Hofstadter law

(b. 6 August 1916 in Buffalo, New York; d. 24 October 1970 in New York City), cultural intellectual historian whose work in the 1960s explored conflicts both within the United States and within its historiography, and preserved the concept of free inquiry against the turmoil of the period.

One of two children of a Polish-born secular Jewish father, Emil A. Hofstadter, a furrier, and a Protestant German-American mother, Katherine Hill, he was baptized a Lutheran. His mother died when he was ten, and his maternal grandmother brought him up as an Episcopalian. Hofstadter was educated at the University of Buffalo, where he was mentored by the historian Julius Pratt. He graduated in 1937. He briefly attended the New York School of Law and then transferred as a history major to Columbia University, where he earned an M.A. degree in 1938 and a Ph.D. in 1942. His dissertation, Social Darwinism in AmericanThought, 1860–1915 (1944), was published and won the American Historical Association's Albert J. Beveridge Award.

Hofstadter went to New York City with Felice Swados, a bright fellow University of Buffalo student who later graduated from Smith College. She was from a prominent Buffalo Jewish family and was the sister of the poet Harvey Swados. Hofstadter and Felice married in 1936 and had a son. Felice worked for Time magazine and was immersed in the vibrant political life of the Communist Party. Hofstadter also joined a Communist group at Columbia but grew disenchanted with its regimented beliefs and drifted away from the party by 1940. Hofstadter and his wife became part of the community of Jewish intellectuals. Alfred Kazin called Hofstadter "the most charming fellow he had ever met."

Following teaching positions at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York and at the University of Maryland, Hofstadter came back to New York City in 1945. The Alfred A. Knopf publishing house gave him a fellowship to work on a new book. This allowed him to devote attention to his wife, who was stricken with cancer and died in that year. He worked sporadically on his book, which was published in 1948 as The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It. The book was a great success, both critically and financially. It is rated by Modern Library as one of the one hundred most influential nonfiction books of the twentieth century. Hofstadter married again on 13 January 1947, this time to Beatrice Kevitt of Buffalo. They had a daughter.

In 1946 Hofstadter began teaching at Columbia University, where he would remain for rest of his life. Hofstadter's career blossomed, as did his writing. His new wife devoted herself to editing his material, and he was immensely pleased with the result. He prided himself as a writer who melded the other social sciences with historical study and was able to do so without the semantics of other disciplines. Ideas and interpretation took precedence over facts for their own sake. Hofstadter was more interested in developing broad concepts. His work became provocative and dominant as he reexamined the work of historians who had founded the base of professional thought on American development. He attacked the agrarian/frontier concepts of Frederick Jackson Turner, the capitalistic monolithic politics of Charles Beard, and the notions of Vernon Louis Parrington that American progressivism was a product of the Midwest. By the 1960s Hofstadter was an established giant in the field of history. The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (1955) won a Pulitzer Prize and charged ideas of agrarian nostalgia and stilted nineteenth-century morality as being unable to understand the urban and industrial society that followed 1890. His work was designed to attract a public as well as an academic audience.

The life of the mind and the freedom of ideas were compelling concerns of Hofstadter. He reacted to the assaults on academia during the 1950s, when Senator Joseph McCarthy led a government effort to rid American society of Communists, by collaborating on education histories of the growth of academic freedom in 1952 and 1955, and in American Higher Education: A Documentary History, a two-volume work published in 1961. His controversial Anti-Intellectualism in American Life followed in 1963, and again he won the Pulitzer Prize. This provocative work offered the trenchant view that intellectuals were not appreciated in the course of American political history. Hofstadter argued that democratic and egalitarian foundations of the United States actually contributed to the alienation and the distrust of intellectuals. He declared that mass education and emphasis on technical education came at the expense of the mind and eroded the values of the old patrician elite. Hofstadter can be seen here as the intellectual mentor to the American historian and social critic Christopher Lasch, whose intellectual breadth and depth are perhaps most derivative of Hofstadter.

The 1960s were Hofstadter's most prolific years. He wrote The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington (1968); The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the United States, 1780–1840 (1969); and a book of controversial essays entitled The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (1965). In this work, which was part of a lecture in 1962, he examined conspiracy theories. He saw them as related to a crusading mentality that held the notion that all ills could be traced to single evil sources that could be eliminated. Failure to heed the warnings soon enough meant society was finished. The world confronts an apocalypse akin to that mentioned in the Book of Revelation. Hofstadter called this "the rhetoric of the dispossessed." Characteristic of this element was not the absence of facts but rather what he termed "the curious leap of imagination that is made at some critical point in the recital of events."

Hofstadter's thinking was keyed to conflict in history. The clash of ideas and forces excited his writing, and in the 1960s he became more daring as he suggested that the negative impulses in American development—agrarian hostility to the city, racism, anti-Semitism, antiliberalism, parochial anti-intellectualism, and cultural ethnocentrism—were the products of the very environment that produced the idea of democracy. This contradiction engaged him while it often enraged his critics. Hofstadter created an urban view and understanding of American history in which the culture of the city was made both directly and inferentially significant in the making of national life. He suggested that the same environment that produced the American politician Robert La Follette and admirable progressive politics also produced Senator Joseph McCarthy and his assault on the life of the mind.

