Obituary: Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., America's Last Great Public Historian

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History, Written in the Present Tense
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By SAM TANENHAUS
Published: March 4, 2007
With the death last week of Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., at 89, America lost its last great public historian. The notion may sound strange, given the appetite, as voracious as at any time in recent memory, for serious works of history, and in particular the vogue for lengthy, often massively detailed biographies of the founders and of presidents.

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Michael Evans/The New York Times, 1968
A PUBLIC HISTORIAN Arthur Schlesinger Jr., shown outside New York’s Biltmore Hotel, used history to speak of present-day problems.

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But 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.

“The Vital Center,” which Mr. Schlesinger expanded from an article he wrote for The New York Times Magazine in 1948, began with a ringing series of declarative sentences.

“Western man in the middle of the 20th century is tense, uncertain, adrift,” Mr. Schlesinger wrote. “We look upon our epoch as a time of troubles, an age of anxiety. The grounds of our civilization, of our certitude, are breaking up under our feet, and familiar ideas and institutions vanish as we reach for them, like shadows in the falling dusk.”

“If I were writing ‘The Vital Center’ today, I would tone down the rhetoric,” Mr. Schlesinger wrote in his memoir, “A Life in the 20th Century,” published in 2000. But that rhetoric was attuned to its moment. (The phrase “age of anxiety,” for instance, was the title of an eclogue by W.H. Auden, published in 1947.) And the “hortatory lushness” Mr. Schlesinger rued in his memoir suited the case he was trying to make for a new political alliance between liberals and conservatives who “believe deeply in civil liberties, in constitutional processes and in the democratic determination of political and economic policies.”

Today these seem self-evident virtues, but Mr. Schlesinger was writing in the immediate aftermath of World War II, with its fresh memories of Nazi death camps, its ongoing spectacle of Soviet brutalities and the new threat of nuclear annihilation. Mr. Schlesinger’s argument that, amid these perils, democracy could not be passively accepted as a national birthright but must be struggled for reflected the emerging mood of the country. His work presaged the civil rights protests of the next two decades even as it expressed the national yearning for a new kind of politics divorced from totalizing extremism.

All this would have made for a fine polemic. But the power of the book radiates from Mr. Schlesinger’s knowledge of modern history, American and European — in his concise but learned discussions of the Federalists, Whigs and Progressives and also of the roots of Communism and Fascism. This ability to find latent connections between the present and the past, as well as between American and Continental thinkers, elevated “The Vital Center” above the ranks of articulate manifestoes and placed it in the company of other monitory classics written at more or less the same cold war moment, including George Orwell’s “1984,” Hannah Arendt’s “Origins of Totalitarianism,” Whittaker Chambers’s “Witness” and Reinhold Niebuhr’s “Irony of American History.” (I should note here that Mr. Schlesinger favorably reviewed my biography of Chambers in The New York Times Book Review.)

That the phrase “vital center” has become a catchword for Democratic Party strategists intent on capturing the mainstream electorate attests to Mr. Schlesinger’s gift for phrase-making — a gift capitalized on by politicians like Adlai Stevenson, whose campaign he worked on.

But the phrase’s popularity also suggests that he wrote with an authority not to be found among younger historians and political thinkers, who continue to borrow from their elders. Peter Beinart, the former editor of The New Republic, has repeatedly invoked the vital center — the term but also the book — in magazine articles and in his own recent book, “The Good Fight.” Indeed, his book is patently an homage to Mr. Schlesinger’s.

And this raises a troubling question. Why do current historians seem unable to engage the world as confidently as Mr. Schlesinger did?

One reason may have to do with an obvious but easily overlooked fact about Mr. Schlesinger’s sizable oeuvre. He wrote less often about the past than about the present — or the nearly present. His three-volume opus, “The Age of Roosevelt,” described events that occurred when Mr. Schlesinger was in his teens and 20s. His volumes on the Kennedys — “A Thousand Days,” about President Kennedy, and “Robert Kennedy and His Times” — were more current still, indeed full of news, since Mr. Schlesinger knew and worked intimately with both men.

This proximity to his subjects, not to mention Mr. Schlesinger’s unabashed admiration for both men, left him vulnerable to the charge that he had abandoned his objectivity and had become a “court historian.” Perhaps. But court historians have written masterpieces, the Duc de Saint-Simon’s memoirs of the Court of Louis XIV, to give one famous example. Mr. Schlesinger’s biographies of the Kennedy brothers have a similar glitter: large characters observed from close range but also with a wholeness only a professional historian could achieve.

When, for instance, Mr. Schlesinger described, in “A Thousand Days,” how the Kennedy family early on “was still marginal socially in Brahmin Boston; and its folk memories were those of a time, not too far distant, when to be Irish was to be poor and have gates slammed in one’s face,” it’s not just Mr. Schlesinger’s sympathy that absorbs us. It is also his detachment and the subtlety of his prose.

And when he wrote of Robert Kennedy that he combined the warring traits of an “incorrigible romantic” and “a realistic political leader” for whom “the ethic of responsibility prevailed over the ethic of ultimate ends,” Mr. Schlesinger was not simply spinning lyrical phrases. He was drawing explicitly on the great essay by Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation.” Mr. Schlesinger was plainly confident that Kennedy stood up to such large terms, and his narrative clinches that claim. It is hard to imagine our more recent leaders being discussed in such lofty terms.

Might they be unworthy? Well, the Kennedys may have been, too, if we measure them by the standards now applied to political figures. The point is not that our leaders have shrunk, but that, in some sense, our historians have.

This may seem unfair. After all, we live in what is often called a golden age of history and biography, when David McCullough, to cite the most obvious example, has attained fame and enormous sales.

But in truth Mr. McCullough and others as talented, or nearly so, don’t command the broad cultural authority that Mr. Schlesinger and his contemporaries did. Nor, for that matter, do academic historians like Gordon S. Wood and James M. McPherson, though their books resonate beyond the university.

The problem is not one of seriousness, intelligence or skill. It is rather one of reach. Mr. Wood’s “Radicalism of the American Revolution” is a major contribution to our understanding of its subject, and Mr. McPherson’s “Battle Cry of Freedom” enthralled readers. But neither work can be said to have affected how many of us think about current issues.

This is even truer of the many popular books on America’s founding founders, from Washington and Adams to Jefferson and Hamilton, and on the lesser figures from the period now being exhumed.

These are books that, for all their merits, seem not only about the past but also, to some extent, mired in it. They are archival. And that may be the problem. 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.


Sam Tanenhaus is the editor of the Book Review.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/04/weekinreview/04tanenhaus.html?pagewanted=all