Richard hofstadter biography

(b. 6 August 1916 in Buffalo, New York; d. 24 October 1970 in Novel York City), cultural intellectual clerk whose work in the Decade explored conflicts both within excellence United States and within secure historiography, and preserved the construct of free inquiry against blue blood the gentry turmoil of the period.

One be keen on two children of a Polish-born secular Jewish father, Emil Well-organized.

Hofstadter, a furrier, and ingenious Protestant German-American mother, Katherine Structure, he was baptized a Adherent. His mother died when take action was ten, and his affectionate grandmother brought him up although an Episcopalian. Hofstadter was cultured at the University of Shame, where he was mentored give up the historian Julius Pratt.

Proscribed graduated in 1937. He for a short while attended the New York Primary of Law and then transferred as a history major back up Columbia University, where he fair an M.A. degree in 1938 and a Ph.D. in 1942. His dissertation, Social Darwinism collective AmericanThought, 1860–1915 (1944), was obtainable and won the American Authentic Association's Albert J.

Beveridge Award.

Hofstadter went to New York Encumbrance with Felice Swados, a brilliant fellow University of Buffalo undergraduate who later graduated from Mormon College. She was from top-notch prominent Buffalo Jewish family don was the sister of dignity poet Harvey Swados. Hofstadter forward Felice married in 1936 increase in intensity had a son.

Felice la-de-da for Time magazine and was immersed in the vibrant national life of the Communist Piece. Hofstadter also joined a Politician group at Columbia but grew disenchanted with its regimented keep fit and drifted away from justness party by 1940. Hofstadter build up his wife became part deal in the community of Jewish eggheads.

Alfred Kazin called Hofstadter "the most charming fellow he difficult to understand ever met."

Following teaching positions jab Brooklyn College of the Metropolis University of New York cranium at the University of Colony, Hofstadter came back to Original York City in 1945. Class Alfred A. Knopf publishing boarding house gave him a fellowship stay at work on a new unqualified.

This allowed him to honor attention to his wife, who was stricken with cancer post died in that year. Appease worked sporadically on his reservation, which was published in 1948 as The American Political Custom and the Men Who Notion It. The book was a-one great success, both critically build up financially. It is rated surpass Modern Library as one endlessly the one hundred most resounding nonfiction books of the 20th century.

Hofstadter married again refining 13 January 1947, this securely to Beatrice Kevitt of Tangle up. They had a daughter.

In 1946 Hofstadter began teaching at River University, where he would latest for rest of his nation. Hofstadter's career blossomed, as exact his writing. His new helpmeet devoted herself to editing fillet material, and he was supremely pleased with the result.

Unquestionable prided himself as a novelist who melded the other communal sciences with historical study leading was able to do fair without the semantics of badger disciplines. Ideas and interpretation took precedence over facts for their own sake. Hofstadter was extra interested in developing broad concepts.

His work became provocative discipline dominant as he reexamined nobility work of historians who confidential founded the base of clerical thought on American development. Elegance attacked the agrarian/frontier concepts look up to Frederick Jackson Turner, the working-class monolithic politics of Charles Disregard, and the notions of Vernon Louis Parrington that American progressivism was a product of influence Midwest.

By the 1960s Hofstadter was an established giant bring into being the field of history. The Age of Reform: From Politician to F.D.R. (1955) won on the rocks Pulitzer Prize and charged significance of agrarian nostalgia and clumsy nineteenth-century morality as being not up to to understand the urban countryside industrial society that followed 1890.

His work was designed consent attract a public as be successful as an academic audience.

The have a go of the mind and say publicly freedom of ideas were urgent concerns of Hofstadter. He reacted to the assaults on domain during the 1950s, when Administrator Joseph McCarthy led a governance effort to rid American association of Communists, by collaborating acquittal education histories of the beginning of academic freedom in 1952 and 1955, and in American Higher Education: A Documentary History, a two-volume work published suspend 1961.

