Richard Hofstadter

His mother died when he was 10, and the Buffalo household she left was already a negotiation. Emil Hofstadter was Jewish, Katherine Hill had been a German Lutheran, and the son was raised Episcopalian. He took a bachelor's degree at the University of Buffalo in 1937, having married Felice Swados the year before over both families' objections, and went to Columbia intending to study law before switching to history within months. In April 1938 he joined the Communist Party. He wrote that he did it without enthusiasm and out of obligation, and that he hated capitalism and wanted rid of it. He was out again by 1939, after the Hitler-Stalin pact. The membership lasted about a year. The wariness of true believers lasted the rest of his life.

He wrote fast and from other people's books. Critics noticed that he did almost no archival work, building instead on secondary sources and a prose style closer to Edmund Wilson than to a seminar. Social Darwinism in American Thought came out of the dissertation in 1944 and sold 200,000 copies. The American Political Tradition followed in 1948 and sold close to a million as a campus assignment. Then the Pulitzers, in 1956 for The Age of Reform and in 1964 for Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. He supervised more than 100 doctoral dissertations and founded no school of history.

He opposed the Vietnam War in writing, co-signing a 1966 letter to Lyndon Johnson and telling Irving Kristol so directly. In February 1967 he asked Columbia's president to go easy on students who had staged a sit-in. Fourteen months later those students occupied five buildings, Grayson Kirk sent in the police, 712 people were arrested and 148 injured, and Hofstadter signed a faculty statement backing the administration. Flyers denouncing him by name went up around campus. Kirk handed him the commencement address, needing a speaker the campus might still hear. On June 4, 1968, at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, more than 300 seniors walked out before he spoke. He called the university a fragile structure and the war a crucial and misconceived venture, to an audience with holes in it.

The essay everyone quotes began as a Herbert Spencer lecture at Oxford in November 1963, and appeared in Harper's in November 1964, amid the Goldwater campaign. Its second paragraph says what it is not: he was not speaking in a clinical sense, he wrote, but borrowing a clinical term, with neither the competence nor the desire to call anyone a lunatic. He meant a way of arguing. His standing collapsed. Through the 1970s and 1980s Lawrence Goodwyn, Norman Pollack and Michael Kazin argued that he had caricatured the Populists, read 1950s anxieties back into the 1890s, and dressed a distaste for ordinary Americans as analysis. The phrase came back anyway, used constantly by people who never read that second paragraph.

Richard Hofstadter's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860-1915 book
  His Columbia dissertation, published at 27 and later a 200,000-copy seller 1944
• The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It book
  Twelve portraits — Calhoun as Marx of the Master Class — that sold close to a million copies 1948
• The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. book
  Pulitzer Prize in 1956, and the most contested book he wrote 1955
• Anti-Intellectualism in American Life book
  Pulitzer Prize in 1964 1963
• The Paranoid Style in American Politics article
  Harper's Magazine, November 1964 — the title essay of a 1965 collection 1964
• America at 1750: A Social Portrait book
  Published after his death — volume one of three he did not live to finish 1971

• c. 1926 aged ~10 His mother dies when he is 10 Katherine Hill Hofstadter was a German-American Lutheran. Richard was raised Episcopalian and identified later with his father's Jewish background.
• 1936 aged ~20 Marries Felice Swados over both families' objections They had met at the University of Buffalo. She died of cancer in 1945, at 29, leaving their son Dan.
• April 1938 aged 21 Joins the Communist Party USA He wrote that he joined without enthusiasm but out of obligation. He withdrew the following year, after the Hitler-Stalin pact.
• 1942 aged ~26 Takes his PhD at Columbia and begins teaching at the University of Maryland He joined the Columbia faculty in 1946 and became DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History in 1959.
• 1948 aged ~32 Publishes The American Political Tradition It became a standard campus assignment and sold close to a million copies.
• 1956 aged ~40 Wins his first Pulitzer Prize, for The Age of Reform The second came in 1964, for Anti-Intellectualism in American Life.
• November 21, 1963 aged 47 Delivers the Herbert Spencer lecture at Oxford that becomes The Paranoid Style Harper's printed an abridged version in November 1964.
• June 4, 1968 aged 51 Gives the Columbia commencement address as more than 300 seniors walk out President Grayson Kirk, discredited by the April occupation and the police response, had handed him the podium.
• October 24, 1970 aged 54 Dies of leukemia at Mount Sinai Hospital, aged 54 He left a planned three-volume history of American society with one volume finished.

• Frederick Jackson Turner 1861–1932
  The frontier thesis — the most influential and most attacked argument in American history. wrote against
• Joseph McCarthy 1908–1957
  Senator whose unsupported accusations and investigations gave “McCarthyism” its name and damaged civil liberties. analyzed
• Barry Goldwater 1909–1998
  Senator and presidential nominee whose 1964 campaign helped create the modern conservative movement. analyzed
• William Jennings Bryan 1860–1925
  Three-time Democratic nominee and orator who made monetary reform, popular democracy, and moral politics central national issues. reinterpreted
• Howard Zinn 1922–2010
  Historian and Boston University professor whose A People's History of the United States reshaped historical narratives. challenged by