Namely, the use of the ideas of Matthiessen's American Renaissance subjects (Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Hawthorne, and Melville) in anti-communist literature by authors such as Schlesinger, Trilling, Howe, and Buckley (and to a lesser extent, fringe groups such as the John Birch Society.)
My reason for posting is that I am consistently hitting places where the nuance of these ideas are consistently contradicted by the authors themselves. Schlesinger, for example in The Age of Jackson, held that the Trancendentalists "from their book-lined studies, or their shady walks in cool Concord woods…found the hullabaloo of party politics unedifying and vulgar," and perhaps sought to make their "flinching from politics…into a virtue,” “leaving responsibility far behind for a magic domain where the mystic sentiment and gnomic utterance exorcised the rude intrusions of the world." However, in The Vital Center, perhaps my main Schlesinger source, the ideas he borrows from Emerson et al. go directly against this opinion.
Has anyone else run into these sort of issues while writing? I have occasionally in the past, however this is much more frequent and frustrating. Additionally, I am always open to suggestion for source materials to assist in the expansion of my idea.
Are you working from a pre-existing thesis (hypothesis/argument)? Because to me
I am consistently hitting places where the nuance of these ideas are consistently contradicted by the authors themselves.
is actually really exciting!
Why try to explain that away or worry about it? Why not embrace the paradox, like your subjects evidently did (I'm taking your word on it!) and see what that tells you about the anti-communist writers?
If you need some theory on that, Caroline Walker Bynum talks about the utility of "paradox" as an interpretive element at the end of her Christian Materiality. Obviously that book's subject matter is vastly far from yours, but it's a cogent assertion and reminder that to explain something does mean explaining away.
I've run into a roughly analogous situation before when looking at the influence of "medievalism" in American thought and literature in the 19th/20th century; "medievalism" in that context is usually either utopian (i.e. people looking back to a romanticized ideal) or dystopian (i.e. people looking back on it as a primitive, backwards, and violent period) - yet while folks like Mark Twain (A Conneticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court) and Lord Tennyson (Idylls of the King) might approach medievalism from these different perspectives, they're both arriving at more or less the same place.
When you mention the John Birch Society, for example, a lot of the places that Transcendentalists like Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman were coming from would have been anathema - especially the influence of Hinduism - but the basic ideals of individualism, transcendental knowledge not reliant on (or disprovable by) evidence (i.e. "we know what is right, we don't have to be told"), and self-reliance are a large part of the John Birch Society's political philosophy...and so too of many anti-Communists.
For an example of how this interpretation might work with regards to your thesis, consider that perhaps Schlesinger's vacillation on Emerson et al. is because S. is trying to cram history into fitting his political theories. If you look at his 4 April 1948 article Not Left, Not Right, But a Vital Center in the New York Times, you'll see that Schlesinger is less coming to grips with the historical realities of his example than trying to make them fall neatly into the demonstration of his theory; extraneous details like individuals that don't quite fall under his easy categorization of Right, Left, and Center are rather glaring in their absence. In that regard, Schlesinger's use of Emerson et al. could be understood as approving of whatever works according to his theories, and disapproving of whatever doesn't.