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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)
Died October 24, 1970 (aged 54)
Occupation Historian, professor, intellectual

Richard Hofstadter (August 6, 1916–October 24, 1970) was an American historian and DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History at Columbia University. One of the leading public intellectuals of the 1950s, his works include The Age of Reform (1955) and Anti-intellectualism in American Life (1963), both of which won the Pulitzer Prize—the former for History and the latter for General Non-Fiction—as well as Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860-1915 (1944), The American Political Tradition (1948), and The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964). Hofstadter became the "iconic historian of postwar liberal consensus" and 21st century scholars continue to admire his books and essays for the grace of his writing, the depth of his insight, his use of the past to illuminate contemporary issues, and his ability to simultaneously engage a scholarly and a popular audience.[1]

Contents

Biography

Hofstadter was born in Buffalo, New York in 1916 to a Polish Jewish father and a German American Lutheran mother, who died when he was ten. He increasingly identified himself culturally as Jewish, and later perhaps lost academic appointments at Johns Hopkins University and the University of California, Berkeley in the 1940s in part because he was considered too Jewish.[2] He attended high school at Fosdick-Masten Park High School (now City Honors School) and enrolled at the University at Buffalo in 1933, majoring in philosophy and minoring in history. He worked with the diplomatic historian Julius Pratt.

Marxist stage

As an undergraduate, Hofstadter became involved in left-wing politics, joining the Young Communist League and meeting a radical student named Felice Swados, whom he married in 1936; she died in 1945. After graduation in 1936, Hofstadter entered the PhD program in history at Columbia University in New York, where he was most influenced by Merle Curti, who synthesized intellectual, social and political history using published sources rather than archival research.[3] Hofstadter became more involved in Marxist circles, joining the Communist Party in 1938, though, in his words at the time, "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." By 1939, however, he had become disenchanted with the party and his participation began a steady decline; by the time of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in September, he was thoroughly and permanently disillusioned with the Communist Party, the Soviet Union, and Marxism itself. He did not, however, change his views on capitalism: "I hate capitalism and everything that goes with it."[4]

Hofstadter was left with a deep sense of cynicism that pervaded his academic work and thought. In 1942, he received his Ph.D. from Columbia after completing his dissertation which was published in 1944 as Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860-1915. Selling 200,000 copies, it was a widely read Marxist critique of American capitalists of the late 19th century who, he argued, believed in a dog-eat-dog sort of ferocious competition endorsed by Social Darwinism as preached by William Graham Sumner. Later critics took issue with his evidence, showing that very few businessmen were Social Darwinists and that many practiced philanthropy in support of colleges and hospitals.[5] However, his misrepresentations of Herbert Spencer's views have been widely copied by later commentators on Spencer. [6]

Influence of Charles Beard

In the early and mid-1940s, Hofstadter was a disciple from afar of Charles Beard, stating "...Beard was really the exciting influence on me."[7] Beard's conflict model taught that American history was the struggle of competing economic groups, primarily farmers, plantation slaveowners, industrialists, and workers. The clashing rhetoric of political leaders meant little, said Beard. He argued that historians should instead look for hidden self-interest and financial goals. Beard viewed the Civil War as a transfer of political power from the Southern plantation elite to Northeastern capitalists; slavery was not especially important as a cause in his analysis.

The consensus historians

After 1945, Hofstadter broke with Beard and moved to the right, becoming associated with the "consensus historians".[8] In 1946, he joined the Columbia faculty and became DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History in 1959. His most well-known and influential work, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It, was published in 1948. It comprised a series of 12 biographical portraits of major political leaders from the 1770s to 1930s. Like all of his books, it was based primarily on reading and synthesizing secondary sources. His essays are historiographical in nature and emphasize discursive analysis. Hofstadter was thinking theoretically about history and its representations. The American Political Tradition was a major publishing and critical success, selling a million copies and widely used in college history courses. Pole (2000) suggests the success was because it was "skeptical, fresh, revisionary, occasionally ironical, without being harsh or merely destructive."[9] The chapter titles themselves were ironic and revisionist, pointing up the paradoxes inherent in the American political idiom: Jefferson was labeled "The Aristocrat as Democrat"; John C. Calhoun was "the Marx of the Master Class"; FDR was "The Patrician as Opportunist". The only positive portrait in a generally debunking book dealt with abolitionist and labor agitator Wendell Phillips, who won praise for representing "the priceless provincial integrity that can be found in midcentury America wherever the seeds of the Puritans had been sown."

