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Search for the American Right Wing
An Analysis of the Social Science Record, 1955â"1987
By William B. Hixson Jr. PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1992 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-08623-1
CHAPTER 1
The New American Right: "McCarthyism" as "Status Politics"
In 1955 a collection of essays appeared that attempted to locate support for McCarthy in a broad social and historical perspective. Entitled The New American Right, it was primarily designed as a series of answers to the question of who supported McCarthy and why. The seven contributors to the book were men on the threshold of major intellectual influence: Daniel Bell, former managing editor of the New Leader and at the time labor editor of Fortune and lecturer in sociology at Columbia; Richard Hofstadter, professor of history at Columbia and author of Social Darwinism in American Thought and The American Political Tradition; David Riesman, at the time professor of social science at the University of Chicago and author of The Lonely Crowd, Faces in the Crowd, and Individualism Reconsidered; Nathan Glazer, associate editor of Commentary and collaborator with Riesman on The Lonely Crowd; Peter Viereck, professor of history at Mount Holyoke and author of Metapolitics: From the Romantics to Hitler as well as of books of poetry, one of which had received the Pulitzer Prize in 1949; Talcott Parsons, professor of sociology at Harvard, one of the leaders of the dominant functionalist school in American sociology and author of The Social System, Towards a General Theory o f Action, and other books; and Seymour Martin Lipset, at the time associate professor of sociology at Columbia and author of Agrarian Socialism.
The above descriptions, adapted from the biographical notes at the beginning of the book, would seem to suffice for the authors' backgrounds. But we cannot begin to account for either the influence the book exerted, or the controversies that continue to surround it, without pursuing the matter further. For a book that would become one of the seminal works in the study of contemporary American social movements and political behavior, it is remarkable that none of the authors was a political scientist, that at the time only two of the contributors (Parsons and Lipset) had Ph.D.s in sociology, and that only one of the historians (Hofstadter) specialized in American history. Bell and Glazer would receive their doctorates within a few years and eventually end up as professors at Harvard, but at the time the world in which they moved was not primarily that of the university and scholarly monographs, but that of the political/literary weeklies and quarterlies. And Riesman had never been trained as a sociologist at all: he was a graduate of Harvard Law School who had served as clerk for Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis and as deputy assistant district attorney in New York.
What these men had in common and what gives the book its power is a certain style, far more characteristic of freewheeling intellectuals than of specialized scholars, which Irving Howe has acutely described as "the style of brilliance," a style characteristic of those he was among the first to call "the New York intellectuals." Unlike the traditional article in the social sciences which moves steadily, if not always gracefully, from a statement of the problem and review of the existing literature, through the author's hypothesis, a description of methodology, and an explication of the data, to a conclusion, the articles in The New American Right moved in a somewhat different direction. They bear far more resemblance to the kind of essay Howe saw as the product of the "New York intellectuals" : one "wide-ranging in reference, melding notions about literature and politics, sometimes announcing itself as a study of a writer or literary group but usually taut with a pressure to 'go beyond' its subject, toward some encompassing moral or social observation." Reading Viereck's identification of the McCarthy supporters with the French Jacobins of 1793, or even Hofstadter's relocation of the concept of "the authoritarian personality" in immigrant families struggling for social acceptance, one is reminded of Howe's discussion of the implications of this "style of brilliance" : "a certain view of the intellectual life: freelance dash, peacock strut, daring hypothesis, knockabout synthesis. ... the idea of die intellectual as anti-specialist, or as a writer whose speciality was the lack of a speciality: the writer as dilettante-connoisseur, Luftmensch of the mind, roamer among theories."
It is true that the focus of Howe's essay was primarily on the literary critics associated with Partisan Review and Commentary, but it is also true that the essays in The New American Right all appeared in whole or in part elsewhere, and that the journals in which they appeared — not only the Partisan Review and Commentary, but the American Scholar, Encounter, and the Yale Review — were more closely associated with literary criticism and with the New York intellectual community in general than with specialized scholarship in the social sciences. (Significantly, only one essay — Lipset's — had appeared in a "scholarly" publication, the British Journal of Sociology.) It is not too much to say that the strengths and weaknesses of this "style of brilliance" associated with New York intellectuals determined the reception of the essays in the book: their conceptual confusion and lack of empirical data in support of their conclusions made them easy targets for scholars of more conventional academic backgrounds; but at the same time, their sweep, their brilliance, what Howe would call their "dazzle," continued to attract and inspire other scholars eager for new angles of perception.
