A Historian's Own History
OSHINSKY, DAVID M.
WINTER BOOKS A Historian's Own History By David M. Oshinsky If the United States were to create the position of national historian, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. would be the people's choice....
...Truman ran hard on that platform, marking postwar liberalism's finest hour...
...During Schlesinger's final months in England, Little, Brown issued The Age of Jackson...
...It is to the American Left that Communism presents the most serious danger...
...For those seeking an explanation, Schlesinger's candid, self-assured, beautifully written memoir, A Life in the 20th Centmy (Houghton Mifflin, 557 pp., $28.95), is a good place to start...
...Intellectual life in Cambridge was a rollicking give-and-take among equals, with a social scene attached...
...But some people—I include myself—view it as the defining book of Schlesinger's career...
...I mention David Niven because he was next to me in line, an appearance that greatly excited the British WACS distributing the loot...
...The War ended shortly thereafter...
...In 1945, his Cambridge draft board reversed itself and ended his deferment...
...This book—the first of two volumes—will be mocked in some quarters for its name-dropping...
...Written at the dawn of the Cold War, it emphasized both the clandestine nature of the party and the blindness of its members and sympathizers toward the Soviet Union...
...Yet the fact is that a fair number of people mentioned by Schlesinger in these pages have also written memoirs that prominently mention him...
...But when Harvard beckoned Schlesinger signed on as an associate professor of history, starting in September 1947...
...And he defends it all too well...
...There are few regrets or second thoughts in this memoir...
...Asked why, he grumbled, "For some goddamn reason Republicans can't write...
...When I met my 12 o'clock class, I was greeted with resounding applause...
...In atime of journalistic titans, he got to know Joe Alsop ("the generous center of our social life...
...His father was a distinguished professor of American History at Harvard, which the son attended following prep school at Phillips Exeter Academy...
...I learned a lesson from the Eisenhower boom of 1948," Schlesinger says...
...The topic was Orestes A. Brownson, a long forgotten New England intellectual, and it became Schlesinger's first book...
...But in fact I have not been bom again, and there it is.' For this—and so much more in his principled and richly productive life—we are all in his debt...
...The Democratic fracture gave Schlesinger and like-minded liberals the opportunity to craft a centrist party platform based on the anti-Communist principles of the ADA...
...Schlesinger watched the election results with the Galbraiths, Perry Millers, and other Cambridge friends...
...The only alternative was to back Truman against Republican standard-bearer Thomas E. Dewey and hope for the best...
...And they tell us much about Schlesinger's professional life...
...One reason is jealousy...
...Life with father introduced Arthur, firsthand, to the nation's intellectual elite...
...When Eisenhower rejected their offer, ADA liberals had nowhere else to turn...
...History reflects the age," Schlesinger notes in his memoir...
...Meanwhile, Southern Democrats were unhappy about the party's growing support for civil rights...
...The postwar world beckoned...
...There was also a subtext to this study that many overlooked...
...Both parents were liberal activists, defending causes from birth control to Sacco and Vanzetti...
...His book, published a year after mine, did a good deal better in the bookshops...
...It is, I suppose, evidence of lack of imagination or of some other infirmity of character," Schlesinger concludes, "but I am somewhat embarrassed to confess that I have not radically altered my general outlook in more than the half century since The Vital Center's publication...
...An instant best seller, it went through eight printings and won the Pulitzer Prize...
...The first child born to Arthur and Elizabeth Bancroft Schlesinger, young Arthur grew up in a world of books and ideas...
...It is an odd profession that holds its most prolific and recognizable member at arm's length...
...War remained hell, but a few wars have been driven by decent purposes and produced beneficial results...
...In those early Cold War years, when the guilt of Alger Hiss and the crimes of Stalin were still open to debate, the very idea of comparing Fascism with Communism, Nazi Germany with the Soviet Union, was sure to spark a brawl among intellectuals, with the offender being branded a Red-baiting enemy of world peace...
...The middle ground he proposed was familiar to ADA liberals: an activist state, a tough but flexible anti-Communist foreign policy, and a less optimistic view of human nature...
...relations with Latin America...
...By this time, Schlesinger had joined the Harvard Society of Fellows, an elite three-year program that provided an alternative to the more cumbersome doctoral process...
...Merging intellectual and political history, Schlesinger argued that Jacksonian Democracy had deep roots in the industrial East as well as the agrarian West, and that its antistatist rhetoric was directed not against government per se, but rather against the influence of the upper classes in national affairs...
...The other senior honors essay to achieve trade publication in these years," he notes, "was written by a young concentrator in government, two years behind me, whom I knew only by sight in the Yard—Why England Slept by John Kennedy '40...
...At Harvard, we learn, he fell in love with Marion Cannon, a Radcliffe graduate, daughter of a "distinguished physiologist," and sister-in-law of the brilliant young Sinologist John K. Fairbank...
