progressivism, individualism, and the public ... - Telmarc Group

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The Telmarc Group PROGRESSIVISM, INDIVIDUALISM, AND THE PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL teachers, some of whom will be either Protestant or Catholic and some of whom will be articulately skeptical or agnostic in their views. He may think in advance that he will be able to overlook these controversies. I can assure him he will not. I also have great faith that a good and vigorous-minded Catholic student will be all the better for having his faith tested in these controversies. One develops strength by overcoming resistance spiritually as well as physically. But it is a very great burden, which I do not want to assume, to urge a student I do not know personally to take this chance." If this letter were written in 2010 and not 1960, and if it were about a Muslim applicant, not a Catholic, then there would be the New York Times, the ACLU, and the Courts all over this case. Instead the letter was written as Kennedy was running for President in the summer of 1960 at a University where the faculty was almost universally Democrat and Kennedy supporters. Yet Kennedy had gone to Harvard, but Columbia, with it hubris, thought it was more of a higher status than Harvard. Was there sound guidance from Barr in his correspondence? Did Columbia present a challenge for a student educated at a Catholic school? Perhaps. For if one reads Thomas Merton's autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, Merton recounts 147 : "There was a sort of legend in New York, fostered by the Hearst papers, that Columbia was a hotbed of Communists….The Communists had control of the college paper and were strong at some of the other publications and on the Student Board." Further if one reads William Barrett, The Truants, one comes away with an even more complex environment of extreme left wing students, most calling themselves Communists, and most opposing the establishment, no matter what it was 148 . Barrett talks about Columbia in the 1930s, especially the late 30s as a hotbed of Communism, with such characters as Delmore Schwartz and the other members of the Partisan Review, a Communist magazine for intellectuals. They used Columbia as their focal point. It provided for the sources of their ideas and for the pathways to disseminate them into the intellectual world. 6.1.2 Hofstadter and the Focal Point of Prejudice Hofstadter was born in Buffalo, NY and of religiously mixed parentage, Lutheran and Jewish. This apparently had an influence on his all his life. Upon completion of his PhD at Columbia in 1942 at the ages of 26 he went to University of Maryland. How he avoided the draft is unknown. Men like Rawls, graduate of Princeton, born in 1921, enlisted in the US Army and fought at the Battle of Leyte. Hofstadter seems to have gone 147 See Merton, T., Seven Storey Mountain, Harcourt (New York) 1976, pp. 141-142. 148 See Barrett, W., The Truants, Doubleday (New York) 1982, pp 209-21. Page 138
The Telmarc Group PROGRESSIVISM, INDIVIDUALISM, AND THE PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL through WW II oblivious of what was happening. His biographer David Brown seems silent on this issue. It is as if the war was never happening and the only low point was the poor housing available in the Washington, DC area at the time. I believe that this speaks volumes about the character of Hofstadter. In this section I want to address the anti- Catholic attitude of Hofstadter and reinforce the observation already made regarding Dewey that this was not a personal quirk of these men but a pandemic attitude at Columbia. Let me begin with the words of Jon Wiener in the Nation, in reviewing the biography by Brown of Hofstadter writes 149 : "Hofstadter was born in Buffalo in 1916 and came of age in the era of the Popular Front. He went to college at the University of Buffalo and became president of his university's chapter of the National Student League, a Communist-led antiwar organization that, according to a government report quoted by Brown, "attempted physical disruption of campus activities which led to arrest, suspensions and expulsions of its members… In his early twenties, he went to Mississippi with his passionate left-wing wife, Felice Swados, and visited black sharecroppers at Delta Cooperative, the subject of a famous series of photographs by Dorothea Lange for the Farm Security Administration. His 1938 master's thesis at Columbia was a fierce indictment of the New Deal's Agricultural Adjustment Act for supporting Southern planters rather than poor farmers…The Spanish Civil War was raging during his graduate school days, and in October 1938 he responded, as many of his peers did, by joining the Communist Party-in his case, the CP unit at Columbia. "My fundamental reason for joining," he wrote his brother-in-law, "is that I don't like capitalism and want to get rid of it.... I join without enthusiasm but with a sense of obligation." … Four months later, in February 1939, he quit the party. His reason, according to fellow student Kenneth Stampp… "He couldn't stand the people." But even after that, in October 1939, he wrote his brother-in-law …: "I hate capitalism and everything that goes with it." In 1941 he got his first full-time job, directly as a result of anti-Communism: He replaced a faculty member forced out by City College because of alleged Communist Party ties: Jack Foner, father of Eric." As such, Hofstadter was well to the left and Columbia provided him with a comfortable home, being the center of American Communism. Hofstadter was also a self proclaimed intellectual. To him and the clique he was associated with, the intellectuals were a chosen group who circled around academe, and Columbia was considered a major focal point at the time, and they saw what truth was and from them truth would be disseminated. Their intellectual work was considered by them and their followers to be without peer. 149 This article can be found on the web at http://www.thenation.com/doc/20061023/wiener The Nation; America, Through a Glass Darkly, by Jon Wiener. Page 139
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