Classics Serial

Review by James Livingston (Likewise cross-posted from Dr. Livingston'southward blog hither.)

Richard Hofstadter. The Historic period of Reform; From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York: Vintage Books, 1955)

In the last semester of my senior year, I took a course in American history for the start time since high school because my comrades gently insisted on it—they figured information technology would lighten me up a petty, brand me less earnest about condign a Bolshevik through fanatic study of Russian history and literature. I'd been accepted into the graduate programs at Columbia and Michigan; I was then leaning toward Columbia because I was already yearning to alive in New York, although I'd never even seen the place.

The instructor in that 400-level course, Industrial America, 1877-1901, was Martin J. Sklar, a legendary figure on the Left and a formidable presence in the classroom. The syllabus listed nearly a dozen required books, equally I remember, amongst them W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction (1935) and Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (1955).

At this time, at the age of 22—I had spent some time out of school, working and fucking around—I didn't know what "Reconstruction" was, or why it mattered. I knew cipher virtually American history except that the civil rights movement had tried and failed to redeem the promise of . . . something. I didn't desire to know annihilation near this ugly past. I was already in intellectual exile from the culture I knew all-time, just from living it all my life. I was bound for Bolshevism, on my way to the Soviet Union by way of New York.

The onetime guy who sat adjacent to me, our backs confronting the wall, was Guy Sand. We were fellow seniors, in both senses, and heavy smokers to boot. We'd make fun of the morons in the grade, giggle indiscreetly when one of them asked a stupid question, or nod wisely when we heard something vaguely intelligent.

I asked him one day before course why he had gone dorsum to school (he was almost 35). He looked mystified. "For this," he said, gesturing at Sklar, who was assembling his notes at the lectern. "I want to know how this matter works." "What thing?" I asked. Guy said, "The whole thing," and now he gestured out the door. "Capitalism."

He was in the right place. Sklar made u.s.a. read everything. Economical history: Fred Shannon, The Farmer'due south Last Frontier (1944); Edward C. Kirkland, Industry Comes of Age (1956). Political history: John D. Hicks, The Populist Defection (1931); Sidney Fine, Laissez Faire and the General Welfare State (1956, this also qualifies as intellectual history); C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South (1951). Labor history: Gerald Grob, Workers and Utopia (1962), plus some obscure articles by a young human named Herbert Gutman. Intellectual history: Baronial Meier, Negro Thought in America (1964); Henry F. May, The Finish of American Innocence (1959) As well William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (1959). Oh, and The Communist Manifesto (1848). Discover the publication dates—he was teaching the aforementioned literature, or rather the aforementioned historiographical canon, that had shaped Hofstadter. These were the books that determined their origins, but not their intellectual destinations.

Taking this course convinced me that doing American history could be every bit interesting and important equally deciphering the Bolshevik Revolution. Now I finally realized that I could exist an proficient in Russian history, simply that neither the Soviet nor the American people would recognize me as the revolutionary I wanted to be. On the other hand, if I knew the history of my people, as Lenin clearly knew his, why . . . . By the cease of Sklar'south course, I saw that I'd write a Masters Thesis in Russian history, then switch to United states history for the PhD. I stayed at Northern Illinois University because I could do both, and Sklar would be notwithstanding around. "Career-wise," a bad determination. Otherwise the smartest thing I've ever washed.

I remember all those books Sklar fabricated us read—we didn't write papers or take tests, we kept journals—just Du Bois and Hofstadter stuck with me considering they seemed so aberrant, so athwart their discipline, and so calmly truculent. They were contentious writers—their arguments with their colleagues and the world were correct up front—and yet somehow they didn't audio polemical. Just authoritative.

I had read enough Marx to doubt Du Bois'due south conflation of slaves and proletarians, and I was ignorant enough to be both astonished and unconvinced past Chapter iv, "The General Strike." I had heard enough from the comrades about Hofstadter—he was one of those bad old "consensus" historians—to discount his anti-Populist position as a warning against the benighted masses who brought us fascism (I didn't know then that Hofstadter was steeped in Frankfurt Schoolhouse sensibilities).

I turned to Guy one day before class—co-ordinate to the syllabus we were supposed to be reading Woodward and Hofstadter alongside each other, or rather contrapuntally—and said, "What do you make of Hofstadter? He gives me a hurting in the ass."

Again he looked mystified. "It's not bad stuff," he said. "He tin can write."

"What about the politics of the affair, though?" I said, "I mean, the Populists are anti-semites, might likewise exist Nazis, c'monday, that's bullshit."

Guy said, "Well, it's non consensus, is it?"

Betwixt them, Martin Sklar and Guy Sand launched me on a career of counter-progressive historical writing about the United States, a career in which Richard Hofstadter became something like an intellectual companion—someone I'd telephone call on from time to fourth dimension, asking what he'd said virtually such and such, wondering how he'd said information technology. I never idea he was a bully writer, but the how, the prose, was as interesting as the what.

The form of his arguments was ever attuned to the audience us Bolsheviks in the making wanted—that general reader, the mutual folk, the everyday bloke. It wasn't conversational, exactly, information technology was only thoughtful, even though its writer made plenty of ex cathedra pronouncements. The content determined by this form of statement was, as William Appleman Williams pointed out—with prejudice—the findings of other historians and social scientists. Hofstadter did inquiry later on the book on Social Darwinism, but he was mostly a synthesizer, a scholar who used the findings of others in new ways, making them newly useful. To my mind, that is productive work, more productive than almost all archivally-driven monographs, although now that I mention them, what else is in that location to synthesize?

