Columbia University in the City of New York | New York 27, N.Y.

OFFICE OF THE SECRETARY

July 20, 1965

Mr. Norman H. Pearson
Yale University
New Haven, Connecticut

Dear Mr. Pearson:

I am enclosing the identification card
requested in your letter of the 13th to Mr. Lane.

JS

Edward B. McMenamin
Secretary of the University

18 June 1963

Dr. Stanley Coben
340 Haven Avenue
New York 33, New York

Dear Dr. Coben:

I am delighted to learn of your election as chairman of the University Seminar in American Civilization for next year. I write, however, not simply to congratulate you but also to explain that I shall be leaving for Japan in September and will not return to this country until February at the earliest. I shall be interested in having notices of the meetings after that time but until then my absence will be unavoidable.

hrd

[dictated by Mr. Pearson, but signed in his absence]

UNIVERSITY SEMINAR IN AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
New York 27, N. Y.

April 5, 1963

Dear Sir:

The next meeting of the Seminar will be held Wednesday evening, April 17th, at the Men's Faculty Club of Columbia University, beginning at 6:00 P. M. Dinner will be served at 6:45 P. M.

Professor Stanley Coben of Hunter College will lead the discussion of August Hollingshead's *Elmtown's Youth: the Impact of Social Classes on Adolescents*, (Science Editions).

Please return the enclosed card so that dinner reservations may be made.

Columbia University

Minutes of meeting of March 20, 1963

Present: James Baxter (Cornell Medical)
Walter Bezanson (Rutgers)
Stanley Cohen (Hunter)
Robert Cross (Columbia)
Herbert Gans (Pennsylvania)
Clyde Griffen (Vassar)
William Hutchison (American)
Marvin Leavitt (Reed)
Kenneth Morgen (Wales)
Warren Susman (Rutgers)
Frank Tannenbaum (Columbia)
Bernard Wishy (Columbia)

Professor Cross began his discussion of Gerhard Lenski's *The Religious Factor* by noting that throughout American history observers of American religious life have been impressed by its great diversity. At the same time they have emphasized the common acceptance of certain fundamental themes of American life by these various denominations. A good sectarian like Cotton Mather declared in a sermon, "Good Men United", which he preached at the First Baptist Church in Boston, that anyone who shared a pious outlook was essentially Christian and all other questions were extraneous. Tocquivelle observed that all denominations supported two fundamental assumptions of the democratic experiment, republican government and the enterprising spirit. Well before Herberg he saw American Catholicism as sharing in these assumptions implying that Catholicism together with Protestantism were denominations of a common American Church. Whatever pluralism there was, was a superficial, surface phenomenon; denominational affiliation led to no profound commitment to a particularistic view of American life.

The American Church History Series of the 1890's was written in this spirit. Though each volume dealt with a different denomination the obvious assumption was that all groups shared central social ideals. This was made explicit in the summary volume by Leonard Bacon, *American Christianity*. William W. Sweet, though differing in his theological views, accepted this thesis. In his *Religion and American Culture* a general statement of religion's impact on some area of American culture precedes sub-sections detailing the work of each denomination. Richard Niebuhr in *Social Sources of American Denominationalism* dealt with religious differences as epiphenomenal of certain external forces and not as significant in themselves. Reinforcing these views which minimize the importance of religious differences, are those general arguments which point to urbanization, education and the increasing development of middle class status as factors reducing further the significance of denominational particularities. With Herberg, Catholic, Jew and Protestant become denominations supporting a common "American way of life."

In the field of religious sociology we have been far behind the intensive work which has been going on in Europe and especially among French and Belgium Catholics. Rather than focus on Church or denomination as we have, the emphasis has been shifted to an area or community and an effort made to discern not what formal role religion plays but what shape religious values take. Lenski's book is in this tradition. He raises the question of the impact of religion. Though his method is overly simple it is a first step in emancipating us from the old categories. Other religious sociologists, for example, have developed a more complex typology of degrees of participation than Lenski's two categories, associational and communal participation. Nor is his distinction between different kinds of religious personalities, dogmatic-orthodoxy and devotionalism, convincing in the

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light of the rather poor questions which elicited the supporting data. Yet it is
a step in the right direction.

