A Conservative Publisher m a Liberal World
Regnery, Henry
"A Conservative Publisher m a Liberal World" levelled at Robert McNamara was that he was inevitably correct intellectually but invariably incorrect in predicting the outcome of the strategies he set in...
...Kirk had won...
...The reason: McNamara simply didn't understand the human dimension or, more accurately perhaps, simply didn't believe in it anymore than, say the Marxist believes in such a thing as human nature...
...It was a mind that could continue to call on its mathematical kind of sanity long after the others, the good liberal social scientists who had never gotten beyond their original logarithms, had trailed off...
...Today," he said, "I should not write such books at all...
...The argument runs that academically qualified students are not available from conservative circles...
...Writing in 1947, in the disillusionment of post-war London, Wyndham Lewis wondered if his long fight had been worthwhile...
...This should be a non-negotiable demand...
...Victor Gollancz was an extremely successful and astute publisher of Jewish background, a member of the Fabian society, and the founder, in the thirties, of the Left Rook Club...
...While the New York Times had greeted the Tehran Decaration with the assertion that it "laid the foundations for a new and better order in the world," Morley pointed out that in the eleven weeks that had followed the pious declarations of the big three about "working together in peace," and welcoming all "freedom loving peoples" into a "World Family of Democratic Nations," Communist Russia had, without consulting its Western Allies done the following: signed an exclusive "mutual assistance pact" with the Czechoslovak government in exile...
...The war, Which represented the triumph of good over evil, had been won...
...I couldn't help but feel, who indeed...
...It was widely read and discussed, for example, in the colleges and universities, and after the reviews came articles--not all, of course, in agreement, but Kirk had launched a concept and established a position which the Liberals recognized as a real challenge, and took seriously...
...This is simply propaganda from the offices of liberal in...
...s an Assoc~mte and regular contributor to The Alteimative./-//s first book, The Kumquat Statem6nt,was published in November by Cowles and he is presently writing a study of Greek J mythology featuring the Vice President Agnew...
...It was becoming increasingly difficult in any case to conduct'a publishing operation divided between Washington and Chicago, so in 1947 I decided to go it alone...
...The man of pure emotion must by nature appear masochistic, for emotionalism in its purest form feeds on self-suffering...
...Thus the peculiar intensity of EUsberg's character as it transmits itself through the media...
...And when, in some period of stress, such as the present period, the McNamara or the Ellsberg realizes this, the result can be an extreme renunciation of the old way of behaving and the fervent espousal of a new behavior...
...The liberal press, which meant nearly the entire press, still fighting fo~" its illusions, ignored it, but such an influential publication as the Christian Century gave it a long and serious review, and it doubtless had some influence on American policy...
...Miss Utley was an authority not only on Communism, Communists and Fellow Travellers, but on Asia as well, and made it her business to put things down as she understood and saw them...
...I came into book publishing, however, by degrees, and as a result of my association with Felix Morley and Frank Hanighen in the publication of a Washington newsletter, Human Events...
...I donk mean a conservative magazine...
...Yet we learned that at least 40 percent of the population is truly conservative in the 1964 presidential election and recent polls have shown similar results...
...What Albert J. Nock said of World War I, that it was a "Liberal's war and a Liberal's peace," was even more true of World War II, at least insofar as this country is concerned...
...The young English instructor at * Michigan State had become a national figure, and the amorphous, scattered opposition to the overwhelming power of Liberalism had received its identity...
...14 The Alternative October, 1971 levelled at Robert McNamara was that he was inevitably correct intellectually but invariably incorrect in predicting the outcome of the strategies he set in motion...
...with them a Festschrifl for the sixtieth birthday of T.S...
...Nothing less will suffice...
...But then the old fighter went on to say, " . . . Darwin, Voltaire, Newton, Raphael, Dante, E p i c t e t u s , A r i s t o t l e , Sophocles, Plato, Pythagoras: all shedding their light upon the same wide, welllit graeco-roman.highway, with the same kind of sane and steady rate----one need only mention these to recognize that it was at least excusable to be concerned about the threat of extinction to that tradition...
...But to get back to book publishing...
...it is to the credit of the New York Times that it reviewed the book favorably and at length, although Miss Utley blamed the Times for helping to create the illusions concerning the Chinese Communists which had disastrously influenced American policy...
...I wrote to him immediately to ask if we might see the manuscript...
...When the Henry Regnery Company was organized in 1947, therefore, it was not with the idea of publishing conservative books, but books which didn't necessarily fit the liberal ideology which so dominated publishing as to constitute a particularly effective form of censorship...
