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(I used to own a copy of his "Writers on the Left". He was a Cold War
figure but by no means as bad as Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol et al.)
NY Times, May 3 2016
Daniel Aaron, Critic and Historian Who Pioneered American Studies, Dies
at 103
By SAM ROBERTS
Daniel Aaron, a literary critic and historian who helped preserve the
nation’s cultural heritage as a co-founder of the nonprofit Library of
America and who pioneered the multifaceted academic field of American
studies, died on Saturday in Cambridge, Mass. He was 103.
The cause was complications of pneumonia, his daughter-in-law Anna Aaron
said.
Professor Aaron recalled in his autobiography that his taking up history
as a profession was augured when he was only 3, with the sinking of the
British ocean liner Lusitania by a German U-boat in 1915.
The victims included his mother’s mentor, Elbert Hubbard, a journalist
who had founded the Roycroft artisan community in upstate New York in
the late 19th century with his wife, Alice. Elbert Hubbard also wrote
the best-selling inspirational essay “A Message to Garcia,” about the
prelude to the Spanish-American War.
Hearing about the sinking while growing up “foreshadowed my introduction
to American history,” Professor Aaron wrote in the memoir, “The
Americanist” (2007). But his route to being granted the first doctoral
degree in American civilization by Harvard and becoming a history
professor at Smith College and Harvard was, much like history itself,
hardly preordained.
He entered the University of Michigan planning to study medicine, before
switching to English. He then intended to pursue graduate studies at the
University of London, until onerous conditions were attached to his
enrollment there.
Accepted instead by Harvard, he began his studies there in the English
department, until it was suggested that a Jewish student might find a
new multidisciplinary program in the history of American civilization
more intellectually congenial. And only after the Germans occupied
France in 1940 did he conclude that “it might be almost as important to
understand American civilization as to preserve it.”
He helped found the Library of America in 1979, the culmination of a
proposal by his fellow critic Edmund Wilson in the 1950s. The company
has published 9.5 million copies of 279 moderately priced novels,
memoirs, narrative histories, forgotten masterpieces and other classics,
beginning with Professor Aaron’s favorite, “Moby-Dick.”
He wrote several major books himself. In “Men of Good Hope: A Story of
American Progressives,” published in 1951, he sought to redeem
progressivism from its disfavor during the McCarthy era, arguing that
rebelling against injustice and inequality was ingrained in American
middle-class tradition.
In “Writers on the Left: Episodes in American Literary Communism”
(1961), he took a nonaccusatory approach toward leftist authors by
acknowledging that communism, for all its failings, had evoked a passion
and hope that “cannot therefore be described simply as a ‘conspiracy.’”
And in “The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War” (1973), a
finalist for the National Book Award, he faulted 19th- and 20th-century
authors for failing to produce a fictional epic commensurate with the
enormity of the war, and for refusing to acknowledge “the centrality of
racial fear (not slavery itself, but black slavery) as the root of the
conflict.” Too often, he wrote, blacks were portrayed “sentimentally and
patronizingly.”
In 1985, Professor Aaron turned his attention to the sprawling journal
of the reclusive, troubled Arthur Crew Inman, a failed poet and scion of
Southern wealth who chronicled his life and observations in the North
with startling detail and candor in 155 volumes of more than 15 million
words. Holed up in a Boston apartment, he committed suicide in 1963.
Critics called the journal a remarkable document of American social history.
Professor Aaron condensed it to 1,661 pages with the title “The Inman
Diary: A Public and Private Confession.”
“In Mr. Aaron’s adroitly edited version, Inman’s diary is a fascinating
document, by turns bizarre and illuminating, poignant and obscene,” the
psychologist Michael Vincent Miller wrote in The New York Times Book Review.
But another reviewer, John Gross, also writing in The Times, balked at
the book’s length.
“Daniel Aaron’s abridgment in fact preserves less than a tenth of the
original,” Mr. Gross said, “but even readers who become addicted to
Inman (and it is easy to develop a taste for him) are likely to feel
that 1,600 pages and more are quite enough to be getting on with.”
In addition to his own memoir, Professor Aaron wrote “Commonplace Book,
1934-2012,” a distillation of the diary and scrapbook he started as a
teenager, published in 2015.
Daniel Baruch Aaron was born in Chicago on Aug. 4, 1912, to immigrants
from Russia transplanted to the Midwest from New York. His father,
Henry, was a lawyer who had multiple sclerosis. His mother was the
former Rose Weinstein.
The family moved to Los Angeles when he was 5. Within five years both
his parents were dead. He returned to Chicago, where he was raised by
relatives.
He received a bachelor’s degree in English from Michigan in 1933 and
entered Harvard at a time when the historian Samuel Eliot Morison still
rode to campus on horseback. As a graduate student there, he graded what
he called a “so-so” exam by a young John F. Kennedy and the English
assignments of “an intense, hungry-looking” Norman Mailer.
His doctoral dissertation on the development of Cincinnati boldly
challenged the renowned Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier thesis,”
suggesting that the city had more in common with the development of the
urban Eastern United States than the Western hinterlands. The doctorate
“signalized my merger with the U.S.A. and my dehyphenizaton,” Professor
Aaron wrote.
Smith College hired him as a freshly minted Ph.D., and he taught there
for 30 years. During wartime shortages of manpower, he worked on a farm
and as a volunteer police officer. He also pitched for a softball team
in Northampton, Mass.
He and his wife, the former Janet Summers, had three sons, Jonathan,
James and Paul Aaron. They survive him, as do several grandchildren and
great-grandchildren.
Professor Aaron refused to be pigeonholed politically, characterizing
himself as “an irregular in the ranks of the non-Communist left.”
“I did not fit neatly into any political party and had no taste or
talent for polemics,” he wrote. He was no fan of Senator Joseph R.
McCarthy or of President Richard M. Nixon. (“Our detestation of him was
almost as aesthetic as political,” he wrote of Nixon.)
Professor Aaron at times served the government as a cultural ambassador
abroad — a “native son neither estranged from the collective American
family nor unreservedly clasped to its bosom,” he wrote. His role, he
said, was “not to ‘sell’ the U.S.A. but to ‘explain’ it, not to palliate
its blemishes but to contextualize them.”
In 2010, he was awarded a National Humanities Medal as a scholar and as
the founding president of the Library of America.
In his memoir, he described himself as “a citizen of two Americas.”
“One of them is the country of Uncle Sam,” he wrote, “an America, in the
words of Herman Melville, ‘intrepid, unprincipled, reckless, predatory,
with boundless ambition, civilized in the externals but savage at heart.’
“The other is its blessed double, home of heroes and clowns and of the
cheerful and welcoming democratic collective — ‘the place where I was
born.’ For all of my romantic Satanism and the satisfaction I took and
still take in the doctrine of original sin, it is this second America to
which I feel culturally and temperamentally attuned.”
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