Dorothy Ross by Francois Furstenberg

Dorothy Ross

 I agreed to address two topics this afternoon: Dorothy’s 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.

The first thing to note about Dorothy’s advising is her seriousness. She was an intimidating figure to many of us – perhaps to all of us. I heard various students describe her as “taciturn,” “formidable,” and even “terrifying.”

But what daunted us?

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.

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 “weighed her words precisely.”

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.

I would begin by talking to her about some topic or other while she watched and listened. Then I’d finish. There would be a long pause. She was just thinking, but it made me nervous. So I’d fill the void with more talk. Inevitably, I’d say something silly.

Drat!

I’d try to make up for my blunder with more talk. Drat again! Another stupid comment, even worse than the last.

So I’d keep talking some more, trying to make up for the last blunder. Of course it was followed by another. And another. I’d talk myself ever deeper into a hole from which it was increasingly obvious I could never dig out. Finally, blessedly, I’d stop.

The whole time, Dorothy would just look at me with some combination of bemusement and pity.

Eventually, I learned to navigate these encounters. I realized that I could just stop talking when I had said what I’d wanted, and wait patiently for her respond. It was a good lesson for me, really.

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.

At first, I found this disconcerting – I’m 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.

The second thing to say about Dorothy is her warmth.

Many of her students remember a moment at the dinner following a symposium we’d 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.

All her students sat in stunned silence, mouths agape. We’d never seen this Dorothy before.

Others had, of course. Shortly after, Stan got up and talked about how sentimental Dorothy was – how she’d cry at the drop of a hat.

Amazing!

As her student Rebecca Plant later remarked: “I often thought about what it must have cost her personally to squeeze herself into the professional strictures of the day.”

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.

I’ll miss her very much.

***

The second thing I want to talk about today are Dorothy’s scholarly politics. Or rather my engagement with them. Perhaps even my projection of them onto her. I can’t be sure and as I said: it’s all pretty hard for me to pick apart.

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.

I situated her as a critic of the liberal tradition in American politics and intellectual life – 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.

It’s hard to see how she was wrong. What is the slogan “Make America Great Again,” 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?

And yet – unlike Pocock or even Hofstadter – Dorothy was generous about the object of her criticism. She didn’t treat American politics with scorn, I think. There was no contempt. If I had to characterize her general approach, it would be wryness.

Unlike Pocock or Hofstadter – or Louis Hartz, I’d add – 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 – notably Protestant millennialism and Pocockian republicanism.

***

Let me take a brief tangent to the biographical. I’m 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.

I never got to know Dorothy’s 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.

As I say, I never really knew him. But I imagine him as a liberal – part of that postwar boom that opened doors for American Jews, allowed for an upward mobility new in American history – new to Jews, anyway.

These were people who used “summer” 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’s that Jeremiad again! Amazing how it creeps in.)

This biographical context may help explain what I find so striking about Dorothy’s politics, as I reflect on them. Or at least what I imagine were Dorothy’s politics. Or perhaps what politics I project onto Dorothy. It will always be an open question to me.

Dorothy wasn’t just a critic of American liberalism. As I say, she differed quite dramatically from Hofstadter in this respect.

As I see her, she was a radical. A true radical. Like other critics, she bemoaned the ahistoricism of American social thought – along with its inevitable, almost irresistible tendency toward an individualism that tragically erased the diversity and the rich potential that always lay within it.

But her response was more creative than others. Where Hartz, Hofstadter, and Pocock criticized, I think Dorothy pushed further.

I spent a little time this past week reading an early essay that she wrote on socialism and American liberalism, published in 1977. I’d never read it before. Even then, nearly fifty years ago, Dorothy was emphasizing the “complexity of liberal thought” in the United States. She was drawing the portrait of a liberalism so capacious it even made room for socialism – a socialism, by the way, with deep roots in the country’s intellectual traditions – a socialism that shaped American liberalism not just in opposition, but also in conversation.

Here was a central element of her work.

Dorothy’s last essays, published almost a half century later, famously ask what happened to the social in American thought. I don’t think they are pessimistic, exactly. Maybe they’re a little wistful. She’d spent more than 45 years telling us where to find it, but few had listened.

***

I’d like to finish here with something that’s been on my mind in the last eleven days.

Dorothy was born to a working-class Jewish family in Milwaukee in 1936.

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 – this moment of triumphalism merged with limitless possibility.

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.

But it’s not quite this linear is it. I may not know much about the twentieth century, but even I know that FDR didn’t come out of nowhere.

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 – a career he’d launched at Johns Hopkins. (Dorothy wrote about Ely’s early socialism in that 1977 article.)

No, FDR didn’t come out of nowhere. And compared to LaFolette and Ely, he wasn’t even very radical.

Dorothy would have been just ten years old when Joseph McCarthy defeated Robert LaFollette, Jr. – the son of the great Progressive. It’s amazing to think about – how Wisconsin held and indeed still holds these extremes within American politics.

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.

I don’t 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?

Did her experience of McCarthyism and the anticommunist paranoia, and the xenophobic hysteria – did that experience as a teenager give her a visceral understanding of the fragility of American democracy?

Did it highlight for her the cowardice – the shallowness – the poverty – of a complacent liberalism, accused of arrogance and yet terrified of its own shadow? Perhaps that sense is what attracted her to Hofstadter.

The Wisconsin Idea was born in the Progressive era that Dorothy studied so penetratingly – that moment when American liberalism flirted with and maybe even dated American socialism before dumping it so cruelly.

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 – of an educated and empowered citizenry to address the most intractable social ills.

***

I once asked Dorothy if she considered herself a liberal. She paused. She thought about the question.

Here’s 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?