Richard Hofstadter: A Model for Synthesizing in His Time…and Ours (Part 1/2)
Personal Introduction
While a student in secondary school and college, I did not think of myself as a future writer— that was not a profession, not an option on the drawing boards for a son of immigrants.[1]
That personal plight noted, there were two American writers whom I especially admired: Edmund Wilson and Richard Hofstadter. I was drawn to them because they wrote compellingly about topics and personalities that interested me; notably, they were also able to intrigue me about topics and personalities in which/where I did not have a prior interest—the mark of a skilled writer.
Hofstadter died at age 54, and while his books remained on my bookshelf, he pretty much disappeared from my radar screen. Wilson continued to write throughout his life. Even after his death at the age of 77, collections of his writings appeared regularly, and so he remained in my consciousness. When I was a student, I invited him to speak at Harvard. He declined, sending me one of his infamous form rejection cards: “Edmund Wilson regrets that it is impossible for him to…” I saved the card. Fifty years later, courtesy of a handwriting analysis via the internet, I confirmed that Wilson himself had penned the rejection — just as Groucho Marx had apparently also created and posted his declination to a similar invitation.[2]
Form rejection from Edmund Wilson
Decline from Groucho Marx
With the benefit of hindsight, I realize that I admired Hofstadter and Wilson for at least two reasons. Both were clear and elegant writers who covered a potpourri of topics. In addition, both were remarkable synthesizers. And that is what impelled me—at least subconsciously—to attempt to follow in their footsteps, as best I could. In a set of essays (link here) I paired Edmund (“Bunny” to his friends) Wilson with his namesake biologist E.O. (“Ed” to his friends) Wilson and reflected on the approaches to synthesizing that each had displayed. Recently, in an effort to understand the nature of his talents and what others could learn from studying his example, I have returned to the other literary hero of my adolescence, Richard (“Dick”) Hofstadter.
In what follows, I give an embarrassingly brief summary of Hofstadter’s life, present his own insightful analyses of how he went about research and writing, and, for fun, see whether I can come up with an analysis of my own approach, one that might some day be carried out by some form of artificial intelligence (AI).
Snapshot biography
Richard Hofstadter was born in Buffalo, New York in 1916. His father was Jewish (and related to a number of well-known scholars bearing the same surname). His mother was Protestant and Hofstadter was raised as a Lutheran. He attended local public schools and then studied history and philosophy at nearby University of Buffalo. Bowing to family pressure, he began law school (see footnote 1) but soon dropped out and decided instead to pursue a doctorate in history at Columbia University. As a doctoral student, he wrote book reviews for the prestigious New York Herald Tribune. While pursuing doctoral studies, he married and had a son, but his wife Felice succumbed to cancer in her late twenties.
Hofstadter had brief teaching stints at University of Maryland but soon returned to become a professor of history at Columbia. He also remarried and with his second wife, Beatrice, had a daughter. He spent the rest of his professional life at Columbia, largely residing on the Upper West Side of New York City, where he was enmeshed in a network of intellectuals—most of whom were Jewish and politically liberal, a few of whom had in their student days been members of the Communist party. Hofstadter had an extremely productive scholarly and writing life, cut short by his death from leukemia at age 54.
I will not even attempt to summarize Hofstadter’s scholarly achievements. He wrote knowledgeably about American history (and American historiography). Having grown up during the Depression years, lived through World War II, and witnessed the political upheavals of the Senator Joseph McCarthy years and the Vietnam War, he was keenly aware of the opportunities and tensions that marked the middle decades of the 20th century. His stance was vivid, whether he was writing about Social Darwinism or “paranoid strains” (at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century: the Age of Reform in the early 20th century until the Franklin Roosevelt era; Anti-intellectualism throughout American history: or the “American political tradition” dating back to the Founders. Often involved in controversy, never shying away from it, Hofstadter was widely considered among the very best American historians of the era, and, with the possible exception of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., the best known to the general public as his biographer David S. Brown wryly comments, “he wrote the best books for the best publisher, won the best prizes, and taught in the best city, at the best school, at the best time.”
For the purposes of this blog, I ask you to accept this brief sketch—Brown’s book provides ample detail as do the tributes to Hofstadter after his early death. You can find a few of these listed in references.
As I have maintained in earlier blogs (links here: history series parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and here), historians stand out among scholars because they are virtually compelled to be synthesizers. I have elsewhere lamented (link here) that my search for how historians synthesize has proved elusive; either the route to synthesizing is obvious (and not worth description or analysis); or it is so challenging that it eludes a useful account. I prize the few exceptions to this rule that I have noted — Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg, and American historian, Bernard Bailyn.
For the most part, Hofstadter took the conventional position of his fellow historians—he did not valorize historiography per se. But in one of his less well-known books, he analyzed the strengths and weaknesses of his principal historical predecessors—specifically Charles Beard, Frederick Jackson Turner, and Vernon Parrington, providing a contribution, perhaps inadvertently or incidentally, to historiography.
