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 in 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). August 6 is the 218th day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar (219th in leap years), with 147 days remaining. ... Year 1916 (MCMXVI) was a leap year starting on Saturday (link will display the full calendar). ... October 24 is the 297th day of the year (298th in leap years) in the Gregorian Calendar, with 68 days remaining. ... 1970 (MCMLXX) was a common year starting on Thursday (the link is to a full 1970 calendar). ... A historian is someone who writes history, and history is a written accounting of the past. ... Columbia University is a private university whose main campus lies in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of the Borough of Manhattan in New York City. ... The Age of Reform by Richard Hofstadter is a history that traces events from the Populist Movement of the 1890s through the Progressive Era ending with the New Deal in the 1930s. ... The gold medal awarded for Public Service in Journalism The Pulitzer Prize is an American award regarded as the highest national honor in print journalism, literary achievements, and musical compositions. ... Non-fiction is an account or representation of a subject which is presented as fact. ... This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ... The Paranoid Style in American Politics is an essay by the American historian Richard J. Hofstadter, first published in Harpers magazine in November 1964. ...

Biography

Hofstadter was born in Buffalo, New York in 1916 to a Jewish father and a German American Lutheran mother, who died when he was ten. He attended high school in Buffalo's 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. At the university, Hofstadter became involved in left-wing politics, joining the Young Communist League and meeting a radical student named Felice Swados, whom he would marry in 1936. Nickname: City of Good Neighbors, Queen City, City of Light Location of Buffalo in New York State County Erie County Mayor Byron Brown Area    - City 136. ... German Americans are citizens of the United States of German ancestry. ... The Lutheran movement is a group of denominations of Protestant Christianity by the original definition. ... An early drawing of what would become Chiron the Centaur, the schools mascot. ... University at Buffalo, The State University of New York (also known as the State University of New York at Buffalo or SUNY-Buffalo and abbreviated as UB) is located in Buffalo and Amherst, New York. ... In politics, left-wing, political left, leftism, or simply the left, are terms which refer (with no particular precision) to the segment of the political spectrum typically associated with any of several strains of socialism, social democracy, or liberalism (especially in the American sense of the word), or with opposition... The Young Communist League was or is the name used by the youth wing of various Communist parties around the world such as the Young Communist League in Britain and the Young Communist League, USA. In the Soviet Union the youth organization under control of the Communist Party of the...

Marxist Stage

After graduation, Hofstadter entered the graduate program in History at Columbia University. In New York, 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 Nazi-Soviet 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."^[1] Columbia University is a private university whose main campus lies in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of the Borough of Manhattan in New York City. ... Marxism is the political practice and social theory based on the works of Karl Marx, a 19th century philosopher, economist, journalist, and revolutionary, along with Friedrich Engels. ... The Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) is a Marxist-Leninist political party in the United States. ... Molotov (left), Ribbentrop (in black) and Stalin The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, also known as the Hitler-Stalin pact or Nazi-Soviet pact, was a non-aggression treaty between Germany and Russia, or more precisely between the Soviet Union and the Third Reich. ...

Hofstadter was left with a deep sense of cynicism that pervaded his academic work and thought. In 1945, he received his Ph.D. from Columbia University after completing his dissertation, which had already been published in 1944 as Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860-1915 and sold 200,000 copies. It was a 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, arguing that very few businessmen were Social Darwinists and that many took positions in favor of philanthropy.^[2] Year 1945 (MCMXLV) was a common year starting on Monday (the link is to a full 1945 calendar). ... Doctor of Philosophy (Ph. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... William Graham Sumner (1840-1910) was the leading American advocate of a free-trade industrial society, which is what he believed the socialists meant by capitalism. ... Philanthropy is the act of donating money, goods, time, or effort to support a charitable cause, usually over an extended period of time and in regard to a defined objective. ...

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."^[3] Beard's conflict model taught that American history was the 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. Charles Austin Beard (November 27, 1874 _ September 1, 1948) was an American historian, author with James Harvey Robinson of The Development of Modern Europe (1907). ... Combatants United States of America (Union) Confederate States of America (Confederacy) Commanders Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee Strength 2,200,000 1,064,000 Casualties 110,000 killed in action, 360,000 total dead, 275,200 wounded 93,000 killed in action, 258,000 total...

