Examines the origin, elements, and evolving significance of the “tides” in the discourse of Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., is a historian and political advocate whose ideas and activities have significantly influenced the shape and direction of American liberalism during the past fifty years. A central feature of Schlesinger’s ideological perspective is his belief that American history has been marked by alternating periods of conservative and liberal dominance, which he has termed the “tides of national politics.” Throughout his career, Schlesinger has used the “tides of national politics” to defend the legitimacy and superiority of active liberal government and leadership.

The study investigates how the “tides” concept has functioned in both Schlesinger’s historical scholarship and his partisan political discourse. Depoe also explores the ways in which the “tides” concept has shaped and channeled Schlesinger’s political thought over time, leading him toward certain definitions of situations and away from others. Finally, Depoe offers Schlesinger’s life and work as a case study of the highs and lows of postwar American liberalism. By tracing Schlesinger’s responses to Eisenhower-era conservatism, Kennedy’s New Frontier, and the problems of Vietnam and violence during the 1960s, and the gradual delegitimation of liberalism from the 1970s to the present, this book offers a road map that can guide the reader toward a better understanding of the past, present, and future of liberalism in America.
 

We commonly think of the psychedelic sixties as an explosion of creative energy and freedom that arose in direct revolt against the social restraint and authoritarian hierarchy of the early Cold War years. Yet, as Fred Turner reveals in The Democratic Surround, the decades that brought us the Korean War and communist witch hunts also witnessed an extraordinary turn toward explicitly democratic, open, and inclusive ideas of communication and with them new, flexible models of social order. Surprisingly, he shows that it was this turn that brought us the revolutionary multimedia and wild-eyed individualism of the 1960s counterculture.

In this prequel to his celebrated book From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Turner rewrites the history of postwar America, showing how in the 1940s and ’50s American liberalism offered a far more radical social vision than we now remember. Turner tracks the influential mid-century entwining of Bauhaus aesthetics with American social science and psychology. From the Museum of Modern Art in New York to the New Bauhaus in Chicago and Black Mountain College in North Carolina, Turner shows how some of the most well-known artists and intellectuals of the forties developed new models of media, new theories of interpersonal and international collaboration, and new visions of an open, tolerant, and democratic self in direct contrast to the repression and conformity associated with the fascist and communist movements. He then shows how their work shaped some of the most significant media events of the Cold War, including Edward Steichen’s Family of Man exhibition, the multimedia performances of John Cage, and, ultimately, the psychedelic Be-Ins of the sixties. Turner demonstrates that by the end of the 1950s this vision of the democratic self and the media built to promote it would actually become part of the mainstream, even shaping American propaganda efforts in Europe.

Overturning common misconceptions of these transformational years, The Democratic Surround shows just how much the artistic and social radicalism of the sixties owed to the liberal ideals of Cold War America, a democratic vision that still underlies our hopes for digital media today.

In The Liberal Tradition in America (1955), Louis Hartz first put forth his thesis that the American political tradition derives essentially from consensual liberal principles. The many detractors to this theory include Bernard Bailyn, who argued that preliberal, republican values initially held sway in eighteenth-century American politics. In The Shaping of American Liberalism, David Ericson offers an innovative reinterpretation of both positions by redefining the terms of the argument.

Focusing on three critical debates in American history—the debate between Anti-Federalists and Federalists over the ratification of the Constitution; the debate between the national republicans and the states-rights republicans over the nullification of the tariff; and the Lincoln-Douglas debates over slavery and pluralist democracy—Ericson shows that republicanism, rather than being opposed to liberalism, is in fact an offshoot of it. His descriptions of republicanism and pluralism represent the poles of an evolving tradition of liberal ideas in America: the former championing the claims of the public sphere, general welfare, and civic virtue; the latter protecting the rights of the individual to liberty, property, and privacy.

Republicanism and pluralism are therefore more properly understood as two sets of competing ideas that evolved from common roots. Ericson concludes that although republican themes persist in American politics, the profound transformations brought about by the Civil War made the ascendancy of pluralism virtually inevitable.

This highly original discussion of the relation between liberalism and republicanism—the central concern of much of the recent scholarship in American political thought—will be important reading for those interested in American politics, history, and culture.