Too bad it is behind the NYRB subscription wall, but Sean Wilentz, a noted historian, has written what can only be described as a Neo-liberal Courtier defense of a Courtier historian of the mid to late 20th Century, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. It is something I hope there are letters in the NYRB to take on Wilentz's essay-review. Right now, I merely jot my thoughts down, and leave it to perhaps either another time or never to fill in the citations. My wife is beckoning me to stop this free punditry, at least for the night...:)
Wilentz clearly loves Schlesinger's The Vital Center, written in 1949, as the great liberal anti-Communist tract that holds up well, in Wilentz's view at least. For me, it is the paradigmatic reason for the failure for liberalism for the next sixty years. When liberals joined in with Red-baiting, they were sealing their own doom for two reasons:
(1) They failed to appreciate how the primary reason for Red-baiting from the conservatives and far rightists was to destroy the New Deal consensus and liberalism overall (see page 333 of the Buckley-Bozell book defending Joe McCarthy's second phase of Red-baiting, where Buckley admits McCarthy's conflation of Alger Hiss as alleged Communist spy and Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic Party's presidential candidate in 1952, is a promising avenue because the primary goal was to attack liberalism and root it out from the nation. Funny too that Buckley right after says the "Schlesingers" should not worry, but there is the threat there too that Buckley will come for them too...Too bad the Schlesingers never saw it coming); and
(2) Cold War liberals like Schlesinger showed little or no concern about preserving the distinction between someone being a Communist and someone being a true "spy" for the Soviet Union. It was one thing to beat up on Joe McCarthy once McCarthy took on the Army (yes, I am saying Edward R. Murrow was not as brave as say Don Hollenbeck), but people like Schlesinger, Joe Rauh, and others in the Americans for Democratic Action from the late 1940s on through the 1960s, never lost a beat with the Buckleys of the world in castigating anyone who stood for Popular Front New Deal politics. And we wonder why Truman's call for national health insurance in 1948 was so hollow then and now from such people, why the promise to repeal 14(b) of the Taft-Hartley Act went nowhere, and eventually stopped being discussed at all, and, by the way, how the War against Vietnam happened.
I get that it looks like it was inevitable that anti-Communism would become so pervasive. But it did not have to be that way but for liberal acquiescence. Had they made clear that Dalton Trumbo was not a security threat, and that even Harry Dexter White and Alger Hiss had strong policy reasons for seeking rapprochement in international affairs, including with the Soviet Union, we could have avoided the military-industrial complex Ike warned us about on his way out the presidential door. We could have avoided the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency and what Gore Vidal rightly called "The National Security State." I have long said, before Oliver Stone and several others, the original sin of American politics post-World War II occurred in 1944, when FDR was ultimately pushed to drop Henry Wallace as his VP and replace him with the shallow machine bred politician, Harry S. Truman. Truman did have the titular lead in an investigation of oil company gouging in the war effort, but otherwise, he really had no grasp of international politics. Wallace, though a spiritualist and sometimes eccentric, had a firmer grasp of the moment, and the need to complete the New Deal. It is remarkable to me that we put up with all sorts of eccentricities in presidents who bow to the National Security State or earlier imperialist impulses (let's recall the Reagans governing the timing of decisions, and sometimes decisions themselves, by astrology; or McKinley thinking God spoke to him to start the war in Spain), but somehow Henry Wallace would have been beyond the pale?
Wilentz literally lays the Vietnam War at LBJ's feet with no sense of historical judgment that JFK would have done the same as LBJ. Wilentz shows little perspective of how LBJ, JFK and Richard M. Nixon all came of age in national politics just before the big "Who lost China?" political storm of 1949-1951. Does Wilentz really think JFK was not thinking like Johnson, who we learned from the Johnson tapes, saying to Senator Richard Russell (D-GA) that the nation would call for "impeachment" of a president who left the South Vietnamese government fall to the Communists? Historians are supposed to help us understand political and intellectual leaders' thinking of the time, and that includes understanding the history as those historical players saw things in their own time. Wilentz is giving us anachronistic history. To not see the systemic nature of the War Against Vietnam is to misunderstand so much insight from so many historians and writers, from George McT. Kahin to Bernard Fall to Telford Taylor to Frances Fitzgerald to David Halberstam to even and especially Chomsky and Zinn. To just castigate people as "Marxists" is to descend to an anti-intellectualism that really is unbecoming from a professor of history who thinks of himself as liberal-left.
I won't bother to say much about Wilentz's abject fear of political correctness, which leads to some strangely reactionary language that others will more readily see. Too often, I find there is an abject ignorance of the 1920s through 1940s from most historians of our age, which is why I speak with such passion about the early years of the Cold War and its portending of what followed.
I won't bother to say much about Wilentz's abject fear of political correctness, which leads to some strangely reactionary language that others will more readily see. Too often, I find there is an abject ignorance of the 1920s through 1940s from most historians of our age, which is why I speak with such passion about the early years of the Cold War and its portending of what followed.
As for Schlesinger himself, Wilentz goes on to admit, in a sly, passively misleading way, that Schlesinger was a courtier to the Kennedys, and that his Age of Jackson book was a partisan reading of the Andrew Jackson era as a way to exult the FDR New Deal years. That Andrew Ward's Andrew Jackson: Symbol for an Age destroyed most of the Schlesinger narrative about Jackson is left unmentioned in Wilentz's review, and there is no doubt Wilentz knows the Ward book. I get the feeling Wilentz is not interested in the economics of the Jacksonian era as much as he should be, even though he handled it decently with Schlesinger in his own short bio of Jackson. Funny, too, that Wilentz never mentions his co-writing of that book on Jackson with Schlesinger in the latter's last years.