...Lewis was also a difficult author to put over, but his intelligence and the quality of his work are gradually being recognized in spite of the critics...
...I should begin by saying that when I first became interested in publishing, we didn't describe ourselves as Conservative...
...was his scandalized reaction to this shameful act...
...John R. Coyne, Jr...
...The Henry Regnery Company began operations that year, but was not incorporated until 1948, taking over the pamphlet series and the remaining stock of "Blueprint for World Conquest...
...Which then consisted primarily of a four-page essay on some aspect of foreign policy...
...But the critics would have none of him - - he was violently anti-Liberal and therefore for them a fascist, and his books, for all their great quality, have never sold...
...but that is i t . relevant when compared to the educational potential from someone who has had the "conservative ex'perience...
...In fact, due to the ridiculously high proportion of liberals to the conservatives on the campus (especially in upper division), a higher proportion of conservatives than 40 percent should be admitted initially...
...A kind of Gresham's Law of scholarship has been in operation for a generation...
...The man of pure intellect must by nature appear at times sadistir, for he understands little of what pains others...
...a commission was appointed to report to the Trustees on its allegations...
...No matter what the critics may say, he is one of the towering figures of this century...
...Part of the problem is one of insulation the peculiar way in which the Twentieth Century has unfolded has led to the rise of groups and classes cut off from the daily life of the society and the majority of its inhabitants, and a consequent overdevelopment of one faculty, the intellectual, at the expense of others, such as the emotional...
...The daughter of one of the early Fabians, she became a Communist in the early twenties, while a student at th~ London Scool of Economics, but some six years in Soviet Russia as the wife of a Russian made her about as antiCommunist as one can be...
...Sen...
...The series continued for some three years, and included among its authors Felix Morley, John U. Nef, Joseph M. Lalley, Arthur E. Morgan, Clare Booth Luce, William A. Orion, Robert M. Hutchins, Douglas Steere and Frank Chodorov...
...The result is not unlike the sort of thing that happens when a fifty-year-old Jesuit suddenly discovers girls...
...We needed a "back list," some books which would be steady, reliable sellers - - a cook book, for instance, or text books...
...of course, that the commssion had anything to do with "the book," which made it all the more apparent that "the book" was its sole reason for existence, and, as was to be expected, Yale completely exonerated in its report...
...For this, we need to encourage new talent, and one means, almost the only means, in fact, of doing this, is good periodicals...
...What we do need, I think, is to develop a body of literature of high quality by people of conservative instincts - - what, for example, T.S...
...an entire issue of the alumnae magazine was devoted to it...
...Our first step in this direction was an arrangement with the Great Books Foundation to publish paperback editions of the books required in their program, paperbook editions of the classics being not then available...
...A Conservative Publisher in a Liberal World Henry Regnery The editor of The Alternative suggested that I write something about my experiences as a publisher of conservative books...
...The flagellant has become "the public penitent...
...Her strong sense of justice and her scorn of hypocrisy were outraged by what she saw, and the resulting book, The High Cost of Vengeance, appeared on our list in 1949...
...Returning from one of his searches for desirable textbook projects, Sidney told me that a young instructor in English at Michigan State had completed a manuscript he thought I should look at...
...To do what is needed to halt the disintegration of our society requires purpose and intelligence...
...Its impact was immediate, and beyond all expectations...
...There won't be any money or glory in it, but we have inherited a great and noble tradition, and it is worth fighting for...
...If the body was tense and driven," says Halberstam, "the mind was mathematical, analytically bringing reason from chaos, always reason...
...All of this, however, didn't prevent him from taking an extremely critical view of post-war allied The A l t e r n a t i v e October, 1971 15 policy in Germany, which he felt was leading to mass starvation, was based on the Nazi doctrine of collective guilt, and was diametrically opposed to every principle the West stood for...
...The other book on that list, Max Picard's Hitler in Ourselves, was a study of Hitlerism, not as an exclusively German phenomenon, but as an expression of the sickness of the West, which had taken a particularly virulent form in Germany...
...Maybe they used to be conservatives, but the Establishment bought them off years ago...
...Conservatives want to go...
...The Ellsbergs are curiously insulated, protected from reality, and they develop hugely in one direction, but usually at the expense of others...
...the Liberal could believe, in fact, that no other position was conceivable...
...Two authors whom it gave me special pleasure, but no profit, to publish were the South African poet, Roy Campbell, and the English writer, Wyndham Lewis...
