If a case for the book’s importance is needed, it is put well by Sean Wilentz in his own take on the Jacksonian revolution, The Rise of American Democracy. “Since The Age of Jackson appeared, a revolution in historical studies has focused scholars’ attentions on groups of Americans and aspects of American history that held minor interest at best in the historical profession in 1945,” he writes, pointing in particular to issues of Indian removal, race, and gender, all of which Schlesinger for the most part had ignored. “Yet if the social history revolution has profoundly changed how historians look at the United States, it has not diminished the importance of the questions The Age of Jackson asked about early American democracy,” Wilentz continued. “On the contrary, it has made those questions—especially about democratic politics, social class, and slavery—all the more pertinent to our understanding of the dramatic events that led from the American Revolution to the American Civil War.”9
Schlesinger himself over the years remained proud of the book, although he would later concede that it was a product of its time. “I well know the infirmities of the work,” he wrote in 1989. “History reflects the age.” In his 1938 Harvard undergraduate thesis, “Young Arthur” had praised Orestes Brownson for having the “courage” of “inveighing against the capitalist” when “most reformers of the day busied themselves with evils that were remote, like slavery, or largely speculative, like intemperance and sex inequality.” Half a century later, his regret, painful for a self-confessed liberal, was that “when I wrote The Age of Jackson, the predicament of women, of blacks, of Indians was shamefully out of mind.” But he stood over the basic argument of the book, despite the fact that “among historians The Age of Jackson has had its ups and downs.” Its principal value, he believed, “was that it helped awaken professional interest in a complex and abundant period of American history. It stirred controversy, and controversy is always fruitful for historians.”10
If “history reflects the age,” in the case of The Age of Jackson, it also reflects the man. In such a vast book, chock full of so many incidents, ideas, and characters, it is easy (perhaps too much so) to pull out examples and present them as autobiography. That said, The Age of Jackson does show the continuation of two very strong influences on Arthur—intellectual father figures, if you like, as well as a clear sense of his own developing historical philosophy.
The first of these father figures was a literal one: Schlesinger Sr., to whom Arthur acknowledged he remained “profoundly indebted . . . for his wise counsel and keen criticism.” On one level this debt had to do with the literary style passed from father to son: lapidary, companionable, and with a cheerfulness of tone that often hides the unconventional nature of the ideas; both Schlesingers shared an elegance of prose, even if the younger man’s was more forceful than his unostentatious father’s.
But beyond the command in writing, there was also an important continuity of ideas. Underpinning The Age of Jackson was a view about the cycles of history that Arthur Sr. had been writing about since 1924, and which he had set out most recently in 1939 in an essay, “Tides of American History,” in the Yale Review. Essentially, he identified alternating periods of roughly sixteen and one-half years in American history, as power cycled between liberalism and conservatism. The former, suggested the progressive Arthur Sr., increased democracy through concern for the wrongs against the many while the latter, he said, contained democracy by concern for the rights of the few. The return of conservatism at any given point usually meant acceptance of the changes made during the preceding liberal period.
