Re: Why Richard Hofstadter Is Still Worth Reading.Huh?
On Oct 10, 2006, at 3:10 PM, Jesse Lemisch wrote:
Hofstadter sided with Grayson Kirk at the 1968 Columbia
commencement, where he spoke, after the bloody bust, while all honorable people were at
the counter-commencement. His commencement speech was published in the
Columbia Forum. Like many other liberal historians, including the
unspeakable Vann Woodward, Hofstadter had a bad reaction to the 60s.
This is from the Jon Weiner essay that set this off:
http://hnn.us/articles/30629.html
In other ways, however, Hofstadter’s response to the student
uprising at Columbia in 1968 set him apart from the liberal critics
who regarded the student movement as dangerously anti-intellectual.
While his friends in Morningside Heights carried on about the
students and saw themselves manning the barricades against the new
barbarians, Hofstadter opened the door and invited his students in
to talk with him about their goals and strategies. Eric Foner, one
of those students, recalled that “his graduate students, many of
whom were actively involved in the civil rights and antiwar
movements, were having as much influence on his evolving interests
and outlook as he was on theirs.” Indeed, the year after Columbia
‘68, Hofstadter was rethinking his earlier work. He privately
conceded that his critics had been right about The Age of Reform;
in a letter he declared that the book’s status thesis was (in
Brown’s paraphrase) “flawed and unusable” and that “nativism and
anti-Semitism permeated American society in the 1890s.” In another
letter written the same year, he declared that his effort in Anti- Intellectualism in American Life to explain the present had (in
Brown’s paraphrase) “clearly missed the mark.” Here was another
surprising and unusual quality: a willingness to reassess his work
and find its flaws.The most remarkable of his relationships with students after the
‘68 events was with his research assistant, Michael Wallace (who
went on to win the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Gotham, a history of New
York City). In the spring of 1968, in the midst of the
demonstrations, Wallace, a PhD candidate, had unlocked the door to
Fayerweather Hall, the history building, so that his fellow student
radicals could occupy it. A few months later, Hofstadter invited
him to collaborate on a documentary history on American violence.Thus the intellectual fruit of the trauma of ‘68 for Hofstadter was
not a history of student radicals as Hitler Youth but rather a
partnership with one of those radical students that produced a
powerful exposé of American racial and class violence. In Foner’s
words, Hofstadter and Wallace’s American Violence: A Documentary
History “utterly contradicted the consensus vision of a nation
placidly evolving without serious disagreements.” This intellectual
turn is the most surprising of all in the Hofstadter story.
American Violence was the last book Hofstadter published before he
died in 1970. He was only 54. (An unfinished work, America at 1750,
was published posthumously in 1971.)