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From The New International, Vol. XXII No. 1, Spring 1956, pp. 58–62.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R.
by Richard Hofstadter
Alfred A. Knopf. New York, 1955.
Richard Hofstadter’s reputation was made by his volume The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It, which first appeared in 1948. This volume, perhaps the most brilliant study in American history to appear in recent years, consists of a series of essays on leading symbols of American eras from the Founding Fathers to Franklin Roosevelt. In this book Hofstadter clearly acknowledges his debt to Charles A. Beard. The disciple, however, surpasses the master in his ability to discern subtle shades of difference in an analysis which locates the dynamic of American history in conflicts of economic classes and material interests. Hofstadter aims his arrows at the American inability to discern that there is more to political conflict than is summed up in an image which has the Good Liberals pitted against the Bad Conservatives throughout history. He ends his essay on Franklin D. Roosevelt on a note indicating that he was more than an academic realist, that he understood the political implications of his evaluation. Hofstadter wrote:
Roosevelt is bound to be the dominant figure in the mythology of any resurgent American liberalism. There are ample texts in his writings for men of good will to feed upon; but it would be fatal to rest content with his belief in personal benevolence, personal arrangements, the sufficiency of good intentions and mouth-to-mouth improvizations, without trying to achieve a more inclusive and systematic conception of what is happening in the world.
With the excellence of this earlier work in mind we have looked forward to Hofstadter’s recent volume, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R., only to be disappointed in the author’s revision of his earlier views, including his present critical estimate of Beard. Our disappointment, it must be emphasized, is relative to Hofstadter’s past achievements, and does not deny that there is positive value to his book.
When compared with such bits of confused liberalese as Louis Hartz’s recent The Liberal Tradition in America (which Hofstadter significantly praised in a review for The New York Times), or much else that has come out in recent years, Hofstadter’s work is a masterpiece of clarity, accuracy and theoretical insight.
Hofstadter sums up what has long been apparent to many: Populism was not a “peasant movement” if by this we conjure up images of the German Peasant Wars, the Jacquerie, or the Russian Populists. Essentially the Populist movement was an attempt of agrarian speculators and their town allies to restore profits in the face of an unfavorable world market situation and a bursting in the 1890s of an over-expanded speculative bubble. Agricultural expansion in the United States came at precisely the same moment as the wide advance of industrial capitalism – that is, at the very time when in England and on the Continent there had been contraction in the agricultural sector of the economy. The expansion of agriculture based upon the small yeoman farmer in an era of increasing monopoly capitalism was an incongruity which produced a social movement wrapped up in a rhetoric reminiscent of a Jeffersonian and Jacksonian idealization of the yeoman farmer. With the relative decline of the population engaged in agriculture after 1900, and the creation in certain sections of a landless rural proletariat the same middle-sized and large farmers, and the merchants of the rural towns who had been the backbone of the midwestern Populist movement, became members of the conservative Farm Bureau Federation. This bureau sought and eventually received in the form of parity payments the subsidy of privilege much in the same fashion as other subsidized sectors of American capitalism. While the rhetoric of Populism was often radical, with attacks on Wall Street and the bankers, at the same time it was not anti-capitalist, seeking rather a share in capitalist privilege.
THE PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENT WAS Populism’s successor in time, if not in program or class composition, of the movement to reform capitalism. Hofstadter’s analysis of the class background of Progressivism links it to the “status revolt” of the middle class, the lawyers, doctors, professors and ministers, a class in revolt against a new capitalistic society which did not afford them the accustomed marks of status. These old middle-classes, cut off suddenly from the source of power in society, attempted to insure “reasonable” and gradual social change. In particular they placed their greatest emphasis on controlling the bigness of the corporations – and to do this they had to advocate increasing the power of the state over the economy.
Hofstadter quite perceptively observes that if the power of the state had to be built up, two things would have to follow. In the first place, the state would have to be conceived of as a neutral state “which would realize as fully as possible the preference of the middle-class public for moderation, impartiality, and ‘law’.” It would be a state which would not be anti-business, not even anti-big business, but rather “neutral” toward the “special interests of society.” As Hofstadter intimates, it would be a state which guaranteed that equality which Anatole France discussed, the equality in which all men are free to sleep under bridges. It would regulate monopoly, and expand credit in the interests of farmers and small businessmen.
In the second place, it would have to cope with what was then universally referred to as the “social question.” If political leadership could be firmly restored to the responsible middle classes who were neither ultra-reactionary, nor in Teddy Roosevelt’s phrase, “wild radicals,” they would establish certain minimal standards of social decency, and thus fend off radical social change. Progressive leaders like Roosevelt were often furious at the plutocrats because their luxury, their arrogance, and the open, naked exercise of their power constituted a continual threat where social resentments would find expression in radical or even “socialistic programs.”
Populism was wiped out when the results of the industrial revolution caught up with the agrarian sector of society. Progressivism, according to Hofstadter, was finished by its identification with participation in World War I, an identification which in the great revulsion against the war in the nineteen-twenties, worked against it.
When dealing with the New Deal, Hofstadter makes two major points missed by liberal students of the New Deal. The latter present the Roosevelt administration as the heir of American reform movements from Jackson to Wilson. Hofstadter, on the other hand, recognizes that the New Deal was unlike other reform periods because instead of coming roughly coincident with a period of prosperity and related to it, it came as a result of the most severe crisis American capitalism has known, and its dynamic was related to that crisis. In response to the crisis, the state had to enter into the operations of the economy in wholesale fashion, taking over many functions from individual capitalists.
