His creed is a fixture.
—Walter Bagehot on Macaulay

It was said of Macaulay’s History of England that its author never tired of drawing comparisons between the backwardness of earlier times and the progressiveness of his own. Whig orthodoxy—Whig complacency, too—became the measure of all political virtue, became, indeed, the measure of virtue itself. As a consequence—and not withstanding its high achievement in other respects—his History was said to have done much to advance the tide of moral complacency that was one of the least attractive features of the Victorian age.

Something similar might be said of the otherwise very different histories which Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., has devoted to the life and times of Andrew Jackson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the Kennedy brothers. Like Macaulay’s History, Mr. Schlesinger’s histories have enjoyed a huge readership and won their author many plaudits among professional historians and in the larger world of literary and public affairs. And there is another important respect in which these histories resemble Macaulay’s. They have likewise been conceived to advance a political interest—in Mr. Schlesinger’s case, the interest of a liberal orthodoxy that is wholly identified with the fortunes of the Democratic Party. What Bagehot called the “party-spirit” shapes their every utterance and makes of their every narrative a fable of moral combat in which the forces of enlightenment (the Democratic Party) and the forces of benightedness (the Republican Party) struggle for ascendency. What Bagehot said of Macaulay’s History may therefore be applied with some justice to Mr. Schlesinger’s histories as well:

When he inclines to a side, he inclines to it too much. His opinions are a shade too strong; his predilections some degrees at least too warm. . . . The Whigs are a trifle like angels; the Tories like, let us say, “our inferiors.” Yet this is evidently an honest party-spirit. It does not lurk in the corners of sentences, it is not insinuated without being alleged; it does not, like the unfairness of Hume, secrete itself so subtly in the turns of words, that when you look to prove it, it is gone. On the contrary, it rushes into broad day. . . . As far as effect goes, this is an error. The very earnestness of the affection leads to a reaction . . . we cannot believe so many pages.

In the many pages which Mr. Schlesinger has now devoted to the first volume of his memoirs, [1] Republicans are indeed routinely depicted as “our inferiors”—Teddy Roosevelt is just about the only exception—while Democrats who remained loyal to Franklin Roosevelt, though not invariably treated as angels, are nonetheless seen to be superior in intellect, wisdom, character, manners, and social vision—even at times in their sense of humor—to any other political species that attained public visibility in the author’s lifetime. This, too, “leads to a reaction,” for the reader of A Life in the Twentieth Century who is not himself an abject believer in the beneficence of the Democratic Party is unlikely to be persuaded that so many candidates for sainthood could really have been confined to a single political party in this country during the first fifty years of the last century.

In the past, Mr. Schlesinger has often shown himself to be a master of both narrative history and political polemic. Yet the first of these gifts seems to have deserted him in the writing of this voluminous memoir, which devotes over five-hundred pages to its author’s first thirty-three years; and his command of polemic degenerates here to exalting his academic mentors, praising his political comrades, and settling old scores with his ideological adversaries. At times this relentless liberal preening verges on the intolerable, and it is not only in regard to politics, moreover, that the author’s impulse to complacency and his sense of moral superiority reign supreme.

For A Life in the Twentieth Century is also, from start to finish, the autobiography of a Harvard man, and Mr. Schlesinger never tires of reminding us of the central role which Harvard—and the access it affords to privilege and preferment—has played in his personal and professional life. As a consequence, there are more than a few moments in this memoir when those hapless souls who made the mistake of not gaining access to those privileges are similarly treated as “our inferiors.” There is thus an element of insouciant period snobbery in this book of which its author seems, if not unaware, then curiously indifferent. Opinion will differ—differ, I suppose, along the usual party lines—as to how this display of unembarrassed snobbery comports with the author’s doctrinaire advocacy of liberal virtue. For this reader, certainly, Mr. Schlesinger’s unabashed Harvard chauvinism lends a distinct element of social comedy to A Life in the Twentieth Century that its author is unlikely to have intended.

Mr. Schlesinger came by both his politics and his intellectual vocation—and, for that matter, his Harvard connection—as a family legacy. Although born in Ohio, in 1917, where his father was teaching American history and political science at the State University, the younger Arthur Schlesinger grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Arthur Schlesinger père had joined the Harvard history faculty in 1923. And just as his father had long been a vocal supporter of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, the future author of The Age of Roosevelt boasts of having been an “ardent New Dealer” since his undergraduate years at Harvard.

