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The Passion of William F. Buckley: Academic Freedom, Conspiratorial Conservatism, and the Rise of the Postwar Right

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 December 2018

JULIAN NEMETH
JULIAN NEMETH*
Affiliation:
History Department, Dawson College. Email: jnemeth@dawsoncollege.qc.ca.
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Abstract

In the early years of the Cold War, as universities expelled scholars with ties to the Communist Party, it became an article of faith among conservatives that the only targets of an ideological purge were people like themselves. William F. Buckley's God and Man at Yale, the most important exponent of this view, argued that “academic freedom” was a “superstition” designed to promote liberal indoctrination. Buckley's work tweaked, and mainstreamed, claims that a subversive conspiracy had overtaken the nation's schools and colleges. The correspondence the book generated demonstrates how attacks on academic freedom, and claims of victimhood, mobilized the postwar right.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 54 , Issue 2 , May 2020 , pp. 323 - 350
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies 2018

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References

1 Promotional brochure for God and Man at Yale, attached to a letter from Walter Pomeroy Jr. to A. Whitney Griswold, 19 Oct. 1951, Box 43, Folder 406, Alfred Whitney Griswold, president of Yale University, Records (RU 22), Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library. Yale officials expressed dismay that Regnery Press had managed to gain access to the alumni directory. See letter, Whitney Griswold to Michael L. Lejeune, 23 Oct. 1951, Box 43, Folder 12, A. W. Griswold Records.

2 Promotional brochure for God and Man at Yale.

3 Buckley, William Jr., God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of “Academic Freedom” (Chicago: Regnery, 1951)Google Scholar.

4 The best account of the Cold War red scare in American higher education remains Schrecker, Ellen, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984)Google Scholar. Also see Heins, Marjorie, Priests of Our Democracy: The Supreme Court, Academic Freedom, and the Anticommunist Purge (New York: NYU Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the American South see Williamson-Lott, Joy Ann, “The Battle over Power, Control, and Academic Freedom at Southern Institutions of Higher Education, 1955–1965,” Journal of Southern History, 79 (Nov. 2013), 879–920Google Scholar.

5 On early conflicts over academic freedom in the United States, Hofstadter, Richard and Metzger, Walter P., The Development of Academic Freedom in the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955)Google Scholar remains valuable. On World War I see Gruber, Carole S., Mars and Minerva: World War I and the Uses of the Higher Learning in America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1975), 164–72Google Scholar. For the interwar years see Cain, Timothy Reese, Establishing Academic Freedom: Politics, Principles, and the Development of Core Values (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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7 On the question of what held postwar conservatism together see Zelizer, Julian, “Rethinking the History of American Conservatism,” Reviews in American History, 28 (June 2010), 367–92, 369CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the expansion of higher education in the postwar era see Loss, Christopher P., Between Citizens and the State: The Politics of American Higher Education in the 20th Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 91–163CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Buckley's archives include folders with early drafts of God and Man at Yale, along with pamphlets and journals he was reading while researching the book. The materials can be found in Box 200, unmarked folder, William Buckley Jr. Papers, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University.

9 Andrew Hartman discusses these movements in Education and the Cold War: The Battle for the American School (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008)Google Scholar. For a contemporary journalistic account of (often successful) right-wing efforts to reshape American education in the 1950s and early 1960s see Nelson, Jack and Roberts, Gene Jr., The Censors and the Schools (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, 1963)Google Scholar.

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11 This represents a very early example of an alliance between conservative Catholics and evangelical Christians, against a rising tide of secularism, which would only begin to gain traction in the late 1960s. See Williams, Daniel K., God's Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 1–10CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 The first major historical work on postwar conservatism was Nash's, George H. still useful The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since 1945 (New York: Basic Books, 1976)Google Scholar. Since then, the book has been criticized for its focus on intellectuals over the grass roots, neglect of economic interests, and bowdlerizing of white supremacy's role in the conservative movement. Important correctives focussing on social history and women include McGirr, Lisa, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001)Google Scholar; on the centrality of race, Lowndes, Joseph, From the New Deal to the New Right: Race and the Southern Origins of Modern Conservatism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008)Google Scholar; and finance, Phillips-Fein, Kim, Invisible Hands: The Businessmen's Crusade against the New Deal (New York: Norton, 2009)Google Scholar.