...Modern Age., National Review, The Intercollegiate Review and the conservative student publications all perform an important function in this respect, but we also need a monthly of national circulation and of high quality - - something on the level of the Atlantic or Harper's m their better days...
...Jr., and it gave enormous pleasure and satisfaction to its publisher...
...This seemed highly promising for a time, but the publication of God and Man at Yale put a stop to that...
...I published it, along with another book by Gollancz which consisted of his account, with photographs, of several visits to Germany during that first terrible winter following the war...
...He had been a bareback rider in the circus, fought bulls in Spain and Portugal, served in the Nationalist Army in the Spanish Civil War and the King's Africa Rifles in World Wa/" I I , baited left-wing poets in London,and with all that, had written some of the most beautiful lyric poetry of this century...
...The threat of extinction is now much greater than it was then: those bent on destroying civilization a r e b e t t e r organized, and the defenses are waker...
...Regnery is Chairman of the Board of the Henry Regnery Company...
...McGovern, Willmoore Kendall's The Conservative Affirmation, Wilhelm Roepke's The Humane Economy - - but for me, The Conservative Mind, coming as it did after The China Story and God and Man atYale was the high point of my publishing career...
...In fact, no one who has not shared the conservative experience can be allowed to teach in the program...
...We published it the following spring, and after much deliberation called it The Conservative M/rid...
...The drug culture, the kids, alid Lire state of the universities no doubt symbolize the utter collapse of Liberalism as a philosophy and a body of ideas, but we must face the fact that the Liberals still hold nearly all the positions of influence in our society, and show no sign of being willing to relinquish them...
...Anyone who looks at the secular campus today is aware of the great number of liberal and radical students and the tiny number of conservatives...
...and, finally, had incorporated the formerly independent states of Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia into the Soviet Union...
...If I am not mistaken, no less a figure than Frank Meyer strongly opposed the adoption of the name "conservative" for the position he felt he represented, but when National Review began publication a few months later it described itself as a conservative journal of opinion...
...If Bill had been a nobody or the book without basis it could have been ignored, but that wasn't the case--he had been Chairman of the Yale News a member of the debating team, an outstanding student, and, for a time, one of the president's prize exhibits at alumnae gatherings, and worst of all, his book was effectively written and based on fact...
...Brandt's answer was published by Human Events as a pamphlet, bearing the same title as the Morgenthau book, and became the first of a series of monthly pamphlets...
...Miss Utley was the first established author to appear on our list, and a following book of hers, The China Story, which we published in 1952, was our first book to make the best-seller lists...
...He replied at once, and a few months later God and Man at Yale gave Yale and the entire liberal establishment a shock from which it has never recovered...
...Morley and Hanighen had founded Human Events in 1944, as World War II was approaching its end...
...Though finally, when the mathematical version of sanity did not work out, when it turned out that the computer had not fed back the right answers and had underestimated those funny little far-off men in their raggedy pajamas, he would be striken with a profound sense of failure, he would at least briefly be a shattered man....And so in the end the Great Statistician became himself a statistic, one more casualty of the war...
...Thus mandatory quotas must be established and enforced on the campus...
...There was opposition to Kirk, and from what became the conservative side, opposition part i c u l a r l y to the designation, "conservative...
...We published many good books after The Conservative Mind ~ Felix Morley's Freedom and Federalism, Richard Weaver's The Ethics of Rhetoric, James Jackson K i l p a t r i c k ' s The Sovereign States, James Burnham's Congress and the AmeriCan Tradition, two books by William lVl...
...Fulbri~ht, Cornell Law Quarterly, Fall, 1961...
...Unlike the majority of ordinary citizens, an Ellsberg has little experience of the whole range of experiences - - mundane and tragic, embarrassing and hilarious, noble and profane - - that form the development of man's character in society...
...The ratio of conservative students must be the same as the overall ratio of conservatives within the general population...
...Ellsberg, reacting to that picture of himself holding a machine gun, tells us just how puny one of the central tragedies of our time has become - - the contingency planner suddenly realizing that his contingency plans, developed like games in a think-tank, can actually be applied in the real world...
...we are all, including Frank Meyer, Conservatives now...
...But then one day it dawns...
...Only if one subscribes to the cult of the 'strong' Presidency which mesmerized American political science in the fifties and early sixties can one look with complacency on the growth of Presidential dictatorship in foreign affalrs...a good Executive is not one who strengthens his own office by exerdsing his powers to the legal utmost and beyond, but one who, by respecting the limits of his own authority, contributes to the vitality of the constitutional system as a whole...
...Everything connected with the program - - grading, admissions, content - - must be under the control of true conservatives...
