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We are honored to share reflections on the life and scholarship of Dorothy Ross, a pioneering intellectual historian and longtime supporter of this organization, in a special forum. My deepest thanks to everyone who joined us for our panel at the 2024 annual meeting in Boston. Please share your reminiscences of Dorothy and her work in the comments below. \u2013Sara Georgini, S-USIH President<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
Dorothy Ross<\/strong><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong>I agreed to address two topics this afternoon: Dorothy\u2019s mentorship and her scholarly politics. Inevitably, perhaps, given recent events, my comments have tilted more toward the political. But before I go there, let me say a few words about her mentorship.<\/p>\n The first thing to note about Dorothy\u2019s advising is her seriousness. She was an intimidating figure to many of us \u2013 perhaps to all of us. I heard various students describe her as \u201ctaciturn,\u201d \u201cformidable,\u201d and even \u201cterrifying.\u201d<\/p>\n But what daunted us?<\/p>\n One was her obvious erudition. Dorothy was brilliant. And boy did she know a lot. She was also intellectually rigorous. She had no tolerance for glibness.<\/p>\n But perhaps more relevantly: she had what I called (borrowing from John Adams) the gift of silence. She listened carefully. She thought before she spoke. (Imagine!) As her former student Doug Rossinow said, she \u201cweighed her words precisely.\u201d<\/p>\n Her poise and reserve created a dynamic that became, to me, sadly familiar. I comfort myself by thinking that some of her other students shared at least some version of the following experience.<\/p>\n I would begin by talking to her about some topic or other while she watched and listened. Then I\u2019d finish. There would be a long pause. She was just thinking, but it made me nervous. So I\u2019d fill the void with more talk. Inevitably, I\u2019d say something silly.<\/p>\n Drat!<\/p>\n I\u2019d try to make up for my blunder with more talk. Drat again! Another stupid comment, even worse than the last.<\/p>\n So I\u2019d keep talking some more, trying to make up for the last blunder. Of course it was followed by another. And another. I\u2019d talk myself ever deeper into a hole from which it was increasingly obvious I could never dig out. Finally, blessedly, I\u2019d stop.<\/p>\n The whole time, Dorothy would just look at me with some combination of bemusement and pity.<\/p>\n Eventually, I learned to navigate these encounters. I realized that I could just stop talking when I had said what I\u2019d wanted, and wait patiently for her respond. It was a good lesson for me, really.<\/p>\n But Dorothy was serious in more than just her personal style. She took our writing seriously. Indeed, nothing was too short, nothing too superficial, for her not to take seriously. Her comments always cut to the central issues. Very often they forced us to reconsider our assumptions.<\/p>\n At first, I found this disconcerting \u2013 I\u2019m kind of a glib person, as you can see. But it mattered that she took us seriously. It forced us to take ourselves and our ideas seriously. As I told Dorothy many times, I was never entirely sure where my ideas ended and hers began.<\/p>\n The second thing to say about Dorothy is her warmth.<\/p>\n Many of her students remember a moment at the dinner following a symposium we\u2019d organized in honor of her retirement. At some point, Dorothy got up to thank us all. She quickly choked up, and began to get teary.<\/p>\n All her students sat in stunned silence, mouths agape. We\u2019d never seen this Dorothy before.<\/p>\n Others had, of course. Shortly after, Stan got up and talked about how sentimental Dorothy was \u2013 how she\u2019d cry at the drop of a hat.<\/p>\n Amazing!<\/p>\n As her student Rebecca Plant later remarked: \u201cI often thought about what it must have cost her personally to squeeze herself into the professional strictures of the day.\u201d<\/p>\n This warmth was real. Many of us felt it. It persisted and grew in our wonderful and very gratifying post-advisor\/ advisee relationship. I always looked up to Dorothy, but I also began to realize that I could think of her as a friend of a certain kind.<\/p>\n I\u2019ll miss her very much.<\/p>\n ***<\/strong><\/p>\n The second thing I want to talk about today are Dorothy\u2019s scholarly politics. Or rather my engagement with them. Perhaps even my projection of them onto her. I can\u2019t be sure and as I said: it\u2019s all pretty hard for me to pick apart.