Re: Why Richard Hofstadter Is Still Worth Reading but Notfor the Reasons the Critics Have in Mind
On Oct 10, 2006, at 4:26 PM, Jerry Monaco wrote:
I accept Doug’s defense of Hofstadter but I have to say in my
memory Hofstadter did not even try to comprehend the Populist
movement in the U.S. He was looking at Populism for roots of
intellectual-cultural trends.
Poor guy seems to suffer from being characterized by people who
remember their readings of him 20-30 years ago, filtered through his
elitist/consensus reputation. He wrote about the deflation of the
late 19th century, the pressures on farmers, etc. etc. But - and I
have to admit this appeals to the urbanite in me - he does not
romanticize the rural life. He emphasizes the commercial, even
speculative motivations of farmers, who often preferred to flip land
at a profit to tending it lovingly. They were small businesspeople
getting crushed by the concentration of capital. It’s not something I
get choked up about.
The anti-Semitism rap is really unfair. There are about 5 pages in
The Age of Reform about the anti-Semitic currents in populism. Though
he doesn’t say this, his analysis is perfectly consonant with the
anti-Semitism that floats through a lot of populist politics that is
anti-finance and anti-urban but not really anti-capitalist. The Jew
becomes the symbolic repository of the cosmopolitanizing (?) trends
of capitalism - that one’s a hardy perennial. Hofstadter emphasizes
that “it would be easy to exaggerate the intensity” of populist anti-
Semitism - it wasn’t a program of persecution, but more a rhetorical
style, “a certain symbolic usage.” He acknowledged that Henry Adams
was a bigtime anti-Semite, too.
A lot of American leftists, historians and otherwise, want to
romanticize the populists - and somehow seem surprised that a lot of
populism today is pretty right-wing. So Hofstadter becomes the
whipping boy for saying that there were right-wing tendencies in
classic American populism. The same leftists want to believe in some
deep radicalism in the American tradition, too, and are annoyed by
his emphasis on the conservatism that runs through our history.
Sorry, folks, it’s there, and anyone alive today can see it. So why
should it surprise us that today’s paranoid, anti-intellectual, right-
wing populism has a pedigree?
Doug