The term The Vital Center was first coined by Harvard historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., in his 1949 book of that title. He himself objects to the domestic use of the phrase, though:
"Vital center" refers to the contest between democracy and totalitarianism, not to contests within democracy between liberalism and conservatism, not at all to the so-called "middle of the road" preferred by cautious politicians of our own time. The middle of the road is definitely not the vital center: it is the dead center. Within democracy the argument adheres to FDR's injunction to move always "a little to the left of center."
— Arthur Schlesinger, from "Introduction to the Transaction Edition" of The Vital Center (page xiii, 1998 edition)
U.S. President Bill Clinton started to use the phrase "vital center" in speeches given during his term of office. Schlesinger wrote an article for Slate magazine noting that Clinton hoped to appropriate this term to mean "middle of the road" or something that his "DLC fans" might prefer its meaning to be, which would locate it "somewhere closer to Ronald Reagan than to Franklin D. Roosevelt". In the Slate article, Schlesinger strongly rejected this interpretation of the term, and reiterated his argument from the 1998 introduction:
In my view, as I have said elsewhere, that middle of the road is definitely not the vital center. It is the dead center.
— Arthur Schlesinger, "It's My Vital Center", Slate magazine
Famous quotes containing the words vital and/or center:
“The philosopher is in advance of his age even in the outward form of his life. He is not fed, sheltered, clothed, warmed, like his contemporaries. How can a man be a philosopher and not maintain his vital heat by better methods than other men?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)