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14 In an otherwise perceptive essay that argues that historians have neglected the way populist and conspiratorial movements have mobilized the American right, Rick Perlstein maintains that William F. Buckley Jr. represents the antithesis of these conspiratorial traditions. This article, by contrast, argues that Buckley was in many ways their logical fulfillment. See Rick Perlstein, “I Thought I Understood the American Right: Trump Proved me Wrong,” New York Times Magazine, 11 April 2017, at www.nytimes.com/2017/04/11/magazine/i-thought-i-understood-the-american-right-trump-proved-me-wrong.html.

15 On the countersubversive tradition, Ribuffo's, Leo P.The Old Christian Right: The Protestant Far Right from the Great Depression to the Cold War (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983)Google Scholar remains valuable.

16 NCAE, How Red Are the Schools?.

17 Ibid., 3.

18 Ibid., 9.

19 Ibid., 6–7.

20 Ibid., 4.

21 Ibid., 10.

22 Ibid., 9.

23 Ibid. 14, italics in original.

24 NCAE pamphlet, Three Important Articles on Academic Freedom (undated, c.1950), Box 200, unmarked folder, William Buckley Jr. Papers.

25 Ibid.

26 W. H. Conant, “This Academic Freedom,” in Three Important Articles on Academic Freedom, 9.

27 Ibid. 5.

28 Ibid., 9, Buckley's underlining.

29 How Red Are the Schools?, 9.

30 NCAE, Red-Ucators at Yale University (15 July 1949).

31 Ibid., 1.

32 Ibid., 3. Buckley's underlining. In reality, the pamphlet was not actually careful at ferreting out subversives. The vast majority of professors listed were simply well-known proponents of civil liberties.

33 There is evidence suggesting, for instance, that Yale denied law professor and civil libertarian Vern Countryman tenure because of the Red-Ucators accusations. See Nick Ravo, “Vern Countryman, 81, Professor and Commercial Law Expert,” New York Times, 17 May 1999, at www.nytimes.com/1999/05/17/us/vern-countryman-81-professor-and-commercial-law-expert.html.

34 NCAE, Red-Ucators at Yale University.

35 Quoted in Cole, Jonathan R., The Great American University (New York: Public Affairs, 2009), 361Google Scholar.

36 In addition to the NCAE pamphlets already discussed, Buckley had the following issues of the Educational Reviewer in his review files for God and Man at Yale: 1, 3 (15 Jan. 1950), 2, 2 (15 Oct. 1950), 2, 3 (15 Jan. 1951).

37 “A Declaration,” Educational Reviewer, 1, 1 (15 July 1949), 1.

38 Ibid.

39 Lucille Cardin Crain in interview with Slater, Bill, “What Is Taught Your Children,” Educational Reviewer, 2, 2 (15 Oct. 1950), 1Google Scholar. For more on Crain's educational activism see Nickerson, Michelle M., Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 69–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40 Crain, “What Is Taught,” 1.

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42 “A Declaration,” Educational Reviewer, 1, 1 (15 July 1949), 1Google Scholar.

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44 Lonigan, Edna, “Broadcasting Collectivist Propaganda,” Educational Reviewer, 1, 1 (15 July 1949), 3Google Scholar

45 Ibid.

46 A. M. Briggs, review of World History, by Boak, Slosson, and Anderson, Educational Reviewer, 1, 4 (15 April 1950), 2Google Scholar; Dewitt E. Sell, review of Psychology: Its Principles and Applications by Engle, T. L., Educational Reviewer, 3, 4 (15 April 1952), 2Google Scholar; Samuel B. Pettengill, review of Building Citizenship by Hughes, R. O., Educational Reviewer, 1, 3 (15 Jan. 1950), 2Google Scholar; Anna P. Butler, review of Within the Americas by Collette, Elizabeth, Cross, Tom Peete, and Stauffer, Elmer, Educational Reviewer, 1, 3 (15 Jan. 1950), 4Google Scholar; M. R. Madden, review of The Making of Modern America by Canfield, Leon H. and Wilder, Howard, Educational Reviewer, 2, 3 (15 Jan. 1951), 7–8Google Scholar.

