Schlesinger now began to reorient Jacksonianism away from the western frontier and instead to emphasize its national character, including among urban workers, small farmers, and intellectuals in the Northeast. “More can be understood about Jacksonian Democracy if it is regarded as a problem not of sections but of classes,” he argued in what would become his book’s single most famous line. The Jacksonian movement sought to harness “the power of the capitalistic groups, mainly Eastern, for the benefit of non-capitalist groups, farmers and laboring men, East, West, and South.” In doing so, Schlesinger would present Jacksonianism as a forerunner of the Progressive Era and the New Deal in attempting to “restrain the power of the business community.” It was a landmark moment for him. In challenging the notion put most famously in Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier thesis” that American democracy was forged in the West, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. had the makings of a Big Idea.23
AS THE FIRST OF HIS three academic years in residence at Harvard’s Society of Fellows drew to its close, Arthur was able to report “a fairly successful year” with “lots of work done [and] a new and mildly important book on Jacksonian democracy well under way.” And if he had found his feet professionally, the return to Cambridge brought clarity in other ways too. By the spring of 1940, as the war intensified in Europe, Arthur abandoned any ambivalence about whether the United States should keep out of the war. There was, he wrote to friends, no choice but to “fight fire with fire.” Convinced that “this war is not a war, it’s a revolution,” Arthur now believed that “what we must do, of course, is to arm.” It was, Charles Wintour noted sardonically, “the end of Arthurian isolationism.”24
The growing possibility of American involvement in the war also helped bring clarity, or at least resolution, to Arthur’s tortured personal life. The previous summer he had admitted to wishing for an altercation with Marian “climactic enough to destroy this miserable affair, which has dragged on in a manic depressive way.” Yet much as their bond made him “physically sick,” he admitted in his diary that “in any number of ways I need her and cannot get along without her.” Things calmed down in a “fairly comforting” way when the two were back in Cambridge together, although Arthur, already recognized on campus as a rising star, coyly admitted to “plenty of female attention on the side.” Friends confessed themselves baffled by the stormy nature of the relationship, which saw letters arriving one week to say “it is all finally over” and the next proclaiming “everything is swell.” No wonder that when Arthur finally asked Marian to marry him, Wintour, on hearing the news, made no effort to hide his skepticism. “I am absolutely delighted to hear you and Marian may get married,” he wrote that spring. “In fact as delighted as I was the last time I heard it.”25
In fact this time the couple did tie the knot. A Unitarian minister married Arthur and Marian on August 10, 1940, on the grounds of the bride’s family home in Franklin, New Hampshire. To Arthur the choice of denomination was coincidental, as Marian’s family were regular Unitarian churchgoers. For their honeymoon, the newlyweds went to Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia. “I’m sorry not to have written earlier,” Arthur wrote to his parents a week later, adding with unnecessary gaucheness that “we have been having such a good time while doing so little that can be written about that I have not had the energy to get off a letter.” He admitted to the “shock when anyone calls Marian ‘Mrs. Schlesinger,’ ” but was pleased to report “that we are very happy, which will surprise no one.” By the end of the month, after “an awfully good time,” Arthur was ready to head back to Cambridge to “get settled and get to work again.”26
After three years of storm and stress, Arthur’s life now settled into a period of stability, even tranquility. The newlyweds moved into an apartment in a pretty federal-style house at 341 Harvard Street, where they started giving regular parties, “serving,” Marian recalled, “what we thought were sophisticated drinks of canned grapefruit juice and gin and inviting such grand figures as Samuel Eliot Morison, who arrived resplendent in his riding clothes, crop in hand, for cocktails.”27
