does not greatly help the historian trying to understand why individuals act one way rather than another As Schumpeter has observed, ''All functions that can be distinguished in the case of a given people and in a given historical situation are 'socially necessary' This criterion, alone, therefore, cannot decide then" relative evaluation " But when Messrs Lipset and Raab, perhaps unconsciously realizing how little status insecurity explains, try to introduce specific historical factors, their efforts are unimpressive Thus they write that, "in addition to identifiable group displacement, there was something more precise taking place in each of these [extremist] periods formal political alignments were shifting, and the conservative political party was usually in trouble" So "the early anti-JJluminati theory of the late 1790s coincided with the decline of Federalism " Most historians would date the decline of Federalism as taking place 10 or 15 years later, at a time when there was no Right-wing extremist manifestation in response The "dramatic rise" of the American Protective Association m the 1890s, the authors write, followed the Republican defeat in the congressional elections of 1890' The Republican party may have lost that election, but it was hardly in trouble, as the election of 1896 showed As for the Ku Klux Klan after World War I, though the Republican party, they concede, was not in trouble, "it had just emerged from the first shock of government mterventiomsm " "In the 1950s, McCarthy came to prominence after victory had been snatched away from a desperate Republican party at the last moment in 1948," we are told But McCarthyism reached its height after the Republicans won in 1952 "The Birch Society came to prominence as the desperate ultraconser-vatives found that Republican victory no longer meant a return to Harding" These last examples, it hardly need be noted, deal with a conservative party not in trouble at all but comfortably entrenched in office, and carry us quite far from the generalization with which the argument began Another of the authors' obsessive ideas is "working-class authoritarianism"—that is, the proposition that "the less sophisticated and more economically insecure a group is, the more hkelv its members are to accept the more simplistic ideology or political program offered to them " This is a chic notion in our current age of the hard-hats One wonders, though, about its historical validity Hawthorne, who was a pretty good observer for his day, has told us that "the influential classes, and those who take upon themselves to be the leaders of the people, are fully liable to all the passionate error that has ever characterized the maddest mob", and Richard Hofstadter, who seemed in Anti-Intellectuahsm in American Life to see the democratic mass as the source of intolerance, turned away from that idea in his last book The Politics of Unreason itself contains plenty of evidence to refute the notion of the peculiar bigotry of the lower classes This evidence, however, is not permitted to compromise the generalization Indeed, the book overflows with confident and useless generalizations Some are purely tautological and superfluous For example, on page 428, more than two-thirds of the way through the book "Historically, extremist movements are movements of disaffection" What else is new9 Or, on an earlier page "The strains giving rise to new political movements in America have typically been characterized by the emergence of new groups and the displacement of others, with some pattern of these cleavages economic interest, regional or urban-rural residence, ethnic-racial origin, or ideological-religious commitment These sets of politicizing differences have often been intrinsically related to one another" Thanks a lot Such statements are both self-ev.dent and nonexplana-tory Other generalizations, equally confident, are simply dubious or wrong Thus "The man who amasses wealth himself feels more insecure about keeping it than do people who possess inherited wealth " The fact is that some do and some don't, a good many Roosevelt haters, for instance, were old-family scions of inherited wealth, and a good many Roosevelt supporters were parvenus who had amassed their wealth themselves Or, to take another, "If the United States had a Golden Age, it was the half-century following the Civil War " This does not require comment—except to say that Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner put it a good deal more accurately Moreover, the book is filled with minor factual error Lyman Beech-er (1775-1863), the influential 19th-century theologian and evangelist, can hardly be described as "an eighteenth-century conspiracy theorist" The Native American party was founded in the 1840s, not in 1854 W H Seward was not a "radical abolitionist" Neither of the two William Wirts—the Anti-Mason of the 1830s or the anti-New Dealer of the 1930s—was ever "killed " It is Jouett Shouse, not Rouse, Herman Welker, not Walker, John, not James, Ash-brook And so on I do not mean to be harsh about The Politics of Unreason If one can labor through the looseness of argument, the contradictions (on page 152 Huey Long is described as head of a "right-wing extremist" movement, on page 197, he becomes not "in any striking sense, either left-wing or right-wing") and the diffuse, repetitious and clotted prose—and if one has total faith in public opinion polls—one can discover some interesting and possibly true things about modern Right-wing movements But this work is no substitute for a history of Right-wing extremism m America I note that it was awarded the first Gunnar Myrdal prize of $10,-000 for "books of distinction in the study of human behavior...

