Schlesinger

by Richard Aldous

  Twice in his review, Leuchtenburg reached casually for religious language to rebuke Schlesinger, suggesting that he had become “the captive of a theological interpretation of history which views America as swaying between two traditions—one liberal, one conservative,” and that in The Crisis of the Old Order “he has presented a morality play.” Other critics of the book, such as Arthur Page, who famously drafted President Truman’s statement on the dropping of the first atomic bomb at Hiroshima in August 1945, used similarly religious language, believing it to be a New Deal “hagiography.”16

  The term hagiographer and its like were ones that would be thrown around a great deal later in Schlesinger’s career, particularly in relation to his books on President John F. Kennedy and the president’s brother Robert Kennedy. By the time, for example, Schlesinger was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 1999, the Financial Times ran a profile under the headline “Loyal Keeper of the Kennedy Flame,” which described how “Arthur Schlesinger has defended Kennedy’s reputation at no little cost of his own. . . . He has been denounced as a ‘servant,’ a ‘poodle’ and one of the US’s ‘more purchasable intellectuals.’ ” Similarly when Schlesinger signed a letter against the impeachment of President Clinton as part of a grouping called Historians in Defense of the Constitution, the contrarian critic Christopher Hitchens (himself no stranger to accusations of being a sellout) noted scathingly in The Nation that Schlesinger “was not known to me before as a historian of any kind, but [he] presumably squeezed in as a composer of profiles in Democratic opportunism.” Schlesinger liked to treat such attacks as a humorous part of the game. “I have not enjoyed such a fusillade for a third of a century,” he quipped nonchalantly in 1999, “it makes me feel young again.” But when friends like Princeton professor Sean Wilentz balanced the unflattering remarks of others with their own judgments that “He is the great liberal Democratic intellectual of our time,” Schlesinger took the time to note down such a “nice quote” in his journal, implying that he was less immune to the barrage of criticism than he liked to pretend.17

  Contemporary writers were using “hagiography” and “Manicheanism” in a general vernacular sense rather than in any specific scholarly way. Although “hagiography” in particular has become a term of abuse today, Schlesinger’s work does have indirect parallels with older notions of the idea. Saints’ lives (vitae) of the fourth or fifth century such as Athanasius’s Life of Antony or Sulpicius Severus’s Life of Martin demonstrated how a holy existence could be transformed into a powerful literary form and widely disseminated, spreading a saint’s reputation and influence. What gave a life coherence was not so much its details or structure but its purpose. “Every hagiographic work is ‘an exercise in persuasion,’ ” writes historian Robert Bartlett, “and its purpose was to persuade the reader that its subject was a saint.”18

  On one level, The Age of Roosevelt, like The Age of Jackson, had a fairly straightforward ideological agenda coming out of Progressive history. Both projects were in some senses intellectual and political tributes to Arthur Sr. But unlike his father, Arthur Jr. was a public intellectual. He believed in the uses of history and in useful history. That instinct, which was present right from the outset in Orestes Brownson, had been accentuated by the wartime experience and writing The Vital Center. Schlesinger did use pseudo-religious language, but the spiritual enterprise for this atheistic historian was to influence the battle he saw going on between the forces of light and darkness in postwar America and in the Cold War. That was his purpose. “The book, if it is any good,” Arthur told his friend Joseph Rauh, “will serve the liberal cause.”19

  For Schlesinger the character of the president was instrumental. “A cheerful strength radiated from him,” Schlesinger writes of FDR, which roused in others “exhilaration and a sense of their own possibilities.” He could “communicate confidence by the intonation of his voice, the tilt of his head, the flourish of a cigarette holder.” His depths were such that “beyond the screen, the real Roosevelt existed in mystery, even to himself.” His eyes were “friendly but impenetrable, the smile genial but non-committal, the manner open but inscrutable—all signified the inaccessibility within.” The inner man was “tougher than the public man, more ambitious, more calculating, more petty, more puckish, more selfish, more profound, more complex, more interesting.” Roosevelt had been through his own time of trial with poliomyelitis in 1921, a “brush with death [that] increased his joy in living” and “developed in him latencies and potentialities that gave him a new power, a new sympathy, a new self-control, a new specific gravity.” Taken all together, “Franklin Roosevelt was a man without illusions, clearheaded and compassionate, who had been close enough to death to understand the frailty of human striving, but who remained loyal enough to life to do his best in the sight of God.”20