Several methodological problems deserve to be mentioned. It would appear
that reliance on the interview technique in measuring the religious factor intro-
duce a large measure of distortion. Everyone is listed as Protestant, Catholic or
Jew and the analysis is robbed of any non-religious grouping which could serve as
a control group. In formulating his questions Lenski assumed everyone is in some
sense religious. The reported differences are then bound to be differences between
one religious group and another. This error is magnified when only two categories,
associational and communal, are used. The technique of his inquiry allows only for
recognizing the prevalence of certain areas of common religious assumptions or dif-
ferences which are to be ascribed primarily to religious differences. Missing is
some analysis of behavior. A person's attitude to unions can hardly be deduced by
merely recording his reply to a question on that score.

Some of Lenski's conclusions which may serve to launch our discussion are:

1) Denominations as a category for analysis are no longer useful. Lenski replaces this with the larger category of Protestant - Catholic - Jew with one cross-correlation for race. He sees correlations like ethnic origin as being less important and believes the factor of religious differences is or will become as important as class differences.

2) Religious groups ara becoming more, rather than less, differentiated.
In this conclusion Lenski runs athwart the assumptions historians have usually made.

3) On any given secular issue the alignment between groups varies. The very
fact that you cannot make a continuous assumption is the final justification for
viewing these groups as fundamental, social groupings in American life.

Lenski's contribution to our discussion of American pluralism is that the
area of shared suppositions is narrower than people had argued previously and that
the differences in religious affiliation, associational or communal, is more im-
portant than we had assumed. If Lenski is right American pluralism has a more
divisive quality than previous writings had supposed.

The discussion opened with one member describing Lenski's analysis as built
on a spider web. The distinctions between associational and communal, orthodoxy
and devotional, his formulation of questions were all too vague and imprecise to
allow one to accept conclusions based on such assumptions. Continuing in a critical
vein another member pointed out that the book turned upon the assumption that it
was possible to draw clear distinctions between characteristics which were deno-
minated as secular and characteristics which were denominated as religious. Could
one validly identify, for example, devotionalism as distinctly religious and not
secular when the questions used to elicit the information for such a judgment
asked how frequently one prayed and if one asked God to make one's decisions. Do
such questions measure the phenomenon called devotionalism or the extent to which
religion is becoming more secular and cultural rather than transcendental?

In responding to the criticism several discussents struck a more moderate
position. One speaker felt that the book was frankly polemical and was attacking
Marxist sociologist straw-men. Once one accounted for this, however, one could say
that Lenski had succeeded in showing the considerable effect of the religious
factor on attitudes and behavior. True, his formulation of association and com-
munal lacked subtlety but it was nonetheless useful in discriminating between belong-

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ing to a church or to a religious sub-culture. Another member felt that Lenski may
have had in mind two generations of historians who have viewed American religion
since 1865 as uninfluential, following and not leading in social and intellectual
developments. Another member offered his conditional acceptance of the Lenski book
by remarking that though one could criticize many of its details, taken in its
totality the *Religious Factor* offered a valid corrective to our conceptions of
religion pluralism in America. Herberg's model placed consensus rather than plu-
ralism at the heart of American religious life. Whatever pluralistic characteristics
existed were decidedly peripheral. No real issues were posed to be eventually re-
conciled by mediating forces as in the Dewey conception. Lenski has given us data
indicating pluralism does operate in American society.

The discussion returned to a re-examination of the particular with members
offering examples which in their opinion placed in doubt the reliability of Lenski's
generalizations. Lenski concluded that certain values which Catholics held hindered
their effectiveness in individual, competitive endeavor. Could one not draw an
equally valid conclusion that such values were advantageous in circumstances of
large, corporate enterprise? Lenski concluded that Catholics value obedience above
intellectual autonomy. His supporting evidence consisted of figures which showed
that 90% of White Protestants in the upper middle class valued intellectual autonomy
more highly than obedience while only 70% of upper middle class White Catholics
shared this view and in the upper working class the corresponding figures were 66%
and 51%. Can you say that 70% of the upper middle class and 51% of the upper working
class is a basis for concluding Catholics prefer obedience? Furthermore, in res-
ponse to the question, do you have the right to make speeches criticizing the
President, many who answered the interviewer in the negative undoubtedly exercised
that right. How reliable, then, is the statistical return on that question as an
indication of attitude towards civil liberties? Another speaker dealt with the
possibility that the framework and ethos of religion may be merely the front behind
which factors which are primarily economic or ethnic play the dominant role.