Hofstadter's histories are beholden to Charles Beard. He inherited that great historian's place in the profession and in the university that had the temerity to dismiss Beard, who refused to compromise academic freedom by recanting his political opinions. Here lay an irony that Hofstadter must have relished, given his championship of the freedom of thought in the university. His work on Beard represented something of historical patricide, for he sought both to demolish and to venerate Beard. Like Beard, he saw history as though under a glass rather than as a physical reality.

Hofstadter's insular view of events was never more exposed than in 1968, when civil rights, free speech, and anti-war issues swept college campuses. Columbia became a sorry example of the weakness of academic institutions; its faculty and administrators meekly surrendered both their offices and their integrity and trooped off the campus to the chorus of taunts and jibes of the raging students who took over the buildings. To save something of themselves, the school, and the community of the mind, Columbia's administration turned to Hofstadter to give the 1968 commencement address. He was the only faculty member ever to be given this task. For Hofstadter, who was shy and retiring when it came to public addresses, it was not a welcome assignment.

Perhaps Hofstadter guessed he was selected to bridge his assessment of radical ideas and conflict of the past with the reality of the radical action of the present. The most raucous and rebellious students marched from the auditorium before he gave his address. Their actions did not distract him from his ivory tower discourse on the university as a peculiar and unique institution dedicated to serve as the "citadel of intellectual individualism." He was, in effect, speaking of himself in his declaration that the university encouraged an independence of the intellect that served society as "an intellectual and spiritual balance wheel." The university was a retreat, a sanctuary of the mind where ideas would always be respected.

In the same year Hofstader wrote a piece on violence for the New York Times in which he posed the argument of America as a violent society and one that decried violence but could not bring itself to control the use of its instruments. He cited D. H. Lawrence's comment on the American soul as being "hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer." The deaths by assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy and the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., left society with a cry against violence but a paralysis in action. This fatalistic view of description over prescription of historical events encouraged the American historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s succinct statement that the permanence of Hofstadter's "historical writing will rest rather in the grace, subtlety, and elegance of his literary style. History, to Hofstadter, was always a part of literature."

Toward the close of his life, while suffering from leukemia, Hofstadter continued working. He collaborated on American Violence: A Documentary History (1970) and negotiated a contract for a three-volume history of the United States, the first volume of which was published as he left it: America at 1750: A Social Portrait (1971). The disruptive events of the 1960s were discouraging to Hofstadter, who in an interview with Newsweek (6 July 1970) declared his time to be the "age of rubbish." This was a denouement that did not discourage fellow historians from declaring his to be "the finest … most humane historical intelligence of our generation."

Hofstadter died of leukemia. His obituary in the New York Times, although generally complimentary, described him as a man of regular habits, scrupulous discipline, and insulated temperament who "went through life with a contained methodicalness that might dull a less lively intelligence." It characterized him as "a blue-eyed, graying, almost nondescript man who wore clip-on bow ties and was constantly hitching up his trousers." Further, it described Hofstadter as having limited social flair but a decided talent for mimicry. A protest was voiced by Hofstadter's colleague Lionel Trilling, who in an unusual letter to the Times insisted that Hofstadter was anything but nondescript or limited in social flair. Speaking for his colleagues, Trilling declared Hofstadter "one of the most clearly defined persons I have ever known.… An enchanting companion, often memorably funny … open not only to ideas but to people of all kinds." He argued that the obituary possessed a "grudging quality" that should be ignored and attention paid instead to the photograph accompanying it. He declared the photograph an accurate representation of "this remarkable man's grace and charm and luminosity of spirit." The photograph shows Hofstadter with full dark hair and obviously much younger than his fifty-four years.

Biographical works include Lawrence A. Cremin, Richard Hofstadter (1916-1970): A Biographical Memoir (1972); Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, eds., The Hofstadter Aegis: A Memorial (1974); and Susan Stout Baker, Radical Beginnings: Richard Hofstadter and the 1930s (1985). See also Christopher Lasch, "On Richard Hofstadter," New York Review of Books (8 Mar. 1972), as well as Lasch's introduction to the fiftieth-anniversary edition of The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (1998). Essays on Hofstadter include Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., "Richard Hofstadter," in Pastmasters: Some Essays on American Historians, edited by Marcus Cunliffe and Robin Winks (1969); and Daniel Joseph Singal, "Beyond Consensus: Richard Hofstadter and American Historiography," American Historical Review 89 (1984). See also Alfred Kazin, Starting Out in the Thirties (1965), and also Kazin on Hofstadter in American Scholar 40 (1970–1971). See Richard Hofstadter, "Spontaneous, Sporadic, and Disorganized," New York Times (28 Apr. 1968). An obituary is in the New York Times (25 Oct. 1970). Lionel Trilling's letter of response is in the New York Times (5 Nov. 1970).

Jack J. Cardoso