Historian’s Progress

America at 1750: A Social Portrait.
by Richard Hofstadter.
Knopf. 293 pp. $6.95.

In May 1969 Richard Hofstadter sent his publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, the prospectus for a three-volume comprehensive history of the United States, extending from 1750 to the present. He estimated that this ambitious undertaking would run to 1,500,000 words and might occupy him for the next eighteen years. Eighteen months later he died of leukemia at the age of fifty-four. He had completed only eight chapters of what would have formed the introductory section of the first volume of his trilogy. Now published as America at 1750: A Social Portrait, these essays offer both a brilliant interpretation of Colonial society on the eve of the Revolution and a fascinating glimpse into the mind of one of the most gifted and influential of American historians.

Like Hofstadter’s previous books, America at 1750 is analytical rather than narrative history. Willing in theory to concede that “the narrative is . . . the shank of history,” Hofstadter was never much interested in story-telling. In private a superb raconteur and mimic, he avoided in his writings the colorful anecdote, the vivid description. His mind was that of the essayist, rather than that of the novelist, and all his books, beginning with Social Darwinism in American Thought (1945), are collections of discrete chapters dealing with the same theme rather than connected narratives. In America at 1750, following an introductory discussion of population and immigration, three chapters examine white and black servitude in the colonies, three others treat religion in the New World, and one comprehensive chapter analyzes “The Middle-Class World.”

Hofstadter’s books are, however, not just collections of essays; in each he advanced a major new thesis about American history. Perhaps his most influential and widely read work was The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (1948), which stressed the shared convictions, the “unity of cultural and political tradition, upon which American civilization has stood.” The Age of Reform (1955), which won the Pulitzer prize in history, suggested that both Populism and Progressivism could best be understood as products of psychological, rather than economic, discontent on the part of farmers and Middle Americans. Hofstadter’s second Pulitzer prize-winning book, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963), traced as a dominant theme in American thought “resentment and suspicion of the life of the mind and of those who are considered to represent it.”

Similarly, America at 1750 is a book with a thesis. Hofstadter argues that by the middle of the 18th century “England and America had become quite different societies, the first still the sphere of a worldly aristocracy and a worldly establishment, the second a center of ascetic Protestantism and middle-class morality.” To explain American distinctiveness, he showed how migration brought to these shores “a skewed sample of the European populations,” plus an enormous number of Africans; he argued that, though wealth and poverty existed in America, middle-class values dominated in Colonial society; and he described how the religious revivals of the Great Awakening made the colonists aware of “their common religious culture and common concerns,” which were increasingly distinguishable from those of Europe.

This interpretation, sure to be debated by experts on early American history, is of interest here chiefly because of what it shows about Hofstadter’s habits of mind. It is not a thesis which could be proved or disproved by the research Hofstadter did. Any claim of American distinctiveness can only be supported by a systematic comparison of American and European society, which Hofstadter did not attempt. But Hofstadter was never much interested in proving his theses. The biographical sketches in The American Political Tradition, for example, were not written so as to argue for “the common climate of American opinion,” which Hofstadter in his introduction announced as his main theme. Actually, as he told me, that much-quoted introduction was drafted almost as an afterthought, at the request of the publisher, so as to give unity to his series of brilliant but loosely related biographical vignettes.

In short, Hofstadter was more concerned with illustrating than with demonstrating his arguments. He announced that he would be satisfied if his work were taken “as a prelude and a spur to further studies,” rather than as “a final judgment.” In consequence he never had much concern for historical methodology—the procedures by which a scholar attempts to test and verify his findings—and he was altogether untouched by the growing vogue among historians of quantitative methods. To be sure, he was broadly tolerant of what he called “positivistic history-writing”—though, as he wrote me, he was rather more willing to trust such experiments when produced by historians who had previously demonstrated mastery of the traditional forms of research and writing.

At the same time, Hofstadter himself was anything but a traditional historian, narrowly limited to his own discipline. Few other American scholars have ranged so broadly through the literature of the social sciences, and he had special competence in sociology and social psychology as well as in history. “I have found,” he wrote, “that my interest and gratification in my own discipline have been enormously intensified by what I have been able to take for it from other disciplines.” Yet, proud of his own craft, he deliberately spoke of the historian as “having contacts with the social sciences rather than as being a social scientist.” He doubted that historians had much to gain by adopting the elaborate and often technical methods of sociology and economics, but he thought they had much to learn from such cognate disciplines because they often explored new topics, “problems which the historian has usually ignored.”

