Richard Hofstadter example essay topic

The book The Age of Reform by Richard Hofstadter describes the last quarter of the nineteenth century known as the Gilded Age and Progressive eras, which exerted strong influence on American politics until the onset of World War I. It introduced Hofstadter!'s own ideas about the politics, which was that the people act less from pure economic self-interest than from a desire to preserve their social standing. He also showed the agrarian myth, and the dark side of the Populists in the late nineteenth-century, by described how they were scared of modernization, and longing for the agrarian past. Richard Hofstadter was one of the greatest scholars of American History. He was famous for writing history books about the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Richard was a professor in Columbia University, at the age of 27, which was in 1943, he began writing his books, including The American Political Tradition, Social Darwinism in American Thought, and The Age of Reform, which was his Pulitzer Prize-winner in 1955. In The Age of Reform, Hofstadter described the agrarian myth as a kind of homage that Americans have to pay to the fancied innocence of their origin.

Many articulate people, such as the philosophers, the poets, writers, and preachers, wrote about the farmers and farming. They believed that the yeoman farmers had a honest industry, and never exploit opportunities to make money. They admired the noncommercial, self-sufficient aspect of farmers! lives. Since then, the farmers had been ranked high in society for it!'s honesty, the quote (on pg. 27)! ^0 And Benjamin Franklin! -once said that agriculture was! ^0 the only honest way! +/- for a nation to acquire wealth, !

(R) wherein man receives a real increase of the seed thrown into the ground! -as a reward for his innocent life and virtuous industry, !! +/- showed how people thought that agriculture was the only honest way for nation to acquire wealth, and that farmer had a upright industry and an innocent life. But later, Hofstadter revealed that the farmers! lives were not as idealized as people thought it was. In fact, he argued that the farmers of the West were eager to become businessmen after the Civil War, when land and capital were cheap at the time. This quote (on pg. 33)! ^0 Thousands of young men! -that agriculture is not the road to wealth, to honor, nor happiness! -until our agriculturists become qualified to assume that rank in society to which the importance of their calling, and their numbers, entitle them, and which intelligence and self-respect can alone give them, ! +/- showed that the farmers were losing in status and respect comparing to the urban classes, and many were encouraged to become businessmen. Populism was the first modern political movement of practical importance in the Unites States to insist that the federal government has some responsibility for the common weal as Hofstadter described in the book.

It was indeed the first such movement to attack the problems created by industrialism seriously. The demands and complaints of the Populists scared many conservatives, because they thought it was radical, which turned out to be harmless or useful later on. But the utopia of the Populists was in the past, they longing for the early nineteenth century in which there were few millionaires and the laborer had excellent prospects and the farmer had abundance, and there were no such things as the big corporations or money powers. The Populists! main goal was to restore the conditions that were before the development of industrialism and the commercialization of agriculture, even though they didn! t mention it clearly.

This quote (on pg. 63)! ^0 Nature, as the agrarian tradition had it, was beneficent. The United States was abundantly endowed with rich land and rich resources, and the! ^0 natural! +/- consequence of such an endowment should be the prosperity of the people. If the people failed to enjoy prosperity, it must be because of a harsh and arbitrary intrusion of human greed and error, ! +/- which emphasized that failure to enjoy prosperity was because of the greediness of the big corporations, which emerged during the development of industrialism, and it also showed that in order to enjoy prosperity, we have to go back to the old agrarian past. Richard Hofstadter discussed in his book about the Populist as the third-party, which was in 1892, when the Populists formed the third-party, with General James B. Weaver as their candidate.

Their lecture (on pg. 66)! ^0 We meet! -in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political, and material ruin. Corruption dominates the ballot-box, the Legislatures, the Congress, and touched even the ermine of the bench. The people are demoralized!

-The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few, unprecedented in the history of mankind; and the possessors of these, in turn, despite the Republic and endanger liberty! -the destruction of civilization, or the establishment of an absolute despotism, ! +/- strongly emphasized that the money powers would be controlling everything, and that industrialized America was a threat to our freedom, and it would be an apocalypse to our society. Weaver only got 8.5 percent of the total votes, which as we know resulted in failure. As a third-party movement, the Populists were only limited to thinly populated mountain states that had discontent farming, and transportation problems. The middle-class people, who thought of the Populists as socialists and anarchists, were feared of them and clearly not willing to give them votes. This third-party movement was described as! ^0 the last phase of a long and perhaps a losing struggle-the struggle to save agricultural America from the devouring jaws of industrial America.!

+/- (On pg. 94) Richard Hofstadter used mostly primary and secondary resources to support his thesis, such as documents from the time period, and quotations from other books, for example, ! ^0 Lee Benson: The New York Farmers! Rejection of Populism: the Back ground, unpublished M.A. thesis, Columbia University, 1948. American Farmers had much in common ideologically, but such was the heterogeneity of American agriculture that their concrete interests often conflicted head-on. For an account of some of these differences see Herman C. Nixon: !

(R) the Cleavage within the Farmers! Alliance Movement, ! Mississippi Valley Historical Review, Vol. XV (June 1928) pp. 22-33.!

+/- I personally think that the writing of Hofstadter reflected the time period when the book was written, because the author had lived during the last decade of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, so unlike historians who wrote about events thousand years ago, he actually witnessed this historical event. Although Hofstadter was very effective in his writing and documentation, but his writing was full of his biased urban view. This book was mainly about his own ideas about the politics, and he didn! t view the Populists from a broader perspective, as a historian would do. Hofstadter, Richard. The Age of Reform. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968.