The meeting concluded with some members till feeling that with reservations
as to individual conclusions, Lenski had shown the religious factor to be fundamen-
tal to our social reality.

UNIVERSITY SEMINARS - NINETEENTH ANNIVERSARY

Cocktails and Dinner Meeting

Wednesday, April 24, 1963

at 6:00 p.m.

at the Men's Faculty Club

400 West 117th Street

It has become customary for members and friends of the University Seminars to have an annual meeting for an informal discussion of questions related to this developing movement. You are, therefore, cordially invited to cocktails and dinner at the time and place indicated above.

UNIVERSITY SEMINARS: 1962-63

* THE STATE

* THE PROBLEM OF PEACE

* ORIENTAL THOUGHT AND RELIGION

* THE RENAISSANCE

* RURAL LIFE

* CONTENT AND METHODS IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

* LABOR

* DEVELOPMENT OF PRE-INDUSTRIAL AREAS

* EIGHTEENTH CENTURY EUROPEAN CULTURE

* HIGHER EDUCATION

* PUBLIC COMMUNICATION

* ORGANIZATION AND MANAGEMENT

* IN A DYNAMIC SOCIETY

* PROBLEMS OF INTERPRETATION ("HERMENEUTICS")

* LANGUAGE AND COMMUNICATION

* AMERICAN CIVILIZATION

* MEDIEVAL STUDIES

* THE ROLES OF THE HEALTH PROFESSIONS

* STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY AFRICA

* POPULATION AND SOCIAL CHANGE

* ECONOMICS OF DISTRIBUTION

* CLASSICAL CIVILIZATION

* MODERN EAST ASIA: CHINA

* MODERN EAST ASIA: JAPAN

* MATHEMATICAL METHODS IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

* GENETICS AND THE EVOLUTION OF MAN

* STUDIES IN THE NEW TESTAMENT

* POWER AND SOCIAL STRUCTURE

* INTERNATIONAL COMMUNISM

* THE ATLANTIC COMMUNITY

* THE CITY

* THE IMPACT OF TECHNOLOGY ON SOCIETY

The reports of various Seminar Chairmen will be followed by a

**DISCUSSION**

of

The University Seminars and The Community at Large

by

**DONALD B. STRAUS**

Adjunct Associate Professor of Administrative Medicine,
Columbia University
President, American Arbitration Association
Member, University Seminar on Labor

**EDWARD L. BERNAYS**

Counselor on Public Relations
Member, University Seminar on Public Communication

**HONORABLE MUHAMMAD ZAFRULLA KHAN**

Chairman, Pakistan Mission to United Nations
President, General Assembly of United Nations
Member, University Seminar on The Problem of Peace

Closing remarks by
**LAWRENCE H. CHAMBERLAIN**

Vice President of the University

R.S.V.P.
409 West 117 Street
New York 27, N. Y.

Columbia University

Minutes of meeting of December 19th, 1962

Present:
Stanley Coben (Hunter)
Lawrence Cremin (Columbia)
Robert Cross (Columbia)
Ruth Miller Elson (Finch)
Lillian Fischer (Brooklyn)
Charles Forcey (Douglas)
Edgar Friedenberg (Brooklyn)
Herbert Gans (Pennsylvania)
Clyde Griffen (Vassar)
Carl Hovde (Columbia)
Norman Pearson (Yale)
Claire Sacks (Brooklyn)
Warren Susman (Rutgers)
Bernard Wishy (Columbia)

