Hofstadter's America

...The exemplary career of Benjamin Franklin to the contrary, "the chance of emergence from indentured servitude to a position of wealth or renown was statistically negligible...

...he did not, however, attribute to religion an overriding influence in the careers of any major public figures except Bryan ("a circuit-riding evangelist in politics") and Wilson ("he made politics his means of spreading spiritual enlightenment...

...The early institutionalization of political conflict he had already lectured upon at Berkeley in 1966...

...Yet his ability to write for laymen and professional historians alike, to bridge that cultural gap which so concerned him through his career, is testimony to his greatness...

...Whether feelings of jealousy or frustration were engendered by immobility is impossible to know...

...Religious indifference abounded, but as Hofstadter writes, "the organized churches had more influence than their numbers, and their creeds and quarrels command our attention...

...Between 1700 and 1750 the population burgeoned from 250,000 to 1.2 million, shattering the homogeneity of British America: "Germans, Swiss, Scotch-Irish, Africans, and peoples of other stocks migrated or were imported in such substantial numbers that by the time of the Revolution half the population south of New England was non-English...

...The adviser to no President (the intellectual with power becomes the expert), not even Columbia's Grayson Kirk, he continued as a critic of American society, most concerned to explore the dimmer aspects of national political life since the New Deal...

...Hofstadter reminds us that only 5 per cent of the slaves brought to the New World were destined for what is now the United States (about 7 per cent of the ships in this trade in 1768 were British-American), and that the trans-Atlantic mortality rate of Africans was less than that of their crews, about equal to that of transported convicts, and possibly equal to that of indentured servants...

...the second unwilling to accept the rise of industrialism and, in its wake, urbanism and the arrival of non-Anglo-Saxon immigrants...

...On October 24, 1970, his career was brought to an abrupt and tragic close at 54...

...Not until the New Deal was there a "drastic new departure...

...Although within America there was considerable variation in the condition of slaves, race prejudice was omnipresent...

...Intellectuals, and often indeed some of our shrewdest politicians, keep a certain distance even from the political and social movements with which they sympathize, and their work becomes a criticism both of these movements and of the institutions they are directed against...

...Other denominations and sects were plentiful when the revolutionary force of mid-18th-century pietism struck?a second and milder Reformation," Hofstadter labels it, whose "essential effect was the internal reinvigoration of Protestantism through more popular styles of worship...

...Much has been said in praise of the English colonists' rejection of European distinctions, but Hofstadter shows its less meritorious side: "While the Latin-Americans developed a complex system of race and class which admitted gradations and compromises, the Anglo-Americans of the North American mainland quickly became committed to sharp race separation, took a forbidding view of manumission, defined mulattoes as Negroes, and made outcasts of free Negroes...

...I still treasure that moment, but it is only through reading Hofstadter's books that I can claim familiarity with him...

...Toleration of dissent was already a matter of agitation where there were established or quasi-established churches, and resistance was weakening...

...when it was flourishing they considered the present...

...Hofstadter's short but lifelike portraits of the Awaken-ers are unexcelled, and his conclusions are unassailable...

...This was owing not to the power of ideas but to changed conditions: FDR, unlike his liberal predecessors, was responding to a sick economy...

...Social differentiation varied by region: No economy was more egalitarian than New England's, yet as one traveled farther and farther south, class distinctions became more apparent...

...In fact, Hofstadter does not deny the bourgeois quality of 18th-century America: "When one speaks of a complex society as being substantially middle class, one conveys an implicit comparison with other societies that are less so...

...But the fact that political change did come as easily as technological progress fostered a "wide and persuasive tendency to believe [about politics] that there is some great but essentially very simple struggle going on, at the heart of which lies some single conspiratorial force...

...In 1963 Hofstadter published An-ti-Intellectualism in American Life, an examination of the quest for simplicity and denial of complexity...

...business activism has provided an overwhelming counterpoise to reflection in this country...

...Excessive formalism and emphasis on sanctimonious behavior was replaced by a religion of feeling that brought many strayed sheep back into the fold but also exacerbated crises within the ministry and between clergy and laity...

