Arthur Schlesinger Jr. - The Letters of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Schlesinger, Arthur M. (Arthur Meier), 19172007.
[Correspondence]
The Letters of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. / edited by Andrew Schlesinger and Stephen Schlesinger.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-8129-9309-7
eBook ISBN 978-0-679-64463-7
1. Schlesinger, Arthur M. (Arthur Meier), 19172007Correspondence. 2. HistoriansUnited StatesCorrespondence. 3. United StatesHistory1945 4. United StatesSocial life and customs19451970. 5. United StatesSocial life and customs1971 6. United StatesPolitics and government19451989. 7. United StatesPolitics and government1989 I. Schlesinger, Andrew. II. Schlesinger, Stephen C. III. Title.
E175.5.S38A4 2013 973.91092dc23 2012049922
[B]

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The historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., was an influential man. He wrote more than sixteen books concerning American history and politics, winning two Pulitzer Prizes and two National Book Awards. He was an adviser to President John F. Kennedy and a leader of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. His judgments and opinions were sought after by editors of The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and the leading magazines of the day. The publication of his Journals after his death in 2007 was a bestseller.

Schlesinger was an inveterate letter writer. He communicated by mail with hundreds of friends, acquaintances, critics, and fans. His associations ranged widely, from presidents of the United States to Supreme Court justices, powerful public officials, celebrated intellectuals, notable literary figures, Hollywood actors and directors, members of the news media, fellow scholars, and religious leaders.

For the most part, what brought him together with these individuals were his political beliefs. The abiding theme of his correspondence over a sixty-year period is his preoccupation with liberalism and its prospects. He was always in some way promoting and advancing the liberal agenda; it was his mission, purpose, and justification.

What did the liberal credo mean to Schlesinger? As he wrote in his much acclaimed book, The Vital Center, published in 1949: The job of liberalism [is] to devote itself to the maintenance of individual liberties and to the democratic control of economic lifeand to brook no compromise, at home or abroad, on either of these two central tenets. For him, liberalism was a fighting faith. In The Cycles of American History (1986) he noted that liberals do not see the unfettered marketplace as an infinitely sensitive, frictionless, impartial, self-equilibrating mechanism. Instead, he wrote, The liberal believes that the mitigation of [economic] problems will require a renewal of affirmative government to redress the markets distortion and compensate for its failuresbut affirmative government chastened and reformed, one must hope, by stringent review of the excesses and errors of [past] centuries.

On September 14, 1960, Senator John F. Kennedy, accepting the New York Liberal Partys presidential nomination, proclaimed his liberalism in words Schlesinger helped craft, saying: If, by a Liberal they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the peopletheir health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil libertiessomeone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a Liberal, then Im proud to say Im a Liberal.

This is what liberalism meant to Schlesinger. These letters from the inside of the movement provide a quasi history of American liberalism and its struggles through the crucial decades from 1945 to 2005, from Franklin D. Roosevelt to George W. Bush.

After Schlesingers death in 2007, the New York Public Library acquired his papers, which fill some 526 separate cardboard boxes. The boxes contain not only thousands of his letters, but also research materials, clippings, awards, data, transcripts, oral testimonies, scrapbooks, photographs, financial records, legal documents, and sundry other papers. From this rich hoard, one becomes aware of being in the presence of a communicator extraordinaire. We estimate the number of letters we reviewed in the archives approached 35,000. Schlesinger may indeed be one of the last of the old-fashioned breed of American figures for whom letters were the paramount means of communicationa phenomenon that seems oddly archaic in a digital age.

How did we choose the letters in this book? What sort of criteria did we use? As noted, we focused principally on Schlesingers intellectual and political development as one of the nations leading liberal voices. Given that his missives ranged from brief notes to lengthy essays and included sober reflections on policy issues, humorous notations, book blurbs, eulogies, business correspondence, family exchanges, regrets at the deaths of friends, and replies to admiring fans, we determined to select those that best articulated his essential beliefs and reflected the movement of the times.

The letters trace the evolution and adjustments of his thinking over the decades: his fight against isolationism before the U.S. entry into World War II, his campaign to preserve liberalism from a Communist threat in the 1940s and 1950s, his work to awaken his country to a liberal revival in the 1960s, his struggles against the Vietnam War and American imperialism in the 1970s, and his push for a progressive presidential administration in the 1980s and 1990s.

Schlesinger wielded his pen as a literary weaponfor criticism, for influence, for humor, for chiding, for self-advancement, for righting wrongs, and for waving the flag of progressivism. He told the powerful what he thought and what they should think. He did not discriminate between his famous friends and anonymous correspondents, treating them with the same respect and offering the same bracing candor. As he seemed incapable of writing a bad sentence, he dispatched letters that invariably exerted an impact. (Nor did he falter in his letter writing in old age, though his notes grew shorter and his signature frailer.) And he was always conscious that potential readers (and history) were watching him, for he often initialed by hand the recipients name and the date of the letter so the letters context would remain clear.