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Richard Hofstadter

 
Biography: Richard Hofstadter
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American historian Richard Hofstadter (1916-1970) won two Pulitzer prizes in recognition of his leading role in reinterpreting United States history during the post-World War II period.

Richard 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 her son was ten. Hofstadter received his undergraduate education at the University of Buffalo, graduating in 1937. He went on to do graduate work in history at Columbia University, completing his M.A. and Ph.D. in 1938 and 1942 respectively. After teaching for four years at the University of Maryland, he joined Columbia University's History Department in 1946 and remained on that faculty until his death in 1970. He was married twice, first (1936) to Felice Swados, with whom he had a son, and then (1947) to Beatrice Kevitt, with whom he had a daughter.

Hofstadter was a highly productive author of works on American political culture, a subject that allowed him to explore in depth both political history and the history of ideas. His first book, Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860-1915 (1944), was an analysis of how American thinkers attempted to adapt Darwinist ideas to their purposes between the Civil War and World War I. In his second book, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (1948), his focus shifted from intellectual to political history. The volume, which was made up of a series of essays on American political figures from the Founding Fathers to Franklin D. Roosevelt, sold very well and established his reputation as an able stylist and a skillful interpretative historian.

Hofstadter's iconoclastic bent was a trait for which he came to be widely admired. This was evident in the challenge he laid down to the prevailing view, one inherited from the so-called progressive historians of the early 20th century, that American party battles were based on a clear-cut, dualistic struggle between the "interests" and "the people" - that is, between a conservative elite's selfishness and the democratic aspirations of the general public. By contrast, Hofstadter argued that ideological cleavages had seldom been so sharply defined as the progressive thesis implied and that opportunism and expediency rather than idealism had generally motivated American political leaders of all stripes.

Between 1955 and 1965 Hofstadter's standing in scholarly circles continued to grow as he produced three significant books - The Age of Reform: From Bryan toF.D.R. (1955), Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1964), and The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (1965) - and won two Pulitzer prizes. The most important of his works from this period was The Age of Reform, a study of the liberal reform tradition from the 1890s to the 1930s. Most previous histories of the Populist and progressive reformers had been written from the reformers' perspective. Hofstadter was careful to acknowledge the positive achievements of the older liberals, but he went on to argue that a close examination of these supposedly idealistic reformers revealed a variety of traits, including tendencies toward nativism and jingoism, that were far from enlightened.

Hofstadter's emphasis on conservative and even retrogressive elements in the liberal reform tradition created something of a sensation in historical circles. Some critics, led by John Higham, suggested that Hofstadter and several other important postwar historians were homogenizing American history, downplaying the conflicts that had separated Americans and substituting a portrait that stressed a bland, middle-class consensus in national affairs. Other scholars, notably Norman Pollack, charged that Hofstadter's exposure of liberalism's supposed deficiencies served to discredit the progressive reform tradition and thus gave aid and comfort to the conservative causes and leaders that were flourishing in the 1950s. Although Hofstadter was certainly interested in describing what Americans had in common, he was not an unthinking defender of an American consensus on bourgeois values. Nor did he think of himself as a conservative simply because he criticized liberalism. On the contrary, he argued that in spelling out liberalism's flaws he hoped to help American progressives put their house in order so that they could preserve the best of their tradition, which he said was his as well, against the attacks being made on it from every direction in the post-World War II period.

Hofstadter's worries about the illiberal mood that prevailed in postwar America were even more apparent in the two major books that followed The Age of Reform. In Anti-Intellectualism in American Life he presented a lengthy and at times tedious diatribe against the hostility he felt American popular culture had displayed toward urbane, cosmopolitan, and intellectually unorthodox views from colonial times into the 20th century. In The Paranoid Style in American Politics he examined the illiberality of a variety of American political movements after the 1890s, giving particular attention to the anti-Communist crusades of the McCarthy era and the militant conservatism of the Goldwater campaign in 1964. Once again, Hofstadter demonstrated his talent for advancing new historical perspectives by arguing that theories of political motivation that stressed rational sources of human conduct had to be supplemented by social scientific insights into the irrational and even unconscious origins of some political behavior.

