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

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The Telmarc Group 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. Page 144
The Telmarc Group PROGRESSIVISM, INDIVIDUALISM, AND THE PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL In Hofstadter's writing, The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt, in the book edited by Daniel Bell, The Radical Right in 1955, and updated in 1963, Hofstadter writes 154 : "Paradoxically the intense concerns of present day politics are shared by two types of persons who arrive at them, in a sense, from opposite directions. The first are found among types of old-family Anglo Saxon Protestants and the second are found among many types of the immigrant families, most notably the Germans and the Irish, who are frequently Catholic." He then goes on to describe the Irish Catholics as just slightly above Neanderthals and acting like sheep in their movement to what he has termed Pseudo-Conservatives. What is amazing is that Kennedy had been in office for two years at this point and one would assume that Hofstadter were aligned with the Kennedy wing, if one reads what Brown writes in his biography. Yet the continually telling diatribes against Catholics are never ending. In Brown's biography of Hofstadter (p. 122) he further reinforces the anti-Catholic and moreover anti-Irish Catholic views held by Hofstadter as well as Daniel Bell 155 . In fact Brown states: "Much of Bell's scholarship during this period focused on the cultural origins of McCarthyism. Like Hofstadter, with whom he worked closely on The New American Right project. Bell observed in the defensive posture of isolationists, anti-communist Irish and German Catholics, and other recent immigrants an eagerness to support a messianic approach to foreign policy as a show of loyalty." Bell graduated from CCNY in 1939 and avoided all military service during World War II. He spent the time as a reporter for The New Leader magazine which was a front for the Socialist Party of America. The magazine was a hotbed of socialists and left leaning followers like Arthur Schlesinger. Bell completed his PhD at Columbia in 1960 and then went on to Harvard. But it appears that Bell was just another of the many faculty including Hofstadter who looked at Irish Catholics as the enemy, as ignorant and superstitious religious zealots who had nothing to contribute to the Academy. The irony was, and still is, that there is no true in-bred Irish in New York, New York is the ultimate melting pot, intermarriage between nationalities, religions, races, and whatever. Bell became putatively a sociologist at Harvard and made a name for him with the publication of several books. 6.1.3 Social Darwinism, Individualism and Progressivism 154 See Hofstadter, Pseudo-Conservatives, in Bell, The Radical Right, Doubleday (New York) 1963. p. 69. 155 See Brown, D., Richard Hofstadter, Univ Chicago Press (Chicago), 2006. Page 145
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