...In my view" says Schlesinger, "the middle of the road is not the vital center...
...In 1947, he joined with other liberals—including James Loeb, Eleanor Roosevelt, Walter Reuther, James Wechsler, David Dubinsky, and Reinhold Niebuhr—to form Americans for Democratic Action...
...Schlesinger's aggressive anti-Stalinism cost him a dear friend, the tragic fellow traveler F. O. Matthiessen, but gained him a cause...
...He studied poetry one-on-one with F. O. Matthiessen...
...His job was to edit classified in-house journals concerning political developments around the world...
...Ike was so popular, he reasoned, that true liberals—Hubert H. Humphrey in Minnesota, Chester B. Bowles in Connecticut, Adlai E. Stevenson in Illinois— could ride his coattails to victory...
...His private life remains private...
...and James "Scotty" Reston ("excellent company, interested, interesting, unfailingly considerate...
...Sales were modest, andreviews were mixed...
...It's not as if drinks with Mary McCarthy, dinner with Arthur Koestler, or a weekend at Isaiah Berlin's place left him too little time to attend the American Historical Society's annual convention...
...Schlesinger is a public intellectual, among the last of the breed...
...Schlesinger left the Army in style...
...Having faced this charge during the 1948 campaign, he sensed its vanishing clout in the world beyond the Nation, the Wallace camp, and elite faculty dining rooms...
...He defended the New Deal welfare state, supported economic and military aid to nations battling Communism, and spoke passionately for civil rights...
...Most important, I suspect, he represents an old-fashioned mainstream liberalism that is now under siege in the academic world...
...Immensely curious, deeply conservative, he seemed intent on staffing his magazines with liberals like John Hersey, Dwight Macdonald, John Kenneth Galbraith, Theodore White, and Archibald MacLeish...
...Life at Harvard provided the foundation for his career...
...Suddenly, at 11:15 A.M.," he writes, "Dewey conceded...
...While posing no threat to the nation's security, Schlesinger concluded, the CP did jeopardize the future of liberal-progressive reform...
...He is a bona fide celebrity, as are most of his friends...
...John Dewey was out...
...Actually, his History 169 became the department's most popular offering...
...In addition, he grew to despise the behavior of the young Communists who slavishly defended Stalin's ever changing line...
...In fact, their structural components—an exalted leader, an infallible ideology, a controlled press, a single party, a brutal secret police—were remarkably alike...
...In the end, the Democratic split probably helped Truman by removing both the Leftist tinge of the Wallace camp and the racist cries ofhard-core Southern Democrats...
...Thus Schlesinger proposed a circular model, with the extremes of fascism and communism standing side-by-side...
...Reinhold Niebuhr was in...
...His recollections of this period are heavily weighted toward power lunches, cocktail parties, and stag dinners, where he made or remade the acquaintance of just about everybody on Washington's ?-list, including Abe Fortas, Clark Clifford, Felix Frankfurter, John F. Kennedy, the Chip Bohlens, Philip Grahams, and W. Averell Harrimans...
...Slowly, Schlesinger moved from the isolationism so popular then on college campuses to an interventionism grounded in the survival of Western democracy...
...Democrats were in a state of shock and exultation, and even Republicans seemed not to mind that much...
...She was a lively brunette, 24 years old (I was 19), very intelligent, very pretty, an artist and a writer of children's books, with sparkling dark eyes, definite opinions, snappy comebacks and cosmopolitan experience.' They were married in August 1940 and had four children...
...Never a natural at the podium, young Schlesinger improved enough to "no longer throw up before lectures...
...Schlesinger was not intimidated...
...Luce proved a fascinating boss...
...Joining Wechsler, who compared the new President to a journeyman baseball player— "good field, no hit"—Schlesinger supported the ill-fated effort to draft General Dwight D. Eisenhower for President on the Democratic ticket in 1948...
...How he managed to keep teaching during the campaign is one of those academic mysteries best not pursued...
...With a boost from the father, the son was assigned the main undergraduate course in American Intellectual History...
...Walter Lippmann ("kind, courteous, and correct...
...What voters likedmost, however, were his common touch and his mainstream liberal approach...
...For politicians today, "vital center" is a vacuous phrase favored by those like President Bill Clinton who crave consensus and common ground...
...It is the dead center...
...At six on Sundays," Schlesinger writes, "we would gather at the DeVotos—the Galbraiths, the Paul Bucks, the Sargent Kennedys, when in town the Elmer Davises and the Wallace Stegners—none among us alcoholics, but, at the end of a hard week's work, cherishing the dry martini shimmering beautifully in its elegant, long-stemmed glass...
...His relationships with famous and talented people, on the whole, have been relationships between equals...
...His sophomore year composition teacher was Bernard DeVoto...
...About personal matters Schlesinger says little...
