Fare Thee Well, Artie Schlessinger



(image via guardian)

Last week's death of the eminent American historian Artie Schlesinger, unlikely courtier of JFK's Camelot, seems like the passing of an era of larger than life chroniclers of The Republic. And we sorely need those reminders of the gentler times, when our ideals were not put aside for such involving "foreign entanglements" that presently tax our national vitality. Even as fellow Camelot courtier Gore Vidal's melancholy last tome is still fresh in our minds, it seems like the literary lights of that greatest of Generations are dimming. Sam Tanenhaus' effervescent memorial in the Gray Lady's "Week in Review," which focused primarily on Sclesinger's centrism, is noteworthy. He writes:

"Mr. Schlesinger performed a different function. He stood at the forefront of a remarkable generation of academic historians. Richard Hofstadter, who died in 1970, and C. Vann Woodward, who died in 1999, were its other towering figures. All three, reciprocal admirers, wrote classic works that reanimated the past even as they rummaged in it for clues to understanding, if not solving, the most pressing political questions of the present. As a result, new books by these historians often generated excitement and conveyed an urgency felt not only by other scholars but also by the broader population of informed readers.

"... Mr. Schlesinger’s accounts of midcentury American politics have the pageantry, texture and depth we normally find in books about long-vanished eras in that they were written by a historian convinced he was living in a period no less than rich than those earlier ones.

"And in fact he was. He — and Hofstadter and Woodward — reached maturity as historians at the precise moment when the nation itself was coming into its own, a freshly minted world power blessed with unparalleled wealth and social mobility.

"But it didn’t always seem so. It began as an 'age of anxiety.' That it seems grander in retrospect is partly owed to the brio and passion of Mr. Schlesinger and his generation of historians. If our own anxious age is to attain similar heights our historians must help lead the way." (Full article here)

Not much, though, is made of Sclesinger's pathbreaking "The Age of Jackson." We encountered this book in the early 90s. As Ross Perot was orbiting, eccentrically, planets Clinton and Bush, 43, we turned to Schlessinger's "Age of Jackson" to get an historical handle on the precedents of Populism in America. There seemed to be great parallels between the two. And we were spellbound by Schlesinger's assessment of what Jacksonian Democracy (which, we wrongly thought was almost entirely informed by Alexis de Tocqueville's magesterial "Democracy in America") meant to the formation of The Republic. Later, we cooled towards Sclesinger, who wrote -- clumsily, we thought at the time -- on the growing Balkanization of America at the end of the Cold War. We generally agreed with the thesis that America was fracturing on the cultural fault lines along ethnic identification over National identity, we thought he handled that most sensitive of American issues with hobnail boots. "If some Kleagle of the Ku Klux Klan wanted to devise an educational curriculum for the specific purpose of handicapping and disabling black Americans," wrote Schlesinger, "he would not be likely to come up with anything more diabolically effective than Afrocentrism." Charmed, I'm sure (Exaggerated cough suggesting feigned detachment).

The Corsair was even more astonished, later, by Sclesinger's reassessment, during his last days, of his own contribution to Jacksonian scholarship and American History. Historians of The Greatest Generation rarely acknowledge their own contingency in the face of History. Or error. It was Sclesinger's finest moment, one in which we prefer to remember his contribution to American History. From his essay "History and National Stupidity" in NYROB:

"The special contribution of The Age of Jackson was, I suppose, to shift the argument from section to class. The Age of Jackson was written more than sixty years ago in another America, and reflected FDR's struggles to democratize American capitalism. I was an ardent young New Dealer, and I sought precedents in American history for the problems that faced FDR.

"FDR saw it this way too. Years later, I came upon a letter he had written to Colonel Edward M. House, Woodrow Wilson's homme de confiance, in November 1933. 'The real truth of the matter,' Roosevelt told House, is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the larger centers has owned the Government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson —and I am not wholly excepting the Administration of W.W. The country is going through a repetition of Jackson's fight with the Bank of the United States—only on a far bigger and broader basis Jackson and Roosevelt, it appeared, had much the same coalition of supporters—farmers, workingmen, intellectuals, the poor—and much the same coalition of adversaries—bankers, merchants, manufacturers, and the rich. There was consequently a striking parallel between the 1830s and the 1930s in politics, and there was striking parallelism in the basic issue of power— the struggle for control of the state between organized money and the rest of society. I was hopelessly absorbed in the dilemmas of democratic capitalism made vivid for my generation by FDR and the New Deal, and I underplayed and ignored other aspects of the Age of Jackson. The predicament of slaves, of the red man and the 'trail of tears'—the forcible removal of the Cherokees and other Indians from Georgia to the far frontier—and the restricted opportunities for women of the period (save for Peggy Eaton, the wife of John Eaton, Jackson's secretary of war, a woman who in 1920s style rebelled against convention with Jackson's support) were shamefully out of my mind.

"Sean Wilentz has done what I should have done in his brilliant, powerful work The Rise of American Democracy. He has given slavery and the Indians their proper place in the Age of Jackson, and he describes Jackson's failures to deal with both. The perspective of 2000 is bound to be different from the perspective of 1940. And the perspective of 2060 is bound to be different from the perspective of 2000—and I trust Sean will still be around."

Ah, the Humility that comes from Perspective; those restorative waters leavening even the most exalted of historians. Later on in the essay, perhaps conscious of his own Mortality, the humbed historian turns his unforgiving gaze on America, 2006:

"History is the best antidote to illusions of omnipotence and omniscience. It should forever remind us of the limitations of our passing perspectives. It should strengthen us to resist the pressure to convert momentary interests into moral absolutes. It should lead us to a profound and chastening sense of our frailty as human beings— to a recognition of the fact, so often and so sadly demonstrated, that the future will outwit all our certitudes and that the possibilities of history are far richer and more various than the human intellect is likely to conceive.

"A nation informed by a vivid understanding of the ironies of history is, I believe, best equipped to live with the temptations and tragedy of power. Since we are condemned as a nation to be a superpower, let a growing sense of history temper and civilize our use of that power."

Wise words best heeded. Rest in Peace, Arthur Schlessinger.