As Bell noted in his introductory essay, although the other essays in The New American Right had already appeared in print, "they showed a remarkable convergence in point of view." "To an extent, then," he wrote, "this is a 'thesis' book" (Bell 1955, 16, 4). Can we extract such a "thesis" from the book? If so, it might run as follows:
1. Senator McCarthy's career represented more than simply one demagogue's exploitation of fears about domestic Communists against a background of high tension with the Soviet Union and open warfare with China. Such an explanation, according to Bell, "fails to account for the extensive damage to the democratic fabric that McCarthy and others were able to cause on the Communist issue — and for the reckless methods disproportionate to the problem." Nor did calling him a demagogue explain his unusual choice of targets: "intellectuals, Harvard Anglophiles, internationalists, the Army." Implicit in all the essays was the idea that "McCarthy has to be understood in relation to the people behind him and the changed political temper which these groups have brought. He was the catalyst not the explosive force. These forces still remain" (Bell 1955, 14, 17).
2. The forces behind McCarthy were not truly conservative, as their increasingly open hostility to the Eisenhower administration made clear. They constituted a movement of the "radical right": radical both because "it desires to make far-reaching changes in American institutions, and because it seeks to eliminate from American political life those persons and institutions which threaten either its values, or its economic interests." As individuals, members of this "radical right" expressed "a profound if largely unconscious hatred of our society and its ways"; as such they conformed to the psychologists' model of the "pseudo-conservative," the person who "in the name of upholding traditional American values and institutions and defending them against those more or less fictitious dangers, consciously or unconsciously aims at their abolition."
3. The most suggestive way to account for the social origins of these "pseudoconservatives" was through adaptation of the idea of "status politics." Thus the famous dichotomy of the book: between "interest politics, the clash of material aims and needs among various groups and blocs" (Hofstadter) or "class politics, ... the discord between ... those who favor redistribution of income, and those favoring the preservation of the status quo" (Lipset), on the one hand, and "status politics" on the other. "Status politics" represented "the clash of various projective rationalizations arising from status aspirations and other personal motives" (Hofstadter) and took the form of "political movements whose appeal is to the not uncommon resentments of individuals or groups who desire to maintain or improve their social status" (Lipset).
4. "In the United States, political movements or parties which stress the need for economic reform have usually gained strength during times of unemployment and depression." On the other hand, "status politics" becomes salient" in periods of prosperity ... when many individuals are able to improve their economic position," and characterizes both those rising groups "frustrated in their desire to be accepted socially" and those groups believing their superior status to be in jeopardy (Lipset 1955, 168).
5. Since "the basic aspirations that underlie status discontent are only partially conscious ... it is difficult to give them a programmatic expression. ... Therefore, it is the tendency of status politics to be expressed more in vindictiveness, in sour memories, in the search for scapegoats, than in realistic proposals for positive action" (Hofstadter 1955a, 44). Notable American examples of past political movements based on "status politics" were the Know-Nothings of the 1850s and the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s.
6. Not surprisingly, then, the 1950s, like the 1850s and the 1920s a period of prosperity, saw the reappearance of "status politics" in the form of support for McCarthy, or what might better be called "McCarthyism." "The intense status concerns of present-day politics are shared by two types of persons who arrive at them, in a sense, from opposite directions. The first are found among some types of old-family, Anglo-Saxon Protestants, and the second are found among many types of immigrant families, most notably among the Germans and Irish, who are very frequently Catholic. The Anglo-Saxons are most disposed toward pseudo-conservatism when they are losing caste, the immigrants when they are gaining" (Hofstadter 1955a, 44; see also Lipset 1955, 195).