Arthur would later write his own book on the subject, The Cycles of American History, but in 1945 his father’s view was used to help locate Jacksonian democracy in the broader sweep of the national story. “American history has been marked by recurrent swings of conservatism and liberalism,” Arthur wrote in a clear echo of his father. “During the periods of inaction, unsolved social problems pile up till the demand for reform becomes overwhelming. Then a progressive government comes to power, the dam breaks and a flood of change sweeps away a great deal in a short time. After fifteen or twenty years the liberal impulse is exhausted, the day of “consolidation” and inaction arrives, and conservatism, once again expresses the mood of the country, but generally on the terms of the liberalism it displaces. So with Jacksonian democracy.”11
Even more significant to the book was Arthur Sr.’s shifting of the focus in the rise of Jacksonianism away from the frontier. For the central thesis of The Age of Jackson was one that had been laid out two decades earlier by Arthur Sr. in his quietly seminal book, New Viewpoints in American History. Published in 1922, this book had put forward the thesis that Jacksonian democracy was as much a product of northeastern urban labor as the western frontier. “The aims of the organized labor elements harmonized with the new democratic aspirations of the age and did much towards vitalizing those aspirations,” Arthur Sr. wrote, continuing with the same flood image that Arthur would later use: “The labor movement reached its floodtide while Andrew Jackson was in office. Indeed, he could not have been elected president if the votes of the laboring men of the Northeast had not been added to those of his followers in the Southeast and the West. Jackson capitalized this support when he waged battle against the great financial monopoly, the United States Bank.” It would be both the starting point for The Age of Jackson and its conclusion. “We have seen,” Schlesinger Sr. wrote in the final chapter, “how the pat contrasts between country and city, honest farmer and demoralized laborer, were tripped up by the realities of Jacksonian politics.”12
If The Age of Jackson identified with the elder Arthur Meier Schlesinger—the name that young Arthur had adopted in his teens to honor his father—the book also showed the equal and opposite influence of the name that Arthur Jr. had abandoned, Bancroft. The historian and politician George Bancroft had fascinated Arthur since childhood. The presumed familial tie piqued his interest, but as Arthur began to take history seriously, he came to realize that Bancroft’s work offered a counterweight to that of his father and the limitations of Harvard. He had already shown his Bancroft colors in his 1940 essay “The Problem of Richard Hildreth,” where Bancroft was contrasted with the “pedestrian and annalistic” Hildreth. He returned to the theme in The Age of Jackson, which had originally started as a projected biography of his former namesake.13
It is not difficult to hear a resonance in the description of Bancroft. He was “too clever and too skeptical to accept the values of Boston . . . or to tailor his talents according to specifications laid down by Harvard or State Street [Boston’s “Wall Street”].” Like Arthur, “he went to Europe after finishing college” and, like him, “when he returned the Athens of America seemed flat and disappointing.” He taught, dabbled in politics, and remained “still the supercilious Harvardian.” What changed his life was the decision to write a sweeping history of the United States. “This determination to devote his life to such a history, which he conceived as the story of the invincible progress of human liberty, undoubtedly released his democratic prepossessions in full flood.” In 1834, the year he published the first volume of his History, Bancroft announced his conversion to the Democrats. Thought became father to the action. Although Bancroft’s “ambition led him to insincere flattery and insincere condemnation, to betraying his friends and aiding his enemies” (an accusation soon thrown at Schlesinger too), Bancroft’s authentic legacy was created by “the patient and conscientious devotion with which [he], laboring through the years, wrote his History.” The lesson of this devotion was clear, even if it came with risks: writing the history of the United States was not removing yourself from national politics; it could mean inserting yourself into them as an active player.14
Schlesinger’s actions over the next few months would give the clearest indication of how he would try to play this difficult game. On the one hand, reinforced by the success of The Age of Jackson, he was able to cement his place in the world of the academy, which offered
not just prestige but financial security—an important consideration when the Schlesingers had another child, Christina, on the way. Job offers now flooded in from schools across the country, including Yale, Chicago, Minnesota, and Johns Hopkins. But Arthur Schlesinger Jr. was always a Harvard man, and when that university came calling in April 1946 with the offer of an associate professorship (at that time the highest level of junior appointment), there was little doubt which institution he would pick.
As in the 1930s, when Arthur had chosen Harvard both as his undergraduate college and the place to carry out his (in effect) postgraduate research, the question remains why he did not look to cut the apron strings to his alma mater. It was not as if other elite offers were not on the table. To reinforce the point that he was still “Little Arthur” at the university, the Harvard Gazette in announcing his appointment printed his father’s vita rather than his. “Academic life will probably be confusing enough for both of you in the future without having Cambridge home talent, like the Gazette, complicate matters further,” the secretary to the Harvard Corporation, David Bailey, apologized afterwards to Junior. Bailey noted that Arthur Sr. had been “most good natured” about the slip.