Professor Gans introduced Paul Goodman's *Growing Up Absurd* by remarking that it was hard to classify the author occupationally. Goodman is a novelist, poet, playwrite, city planner, psychologist, lay analyst and critic. One reason for this virtuosity is his continuous use of the same theme which he adapts to a variety of situations. Lewis Feuer who reviewed *Growing Up Absurd* favorably in the *New Leader* said that Goodman held these same ideas in the early 1930's when they were both graduate students at Columbia. *Growing Up Absurd* is a book about delinquency, which may reflect a sociological bias, but it is also a book that once again contains the sum of his ideas. The main message of the book is that society ought to be anarchistic and syndicalistic. A society of educated and thoughtful people earning their livelihood through manual labor should run their community through the guilds in which they are organized and by the town meeting democracy which should govern the small neighborhoods and farms where they live. The small community is greatly stressed as is a handicraft economy which permits individual creativity. A frequent and healthy sex life pervades the whole. In this primitive communism, at least for the subsistence part of life, the individual is free to develop his own individuality. Goodman compares the existing industrial and bureaucratic society with his own conception of the good society and concludes that the discrepancy he finds is to be attributed to a conspiracy on the part of the leadership of the present society which just does not know any better. Goodman makes no effort to understand our society as it is, or to consider how it came to be what it is. People have no free choice not only because of this conspiracy resulting from stupid leadership but because people socialize the wrong way. When asked why they socialize as they do, Goodman replies, because of ignorance or stupidity. He shows no understanding of cultural differences. His conception of the good society comes through more clearly in *Communitas*. The participants in his society are intellectuals and artists like himself, hence its appeal to the romanticism among intellectuals. Out of a comparison with this romantic vision come recommendations for our society.

The basic theme in his theory of delinquency among the working class teen-agers is that they have no function in society. They have no jobs and their school experience is unsatisfactory. The result is a sense of uselessness and the feeling that society is conspiring against them. The contribution of the book lies in its insight into the lower class teen-ager and the valid description of his feeling of uselessness and revolt against an adult world that does not comprehend his real needs. Goodman can offer such insights about the teen-ager because the teen-ager holds aristocratic values - and here I am borrowing from Edgar Friedenberg; these aristocratic values are the values of medieval society and it is medieval society that Goodman is essentially defending.

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Up to this point Goodman is useful but beyond it, reality and Paul Goodman-part ways. The fact remains that teen-agers do accept many of the values of the society and do not long for the work Goodman thinksthey should be doing. The manly jobs he values are mostly dirty jobs and the teen-ager doesn't want them any more than anyone else does. Finally, once the teen-ager moves from the turmoil of adolescence to adulthood the majority settles down and becomes as law-abiding as anyone else. His theory does not explain why this happens.

## Summary of discussion:

Goodman is extraordinarily traditional and classical in his romantic visions. Just as one can speak of the book as being concerned with delinquency, it is possible to say that it is a book about precisely the opposite and claim that Goodman is most concerned about the violation of his romantic ideal. Like a good analyst who works on the basis of a concept of a romantic "whole man", Goodman holds an almost Rousseauesque concept of the innate goodness of man.

I don't believe Goodman is primarily concerned with adolescence. He is concerned with the deficiencies of society. Nor is he negligent in considering social forces. He regards society, itself, as stultified. His basic complaint is that experiences within the roles that Society offers young people is, in Holden Caulfield's sense, phoney. *Growing Up Absurd* means growing up to become absurd. He recognizes that teen-agers will not prefer manual jobs for he understands that the possibility for the teen-ager to evaluate the role he is in has been spoiled for him.

Can Goodman's program be summed up as a wish to return to a world pre-industrial? There are elements in Goodman's writing of the romantic, the pastoral and the medieval. There is a large and very important section in *Growing Up Absurd*, however, in which Goodman seems to accept the kind of revolution James, Dewey and Veblen began but never carried out. He suggests that had this revolution of pragmatism, instrumentalism and technologism been completed something beneficial would have resulted. Unfortunately, in the transition between what he calls old-tycoon and clergyman culture, and the new managerial organization, education somehow failed. This is forward looking and not backward looking.

