SOURCE: "The Schlesinger Thesis," in Commentary, Vol. 83, No. 3, March, 1987, pp. 46-52.

An American literary scholar whose works evidence his conservative principles, Lynn is the general editor of Houghton-Mifflin's "Riverside Literature" series and the author of numerous essays and books on American life and letters. In the following essay, Lynn censures Schlesinger for allowing his political loyalties to bias his historical accounts.

Once upon a time, the books of the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. were worth reading. In The Vital Center (1949), for instance, he spoke with a fog-cutting scorn of those "progressives" who still clung to the miasmic dreams of the 1930's and were still blind, in consequence, to Soviet imperialism and the malevolence of the American Communist party. The modern liberalism which he represented was much more tough-minded. Thanks to a "restoration of radical nerve," he explained, in words that revealed how much he owed to the...