January 28, 2010 05:45 AM
Editor's note: Koil Rowland has been in the practice of writing letters to his friends on significant historical and political issues for several years. The Missouri Record is pleased to print these letters with the author's permission.
Doctor:
You have no need of instruction from me about the roots of present-day American conservatism, and I don’t presume to think I have any such instruction to offer you in the paragraphs which will follow this one. What I’m writing in this letter is not an attempt to teach you anything you don’t already know. It’s merely a way of reminding myself, as I like to do from time to time, of the sea-change in American politics which has occurred in your lifetime and mine. I’ve written elsewhere about what I understand to be the shape and substance of the conservatism which has resulted from that change. In this letter I want to pay homage to the men I believe were chiefly responsible for bringing the change about, present-day conservatism’s Founding Fathers, as it were.
About six decades ago all serious American political thought was liberal in form, substance, and outlook. That changed in the decade of the 1950s. Before that decade, to identify oneself as a political conservative was to invite the scorn of respectable people. The time of that scorn now is long gone, and partly because it is whole generations of students of American political life have grown to adulthood largely without knowledge of how present-day American conservatism came into being and of the men who were its authors. Since that’s the case, perhaps the brief outline which follows will be of some practical use to young students of conservatism. I hope so at least.
Before the decade of the 1950s, to identify oneself as a political conservative was to invite that treatment which is reserved for political pariahs. Before the 1950s, there was no political conservatism worthy of the attention and affection of thoughtful and decent people. But in the decade of the 1950s, several discrete forces converged to create a movement which stood American political thinking on its head. Fat books have been written about those forces and their transformative effect on American political life. I have neither the knowledge nor the energy to attempt to add to the imposing number of those books. But I will offer you the following outline of what went on in American political thought in the 1950s--and how the transformative forces shaping and giving substance to present-day conservatism in our country came into being.
In the mid-1950s, William F. Buckley founded his National Review magazine. Buckley was more than just a brilliant writer; though certainly he was one of those; he was also a brilliant synthesizer of the writings of others and a conspicuously skilled editor of those writings. His magazine enlisted the talents of a formidable array of rightist writers both foreign and domestic: men like William Schlamm, Max Eastman, Richard Weaver, Willmoore Kendall, and John Chamberlain. All of those men were former Marxists. All of their various writings combined to give National Review a hard and uncompromising anti-Communist edge.
National Review had founding editors of even more formative importance in its life than the men I’ve just mentioned. One of them was James Burnham, the man Buckley credited with having done the most to give NR its intellectual tone. Two of the others were Russell Kirk and Frank S. Meyer, who between them staked out and gave substance to the ideas of conservative community and conservative order on the one hand and the ideas of individual rights and individual responsibilities on the other. Like so many of the other National Review’s editors at the magazine’s founding, both Burnham and Meyer were turned Marxists. And like those others, when they turned they turned with a vengeance.
Whittaker Chambers wrote his searing Witness in the decade in which National Review was finding its eloquent voice. Russell Kirk wrote a fat book called The Conservative Mind in that decade also, and Frank S. Meyer wrote a skinny one called In Defense of Freedom. Taken together, those three books changed me almost all by themselves from the kind of liberal I had thought I was to the kind of conservative I have striven and still am striving to become. All three of the books are fine far beyond my powers of description. But if I could take only one of them to the proverbial desert island, that one would be Meyer’s In Defense of Freedom. I don’t for a moment hesitate to say that of all the lights in the conservative galaxy, it was Frank S. Meyer’s which shone the brightest. If I had to name the one man whose teachings did the most to show me what a conservatism of good mind and good heart is all about, Frank Meyer certainly would be that man.
I wrote at the beginning of this letter that I’d be endeavoring to put together in it an outline sketching some of the forces which came together in the 1950s to act as agents of major importance in the creation and movement to respectability of present-day American conservatism. Much more could be written about those forces and their effects on our nation’s political life. But perhaps what I’ve written about conservatism in the 1950s and the men who shaped and moved it will be of some use as a kind of a road-map for those seeking to know more about the events of that transformative decade in American political history--and about the men whose various talents combined to transform it. I know that you have no need for such a road-map. I’ve written this letter in the hope that it will be of some use to those who feel they have a need for one.
You and I, Doctor, are among the relatively few people still alive who remember the times when present-day American conservatism had its beginnings. They were for me fine and bracing times to be alive--and to call myself a conservative. The memory of them moves and invigorates me still. I hope the memory of them still moves and invigorates you too.
Koil Rowland is a writer in Jefferson City, Missouri. His columns are adapted from letters written to friends.
About six decades ago all serious American political thought was liberal in form, substance, and outlook. That changed in the decade of the 1950s. Before that decade, to identify oneself as a political conservative was to invite the scorn of respectable people. The time of that scorn now is long gone
