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Sacralizing the right: William F. Buckley Jr., Whittaker Chambers, Will Herberg and the transformation of intellectual conservatism, 1945-1964
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Sacralizing the right: William F. Buckley Jr., Whittaker Chambers, Will Herberg and the transformation of intellectual conservatism, 1945-1964

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Content SACRALIZING THE RIGHT: WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR., WHITTAKER CHAMBERS, WILL HERBERG AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF INTELLECTUAL CONSERVATISM, 1945-1964 by Hyrum S. Lewis ____________________________________________________________________ A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (HISTORY) December 2007 Copyright 2007 Hyrum S. Lewis ii Table of Contents Abbreviations iii Abstract iv Introduction 1 Chapter 1: Anti-Statism I-Buckley and the Quest for Catholic Individualism 27 Chapter 2: Anti-Statism II-Chambers and the Anti-Communist Faith 67 Chapter 3: Anti-Relativism I-The Conservative Capture of Anti-Relativism 122 Chapter 4: Anti-Relativism II-Herberg & The Boundaries of Conservative Orthodoxy 159 Chapter 5: The Growth of Anti-Secularism on the Right 199 Chapter 6: Religious Consolidation on the Right 229 Bibliography 261 iii Abbreviations C Commentary CF Cold Friday—Whittaker Chambers (NY: Random House, 1964). CW Commonweal GR Ghosts on the Roof: Selected Journalism of Whittaker Chambers, 1931-1959, edited by Terry Teachout (D.C.: Regnery, 1989) HD Hillsdale College Buckley Online Database HI Firing Line Collection, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University HP Will Herberg Papers, Drew University Special Collections, Madison, New Jersey NR National Review NU Notes from the Underground: The Whittaker Chambers-Ralph de Toledano Correspondence, 1949-1960, edited by Ralph de Toledano (D.C.: Regnery, 1997) OF Odyssey of a Friend: Letters to William F. Buckley, Jr., 1954-1961– Whittaker Chambers (D.C.: Regnery, 1987) PR Partisan Review TNR The New Republic W Witness—Whittaker Chambers (NY: Random House, 1952) iv Abstract From the end of World War II to the Barry Goldwater presidential campaign of 1964, the meaning of conservatism underwent an important shift as Right-wing thought became increasingly associated with religious belief. Three conservative intellectuals—William F. Buckley Jr., Will Herberg, and Whittaker Chambers—did the most to effect this change and forged a religious-conservative nexus by basing their opposition to the growth of state power in religion, conceiving of anti- communism as an extension of this concern, and claiming opposition to secularism and relativism as conservative causes. Their efforts drew many religious intellectuals to their side, but ultimately created internal contradictions in the conservative movement that were never resolved and created many of the splits among conservatives that persist into the present. 1 Introduction I argue in this dissertation that the years 1945-1964 were a key moment of epistemic shift for conservative political ideology. In 1945 conservatism meant opposition to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, but by 1964 it had expanded its meaning to encompass the application of religion to politics. Most religious Americans were political liberals during Roosevelt’s presidency, however, conservatives would work to change this in the postwar era, but as they did so, their new expanded definition of conservatism created internal contradictions that conservatives have yet to resolve. As my argument rests upon the idea that conservatism underwent a transformation, this dissertation rejects the essentialist paradigm so often used in describing the history of the Right, which sees the persistence of a core ideal or set of principles as defining conservatism through space and time. 1 Against such views, I see conservatism as a fluid coalition of impulses that evolves in structure, composition, and meaning in response to historical pressures and context. The conservatism of Reagan in the 1980s differed significantly from that of Burke in the 1780s. Likewise, the conservatism of Sen. Barry Goldwater in 1964 was much different than that of Sen. Robert Taft in 1945. 1 Works that attempt to provide a timeless definition of conservatism include Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind (Chicago: Regnery, 1953); Norman Cantor, The American Century: Varieties of Culture in Modern Times, New York: HarperCollins, 1997; and Charles W. Dunn and J. David Woodard, American Conservatism from Burke to Bush: An Introduction, (Lanham, MD: Madison Books, 1991). 2 While this dissertation has relevance beyond American intellectual life, it does not purport to be a full history of the conservative-religious nexus; it limits itself to examining only the intellectual formation of conservatism at mid-century. The conservative-religious nexus extends beyond the realm of ideas into the history of grassroots social action, culture broadly conceived, and even economics. Each of these realms holds a symbiotic relationship to the others—for instance, political and social forces shape the development of ideas and vice versa. I leave it for other historians to tell the story of how conservative ideas were put into practice in the form of right-wing organization and political maneuvering in later decades. Such works as Lisa McGirr’s Suburban Warriors, Jerome Himmelstein’s To the Right, and Walter Capps’s The New Religious Right have already begun this process, but this work focuses on the formation and articulation of the ideas that would later be deployed in the conservative political movement. 