7. "Both the displaced old-American type and the new ethnic elements that are so desperately eager for reassurance of their fundamental Americanism can conveniently converge upon liberals, critics, and nonconformists of various sorts, as well as Communists and suspected Communists," who thus take the place of racial and religious minorities scapegoated by earlier movements expressing "status politics" (Hofstadter 1955a, 50–51).
Stated in this manner the arguments in The New American Right have a certain attractive simplicity about them, which would account for the hold of "status politics" on subsequent scholars. Many of them further concluded that the book's "thesis" was that McCarthyism was the expression of the "status" anxieties of specific groups in the population. That may be true of the book as a whole; it is not necessarily true of the individual contributions. Upon closer examination it would be fair to say that among them only Hofstadter had such a coherent theory. For him at least the sources of McCarthyism lay in the anxieties experienced by the upwardly mobile descendants of recent immigrants, intensely pressured individuals who turned their suppressed rage against imagined "subversive" adversaries, including the leaders of their own government.
The application of "status politics" by the other contributors to The New American Right was far less focused. As the above quotations suggest, Lipset also utilized "status politics" as an explanation o f McCarthyism; but he added so many other factors in his discussion — including the economic situation of small businessmen, the ethnic origins of isolationists, and the traditional anticommunism of the Catholic hierarchy — that the reader is left wondering whether he believed "status politics" was the central explanation of McCarthyism or merely one of a number of explanations. Parsons saw McCarthyism as representing not only the "status politics" of the upwardly mobile but also a more diffuse resentment on the part of the business community at having its leadership challenged by politicians and intellectuals. In the hands of Riesman and Glazer, "status politics" was broadened to include all those who, whatever their ethnic background, had undergone "a fast race from humble origins, or a transplantation to the city, or a move from the factory class to the white-collar class" (Riesman and Glazer 1955, 67). With Viereck, on the other hand, the concept was narrowed to its crudest component, making it almost synonymous with envy: "McCarthyism is the revenge of the noses that for twenty years of fancy parties were pressed against the window pane" (Viereck 1955, 93). Not surprisingly, therefore, the chief conceptual problem of the book (even aside from the empirical problems raised by the authors' interpretation of historical and behavioral evidence) soon became clear: "status politics" was so variously interpreted that it became a catch-all, leading one exasperated reviewer to protest that this was "multidimensionality run riot. When we know so much we know scarcely anything."
Only two published studies tested the hypotheses of The New American Right through empirical investigations of patterns of support for McCarthy, and both provided only a partial confirmation of those hypotheses. The first was a study of attitudes toward McCarthy in Bennington, Vermont, undertaken by Martin Trow at the height of the senator's visibility in 1954 (Trow 1958). From his sample he concluded that, insofar as "authoritarian" attitudes revealed themselves in opposition to freedom of speech for radical leftists (a connection assumed by Hofstadter and some of the others), the correlation between such attitudes and support for McCarthy was largely a statistical artifact — the supporters of McCarthy were simply less educated than his opponents. Once education was held constant, however, his opponents were as "authoritarian" as his supporters: they simply preferred to ferret out "subversives" within an established framework and tended to identify with McCarthy's targets, "responsible" officials in the federal bureaucracy.
Trow's major argument was that McCarthy supporters in Bennington were disproportionately self-employed, and that a McCarthyite response on the part of small businessmen came from their allegiance to what he called "nineteenth-century liberal" ideology, hostile both to unions and big business. That ideology in turn reflected their fear of trends toward economic concentration, bureaucratization, specialization, and their lack of organization in meeting those threats. By implication, however, the threat posed by the trends Trow described were to the income and power of these small businessmen far more than to their prestige, and so status considerations were not applicable. On two key points, then, Trow challenged the specific arguments in The New American Right: he found that "authoritarianism" did not automatically translate into support for McCarthy, and that class considerations, not status considerations, determined the support of small businessmen. On two other points, however, the general tone of The New American Right was confirmed: McCarthy's support was due in part to his image as defender of "the little guy," and in the case of the most prominent group of supporters in Bennington, the small businessmen, his support was clearly reactionary, opposing the dominant trends in social and economic organization.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Search for the American Right Wing by William B. Hixson Jr.. Copyright © 1992 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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