Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.: Liberalism’s Historian

No one is likely to complain that Richard Aldous’s new biography of Schlesinger has failed to capture the totality of its subject’s life, from youth to old age. Aldous writes with a verve and clarity that matches Schlesinger’s, and offers as balanced a presentation as can be imagined of a man who, while considering himself a figure of the political center, usually found himself, as most others saw him, on the left. An appropriately hard critic of Schlesinger’s faults and errors, Aldous, a professor of British history and literature at Bard College, takes care to allot Schlesinger’s critics plenty of ink in the book’s pages. This is by no means a whitewash.

Schlesinger was a son of the Midwest, not of the New England with which he’s so often associated. His father’s family was of German-Jewish stock, his mother of deep New England roots and distantly related to the great historian George Bancroft. Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. long served as a noted member of the Harvard history faculty, in whose orbit Arthur Jr. grew up and into professional maturity. One can complain that Aldous fails to give adequate emphasis to the context of the Schlesinger family’s progress into the American middle class. Upward-striving German Jews’ assimilation proved easier than that of their Eastern European coreligionists (from whom they often stood apart) because they arrived earlier and in smaller numbers. But Aldous’s short-wordedness on this account is understandable inasmuch as by the time Schlesinger Jr. was an experienced historian, the world took him, as it took his father, to be echt Harvard. And why not? The younger Schlesinger had gone to college there and been a member of its prestigious Society of Fellows. Assimilation had been relatively quick and complete. Not for nothing would Schlesinger’s future critics deride him and many others who likewise served in John F. Kennedy’s administration as “the Harvards.” Could there be assimilation any more successful than acceptance as a leading member of the northeastern elite?

Aldous deals with the facts of Schlesinger’s rise to success more fully than he does the family’s integration into the northeastern intellectual empyrean. It comes as a revelation—one strengthened by the author’s having secured interviews with Arthur Jr.’s children and two wives—how emotionally and professionally dependent the younger man remained on his father. A pedal point of the entire book is the way the father promoted his son’s advancement while the son sought guidance and succor from his parent and seemed unable, despite some evidence of his wish to do so, to break free of his father’s enveloping oversight.

Schlesinger initially came to public notice as a scholar—one, it should be noted, who never secured a Ph.D. in history. His first big book, The Age of Jackson, was a kind of scholarly coup de foudre. It forced reconsideration of a hoary line of argument going back to the days of the great historian Frederick Jackson Turner, whose “school” had situated the center of Andrew Jackson’s majority Democratic party in the West and on farms. By contrast, Schlesinger situated Jackson’s antebellum party among urban working people of the East. As a result of his book, which won Schlesinger his first Pulitzer Prize, the history of 19th-century American politics has never since been the same. One has to contend with Schlesinger’s interpretation every step of the way.

Then came what has to be considered Schlesinger’s major scholarly achievement—his three-volume Age of Roosevelt, published between 1957 and 1960, a massive, propulsive outpouring of more than 1,600 printed pages in three years. Here’s where Schlesinger showed his full colors as a New Deal Democrat. Despite a near-idolization of the hero of these books, the historian, then teaching at Harvard, captured as no one else ever has the sheer experimental vitality of the first four years of FDR’s administration. While there could be no question that Schlesinger’s sympathies lay with the New Deal, he was evenhanded in analyzing the Roosevelt team’s successes and failures as it tried to dig the nation out of unprecedented crisis.

For long years, historians awaited more from Schlesinger’s deft pen about the nation’s greatest set of public-policy innovations since the Washington administration. Schlesinger hinted that eventually they’d appear. But they didn’t. How any succeeding volumes would have dealt with the New Deal’s aging as Schlesinger himself aged can’t be known. Instead, putting the subject behind him, Schlesinger allowed himself gradually to be drawn off to Washington and to Democratic politics.

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Aldous does a fine job of relating Schlesinger’s growing immersion in public affairs as he grew fatigued with academic life. It was Adlai Stevenson who first appealed to Schlesinger’s bumptious liberalism. But it was not until he became a special assistant to President Kennedy that the Schlesinger whom the public recalls first came into general public view. It’s this phase of Schlesinger’s life that continues most to interest historians as well as students of politics. How does one reconcile a historian’s professional commitment to “objectivity”—however tattered that ideal may be today—with commitments he may coincidentally possess to try to better the public welfare, whether on the right, on the left, or, as Schlesinger himself believed his position to be, from the center? This question, which continues to bedevil the academic world, played out and affected Schlesinger throughout his active, varied career, even though he never wrote about it.

He did, however, set down a defense of political centrism, one from which he never deviated. In The Vital Center, his brilliant, muscular, optimistic 1949 testament to centrist democratic politics, Schlesinger provided what’s likely to prove his most lasting contribution to American political thought and action. It’s impossible to single out any one of his many other books more relevant to our day’s political troubles. It can also be read, as it rarely if ever is (and as Aldous could have made more of in his otherwise effective account of its origins and reception), as an implicit statement of scholars’ responsibility to civic life. Schlesinger was emerging as a major postwar public intellectual.