But possibly because of his awareness of his precarious health, Hofstadter at one time stepped back and tried to analyze his own approach to history and to historical synthesis. In an invaluable autobiographical essay Hofstadter asserts the following, under the title “Four facts that explain all I have done.”
“l came of age politically during the Great Depression—growing up in Buffalo at the time was my world.”
All books are topical in their inspiration: “I have always begun with a concern with some present reality and have been led to see the past in the light of current problems and controversies.”
As noted above, Social Darwinism in American Thought and The American Political Tradition refract Hofstadter’s experiences of the Depression era and the New Deal. Hofstadter’s later books, Age of Reform and Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, reflect the concerns of the post war era, the cold war, and McCarthyism.
“The basic interest of my work has not been in the machinery of politics or in political or economic power, but in ideas, moods, and atmosphere.” Hofstadter has been called an intellectual historian but he asserts: “I think of myself as a political historian whose chief contribution has been to try tell what people thought they were doing in their political activities—that is, what they thought they were either conserving, or reforming or constructing.”
Hofstadter goes on: “My work has always been shaped by a very considerable interest in the fields adjacent to history—first philosophy, I have found my historical writing shaped very much by my reading in literary criticism, sociology, and psychology—to a lesser degree by political science and economics.” Hofstadter goes on to list many of his readings—and contends that he has had to unlearn much of what he had earlier gleaned from his historical predecessors, Charles Beard and Vernon Parrington.
Hofstadter also offers revealing insights into himself: “I do not read history for pleasure, ordinarily, and I find that I retain almost nothing that I read if the reading is not done in connection with something I am writing….no doubt there are several conclusions that might be drawn from this experience, but the one I am most sure of is this: If you want to be generally educated, read voluminously when you are very young; nothing you do when you are older will be clearly so effective.”
Tellingly, as he describes his approach to work, Hofstadter quotes copiously from an article on the Depression in Chicago, written by none other than his (and my) literary hero—Edmund Wilson (the article, written in 1932, is reprinted in Wilson’s collection The American Earthquake).
And Hofstadter asserts: “I am as much, maybe more of an essayist than an historian. I think people like Edmund Wilson had much more influence on my style than historians.”
And a final taxonomic comment from Hofstadter:
“I cannot recall ever having made a conscious decision as to the kind of history that I wanted to write…there are basically three kinds of history writing, though any one of them may contain them in some combination”
historiography, narrative history
the scientific ideal— the typical academic monograph—careful accumulation of detailed evidence, from untapped or little used sources
while the first two kinds derive respectively from art and science—“the kind of history I have increasingly aspired to write derives from philosophy and criticism—…I attempt to develop and state new ways of looking at historical events—it assumes the reader already knows the story—it sacrifices verifying details, “its weakness lies in its reliance upon a speculative tissue to hold it together. Its strength lies in its novelty and provocative effect, and in the play it gives to an essayistic style.”
So there, in the barest of sketches, is Richard Hofstadter—I hope a reasonable introduction for those who do not know his name, and not too much of a distortion for whom he is already part of their intellectual landscape.
In the second and concluding blog, I describe some parallels and differences in Hofstadter’s and my work—and then attempt to carry out a thought experiment: an “AI” realization of synthesis as it might previously have been executed by specific writers.
[1] I am reminded of the old joke. Question: “What’s a lawyer?” Answer: “A Jewish boy who hates the sight of blood.”
[2] Psychologist Jean Piaget and anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss each commented personally on a paper that I had sent them. As it happens, their letters bore the identical date–4/10/70. This striking co-incidence, along with the fact that both scholars actually cared enough to reply to an unknown student, may have influenced my choice of career and my decision to be a scholar in the social sciences rather become than a wide-ranging author like Edmund Wilson or an historical stylist like Richard Hofstadter.
References:
Brown, D. (2008). Richard Hofstadter: An intellectual biography. University of Chicago Press.
Hofstadter, R. (1960). The age of reform. Vintage Books.
Hofstadter, R. (1948). The American political tradition and the men who made it. Knopf.
Hofstadter, R. (1960). Anti-intellectualism in American life. Vintage Books.
Hofstadter, R. (2020). Anti-intellectualism in American life; The paranoid style in American politics; Uncollected essays 1956-1965, Ed. Wilentz, S., (pp. 962-967). New York: Library of America.
Hofstadter, R. (2008). The paranoid style in American politics. Vintage Books.
Juergens, G. (1971). Richard Hofstadter: A Memorial. Journal Of American History, 58(2), 313-315. https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/58.2.313
Howe, D., & Finn, P. (1974). Richard Hofstadter: The Ironies of an American Historian. Pacific Historical Review, 43(1), 1-23. https://doi.org/10.2307/3637588
Whitman, A. (2022). Richard Hofstadter, Pulitzer Historian, 54, Dies. Static01.nyt.com. Retrieved 15 September 2022, from https://static01.nyt.com/packages/html/books/hofstadter-obit.pdf.