On Wed, 23 Feb 2005, Doug Henwood wrote:
> A lot of American populism's historical hostility to Wall Street was
> powered by a resentment of city slickers - rootless cosmopolitans, if you
> will - which is why anti-Semitism has been its frequent travelling
> companion.
This is very apropos our recent thread on how historical fraud is treated differently depending on how congenial it is the powers that be. Because anti-semitism actually wasn't a travelling companion of American populism. AFAICT, the belief that it was is entirely based on a historical fraud perpetrated by Richard Hofstadter and disseminated by the host of 50s writers who wrote on "mass society" and "the end of ideology." He was refuted at the time by virtually every historian who actually knew something about Southern and Western history, starting with C. Vann Woodward. And he not only admitted that he had distorted the record, he was downright proud of it. He said that if a new view was worth anything it was a worth a "strong overstatement," and he mocked historians who wrote "as if engaged in a death grapple with the truth."
But somehow he was never drummed out of the profession. Tenditious history in the service of cold war liberalism was no crime.
Michael