II

In the years betwixt 1955, with the publication of The Historic period of Reform, and 1976, with the publication of Lawrence Goodwyn's Democratic Hope, so-called consensus history flourished on American premises. The assumption animating this designation was that the consensus historians—Louis Hartz, Irwin Unger, Daniel Boorstin, Lee Benson, amid others—denied the determinative part of class conflict in the American past, emphasizing age of reforminstead an ideological consensus on liberalism, or capitalism, whatever, or emphasizing ethno-cultural differences rather than the gradients of social grade. These historians were supposedly justifying or creating the illusion of cultural-intellectual solidarity in the confront of the Soviet threat.

That assumption and its corollary were, and are, a palliative, a lullaby, for academics and intellectuals who long(ed) for the good old days of the Pop Forepart, when the CP made the working grade, and form conflict, the regulative principles of theory and exercise. For the two most of import of the so-called consensus historians, Hofstadter and Williams, were steeped in Marxism and Continental social theory—they knew their way around the CP (Hofstadter was a carte-conveying fellow member who quit earlier the 1939 debacle of the Nazi-Soviet Pact), and they admired its purposes if non its methods. They never avoided analysis of social conflict; instead they conducted that analysis as if the people and the polity they studied were, except in extraordinary, revolutionary times, independent past ideological limits on the meanings of freedom and equality. The ceremonious rights move, for instance, certainly chosen forth conflict, just its leaders told both constituents and contestants that the goal was to live up to what everyone agreed on every bit founding principles.

The meliorate way to think about so-called consensus history is to rename and rethink it according to Gene Wise's specifications. He called it counter-progressive history, equally in up against the Progressive tradition Hofstadter himself summarized in what I think is his best book.

By my measurements, Progressive historiography was congenital on three premises. First, course supersedes race as the central category of the narratives that offering to explicate the national experience. Think of Turner and Beard every bit against Bancroft.   2d, "large business" (a.chiliad.a. industry) becomes the predator of the pocket-sized holder, and therefore of equality, or democracy, as such. Monopoly majuscule, not capitalism writ large or minor, becomes the intellectual and the political problem. Again, call back of Turner and Bristles, then fast forward to the anti-corporate bias that now serves every bit a left-wing credential in every relevant venue: Thomas Frank, Matt Taibbi, Elizabeth Sanders. Third, corporations appear equally belated, artificial entities—simply like John Marshall said in 1819—rather than original, organic components of American history, of the country created by corporations like the Massachusetts Bay Co. and the Virginia Co.

Hofstadter and Williams refused, or modified, all three premises. Hofstadter led the way. The American Political Tradition (1948) was preface to The Historic period of Reform, in this sense, because it made the states think of the reformers, the revolutionaries, and the reactionaries every bit characters on a continuum of mistaken identity, not difficult patients with irreconcilable etiologies. A kind of consensus.

So conceived, the central passages in The Age of Reform come at the edges of those places where Hofstadter acknowledges that he'due south writing nigh his own fourth dimension, non some afar past. They're awkward moments, when the voice changes and the remaining grace of the prose breaks down. He trips himself; he sounds apologetic.

"If we look at the 2nd of the two great foes of Progressivism, big business and monopoly, we find that by the time of the New Deal public sentiment had changed materially. . . . By 1933 the American public had lived with the swell corporation for so long that it was felt to be domesticated."

A few pages after: "The generation for which Wilson and Brandeis spoke looked to economic life as a field for the expression of grapheme; mod liberals seem to think of it quite exclusively equally a field in which certain results are to be expected. It is this alter in the moral opinion that seems most worthy of remark."

This is a man who has constitute his manner into the present, but he doesn't know how to say information technology, not just yet. Merely that tremor in both passages, where the voice moves from active to passive, that's where the divide between Progressive and counter-progressive historiography ought to exist marked, because information technology's where Hofstadter says that the corporation is non a parasite on the torso politic and that individuality (character) can no longer be conceived equally routinely enacted in economic life, through work and its correlate, self-ownership.

To find your mode into the present, equally Hofstadter did in The Age of Reform, is to realize that the Populists played a losing paw by thinking that they could restore equality, such equally it was, and reinstate 18-carat selfhood, such as it was, past abolishing corporations, monopolies, large banks, whatever you lot want to phone call the "artificial persons" who oppressed them and us. He finally knew how and why and where Turner and Beard and Robinson and Parrington were wrong, just still useful.

"Consensus" doesn't begin to describe what Hofstadter offered the states every bit historians and citizens. Counter-progressive will do for now.   But let'southward retrieve further on up the road. The Historic period of Reform makes everyone who reads it call up nigh the filial—OK, Oedipal—relation between the Progressive Era and the New Deal, Sometime Testament and New. It makes the states recollect about the reach and the limits of Populism, third parties, renegade politicians. It makes us think near the conflicts of our ain fourth dimension, when "unnatural persons," whether corporations or real estate agents, roam freely beyond the political landscape.

Can you say that about any other book you pick off your shelf?

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James Livingston teaches history at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.  He is the author of six books, including Fuck Piece of work, forthcoming from UNC Press.  Along with Bruce Robbins and Matthew Friedman, he runs an online trivial magazine, POLITICS/Letters, which combines non-fiction, poetry, music, short stories, and whatever else we tin recall of.  Issue # 4 is out in February, featuring work by Etienne Balibar and James Clifford.