...Ranging through American history with the ease, wit and grace that are the hallmarks of his writing, Hofstadter depicted the polar alternatives facing the intellectual in "the unresolvable conflict between the elite character of his class and his democratic aspirations...

...By contrast to the early gradual settlement of the continent, the 18th century was one of unparalleled growth...

...Yet ideas did not always change in response to altered conditions, as Hofstadter demonstrated in his next book, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (1948 ). The tradition he traced from the founding fathers to Franklin Roosevelt was a shared belief in "the rights of property, the philosophy of economic individualism, the value of competition...

...Notwithstanding the tribulations of those Puritans who sensed a decline of piety in New England, colonists were generally agreed upon or indifferent to the brand of Protestantism dominating their communities...

...The task may have been painful, but Hofstadter managed it...

...In his third study, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R...

...Hofstadter was ever sensitive to the currents of his time and, in The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington (1968), he dealt with men whose work, like his own, was shaped by their political environment...

...In The American Political Tradition Hofstadter had noted a basic belief in "the economic virtues of capitalist culture as the necessary qualities of man...

...In the last agonizing year," said Alfred Kazin, "he worked with his dying breath, worked with a courage and determination for which there are simply no words...

...The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the United States, 1780-1840 appeared three years later...

...1955), Hofstadter remarked that he saw his own role as neither an ivory tower academic nor a political activist but a detached critic of his society...

...Populists and Progressives alike accepted the equation of success with character and enterprise, and selfishly sought to wrest economic advantage to themselves from the clutches of the industrial plutocrats...

...The role was a self-conscious one, not easily assumed where American reform was concerned, since Hofstadter and most intellectuals were reared in the liberal tradition ("I am largely criticizing from within...

...It was to be a political history "not narrowly construed" (as if his work ever fit that category), "a general interpretive synthesis of the past generation of professional historians"????i.e., the sort of work that had distinguished his career...

...Again he found the culmination of his subject in the New Deal, when public resentment of the expert, symbolized by the Brain Truster, reached an all-time high...

...He viewed both the Populist movement of the 1890s and the Progressivism of the early 20th century as unfortunately nostalgic: the first unable to adjust to the decline of rural America...

...Hofstadter suggests the attitude may have been one of resignation for those persons whose "journey across the Atlantic proved in the end to have been only an epitome of their journey through life...

...By dividing the ministry, the Great Awakening reaffirmed the principle and the practice of lay choice, while at the same time putting "the evangelical impulse, as opposed to churchly formalities, at the very heart of American religion and intellect...

...Nonetheless, he recalled, these men had already been worshipped: "A democratic society...

...Despite his thoughtful inquiries about my work and his easy manner, I had respected his work too long to be uninhibited in his presence, and I was more concerned not to appear the bumptious young provincial professor than to chance bringing up an outlandish idea...

...Reviewed by Joseph E. Illick Professor of History, San Francisco State College I met Richard Hofstadter only once, one sunny summer afternoon in 1968 when he graciously responded to my request to compare notes on Columbia University and San Francisco State by inviting me to his home...

...His book will probably invite comparison with Daniel Boorstin's The Americans: The Colonial Experience (1959), a volume celebrating American pragmatism, simplicity and community...

...As Hofstadter had already written, this brand of religion—not the intellectual elitism of Puritanism—has dominated American life...

...Wisely, he chose to begin his story in the 18th century...

...The social complexity of 18th-century America was accentuated by the Great Awakening...

...When capitalism was rising, men looked to the future...

...But in the 20th century?in an age of concentration, bigness, and corporate monopoly????when competition and opportunity have gone into decline, men look wistfully back toward a golden age...

...The heritage of the Populists included "provincial resentments, popular and 'democratic' rebelliousness and suspiciousness, and nativ-ism...

...That Richard Hofstadter did not live to complete this work is tragic...

...his constituency was labor, including ethnic groups, rather than the established m'ddle class...

...can more safely be overcritical than overindulgent in its attitude toward public leadership...

...While we mourn the brevity of this, his last book, we can rejoice in the fruitful-ness of a life that, although too short, helped insure the importance of ideas and exemplified the role of the intellectual in America...