47 MacBride, Roger, “What They Are Teaching Us,” Educational Reviewer, 1, 4 (15 April 1950), 1Google Scholar.

48 Ibid.

49 Samuel J. Kornhauser, review of A Grammar of American Politics: The National Government by Binkley, Wilfred E., Educational Reviewer, 2, 4 (15 April 1951), 4Google Scholar.

50 James J. Flynn, review of The Beginnings of the American People and the Nation, by Kelty, Mary G., Educational Reviewer, 1, 1 (15 July 1949), 2Google Scholar.

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52 Ibid.

53 Jack Schwartzman, review of Social Living, by Landis, Paul H., Educational Reviewer, 3, 3 (15 Jan. 1952), 6Google Scholar.

54 All quotes from the editorial come from McCarthy, Joseph, “A Question for Americans,” Educational Reviewer, 4, 2 (15 Oct. 1952), 1Google Scholar, original emphasis.

55 Hartman, Education and the Cold War, 105.

56 Nelson and Roberts, The Censors and the Schools, 47.

57 As quoted in ibid., 41.

58 Crain, Lucille Cardin, “Goodbye,” Educational Reviewer, 5, 2 (15 Oct. 1953), 1Google Scholar.

59 On Zoll's decline see Robert Morris, “Era of Anxiety: An Historical Account of Right Wing Forces Affecting Education during the Years 1949 to 1954,” PhD dissertation, Indiana State University, 1977, 147–50.

60 Carey McWilliams, New Statesman, 17 Oct. 1951, 455.

61 For Kendall's extensive editing suggestions, many of which Buckley incorporated, see Box 200, folder “Criticisms of Intro and Religion,” William Buckley Papers. Also see Buckley, William Jr., Miles Gone By: A Literary Autobiography (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2004), 69Google Scholar.

62 Kendall, Willmoore, Willmoore Kendall Contra Mundum, ed. Kendall, Nellie D. (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1971), 93–102Google Scholar.

63 Nash, George H., “Willmoore Kendall: Conservative Iconoclast (I),” Modern Age, 19 (Spring 1975), 127–35Google Scholar.

64 Ibid., 127–28.

65 Kendall, 163–67.

66 For biting critiques of standard liberal defenses of freedom speech, especially ones that depend on references to Plato's Apology or Milton's Areopagitica, see ibid., 149–67, 168–95 respectively.

67 Kendall, Willmoore, “Review of Hans Kohn, Prophets and Peoples,” Journal of Politics, 8, 3 (Aug. 1946), 426–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

68 Kendall, Willmoore Kendall, 93–102.

69 Buckley, Miles Gone By, 59.

70 For an example of Kendall making a biological argument to support his racist views on African American inferiority see Kendall, Willmoore, “Review of Natheniel Weyl's The Negro in American Civilization,” in Kendall, The Conservative Affirmation (Chicago: Regnery Press, 1963), 216Google Scholar.

71 Buckley supported “massive resistance” against civil rights in the South. See William F. Buckley, “Why the South Must Prevail”, National Review, 24 Aug. 1957, 148–49. For the racist strains in mid-century conservative thought more generally see Maclean, Nancy, “Guardians of Privilege,” in Critchlow, Donald and Maclean, Nancy, eds., Debating the American Conservative Movement: 1945 to the Present (Rowman and Littlefield: 2009), 123–76Google Scholar.

72 Buckley, William F. Jr., “A Reply to Robert Hutchins: The Aimlessness of American Education,” in Buckley, in Rumbles Left and Right: A Book about Troublesome People and Ideas (New York: G. P. Putnam and Sons, 1963), 128–41, 134Google Scholar.

