The Conservative Mind

...She was badly beaten by an old Turk, the yenerable syndicated columnist Holmes Alexander, and one doesn't hear much silly reform talk about the bar anymore, praise be to Allah...

...It's a good club, a great saloon, and definitely worth experiencing...

...Above all, perhaps, Kirk's book helped make the conservative argument a respoctable intellectual doctrine, one that could not facilely be dismissed by the lively liberal intellects as ossified and moribund...

...Quite apart from party struggles," he wrote in the middle sixties, "the American nation seems destined to grope its way toward conservative measures, for the next decade and perhaps the next generation...

...The National Press Club is by far the most disreputable of the three, and by far the most fun...

...Perhaps it is an exaggeration to say that The Conservative Mind has become a bible to American conservatives...

...No matter...

...The Men's Bar, National Press Club (V~ASHINGTON)--The trouble with most great American saloons is that they no longer exist, a conclusion reluctantly reached after the most thorough possible research (witnessed by the palsied scrawl of this article in original manuscript...

...For me, the book was a kind of '~bible" of the conservative tradition the sine qua non to the understanding of conservative principles...

...For once I can't say that I find the free market principle in action very edifying...

...A year later, Thomas Molnar, largely on the basis on The Conservative Mind, had listed Kirk as one of the leading intellectuals in Araerica...

...about 12 years from now, they may be at the height of their influence...

...New York can also boast a long and varied list, as, on a smaller scale, can my native Washington where the Metropolitan Club opens its doors to the oldest families and fattest Babbitts, the Cosmos Club to literary men and scientists, and the National Press Club to captains and camp followers of the Fourth Estate...

...Andrew's University in Scotland...

...and he wrote with an eloquence and power that could be neither ridiculed nor ignored...

...Nowadays, Kirk does not perceive the future of conservatism to be a rout...

...Burke's philosophy had not been interred with him after his death, but had been carried on down through the generations by a few thoughtful statesmen and writers...

...But, at the very least, its influence has been far more considerable than the usual political tract or intellectual history...

...My own first copy of the book was purchased while a college student in the middle sixties Soon my old Henry Regnery paperback edition was tattered and falling apart from my frequent use...

...The Martinis are excellent and, besides all of the major imported and domestic bottled beers and ales, one has a good choice of lagers and even Watney Bitter on tap...

...the library with its odd assortment of classics, trivia, and snoozing senior members...

...In fact, the original manuscript of the book was entitled The Conservatives' Rout...

...Whether conservatism is destined to flourish or perish, Kirk argues that first of all conservatives must understand their tradition...

...For in America, as in Britain, about three decades must pass before a body of ideas can be popularized and come to dominate public policy...

...Tasteful tipplers and discerning dipsomaniacs can still find solace in a number of good private club-bars around the globe and revel in an ambiance that, fifty years ago, was typical of the better sort of saloon...

...True, some of the grand old watering holes still survive in name, a few even with authentic trappings, but the overall impression left by such relics is one of real rather than figurative embalming fluid...

...The book's publication marked the beginning of a fresh stirring of conservative ideas in America...

...You never know who might walk in, who might pass out, or who might suddeMy decide to leave via a window, as happened a few years ago with a despondent veteran member...

...Young students of political ideas today are reading Burke, Adams, Calhoun, and Eliot largely because they first discovered these writers in The Conservative Mind They attend meetings of the Young Americans for Freedom or the seminars of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute because they wish to find a forum to discuss what they first discovered through their reading of Kirk...

...But bare floors and brass rails alone do not a great American saloon make...

...The less said about most of the wine the better...

...It is not so much a club as a series of bars, sometimes as many as six of them simultaneously pumping nectar into the ever-yawning maws of the capital's scribblers, news sources, and PR men...

...If there is a conservative movement in this country," observed Henry Regnery recently at the 121st Commencement of Hillsdale College, "and we have every reason' to believe that there is, it was Russell Kirk who set it in motion...

...W. Wesley McDonald The Great American Saloon Series by Aram Bakshian, Jr...

...No doubt this is all quite commendable in its way...

...The long panelled corridor, embellished with front page mats of a bygone era, the dignifled main lounge with its overstuffed sofas and wing chairs and the yellowed Edwardian nude who looks down from the east wall, through generations of cigar smoke and alcohol fumes, with a smiling detachment that the late Mrs...