...This sentence, alas, is only a portent of the combination of imprecision, pretentiousness and obscurity that distinguishes this book Is it really indispensable to their trade that sociologists write so badly...

...Albert Schweitzer Professor of the Humanities, City University of New York It was probably a mistake to turn this book over to an historian for review, and the reader must take into account the occupational deformations of my trade Still, I suppose the subtitle would have led any editor to send the book to an historian Right-Wing Extremism in America, 1790-1970'' Heaven knows that we have long needed a comprehensive work on this subject What then is the historian, as he takes up the book, to make of the fact that two out of its 12 chapters76 pages—cover the years 1776-1918, and necessarily in a sketchy and superficial way, while later on he finds 90 pages on the John Birch Society and 90 pages on George Wallace' This would seem a prime case of mislabeling, subject perhaps to objection under the Pure Food and Drug Act The book should more honestly have been subtitled Right-Wmg Extremism in Ameiica, 1950-1970, with a Bnef Historical Introduction Then one begins to read The first sentence in any work presumably engages the particular attention of the book's author Many authors brood over their opening for days Yet the first sentence m The Politics of Unreason reads as follows "Extremist movements designated left' and 'right' m America have frequently shared the same political technology, such as a working impatience with dissent" Perhaps the patois of sociologists has departed even further from common speech than one realized, but under whatever definition can a "working impatience with dissent" qualify as a "technology...

...The judges were Kenneth B Clark, Robert Coles, Harold D Lasswell, Claude Levi-Strauss and Dr Myrdal Men of extreme tolerance, evidently, but not an historian in the lot...

...Did status insecurity suddenly become acute and intolerable m the years after World War II...

...No Substitute for History The Politics of Unreason: Right-Wing Extremism in America, 1790-1970 By Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab Harper and Row 547 pp $12 50 Reviewed by Arthur Schlesinger Jr...

...The thesis of this work, if I decipher it correctly, is that Right-wing movements in America have been "monistic" revolts against the pluralism of American politics and society Right-wing extremism is characterized by an alliance between "a displaced elite" and "an unstable mass," both of which have an investment, real or imagined, in the past and wish to defend certain power positions, if they are of the elite, or status positions, if they are of the mass The bridge between elite and mass is supplied by a conspiracy theory, a backlash movement is incomplete without a visible target in the form of a concrete social, religious or ethnic group Morahsm--the belief that good or evil intention is specifically determinative in history"—gives the monistic impulse its driving force, and that impulse becomes active in times of the breakdown of formal political loyalties The most usual form of Right-wing extremism is nativism, which "has served in America to flesh out the conspiracy theory and to legitimate a generalized doctrine of repression This is all very well, yet what does it tell us9 Messrs Lipset and Raab do not appear to grasp what an historian would regard as the difference between description and explanation Let us concede that their formulations describe salient features of Right-wing extremism But these formulations do not explain why such extremism happens to explode at a particular time m history Status insecurity is, of course, their favorite explanation of everything But surely the trouble is that status insecurity explains too much—and therefore explains very little Status insecurity has been with us since the founding of the republic We have always been a society in which some people are rising and others are falling and everyone feels a gap between what they thmk due them and what they get Tocqueville made this pomt about America in the 1830s, and Edward Everett observed that the "wheel of fortune is in constant revolution, and the poor, m one generation, furnish the nch of the next" Smce this has been a constant condition throughout American history, how is one to use it to explain the rise of specific Right-wing movements at specific times'' How does it explain, for example, the rise of McCarthyism in the early '50s...