ARTHUR M. SCHLESINGER, JR. AND AMERICAN LIBERALISM

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Letters of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., edited by Andrew Schlesinger & Stephen Schlesinger (New York: Random House, 2013) ("These letters from the inside of the movement provide a quasi history of American liberalism and its struggles through the crucial decades from 1945 to 2005, from Franklin D. Roosevelt to George W. Bush." Id. at xii. From a letter to Averell Harriman, 12/12/1949: "The presence of a college president indifferent to educational values or problems has, as you would well imagine, seriously demoralizing consequences for the total intellectual life of the university. It is most improbable that universities under such leadership, or lack of it, will become vital intellectual centers." Id. at 28, 28. From a letter to Ernest Daniels, 8/1/1988: "... Of course, democracy is a most unsatisfactory form of government. The argument for it, as Churchill famously pointed out, is that it is less unsatisfactory than all the other forms. Despite the ignorance and infirmities of a mass electorate, the democratic form contains more possibilities of intelligent self-correction than any other form--or so it seems to me. But I have never supposed democracy to be a self-executing process. 'Perhaps no form of government,' as Bryce said, 'needs greater leaders so much as democracy.' You may be interested in some of the reflections in 'Democracy and Leadership,' the last chapter in The Cycles of American History." "I doubt, by the way, that those whom you call the 'plebeians' really constitute 'democracy's ruling class.' Power in the American democracy resides elsewhere." Id. at 501, 501. Also, see George Packer, "A Historian in Camelot," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 12/22/2013.).