Hofstadter - Social Darwinism in American Thought

THIS EDITION IS FOR MY CHILDREN DAN AND SARAH

Two decades have now elapsed since the untimely death of Richard Hofstadter. Despite the sweeping transformation of historical scholarship during these years, his writings continue to exert a powerful influence on how scholars and general readers alike understand the American past. Since his death, the study of political ideasthe recurring theme of Hofstadters workhas to a considerable extent been eclipsed by the histories of family life, race relations, popular culture, and a host of other social concerns. The writings of many of his contemporaries are now all but forgotten, yet because of his penetrating intellect and sparkling literary style, Hofstadter still commands the attention of anyone who wishes to think seriously about the American past. The reissue of his first book, Social Darwinism in American Thought, provides an opportune moment to consider the circumstances of its composition and the reasons for its enduring influence.

Richard Hofstadter was born in 1916 in Buffalo, New York, the son of a Jewish father and a mother of German Lutheran descent. After graduating from high school in 1933, he entered the University of Buffalo, where he majored in philosophy and minored in history. As for so many others of his generation, his formative intellectual and political experience was the Great Depression. Buffalo, a major industrial center, was particularly hard hit by unemployment and social dislocation. The Depression, Hofstadter later recalled, started me thinking about the world.... It was as clear as day that something had to change.... You had to decide, in the first instance, whether you were a Marxist or an American liberal.

In 1936, on the eve of his graduation, Hofstadter and Felice were married and subsequently moved to New York. Felice first worked for the National Maritime Union and International Ladies Garment Workers Union and then took a job as a copy editor at Time, while Hofstadter enrolled in the graduate history program at Columbia University. Both became part of New Yorks broad radical political culture that centered on the Communist party in the era of the Popular Front. Hofstadter would later describe himself (with some exaggeration) as by temperament quite conservative and timid and acquiescent, and it seems that the dynamic Felice, a committed political activist, animated their engagement with radicalism. Nonetheless, politics for Hofstadter was much more than a passing fancy; he identified himself as a Marxist and, in apartment discussions and in his correspondence with Felices brother Harvey Swados, took part in the doctrinal debates between Communists, Trotskyists, Schachtmanites, and others that flourished in the world of New Yorks radical intelligentsia.

In 1938, Hofstadter joined the Communist partys unit at Columbia. The decision, taken with some reluctance (he had already startled some of his friends by concluding that the Moscow purge trials were phony) reflected a craving for decisive action after the hours I have spent jawing about the thing. As he explained to his brother-in-law: I join without enthusiasm but with a sense of obligation.... My fundamental reason for joining is that I dont 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.

Hofstadter, however, did not prove to be a very committed party member. He found meetings dull and chafed at what he considered the partys intellectual regimentation. By February 1939 he had quietly eased myself out. His break became irreversible in September, after the announcement of the Nazi-Soviet Pact.

Although Hofstadter abandoned active politics after 1939, his earliest work as a historian reflected his continuing intellectual engagement with radicalism. His Columbia masters thesis, written in 1938, dealt with the plight of southern sharecroppers, a contemporary problem that had become the focus of intense organizing efforts by Socialists and Communists. Hofstadter showed how the benefits of New Deal agricultural policies in the cotton states flowed to large landowners, while the sharecroppers conditions only worsened. The essay presented a devastating indictment of the Roosevelt administration for pandering to the Souths undemocratic elite. Its critical evaluation of Roosevelt, a common attitude among New York radicals, would persist in Hofstadters writings long after the political impulse that inspired the thesis had faded.

As with many others who came of age in the 1930s, Hofstadters general intellectual approach was framed by Marxism, but in application to the American past, the iconoclastic materialism of Charles A. Beard was his greatest inspiration. Beard was really the exciting influence on me, Hofstadter later remarked. (The homestead issue, Hofstadter argued, far outweighed the tariff as a source of sectional tension.) The article inaugurated a dialogue with the Beardian tradition that shaped much of Hofstadters subsequent career.

While Beard devoted little attention to political ideas, seeing them as mere masks for economic self-interest, Hofstadter soon became attracted to the study of American social thought. His interest was encouraged by Merle Curti, a Marxist Columbia professor with whom Hofstadter by 1939 had formed, according to Felice, a mutual admiration society. (None of them, one can assume, had, like Hofstadter, published in the AHR.)

Denied financial aid, Hofstadter was forced to seek a teaching job. In the spring of 1940, he obtained a part-time position in the evening session of Brooklyn College. His first fulltime job was at the downtown branch of City College, where a position opened in the spring of 1941 because of the forced departure of a professor accused of membership in the Communist party. The New York legislatures Rapp-Coudert Committee had been investigating subversive influences within the city colleges; eventually, some forty teachers were fired or forced to resign after being named by informants. Students initially boycotted Hofstadters lectures as a show of support for his purged predecessor, but eventually they returned to the classroom. Ironically, Hofstadters first fulltime job resulted from the flourishing of the kind of political paranoia that he would later lament in his historical writings.

Meanwhile, having passed his comprehensive examinations, Hofstadter set out in quest of a dissertation topic. In a letter to his brother-in-law that typified Hofstadters wry, self-deprecating sense of humor, he described the process. First, he considered writing a biography of the old rascal Ben Wade (the Radical Republican senator from Ohio) only to discover that Wade had destroyed most of his papers. Then he turned to Simon Cameron, Lincolns first secretary of war, but abandoned that subject when he heard that somebody from Indiana had been working on Cameron for 15 years. Columbia professor John A. Krout suggested a biography of Jeremiah Wadsworth, a colonial merchant who not only left abundant papers but had some admirers willing to help fund biographical research. Hofstadter, however, did not pursue the idea farhe and Felice considered Wadsworth inconsequential and kept referring to him as Jedediah Hockenpfuss. Finally, with Curtis approval, he settled on social Darwinism. By mid-1940, he was hard at work, and two years later, at the precocious age of twenty-six, he completed the dissertation.