...Hofstadter acknowledged that his own interest "had been drawn to that side of Populism and Progressivism????particularly of Populism????which seems very strongly to foreshadow some aspects of the cranky pseudoconservatism of our time...

...The history of Darwinian individualism," Hofstadter asserted, "is a clear example of the principle that changes in the structure of social ideas wait on general changes in economic and political life...

...Hofstadter had pointed out in The American Political Tradition that the founding fathers' "vivid Calvinistic sense of human evil and damnation" was responsible for the checks and balances in the Constitution...

...He showed that the concept of survival of the fittest was seized upon to justify business competition, and that when Americans were "in the mood" to have the competitive rationale destroyed, the concept was applied to international conflict, thus vindicating imperialism and even racism...

...To draw on a metaphor we have inherited from that time, Hofstadter draws attention to the darker side of the American past...

...At that time Hofstadter was planning to write, over the next two decades, a three-volume history of the United States, beginning in the mid-18th century...

...He probed the possibilities of that conflict without resolving it, except in the example of his own life...

...The roots of anti-intellectualism lay in evangelical religion, to which reason was irrelevant or dangerous, and in primitivism, signalized by the rejection of Europe (civilization) for America (pure because uncomplex...

...The present tendency is to think of this condition in terms of blacks alone...

...Hofstadter granted that the political portraits in this book were "not painted in roseate colors," for men of action were not at their most impressive in matters of the mind...

...the pattern of eastern society, though visibly modified, was reproduced surprisingly faithfully in the west...

...Simultaneously the religious complacency of the provinces was shaken by the Great Awakening, a religious contest for men's souls...

...in the history of American reformism...

...Its growth was nurtured by commerce...

...This was evidenced in The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (1965), with its focus on the "pseudoconservative revolt" of the 1950s and '60s, and American Violence: A Documentary History (with Michael Wallace, 1970), where he deplored the cult of violence on the Left...

...But Hofstadter argued that the more current consensus approach was also deficient: "It disposes us to turn away from one of the most significant facts of American social life????the racial, ethnic, and religious conflict with which our history is saturated...

...His first publication, Social Darwinism in American Thought (1944), concerned the behavioral interpretation of a biological theory...

...The product of Hofstadter's final labor, America at 1750: A Social Portrait, describes the origins of that racial, ethnic and religious conflict he assigned a central place in American history...

...Only FDR sensed the failure of tradition and dared try novel policies...

...There was increasing stratification in the colonial cities, but wealth still defined the apex...

...If the Progressives were more "good-natured," they were similarly less concerned with promoting social democracy than with restoring economic opportunity...

...The moral crusading of the Populists and Progressives Hofstadter ascribed to a naive faith that the human condition could be dealt with as easily as material problems...

...The frontier provided no relief from this rule...

...The sources of this attitude toward evil were religious as well as materialistic...

...still, he articulated no ideology to replace the outworn legacy...

...Up to the Depression, then, politics in the United States was shaped by a mentality about which Hofstadter observed: "Americans do not abide very quietly the evils of life...

...The Atlantic crossing, acclimatization (or "seasoning," as it was then called) to the New World and conditions of servitude????all graphically described????were unpleasant in the extreme...

...17th-century America was overwhelmingly English, save for the pocket of Dutch in New York and a small number of blacks settled largely south of Pennsylvania...

...Much of their thought has been revised and some of it rejected, especially the central place given to economic and political conflict in our past...

...Anglicanism was no more able to reproduce itself in America than other English institutions, and Puritanism was struggling through its transition from sect to church...

...For almost 200 years the poor of England were "lured, seduced, or forced into the emigrant stream," and during the early 1700s "the same sort of concentrated business of recruitment" took place in northern Europe...

...He candidly admitted his motives for writing: "Although this book deals mainly with certain aspects of the remoter American past, it is conceived in response to the political and intellectual conditions of the 1950s...

...Hofstadter calculates that half or more of the white immigrants (excluding the Puritans arriving in 1630-40) were indentured servants, and their lot was an unfortunate one...