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Hofstadter's The Age of Reform and the Crucible of the Fifties

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 November 2010

Gillis Harp
Gillis Harp
Affiliation:
Grove city College
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Extract

In December 1954, the United States Senate voted 67-22 to censure the junior senator from Wisconsin. Joe McCarthy had been drawing increasing criticism for his bullying tactics in ferreting out alleged communists and communist sympathizers within the federal civil service and elsewhere. In the wake of the Army-McCarthy hearings of the preceding spring (and especially after the dramatic televised confrontation with Army counsel Joseph Welch), the tide of public opinion finally turned against McCarthy. Still, his demagogic campaign had ruined the careers of scores of American citizens, from civil servants to artists, and had raised disturbing questions about room for political dissent within a democracy during the height of the Cold War.

Type
Forum: Richard Hofstadter's The Age of Reform after Fifty Years
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 6 , Issue 2 , April 2007 , pp. 139 - 148
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2007

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References

1 Source: <http://xroads.virgink.edu/~UG97/inherit/1955home.html>. One might also mention Arthur Miller's parable The Crucible which debuted on Broadway only two years earlier in 1953.

2 Brinkley, Alan, “Richard Hofstadter's The Age of Reform: A Reconsideration,” Reviews in American History 13 (September 1985): 462CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Kazin, Michael, “Hofstadter Lives: Political Culture and Temperament in the Work of an American Historian,” Reviews in American History 27 (June 1999): 334CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Hofstadter quoted by Hicks, John D., “Politics in Pattern,” review of The Age of Reform by Hofstadter, Richard, in the Saturday Review, Oct. 12, 1955, p. 12Google Scholar.

5 Brogan, D. W., “Fifty Years of Dreams, Protests and Achievement,” review of The Age of the Reform by Hofstadter, Richard, in the New York Times, Oct. 16, 1955, p. 7Google Scholar.

6 Mowry, George E., review of The Age of Reform in Valley Historical Review 42 (March 1956): 769Google Scholar.

7 Roche, John P. recognized this movement early on; see his review of The Age of Reform by Hofstadter, Richard, in The American Political Science Review 50 (Sept. 1956): 863CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Hollinger, David A., “Ethnic Diversity, Cosmopolitanism, and the Emergence of the American Liberal Intelligentsia,” In the American Province: Studies in the History and Historiography of Ideas (Baltimore, 1985), 57–58Google Scholar.

9 Bell quoted byBrown, David, “Redefining American History: Ethnicity, Progressive Historiography and the Making of Richard Hofstadter,” The History Teacher 36 (2003): 528CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 See , Hollinger, “Ethnic Diversity,” 59 for definitionGoogle Scholar.

11 , Trilling quoted by , Hollinger, “Ethnic Diversity,” 67Google Scholar.

12 Fellman, David, “History in the Round,” review of The Age of Reform, in the New Republic, Oct. 24, 1955, p. 20Google Scholar.

13 Hofstadter, Richard, The Age of Reform: Bryan to F.D.R. (New York, 1955), 5.Google Scholar I concur with Christopher Lasch's assessment of Hofstadter's critique of provincialism, viz., that it unfortunately “left no alternative to nostalgia except a cosmopolitanism wholly contemptuous of American popular culture.” See Lasch, Christopher, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (New York, 1991), 115Google Scholar.

14 , Fellman, “History in the Round,” 20. (Voice has been changed in this quotation.)Google Scholar

15 , Roche, APSR, 863.Google Scholar Hofstadter had actually penned a scathing critique of Turner's fron-tier thesis six years earlier. See , Hofstadter, “Turner and the Frontier Myth,” American Scholar, October 1949, p. 435Google Scholar.

16 New Republic, Oct. 24, 1955, p. 20.

17 Brick, Howard, “Talcott Parson's ‘Shift Away from Economics’, 1937-1946,” Journal of American History 87 (2000): 510CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 My analysis here follows Brown's perceptive account of Hofstadter's thinking between 1950 and 1965. Brown, “Redefining,” 533-44. Some did express qualms about Hofstadter's use of new social science methods. George Mowry, for example, wrote: “There is always a nagging question of certitude in applying scholarly techniques designed for use in the present to a past where the possibility of check and verification is small indeed.” ( , Mowry, MVHR, 769)Google Scholar.

19 , Hofstadter, Age of Reform, 19Google Scholar.

20 , Hofstadter quoted by , Brown, “Redefining,” 540Google Scholar.

21 Merton, Robert K., Social Theory and Social Structure (Glencoe, IL, 1957), 60, 64–65.Google Scholar Italics in the original. Note, for instance, how Merton described historical attempts to reform urban political machines: ‘To seek social change, without due recognition of the manifest and latent functions performed by the social organisation undergoing change, is to indulge in social ritual rather than social engineering’ (81, italics in the original).

22 , Hofstadter, Age of Reform, 22Google Scholar.

23 , Hofstadter, Age of Reform, 6.Google Scholar Here, Hofstadter contrasts his approach with a study more focused on “high culture,” such as White, Morton, Social Thought in America: The Revolt Against Formalism (New York, 1949)Google Scholar.

24 , Hofstadter, “History and the Social Sciences” in The Varieties of History: From Voltaire to the Present, ed. Stern, Fritz (New York, 1956), 361.Google Scholar Also cited by , Brown, “Redefining,” 532Google Scholar.

25 Curti quoted by , Brown, “Redefining,” 537Google Scholar.

26 Kirkland, Edward C., review of Age of Reform by Hofstadter, Richard in The American Historical Review 61 (Apr. 1956): 667Google Scholar.

27 , Mowry, MVHR, 769Google Scholar.

28 Wood, Gordon S.: “Rhetoric and Reality in the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd set, 23 (Jan. 1966): 3–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 Note, for example, immensely popular works published in the last decade by Stephen Ambrose and David McCullough, among others.

30 Kazin, “Hofstadter Lives.”