Too bad neither you, nor apparently Wiener, have read H's commencement address in the Columbia Forum, nor have you considered the meaning of speaking at Grayson Kirk's little commencement after the bust, rather than the counter-commencement.
And it's notorious that he reconsidered The American Political Tradition --which you seem to think a positive step -- putting his Progresive phase behind him, like so many others during this period. You think this is progress?
Jesse Lemisch
----- Original Message ----- From: "Doug Henwood" <dhenwood at panix.com> To: <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org> Sent: Tuesday, October 10, 2006 6:22 PM Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Why Richard Hofstadter Is Still Worth Reading.Huh?
>
> 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.)
>
>
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