Wilentz is most egregious in his discussion of the Clintons. To think the Clintons are anything other than well meaning bankers is almost pathetically laughable for someone who is considered a serious historian. To talk about Clinton's capitulation to the right wing on welfare, and then say, sheepishly as he does, that Clinton meant to reform the reform, is naive at best. Clinton simply did not care about poor people when it came to holding power. And Wilentz never mentions the NAFTA or the WTO, which was doing the work of international bankers in a way that Harry Dexter White would have found deeply troubling, to talk about ironies. The "free trade" views of late New Dealers is certainly misplaced when it came to understanding the needs of labor in the 1970s and 1980s and beyond. What the nation needed from liberals was a re-embrace of tariff policy, industrial policy, and not free trade nostrums. Instead, tone deaf courtiers like Schlesinger and now Wilentz continue to ignore how many parts of the US now resemble second rate, and even second world nations after the devastation wrought by a globalization that was the product of policy as much as "natural economic forces." Wilentz said the essence of the political liberal of the mid-20th Century was a sense of "fallibility and tragedy," in other words, a flexibility and humility. That is why there should have been a jettisoning of "free trade" thinking that was itself a short term response to what was thought to be a reason for the Great Depression--but was not, as Schumpeter and others also recognized. Unlike too many economists, I think sociologists have much to teach us about political economy. And too many Neo-liberal historians such as Wilentz seem particularly clueless about these things. What Wilentz calls "Marxist"--in an anti-intellectual manner, I should repeat--is actually a history informed by sociology. This failure to understand historians to his left causes Wilentz to see only tragedy in the Clinton era's 1994 Congressional results, and doubtless the Obama era's 2010 Congressional election results, when those electoral failures were the product of the same pusillanimous liberalism that dates back to the cave-in to Red Scare hysteria before Joe McCarthy arrived on the scene in 1950, and for too long a period after McCarthy's arrival on the scene.
Wilentz is most egregious in his discussion of the Clintons. To think the Clintons are anything other than well meaning bankers is almost pathetically laughable for someone who is considered a serious historian. To talk about Clinton's capitulation to the right wing on welfare, and then say, sheepishly as he does, that Clinton meant to reform the reform, is naive at best. Clinton simply did not care about poor people when it came to holding power. And Wilentz never mentions the NAFTA or the WTO, which was doing the work of international bankers in a way that Harry Dexter White would have found deeply troubling, to talk about ironies. The "free trade" views of late New Dealers is certainly misplaced when it came to understanding the needs of labor in the 1970s and 1980s and beyond. What the nation needed from liberals was a re-embrace of tariff policy, industrial policy, and not free trade nostrums. Instead, tone deaf courtiers like Schlesinger and now Wilentz continue to ignore how many parts of the US now resemble second rate, and even second world nations after the devastation wrought by a globalization that was the product of policy as much as "natural economic forces." Wilentz said the essence of the political liberal of the mid-20th Century was a sense of "fallibility and tragedy," in other words, a flexibility and humility. That is why there should have been a jettisoning of "free trade" thinking that was itself a short term response to what was thought to be a reason for the Great Depression--but was not, as Schumpeter and others also recognized. Unlike too many economists, I think sociologists have much to teach us about political economy. And too many Neo-liberal historians such as Wilentz seem particularly clueless about these things. What Wilentz calls "Marxist"--in an anti-intellectual manner, I should repeat--is actually a history informed by sociology. This failure to understand historians to his left causes Wilentz to see only tragedy in the Clinton era's 1994 Congressional results, and doubtless the Obama era's 2010 Congressional election results, when those electoral failures were the product of the same pusillanimous liberalism that dates back to the cave-in to Red Scare hysteria before Joe McCarthy arrived on the scene in 1950, and for too long a period after McCarthy's arrival on the scene.
Wilentz's review should not have been given the green light for at least the reason that Wilentz co-wrote a book with Schlesinger and it is again not mentioned in the review. This essay-review is clearly a brief for Schlesinger by a party too close to the subject of a biography that Wilentz would have wanted to write himself. That Wilentz could only criticize the sub-title of the biography--and ironically mention that some who do not like Schlesinger could call him a Courtier historian, as if that would not have been "fair"--and for the book not covering in detail the last years of Schlesinger's life--which is amusing because maybe Wilentz thinks he should have been given more mention personally...?--is telling, as it feels like Wilentz is gritting his teeth with a review that is mostly positive about the biography.*
One can go on, and I certainly can, but spousal cooperation is the key to a long marriage. I urge anyone who knows some historians of the American 20th Century to speak up against Wilentz's shallow review of a courtier historian who personified more of the failures than victories of liberalism. One would get a much better understanding of the period by starting with Chris Hedges, The Death of the Liberal Class. Hedges is no historian, and he is a polemicist. But his perspective, perception and insight on the topic of his book (not always, as Hedges was a horrible voice in the presidential election of 2016) is far more on the mark than what Wilentz has written.
* And historians who study the historians of the 20th Century should be screaming to see Wilentz place Schlesinger on par with Richard Hofstadter and C. Vann Woodward, early in the essay-review. As an amateur historiography student, and student of historians from Richard Hildreth to Eric Foner, I was appalled.
* And historians who study the historians of the 20th Century should be screaming to see Wilentz place Schlesinger on par with Richard Hofstadter and C. Vann Woodward, early in the essay-review. As an amateur historiography student, and student of historians from Richard Hildreth to Eric Foner, I was appalled.
