Schlesinger

by Richard Aldous

  He left on June 20, enduring “a somewhat rough flight,” before transferring to Biebrich, a suburb of Wiesbaden in Hessen. His new office was located in the Henkell Trocken factory, which, despite its associations with the Nazi foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, was still producing bottles of sparkling wine on a daily basis. Schlesinger and his OSS colleagues were billeted in a house with views of the Rhine that had “very much the atmosphere of a college fraternity.” At last, Schlesinger was back in his Ivy League comfort zone. Even Charles Wintour was nearby at the SHAEF HQ in Frankfurt, where the two friends soon met for “drinks, dinner and an evening of imbibing some excellent Moselle.”22

  Frankfurt brought Schlesinger face to face with the destruction that Allied bombing wrought. His Harvard tutor, Perry Miller, who was also in Germany, had shown “positive delight” in seeing German cities in ruins. Schlesinger did not share that sense of jubilation, but surveying the coverage and magnitude of the aerial bombardment, he did “still tend to feel a certain satisfaction in seeing how low the sons of bitches who talked so big a few years back have been laid.” Even ordinary Germans still evoked intense feelings of suspicion and mistrust. “How does one feel about the Germans?” he asked. “My general reaction thus far is that I continue to hate their guts.” Most he found “sullen, smug and stubborn,” an assessment reinforced by his job, in which he “assisted in interrogation of enemy prisoners.”23

  In July, Allan Evans, a medievalist from Yale, invited Schlesinger to return to London to coordinate R&A reporting on politics in Britain, where a general election had just taken place. The position in many ways ideally suited Schlesinger. Not only did he have a strong interest in the British political world, where he could use a new expense account to consolidate his “business political contacts with probable post-war value,” but a condition of the move was that he would serve for only three months before returning to the United States.24

  To some it might have appeared unseemly to use the war effort to promote his own postwar interests. Certainly that was how it looked to his colleagues in Wiesbaden. On July 21, Schlesinger faced his branch chief, Harry Rositzke, “a very intelligent and hard hitting guy” who would later become the first chief of the CIA’s Soviet division. Rositzke lost no time in letting Schlesinger know what he thought about a potential return to London, accusing him of prioritizing “personal preferences to the detriment of the national interest.” Schlesinger protested that his job in Germany really didn’t amount to much. “Well there would be a job if you wanted one and were not satisfied with simply discharging the day’s work,” Rositzke fired back. Afterwards, Schlesinger admitted, “There is some truth in this. I have never been fully committed to any job I have had in OSS.”25

  “I am not really an organization man,” he explained to Marian. “I have a certain unhappy knack at administration, particularly at handling paper . . . but I probably will never be able to put my full energy into anything unless (a) it is a writing job, and (b) it is altogether my own.” It was an important moment of self-awareness. “This is a conclusion which I must remember,” he reflected. “Otherwise I can see the postwar world as a succession of well-paying, high-pressure jobs . . . in which I would draw a good salary, expend a lot of physical and nervous energy and be basically frustrated and unhappy, as basically I am now.”26

  On August 12, with his tail between his legs, Schlesinger left for London, which he found “foggy and drab as ever.” Three days later, Japan announced its surrender (“I rushed back to bed and slept”). The end of the war was good news for Schlesinger in that it was likely to hasten his return to the United States, but it also meant that his promising London job dwindled to nothing. “It is very annoying to have to have an artificial job now that the war is well over,” he groused. To while away the time, he began using the OWI Library, which in his current mood did little to raise his spirits. Reading American political commentary was “nauseating,” particularly the pro-Soviet views of the liberal magazines. His developing anti-Communist fervor would preoccupy him in the postwar world. Reading the scholarly magazines was even worse, albeit for more personal reasons. “I find myself overflowing with that strong resentment possessed by people who have been overseas for a considerable period,” he railed, “toward those lucky bastards who remained, made a lot of money and captured secure places in their various professions.” It was, he complained, “extremely annoying.”27

  Arthur’s petulance continued throughout that summer of 1945 and into the fall, as he focused his energy on getting home. With his lowly army rank compromising his status within OSS, he lived in constant fear that “most of these sons of bitches will be so concerned with saving their own futures that they may very well overlook such minor details as me.” Familiar doubts lurked about the OSS hierarchy in Washington, not least that “Langer’s sympathetic approach to my problem will certainly result in my staying over the maximum.” Any vague concerns turned to real ones on September 20, 1945, when President Truman dissolved OSS. Even though the R&A Branch was transferred to the State Department, it looked for a brief moment as if Schlesinger might be released back to the army, with the unhappy possibility of serving as a noncommissioned officer in an army of occupation. When the news was announced, in utter despair, he telephoned Marian, and “doubtless I sounded somewhat distraught.” In the end, he managed to “beat a freeze order by a nose [and] I am slated to leave 7 October on a Liberty ship.” It was welcome news for Marian that her husband would be home; Arthur could not have known when he wrote that her father, Walter Cannon, had died that day in Franklin, New Hampshire.28