While the intellectuals in discussing education say we must go beyond Progressivism to a new formulation, Goodman says we must go back to the radical, authentic revolution which was never completed. In *School and Society* we found a similiar contradiction, Dewey attempted to reconcile education to the demands of the new industrial age but his theory of the individual, the one he attempted to save, came out of the older, agrarian culture.

In our discussion thus far we have underestimated the degree to which Goodman's indignation stems from his conviction of what the individual human being should be and indignation at that individual's self betrayal. There is an assumption which you may call idealistic that people don't have to live the way they do.

Given our sensitivity to the problems Goodman chronicles and our wish to ameliorate them, admitting, too, the authenticity of Goodman's passion, have we not as a result become too deferential to the general thesis of the book? I question whether the evidence has been presented in an intellectually responsible way. Though sympathetic with the problem I find myself irritated by a fragmented and impoverished performance. He has not taken the trouble in this book, as he did in *Communitas*, to say precisely what he means.

- 3 -

The Chapter on Patriotism is an example of this lack of intellectual responsibility. He fails to marshal the evidence to support the large claim and broad framework with which he starts.

- - -

This criticism of Goodman's rhetoric may be less valid if one realizes that he is not giving us a political theology. We Americans have rarely come up with our own theology. Goodman writes in the American tradition of self-examination and thwarted idealism. Furthermore, Goodman has the problem of a man continually reiterating a single theme. In repeating that one point of view he becomes more and more hortatory in his works.

- - -

A basic problem of the book is Goodman's unwillingness to really accept adolescence. His view of society is one of children and adults and because of his concern with the traditional and romantic element in society he wants to go back only to that point where the adolescent becomes adult, that is, the point the adolescent becomes impatient with school.

- - -

I don't believe Goodman is fundamentally interested in youth. He is basically a city planner. What is important about youth which is basic to the book is contained in his chapter "On Being Taken Seriously". Goodman says that in our society youth can't be taken seriously and this is what is wrong with the society, and he is right. The therapist in Goodman is evident here. Being taken seriously means accepting as data, as something to be worked with and to go on from, the youth's sense of reality, his feelings that this is what he really is.

- - -

Society taking its youth seriously and the therapist taking his patient seriously are not quite parallel. The therapeutic situation as it is commonly experienced is not a social session.

- - -

Goodman is actually echoing a phrase the therapist hears so frequently from his patient - I am not being taken seriously. And he very wisely uses it with all of its implications. From one point of view we are all in therapy and there is little difference between the situation in which the therapist acts as surrogate for society or the situation of group therapy.

- - -

Fundamental to his idea "of being taken seriously" is naming things for what they are. Goodman suggests throughout the book that not only the delinquent but adults in many walks of life are unable to name the situation they are in, or are able to name it only in private and must in fact live a lie.

- - -

Another question that suggests itself is, to what extent are the problems and solutions Goodman discusses functions of the specific social reality of the American scene and to what extent are they valid for any industrial, rationalized society. We may consider Sweden a more just society than our own and yet it has a higher suicide rate than we have and the most bizarre types of delinquency.

- - -

The problem is not a purely American one but it would be more fruitful to enquire about those aspects of it which relate specifically to youth. I would then ask, in what proportion of face to face interpersonal relationships that

- 4 -

an adolescent is likely to find available to him is the response made by the other party - be it counselor, teacher, parent, even peer - likely to be other than settled before he enters that relationship. There is nothing an adolescent can do in most of his relationships that will alter what the machine does to him.

What has interested me about Paul Goodman is the warm reception by intellectuals who would rise up in wrath were Goodman's proposals actually carried out in the public school or the college. Summerhill, for example, was enthusiastically received by people who have educated themselves and educated their own children in a completely different way. Why is the intellectual at once drawn and repelled by Summerhill?

I praise him as a useful idealist and a constant, characteristic to American dialectics. On the other hand with our pragmatic concept of how things work we have a tendency not to take Goodman seriously. He is far from being a practical city planner and in a sense we patronize him.