  In volume II of The Age of Roosevelt, Schlesinger set about showing the works that the new president had wrought. The stakes in 1933 were high, “a matter of seeing whether a representative democracy could conquer economic collapse . . . even (at least some so thought) revolution.” Again religious imagery came to the forefront. “Faith in a free system was plainly waning.” Roosevelt’s first hundred days provided “resurgent hope.” The new president sent fifteen messages to Congress, pushed through fifteen major laws, delivered ten speeches, gave press conferences and held cabinet meetings, undertook talks with foreign leaders and sponsored an international conference, “made all the major decisions in domestic and foreign policy, and never displayed fright or panic and rarely even bad temper.”

  “His mastery astonished many who thought they had long since taken his measure,” Schlesinger writes of the president at the end of those first hundred days. “Norman Davis, encountering Raymond Fosdick outside the presidential office, expressed the incredulity of those who had worked with him during the Wilson administration. ‘Ray, that fellow in there is not the fellow we used to know. There’s been a miracle here.’ ”21

  The “miracle” of the hundred days began the process of healing “a people who had lost faith.” A raft of legislation and reforms followed in the next two years, including a new farm policy, experiments in industrial policy such as the National Recovery Administration, the rise of federal relief, public works and social security, the development of a national labor policy, and attempts at controlling the stock exchanges. By the time of the midterm election in 1934, the New Deal achieved what Arthur Krock in the New York Times described as “the most overwhelming victory in the history of American politics”—and certainly the best result for a sitting president since the Civil War. “It shows how faithful the American people are to the true spirit of democracy,” William Randolph Hearst, owner of the nation’s largest newspaper chain, wrote afterwards to Roosevelt.22

  “Make no mistake,” Schlesinger quotes Carl Jung saying after seeing FDR in 1936, “He is a force.” Those who despised the president did so not “from honest opposition” but from “an emotion of irrational violence, directed against Roosevelt’s personality rather than his program.” This hostility shared “not just a common psychopathological impulse but a common social source,” namely, “the American upper class.” It was, Schlesinger said, “a disease of the rentier class” made worse for them in constituting “apostasy” by “one of their own.” Ordinary people, however, admired Roosevelt. Portraits “now stood on the mantle” as icons, because “FDR cared for people, battled for them, and exulted in the battle.” His was the image of “human warmth in a setting of dramatic national action which made people love him.”23

  Behind Roosevelt’s force, Schlesinger concludes in the final pages of The Coming of the New Deal, lay a sense of providence. “I doubt if there is in the world a single problem, whether social, political, or economic,” FDR himself wrote, “which would not find ready solution if men and nations would rule their lives according to the plain teaching of the Sermon on the Mount.” To which Schlesinger adds, “If nothing ever upset him, if his confide
nce seemed illimitable, it was because he deeply believed, with full reverence and humility, that he was doing his best in the eyes of God, that God was blessing his purpose, that he was at one with the benign forces of the universe.”24

  When the book came out in January 1959, reviewers followed its author’s lead in maintaining this religious language about Roosevelt. “What anni mirabiles they were!” Henry Steele Commager exclaimed in the New York Times Sunday Book Review. Furthermore, he pointed out, “In the last analysis—so Schlesinger concludes—the energies that fed him [FDR] were moral,” adding his own judgment that “however clever, however elusive and indirect he was in tactics, his grand strategy was always simple and clear: it involved faith in the triumph of the right, faith in the ability of men to overcome evil and achieve peace and dignity.”25