In the few remaining years of his life Hofstadter continued to be an active publishing scholar. He produced a large volume, The Progressive Historians (1969), in which he discussed the careers and scholarly contributions of Frederick Jackson Turner, Vernon L. Parrington, and Charles A. Beard. The Idea of a Party System, Hofstadter's analysis of the virtues of the pragmatic and consensusoriented American party system, was published in 1969. He was beginning work on a projected three-volume study of American life (the unfinished first volume of which was published posthumously as America in 1750: A Social Portrait in 1971) at the time of his death from leukemia on October 24, 1970.

Hofstadter's achievement lay not in founding a school, something he made no attempt to do, but in challenging many of the established historical interpretations of his day. The gracefulness of his writing style and the boldness of his treatment of American ideas, reform movements, and political figures made him one of the most widely read and respected historians of the early postwar period.

Further Reading

The best introduction to Hofstadter's life and work is Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, "Richard Hofstadter: A Progress, " in The Hofstadter Aegis: A Memorial, edited by Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick (1974).

Additional Sources

Baker, Susan Stout, Radical beginnings: Richard Hofstadter and the 1930s, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985.

Cremin, Lawrence Arthur, Richard Hofstadter (1916-1970); a biographical memoir, Syracuse, N.Y. National Academy of Education 1972.

The Hofstadter aegis, a memorial, New York, Knopf; distributed by Random House 1974.

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US History Companion: Hofstadter, Richard
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(1916-1970), historian. Hofstadter was once referred to by another historian of distinction, John Higham, as "the finest and also the most humane historical intelligence of our generation." Such a judgment, which has had a wide measure of concurrence both during Hofstadter's lifetime and in the years following his death, derives from what has been seen as a fresh and essentially new way of perceiving historical events, tendencies, and persons, and of writing about them.

The range of his interests was unusual, extending from the earliest phases of the American experience down to the concerns of his own time. Unlike most of his professional contemporaries, Hofstadter was not a "specialist," though his mastery of the many subjects to which he gave his attention was widely acknowledged and respected. It was "a telling fact," as one commentator on his work has observed, "that no two of his books closely resemble each other." If any one theme could be said to unite all his writings, it was the importance of ideas in history; more precisely, it was the relation between the way people behaved, in politics and other realms of effort, and the use they made of their minds. The historian, as he himself wrote, must "think of history as being not only the analysis but the expression of human experience," the search being "for clues not simply as to how life may be controlled but as to how it may be felt, and he realizes more fully than before how much history is indeed akin to literature."

Hofstadter was born in Buffalo, New York, of a Jewish father and Protestant mother, was educated in the public schools there, and attended the University of Buffalo and Columbia University, where he received his doctorate in 1942. His first book, Social Darwinism in American Thought (1944), was awarded the A. J. Beveridge Prize of the American Historical Association. His first academic position was at the University of Maryland, which he left in 1946 to join the history faculty at Columbia. Over the next twenty-four years at the university, he--along with such figures as Lionel Trilling and Robert K. Merton--helped create a climate of exceptional vitality in the realms of historical, literary, and social thought.

During his student years in the metropolis Hofstadter had been attracted to leftist politics, attending meetings of the Communist party and perhaps becoming for a brief time a party member. But an inherent skepticism and a pervading sense of irony in his temper served to limit the appeal of comprehensive theories of social change, and he tended to drift away from these early attachments. Although he did not remove himself from public causes--he took an active part in the Stevenson campaign of 1952 and in the Selma civil rights march of 1965--he had little faith in radical solutions, from right or left, for anything.

His last significant public act occurred at the height of the campus uprisings at Columbia in the spring of 1968, at which time a general respect for his detachment and moderation made him the logical choice to deliver the commencement address of that year. He closed it with the question of how the university could go on after what had just happened. "I can only answer: How can it not go on? ... What kind of people would we be if we allowed this center of our culture and our hope to languish and fail?"

Hofstadter's most influential books were The American Political Tradition (1948); two Pulitzer Prize winners, The Age of Reform (1955) and Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963); The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington (1968); and The Idea of a Party System (1969). At the time of his death from leukemia in 1970 he was at work on a comprehensive historical portrait of American society from the mid-eighteenth century to the recent past, of which a completed fragment was posthumously published in 1971, America at 1750.

Bibliography:

Stanley Elkins and Eric L. McKitrick, eds., The Hofstadter Aegis: A Memorial (1974); Daniel J. Singal, "Beyond Consensus: Richard Hofstadter and American Historiography," American Historical Review 89 (October 1984): 976-1004.

Author:

Eric L. McKitrick

See also History and Historians.