73 On Bryan's communitarian arguments see Larson, Edward, Summer for the Gods (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 44–45Google Scholar.

74 Judis, John, William F. Buckley Jr.: Patron Saint of the Conservatives (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), 86Google Scholar.

75 Ibid.

76 For a history of the AAUP's elaboration of academic freedom doctrine through the twentieth century see Finkin, Matthew and Post, Robert, For the Common Good: Principles of American Academic Freedom (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009)Google Scholar. On the development of the 1915 document see Hofstadter and Metzger, The Development of Academic, 367–412.

77 American Association of University Professors, “1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure,” Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors, 27, 1 (1941), 40–46Google Scholar.

78 See, for instance, “The Professors’ Union,” New York Times, 21 Jan. 1916, 8.

79 Buckley, God and Man, 190.

80 Ibid.

81 Ibid., xvi.

82 Ibid., xvii. For Kendall's insertion of the line see Box 200, folder “Criticisms of Intro and Religion,” William Buckley Papers.

83 On Buckley's militant Catholicism, which saw Communism as a “Satanic faith that threatened the soul of Western Civilization,” see Judis, 27.

84 Buckley, God and Man, 34.

85 Ibid., 43.

86 Ibid., 67.

87 Ibid., 81–82.

88 Ibid., 150–51.

89 Ibid., 139–40.

90 Ibid., 157–59.

91 Buckley, “The Aimlessness of American Education,” 138–39.

92 Buckley, God and Man, 189.

93 Ibid.

94 Ibid., xvi.

95 McCasland, S. Vernon, “God and Man at Yale Review,” Journal of Bible and Religion, 20, 2 (April 1952), 135–36Google Scholar.

96 For a typical example, see Time magazine, “Rebel in Reverse”, 29 Oct. 1951, 57–58.

97 Letter, Frank E. Simmons to A. W. Griswold, 24 Nov. 1951, Box 42, Folder 407, A. W. Griswold Records.

98 Anonymous Yale University alumni responses to promotional material sent by Regnery Press, undated, probably 1951, Box 411, Folder, “God and Man at Yale, W,” William Buckley Papers.

99 Letter, Robert M. Stein to Henry Regnery, 10 Oct. 1951, Box 411, Folder S, William Buckley Jr. Papers.

100 “Yale Attempts to Answer Buckley,” American Legion Firing Line, 1 March 1952, 1.

101 Buckley, William F. Jr. and Bozell, L. Brent, McCarthy and His Enemies (Chicago: Regnery Press, 1954)Google Scholar. Also see correspondence discussed in Dwight Macdonald, “God and Buckley at Yale,” The Reporter, 27 May 1952, 36.

102 Letter, Howard Brenton Macdonald to A. Whitney Griswold, 21 Feb. 1952, Box 43, Folder 12, A. W. Griswold Records.

103 Adolphe Menjou (transcribed radio broadcast produced by America's Future, Inc., released for week of 27 Jan–2 Feb. 1952), Box 411, folder “Special Correspondences 1951,” William Buckley Jr. Papers.