  Reviews of The Coming of the New Deal were more consistently positive than for the previous volume, The Crisis of the Old Order. Two clear themes emerge from these notices. First, the new book was elegantly and persuasively written. Reviewers marveled that he had produced another volume so quickly without apparently having compromised on quality. “It is possible that other energetic scholars could accomplish as much work in the same interval,” Orville Prescott observed in the Times review. “It is unlikely that many could have done it so well, for Mr. Schlesinger is a writer as well as a historian.” Therefore the “brightly entertaining” book was written with “skill and dash.” Academic reviewers, who might have sniffed out more weaknesses, instead concurred. “There is no evidence of shoddy writing,” George C. Osborn glowed in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, “of any lack of acquaintance with the materials, of any conclusions hastily drawn.” Other reviewers praised the “sparkling” way in which characters were brought to life, “the literary talents and orderly intelligence” that could pull off “history with appropriate ingredients of narrative, drama, biography, analysis and interpretation,” and the “first-rate piece of historical writing” that made The Coming of the New Deal such a “highly readable narrative.” Few, if any, would have doubted by 1959 that Schlesinger was established as a leading, perhaps the preeminent, contemporary stylist writing American history.

  The second theme to emerge was that whereas many reviewers of the first volume of The Age of Roosevelt felt that Schlesinger had crossed a line into political partisanship, most saw him stopping just short of that line in this new volume. “Although essentially favourable to the New Deal,” G. M. Craig wrote in the International Journal, “this second volume is less of an anti-Republican tract than was the first.” It was a view echoed in the American Historical Review, where Robert E. Burke noted, “If Schlesinger’s sympathies are clearly with his hero throughout, in this volume he seems less partisan than in the introductory one. He affords little aid and comfort to the anti-New Dealers, but he does permit them to state their cases.” Other reviewers pointed out that there was “never any doubt” about Schlesinger’s feelings about the New Deal, and even complained he was “too ready” to explain the New Deal through “the Roosevelt personality.” But the broad tone of the reviews matched that of Commager in the Times, who proclaimed of The Age of Roosevelt, “spacious and monumental in form, scholarly and authoritative in character, spirited and affluent in style, it promises to be one of the major works in American historical literature.”26

  The week after that rhapsodic review appeared, Schlesinger’s publisher Houghton Mifflin threw a book party for him in Manhattan. Schlesinger was already on a high by the time he arrived to celebrate, having just met one of his childhood idols, Greta Garbo, at the home of a mutual friend, the journalist John Gunther. (“She is the greatest actress ever to play in the movies,” Arthur gushed to his children. “I had somehow expected her to be older, but . . . her face is as young and lovely as a girl in her twenties.”) After the Houghton Mifflin party, attended by friends ranging from Averell Harriman to Teddy White, the Schlesingers headed out to Idlewild (now JFK) Airport to catch a flight to England; Arthur was taking Roosevelt on tour.27

  The occasion was the 1959 Commonwealth Fund Lectures at University College London, for which Schlesinger would deliver a series of eight talks on “Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Coming of the War”—essentially the first reading of ideas for the proposed fourth volume of The Age of Roosevelt. It was in many ways an evocative invitation, as Arthur Sr. had delivered lectures in the same series in 1934, taking Arthur Jr. with him as part of a round-the-world tour that made such a dramatic impact on the boy. It was just before that trip that Arthur Bancroft Schlesinger had legally changed his name to Arthur Meier Schlesinger Jr. in honor of his father; now two decades later, he was following in his father’s footsteps, not just as the Commonwealth Fund Lecturer, but doing so, like his father, as a professor of history at Harvard. Arthur had dedicated The Coming of the New Deal to his parents. It was left to his more demonstrative mother to express what that dedication meant to the couple. “I just wanted to tell you again how supremely happy we are over your great success,” she wrote to him that month. “Your tribute to us, so unexpected and cherished, gave us a joy which I hope you will experience in your turn and when it comes you will really understand what great happiness it has brought us.” The more taciturn Arthur Sr. demonstrated his appreciation by agreeing to come out of retirement to cover his son’s classes at Harvard while Arthur was in London. “It was like an old horse returning to pasture!” he quipped.28