 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Richard Hofstadter
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Hofstadter, Richard (hōf'stăt'ər, hŏf'-, hôf'-), 1916-70, American historian, b. Buffalo, N.Y. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia in 1942 and began teaching there in 1946, becoming full professor in 1952 and De Witt Clinton professor of American history in 1959. One of the most brilliant of 20th-century American historians, he did not believe that economic self-interest was the sole motivator of human conduct and in his work stressed America's tradition of shared ideas and values. Hofstadter wrote widely on the nation's intellectual, social, and political history. He won Pulitzer Prizes for The Age of Reform (1956, repr. 1999) and Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963). His other major works include Social Darwinism in American Thought (1944, rev. ed. 1955, repr. 1992), The American Political Tradition (1948, rev. ed. 1973, repr. 1999), The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1965, repr. 1995), The Progressive Historians (1968, repr. 1979), The Idea of a Party System (1969), and America at 1750 (1971, repr. 1973).

Bibliography

See biography by D. S. Brown (2006).

Works: Works by Richard Hofstadter
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(1916-1970)

1955The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. Hofstadter's account of the 1890s through the New Deal earns the Pulitzer Prize. The book prompts criticism among liberals who feel that Hofstadter is too critical of the progressive era. Hofstadter was a distinguished historian at Columbia, whose other works include Social Darwinism in American Thought (1944), The American Political Tradition (1948), and The Development of Academic Freedom in the U.S. (1955).
1963Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. Hofstadter's cultural analysis, "conceived in response to the political and intellectual conditions of the 1950s," earns the historian his second Pulitzer Prize, following The Age of Reform (1956). The work examines the threat to intellectual life in America.

Wikipedia: Richard Hofstadter
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Richard Hofstadter
Born August 6, 1916(1916-08-06)
Buffalo, New York, United States
Died October 24, 1970 (aged 54)
New York, NY,
United States
Occupation Author
Historian
Public intellectual
Nationality American
Subjects American History, Politics, Anti-intellectualism, Progressivism in the United States, Intellectual History
Spouse(s) Felice Swados (died 1945)
Beatrice Kevitt (widowed in 1970)
Children Daniel and Sarah

Richard Hofstadter (6 August 1916 – 24 October 1970) was an American public intellectual of the 1950s, an historian and DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History at Columbia University. In the course of his career, Hofstadter became the “iconic historian of postwar liberal consensus” whom twenty-first century scholars continue consulting, because his intellectually engaging books and essays remain pertinent to illuminating contemporary history.[1]

His most important works are Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860–1915 (1944); The American Political Tradition (1948); The Age of Reform (1955); Anti-intellectualism in American Life (1963), and the essays collected in The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964). He was twice awarded the Pulitzer Prize; in 1956 for The Age of Reform, an unsentimental historical analysis of Populism in the 1890s and Progressive Movement of the early 20th century; and in 1964 for the cultural history, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life.[2]

Contents

Biography

Richard Hofstadter was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1916 to a Polish Jewish father and a German American Lutheran mother; when he was ten years old, his father died. He attended the Fosdick-Masten Park High School (City Honors School), then studied philosophy and history at the State University University of New York, at Buffalo in 1933, under the diplomatic historian Julius Pratt. As he intellectually matured, he culturally identified himself primarily as a Jew, rather than as a Protestant Christian, a stance that might have cost him professorships at Johns Hopkins University and the University of California, Berkeley, because of the contemporary institutional antisemitism of the 1940s. [3]

The Communist

As a man of his time, Richard Hofstadter was a Communist, and a member of the Young Communist League at university, and later progressed to Communist Party membership. In 1936, he entered the doctoral program in history at Columbia University, New York City, where Merle Curti demonstrated how to write books by synthesizing intellectual, social, and political history based upon secondary (published) sources rather than primary-source archival research.[4] In 1938, he joined the Communist Party of the USA, yet realistically qualified his action: “I join without enthusiasm, but with a sense of obligation. . . My fundamental reason for joining is that I don’t like capitalism and want to get rid of it. I am tired of talking . . . The party is making a very profound contribution to the radicalization of the American people. . . . I prefer to go along with it now”. In late 1939, he ended the Communist stage of his life, because of the Soviet–Nazi Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact; yet remained anti-capitalist: “I hate capitalism and everything that goes with it”. [5]