<\/p>\n At a USIH conference eight years ago, I gave a talk where I connected Dorothy to two figures: Richard Hofstadter and J.G.A. Pocock.<\/p>\n I situated her as a critic of the liberal tradition in American politics and intellectual life \u2013 which she was. She was a critic who drew on those figures to articulate a penetrating critique of a still-born American historical consciousness that impoverished social thought in the United States. American social thought, as she saw it, was engaged in a perpetual quarrel with history.<\/p>\n It\u2019s hard to see how she was wrong. What is the slogan \u201cMake America Great Again,\u201d after all, if not a classic American jeremiad of fall from original purity to corruption? What is it, if not a call for a cyclical return to an imagined past when greater virtue reigned?<\/p>\n And yet \u2013 unlike Pocock or even Hofstadter \u2013 Dorothy was generous about the object of her criticism. She didn\u2019t treat American politics with scorn, I think. There was no contempt. If I had to characterize her general approach, it would be wryness.<\/p>\n Unlike Pocock or Hofstadter \u2013 or Louis Hartz, I\u2019d add \u2013 Dorothy recognized the breadth of American liberalism. She recognized its capaciousness. All her work traced the ways the American liberal tradition intermixed with other intellectual traditions deeply-rooted in US soil \u2013 notably Protestant millennialism and Pocockian republicanism.<\/p>\n ***<\/strong><\/p>\n Let me take a brief tangent to the biographical. I\u2019m thinking here of the memorial service for Dorothy that took place on Zoom this summer, which I found moving. Many of the testaments came from friends and family. I thought about saying something, but I felt out of place.<\/p>\n I never got to know Dorothy\u2019s husband Stan very well. He was a tax lawyer who worked in the Kennedy and Johnson White House. President Carter appointed him Commissioner of the Social Security Administration. He later became partner at a white shoe law firm, and advised to governments on behalf of the IMF and the World Bank. Here is someone who was obviously very familiar with power.<\/p>\n As I say, I never really knew him. But I imagine him as a liberal \u2013 part of that postwar boom that opened doors for American Jews, allowed for an upward mobility new in American history \u2013 new to Jews, anyway.<\/p>\n These were people who used \u201csummer\u201d as a verb. Dorothy and Stan bought a house at Wellfleet, on Cape Cod. As I listened to the memories, I was put in mind of the Golden Era of mid-twentieth century abundance, and even found myself feeling a bit wistful for this era of upward mobility and opportunity. (There\u2019s that Jeremiad again! Amazing how it creeps in.)<\/p>\n This biographical context may help explain what I find so striking about Dorothy\u2019s politics, as I reflect on them. Or at least what I imagine were Dorothy\u2019s politics. Or perhaps what politics I project onto Dorothy. It will always be an open question to me.<\/p>\n Dorothy wasn\u2019t just a critic of American liberalism. As I say, she differed quite dramatically from Hofstadter in this respect.<\/p>\n As I see her, she was a radical. A true radical. Like other critics, she bemoaned the ahistoricism of American social thought \u2013 along with its inevitable, almost irresistible tendency toward an individualism that tragically erased the diversity and the rich potential that always lay within it.<\/p>\n But her response was more creative than others. Where Hartz, Hofstadter, and Pocock criticized, I think Dorothy pushed further.<\/p>\n I spent a little time this past week reading an early essay that she wrote on socialism and American liberalism, published in 1977. I\u2019d never read it before. Even then, nearly fifty years ago, Dorothy was emphasizing the \u201ccomplexity of liberal thought\u201d in the United States. She was drawing the portrait of a liberalism so capacious it even made room for socialism \u2013 a socialism, by the way, with deep roots in the country\u2019s intellectual traditions \u2013 a socialism that shaped American liberalism not just in opposition, but also in conversation.<\/p>\n Here was a central element of her work.<\/p>\n Dorothy\u2019s last essays, published almost a half century later, famously ask what happened to the social in American thought. I don\u2019t think they are pessimistic, exactly. Maybe they\u2019re a little wistful. She\u2019d spent more than 45 years telling us where to find it, but few had listened.