In the second place, Hofstadter points to the fact that the 1930s marked the mass unionization of the American working-class and witnessed the rise of the CIO with a new wave of militancy characterizing the class struggle in the United States. As a result, the American working class emerged as a powerful force, and made demands which had to be met.
“The demands of a large and powerful labor movement, coupled with the interests of the unemployed, gave the later New Deal a social- democratic tinge that had never before been present in American reform movements. Hitherto concerned very largely with reforms of an essentially entrepreneurial sort and only marginally with social legislation, American political reformism was fated henceforth to take responsibility on a large scale for social security, unemployment insurance, wages and hours, and housing.”
Despite these aspects of his analysis, Hofstadter’s mood has changed since he wrote the American Political Tradition. There is a tired tone to The Age of Reform, and Hofstadter admits to being influenced by the “new conservatism.” Liberals – and he clearly indicates that he is talking about himself – Hofstadter explains today, find themselves far more conscious of those things that they would like to preserve rather than they are of those things that they would like to change. The immense enthusiasm that was aroused among American intellectuals by such a circumspect and sober gentleman as Adlai Stevenson in 1952 is the most outstanding evidence of this conservatism. Stevenson himself remarked during the course of his campaign that the liberals have become the true conservatives of our time. This is true not because they have some sweeping ideological commitment to conservatism (indeed, their sentiments and loyalties still lie mainly in another direction) but because they feel that we can better serve ourselves in the calculable future by holding to what we have gained and learned, while trying to find some way out of the dreadful impasse of our polarized world, than by dismantling the social achievements of the past twenty years, abandoning all that is best in American traditions, and indulging in the costly pretense of repudiating what we should not and in fact cannot repudiate.
Hofstadter apparently is being overtaken by the mood of the great majority of American intellectuals who, despite their protestations that they are happy in suburbia, nonetheless, are “alone and afraid in a world we never made." Those “independent critical intellectuals” who do not tome forward with programs of their own eventually submit, by almost imperceptible steps and in an uneven fashion, to the mood of the moment, succumbing to the present rather than struggling with it.
This drive of intellectuals to conform today intrudes on much of Hofstadter’s analysis of the past. Granted that Populism was a movement of agrarian businessmen and speculators who eventually became the conservatives of the Farm Bureau Federation, this does not mean that Populism did not have its genuinely radical side, did not attempt to create an alliance with the working class against monopoly capitalism. Yet, Hofstadter, although not as crude as other recent critics of Populism who transform it into a quasi-fascist Know Nothing- ism, tends to throw out the radical baby with the speculative bath. Like many other intellectuals he has discovered to his chagrin that the programs of the intellectuals and the reality of the masses are in a certain contradiction one with the other, that reality is not as “pure” as the images the intellectuals conjure up about it. Hofstadter, again in the preface, indicates that he was one of those liberal intellectuals, with rather well-rationalized systems of political beliefs, who tended “to expect that the masses of people, whose actions at certain moments in history coincide with some of these beliefs, will share their other convictions as a matter of logic and principle,” and thus falsely sentimentalized “the folk.” Reacting against this, Hofstadter is going to be the “ultra-hard,” who not only will not sentimentalize “the folk” and their political movements, but will almost completely disavow any kinship with them.
And then there is the conceit of the term “status-revolt,” a term which Hofstadter has taken over from the New Sophisticates, the Sociologists, who are daily finding new terms for old concepts. America according to these savants has not had “a class struggle,” but rather a “status struggle.” Besides for the alliterative delights of “status struggle” there is nothing in their usage of the term that is superior to the term “class struggle” in the way Marxists – and not Stalinist hacks and the liberals who go to them for their image of Marxism – have always used the term. While allowing them the delights of coining a new phrase and of thinking they have discovered a new theory, it may not be merely captious to point out that Engels and Marx themselves realized that matters of social prestige were often involved in the particular forms that the class struggle takes in particular situations. Thus, Engels wrote in the preface to the English edition of Socialism: Scientific and Utopian, that in:
“England, the bourgeoisie never held undivided sway. Even the victory of 1832 left the landed aristocracy in almost exclusive possession of all the leading government offices ... The fact was, the English middle class of that time were, as a rule, quite uneducated upstarts, and could not help leaving to the aristocracy those superior government places where other qualifications were required than mere insular narrowness and insular conceit, seasoned to business sharpness.”
The current attitude of the Sophisticated Sociologist is to concede that Marx was a perceptive guy, but nevertheless inadequate. Therefore, they substitute new terms for Marxian ones – and usually do nothing more. And these are the people with whom Hofstadter obviously travels – and can one blame a man for adopting the language of his fellow-travelers? After all, when in Rome ...
And thus the more friendly tone toward the New Deal; not that one can fully accept the New Deal nor fully commit oneself to its defense. For it too shares in the sins of the flesh, as do all politics. But, still, in a sorry world it was better than nothing.
All this may be a warning to those who believe that in order to “get with reality” they have to retreat to the happy isolation of the academy. Perhaps this is possible for the scholar who concerns himself exclusively with basic research, with going through tons of primary material, in an attempt at historic reconstruction. Thus someone like C. Van Woodward can function as an academician, cut off from politics, without degenerating. But the grand-synthesizer, such as Hofstadter, who seems unwilling to do basic research is in danger of becoming the straw that can be blown by the current ideological breeze.
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