Richard Hofstadter was my role model when I started graduate school, and not only because (as David Brown writes in his engaging and thoughtful biography) Hofstadter"wrote the best books for the best publisher, won the best prizes, and taught at the best city, at the best school, at the best time"(xiii)—though all that certainly appealed to me. Nor was it only because Hofstadter wrote well, or because he wrote with a sense of humor. Nor was it even because Hofstadter was the first, and maybe the only, major American historian to build a career out of noticing that American democracy was not always liberty-loving.

All those things mattered to me, and still do, but they paled beside the really embarrassingly dumb reason I was happy to have Hofstadter for a role model. See, I went to school during one of the great waves of identity politics, when an awful lot of otherwise bright people were too willing to say that to write history you really needed to be in touch with your ethnic (or racial, or gender) identity. And Richard Hofstadter was the only historian I knew of who had the same ethnicity as me—half Eastern European Jew, half German Lutheran. I took some comfort in the idea (I did say that this was embarrassingly dumb) that Hofstadter wrote from an inside-outside position similar to mine, feeling himself neither fish nor fowl.

Now David Brown says maybe this wasn't such an embarrassingly dumb idea after all: that Hofstadter's non-ethnicity might have had something to do with the way he wrote about American politics and history, the way he could be both critically detached and passionately involved at the same time. Hofstadter met with few real obstacles to his career, moving from graduate school at Columbia to the University of Maryland and back, as faculty, to Columbia. Yet he worked in an era when historian John Hicks could write,"would you take pains to see Hofstadter of Columbia and give him the careful once-over? I am not yet quite sure that he is the man we want. His point of view strikes me as rather typical of the New York Jewish intelligentsia, although I do not even know that he is a Jew." (53) At the same time, as not-quite-Jewish, he felt uncomfortably outside his first wife's family. (13) Not really from anywhere, nor really unwelcome anywhere, Hofstadter loved America for its inclusiveness yet wondered at its continuing clannishness, which erupted in strange, and increasingly alarming, political ways.

Hofstadter's most solid contribution to American intellectual life remains The American Political Tradition, published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1948. In it Hofstadter uses sketches of American leaders to show how strange and durable is the Jeffersonian tradition holding that a nation of free and equal citizens might display a rugged independence and individualism and thus run a virtuous republic in defiance of the great financial and commercial interests. It was, Hofstadter thought, triple-distilled nonsense from the outset. The American people didn't want virtuous independence from a corrupt system, they wanted a piece of the action.

As Brown puts it,"The electorate did not fear the expansion of the market.... [They] wanted advantages previously reserved for commercial elites." (58) Only the New Deal had, according to Hofstadter, even slightly undermined these expectations. When FDR announced,"Equality of opportunity as we have known it no longer exists," (62) it sounded a good deal as though Americans might change their thinking. Yet, as it turned out, a politics born of the Depression was only a partial and temporary victory over the old tradition.

Hofstadter's American Political Tradition antagonized devoted leftist scholars who saw genuine radicalism in the American populist tradition; it annoyed presidential scholars who thought Hofstadter had handled their idols a bit roughly; it infuriated professional insiders who wrung their hands over Hofstadter's refusal to take them seriously enough ("superficial", they wrote; also,"supercilious"(63)). It delighted pretty much everybody else, and it still does.

Everybody else, that is, except the sort of person who simply doesn't read serious nonfiction, the sort of person who regards professors—even those who compose readable sentences—with suspicion. Such people increasingly worried Hofstadter through the next decade, as he took up his pen to write on the least American of themes, the hazards of mass democracy.

What Hofstadter began to say should, perhaps, not sound so radical: as Brown puts it,"Popular rule ... offered no guarantee of freedom...." (88) It is hardly a blinding insight. People can, and often do, support movements to take away their liberties. Yet mentioning the flaws of majority opinion—be it enlisted on behalf of astrology, the flat earth, or the inerrancy of the President—offends the American sensibility far more than any random blurt of bodily gases.

Hofstadter gave his suspicion of mass politics its most sophisticated treatment in his 1955 Age of Reform, in which he pointed out that the evidently radical and democratic movements of the Populist and Progressive era arose from some pretty ignoble impulses—fear of immigrants, foreigners, and other kinds of different people, mostly. Hofstadter overstated the argument, there's no question—although he did acknowledge that there were real economic causes for these revolts, he acknowledged it as fleetingly as he possibly could. There was far too much emphasis on the anti-Semitic character of American Populism, which (as two of his students wrote) resulted more from"provincialism & naivete" than from ideological conviction. (107)

But Hofstadter annoyed some of the right people for some of the right reasons. As the livid John Hicks, defender of Populism and of the University against Jews, said with pride,"I ... was a white Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, small-town, middle-class, midwestern American...." Well, exactly: there's nothing wrong with that; my mother's people were that, and so were Hofstadter's mother's people, and I'm proud and so was Hofstadter. But likewise, being that doesn't grant you the right to inveigh, as Hicks did, against the"the New York Jewish intelligentsia." (102) In fact, your being a petit-bourgeois WASP means you maybe have a special burden not to talk trash about"the New York Jewish intelligentsia." At the least, it would be less tacky if you managed not to. And in fairness to Hicks, in public he did not: in print he described Hofstadter's as"a delightfully refreshing book." (111) Although, perhaps there's no need to be so fair. I have, in this modern era, heard a fine Western WASP professor mutter in what he thought was unmixed company that he might have enjoyed a seminar presentation more if the presenter had been less Jewish about making the argument. Private bigotry matters, too. Certain doors stay closed, even while others stand open.