In 1942, he earned his doctorate in history, and in 1944 published his dissertation Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860–1915, a pithy and commercially successful (200,000 copies) critique of late nineteenth-century American capitalism and the men who espoused its ruthless “dog-eat-dog” economic competition — justified as Social Darwinism, identified by William Graham Sumner; none the less, conservative critics, such as Irwin G. Wylie and Robert C. Bannister, disagree with his interpretation.[6]

Charles Beard’s influence

In the 1940s, as an historian, Richard Hofstadter acknowledged that: “. . . Beard was really the exciting influence on me”, [7] specifically the social-conflict model of US history as the struggle among competing economic groups — primarily farmers, Southern slavers, Northern industrialists, and the workers — wherein abstract political rhetoric meant little in practice; that historians must search for the hidden self-interest and financial goals of the economic belligerents. As such, Charles Beard perceived the American Civil War (1861–65) as a South-to-North transference of political power, progressing from slavery to industrial capitalism, because neither the Union nor the Confederacy was truly interested in resolving the cultural and Constitutional contradictions of American slavery’s existence.

Consensus historian

After 1945, Hofstadter philosophically broke with Charles Beard, and moved to the right wing in his leadership of the “consensus historians”.[8] In 1946, he joined the Columbia University faculty; in 1959, he became the DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History.

In 1948, he published The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It, incisive interpretive studies of twelve major American political leaders from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. Besides critical success, the book sold nearly a million copies at university campuses, where it was used as a history textbook; critics found it “skeptical, fresh, revisionary, occasionally ironical, without being harsh or merely destructive” [9]. Although, as Bruce Kuklik notes, it still "owed much to Hofstadter's leftist background", it was ironic and paradoxic in dealing with political leaders from the Revolution to the present. Each chapter title illustrated a paradox: Thomas Jefferson is “The Aristocrat as Democrat”; John C. Calhoun is the “Marx of the Master Class”; and Franklin Roosevelt is “The Patrician as Opportunist”.[10]

As a consensus historian, Hofstadter rejected Beard’s interpretation of history as a succession of socio-economic group conflicts. He thought that all historical periods could be understood as an implicit consensus, shared by antagonists, explaining that the generation of Beard and Vernon Louis Parrington had:

. . . put such an excessive emphasis on conflict, that an antidote was needed. . . . It seems to me to be clear that a political society cannot hang together, at all, unless there is some kind of consensus running through it, and yet that no society has such a total consensus as to be devoid of significant conflict. It is all a matter of proportion and emphasis, which is terribly important in history. Of course, obviously, we have had one total failure of consensus, which led to the Civil War. One could use that as the extreme case in which consensus breaks down.[11]

Later works

As an historian, Hofstadter’s historiographic ground-breaking came in using social psychology concepts to explain political history.[12] He explored subconscious motives such as social status anxiety, anti-intellectualism, irrational fear, and paranoia — as they propelling political discourse and action in politics.

The rural ethos

The Age of Reform (1955) analyzes the yeoman ideal in America’s sentimental attachment to rural life, “a kind of homage that Americans have paid to the fancied innocence of their origins”, however, to call it a myth does not imply falsity, because it effectively embodies the rural values of the American people, profoundly influencing their perception of the correct values, hence their political behavior. In this matter, the stress is upon the importance of Jefferson’s writings, and of his followers, in the development of agricultural fundamentalism in the US, as establishing the agrarian myth, and its importance, in American life and politics — despite the rural and urban industrialization that rendered the myth moot.[13]

Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963) and The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1965) describe the provincialism in American society, warning it contains much anti-intellectual fear of the cosmopolitan city, presented as wicked by the xenophobic and anti-Semitic Populists of the 1890s. They trace the direct political and ideological lineage between the Populists and anti-communist Senator Joseph McCarthy and McCarthyism, the political paranoia manifest in his contemporary time. His dissertation director Merle Curti noted about Hofstadter that: “His position is as biased, by his urban background . . . as the work of older historians was biased by their rural background and traditional agrarian sympathies”. [14]

Irrational fear

The Idea of a Party System (1900) describes the origins of the First Party System as reflecting fears that the other political party threatened to destroy the republic. The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington (1968) systematically analyzes and criticizes the intellectual foundations and historical validity of Charles Beard’s historiography; the book “signalled a growing support for neoconservatism”. In the event, Turner, said that, as an historian, Richard Hofstadter, no longer was a useful guide, because his ideas were too-isolationist, and too often had “a pound of falsehood for every few ounces of truth”. [15]