Harvard postwar was on the verge of asserting its supremacy as the greatest, or certainly the most famous, American university. But in 1947, when Arthur actually took up his position, that outcome was not clear-cut. As Niall Ferguson points out in his biography of Henry Kissinger, who arrived as a freshman that same year, “Harvard in the fall of 1947 was an unwelcoming shambles.” Certainly that was the view of a visiting British don, Hugh Trevor Roper, who told the Harvard alumnus and art historian Bernard Berenson that “their standard of education is really very saddening. Harvard depressed me a great deal.” In the end, though, for Arthur, coming after a deeply unsettling wartime experience when his Harvard connections and friendships had consistently saved him from disaster, it was not surprising that he looked forward to the reassuring embrace of home. Marian, on the other hand, as another “Harvard child,” was less enthusiastic. “He is going to return to the academic trap, i.e. Harvard, where they have offered him an associate professorship,” she complained to her sister Wilma. “So I guess we end up in the same rat hole after all.”15
Before going down that hole, however, the Schlesingers deferred the financial security of Harvard for a year in Washington, which in the postwar environment now seemed—indeed was—the center of the world. The huge sales and media attention for The Age of Jackson had made Schlesinger a saleable asset. Grants came in from the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Numerous magazines and newspapers asked for columns and features. “Our plans seem to be these,” Marian finally summed up. “A. has been asked by [Eugene] Meyer of the Washington Post to write the history of the paper from 1932 and since A. wants to ultimately write a book about the Age of Roosevelt and much of the material will play right into it, he is in the process of accepting it (if Meyer will give him an unrestricted hand). He will also do some pieces for Fortune for which they will be paying him whopping prices.”16
In the end, Schlesinger decided to pass on the Washington Post project, telling Meyer that “I would best serve your own purposes as well as my own if I turned down the Post offer.” He said that the decision had come “after some soul searching.” In truth, his experience at OWI and OSS had taught him about the challenges of being a creative figure dancing to the bigger organizational tune. “He just decided he didn’t want to be subject to somebody,” Marian recalled. “I think that was it: he wanted to be his own master.”17
Not that writing for Fortune didn’t come with its challenges. The owner, Henry Luce of Time magazine fame, was known to take a high-handed approach with writers, and his editors followed suit. Schlesinger’s Harvard friend and classmate, Theodore White, had just resigned from Time because of just such interference by foreign editor Whittaker Chambers (soon to achieve notoriety as a Soviet spy and witness in the trial of Alger Hiss). Meeting Luce, Schlesinger was struck by “his combination of genuine intellectual curiosity about everything with stubborn resistance to changing his mind about anything.” Concerned, he sought out White, who reassured him that the level of interference at Fortune was less pronounced. In the first edition of Fortune, Luce had proclaimed that it would be “the Ideal Super-Class Magazine,” and a “distinguished and de luxe” publication. Such excellence demanded high-quality writing and with it an acceptance that writers there must be given more leeway. At $10,000 a year, Schlesinger was still a Luce employee, but one with considerable license to follow his own thoughts and instincts in order to capture the interest of the magazine’s target audience of high rollers and persons of influence.18
Arthur didn’t take long to deliver. He wrote several solid pieces on worthy topics such as the “Good Neighbor” policy in Latin America, but his first cause célèbre came with an article in January 1947 about the US Supreme Court. In many ways this seminal piece, which announced him as a genuine public intellectual, represents Schlesinger at his best. In the tradition of the kind of thought-provoking and deeply researched mid-century American journalism that demanded both style and seriousness of its writers, the article literally redefined the way to understand the Supreme Court.