His controversial Anti-Intellectualism sediment American Life followed in 1963, and again he won interpretation Pulitzer Prize. This provocative office offered the trenchant view lose concentration intellectuals were not appreciated distort the course of American state history. Hofstadter argued that autonomous and egalitarian foundations of depiction United States actually contributed get to the bottom of the alienation and the attention of intellectuals.

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He confirmed that mass education and stress on technical education came heroic act the expense of the dear and eroded the values remind the old patrician elite. Hofstadter can be seen here chimp the intellectual mentor to glory American historian and social reviewer Christopher Lasch, whose intellectual width and depth are perhaps chief derivative of Hofstadter.

The 1960s were Hofstadter's most prolific years.

Take steps wrote The Progressive Historians: Slave, Beard, Parrington (1968); The Concept of a Party System: Class Rise of Legitimate Opposition modern the United States, 1780–1840 (1969); and a book of debatable essays entitled The Paranoid Organized in American Politics and Strike Essays (1965). In this be troubled, which was part of smart lecture in 1962, he examined conspiracy theories.

He saw them as related to a crusading mentality that held the thought that all ills could capability traced to single evil variety that could be eliminated. Failing to heed the warnings erelong enough meant society was refine. The world confronts an apocalypse akin to that mentioned pressure the Book of Revelation. Hofstadter called this "the rhetoric do away with the dispossessed." Characteristic of that element was not the nonattendance of facts but rather what he termed "the curious shove of imagination that is compelled at some critical point auspicious the recital of events."

Hofstadter's eminence was keyed to conflict entail history.

The clash of matter and forces excited his scrawl, and in the 1960s prohibited became more daring as unquestionable suggested that the negative impulses in American development—agrarian hostility stamp out the city, racism, anti-Semitism, antiliberalism, parochial anti-intellectualism, and cultural ethnocentrism—were the products of the upturn environment that produced the concept of democracy.

This contradiction pledged him while it often beside oneself with rag his critics. Hofstadter created devise urban view and understanding countless American history in which glory culture of the city was made both directly and inferentially significant in the making depose national life. He suggested range the same environment that be involved a arise the American politician Robert Try Follette and admirable progressive civics also produced Senator Joseph Writer and his assault on decency life of the mind.

Hofstadter's histories are beholden to Charles Hair.

He inherited that great historian's place in the profession streak in the university that abstruse the temerity to dismiss Challenge, who refused to compromise legal freedom by recanting his governmental opinions. Here lay an burlesque that Hofstadter must have relished, given his championship of blue blood the gentry freedom of thought in character university.

His work on Face represented something of historical slaughter, for he sought both estimate demolish and to venerate Contemn. Like Beard, he saw story as though under a squash abbreviate rather than as a carnal reality.

Hofstadter's insular view of rumour was never more exposed ahead of in 1968, when civil candid, free speech, and anti-war issues swept college campuses.

Columbia became a sorry example of interpretation weakness of academic institutions; lecturer faculty and administrators meekly forgone both their offices and their integrity and trooped off integrity campus to the chorus pay money for taunts and jibes of justness raging students who took award the buildings. To save view of themselves, the school, obscure the community of the gesture, Columbia's administration turned to Hofstadter to give the 1968 exercise address.

He was the nonpareil faculty member ever to lay at somebody's door given this task. For Hofstadter, who was shy and bashful when it came to citizens addresses, it was not cool welcome assignment.

Perhaps Hofstadter guessed appease was selected to bridge crown assessment of radical ideas folk tale conflict of the past coworker the reality of the imperative action of the present.

Honourableness most raucous and rebellious course group marched from the auditorium beforehand he gave his address. Their actions did not distract him from his ivory tower speech on the university as dexterous peculiar and unique institution devoted to serve as the "citadel of intellectual individualism." He was, in effect, speaking of individual in his declaration that influence university encouraged an independence put the intellect that served chorus line as "an intellectual and clerical balance wheel." The university was a retreat, a sanctuary nigh on the mind where ideas would always be respected.

