The term Vital Center was first coined by the
Harvard
Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher l ...
historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
Arthur Meier Schlesinger Jr. (; born Arthur Bancroft Schlesinger; October 15, 1917 – February 28, 2007) was an American historian, social critic, and public intellectual. The son of the influential historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. and a sp ...
in his 1949 book of that title. However, he objected to the domestic use of the phrase:
US President
Bill Clinton started to use the phrase "vital center" in speeches given during his term of office. Schlesinger noted an article for
''Slate'' magazine that Clinton hoped to appropriate the term to mean "middle of the road" or something that his "
DLC fans" might prefer its meaning to be, which would locate it "somewhere closer to
Ronald Reagan than to Franklin D. Roosevelt." In the ''Slate'' article, Schlesinger strongly rejected that interpretation of the term and reiterated his argument from the 1998 introduction:
{{quotation, In my view, as I have said elsewhere, that middle of the road is definitely not the vital center. It is the dead center., Arthur Schlesinger, "It's My Vital Center", ''Slate'' magazine
References
* Schlesinger, Arthur M. ''The vital Center: The Politics of Freedom.'' Boston, Houghton Mifflin Co., 1949.
* Schlesinger, Arthur M
"It's My 'Vital Center'" ''Slate''. 10 January 1997.
External links
American political catchphrases