In Memoriam: An American Dissident
Jr ., T. Kenneth Cribb
"In Memoriam: An American Dissident" by T. Kenneth Cribb, Jr. An American Dissident Henry Regnery published the conservative revolution....
...Whittaker Chambers once said, "Each age finds its own language for an eternal meaning...
...With gratitude beyond expression, we honor his memory...
...Did he succeed...
...On shelf after shelf, the most incisive and timeless of the volumes tended to have the Regnery imprint on the spine...
...In the early days of the resurgent movement among conservative intellectuals in the 1950's, it was Henry Regnery who possessed the vision to draw together and publish landmark books...
...We live in a time of climactic struggle for the human spirit, a time that will tell whether the great civilized ideas of individual liberty, representative government, and the rule of law under God will perish or endure...
...yet his friends remember him as a true renaissance man -musician, essayist, correspondent, friend, husband, and father...
...Bill Buckley once said, "The renaissance man is, I think, someone who bows his head before the great unthreatened truths and...
...onservatism is enjoyment," as Walter Bagehot once said...
...Yet there was nothing of conventional heroic poses in Henry's personal demeanor...
...And through his life's work he in turn filled our lives with joy-the joy of the word, which is the truth...
...Regnery began to publish the best thinkers: Max Picard, Gabriel Marcel, Wyndham Lewis, Roy Campbell, Ernst Juenger, and Romano Guardini...
...His modesty was genuine, bordering on self-effacement...
...Henry Regnery took joy in his family, his music, and his literary pursuits...
...63 The American Spectator • October 19 9 6...
...His ultimate goal, however, was to effect change of a very specific nature...
...authors central to the post-World War II conservative revival: Buckley, Burnham, Vivas, Meyer, and Weaver...
...If we want to do anything, we must work on the level of ideas...
...In every room of the house, from floor to ceiling, was the orderly profusion of Meyer's library, a fine collection centered on the conservative revival...
...With Regnery's 1953 publication of Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind, the conservative intellectual recrudescence became self-conscious and overt...
...I N M E M O R I A M by T. Kenneth Cribb, Jr...
...He gave voice to supreme works of the moral imagination through the transforming medium of his publishing house...
...These remarks are adapted from a eulogy delivered in Chicago at Henry Regnery's memorial service on July 18,1996...
...As Henry himself put it, Kirk had given an "amorphous, scattered opposition" to liberalism as an "identity...
...In our age, that language is very largely to be found in the distinguished books Henry Regnery published during his fruitful life...
...Here is the testimony of Ronald Reagan, writing in 1985: The first rampart of peaceful revolution is the printing press...
...Early in his life, Henry Regnery understood that the root cause of civilization's decline was the rejection of the word, of truth as it had been revealed and handed down over the centuries...
...He determined to labor against the relativistic tides of his century, counter-attacking this most insidious aspect of modernity...
...Shortly after hearing of Henry's passing, I visited the home of the late Frank Meyer, one of the muscular intellects associated with the formative years of National Review...
...It is ideas that shape history...
...Henry Regnery lived his life in service to those great unthreatened truths, to the unseen things that do not die-to the word...
...No further inquiry as to Henry's success is needed...
...For the heroic part you have played in that struggle, I salute you, Henry Regnery...
...He served as chief of domestic affairs in the Reagan White House...
...T. KENNETH CRIBB, JR...
...It was very much like Reagan to detect the true heroism of Henry Refinery's quiet stand...
...In the course of the three years that followed this assessment, President Reagan marshaled the ideas in those very books and, without firing a shot, pushed Communism backward into the abyss of its own making...
...Henry's proximate goal was to publish books of quality, books that had something to say...
...knows enough to know, that the computer does not now exist, nor ever shall, that has the power to repeal the basic formulas of civilization...
...In a 1953 letter Henry declared, "I felt it was time somebody did something to break the almost complete monopoly of book publishing...
...is president of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute...
...In the course of his search for quality, he also became the publisher of...
...the real source of our strength as a political movement...
...He proposed to gather, between the covers of his books, ideas of such force and light as to disperse the fog of a debased liberalism that clouded the American mind at mid-century...
...not in the vulgar sense of amusement, but in the sense of taking joy in the world as God created it, of finding joy in the apprehension of the truths of that creation...
...The problem was words, so he set out to become a publisher-a "dissident publisher," as he memorably phrased it...
Vol. 29 • October 1996 • No. 10