...He hooked up with the Office of War Information, researching articles while whipping his 1,500-page Andrew Jackson thesis into publishable shape...
...The night passed with neither candidate claiming victory...
...It never occurred to me that [he] was homosexual...
...The term "vital center" quickly entered the lexicon of American politics, but its meaning has changed over the years...
...But like all wars, our war was accompanied by atrocity and sadism, by stupidities and lies, by pomposity and chickenshit...
...During his stint with Luce Schlesinger did feature articles about the Roosevelt family, the Supreme Court, and U.S...
...There was a silver lining, of course...
...Even the mundane chore of picking out civilian clothes at a British demobilization center turned up a celebrity of note...
...But war was coming, and the nation chose up sides...
...Everyone from a cockney costermonger to Major David Niven had the same choices...
...In 1943, he jumped to the Office of Strategic Services, a new intelligence agency headed by William J. (Wild Bill) Donovan...
...His] cocktail parties were great fun...
...The process was egalitarian," he writes...
...His favorite piece, on the American Communist Party, appeared in the July 29,1946, issue of Life...
...It was activist and bold...
...Increasingly, politics intervened...
...He believes that writing a piece for Vogue is as important as writing one for the New England Quarterly, and that a good scholar should feel free to do both...
...Bad eyesight kept me out of the draft," Schlesinger recalls, "and my plan was to find a job in Washington...
...The memoir ends with publication of The Vital Center in 1949...
...Intrigued by its insights, Schlesinger tried to track down the author and "was told he was a Time staffer unknown to me called Whittaker Chambers...
...David M. Oshinsky, a longtime New Leader contributor, is Board of Governors Professor of History at Rutgers University...
...He took history courses from Samuel Eliot Morison (who ruined Schlesinger's almost perfect grade point average by giving him a B...
...Turning down offers from Johns Hopkins, Chicago, the University of Minnesota, and Yale, he hoped to land a magazine job before returning to the cloistered halls of academia...
...Its dual objective meshed perfectly with Schlesinger's thinking: "to infuse the Truman Administration with the spirit of the New Deal, and to liberate the democratic Left from Communist manipulation...
...Leaving Washington was not easy...
...Like many liberal Democrats, Schlesinger initially scorned Harry S. Truman as a political lightweight, unfit to carry the banner of Franklin D. Roosevelt...
...I had 15 months," he writes, "to try the life of a freelance...
...For Schlesinger, "vital center" fixed the role and place of liberal democracy in the ongoing struggle against totalitarianism at home and abroad...
...Perhaps I should apologize for not being able to claim disillusions, revelations, conversions...
...I labored happily away on the Jacksonian era," he writes, "exploiting the riches to be found in the endless—and wonderfully accessible—resources of Harvard's Widener Library...
...His reach and vision go well beyond university walls...
...It was, I suppose, a Good War," he writes...
...To resist these evils, Schlesinger called for an alliance between the non-Communist Left and the non-Fascist Right...
...But among historians, sad to say, that choice would draw as much criticism as praise...
...Moving to Georgetown, Schlesinger joined the Luce empire, doing features for Life and Fortune magazines...
...In reality, Schlesinger argued, Andrew Jackson was America's first activist President— a Chief Executive who defended Federal supremacy, opened politics to the masses, and supported the majority interests of small farmers and workers over the minority interests of big capital, most notably the Bank of the United States...
...I was preoccupied with the issues of economic power and the dilemmas of democratic capitalism made vivid for my generation by FDR....' An unsigned review in Time magazine did catch the linkage, calling the book "a brilliant justification of the New Deal disguised as a history of the age of Jackson...
...He traveled endlessly, meeting a new generation of snoops that included Richard Bissell and E. Howard Hunt...
...For $ 17,000—a princely sum in 1947—the Schlesingers bought a "commodious house" near Harvard Square...
...The book argued that Fascism and Communism could no longer be viewed as polar opposites on a linear political spectrum...
...Old friends were everywhere and new friends appeared— Bernard Bailyn from History, Lewis Hartz from Government, MacGeorge Bundy from the Society of Fellows...
...We are told the groom spent his last night of bachelorhood in the company of Ralph Barton Perry, "the friend and biographer of William James and a kind man whose reflections on marriage (he had been married to Bernard Berenson's sister Rachel) helped soothe my nerves...
...Never back a Presidential candidate whose views are top secret...
...And he wrote his senior thesis under Perry Miller, described then and today as the best historical mind of his generation...
...Far Left Democrats were streaming into the Progressive Party of Henry A. Wallace, which opposed the Marshall Plan, the Truman Doctrine, and virtually all criticism of Stalin's USSR...
...At 28, Schlesinger had talent, connections, and now a measure of fame...
...His works combine elegant narrative and sweeping synthesis in ways that are rarely seen today...
Vol. 83 • November 2000 • No. 5