<\/p>\n ***<\/strong><\/p>\n I\u2019d like to finish here with something that\u2019s been on my mind in the last eleven days.<\/p>\n Dorothy was born to a working-class Jewish family in Milwaukee in 1936.<\/p>\n If the best choice you can make in life is when and where to be born, Dorothy chose a pretty good time and place. She grew up amidst the proverbial postwar abundance and shared prosperity. Hers was the great age of the liberal consensus \u2013 this moment of triumphalism merged with limitless possibility.<\/p>\n I, on the other hand, was born as that world was disappearing. If she grew up amidst the efflorescence of a New Deal-inflected postwar America, I grew up in its retreat.<\/p>\n But it\u2019s not quite this linear is it. I may not know much about the twentieth century, but even I know that FDR didn\u2019t come out of nowhere.<\/p>\n Dorothy was born in Milwaukee in 1936. She was born just ten years after the death of Robert LaFollette. She was born eleven years after the economist Richard Ely wrapped up his career at Wisconsin \u2013 a career he\u2019d launched at Johns Hopkins. (Dorothy wrote about Ely\u2019s early socialism in that 1977 article.)<\/p>\n No, FDR didn\u2019t come out of nowhere. And compared to LaFolette and Ely, he wasn\u2019t even very radical.<\/p>\n Dorothy would have been just ten years old when Joseph McCarthy defeated Robert LaFollette, Jr. \u2013 the son of the great Progressive. It\u2019s amazing to think about \u2013 how Wisconsin held and indeed still holds these extremes within American politics.<\/p>\n Dorothy would have been fourteen when McCarthy began his anticommunist campaign. His fall in the Army-McCarthy hearings happened the year she graduated from high school. She was just eighteen.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t think I ever spoke to Dorothy about her Wisconsin roots. I wish I had. I wonder if it gave her a keen sense of the diversity of American intellectual and political life. How would someone who grew up under the twin shadows of LaFolette and McCarthy read Louis Hartz? Could she have read his book and seen the portrait of a unitary liberal tradition as anything but a brilliant fantasy?<\/p>\n Did her experience of McCarthyism and the anticommunist paranoia, and the xenophobic hysteria \u2013 did that experience as a teenager give her a visceral understanding of the fragility of American democracy?<\/p>\n Did it highlight for her the cowardice \u2013 the shallowness \u2013 the poverty \u2013 of a complacent liberalism, accused of arrogance and yet terrified of its own shadow? Perhaps that sense is what attracted her to Hofstadter.<\/p>\n The Wisconsin Idea was born in the Progressive era that Dorothy studied so penetratingly \u2013 that moment when American liberalism flirted with and maybe even dated American socialism before dumping it so cruelly.<\/p>\n That was period when the Wisconsin idea fought monopoly power, explored tariff controversies, challenged the high cost of living, and denounced the social pathologies generated by great accumulations predatory wealth. It puts its faith in the power of social science \u2013 of an educated and empowered citizenry to address the most intractable social ills.<\/p>\n ***<\/strong><\/p>\n I once asked Dorothy if she considered herself a liberal. She paused. She thought about the question.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s how I remember her response. After a brief moment of her proverbial silence, she eventually said that she did. What other hope for our politics was there, really?<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Editor’s Note We are honored to share reflections on the life and scholarship of Dorothy Ross, a pioneering intellectual historian and longtime supporter of this organization, in a special forum. My deepest thanks to everyone who joined us for our panel at the 2024 annual meeting in Boston. Please share your reminiscences of Dorothy and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":95722,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12032],"tags":[45398,41959,45399,45400,45401,581,5390],"dealstore":[],"offerexpiration":[],"class_list":["post-95721","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-american-history","tag-2024-s-usih-conference","tag-dorothy","tag-dorothy-ross-historian","tag-francois","tag-furstenberg","tag-ideas","tag-ross"],"yoast_head":"\n