104 Letter, Robert Donner to Yale Daily News, 30 Oct. 1951, Box 42, Folder 403, A. W. Griswold Records.

105 Letter, Bob Andelson to William Buckley Jr., 6 Nov. 1951, Box 41, Folder 186, William Buckley Jr. Papers.

106 Letter, W. Fairfield Peterson to William Buckley Jr., 24 Oct. 1951, Box 410, Folder 201, William Buckley Jr. Papers.

107 Letter, Frank Seaver to William Buckley Jr., 23 Nov. 1951, Box 411, Folder S, William Buckley Jr. Papers.

108 Letter, J. W. Simmons to William Buckley Jr., 25 Jan. 1952, Box 411, Folder S, William Buckley Jr. Papers.

109 Letter, F. Reeves Rutledge to William Buckley Jr., 11 Nov. 1951, Box 410, Folder 203, William Buckley Jr. Papers.

110 Letter, Sergeant Lewis to William Buckley Jr., 14 Dec. 1951, Box 410, Folder 203, William Buckley Jr. Papers.

111 Ibid.

112 Letter, Milton W. Brown to William Buckley Jr., 21 Nov. 1951, Box 410, Folder 187, William Buckley Jr. Papers.

113 Letter, A. W. Griswold to Lloyd H. Smith, 28 May 1951, Box 42, Folder 407, A. W. Griswold Records. Yale officials also sent out 2,000 copies of McGeorge Bundy's critique of God and Man at Yale, which relied heavily on anti-Catholicism. See McGeorge Bundy, “The Attack on Yale,” Atlantic Monthly, Nov. 1951, 50–52. Letter, A. W. Griswold to Edward Weeks, 25 Oct. 1951, Box 42, Folder 404, A. W. Griswold Records. On the significance of anti-Catholicism to American social thought in the twentieth century see McGreevy, John T. “Thinking on One's Own: Catholics in the American Intellectual Imagination, 1928–1960,” Journal of American History, 84, 1 (1997), 97–131CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

114 As quoted in Judis, William F. Buckley, 96. For a similarly stinging critique in a national Catholic periodical see Eva J. Rose, “Books,” The Sign: A National Catholic Magazine, Feb. 1952, 70.

115 Yale was founded in 1701 to propagate a strict version of Calvinism. In its early years, a Catholic such as Buckley would never have even been accepted. No Catholics attended Yale until the 1830s and fewer than three dozen had graduated by the end of the nineteenth century. See Peter C. Alegi, “A History of Catholicism at Yale to 1943,” Departmental Essay in American Studies, Yale University, 1956, 1–19.

116 E. Merrill Root, “Darkness at Noon in America's College,” Human Events, 30 July 1952, 1–6.

117 Ibid.

118 Root, E. Merrill, Collectivism on the Campus: The Battle for the Mind in American Colleges (New York: Devin-Adair, 1955), 20–21Google Scholar.

119 Wittmer, Felix, Conquest of the American Mind (Boston, MA: Meador, 1956), 209–10Google Scholar.

120 Ibid., 181, 196, 88, 293.

121 William Buckley Jr., “The Ivory Tower,” National Review, 26 Nov. 1955, 25.

122 E. Merrill Root, “American J'Accuse,” National Review, 20 Oct. 1956, 21.

123 Kirk, Russell, Academic Freedom: An Essay in Definition. (Chicago: Regnery, 1955)Google Scholar.

124 Raywid, Mary Anne, The Ax-Grinder: Critics of Our Public Schools (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1962), 123–28Google Scholar.

125 For survey date that confirms the “liberal” orientation of the American professoriate in the postwar era see Gross, Neil, Why Are Professors Liberal and Why Do Conservatives Care? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 27–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the decline of religious and ethical engagement in higher education see Marsden, George, The Soul of the American University (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 332–57Google Scholar; and Reuben, Julie, The Making of the Modern University (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

126 Macdonald, “God and Buckley at Yale,” 37.

127 See, for example, Sidney Hook's review of Root's Collectivism on the Campus, “The Teaching and the Taught,” New York Times, 6 Nov. 1955, B58. On the crucial role that Hook played in shaping the academic-freedom discourse of the McCarthy era see Nemeth, Julian, “The Case for Cleaning House: Sidney Hook and the Ethics of Academic Freedom during the McCarthy Era,” History of Education Quarterly, 57, 3 (Aug. 2017), 400–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

128 Willmoore Kendall, Willmoore Kendall, 613–25.

129 Laats, Adam, Fundamentalist U: Keeping the Faith in American Higher Education (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

130 See, for instance, de Forest, Jennifer, “Conservatism Goes to College: The Role of Philanthropic Foundations in the Rise of Conservative Student Networks,” in Geiger, Roger L., ed., Perspectives on the History of Higher Education (Livingston, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2008), 103–27Google Scholar.

131 Kendall, Willmoore Kendall, 623, italics in original.

132 Ibid.

133 Ibid., 621.