Schlesinger’s late New Deal liberalism had already tainted his reputation among conservative academics. His active assistance to Adlai Stevenson in the latter’s 1950s presidential campaigns, then his membership in the Kennedy White House opened the way for leftist Democrats to begin to question Schlesinger’s reliability as an adequately committed Democrat and conservatives to question his reliability as a historian. The publication in 1965 of his laudatory post-assassination, on-the-spot Kennedy administration account, A Thousand Days, turned the radical New Left against him, too. He was now caught, as historian as well as public figure, between the upper and lower jaws of American politics—and in an era whose political participants weren’t inclined to forgiveness. This probably explains why Schlesinger, surely deserving of the post, was never elected by his colleagues to be president of the American Historical Association, a scandalous blot on the record of the largest and most important organization of historians in the world. He’d become a victim of the bitterness that by 1970 began to infect every corner of American life.

Aldous’s pages on Schlesinger’s role at the center of things are among his most revealing. Wanting to be more than the “historian-in-waiting” of Kennedy’s achievements, a role he disclaimed, Schlesinger nevertheless understood that his job was to protect the president’s legacy. To do so, he helped see to the amassing of a huge record of the administration. But despite, in Aldous’s view, being sometimes naïve and out of his league, Schlesinger, as the author makes a strong case, was also an active, even a formative, participant in some major policy-making matters, especially Kennedy’s approach to the crisis over the Berlin Wall. And this despite being held in suspicion by those (especially Ted Sorensen) who resented his closeness to the party’s Stevenson wing and others who looked down on Schlesinger as nothing but an egghead.

Schlesinger considered A Thousand Days a memoir, not a history. It was written in a single year, at roughly 3,000 words a day. Yet even the insider-historian missed much. He simply couldn’t know, as no single participant in any set of events is ever able to know, all that was going on around him. Schlesinger, Aldous concludes, may have been an insider, but he was fooled into thinking that he was in on it all.

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After leaving the post-Kennedy White House, in 1965 Schlesinger took up an academic berth at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and returned to his role as public intellectual. He became known around New York, writes Aldous, as a kind of “swinging soothsayer,” one much in demand and enjoying life immensely. His biography of Robert Kennedy appeared in 1978, a decade after the senator’s assassination. Although Schlesinger’s experiences with both deceased Kennedys might have made him just another disillusioned intellectual of the kind that characterized so much of the East Coast intelligentsia in the 1970s, he instead became a practiced and distinctive analyst of big public issues, viewing the nation without irony and with a robust confidence in its improvability as he saw it.

Through it all, he continued to produce books of widespread impact, both publicly and among historians. The Imperial Presidency (1973) popularized a name for a development that we continue to wrestle with. Schlesinger returned to an earlier interest of his father, the ever-recurring general pattern of historical change, and gave us The Cycles of American History (1986). He also waded into the controversy over multiculturalism with The Disuniting of America (1991). That book lost as well as won him friends but proved, as so many of his works had, that he remained true to his commitments to the political and cultural middle road. And unlike so many other popular historians—who either write biographies of figures already over-biographied or who deliver strings of narrative facts without analysis—Schlesinger always tackled large issues and waded with powerful historical arguments into current debates. There are too few like him.

By the end of his life, with many other books also to his credit, Schlesinger had amassed two Pulitzers, two National Book Awards, one Bancroft and one Parkman prize, and the National Humanities Medal—a record never equaled. Yet such accolades didn’t protect the man, just as they never protect anyone, from controversy. Schlesinger’s politics were always fair game for criticism. But what, in the end, are we to make of any historian’s role in public life? Where’s the line to be drawn between abstemiousness and engagement; on what grounds is it to be defined; and who’s to do so?

Here’s where Aldous misses a chance to dig into what’s likely to prove the enduring question raised by Schlesinger’s life and career: To what degree can a scholar be an engaged public official—and play a legitimate role as scholar in public life—while remaining true to professional canons? Americans seem to be particularly bothered by the crossover. By contrast, in Britain Lord Clarendon and Winston Churchill and in France Adolphe Thiers, François Mignet, Jean Jaurès, and other historians have led and adorned their nations’ governments. Even Thucydides, the very cofounder of historical inquiry, was deeply involved in the Peloponnesian War. But Americans seem to expect a kind of saintly purity of those whom they pigeonhole into particular categories: You’re either a “pure” scholar or “just” a politician.

The distinction doesn’t hold up in fact, nor can it be justified. Aldous’s otherwise fine biography could have been enriched by tussling with this issue in the context of Schlesinger’s eventful life or at least concluding with reflections upon it. Despite the author’s silence on this score, his book is likely to long endure as the standard work on its gifted title character.

James M. Banner Jr.’s second edition of The Elements of Teaching, coauthored with the late Harold C. Cannon, has just been published by Yale.