Goodman recognizes that Progressive education is not perfect. He lists all its deficiencies. But if the choice is the waste or human resources or non-waste of human resources, Progressive education is the minimum we have to settle for.

His idealized version of Progressive education is akin to those interpretations of the movement which tried to save Dewey from those horrible people who were clustered around him. The only thing wrong with those efforts was that you could find the beginnings of all those horrible people in Dewey.

Goodman does not face up to the degree to which his spontaneous, cooperative, less coercive and more rational kind of community has built into it, a kind of coerciveness, a kind of sanction of the good which is far more terrifying in its inescapability and power than the fragmented, horrid society in which we live. One of the contradictions in the book is the potential tyranny of the small community which is meant to liberate the individual.

One of the virtues of the book is the constant tension Goodman is able to create between what he considers the ideal and what he considers to be the practical minimum which might be achieved. He describes where we want to go and what we might be able to settle for in terms of what the tradition has provided us with. Both the idealist and the practical man are operative which also explains some of the confusion or contradictions.

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(ADDRESS)

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

New York 27, N. Y.

December 7, 1962

Dear Sir:

The next meeting of the Seminar will be held Wednesday evening, December 19th, at the Men's Faculty Club of Columbia University, beginning at 6:00 P.M. Dinner will be served at 6:30 and will be followed by a consideration of Paul Goodman's _Growing Up Absurd_, (Vintage).

Members coming from out of town are reminded to obtain receipts for train fares which will facilitate securing recompense from the University. Please return the enclosed card so that dinner reservations may be made.

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

Minutes of meeting of October 17th, 1962

Present: Walter Bezanson (Rutgers)
Stanley Coben (Hunter)
Robert Cross (Columbia)
Ruth Elson (Hunter)
Charles Forcey (Douglas)
Clyde Griffen (Vassar)
Walter Metzger (Columbia)
Basil Rauch (Barnard)
Warren Susman (Rutgers)
Bernard Wishy (Columbia)

Professor Cross introduced Daniel Boorstin's *The Genius of American Politics* with some background material on the author. Boorstin was born in the South, (Atlanta, Georgia) and attended schools in Oklahoma. He considers himself a Southerner and is now an orthodox Jew. Boorstin studied at Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship and while in England became a barrister of the Inner Temple. He returned to the United States in 1936. From 1939 to 1942 he taught legal history at Harvard Law School, edited a case book on early American law and wrote his book on Blackstone, *The Mysterious Science of the Law*. During this time he was a Marxist. At Harvard Boorstin was greatly influenced by Perry Miller and Frederick Merk. Merk has been considered by many to have been Turner's favorite student. After teaching at Swarthmore for several years Boorstin came to the University of Chicago in 1945.

*The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson* (1948) was the first in a series of farewells to his previous position. Far different from his book on Blackstone it provided a critique of the idea of progress, human perfectibility and the universality of institutional development. *The Genius of American Politics* (1953) grew out of the 1952 Walgreen Lectures. We can find a clue to the changing nature of American thought by noting that George Kennan, Walgreen Lecturer for 1951, published his lectures as *American Diplomacy* and David Potter, from the same lectureship the year following Boorstin, gave us *People of Plenty*. Boorstin's next book, *The Americans: the Colonial Experience* (1958), is a curious and intriguing one with brilliant insights but it is a disconcerting book as well. One is hard put to examine it in the light of the traditional questions of historiography. From the time Boorstin wrote *The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson* until his two most recent books, *America and the Image of Europe* (1960) and *The Image or What Happened to the American Dream* (1962), he has preached the irrelevance of exporting American ideas. However, this has not dampened his ardor for lecturing abroad and he is today probably more active than any other American historian in lecturing in foreign countries.