...His book on this subject, Our Threatened Values, was declined by his former New York publisher, who, by the way, had published the Morgenthaubook, and somehow he came to me...
...This came out just at the time MacArthur was dismissed from his command and when, as a conqueror, the whole subject of Asia, and particularly the loss of China to Communism, was at the center of discussion...
...In order for a truly conservative CS program to survive on campus, it is oh...
...If anything like fairness is to be restored to the campus scene, there has to be a balancing of opinions on those campuses like Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Eerkeley...
...It is probably difficult even for those who experienced it to believe that it could have happened...
...The unexpected appearance in the fifties of what promised to be a rational, viable alternative te Liberalism was followed by the dismal sixties...
...These CS programs will renovate all of academic life...
...As for the book of essays by Ezra Pound, the reviewer in Commonweat - - a Liberal Catholic, for me, is as much an anathema as a Liberal Southerner - - was outraged...
...vi0us that only true conservatives should be hired to run them...
...And the man of pure intellect suddenly discovers the whole welter of emotions that defines human beings...
...He doesn't say much," Sidney said, "is about as communicative, in fact, as a turtle (how Russell has changed), but he ires a formidable intelligence, and when he gets behind a typewriter, the results are most impressive...
...Liberalism reigned supreme and without question...
...It should be obvious even to the most liberal academic intellectualist that lib...
...A Modest Academic Proposal Gary North Ever since those dark days in March of 1933, when Franklin Roosevelt and his Brain Hustlers took over the greased pig of the American political scene, serious conservatives have been driven from the academic establishment...
...Gair, however, made a great contribution to the firm - - he put me in touch with Russell Kirk...
...Our first list consisted of three books: a study of the phenomenon of Hitlerism by the Swiss philosopher, Max Picard, and two books on allied occupation policy in Germany by the English publisher, Victor Gollancz...
...Whether the book had any positive influence on Yale is doubtful, Yale's selfesteem at that time being pretty solidly entrenched, but it helped to launch the career of William F. Buckley...
...Keynesians control the departments of economics, court apologists rewrite diplomatic history, functional i l l i t e r a t e s rewrite sociology, and some very peculiar people teach English...
...In 1948 she went to Germany as a correspondent...
...those who could "see things as they were," to which small but distinguished group Morley and Hanighen belonged, were not at all convinced that the victorious conclusion of the war and the policy enunciated by the administration would introduce the era of peace and good will among the nations proclaimed by the official propaganda line...
...There were reviews everywhere, columns, letters to the editor, interviews with the author, all any publisher could ask for...
...A society seemingly characterized by Camelot, the "Playboy philosophy" of Hugh Heffner, Bobble Baker, the drug culture, and the contemptible collapse of our once proud universities in face of demands by "the kids" was hardly a favorable atmosphere in which to publish serious books...
...I read it during my vacation, and what an inspiring experience that was...
...We don't need any Uncle Garrys (Garry Wills:, with their fashionable Ph.D.'s and sideburns, to take over our CS programs...
...by its actions had made it clear that it considered Poland an exclusive Russian preserve: had blasted Pius XII as a pro-fascist...
...tellectualists...
...Admittedly, we may have to settle initially for true conservatives who have not finished the Ph.D...
...When, therefore, Professor Karl Brandt of Stanford University sought a publisher to bring out an answer to Henry Morgenthau's Germany Is Our ProbLem, which had just appeared and proposed to convert Germany into a "goat pasture," it was quite natural that he should go to the publishers of Human Events--no one else, at that time, being even willing to discuss the publication of such a book...
...Her account of the loss of China couldn't be ignored...
...It was our first real success...
...At that time, 1946, when Stalin was referred to as "Good Old Uncle Joe," and any realistic appraisal of Soviet Russia regarded as a particularly obnoxious form of heresy, the publication of the aims and methods of the Communist International created something of a sensation, and, I must say, whetted my appetite to publish more books...
...It was carefully denied...
...it should be edited by a man of conservative h~stincts - - a man, that is, who takes a positive attitude toward the traditions of Western civilization - - but the first consideration should not be Conservatism, but quality...
...It was a beautiful picture and questions about its conformity to the facts of life were not welcome...
...the PeaceI~ving Nations, joined together in San Francisco in a perpetual bond, would preserve peace, protect the weak, and guarantee the rule of democracy - - the future seemed assured...
...To understand what has happened since, one should have some understanding of the general atmosphere of the immediate post-war period...
...Who but Regnery would publish such a book...
...To have known Roy Campbell, a free spirit if ever there was one, was a great privilege...