  Writing to Marian before he knew about her loss, Arthur had cautioned her in somewhat callow fashion about what to expect on his return. “I am profoundly tired, very antisocial, somewhat irritable; and all I really want to do is to go off with you and the babies,” he wrote. “If there are pressing decisions to be made, they will have to be delayed until I am rested up. I do not want to accept any responsibility or whip up any initiative until I am feeling very much better than I am now.”29

  The journey across the Atlantic to Baltimore took almost three weeks. Schlesinger passed the time sleeping, playing bridge with other GIs (“those who had been to college gravitated to one another”), and eating steak twice a day. The wartime experience had not been a happy one for him. It exposed many of his contradictions that goaded those with whom he crossed political and academic swords in the postwar world. He was both a small “d” democrat and a snob; his clever, ironic personality could also be waspish and peevish. Physically and mentally exhausted, demoralized and unsure of his future, Arthur passed a disheartening twenty-eighth birthday. “I am beginning to lose that feeling of being a bright young man on which I have coasted for so long,” he had written to Marian before his departure. “I am getting toward thirty without much accomplished, apart from my distinguished achievements in the fields of matrimony and paternity, and I would like to stop marking time.”30

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE AGE OF SCHLESINGER

  Waiting in London two weeks before his return to the United States in October 1945, Arthur Schlesinger had written to his wife in a “somewhat distraught” condition. He regularly shared with her complaints about his “miserable” wartime experience in which he had been ground down by the bureaucratic infighting of OSS and the drudgery of life in the United States Army. Aside from the thought of his young family at home in Washington, DC, only one thing seems to have kept him going: Little, Brown was about to publish his new book. “I am looking forward to all the reviews,” he told Marian in a rare burst of optimism, before adding, “I hope the god damn book sells.” In fact, The Age of Jackson would exceed all of Schlesinger’s most hopeful expectations.1

  The most important reviews that came in even before he left England set the tone for what followed. Orville Prescott for the New York Times praised The Age of Jackson as “an original, brilliant and monumentally massive historical work” and drew a moral from it:
“that Jacksonian democracy was not only democratic but the lineal and spiritual ancestor of the Rooseveltian New Deal.” Two days later, on September 16, the book was the cover review in the New York Times Sunday Book Review. The choice of Columbia historian Allan Nevins as reviewer was in many ways a lucky one for Schlesinger. In the years after the publication of The Age of Jackson, Columbia University would emerge as the center of a counternarrative, explicitly anti-Schlesingerian, on the Jacksonian period. But in 1945, Columbia historian Allan Nevins was in London as chief public affairs officer at the American embassy. His office at No. 1 Grosvenor Square was precisely 0.1 mile, or a two-minute walk, from Schlesinger’s OSS office at 36 Brook Street. To say that a bad review in the New York Times would have been socially awkward for both men, working virtually next door to each other and running into one another at the popular Causerie buffet inside Claridge’s Hotel, is an understatement. Luckily or otherwise, Nevins judged The Age of Jackson to be “a remarkable piece of analytical history, full of vitality, rich in insights and new facts, and casting a broad shaft of illumination over one of the most interesting periods of our national life,” even if it “sometimes rides its thesis a bit too hard.”2

  Glowing notices in the commercial press and academic journals followed these two reviews in the New York Times. The praise flowed from those who had taken an interest in Schlesinger since his youth, including Bernard DeVoto and Charles Beard, and from contemporaries, including Richard Hofstadter. A year older than Schlesinger, Hofstadter was exhilarated by The Age of Jackson, a work that would act as an important spur to his own historical thinking and eventually produce a counterblast in 1948 when he published The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It. His review for New Republic was glowing. “At a time when such a heavy proportion of second-rate or downright shoddy historical writing is being widely praised and widely read, it is a pleasure to report on a book like this and find oneself part of a general chorus of approval,” he purred. “Mr. Schlesinger’s book is a major contribution to American historiography.” The one dissenting voice amid that chorus of approval, tucked away in the Journal of Economic History, was from the financial historian Bray Hamilton, who in 1945 was an assistant secretary to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors in Washington, DC. He conceded that the book was “important and abounds in excellences” but was highly critical of Schlesinger’s “manichean naivete with respect to the nobility of all things Jacksonian and sordidness of all things opposed.” Hamilton disparaged the “fumbling treatment of economic matters and particularly of the Bank of the United States.” That was a theme to which Hamilton would return in his influential book Banks and Politics in America from the Revolution to the Civil War.3