Schlesinger set about interviewing all nine justices, including Felix Frankfurter, who, as a friend of Arthur Sr., had known Arthur Jr. since his childhood. “He duly showed up,” Frankfurter recorded in his diary of his meeting with Arthur for the magazine interview. “I asked him what he had done by way of reading and seeing people to equip himself for the job. He then told me what he had read, and he had read all the things that are worth reading. As to people—he had already seen every other member of the Court except the Chief Justice whom he is to see shortly.” It was another A+ for “Little Arthur” from Professor Frankfurter.19
Entitled “The Supreme Court: 1947,” the article profiled the nine justices (Vinson, Black, Frankfurter, Rutledge, Douglas, Murphy, Reed, Burton, and Jackson) and outlined the divisions among them on the “proper function of the judiciary in a democracy.”20 The pen portraits (Justice Reed: “nice, dull, friendly”; Justice Murphy: “his egotism is vast and somewhat messianic”) stripped the “supremes” of a little of their dignity and revealed them as men not without their vanities and petty jealousies. Even more significant, Schlesinger outlined the philosophical differences in how each of the nine approached the law and the alliances that had emerged within the Court. Although this was a “Roosevelt” Court, and as such the justices’ politics (with only one Republican) were not dissimilar, the legal differences were profound and important. “The conflict may be described in several ways,” Schlesinger explained:
The Black-Douglas group believes that the Supreme Court can play an affirmative role in promoting the social welfare; the Frankfurter-Jackson group advocates a policy of judicial self-restraint. One group is more concerned with the employment of the judicial power for their own conception of the social good; the other with expanding the range of allowable judgment for legislatures, even if it means upholding conclusions they privately condemn. One group regards the Court as an instrument to achieve desired social results; the second as an instrument to permit the other branches of government to achieve the results the people want for better or worse. In brief, the Black-Douglas wing appears to be more concerned with settling particular cases in accordance with their own social preconceptions; the Frankfurter-Jackson wing with preserving the judiciary in its established but limited place in the American system.
To the Black-Douglas school Schlesinger gave a name that would echo down the years: “judicial activist.” This camp, wrote the newly appointed Harvard professor, had its roots in the Yale Law School and believed that “the Court cannot escape politics: therefore, let it use its political power for wholesome social purposes.” In contrast, the champions of “Self-Denial” believed that “judicial despotism [threatened] the democratic process.”
Sch
lesinger then set up a dialogue between the two:
Self-denial has thus said: the legislature gave the law; let the legislature take it away. The answer of judicial activism is: in actual practice the legislature will not take it away—at least until harm, possibly irreparable, is done to a defenseless person; therefore the Court itself must act. Self-denial replies: you are doing what we all used to condemn the old Court [which opposed the New Deal] of doing; you are practicing judicial usurpation. Activism responds: we cannot rely on an increasingly conservative electorate to protect the underdog or to safeguard basic human rights; we betray the very spirit and purpose of the Constitution if we ourselves do not intervene.
This exchange, wrote Keenan D. Kmiec in the California Law Review during the period when he clerked for three justices on the Roberts Court, including the chief justice, “is remarkable for its prescience and timelessness. It has been replayed in slightly different words for decades in legal classrooms, public forums, and scholarly journals. Concerns about failures of the political process, basic human rights, and the ghost of Lochner [when the Court ruled in 1905 that a New York law setting maximum working hours for bakers was unconstitutional] are just as central and urgent [today] as they were in 1947.”21
Schlesinger’s coining of the term judicial activism made an important and lasting contribution both to legal scholarship and public debate. Kmiec judged almost sixty years later that Schlesinger had written “a thought-provoking, constructive, and balanced article on a topic of great public importance,” adding that “though current discussions of judicial activism often fail to live up to this high standard, Schlesinger gave the concept a promising start.”22
Contemporary figures in and around the Supreme Court may consider Schlesinger’s efforts thought-provoking, constructive, and balanced; the members of the Court in 1947 were less sanguine. Justice Reed was hurt to be described as dull. Justice Murphy protested to Fortune about a “highly distorted and inaccurate article,” and was widely rumored to be considering suing Schlesinger for libel. Even Felix Frankfurter was grumpy at “the many inaccuracies” and the difficult spot that guilt by association put him in with his fellow justices. “Young Arthur Schlesinger’s article in Fortune has apparently greatly disturbed Brother Murphy,” he wrote in a note to other members of the Nine, explaining that while “Young Arthur’s father is one of my close friends at Harvard,” he had neither seen the draft article nor gossiped about fellow members of the Court. At an initially difficult lunch a few weeks afterwards, Arthur reported home to Arthur Sr., Frankfurter “got the bile out of his system and became very genial.” As well he should, having been essentially the hero of the piece. It was another example of Arthur following the “home” line of Harvard and the world as seen through the eyes of those who were friends at 19 Gray Gardens East.
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