...Had she advocated wallto-wall sawdust, the old girl might have stood a chance but carpeting--my God...

...I felt that it had to be mastered before I could call myself a conservative...

...On Kirk's return to the United States in 1953, he discovered to his from Burke to Eliot Fifth Revised Edition by Russell Kirk Henry Regnery $15.00 amazement that his book, which he thought to be no more than an obscure study of intellectual history, had become the basis for a sizable revival of interest in conservative ideas...

...Any evening you might find a mixed forest of journalistic saplings, spruces and burnt out stumps, babbling profound nonsense and nonsensical profundities--local press, foreign correspondents, members of national bureaus, a large Commonwealth Contingent Ithe Canadians seem the best behaved of this lot, and are almost always well-read, civil and house broken), and whatever else chance happens to blow through the swinging door...

...The major portion of The Conservative Mind was written in the late forties, to be submitted as Kirk's dissertation for the doctor of letters degree at St...

...By 1960, M. Stanton Evans noted in his book, Revolt on the Campus (1961), that in surveys carried out on campuses, college conservatives considered Kirk to be one of the major influences on their thinking outside of Buckley, Goldwater, and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute...

...Even on the worst of evenings, there will be a sprinkling of literate sots spouting Shakespeare, remembering Mencken or reciting barid episodes from the dynastic vendettas and internecine strife that comprise the internal politics of the Club (just now, alas, the liberals seem to have the upperhand...

...It is that purpose that The Conservative Mind has so ably served during the past two decades...

...Since the Club occupies the thirteenth floor of the National Press Building, such exits are not encouraged...

...Often they seem to be sterile museum exhibits of a dead way of life...

...I have been in love with the splendid, squalid old place ever since we first met, despite the disparity in our ages (it had already passed the half century mark and I was still a callow teenager, editor of my prep school newspaper at the time...

...and he was obviously wellread...

...In the teeth of Liberal assertions that conservatives are superannuated and inarticulate," wrote M. Stanton Evans, "Kirk hurled a monumental defense of the conservative philosophy...

...The Alternative April 1974 27...

...In all three departments, the Press Club scores well...

...So much for the dispensibles...

...Kirk's greatest achievement has been to educate American conservatives on their tradition...

...The history of conservatism appeared to be largely that of an intellectual rout...

...The three prime requisites are good booze, good bartenders, and good conversation...

...As for the dispensors, they are an altogether worthy lot, including several stout, veteran Hibernians, an obliging Nubian or two, and the intellectual doyen of Washington tapsters, the redoubtable John Prokof--a keen chess player and philosopher manque of Lithuanian origin who views the world, and its microcosmic reflection in the form of his clientele, with a good-natured contempt that is wholly warranted...

...But, be warned, those haunting and haunted old corridors have a way of becoming habit forming and, although the Surgeon General has never said so in so many words, I suspect that, in many cases, they can be hazardous to your health...

...The book's major contribution to the conservative movement was its revived interest in Burke's political thought...

...Others have changed everything but the name...

...At the Press Club, the sexual revolution has been nonviolent and inoffensive, a true phoney war with no killed or wounded on either side...

...Several years ago, he noted in his newspaper column the progressive growth of conservative ideas: "American conservatives are in the middle of their journey: that is, their revived strength has been growing for the past 18 years, say...

...all of them remain today much as they were when I first saw them...

...But the nerve center of the Press Club, its true essence, is to be found in the Men's Bar (nowadays, the sex barrier having been broken, it is sometimes referred to as the Tap Room...

...Drinking, once a noble pursuit for its own sake, is relegated in such cases to the role of psychic lubricant, raising the audacity of the randy boob and lowering the inhibitions of the lonely boobess, prelimina~ to the real business of the evening which, in any event, is seldom consummated on the premises...

...the grand ballroom which so many visiting celebrities and heads of state have used as a forum during their Washington forays...

...Written when liberalism appeared everywhere triumphant, the book was understandably pessimistic about the prospects for a reemergence of reflective conservative thinking...

...Those who think othe~vise do so at ~ their own peril...