Perry Miller had warned of inevitable “soggy moments” and the “problem of keeping yourself going for three years on your own steam, inspired simply by your own urge to get something done.” Yet armed with an ambitious new topic and a big idea, and having resolved his personal issues, Arthur now embarked on a conscientious spell of archival research on Andrew Jackson and his contemporaries. Much of the work was done in the familiar surroundings of Harvard’s Widener Library, but there were also extended trips to New York and Washington, DC, in 1941. These visits had the added advantage of giving Arthur and Marian time together away from Cambridge. There were a few awkward duties to be performed, including a visit to Arthur’s grandmother in Washington, DC, “evenings [that] were very difficult, and left us both nervously exhausted.” But for the most part, still only in his early twenties, Arthur cheerfully burnt the candle at both ends on these research trips. Long hours “in the manuscript room . . . from nine to five every day,” he told his parents, were followed (he did not report) by long evenings of drinking and socializing. Watching Citizen Kane in New York after “too many old fashioneds at dinner,” Arthur admitted, “I had only an imperfect idea of what was going on and had to have crucial details explained to me afterward.” Prudently he told his folks the confusion was “because we sat so far from the screen.”28
Fueled by bourbon and ambition, Arthur began to accumulate shoebox after shoebox of research notes, all carefully cross-indexed on four-by-six cards. He was under no obligation to teach, but to gain experience he tested some of his early ideas on the women undergraduates at Radcliffe College; despite his outward confidence, he was often so affected by nerves that he regularly threw up before lectures began. As his stint at the Society of Fellows began to draw to its close, he drew up an outline for a book in fifty-eight chapters, tentatively entitled “Jackson and the American Democratic Tradition.” It showed strong links with the work of Arthur Sr., whose work emphasized the role of labor in the American Revolution. Arthur sat down to lay out the broad thrust of his argument. The new study would redress “the balance of emphasis that represented Jacksonian democracy as essentially the product of the western frontier.” More could be understood about it by “a class analysis than by a sectional analysis.” By examining “the ideas, theories, and preconceptions which the non-business groups of the day used in their attempt to adjust and moderate a nation increasingly dominated by business,” it might be possible to write a new “intellectual history of Jacksonian democracy.”29
No one could doubt the scale of Arthur’s ambition. Indeed, such was the impact of the book that would finally emerge that his success now looks like the academic equivalent of a slam dunk. That’s not how it felt to Arthur at the time. As he entered the final year of his fellowship, it began to dawn on him and his supporters that he may actually have fallen down the pecking order of his contemporaries. When in 1939, away in England, he had published Orestes Brownson with Little, Brown to warm reviews, there was little doubt that he was a star of the Harvard academic farm system. The junior fellowship at the Society of Fellows was another glittering prize. Yet Arthur had stepped off the traditional academic track for four years. By 1941–1942, as he prepared to enter the job market, it was clear that others had caught up and in some respects overtaken him. Arthur had the advantage of a book already published, but it was one clearly based on undergraduate research. His return to Harvard had seen him hard at work on research for the next book, but he had nothing physical to show for his effort except a slim journal article on Richard Hildreth in the New England Quarterly. Meanwhile, most of those with whom he was competing for academic positions had followed a more conventional path at graduate school. But conventional by its definition meant understood and accepted. And in a field that was becoming increasingly professionalized, Arthur’s lack of a PhD now suddenly began to look at best eccentric, at worst lackadaisical. The gentlemanly scholar
of Harvard’s Society of Fellows was suddenly in danger of looking like an amateur and a dabbler.