The Conservative

Consequent to the radical politics of the 1960s, and especially because of the student occupation and temporary closing of Columbia University in 1968, Hofstadter became more conservative; friend David Herbert Donald said: “He was appalled by the growing radical, even revolutionary, sentiment that he sensed among his colleagues and his students. He could never share their simplistic, moralistic approach”.[16] Moreover, he was “extremely critical of student tactics, believing that they were based on irrational romantic ideas, rather than sensible plans for achievable change, that they undermined the unique status of the university, as an institutional bastion of free thought, and that they were bound to provoke a political reaction from the right”.[17] Despite strongly disagreeing with their radical political methods, he invited his students to discuss goals and strategies with him. In the event, he employed one, Mike Wallace, to collaborate with him on American Violence: A Documentary History (1900); about the book, Hofstadter student Eric Foner said that it “utterly contradicted the consensus vision of a nation placidly evolving without serious disagreements”.

Death

Richard Hofstadter had planned to write a three-volume history of American society, but at his death from leukemia in 1970, he had only completed part of the trilogy’s first volume, America in 1750: A Social Portrait (1971).

Criticism

The sharpest criticism of Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860–1915 exposed one of Hofstadter’s major weaknesses as an historian: he did little research of manuscripts, newspapers, archival, and unpublished sources. Instead, he primarily relied upon his wide-ranging interdisciplinary imagination, producing very well-written theories upon a slight base of evidence drawn from secondary sources.[18] As an academic, Hofstadter directed more than one hundred finished doctoral dissertations, but gave his graduate students only cursory attention; that academic latitude enabled them to find their own models of history.[citation needed] Some adopted New Left perspectives that he rejected, among them were Herbert Gutman, Eric Foner, Lawrence Levine, Linda Kerber, and Paula Fass, while others, such as Eric McKitrick and Stanley Elkins, were more conservative than he; hence, Prof. Hofstadter had few disciples and founded no school of history writing.[19]

Conservative commentator George Will called Richard Hofstadter “the iconic public intellectual of liberal condescension”, who “dismissed conservatives as victims of character flaws and psychological disorders — a ‘paranoid style’ of politics rooted in ‘status anxiety’, etc. Conservatism rose on a tide of votes cast by people irritated by the liberalism of condescension.” [20] A dismissal confirming the accuracy of Hofstadter's 1964 essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”, which articulates this partly psychological characterization of the thinking of the radical right.[21]

Published works

  • "The Tariff Issue on the Eve of the Civil War," The American Historical Review Vol. 44, No. 1 (Oct., 1938), pp. 50-55 full text in JSTOR
  • "William Graham Sumner, Social Darwinist," The New England Quarterly> Vol. 14, No. 3 (Sep., 1941), pp. 457-477 online at JSTOR
  • "Parrington and the Jeffersonian Tradition," Journal of the History of Ideas Vol. 2, No. 4 (Oct., 1941), pp. 391-400 JSTOR
  • "William Leggett, Spokesman of Jacksonian Democracy," Political Science Quarterly Vol. 58, No. 4 (Dec., 1943), pp. 581-594 JSTOR
  • "U. B. Phillips and The Plantation Legend," The Journal of Negro History Vol. 29, No. 2 (Apr., 1944), pp. 109-124 JSTOR
  • Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860-1915 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1944); 1992 edition with preface by Eric Foner
  • The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1948). online edition
  • "Beard and the Constitution: The History of an Idea," American Quarterly Vol. 2, No. 3 (Autumn, 1950), pp. 195-213 JSTOR
  • The Age of Reform: from Bryan to F.D.R (New York: Knopf, 1955). online edition
  • The Development of Academic Freedom in the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955). (with Walter P. Metzger)
  • The United States: the History of a Republic (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.,: Prentice-Hall, 1957), college textbook; several editions; coauthored with Daniel Aaron and William Miller
  • Anti-intellectualism in American Life (New York: Knopf, 1963).
  • The Progressive Movement, 1900-1915 (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1963). edited excerpts
  • The Paranoid Style in American Politics, and Other Essays (New York: Knopf, 1965).
  • The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington (New York: Knopf, 1968).
  • The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the United States, 1780-1840 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969).
  • American Violence: A Documentary History. co-edited with Mike Wallace (1970)
  • America at 1750: A Social Portrait (1971)
  • Academic Freedom in the Age of the College, Columbia University Press, 1955, 1961.

