Why Schlesinger mattered

In an essay on historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., who died Wednesday, political scholars John Patrick Diggins and Michael Lind recall a well-known chestnut about the professor who became a "Prince of Camelot" during John F. Kennedy's presidency.

The perennially bow-tied, horn-rimmed star historian, who won his first Pulitzer Prize at 28 for The Age of Jackson (1945), proved himself a key Kennedy operative in getting Adlai Stevenson supporters to back JFK in 1960. Appointed a special assistant to the president, Schlesinger supposedly walked into the Oval Office in January 1961 for a meeting with his new boss, shook his hand, and said, "I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be doing here."

"Neither am I," the new president reportedly quipped.

But Schlesinger did know what he wanted to see happen in the Kennedy presidency. As he observed in The Age of Jackson: "During periods of inaction, unsolved social problems pile up till demand for reform becomes overwhelming. Then a liberal government comes to power, the dam breaks, and a flood of change sweeps away a great deal in a short time."

Schlesinger, the last wholly unapologetic liberal, wanted to be present at the dam break of his generation. If you wonder why an octogenarian American historian commanded front-page attention in newspapers at his death, it's partly that "between left and right" perspective. For many decades, Schlesinger's view of politics and America's past - he titled his 1949 manifesto for a postwar American liberalism The Vital Center - largely defined liberalism as a centrist political position for a certain well-educated and traditionally powerful Northeastern elite.

Precocious in all intellectual matters - a Harvard graduate before age 21, member of its prestigious Society of Fellows immediately afterward - Schlesinger Jr. took on the "tides of national politics" approach to his field (the notion that waves of conservative or liberal domination alternate in American history) introduced by his father, Harvard historian Arthur Schlesinger Sr., and won fame by concretizing it.

He did it by reading Andrew Jackson's presidency as a forerunner of FDR's New Deal achievements - an earlier case of a heroic liberal figure, steering and inspiring America from the top to new feats of reform and democracy. As Jackson scholar Robert Remini wrote, Schlesinger's class-based analysis "offered something new and exciting" to young historians then ritually interpreting the American past through Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis and Charles Beard's focus on economic causality.

In doing so, Schlesinger highlighted fundamental questions about whether national government favored one class - the business class - over others, and the overarching question of whether that government governs best that governs least. His insistence on drawing lessons from the past for the present proved hugely influential.

Schlesinger's admiration for pragmatic wisdom and strong national leadership made him an important centrist figure in cultural and political wars from the 1940s on. Anticommunist, anti-Stalinist, anti-McCarthyite (in the '50s), anti-Old-Left, anti-New-Left, Schlesinger favored pragmatic, empirical, experimental approaches to politics in the style of such heroes of his own as William James and his contemporary, theologian Reinhold Niebuhr.

Yet if Schlesinger had never ventured beyond his professorial chairs, it's doubtful he'd have reached household-name status. Whether cofounding Americans for Democratic Action in 1947 to pull together non-Communist liberals, or writing speeches for Stevenson, or accepting invitations from top national publications to size up the American political scene, Schlesinger provided an early model of how academic intellectuals can play a role in America's political trenches. He once commented that "American historians spend too much time writing about events which the whole nature of their lives prevents them from understanding. Their life is defined by universities, libraries, and seminars."

Yet right up to The Disuniting of America (1991), a tart critique of multicultural identity politics, Schlesinger still provoked scholars with his most serious long-form work. The quality of his scholarship kept his political activism or journalistic popularizing from eclipsing his proper image as a serious thinker. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., in short, invented the modern American role of "public intellectual" before the phrase took hold.

Schlesinger shared some blindnesses of his generation. His 1950s writings about America ("Poverty has receded from the forefront of our national life") sound as color-blind as those of other white historians. But that old-fashioned focus - his insistence that ideas connect to power in American history "from the top down," that scrutinizing decisive leaders remains key to understanding historical change - remains a challenge to young social historians.

"The heroic leader," Schlesinger wrote, "has the Promethean responsibility to affirm human freedom against the supposed inevitabilities of history. As he does this, he combats the infection of fatalism which might otherwise paralyze mass democracy." For Schlesinger, a democratic society without heroic leaders would simply "acquiesce in the drift of history."

Oh, yes. He knew why he wound up in the Oval Office that day. And he'd very much understand why he made the front page after his death.