David S. Brown, Richard Hofstadter (Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography) (Book Review‪)‬

David S. Brown, Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006) 291 pp., bibliography, list of students, index, cloth, $27.50, ISBN 0-226-07640-7. In March 1965, a delegation of distinguished historians, organized by University of Chicago scholars Walter Johnson and John Hope Franklin, gathered in Atlanta to join Martin Luther King, Jr. in Selma to march to Montgomery. Richard Hofstadter was among them. Weeks earlier, Alabama state troopers, wheeling nightsticks and discharging tear gas, had busted up a voting rights march to Selma. John Hope Franklin, in his autobiography, recalls "those of us who gathered in Atlanta were taken by SCLC bus to Tuskegee, where we were to be received by Luther Foster, president of Tuskegee Institute. It was on route to Tuskegee that the bus made a lurch around the corner and almost left the road. At that point, Richard Hofstadter stood and pleaded with the bus driver to be more careful: 'If your driving leads to an accident that kills us all, you will set back the liberal interpretation of American history for a century."' Hofstadter's irony was deeper than he realized. John Lewis, then of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and now of the U.S. Congress, had his head bashed open by a state trooper in Selma. Lewis was carrying a knapsack, which contained a copy of Richard Hofstadter's The American Political Tradition.