As a consensus historian, Hofstadter rejected Beard's interpretation of history as a succession of conflicts. Hofstadter believed that a historical period could be understood by an implicit consensus, shared by apparent antagonists. Hofstadter explained that the generation of Beard and Vernon 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.[10]

Later work

Uses social psychology

Hofstadter broke new historiographical ground by exploring sociological aspects of historical structures,[11] and by probing unconscious psychological motives, status anxieties, irrational hatreds, and even "paranoia" (metaphorically speaking) as political motivators.

Attacks small town ethos

In The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, Hofstadter described the provincial small-town dimensions of American society, warning that it harbored widespread fears of cosmopolitan ideas of the sort current in metropolitan centers. He depicted the Populists of the 1890s as xenophobic anti-Semites. Hofstadter saw a direct lineage from the Populists to the McCarthyism of his era. Historian Merle Curti, who knew Hofstadter well, complained 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."[12]

Identifies irrational fears

In other works, Hofstadter described irrational elements in American politics. In The Idea of a Party System, Hofstadter described the origins of the First Party System as reflecting fears that the other party threatened to destroy the republic. In The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington (1968), Hofstadter set out to systematically demolish the intellectual foundations of Beardian historiography, and as Brown (2003) notes, "signalled a growing support for neoconservatism." Turner, said Hofstadter, was no longer a useful guide as his ideas were too isolationist and too often had "a pound of falsehood for every few ounces of truth."[13]

Conservative reaction against radicals of 1960s

As Brown (2006) shows, he had become more conservative in the wake of the radical sit-in and temporary closing of Columbia university in 1968. His friend David Herbert Donald recalled, "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."[14] As Geary reports, Hofstadter 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."[15] But others noted that, during and after the events of '68, he invited his students in to talk with him about their political goals and strategies, and invited one of the radical students, Mike Wallace, to collaborate with him on a history of violence in the US. In the words of his student Eric Foner, Hofstadter and Wallace's American Violence: A Documentary History "utterly contradicted the consensus vision of a nation placidly evolving without serious disagreements."

Death

Hofstadter planned to write a major three-volume history of American society, but at his death from leukemia in 1970 he had only partially completed the first volume, later published as America in 1750.

Criticism

The sharp criticism leveled at his Social Darwinism exposed one of Hofstadter's major weaknesses as a historian: he did little research in manuscripts, newspapers, or other archival or unpublished sources. Instead he relied primarily on his wide-ranging interdisciplinary imagination, spinning very well-written theories around a slender base of evidence drawn from published books.[16]

Hofstadter directed over 100 finished PhD dissertations, but gave his graduate students only cursory attention; the latitude enabled them to find their own models of history. Some adopted New Left perspectives that Hofstadter rejected, including Herbert Gutman, Eric Foner, Lawrence Levine, Linda Kerber, and Paula Fass, while others were much more conservative, such as Eric McKitrick and Stanley Elkins. Thus Hofstadter had few disciples and founded no school. He lectured to undergraduates by reading the text of his next book.[17]

Conservative commentator George Will called 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."[18] Hofstadter's famous 1964 essay, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, articulates this partly psychological characterization of thinking on the radical right.[19]

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)

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"[20]
  • 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
  • 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. ^ Brown (2003) p. 38, 53.
  3. ^ Brown (2006) pp. 22, 29
  4. ^ Foner 1992
  5. ^ Brown (2006) p. 30-37; Irwin G. Wylie, "Social Darwinism and the Businessmen", Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 103 (1959), pp. 629-35, showed that few businessmen believed in Social Darwinism. Robert C. Bannister. Social Darwinism: Science and Myth in Anglo-American Social Thought. (1989). Sumner had given up Social Darwinism by the early 1880s, a point Hofstadter de-emphasized by citing posthumous editions of Sumner's essays.
  6. ^ http://www.lewrockwell.com/long/long10.html
  7. ^ Foner, 1992
  8. ^ Brown(2006) p 75
  9. ^ Pole (2000)
  10. ^ quoted in Pole 2000 p. 73-74
  11. ^ He was probably influenced by his close friend sociologist C. Wright Mills; Brown (2006) p. 93.
  12. ^ Quoted in Brown (2006) p. 112
  13. ^ Quoted in Brown (2003) p. 531
  14. ^ quoted in Brown (2006) p. 180
  15. ^ Geary (2007) p. 430
  16. ^ Brown (2006) p. 38, 113
  17. ^ Brown (2006) pp. 66-71; Kazin (1999) p 343
  18. ^ Candidate on a High Horse, George Will, The Washington Post, April 15, 2008
  19. ^ The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Richard Hofstadter, Harper's Magazine, November 1964.
  20. ^ Geary (2007) p. 425
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