Richard Hofstadter

The Age of Reform, From Bryan to F.D.R.

Richard Hofstadter, 1955

Richard Hofstadter (1916-1970) was a leading “Consensus” historian of the mid-20th century. He studied and then taught at Columbia University, and won two Pulitzer Prizes including one for The Age of Reform. Hofstadter is known for his romantic view of Jefferson and his yeoman farmers. He is also remembered as an opponent of the idea that there was ever any class conflict in the American past. Hofstadter has been described by critics as writing this book during the McCarthy Era for “frightened elitist liberals” and using a “ a bastardized clinical frame to airbrush the ideological importance of mass movements out of American history” (Stoller, Goliath).

Introducing his subject in 1955, Hofstadter said, “Our conception of Populism and Progressivism has...been intimately bound up with the New Deal experience” (4).  While he admitted New Deal reforms would have been impossible “without the impetus given by certain social grievances,” Hofstadter preferred to separate out a more-or-less cultural spirit of  progressivism, which he said was “not nearly so much the movement of any social class,” as it was “a rather widespread and remarkably good-natured effort of the greater part of society to achieve some not very clearly specified self-reformation” (5). Why?  Because by distinguishing a generalized, apolitical spirit of improvement called progressivism, he was able to cut its ties with the Populist political movement that proceeded it. Because the Populist Party, in Hofstadter’s judgment, was at best anachronistic and backward-looking, and at worst a haven for racist, xenophobic kooks.

But this separation led to a paradox Hofstadter recognized as “One of the more ironic problems confronting reformers...that the very activities they pursued in attempting to defend or restore the individualistic values they admired brought them closer to the techniques of organization they feared” (7). Hofstadter wanted to separate the Populist and Progressive movements because he “found much that was retrograde and delusive, a little that was vicious, and a good deal that was comic” in populism, and he wanted to purge those elements from progressivism (11). Populism leads, he said, to “the cranky pseudo-conservatism of our time,” and he wanted progressivism to lead somewhere purer, nobler, and more useful in the present day (15).

The problem is, Hofstadter’s definitions and the bundles of ideas he called liberalism and conservatism were presentist (in 1955), and his concerns were very much those of his own day. “The United States,” he famously began Chapter One, “was born in the country and has moved to the city” (23). It was a mistake, then, to project contemporary, urban ideas back onto the radical farmers of the Gilded Age. The “continued coexistence of reformism and reaction” and the contradiction of “liberal totalitarianism” might look substantially different, if viewed from a 19th century, rural point of view (20). And on some level, Hofstadter was clearly aware of this. He reminded the reader that “in origin the agrarian myth was not a popular but a literary idea, a preoccupation of the upper classes” (25). Hofstadter concluded too readily, I think, that farmers took on the Jeffersonian Agrarian myth -- which he admitted was a political device, “the basis of a strategy of continental development” (29). That this led to a political rhetoric of “Producers” and later of “an innocent and victimized populace” does not prove that this was the way most rural people really thought of themselves and their world (35). I think Hofstadter lost sight of the “most characteristic thinking” of the “ordinary culture” he wanted to find (6).

There are lots of great details in the book, that I’d like to learn more about. I didn’t know that “In 1914, Canadian officials estimated that 925,000 Americans had moved...to the lands of Alberta and Saskatchewan” (53). Didn’t know that Ignatius Donnelly’s book Caesar’s Column was one of the most widely read books of the 1890s (67). These are both interesting facts and I think they both complicate Hofstadter’s claim that because of the agrarian myth, the “utopia of the Populists was in the past” and country people really wanted to “restore the conditions prevailing before the development of industrialism and the commercialization of agriculture” (62). I guess that interpretation hangs on which conditions they wanted to reverse.  When Hofstadter called attention to Populists’ use of Andrew Jackson's slogan “Equal Rights for All, Special Privileges for None,” I think he hit the nail on the head and simultaneously undermined his argument. Maybe the core of the issue is an even earlier misinterpretation by John Hicks, who Hofstadter said characterized populism as “the last phase of a long and...losing struggle...to save agricultural America from the devouring jaws of industrial America” (quoting The Populist Revolt, 237, 94). What if the populists weren’t objecting so much to the changes that were happening in modernizing America (as Postel suggested), but to who benefited from them and how power was being misused to achieve those results.