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Hofstadter’s pivotal position in American historical scholarship derives from the fact that he himself examined just such new problems. Originally interested in American political history and in the history of ideas, he discovered that the area of his deepest concern “lay between the two fields, at the intersection of their perimeters,” and that he wanted to “write about . . . things marginal to both political historians and to practitioners of the history of ideas.” He did not want to undertake “a study of our high culture, but of the kinds of thinking that impinged most directly upon the ordinary politically conscious citizen.” Consequently his investigations led him into subjects professional historians had hitherto considered unworthy of serious study. It would be hard to think of a major scholar before Hofstadter who deigned to examine the mind of “Coin” Harvey or the literary-scientific fantasies of Ignatius Donnelly.

If Hofstadter was motivated in part by a kind of collector’s relish for American zanies and bigots, he also had a very serious purpose in exploring these darker crevasses of the American mind. Most of his books sought to recreate the past in order to reappraise the present. Like all great historians, he was a serious, and sometimes a devastating, social critic. In The American Political Tradition he presented a mordant portrait of our leading politicians, no one of whom lived up to Hofstadter’s exacting criteria for statesmanship except Wendell Phillips—the only one who never held office. The Age of Reform subjected the Populist-Progressive tradition, in which Hofstadter himself had been reared and in which his political sentiments were formed, to equally severe criticism. Even the titles of Anti-Intellectualism in American Life and The Paranoid Style in American Politics show Hofstadter’s intent to expose the shoddy and the pretentious aspects of our culture.

Because Hofstadter often stressed the values shared by most Americans, some younger scholars, many of whom were in diapers when he began to write, have seriously misunderstood his work, and they have identified him with the so-called consensus school of historians, whose other key figures are Louis Hartz and Daniel J. Boorstin. The linkage was one which Hofstadter himself rejected, and he took pains to distinguish his own unique position and to point out the limits of consensus historiography. When he outlined the common ground upon which Federalists and Jeffersonians, Whigs and Jacksonians, Republicans and Democrats stood, it was not in order to rejoice that America had been spared meaningful political conflict, much less to exalt mindlessness as an admirable and distinctively American outlook; his purpose was to show that our “fiercely individualistic and capitalistic” shared beliefs were outmoded in an age that demanded “international responsibility, cohesion, centralization, and planning.”

During the late 1960’s Hofstadter grew increasingly uncertain about the historian’s role as a social critic. There was less and less need for him to expose the weaknesses of our system when the United States government was daily demonstrating its incompetence at home and its irresponsibility abroad. Moreover, as a liberal who criticized the liberal tradition from within, he was appalled by the growing radical, and even revolutionary, sentiment that he sensed among his colleagues and his students. He could never share their simplistic, moralistic approach to social problems of enormous complexity, any more than he could be attracted by their “coarser rallying cries of politics.” In one of his best but most neglected books, The Progressive Historians (1968), he exhibited how a want of scholarly detachment undermined the historical work of Frederick Jackson Turner, Charles A. Beard, and Vernon L. Parrington. When the radical student movement shook the foundations of his beloved Columbia University, he had still further reason to reconsider the social responsibilities of the historian.

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I suspect that Hofstadter began his projected trilogy in order to work out his new, though not yet completely articulated, view of the historian’s social role. He was developing a profoundly humanistic, deeply tragic, conception of history. One function of history “as practiced by mature minds,” he suggested, is to require us to recognize “the structural complexity of our society in the past” and also “the moral complexity of social action”; the other is constantly to remind us “of defeat and failure,” of “the sadness that is natural to life.” These two ideas are the dominant themes in America at 1750, and they make it at once the most subtle and the most pessimistic of Hofstadter’s books. For him the American experience was not a success story but an experiment of doubtful value and of questionable outcome. Carefully sketching the complacent world of the middle-class colonists, he clearly sympathized with the enormous portion of the population that never attained that comfortable status. Reminding us that over half the white inhabitants came to the New World as indentured servants, redemptioners, and convicts, he described the perils of the ocean voyage as these social rejects of Europe “lay in their narrow bedsteads listening to the wash of the rank bilge water below them, sometimes racked with fever or lying in their own vomit.” Then, bleakly, he interrupted his narrative: “Few could have expected very much from American life, and those who did were too often disappointed.” Yet Hofstadter recognized that the experience of these white settlers was almost idyllic when compared to that of the blacks, who tasted the full “anguish of the early American experience.”

From such origins he planned to trace the emergence of the United States as “the first post-feudal nation, the first nation in the world to be formed and to grow from its earliest days under the influence of Protestantism, nationalism, and modern capitalistic enterprise.” When George Bancroft used much the same language to describe his own monumental history, he thought he was enumerating the solid virtues which had caused the United States to flourish; Hofstadter was pointing as well to the serious weaknesses that flawed the Republic from the start. He might have taken as the theme for his work T. S. Eliot’s line: “In my beginning is my end.”

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