If you ever glance through the most influential history books of all time; you’re most likely to come across books like, Arthur Schlesinger Jr’s, “The Age of Jackson,” “The Guns of August” By Barbara W. Tuchman, and "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany," by William L. Shirer, among other canons of history.
All of these books are considered, by many, vital and enduring classics.
Another monumental book undoubtedly is “The Age of Reform,” Richard Hofstadter’s 1955 Pulitzer-Prize winning book and its pioneering examination of American history from the Populist Movement of the 1890s through the Progressive Era to the New Deal of the 1930s.
As I observed “The Age of Reform’’ popping up like a toaster on a number of political classics of all time, I wondered whether Hofstadter’s opus withstood the passage of time 64 years after it first hit the bookstores?
I also wondered what exactly makes a classic?
So, I put that very question to some scholars.
According to Lawrence Cahoone, Professor of Philosophy at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA, and author of “Cultural Revolutions: Reason versus Culture in Philosophy, Politics, and Jihad,” “a "classic" piece of nonfiction is one that had a large and lasting positive impact (positive meaning, its impact is due to people learning from it and agreeing with it). And that means people in the field ought to read it to be well educated in the field. “
“But that does not mean it is right,” Cahoone went on to explain. “I can regard something as a classic and still think it was wrong or misguided. Indeed, if you admit there are "classics" which disagree with each other, you have to accept that.”
Eric Foner, Professor of History at Columbia University, observed that “some of the most influential books are influential precisely because so many people were inspired to refute them. In writing history refutation is often the highest form of flattery. “
Foner additionally tells me that much of “The Age of Reform” has been seriously questioned and indeed refuted by recent scholars. Still, it is well worth reading,” Foner said. “It’s a classic and students should understand why it made so large an impact and what they can learn from it about history and writing.”
In 1985, 35 years after it was published, historian Alan Brinkley considered "The Age of Reform" the most influential book ever published on the history of twentieth-century America. “
Richard Hofstadter at his desk.
Photo Credit: Sam Falk/The New York Times
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In his Pulitzer-Prize winning book, Hofstadter re-examined Populism, a 19th century term that is often attributed to the liberal reform tradition of the 1890s.
Populism is generally defined as the “people,” (a morally good force) in riot with “the elite” (corrupt, greedy, and self-serving). It represented the promotion of democracy.
The Populist Movement, in U.S. history, was a coalition of agrarian reformers in the Middle West and South in revolt against the Democratic and Republican leaders for ignoring their interests. They suffered from economic hardship due to falling prices, crop failures, and lack of credit institutions.
So frustrated by the lack of progress, Populists challenged the federal government to help alleviate economic depressions, regulate banks and corporations, and help farmers who were being crushed from economic chaos.
In breaking with his contemporaries, Hofstadter, a Columbia University historian, blistered liberals and their purportedly idealistic reforms by revealing a number of unbecoming traits, including their nativism, jingoism, and anti-Semitism.
Previously, Populists and Progressives of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were heralded by most historians for ushering in a number of progressive reforms; among them, the secret ballot, direct elections of U.S. senators, and amendments in electoral laws promoting suffrage for women.
These reforms were put in place, history tells us, to combat the corrupt monopolies of the late 19th century, including the regulation of transportation, finance, utilities, and corporations.
According to Hofstadter, these reforms sprang from resentment from the rural population (“urbanized against their will”) who lost ground to the more socially democratic and multicultural interests of the country. The two groups erupted into a cultural bonfire.
Many of these reforms were hailed as “the rebirth of American democracy.”
Not until “The Age of Reform’’ was published, however, were many of these democratic reforms of the Populists and Progressives put under close scrutiny by Hofstadter.
No book, according to Hofstadter, investigated the anti-Semitism of the rural population.
Stripped to its core, Hofstadter recognized hostility by Populists to the foreign “ideologies” of immigrants who poured through the U.S. in record numbers in the last half of the 19th century and early 20th centuries. Yankee Protestants, from Hofstadter’s vantage point, resented the rising status of the Jews, Poles, and Irish, ethnic groups who didn’t fall in line with the social conservatism of the “old Wasp elites.”
The decline of rural America, in other words, awoke a smoldering anti-Semitism within the farming class. Hofstadter’s analysis, in another break from his contemporaries, was taking a hard look at American politics through the prism of culture, not in economic terms.
The Columba University historian inveighed against native-born citizens seeking to define what it meant to be an American on their terms, while condemning supposedly foreign challenges to the nation’s values and institutions.
Shortly after its publication, historian Norman Pollack harshly challenged Hofstadter’s arguments in “The Age of Reform,” which he thought obscured the truly humane character of the movement and denied Populism "its traditional place as a democratic social force.”
