homa. An aggressive, undiscriminating modernism that dismissed all these works as retrograde and politically reactionary—and most of them were subjected at one time or another to this kind of attack, if not by Hofstadter then by like-minded literary critics in Partisan Review—left no alternative to nostalgia except a cosmopolitanism wholly contemptuous of American popular culture.

Hofstadter's attack on "Americana" was open to the additional objection that it was internally inconsistent—as it had to be, if it was to enable sophisticated observers of the cultural scene to dismiss resistance to change as irrational, to equate loving memory with escapism, and to shore up a faltering faith in the future without explaining why such a faith was justified. Having attributed the "overpowering nostalgia of the last fifteen years" to a crisis of national confidence brought on by two world wars and the Great Depression, Hofstadter reversed himself and explained, "Although the national nostalgia has intensified in the last decade, it is by no means new." The "longing to recapture the past" had a "history of its own," which could be traced all the way back to the Jeffersonian myth of the yeoman farmer, already out of date at the time of its first appearance. A sentimental agrarian myth had distorted political thinking for a hundred and fifty years and prevented Americans from coming to grips with the urban, industrial civilization their country was clearly destined to become. In The American Political Tradition as well as in subsequent works, notably The Age of Reform, Hofstadter tried to show that American reform movements, far from embracing the future, had invariably tried to restore the conditions of primitive capitalism, clinging to the Jeffersonian vision of a nation of small landholders when in fact the United States, even in the nineteenth century, was rapidly becoming a nation of wage earners. According to Hofstadter and to a whole generation of historians who followed in his footsteps, reform movements were usually led not by men and women confident about the future but by dispossessed patricians suffering from "status anxiety" and eager to recapture their former social standing.

In 1961, Arthur P. Dudden summed up this line of interpretation, now firmly established, in an essay entitled "Nostalgia and the American." Like Hofstadter, Dudden began by linking nostalgia to the declining faith in progress, only to subvert this contention with the quite different contention that Americans had been afflicted with a debilitating nostalgia

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