Thursday, March 1, 2007
Citizen Schlesinger
Mark Feeney, author of the Globe's obituary of Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., checked in this morning with word that he had a few more thoughts on the historian to share:
There are many things to be said pro and con about Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., who died of a heart attack last night in New York. You'd have to go back to Henry Adams to find a more graceful writer among American historians, and his "Age of Roosevelt" books solidified a template for our understanding of the New Deal that remains largely intact half a century later.
Of course, "The Age of Jackson" (1945), which won him the first of two Pulitzer Prizes, reads today like a brilliant backdating of the New Deal. Old Hickory, as portrayed by Schlesinger, seemed to have nothing to fear but fear itself. The same might be said of Schlesinger's portrayals of John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert -- except they come across as even more impressive than FDR. It's as if FDR, in the implicit Schlesingerian schema, is John the Baptist to . . . well, you get the idea. It's not for nothing that Garry Wills labeled Schlesinger a "Kennedy courtier." "A Thousand Days" (1965), his book about JFK, may have won Schlesinger a second Pulitzer, but it soon came to seem more like roseate apologia than objective history.
For better or worse, Schlesinger's association with the Kennedys will forever define his career. Now only Robert S. McNamara and Ted Sorensen remain from the higher echelons of Camelot. Yet Schlesinger belonged to another starry, if less prominent, group with roots in Cambridge: the scholars at Harvard in the 1930s and '40s who all but created the field now known as American studies.
Schlesinger was a generation younger than Perry Miller and F.O. Matthiessen and Samuel Eliot Morison, slightly younger than Daniel Aaron and Henry Nash Smith, and slightly older than Edmund S. Morgan and Leo Marx. But the intellectual influence of that group is hard to exaggerate, and far from the least among them was Schlesinger (a Harvard faculty brat, whose namesake father was a noted historian in his own right). Their senior member now is Aaron, who at 94 still goes into his Harvard office each weekday morning, and whose memoir, "The Americanist," the University of Michigan Press will publish this spring.
If any one work defined that Harvard cadre, it was Matthiessen's "American Renaissance" (1941), which among many other things celebrated the deeply democratic impulse in American culture. That impulse was something Schlesinger embraced in his life as well as work. His donnish bow ties and frequent appearances in the New York society pages gave him an aristo air. But he listed his number in the Manhattan White Pages. He answered his own phone and always had time for journalists' questions. That willingness to respond owed something to a fondness for seeing his name in print, yes, but even more it was indicative of a vision of scholarship that rejected any idea of an ivory tower and saw it as a vital part of the life of the republic. Think of it as a sort of civic equation: scholar + courtier = citizen.
--Mark Feeney
[Updated 5:05pm]
Posted by John Swansburg at
12:15 PM