The Consensus Historians

After 1945, Hofstadter broke with Beard and moved to the right, becoming associated with the "consensus historians". 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 many of his other books, it focused primarily on reading and synthesizing secondary sources. It was a major success, as Pole (2000) explains, because it was "skeptical, fresh, revisionary, occasionally ironical, without being harsh or merely destructive." The chapters 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." Year 1946 (MCMXLVI) was a common year starting on Tuesday. ... This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ... Secondary sources is a term used in historical scholarship to refer to works of history written as synthetic accounts, based on primary sources and usually the consultation of other secondary sources. ... In Parson Weems Fable (1939) Grant Wood takes a sly poke at a traditional hagiographical account of George Washington Historical revisionism is the reexamination of historical facts, with an eye towards updating histories with newly discovered, more accurate, or less biased information. ... This article is 150 kilobytes or more in size. ... John Caldwell Calhoun (March 18, 1782 – March 31, 1850) was a prominent United States Southern politician and political philosopher from South Carolina during the first half of the 19th century. ... Franklin Delano Roosevelt (January 30, 1882–April 12, 1945), often referred to as FDR, was the 32nd (1933–1945) President of the United States. ...

Hofstadter's work after 1945 represented the "consensus school" that flourished in the 1950s in reaction to Beard. 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.^[4]

Later work

Hofstadter broke new historiographical ground by exploring sociological structures (perhaps influenced by his friend C. Wright Mills) and by probing unconscious psychological motives, status anxieties, irrational hatreds, and finally paranoia as political motivators. Although he directed over 100 Ph.D. dissertations in American history, he did not found a school, and gave little advice to his graduate students. He rarely entered the archives himself and could not help his students in that regard. He was an aloof teacher who read sections of his next book to undergraduate classes, and was hard for graduate students to approach.^[5] Charles Wright Mills (August 28, 1916, Waco, Texas – March 20, 1962, Nyack, New York) was an American sociologist. ...

In The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, Hofstadter described American society as a whole as extremely provincial, harboring widespread fears of any ideas outside the mainstream. Hofstadter saw a direct lineage from the Salem witch trials in the 17th century down to the McCarthyism of his era. The title essay was first delivered as the Herbert Spencer Lecture at Oxford University in November 1963. The Paranoid Style in American Politics is an essay by the American historian Richard J. Hofstadter, first published in Harpers magazine in November 1964. ... 1876 illustration of the courtroom; the central figure is usually identified as Mary Walcott The Salem witch trials, which began in 1692 (also known as the Salem witch hunt and the Salem witchcraft episode), resulted in a number of convictions and executions for witchcraft in both Salem Village and Salem... Red Channels; A 1950 publication documenting Communist influence in radio and television McCarthyism is the term describing a period of intense anti-Communist suspicion in the United States that lasted roughly from the late 1940s to the late 1950s. ...

In other works, Hofstadter described American politics as essentially irrationally motivated. In The Idea of a Party System, Hofstadter described the origins of the first party system in America as being driven by an irrational fear that one of the two major parties hoped to destroy the republic. Hofstadter planned to write a major three-volume history of American politics, but had only partially completed the first volume (later published as America in 1750) when he died at the early age of 54 from leukemia. A party system is a concept in political science concerning the system of government in a state where political parties exist. ... HI CAMOIN thIS IS YOUR FRIEND CJ Leukemia (leukaemia in British English) is a cancer of the blood or bone marrow and is characterized by an abnormal proliferation of blood cells, usually white blood cells (leukocytes). ...

As Brown (2006) shows, he had become a 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."^[6] 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." American Violence was the last book Hofstadter published before he died in 1970. David Herbert Donald (b. ... Mike Wallace can refer to: Mike Wallace, the long-time television correspondent for CBS. Mike Wallace, the historian. ... Eric Foner (born February 7, 1943 in New York City) is an American historian. ...

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).
  • includes "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" Harper's Magazine (1964)
• 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 in 1750: A Social Portrait (1971)

This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ... The Age of Reform by Richard Hofstadter is a history that traces events from the Populist Movement of the 1890s through the Progressive Era ending with the New Deal in the 1930s. ... The Paranoid Style in American Politics is an essay by the American historian Richard J. Hofstadter, first published in Harpers magazine in November 1964. ... Mike Wallace can refer to: Mike Wallace, the long-time television correspondent for CBS. Mike Wallace, the historian. ...

References

• Alan Brinkley, "Richard Hofstadter's the Age of Reform: A Reconsideration," Reviews in American History Vol. 13, No. 3 (Sep., 1985), pp. 462-480 JSTOR
• David S. Brown, Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography (U. of Chicago Press, 2006) full-scale biography
• Dane S. Claussen, Anti-Intellectualism in American Media," New York: Peter Lang Publishing (2004).
• 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+.
• 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
• Jon Wiener, "America, Through A Glass Darkly." The Nation, Oct. 5, 2006.

Eric Foner (born February 7, 1943 in New York City) is an American historian. ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ...

Notes

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