When *The Genius of American Politics* appeared it was received as a demonstration of Boorstin's recognized virtuosity. The best

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known review of the book, by John Higham, appeared six years later. Higham saw it as symptomatic of the new trend in American historiography in its appeal to homogeneity and continuity, a bell-weather of the "monists". Most recently Hollingworth has discussed the consensus and continuity theme in the *South Atlantic Quarterly*, Winter, 1962. *The Genius of American Politics*, like *The Americans*, has no clearly conceived central theme. It is, rather, a series of felt revulsions against the traditional judgments and interpretations. One is suspicious that the real logic employed is a highly personal one. In his introductory chapter Boorstin argues that Americans have had no need for basic theories. "Givenness", the consequences of the fortunate circumstances of American settlement, has supplied us with our values. We have here actually a re-statement of Turner without the ideological conclusions Turner drew. In the second chapter Boorstin would have us believe that Puritanism, as the prototype of a European legacy and system of ideas, had no influence and was eventually eliminated. In his rejection of the New England historians he narrows the nature of the American experience much as Turner did. In his consideration of the American Revolution Boorstin bids farewell to Carl Becker and Enlightenment Man and to Charles Beard and social revolution. What he says in criticism of Beard is no doubt relevant but what emerges is, once again, a drastic narrowing of the American experience as well as an extreme understatement of the extent and quality of conflict evident in the Revolution. His conception of an America without theory produces a monochromatic view of the Revolution. Boorstin is more severely reductionist here than in his earlier treatment of the Puritans. Jefferson is reduced to a lawyer and the Declaration to an imperial legal document. (Jefferson's conservatism is illustrated by invoking Hengist and horsa.) In discussing the Civil War Boorstin continues his narrow, legalistic construction maintaining an excessively limited notion of the political. The South appears as the bulwark of States' rights and Thoreau as a vagrant. The Civil War is discussed as a constitutional question. In the final two chapters Boorstin finds himself in the predicament of a conservative who is unhappy with the product of a process he admires. His re-evaluation of religion in America is misconceived. (The moral critic is evident in his views of American religion as too experiential, anti-intellectual and oratorical.) In the end Boorstin admits a decline in the sense of "givenness" and suggests the need after careful deliberation to choose between alternate courses. In closing one must say that the fragments that make up the book are shored together with skill but with little consistency. The influence of Turner, Burke and Niebuhr (of the *Irony of American History*) predominate. *The Genius of American politics* is not an accurate chart of the American political past.

## Summary of discussion:

Boorstin's treatment of the American Revolution as a conservative Whig revolution in defense of historical rights and not as a revolution in the name of a new egalitarian order raises the question of how the American Revolution came to be considered a radical one when viewed in world perspective. His rejection of ideology in favor of "givenness" prompts us to consider the striking degree America after 1776 was consciously the child of an idea, in fact, a child of its own idea.

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Boorstin describes a revolution with little opposition. Palmer believes our Revolution was bloodier than the French. He also believes that we absorbed much more of the Enlightenment than the French.

Using the Puritans as the ideological group we might well ask, what happened to the idea in this setting? Suppose a group consciously or unconsciously surrenders its values, how are those ideas blunted? What are we to make of the persistence of beliefs despite social change? In *The Americans* Boorstin tells us that no one took ideas seriously except the Quakers and they were un-American because once their ideas were rejected they persisted in holding on to them.

Boorstin's isolation of "givenness" from the influence of ideas which he emphasizes in his discussion of Puritanism ignores the jeremiad theme completely. Yet the jeremiads prove the Puritans were haunted by ideals, albeit ideals they were not living up to.

The last chapters are strikingly different in tone. Boorstin's remonstrance against searching for an ideology is a reaction to the 1930's and his conclusions that what is European is ideological and hence harmful is a brand of nativism. Admitting that there is no guarantee that the sense of "givenness" will serve us in the future as it has in the past and even recognizing signs of atrophy, he bolsters the common experience with a common enemy - the formulation of a social philosophy. In so doing he stands alone in stressing a pragmatism where the practical is the traditional.

John Dewey in *The Public and Its Problems* describes a democratic, liberal society consisting of groups with various interests in a process of constant adjustment. The society maintains its balance because the extremists at the edges of society are blunted in their intemperance. Boorstin reduces all such quarrels to the level of insignificance.