“It is, I suppose, evidence of lack of imagination or of some other infirmity of character,” he writes at the close of this long book,

but I am somewhat embarrassed to confess that I have not radically altered my general outlook in more than half a century since The Vital Center’s publication [in 1949]. Perhaps I should apologize for not being able to claim disillusions, revelations, conversions. But in fact I have not been born again, and there it is.

This is all undoubtedly true as far as Mr. Schlesinger’s devotion to the New Deal and the Democratic Party is concerned. “I remain to this day a New Dealer, unreconstructed and unrepentant,” he writes in A Life in the Twentieth Century, and there is no reason to doubt it. Yet in one important respect, Mr. Schlesinger has indeed undergone a conversion of sorts. This is on the subject of anti-Communism. For the writer who sounded the alarm about Communism in Life magazine in 1946 and in The Vital Center in 1949, warning liberals in no uncertain terms against the consequences of succumbing to the totalitarian temptations of the radical Left, has in recent years lent his considerable prestige to the anti-anti-Communist campaign that grew out of the political uproars of the 1960s. In The Vital Center, Mr. Schlesinger could say of the widespread support of Communism in American liberal circles at the dawn of the Cold War that “This was in a real sense a trahison des clercs,” and as late as 1960, in The Politics of Upheaval—volume one of The Age of Roosevelt—the chapter on Communist influence was called “Growth of a Conspiracy.” At the end of that chapter Mr. Schlesinger wrote of the Roosevelt administration’s refusal to take the Communist conspiracy seriously that “The American government knew no more spectacular failure than this in the decade of the thirties.”

Even then, to be sure, he softened his criticism of this failure by also characterizing the Communist conspiracy in this country as “an underground creature, pallid but vicious, negligible and even comic in many of its aspects, yet still a great potential challenge to American democracy.” Yet, in A Life in the Twentieth Century, Mr. Schlesinger’s categorical judgment on the Communist conspiracy is repeatedly summed up in the phrase: “no harm done.” Which, as an account of the Communist issue in this country, is fairly breathtaking even from an unrepentant New Dealer. Needless to say, there are now no references to a trahison des clercs or to the Roosevelt administration’s “spectacular failure” in dealing with the Communist “underground” or to “a great potential challenge to American democracy.” After 1968, such utterances ran the risk of sounding like Richard Nixon and, after 1980, even more like Ronald Reagan. The altered political and cultural climate required a change of course for a Democratic Party loyalist even before the collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union. To be seen to be a doctrinaire anti-Communist was no longer permissible for the liberal elite, and Mr. Schlesinger adjusted his position accordingly.

As an earnest of that adjustment, Mr. Schlesinger took to stigmatizing Sidney Hook, his former ally in the liberal anti-Communist crusade of The Vital Center period, as the wrong kind of anti-Communist. Hook was then an easy target, of course. He had already run into trouble on this score among his old comrades on Partisan Review, which had itself accommodated itself to the politics and culture of 1960s radicalism. He had been effectively banished from the pages of The New York Times Book Review and The New York Times Magazine, where he had been considered something of a star in The Vital Center period. It was Hook, for example, who wrote a long laudatory review of Whittaker Chambers’s Witness for the front page of The New York Times Book Review in 1950. So, for that matter, did Mr. Schlesinger, in The Saturday Review. But in the new, post-Sixties climate, Hook couldn’t even get his books reviewed in the Times. His anti-Communism had rendered him unpublishable in the liberal press.

It was left for Mr. Schlesinger to put the knife in when Hook published his own memoir, Out Of Step, in 1987. Reviewing this book, in The New Republic, he grandly announced that “there are indeed more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in the anti-Communist philosophy,” and happily set about the task of eviscerating what remained of Hook’s reputation as a liberal anti-Communist. It was an ugly, self-serving assault on the integrity of a man who had honorably served his country and its culture in difficult times, and for some of us it will always remain a stain on whatever honor Mr. Schlesinger may claim for himself.