Another, C. Vann Woodward, a Pulitzer-Prize winning American historian who wrote extensively about the American South and race relations in the 20th century took issue with Hofstadter for singling out Populists for their nativism and anti-Semitism, when such traits were shared by elite eastern intellectuals and nation’s urban underprivileged.
64 years after its publication, “The Age of Reform” continues to have its strong supporters, especially in the Donald Trump era.
Harold Bloom, an American literary critic and Professor of Humanities at Yale University, contends that “now that we are all of us in the Age of Trump, I think we have to regard Hofstadter as having been prescient. Populism, whether here or abroad, is anything but a democratic social force. It has become Fascistic. Let us tell the truth. We are now under a Fascistic government. I do not think that I would call the Hofstadter book a classic. It is not a great work. “
Lizabeth Cohen, Professor of American Studies at Harvard University, echoes Harold Bloom’s sentiments.
“Trump’s victory,” Cohen observes, “surely would not have surprised Hofstadter. After all, he tracked extremist revolt in the Heartland of America from the Populists of the 1890s to the anti-urban nativists of the 1920s to the McCarthyites and other anti-communists in the 1950s to the Goldwater Campaigners of 1964.”
Cohen, furthermore, points out that Hofstadter predicted the impact of media celebrity on politics when he wrote in 1964: “The growth of the mass media of communication and their use in politics have brought politics closer to the people than ever before and have made politics a form of entertainment in which the spectators feel themselves involved. Thus, it has become, more than ever before, an arena into which private emotions and personal problems can be readily projected.”
Critics of Hofstadter think his radical politics sprang from his transition from Marxism in the early 1930s, which over time, developed into hostility against “populistic democracy.”
Hofstadter joined the Communist Party in 1938; but was so disheartened with the Moscow show trials, that he quit the party four months later.
Conservative columnist George F. Will once described Hofstadter as a liberal intellectual who “dismissed conservatives as victims of character flaws and psychological disorders.”
Hofstadter was born on August 6, 1916, in Buffalo, New York. His father was a Jewish immigrant from Poland, his mother an American-born Protestant who died when he was ten. He lived at 1125 Park Avenue in NYC.
Not all scholars consider “The Age of Reform” a classic.
Paul E. Peterson, Professor of Government at Harvard University, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, said that “when I first read it in graduate school, I thought it did not understand country folk I came to know when running a campaign in rural Minnesota. The people were mainly interested in the weather, the prices for their crops, and any government subsidies they might persuade the federal government to give them. The book appealed to the folks on the eastern seaboard. I never assigned it [to my class].” “Never believe a blurb on the back of a book,” Peterson advised me.
In addition to Populists and Progressives, “The Age of Reform,” examines FDR’s New Deal, which is viewed by the author as the only true political reform movement which was motivated not by the cultural ethos of the nation, emblematic of the Populist Movement, but motivated by sheer economic necessity. The New Deal, according to Hofstadter, "added a social-democratic tinge that had never before been present in American reform movements."
Because of the New Deal, Hofstadter argued, liberals would in the future be less concerned with “entrepreneurial,” reform and increasingly more committed to social legislation (social security, unemployment insurance, wages and hours, and housing).
Hofstadter maintained that the New Deal “represented the triumph of economic emergency and human needs over inherited notions and inhibitions."
Joseph A. McCartin, a historian of the U.S. labor movement and 20th century U.S. social and political history at Georgetown University, strongly believes the Age of Reform is “indeed a classic work of U.S. political history. Hofstadter brilliantly synthesized historical scholarship and he analyzed American political developments during a crucial period in such a compelling way that the book continues to attract readers more than a half-century after he wrote it.”
“I think it is safe to say’’ McCartin went on to tell me, “that most historians of populism in the years since Hofstadter have thought that he had overplayed the extent to which anti-Semitism infected the populist movement and its followers.”
But McCartin was just as quick to point out that “just as his keen awareness of the post-WWII Red Scare and McCarthyism caused Hofstadter to see some illiberal forerunners among the populists, events in our time have served as a warning to present day historians that there has perhaps been a greater persistence of illiberal, tribal, and anti-Semitic tendencies in our culture than we might have hoped or assumed.”
In addition to winning a Pulitzer Prize for “The Age of Reform,” Hofstadter was the recipient of yet another Pulitzer in 1964 for “ Anti-intellectualism in American Life,’’ in which he traced the social movements that altered the role of intellect in American society. He published 13 books, a number of them bestsellers.
The celebrated American historian and public intellectual died in 1970 [Obituary] from leukemia. He was 54.
--Bill Lucey
September 8, 2019