We should distinguish between what Boorstin says about consensus, which is incorrect, and what he says about continuity. We do not have competing authorities. Our system of Supreme Court review, for example, has provided a great stream of continuity

Boorstin failed to make a stronger case because of a curious notion of political life. His attraction to the highly dramatic led him to treat the Revolution and the Civil War as characteristic of our political life. His thesis obliges him to resolve the crisis of the Civil War not as a disruption in the flow of continuity but as a contribution to it. He then resorts to the sociological writing of Holmes, Hughes and Fitzhugh as of sufficient significance to bolster the continuum of our political thinking. This is an utterly sophistic and perverse view.

Without denying the usefulness of the continuity theme it does lack a necessary precision. Furthermore, it is incorrect to conceive of it as something peculiarly American. Brogan has described the same kind of continuity in French history. Boorstin conceives of Europe as being in a continuous state of revolution, forever going to greater extremes more often than America.

The rationale of party divisions in America is different from

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Europe which suggests not that conflict is absent in American life but that one must look for it in other places. We have not been able to take our nationality for granted. In consciously developing it we have recognized the diversity and disunity in American life. We may agree with Boorstin that the Eisenhower - Stevenson campaigns reflected little dissension in our society but the same could not be said if we considered the authentic campaign as one of Eisenhower and Stevenson against McCarthy.

Boorstin's emphatic support of regionalism and local institutional freedom becomes highly questionable as a factor for continuity when considered in the light of recent events in Mississippi.

In his discussion of religion Boorstin, like Herberg, notes those areas of confluence and concludes that there exists a unity in religious life, a conclusion which is not justified. Widely divergent views are held in important realms which hardly warrant the identity of outlook Boorstin claims exists. Yet, he has made a start in describing the curious ability our religious groups have of maintaining a certain kind of agreement.

Boorstin failed to consider the mechanisms by which the consensus overcomes deviations from the consensus. What has the consensus tolerated and what has it not tolerated? How has it operated? The sect itself seems to have recognized certain limits to its deviation from the consensus urging its sectarian position to a given point and then ceasing to press. The controversy over the dissemination of birth control information is an example of this.

The Genius of American Politics leaves you with a sense of drift and a vague sense of "leave it to the good instincts of the people" who will be guided by their inheritance. The book is anti-historical in its analysis.

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UNIVERSITY SEMINARS

October 6, 1962

Dear Sir:

The first meeting will be held Wednesday evening, October 17th, at the Men's Faculty Club of Columbia University, beginning at 6:00 P.M. Dinner will be served about 6:45. As in the past, the meeting will adjourn promptly at 9:00.

At the May meeting, Warren Susman of Rutgers and Robert Cross of Columbia, co-chairmen, were entrusted with the responsibility of planning for 1962-3. We understood the democracy to favor a program analogous to that carried on in 1961-2, but with a somewhat more insistent central theme. We therefore propose that this year's seminar consider the presuppositions and accomplishments of recent approaches to American Civilization. Each meeting will focus on a book which, it will be presumed, members of the seminar will have recently read. One member of the seminar, or on occasion a guest, will provide a 10 to 15 minute introduction. Thereafter the discussion will be general and (hopefully) spirited.

October 17th Boorstin, *Genius of American Politics*, (Phoenix)

Discussant: Cross

November 21st Rosenberg, *Tradition of the New*, (Evergreen)

December 19th Goodman, *Growing Up Absurd*, (Vintage)

January 16th Galbraith, *American Capitalism*, (Sentry Editions)

Susman and Cross are aware that some members of the Seminar would tend to prefer a program of scholarly papers, and that others would opt for a series of discussions on a more limited subject than that proposed, or even on a specific genre. We shall be delighted to be provided with detailed suggestions for the spring; at the December meeting, the Seminar will be asked to settle on plans for the rest of the academic year.

The Seminar is fortunate in securing as Secretary Mr. Arthur Gorenstein, a graduate student of American History at Columbia. Please return the enclosed card to him as soon as possible. Members coming from out-of-town are reminded to obtain vouchers or receipts for train fares, turnpike tolls etc., since these will simplify the task of securing recompense from the University. The enclosed form may be used by out-of-town members to claim exemption from the travel tax.