Richard Hofstadter was a prominent historian during America’s post-World War II rise. He reflected and established important tendencies in the progressive narrative of American history, so his career reveals much about America’s self-understanding and the tensions within New Deal liberalism. He won two Pulitzer Prizes, one for The Age of Reform (1956) and the other for Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1964). Library of America is out with a volume that contains two of Hofstadter’s famed contributions to political history—the aforementioned Anti-Intellectualism and The Paranoid Style in American Politics (also 1964)—as well as sundry essays written between 1956 and 1965.
The Hofstadter of this volume writes history while keeping one eye on America’s political situation. Hofstadter votes against Barry Goldwater on every page, while surveying anti-intellectualism and America’s paranoid style. All the progressives’ men turn out to be clear-eyed, public-spirited intellectuals and reformers, while their opponents are most often proto-fascists or reactionaries unaware of the world’s complexities or the achievements of science. But his manner of smearing his opponents opened the way to a liberalism he neither foresaw nor could resist.
Born to a secular Jew married to a nominal Protestant in 1916 Buffalo, Hofstadter was a communist of sorts as an undergraduate at the University of Buffalo. He headed the Communist-affiliated National Student League. His fellow-travelling continued as he enrolled in Columbia’s graduate program for history in 1938. He quit communism before the Hitler-Stalin Pact in Summer 1939. He finished his Ph.D. in 1942, began studying Frankfurt School sociology on his first academic job at the University of Maryland, and then landed back at Columbia in 1946. Columbia was his home—and he was a court historian of liberalism during his heyday. He jet-setted to lectures all over the world, picking up prizes and honors along the way until his death in 1968.
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