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

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PROGRESSIVISM, INDIVIDUALISM, AND THE PUBLIC
INTELLECTUAL
In Hofstadter’s case this meant exploring in a systematic way “the sociological
penumbra of political life” — the murky substratum of desires and impulses that
underlay the surface pageantry of American politics. He was much impressed by “The
Authoritarian Personality” (1950), a survey of contemporary American political attitudes
compiled by a team of researchers under the direction of the German émigré Theodore
Adorno. Hofstadter adapted Adorno’s “social-psychological categories” in his essay
“The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt,” an attempt to uncover the hidden sources of
McCarthyism. "
Tanenhaus continues:
"In the boom years of the 1920’s, for instance, millions of small-town and rural “native
stock” Americans, alarmed by the ascendancy of the country’s pluralistic urban culture,
had embraced the organized bigotry of the Ku Klux Klan and flocked to the punitive
crusades of anti-evolutionism and Prohibition. The pattern was being repeated in the
1950’s, also a boom period, only now it was a curious alliance of upwardly mobile white
ethnics (many of them Catholics) and downwardly sinking displaced WASPs, who looked
to secure their status as authentic Americans by converging upon “liberals, critics and
nonconformists of various sorts, as well as Communists and suspected Communists.….
And if, as Hofstadter maintained, political issues now reflected a wider cultural debate
over “the capacity of various groups and occupations to command personal deference in
society,” then the largely Jewish inhabitants of what Brown calls the “Claremont Avenue
ghetto” were, for all their seeming detachment, as deeply embroiled in the struggle as
Midwestern rubes or urban Catholics."
The characterization of Midwestern rubes and urban Catholics and their antithesis which
he calls the Claremont Avenue Jews 153 are somehow in a massive cultural struggle, with
these bone headed rubes and Papists pitted against the small enclave of intellectuals who
have singular knowledge of the truth.
The small group of left wing intellectuals, according to Hofstadter, has taken the place of
blacks, evolutionists and anti-prohibitionists, and the rubes and Papists are unjustly and in
total ignorance attacking them as a result of their deckling social status! The irony is that
the Irish Catholics and Italian Catholics in New York at that time were still Police and
Garbage Collectors and had just returned from the War. Neither Hofstadter nor Bell had
done the country the honor of such service and kept their comforts on the hill at
Morningside Heights while the Irish Catholics, Italian Catholics and Protestant rubes
from the mid West lost their lives defending their rights to call them dolts! Yet their
attitude was and, in many ways, remains pervasive at Columbia.
153 Claremont Avenue is a small street that runs parallel to Riverside Drive on the West Side of Manhattan just west of
Columbia University. It is a residential area for many Columbia faculty. In the 1950s and 1960s it was a mix of
academic and middle class Jews. Many of the building were eventually taken over by Columbia.
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