Richard Hofstadter

American · 1916 to 1970

Born on August 6, 1916, in Buffalo, New York, to Emil Hofstadter, who was Jewish, and Katherine Hill Hofstadter, a Lutheran of German descent who died when Richard was ten, he grew up between two faiths that never fully claimed him. He attended Fosdick-Masten Park High School, then the University at Buffalo, studying under the diplomatic historian Julius W. Pratt, before moving to Columbia University for his doctorate, awarded in 1942 under Merle Curti. In 1938 he joined the Communist Party, saying simply, "I don't like capitalism and want to get rid of it," only to resign the following August after the Hitler-Stalin Pact, disillusioned by the Moscow Show Trials and what he came to see as the party's rigid, doctrinaire mind. He had married Felice Swados, sister of the novelist Harvey Swados, in 1936, and their son Dan was still a boy when Felice was diagnosed with cancer. According to his friend Alfred Kazin, Hofstadter wrote much of The American Political Tradition (1948) on a pad in her darkened sickroom, unable even to see the words he set down; Felice died before the book was finished. He married Beatrice Kevitt in 1947 and joined Columbia's history faculty around the same time, eventually becoming DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History and directing more than a hundred doctoral students, Eric Foner and Lawrence Levine among them. His later books turned to the psychology of political life: The Age of Reform (1955) and Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963) each won a Pulitzer Prize, and The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1965) gave American political language one of its most enduring phrases. He died of leukemia on October 24, 1970, at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan, at fifty-four, midway through a planned three-volume history of American society, of which only the first book, America at 1750, was finished.