References

  • Alan Brinkley, "Richard Hofstadter's the Age of Reform: A Reconsideration," Reviews in American History Vol. 13, No. 3 (Sept., 1985), pp. 462-480 JSTOR
  • David S. Brown, "Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography" (U. of Chicago Press, 2006) full-scale biography; seen as "readable, informative, engaging, and provocative"[22]
  • David S. Brown, "Redefining American History: Ethnicity, Progressive Historiography and the Making of Richard Hofstadter," The History Teacher, Vol. 36, No. 4 (Aug., 2003), pp. 527-548 in JSTOR
  • Dane S. Claussen, Anti-Intellectualism in American Media, New York: Peter Lang Publishing (2004).
  • Robert M. Collins, "The Originality Trap: Richard Hofstadter on Populism," Journal of American History 76 (June 1989): 150-67 in JSTOR
  • Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, "Richard Hofstadter: A Progress," in their The Hofstadter Aegis (Knopf, 1974), pp 300–367.
  • Eric Foner, "The Education of Richard Hofstadter." The Nation . Volume: 254. Issue: 17. May 4, 1992. pp 597+.
  • Daniel Geary, "Richard Hofstadter Reconsidered," Reviews in American History, Volume 35, Number 3, September 2007, pp. 425-431 in Project Muse
  • David Greenberg, "Richard Hofstadter Reconsidered," Raritan Review Vol. 27, No. 2 (Fall 2007), pp. 144-167.
  • Daniel Walker Howe and Peter Elliott Finn, "Richard Hofstadter: The Ironies of an American Historian," Pacific Historical Review 43 (February 1974): 1-18 in JSTOR
  • Michael Kazin, "Hofstadter Lives: Political Culture and Temperament in the Work of an American Historian,? Reviews in American History 27.2 (1999) 334-348 online in Project Muse
  • Jack Pole, "Richard Hofstadter," in Robert Allen Rutland, ed. "Clio's Favorites: Leading Historians of the United States, 1945-2000" U of Missouri Press. (2000) pp 68–83
  • Harry N. Scheiber, "Review: A Keen Sense of History and the Need to Act: Reflections on Richard Hofstadter and the American Political Tradition' Reviews in American History Vol. 2, No. 3 (Sep., 1974), pp. 445-452 JSTOR
  • Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr. "Richard Hofstadter" in Marcus Cunliffe and Robin Winks, eds. Pastmasters: Some Essays on American Historians (1969) pp 278-315.
  • Daniel J. Singal, "Beyond Consensus: Richard Hofstadter and American Historiography," American Historical Review 89 (October 1984): 976-1004. in JSTOR
  • Jon Wiener, "America, Through A Glass Darkly." The Nation, October 5, 2006.

Notes

  1. ^ Geary (2007) pp. 430, 425
  2. ^ Benét’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition, (1996) p. 478.
  3. ^ Brown (2003) p. 38, 53.
  4. ^ Brown (2006) pp. 22, 29.
  5. ^ Foner 1992
  6. ^ Brown (2006) pp. 30–37; Irwin G. Wylie, “Social Darwinism and the Businessmen” in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 103 (1959), pp. 629–35, shows few businessmen believed in Social Darwinism. Robert C. Bannister, Social Darwinism: Science and Myth in Anglo–American Social Thought (1989). By the 1880s, Sumner had progressed beyond Social Darwinism, which Hofstadter de-emphasized by citing posthumous editions of Sumner’s essays.
  7. ^ Foner, 1992
  8. ^ Brown(2006) p. 75
  9. ^ Pole (2000)
  10. ^ Pole (2000); Bruce Kuklick in Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society v.42 #4 (2006) 574-577
  11. ^ quoted in Pole 2000 pp. 73–74
  12. ^ He was influenced by his friend sociologist C. Wright Mills; Brown (2006) p. 93.
  13. ^ Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (1955).
  14. ^ Quoted in Brown (2006) p. 112.
  15. ^ Quoted in Brown (2003) p. 531.
  16. ^ quoted in Brown (2006) p. 180
  17. ^ Geary (2007) p. 430.
  18. ^ Brown (2006) pp. 38, 113
  19. ^ Brown (2006) pp. 66-71; Kazin (1999) p. 343.
  20. ^ Candidate on a High Horse, George Will, The Washington Post, April 15, 2008
  21. ^ The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Richard Hofstadter, Harper's Magazine, November 1964.
  22. ^ Geary (2007) p. 425
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