The growing realization that Arthur had taken a misstep had to be addressed. As usual, it was Arthur Sr. who stepped into the breach to take control. In 1942, Arthur Schlesinger registered Arthur Jr. as his PhD student. In many ways it was an extraordinary step, confirming the younger man’s place as “Little Arthur.” It also pushed the boundaries of academic propriety or even common sense to the breaking point. Just as in 1933 a bright boy at Exeter whose father taught at Harvard might have thought to apply to a different Ivy League university, there was no shortage of options available to him for a PhD supervisor almost a decade later. Frederick Merk and Paul Buck, the latter a Pulitzer Prize winner, were, after all, both trusted family friends as well as nineteenth-century historians well able to advise Arthur’s dissertation. Yet in the end, for Schlesinger, nobody else would do for his son. In part this was pure practicality. Arthur needed a PhD in a hurry. On his registration form with the Harvard Appointment Office, Arthur wrote that his thesis, entitled “Conflict of Ideas in Jacksonian Democracy,” was expected in “1942 fall.” No one would be better able to push the administrative and examination process along faster than Schlesinger himself, a man who, his friend Bernard DeVoto noted at this time, “dominates every committee he gets on.”30
But there was something deeper at work too. As Marian remarked of her husband’s relationship with his father, “Mr. Schlesinger had a very strong control over him.” More than that, he had a vision for his career. DeVoto, no enemy, astutely noted how “the meek and mild Arthur Schlesinger has a tremendous drive for power.” He had formidable political skills to match that drive. “He’s been on the History committee for four years now,” DeVoto observed admiringly, “score: [jobs to] two pupils of Arthur’s.” Manipulation, maneuver, and jockeying for position—these were skills that Schlesinger routinely applied with masterly deftness in the game of Harvard academic politics. It was inconceivable that he would not pull the same levers for his own son.31
Arthur was not keeping his personal journal at this point, so his private thoughts on the subject went unrecorded. Marian recognized that her husband had “an ambivalent attitude towards Harvard that was probably connected with the fact that he felt under his father’s pressure.” But at the same time, like an academic homing pigeon, whenever Arthur had been given the opportunity to fly off to new horizons, he always came back to the Harvard coop. At moments of extremity, whether suffering a crisis of identity at the end of his junior year, struggling with his book proofs in England, or facing an uncertain future after the Society of Fellows, it was always to Schlesinger Sr. that he turned. For all the intellectual exuberance of the early years and the scope of the Jacksonian project, he was now transformed into a registered PhD student without an academic appointment or higher qualification, struggling with a manuscript that was already too long, and reliant on the good offices of his father and the Society of Fellows, the latter of which now offered to extend his fellowship by an extra year.
In the end, Arthur’s ambivalence about Harvard was reconciled not by academic considerations but by life. Not only did he have a child on the way (twins as it turned out), but the world was transformed during his third year at the Society of Fellows. He had tuned in to listen to a Sunday afternoon concert given by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra on December 7, when “the radio suddenly blared out the unbelievable news” that Japanese forces had attacked Pearl Harbor. “An era came to an end,” he wrote later.
That was true for many in what Tom Brokaw later called the “Greatest Generation,” who would now face perhaps the bloodiest war in history. But for Arthur it also meant leaving home for the second time. In 1942, with his academic prospects sketchy, Arthur applied for a job in a newly created government agency, the Office of War Information (OWI). At the end of August, a week after twins Stephen and Katharine were born, Arthur received an offer. “We can [give] you a place here as a writer-researcher at $3200,” Henry Pringle, the chief of the OWI’s Bureau of Publications, wrote, “to start at your earliest convenience.” The Schlesingers were going to Washington.32
CHAPTER FOUR
A KNEE-PANTS GENIUS
With an executive order in June 1942, six months after the United States entered World War II, Franklin Roosevelt established the Office of War Information (OWI). The agency would soon become, even by the standards of Washington, DC, a snakepit of intrigue, competing interests, and sharp practice. The problem was a simple but perennial one for any democratic nation at war: how much can you propagandize your own citizens in the search for victory? The agency would provide Arthur Schlesinger Jr. with his first difficult lesson in the conflict between idealism and the hard realities of politics.