Even more dismaying is the eagerness with which Mr. Schlesinger now returns to the attack in the closing pages of A Life in the Twentieth Century. Once again, it is alleged that Sidney Hook’s “great error” was “in letting anticommunism take over his life.” Hook, it is again charged, “considerably exaggerates the power of American Communists.” Hook’s observation that Communist influence in the Thirties was “so strong it amounted to domination of key areas of American cultural life, in literature, art, and movies,” is categorically rejected without ever being addressed. So are Hook’s criticisms of certain literary figures—Norman Mailer and Mary McCarthy among them. Hook’s perfectly accurate statement that Mailer “would forgive murder” is dismissed as the work of “a bitter man,” which, among much else, suggests that Mr. Schlesinger does not have a very close acquaintance with “The White Negro” and certain of Mailer’s other writings having to do with the “existential” glory to be found in committing murder. Nor does Mr. Schlesinger condescend to acknowledge Mary McCarthy’s enthusiastic praise of the Communist regime in North Vietnam, for she, too, had escaped the onus of being tagged a liberal anti-Communist in the post-Sixties era.

The fact is, Hook was not exaggerating the Communist influence on key areas of American cultural life in the Thirties. If anything, he may have underestimated the scale and lasting effects of that influence. It was, after all, the Cominterm’s Popular Front, proclaimed as official Communist policy in 1935, that determined not only the political content of “progressive” culture in this country from the mid-1930s right through the war and postwar years of the 1940s, but also its cultural level as well. As Robert Warshow wrote in his essay on “The Legacy of the 30s” in 1947, when Mr. Schlesinger was himself a good deal more reliable on these matters than he is now, “What happened was more than the defection of one part of the intelligentsia. The whole level of thought and discussion, the level of culture itself, had been lowered.” Writers who resisted the blight of the Popular Front mentality—William Faulkner, for example, and Wallace Stevens—were precisely the writers most abominated by the Communists and their liberal fellow travelers. Even such distinguished critics as Malcolm Cowley and Alfred Kazin could not bring themselves to acknowledge Faulkner’s greatness until after the Second World War when it became politically safer to do so. If you doubt this, go back and see how Faulkner fared in the pages of The New Republic during Cowley’s literary editorship there in the 1930s or have a look at Kazin’s treatment of Faulkner in On Native Grounds (1942). That they afterwards lavished all sorts of praise on Faulkner is beside the point. When the Communists and their fellow travelers were still a power on the literary scene, such critics could be counted upon to fall into line. All of this is something that Hook understood, and Mr. Schlesinger still does not.

What really seems to animate Mr. Schlesinger’s continued assault on Hook’s now posthumous reputation isn’t any argument about the fortunes of American cultural life, however. Despite his sometimes lengthy lists of the movies and plays he has seen and loved and the famous cultural figures he has known, Mr. Schlesinger writes as a cultural innocent on such subjects. His opinions are invariably those of a middlebrow liberal with a philistine taste, and are not so different, by the way, from Hook’s own views on the arts. [2] What he finds unforgivable about Hook is something else—his politics. “While still describing himself as a socialist in Out of Step,” he writes, “Hook was at the same time an unabashed supporter of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.” This is what has driven this unreconstructed New Dealer to perform a final hatchet job on his former comrade-in-arms.

About his disagreements with his “friends” on the radical Left, Mr. Schlesinger tends to write in a more fraternal and forgiving spirit. Thus he writes with a special fondness about his friendship with the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm and certain other “Leninists”—his word—at Cambridge University:

British Communists, at least in the universities, were very different from the Communists I had known in the United States. Firm in their faith and articulate in its support, they—or at any rate those at Cambridge who had not been recruited by Soviet intelligence—did not pretend to be liberals or social democrats. They were Leninists, and proud of it. They did not go in for the dissembling and deceit routinely practiced by American Communists.

And further:

Incompatibility in ideology did not prevent compatibility in personal relations, at least with Hobsbawm, [Pieter] Keuneman, H. S. Ferns, a Canadian historian at Trinity College, John Alexander, a witty young man from a proper county family, and others. I considered them good friends, and I wholeheartedly endorsed Eric’s inscription when he gave me his Age of Extremes in 1994: “For Arthur, in memory of 55 years of friendship and disagreement.”

Reading A Life in the Twentieth Century, you sometimes have to wonder if Mr. Schlesinger really understands the meaning of la trahison des clercs.

Notes
Go to the top of the document.

1. A Life in the Twentieth Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917–1950, by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.; Houghton-Mifflin, 557 pages, $28.95. Go back to the text.
2. For a discussion of Sidney Hook’s views on the arts, see my essay “The Role of Sidney Hook” in The Twilight of the Intellectuals (1999). Go back to the text.