On Oct 10, 2006, at 3:10 PM, Jesse Lemisch wrote:
> Hofstadter sided with Grayson Kirk at the 1968 Columbia
> commencement, where
> he spoke, after the bloody bust, while all honorable people were at
> the
> counter-commencement. His commencement speech was published in the
> Columbia
> Forum. Like many other liberal historians, including the
> unspeakable Vann
> Woodward, Hofstadter had a bad reaction to the 60s.
This is from the Jon Weiner essay that set this off:
<http://hnn.us/articles/30629.html>
> In other ways, however, Hofstadter's response to the student
> uprising at Columbia in 1968 set him apart from the liberal critics
> who regarded the student movement as dangerously anti-intellectual.
> While his friends in Morningside Heights carried on about the
> students and saw themselves manning the barricades against the new
> barbarians, Hofstadter opened the door and invited his students in
> to talk with him about their goals and strategies. Eric Foner, one
> of those students, recalled that "his graduate students, many of
> whom were actively involved in the civil rights and antiwar
> movements, were having as much influence on his evolving interests
> and outlook as he was on theirs." Indeed, the year after Columbia
> '68, Hofstadter was rethinking his earlier work. He privately
> conceded that his critics had been right about The Age of Reform;
> in a letter he declared that the book's status thesis was (in
> Brown's paraphrase) "flawed and unusable" and that "nativism and
> anti-Semitism permeated American society in the 1890s." In another
> letter written the same year, he declared that his effort in Anti-
> Intellectualism in American Life to explain the present had (in
> Brown's paraphrase) "clearly missed the mark." Here was another
> surprising and unusual quality: a willingness to reassess his work
> and find its flaws.
>
> The most remarkable of his relationships with students after the
> '68 events was with his research assistant, Michael Wallace (who
> went on to win the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Gotham, a history of New
> York City). In the spring of 1968, in the midst of the
> demonstrations, Wallace, a PhD candidate, had unlocked the door to
> Fayerweather Hall, the history building, so that his fellow student
> radicals could occupy it. A few months later, Hofstadter invited
> him to collaborate on a documentary history on American violence.
>
> Thus the intellectual fruit of the trauma of '68 for Hofstadter was
> not a history of student radicals as Hitler Youth but rather a
> partnership with one of those radical students that produced a
> powerful exposé of American racial and class violence. In Foner's
> words, Hofstadter and Wallace's American Violence: A Documentary
> History "utterly contradicted the consensus vision of a nation
> placidly evolving without serious disagreements." This intellectual
> turn is the most surprising of all in the Hofstadter story.
> American Violence was the last book Hofstadter published before he
> died in 1970. He was only 54. (An unfinished work, America at 1750,
> was published posthumously in 1971.)