  Sales of The Age of Jackson were spectacular for an academic study. The book was serialized in the New Republic and was a top pick for the Book Find Club. It quickly entered the New York Times bestseller list, where it stayed for twenty-five weeks, selling 90,000 copies in the first year of publication. The following spring put the cap on Schlesinger’s achievement when The Age of Jackson won the 1946 Pulitzer Prize for History. At only twenty-eight years old, he was thought to be the youngest historian ever to win the prize. Given the critical and popular success of the book, few caviled that he deserved the honor, although as always in his career there had been a few familiar, or more accurately familial, nudges behind the scenes on his behalf. Arthur Schlesinger Sr. had been a member of the history advisory committee for the Pulitzer Prize since 1937. In 1946, he officially withdrew once it became clear that “my son’s Age of Jackson was in the running,” but it is impossible to believe that his fellow committee members were immune to his influence even in his physical absence. It was another example of Bernard DeVoto’s maxim that his “meek and mild” friend dominated “every committee he gets on.” In 1938, the senior Schlesinger had secured the prize for his PhD student, Paul Buck. In the two years after Arthur won in 1946, James Phinney Baxter III, who had been master of Schlesinger’s house at Harvard, and then DeVoto himself both won the Pulitzer. Doubtless Schlesinger’s lobbying for his son and The Age of Jackson was subtle, not least because the book spoke for itself. But winning the prize was another instance of Arthur Jr. living on the inside track, a placement that had served him well throughout his rise to national prominence, so often giving him a head start in an always competitive race.4

  The scope and style of the book was audacious. Neither a biography of Andrew Jackson nor a history of his administration (in fact President Martin Van Buren features more strongly than “Old Hickory”), The Age of Jackson is, as Donald B. Cole points out, six closely woven essays on the intellectual history of the period. These move from the background of Jacksonian democracy to the president’s campaign to destroy the Second Bank of the United States, before examining Jacksonian democracy at the local level and in the context of civil society, culture, industry, and the law, and concluding with a look forward to the Jacksonians in the American Civil War.5

  Underpinned by vast research and written with great panache, The Age of Jackson was generational history at its most powerful and persuasive. Each essay supports and reinforces Schlesinger’s argument that the East was a major force in Jacksonian democracy. Stylistically, the book is populated by colorful, often witty, sometimes moving, sketches not just of the main political players, but other familiar faces—Bancroft and Brownson, of course, but also leading artists and writers of the day such as James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Cullen Bryant, Washington Irving, Walt Whitman, James Kirke Paulding, the actor Edwin Forrest, the sculptors Horatio Greenough and Hiram Powers, as well as hundreds of lesser known figures who were brought back to life and shown, when taken together, to form an identifiably Jacksonian worldview.6

  Franklin D. Roosevelt, the president who had died a few months before the book was published, loomed in the shadows throughout the entire text of The Age of Jackson. Schlesinger, still in Paris at the time, had been stunned by the “inherently incredible” news of FDR’s demise. “With all his faults,” he wrote to his parents, “he was an extraordinary man, and this was no time for him to go. Stalin or Churchill might have been much more easily spared.” Schlesinger’s admiration for Roosevelt went back to his school days at Exeter, when he had been one of the few Democratic supporters during the 1932 presidential election. When Roosevelt came through the town, Schlesinger excitedly lined up to see him, amid other boys shouting out support for Herbert Hoover. In school debates, he spoke for Roosevelt and “made a lot of sarcastic statements about Herb.” When one Republican supporter suggested that Washington freed the country, Lincoln the slaves, and Hoover the working man, Schlesinger retorted, “Yeah. Hoover freed the working man from his home and his possessions.”

  Now in The Age of Jackson Schlesinger presented the New Deal as the culmination of the liberal tradition in which “the Jeffersonian case for weak government” was rejected in favor of “executive vigor and government action” on behalf of all the people and against vested interest. To ram home the point, Schlesinger quoted on the last page of his book Roosevelt himself, that “this heritage . . . we owe to Jacksonian democracy—the American doctrine that entrusts the general welfare to no one group or class, but dedicates itself to the end that American people shall not be thwarted in their high purpose to remain the custodians of their own destiny.”7

  Here is not the place to engage with the historiographical debates that would surround The Age of Jackson throughout the rest of the twentieth century and beyond. To demonstrate its professional impact, it is enough to point out that by the 1970s historians polled about the most influential book of the postwar era chose The Age of Jackson. Furthermore, two of the next three books on the list were revisionist works that The Age of Jackson inspired. Although the book, along with political and intellectual history more generally, would fall out of fashion shortly thereafter, it remained a touchstone for the study of nineteenth-century America, even if sometimes a negative one. In 2
009, more than sixty years after its publication, a review by Daniel Howe in the New York Review of Books was still asking whether new titles under review meant “Goodbye to the ‘Age of Jackson’?” A new generation of academic historians such as Jonathan H. Earle in Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil began to rehabilitate some of the ideas set out in The Age of Jackson. And the victory of a new kind of popular politics in the 2016 election drew commentators back to both the age of Jackson and to The Age of Jackson. “Andrew Jackson represented a farmer-frontier-worker rebellion against the eastern establishment who had maintained control for over a generation,” former House Speaker and Donald Trump surrogate Newt Gingrich told the Washington Post during the campaign, comparing the Republican nominee to Andrew Jackson. “The elites disliked him so much he got bad press for a century until Schlesinger’s ‘The Age of Jackson’ rehabilitated him.”8