Richard Hofstadter - Early Life and Education

Early Life and Education

Richard Hofstadter was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1916 to a German American Lutheran mother and a Jewish father, who died when Richard was ten. He was raised as an Episcopalian. He attended the Fosdick-Masten Park High School in Buffalo. Hofstadter then studied philosophy and history at the University at Buffalo, from 1933, under the diplomatic historian Julius W. Pratt. Despite opposition from both families, he married Felice Swados in 1936; they had one child. He was raised as an Episcopalian but later identified more with his Jewish roots. Antisemitism may have cost him fellowships at Columbia and attractive professorships.

From 1934 to 1939 Hofstadter was active in left-wing groups, including membership in the Young Communist League and (for less than a year in 1938-39) a member of the Communist Party. Although disillusioned by Stalin's deal with Hitler in 1939, and disgusted with the party's anti-intellectualism, he remained a fellow traveler into the early 1940s.

In 1936, Hofstadter entered the doctoral program in history at Columbia University, where Merle Curti was demonstrating how to synthesize intellectual, social, and political history based upon secondary sources rather than primary-source archival research. In 1942, Hofstadter earned his doctorate in history and in 1944 published his dissertation Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860–1915, a pithy and commercially successful (200,000 copies) critique of late nineteenth-century American capitalism and its ruthless "dog-eat-dog" economic competition and Social Darwinian self-justification. Conservative critics, such as Irwin G. Wylie and Robert C. Bannister, disagree with his interpretation. The sharpest criticism of Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860–1915 focused on Hofstadter's weakness as a research scholar: he did little or no research into manuscripts, newspapers, archival, or unpublished sources. Instead, he primarily relied upon secondary sources augmented by his lively style and wide-ranging interdisciplinary readings, this producing very well-written arguments based upon scattered evidence he found by reading other historians.