...We were having some impact, it seemed, and some of our books had done well, but it wasn't enough to put the operation on a sound financial basis...
...for those too young to remember, it must seem entirely incredible...
...Then Time magazine--as a result, I ieat,~d later, oi a s u ~ k , n of Whittaker Dialogue of a Schizophrenic The Rt...
...Sen...
...People should be allowed to drop to pieces in any way they choose...
...Fulhri~t, Yale University, 3 April 1971 16 The A l t e r n a t i v e O c t o b e r , 1971 Chambers - - devoted the entire book, review section of its 4 July issue to this one book, and mentioned it again in a news...
...oral ideology reigns supreme on the major campuses of our time...
...Eliot and a book of essays by Ezra Pound, we could feel that we had some connection with the most important group of men writing in English in this century, and writers who had devoted their talent and energy to opposing the disintegration of the values of our civilization...
...I wrote for the manuscript which, as it happened, had just been rejected by Knopf, and a few days later the very neatly typed manuscript of The Conservative Rout, as it was then called, arrived in the mail...
...The Conservctive Mind had an impact which, in the bored and blase atmosphere of the present, is hard to imagine...
...One book was published during this period under the Human Events imprint, a collection of official communist documents with an introduction by William Henry Chamberlin called "Blueprint for World Conquest...
...Another early author of ours was Freda Utley...
...There were, of course, other books - - a witty little book on vrogressive education...
...Human Events, as the war ended, was one of the few publications to point out the dangers of the policy of unconditional surrender, and to remind its readers that a settlement based on hatred and revenge could neither bring peace nor would be in accordance with the traditions and ideals professed by this country...
...And Madly Teadh by Mortimer Smith which received much attention and was widely read, William Henry Chamberlin's America's Second Crusade, The German Opposition to Hitler by the distinguished historian, then at the University of Chicago, Hans Rothfels, several important books in philosophy, including James Collins' The Existentialists, which is still in print, to mention only a few...
...The best way to accomplish this is the establishment of Conservative Studies programs on every major campus...
...Fascism, militarism and colonialism had been banished from the earth...
...It received leading reviews in the Times, HeraldTribune, New Yorker, Saturday Review, etc...
...Eliot undertook to do in his own writing and in his encouragement of others...
...Toward the end of his reign McNamara, I believe, came to realize this, and his realization led to a particularly poignant understanding, finally of how dismally he had failed...
...The following year we had another - - William F. Buckley's God and Man at Yale Frank Hanighen, who had published a piece on Yale by Buckley in Human Events, told me that Bill, who had just graduated, was writing a book along the same general lines...
...This, I think, is the explanation of the violent, irrational hatred by the Liberals of McCarthy - - he has become for them the symbol of the influence that brought their illusions down to earth...
...story...
...Then we decided to try to build up a college test book list, and brought in a retired text book traveller, Sidney Gair, to put together a list...
...Perhaps there have been, for the time, enough books about Conservatism itself, and there is certainly no need for more books pointing out the mess the Liberals have made of things - - that should be evident enough...
...We did a few books of outstanding quality, but didn't have sufficient capital to put it over...
...And when he does, especially if he decides that his overdeveloped intellect has been misdirected, the renunciation is extreme, the act of expiation dramatic, and the man of pure ifltellect becomes the man of pure emotion...
...For nearly a week after the book appeared on prominent member of the faculty after another in the most ponderous, professorial manner, inveighed against "the book" as it soon came to be called in the Yale News...
...What we now think of as the "Conservative Movement" received its name and identity with the publication in 1954 of Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind There had, of course, long been opposition to the dominant liberal ideology, in some cases on a high intellectual level - - Weaver's Ideas Have Consequences, for example, and Hayek's Road to Serfdom had both preceded Kirk's book, but it was The Conservative Mind that brought the opposition together, gave it a name, and began the development of a coherent alternative...
...The second issue of Human Events, for example, dated 9 February 1944, consisted of an article by Felix Morley called "The Trend Since Tehran," the Tehran Declaration having been signed some three months before by Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin...
...This will mean that an active program of junior college recruiting must go into effect at once...
...J. William Fulbright "The source of an effective foreign policy under our system is Presidedtial power...With their excessivelyparochio al orientation, Congressmen are acutely sensitive to the influence of private pressure and to the excesses and in, adequacies of public opinion that is all too often i~morant of the needs, the dangers, and the opportunities in our foreign relations...legislators display a distressing tendency to adhere to the dictates of public opinion, or at least to its vocal and organized segments...
Vol. 5 • October 1971 • No. 1