Schlesinger arrived in Washington in September 1942, leaving Marian and the newborn twins behind while he looked for a place to live. In the meantime, he stayed with Marian’s sister, Wilma, who was married to John King Fairbank, the “dean” of modern Chinese studies in the United States. Although Fairbank was ten years older than Schlesinger, the two men enjoyed a reasonably cordial relationship. Later they worked together in organizing the “non-Communist Left,” and Schlesinger would help when his brother-in-law was named in front of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS). “Fairbank greatly admired my father and the sentiment was very much reciprocated,” Arthur’s son Stephen later recalled. “I never saw anything in their relationship other than respect.” Even so, there was a slight condescension in Fairbank’s attitude, particularly after Arthur became famous. In Fairbank’s 1982 memoir, he wrote that Teddy White, in the same class as Arthur, was the “most exciting” student he came across in Cambridge. Teaching White was “like Fourth of July fireworks,” even if he had arrived at Harvard “without presenting letters of introduction, being au courant with the theater and books of the moment, having made the grand tour of major European capitals, and the other superficial frills.” The sideswipe at his brother-in-law, who in 1934 had returned to Harvard from his world tour replete with letters of recommendation, was obvious enough.1
By the end of October, Schlesinger had found a place for his family at 5353 Broad Branch Road, near Chevy Chase village in northwest Washington. The neighborhood resembled the familiar suburban surroundings of 19 Gray Gardens East in Cambridge. Schlesinger “rushed back” to Massachusetts to collect his family before returning with them to Washington’s Union Station, where the twins were pushed along the crowded platform by a porter cheerfully shouting “Make way for two of a kind!”2
At the OWI, Schlesinger joined the Writers Division, occupying the desk recently vacated by McGeorge Bundy, with whom his Harvard and his political careers would later become so entwined. There he ghosted speeches, memoranda, and letters, including those for presidential signature, quickly discovering that he was “deplorably adept at a ghostwriter’s duplicity.” He worked long hours, often late into the night, six days a week, but was sustained by the palpable esprit de corps among the tight knit group of writers. The Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Henry Pringle inspired reverence among his high-strung cohort of journalists and academics. “The spirit is extremely good,” Schlesinger reported home, with “all devoted to Pringle.”3
Pringle and the writers saw themselves not just as ghostwriters but as educators for a public they believed did not understand that the United States was “not yet more than ankle deep in this war.” To sharpen national awareness of the war, they published solemn pamphlets such as “Divide and Conquer,” which profiled Hitler’s plans, as well as those like “How to Raise $16 Billion,” which drew attention to the required sacrifices on the home front. Many of these pamphlets gave rise to public criticism, not least from a hostile Congress, which often saw them as propaganda, not for the United States but for FDR’s New Deal. It was not surprising, then, that Schlesinger’s first proper assignment should immediately have thrown him headfirst into the middle of an ongoing political row. Re
ports of public drunkenness among US soldiers had prompted demands for a ban on sales of liquor near military camps. Some even called for a return to Prohibition, inspired by World War I and repealed less than a decade earlier. Galvanized by this threat to the flourishing drinking culture of the OWI Writers Division, Pringle dispatched his young researchers around the country to investigate the graphic stories of intoxication and debauchery to see if they were true.4
Schlesinger traveled south on a sixteen-day tour of alcoholic duty, starting at Fort Bragg in North Carolina before heading down to Fort Benning in Georgia and Keesler Field in Mississippi, and then turning west to Fort Riley in Kansas, Fort Crowder in Missouri, and Fort Knox in Kentucky. “Our mission, we discovered not without pleasure, required frequent stops at local bars and night spots,” Schlesinger recalled afterwards. His notes at the time record visits to “crowded juke box joint[s] with a lot of soldiers dancing with a lot of cheap tarts.” “You bum!” his wife chided him after receiving his first letter home. “You sound as if you were suffering no hardships!”5
Reporting back to Pringle at the end of the trip, Schlesinger told him that “It is my judgement that the situation at present is thoroughly under control, and that the enactment of prohibition would enormously complicate the problems of the existing enforcement agencies.” Certainly many new recruits drank out of a combination of loneliness, ennui, and anxiety about the coming fight, but public concerns about poor conduct seemed to be mainly connected with rowdy train rides shared with soldiers at the start or end of their furlough. There were no recommendations to be made, because essentially there was no problem. “No American Army in all history has been so orderly,” Schlesinger and the other writers concluded in their “Coast to Coast Survey of Drinking Conditions in and around Army Camps.”6
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