...enter dim lighting, juke boxes, and not-so-beautiful people in quest of a transient hump...

...Well-read conservatives have undoubtedly read The Conservative Mind at least once if not many times...

...Although Burke would undoubtedly be important to conservatives even without Kirk's efforts to clap him onto the modern conservative movement, Kirk's persistent articulation and defense of the Burkean position has enormously increased the Old Whig's influence...

...While amateur sex has been going public, serious saloon keeping has been going private...

...Trenchant critiques of liberal orthodox opinions were being published, and small groups of writers and thinkers were publicly identifying themselves as conservatives...

...If a conservative order is indeed to return," he tells us in the first pages of the book, "we ought to know the tradition which is attached to it, so that we may 26 The Alternative April 1974 rebuild society...

...Of all Kirk's many books and articles published since the first appearance of The Conservative Mind in 1953, The Conservative Mind still remains today in Clinton Rossiter's words "his most enduring contribution to conservatism...

...The conservative philosophy could no longer be ignored as fuddy-duddy Babbittism...

...Through Burke, conservatives apprehend the principles of natural law and prescription--long-established rights, moral precepts, and custom--which are fundamental to traditional conservative thinking...

...Exeunt sawdust, brass rails, and cuspidors...

...RUSSELL KIRK Kirk's sudden burgeoning popularity among conservatives was due to his eloquent articulation, resuscitation, and defense of the lost conservative tradition...

...In the late forties, with the liberal Democratic Party firmly entrenched in Washington, D.C., and the Clement Attlee Labour Party government elected in Great Britain, conservative prospects never looked more dim to Kirk...

...Hardly a page of the book escaped my copious margin scribbling...

...The American political pendulum, he now argues, is moving toward his own Burkean principles...

...Keppel (mistressin-chief to Edward VII) would have envied...

...By 1954, Francis Wilson called it "one of the most important books of the present time...

...Although conservative ideas might prosper briefly under the leadership of a Disraeli, Kirk argued, conservatism was more often found fighting a desperate rear-guard action against the excesses of liberal or radical creeds...

...but they never have surrendered...

...The flow of bumpkin legions to the city, and their dubious metamorphosis into smart young moderns with ample leisure time and pocket money (and an almost total lack of creative imagination) has made itself felt amongst the race of publicans...

...During the last club elections, for example, a well-intentioned lady running for the Board of Directors made carpeting the concrete floor of the Men's Bar a keystone in her platform...

...Most of the better Bourbons and Scotches are always on hand along with a good range of assorted aperitifs, liqueurs, and liquid rubbish of the Compare and Dubonnet varieties...

...Conservatism had been born out of Edmund Burke's reaction to the French Revolution...

...the small lounge with the large window over-looking most of Washington and, before the sun sets, the Potomac as it flows toward Mount Vernon...

...His conclusions in The Conservative Mind are therefore hopeful: "Certainly the conservatives have been routed, forced back from ditch to palisade...

...if it is not to be restored, still we ought to understand conservative ideas so that we may rake from the ashes what scorched fragments of civilization escape the conflagration of unchecked will and appetite...

...He was young (then thirty-five...

...It was a position with which the liberals would eventually have to grapple...

...Nowadays hardly a conservative is unaware of Burke's ideas...

...Scant reupholsrering and few fresh coats of paint have been more than countered by the pleasant, gradual process of decay and the pervasive sense, strengthened with each passing day, of countless hours merrily misspent within club confines...

...and today, when the ranks of radicalism are decimated, timorous, and afflicted by internecine ferocity, conservatism has such an opportunity for regaining ground as it has not seen since that day when modern radicalism issued its challenge to traditional society by decorating 'this hell-porch of a Hotel de Ville' with human heads on pikes...

...In London there is White's for the blue-bloods and millionaires, the Carleton for deep-dyed Tories, the Savile for Aesthetes, and the Savage for authors, artists, and professional men, to mention only a few...

...Fortunately, the few ladies that enter are usually either strikingly pretty and therefore permissable for scenic value, or such hardened old reportorial harridans that one hardly thinks of them as sex objects...

...His writings have taken a markedly optimistic turn...

...However, while Kirk was penning these gloomy reflections, a reaction against dominant liberal ideas in America was indeed taking place...