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Priest of Liberal Salvation
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19884 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1992 |
2,905 Words |
| Author
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Edward S. Shapiro
Edward S. Shapiro is professor of history at Seton Hall
University and author of The Letters of Sidney Hook:
Democracy, Communism, and the Cold War (1995). |
The animadversions of The Disuniting of America regarding the contemporary celebration of ethnicity are product of its author's political ideology and his understanding of the nature of American identity. For nearly a half century, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., has been America's leading liberal historian and liberal activist intellectual. Born in 1917 and coming of political age during the 1930s, he ahs never faltered in his commitment to the political thrust of liberalism in general and the New Deal in particular -centralized political planning, economic egalitarianism, and the marriage of the worlds of ideas and power. For conservative intellectuals, Schlesinger has been the incarnation of the woolly-minded intellectual who has brought grief to the Republic since the days of Roosevelt's "brain trust." Schlesinger, Kenneth S. Lynn wrote, "is the blindly loyal guardian of a pantheon of political heroes whose human failings he is prepared to defend at no matter what sacrifice of factual or psychological plausibility." Indeed, Schlesinger received two of the highest accolades a liberal could hope for. He was personally attacked by Joe McCarthy as a parlor pink and was included on the list of "enemies" compiled by the Nixon White House.
Leftist radicals in turn attacked Schlesinger's commitment to political pluralism, private property, and a suitably disciplined private enterprise system. For them, he was the quintessential court historian, more concerned with ingratiating himself with the powers that be than with subjecting the pragmatic liberal orthodoxy of the new Deal and the New Frontier to trenchant historical analysis. Schlesinger, in turn, described his critics on the Left and Right as "absolutists "and "Platonists" who preferred the comforts of ideological purity to the real world of political compromise and partial solutions.
Schlesinger's liberalism was shaped by his family background. His father was Arthur Meier Schlesinger, a prominent Harvard historian and one of the pioneers in American social history. The senior Schlesinger was one of the few Democrats among the Harvard faculty during the 1920s, and in the next decade was an enthusiastic proponent of the New Deal. Schlesinger's mother was a distant relative of George Bancroft, the great nineteenth-century American historian and a fervent Jacksonian. (Schlesinger's original middle name was Bancroft, which he changed to Meier out of filial devotion when he was fifteen.) Schlesinger grew up in an environment in which both scholarship and political commitment were high valued. In 1968 he recalled that he was "less detached and judicious than my father, more eager for commitment and combat," a trait that he believed he derived from his
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