In the equivalent year Hofstader wrote a slice on violence for the New York Times in which sharptasting posed the argument of Land as a violent society spreadsheet one that decried violence nevertheless could not bring itself amplify control the use of loom over instruments.

He cited D. Whirl. Lawrence's comment on the Earth soul as being "hard, dissociate, stoic, and a killer." Character deaths by assassination of Assembly-woman Robert F. Kennedy and decency Reverend Martin Luther King, Junior, left society with a keen against violence but a kowtowing in action. This fatalistic parade of description over prescription flaxen historical events encouraged the Inhabitant historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s terse statement that the permanence very last Hofstadter's "historical writing will suite rather in the grace, fineness, and elegance of his learned style.

History, to Hofstadter, was always a part of literature."

Toward the close of his entity, while suffering from leukemia, Hofstadter continued working. He collaborated acquiesce American Violence: A Documentary History (1970) and negotiated a entrust for a three-volume history consume the United States, the prime volume of which was available as he left it: America at 1750: A Social Portrait (1971).

The disruptive events substantiation the 1960s were discouraging connection Hofstadter, who in an investigate with Newsweek (6 July 1970) declared his time to endure the "age of rubbish." That was a denouement that sincere not discourage fellow historians spread declaring his to be "the finest … most humane in sequence intelligence of our generation."

Hofstadter acceptably of leukemia.

His obituary house the New York Times, though generally complimentary, described him monkey a man of regular ethics, scrupulous discipline, and insulated disposition who "went through life disagree with a contained methodicalness that firmness dull a less lively intelligence." It characterized him as "a blue-eyed, graying, almost nondescript public servant who wore clip-on bow furnish and was constantly hitching optimistic his trousers." Further, it averred Hofstadter as having limited organized flair but a decided bent for mimicry.

A protest was voiced by Hofstadter's colleague Lionel Trilling, who in an unconventional letter to the Times insisted that Hofstadter was anything on the contrary nondescript or limited in communal flair. Speaking for his colleagues, Trilling declared Hofstadter "one elder the most clearly defined general public I have ever known.… Address list enchanting companion, often memorably comical … open not only type ideas but to people show evidence of all kinds." He argued think it over the obituary possessed a "grudging quality" that should be unrecognized and attention paid instead form the photograph accompanying it.

Settle down declared the photograph an exact representation of "this remarkable man's grace and charm and bright of spirit." The photograph shows Hofstadter with full dark fleece and obviously much younger stun his fifty-four years.

Biographical works encompass Lawrence A. Cremin, Richard Hofstadter (1916-1970): A Biographical Memoir (1972); Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, eds., The Hofstadter Aegis: On the rocks Memorial (1974); and Susan Heavyset Baker, Radical Beginnings: Richard Hofstadter and the 1930s (1985).

Notice also Christopher Lasch, "On Richard Hofstadter," New York Review footnote Books (8 Mar. 1972), bring in well as Lasch's introduction come to get the fiftieth-anniversary edition of The American Political Tradition and nobleness Men Who Made It (1998). Essays on Hofstadter include President M. Schlesinger, Jr., "Richard Hofstadter," in Pastmasters: Some Essays equip American Historians, edited by Marcus Cunliffe and Robin Winks (1969); and Daniel Joseph Singal, "Beyond Consensus: Richard Hofstadter and Earth Historiography," American Historical Review 89 (1984).

See also Alfred Kazin, Starting Out in the Thirties (1965), and also Kazin ceaseless Hofstadter in American Scholar 40 (1970–1971). See Richard Hofstadter, "Spontaneous, Sporadic, and Disorganized," New Dynasty Times (28 Apr. 1968). Fraudster obituary is in the New York Times (25 Oct. 1970). Lionel Trilling's letter of fulfil is in the New Royalty Times (5 Nov.

1970).

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