Hofstadter won the Pulitzer Prize in history for Age of Reform. One of the judges who so honored him was the Yale historian and white Southerner C. Vann Woodward, who also offered one of the most penetrating critiques of Hofstadter, noting that in his effort to find the roots of McCarthyism,"the risk is incurred ... of swapping an old stereotype for a new one." (114)

Hofstadter should have spent more time on the enduring contribution of the people he unblushingly called"hayseeds" to what became the New Deal coalition and agenda. Whatever the prejudices agrarian farmers invoked, they proposed serious legislation, born of serious ideas about political economy. But then, Hofstadter's critics spent little time acknowledging that the urbanites they so mistrusted had provided electoral and intellectual support to their beloved agrarians. It remained for future generations of historians to describe the uneasy interaction of these reformist constituencies, each as essentially American as the other.

One notices a similarly frustrating either-orism in the private correspondence between Hofstadter and Woodward, as outlined by Brown. Woodward wrote,"In the McCarthy movement I believe a close study would reveal a considerable element of college-bred, established-wealth, old family industrial support." Hofstadter rejoined, Brown writes, that"the typical McCarthyite was underprivileged and undereducated, lived in a small town, and subscribed to an evangelical brand of Christian worship." (115) Gentlemen, please: it's entirely possible that you're both right—that the scions of coal, steel, and oil families can get, at least electorally, together with the underprivileged and happily hate New Deal high-brows like both of you.

Hofstadter won the Pulitzer again, this time for general nonfiction, for his 1963 Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, which plumbed the same antipathetic depths he had been sounding for years. But now the critical reaction was harsher. What, exactly, was anti-intellectualism? Did it play a larger, a more bigoted role in American politics than in, say, the Dreyfus affair, or German romanticism, or any of various totalitarian purges? Finally, was the book much more than an entertaining, inspired, and exceptionally well-informed rant—a pleasure to read, to be sure—against small-minded people of all kinds in various corners of American history? In retrospect, Hofstadter himself answered"no": as Brown writes, Hofstadter"described the book ... as an exercise in self-exposure that failed to turn out as he intended. Anti-Intellectualism, he concluded, had written him more than he had written it." (140)

By this point, though, Hofstadter had succeeded sufficiently in the one realm any anti-intellectual would respect—the marketplace—that he could either ignore these gripes, or treat them as his own private concerns. Scholars sniped at him, as they still do, for being"somewhat out of contact with ... those who for the past ten years or so have been doing the grubby, tedious work of digging up data and turning out monographs." (144) But Hofstadter had gone, as perhaps only one or two academic historians ever really have, beyond the reach of such darts.

Hofstadter became a public figure and a phrasemaking machine aimed at the new right, whom he called"pseudo-conservatives" (i.e., they want to tear down existing institutions, not conserve them). His best such effort,"paranoid style", has been recycled repeatedly. (Though it it not very useful: when a majority of a country entertain a set of thoughts, haven't they gone beyond psychological disorders into the realm of ideology, or culture?) And he became a quipper:"We certainly cannot commit them [modern conservatives] all to mental hospitals ... but we can recognize their agitation as a kind of vocational therapy, without which they might have to be committed." (152) Maybe it was easy to make such cracks in 1964, as Goldwater rode to humiliation: but it seems not too terribly harsh, nor entirely un-Hofstadterian, to note in hindsight that while chuckling at such jokes, the Democratic party laughed itself into the enduring minority status it enjoys today.

And yet, and yet: we should not do to Hofstadter what he is accused of doing to others; indeed, it would be worse for us to do it to Hofstadter than it was for him to do it to"the Populists" or"the pseudo-conservatives". It is bad enough to condemn an abstract social category like that, but it is decidedly evil to condemn a man in like manner. Hofstadter had his flaws, but we too rarely remember that there are actually worse sins than being wrong, and these sins were not his. He did not lie about what he knew. He did not write history to make people comfortable. Above all, he was not boring. As Brown helpfully notes, Hofstadter was not merely popular, unlike some historians who wrote easily digestible prose full of pre-digested ideas. He wrote so that people would read, and find themselves provoked.

The late 1960s found Hofstadter out of his element, as he tried to steer a middle course between the Johnson administration, whose war he opposed, and the student protesters, whose violence looked to him like the worst excesses of American anti-intellectuals. Then he died suddenly and young, of leukemia, in 1970. He never saw the rise of the New Right nor the transformation of the paranoid style into the one-percent doctrine. We are poorer for lacking his insights into how the past might bear on our new present.

This article first appeared at Altercation.