  The relationship between father and son—the “bloodstock stable”—was one that caught the attention of the London press in their coverage of the lectures. “Dr. Arthur Meier Schlesinger, second of his name and line to be professor of history at Harvard, had shouldered his way to the front rank of his profession before he was 30,” gushed a profile in the Times, “and now at 41 he has a row of brilliant yet solid books behind him.” For the Observer, he was an “important American prophet in London now, Professor Arthur M. Schlesinger Junior, professor of history at Harvard, not to be confused with Professor Arthur M. Schlesinger Senior, former professor of history at Harvard.” The slightly irreverent Observer profile, which appeared under the headline “Charm and Bourbons,” went on to describe Schlesinger as “a smallish, birdlike man with the quicksilver quality . . . of great charm, no chips on shoulder, and a capacity for warm friendships and very large Bourbons on the rocks.”29

  This last phrase drew a quick apology from the columnist “Pendennis”—in reality the bohemian socialite Philip Toynbee, himself a famous alcoholic and the son of an eminent historian (Arnold Toynbee). “I wrote that ‘Pendennis was surprised and delighted by the size of the whiskies which were offered,’ ” he explained. “This was transformed, but by a piece of irritating editorial shorthand, into a tiresome implication that you yourself are a gargantuan drinker. I hope you’ll forgive this!” Schlesinger lightly brushed it off, but writing home to his family, he did express puzzlement at “increasingly grim and fatuous” publicity. “Do I strike any of you as smallish? birdlike?” he asked his children, but did not neglect to tell them to pass along the clippings to Grandpa and Grandma Schlesinger.30

  Aside from the lectures, “London University leaves me alone,” Schlesinger cheerily reported home, but “no one else does, and we are now at a point where we have no lunch or dinner free for the rest of our time here.” Poor Marian “goes to so many luncheons, cocktail parties and dinners that she says she is tired all the time.” Arthur on the other hand thrived on the attention and the company, which blended academia, politics, and the arts. (“Lunched with Lady Pamela Berry,” notes a typical daily report. “Present were Hugh Gaitskell, Isaiah Berlin, and Mr. and Mrs. Graham Sutherland. . . . Later in the afternoon we went to a party given by Encounter for the Stephen Spenders, who were leaving for the US. Graham Greene was there.”)31

  As well as time in the capital, Schlesinger made trips to both Oxford and Cambridge, where he continued the pattern of lecturing a little and socializing a lot. For all the agr
eeable company in both universities, including dinner with the likes of good friend Isaiah Berlin, Maurice Bowra, and A. J. P. Taylor at Oxford, and a happy return to Peterhouse, Cambridge, Arthur nevertheless felt a certain ennui about these academic towns in comparison to London. “Each visit,” he told his father, “confirms me in my belief that it would drive me mad to spend an entire year at either of these institutions.”32

  This apparently off-hand comment marks the beginning of a shift in Schlesinger’s attitude toward academic life, one in which his professorship gradually became little more than a useful title, a salary, and a means to store his books. The Commonwealth Lectures, strikingly in his letters, are the element of his stay in England that seemed to interest Schlesinger the least. In part this was because the broad topic was foreign policy, with lectures on isolationism, relations with Britain and Russia, and policy in the Far East. Schlesinger’s lack of enthusiasm flags a longer-term difficulty in engaging with FDR’s foreign policy that later would make completing The Age of Roosevelt such a troubling, almost existential, experience for him over several decades. Arriving now at University College London on the day of the first lecture, “I realized with all these dignitaries, the lecture would have to be rewritten and rushed back and added a few new bits.” In the end, Schlesinger had “no idea how it went.” Not all the lectures had even been written, and having been “busy for luncheon, dinner and usually cocktails every day” he “only got round” to working on each one at the last minute. In the end the most memorable aspect of visiting UCL was not giving the lectures, but viewing the preserved body of Jeremy Bentham, utilitarian founder of the college, whose unusual predicament—his corpse on display, fully dressed, and sitting in his favorite chair—Arthur took delight in describing in grisly detail to his children, not least the philosopher’s head, “which is kept in a mummified state in a box nearby.”33