2 Because this work focuses on intellectual development, I have chosen to confine my study to the years 1945-1964. Most historians agree that the Goldwater campaign represented the tapering off of the “intellectual formation” era in the history of conservatism, and the beginning of the era of “political action.” Historian Mary Brennan, for instance, shows that with the Goldwater campaign, grass-roots participation, mass-organizations, institutional infrastructure, and political jockeying replaced idea-development as the guiding conservative concern. Historian Lee Edwards agrees with this assessment. In his celebratory book, The Conservative 2 Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001); Jerome L. Himmelstein, To the Right: The Transformation of American Conservatism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); and Walter H Capps, The New Religious Right: Piety, Patriotism, and Politics (Columbia : University of South Carolina Press, 1990). 3 Revolution, “men of ideas and interpretation,” such as Buckley, Chambers, Hayek, and Kirk, precede the “men of action,” such as Goldwater, Reagan, and Gingrich. 3 Jonathan Schoenwald more explicitly divides the history of modern American conservatism into three phases: 1) the era of ideas, 1945-1964; 2) the era of organization, 1964-1980; and 3) the era of victory, 1980-1994. 4 Historians agree that, in the conservative movement, action followed ideas and that the intellectual form of modern American conservatism was largely in place by the time of Goldwater’s nomination. While this dissertation describes and analyzes the mid-twentieth-century evolution of conservatism in a religious direction, it specifically focuses on the lives, world, and thought of the three figures who did the most to effect this intellectual transformation—William F. Buckley Jr., Whittaker Chambers, and Will Herberg. Each of these figures advocated a political order grounded in a religious understanding of the world and brought their common concern together at the flagship organ of conservative thought, National Review. Buckley, the enfant terrible of the conservative movement, came to fame with the publication of his iconoclastic God and Man at Yale in 1951. This book, the first of many that Buckley wrote, attempted to ground political individualism in Christian beliefs and traditions. Later, as the founder and editor of National Review, Buckley would lead, define, and give a public face to the conservative movement. 3 Lee Edwards, The Conservative Revolution: The Movement that Remade America (New York: Free Press, 1999); and Mary C. Brennan, Turning Right in the Sixties: The Conservative Capture of the GOP (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995). 4 Jonathan M. Schoenwald, A Time for Choosing: The Rise of Modern American Conservatism (NY: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 2-13. 4 Through personal charisma, polemical skill, and synthetic flexibility, Buckley held the movement together even as contradictions emerged and its religious directions threatened its intellectual coherence. As the “conductor” of the conservative symphony, Buckley directed that the notes of faith play loudly while subduing the discordant tones of disbelief. Because of his central role in leading, negotiating, and harmonizing various strands of conservatism, Buckley’s own attitudes towards religion in politics were projected out onto the movement he led. His main intellectual contribution was his reconciliation of general Christian principles, and specifically Catholic traditions, with the laissez-faire approach to government and politics that virtually all Catholic intellectuals—defenders of the New Deal social order—still reviled when Buckley stepped onto the public scene in 1951. Buckley was joined in the creation of religious conservatism by Whittaker Chambers whose book Witness (first serialized in 1951) applied religion directly to political questions. All social positions, Chambers would claim, ultimately grew out of an underlying faith. The choice of either “faith in God” or “faith in Man” ultimately determined political ideologies and forms. Although most famous for his communist spy background and role as the chief accuser in the Alger Hiss trial, Chambers also possessed intellectual and writing gifts that benefited both the communist movement of his youth and the conservative movement of his later years. With his distinctively melancholic eloquence, Chambers moved thousands of readers with his personal story of suffering through the darkness of Communism before finding personal redemption in Christianity. 5 As is often the case, apostates turn against their former faith with especial vehemence, and the ex-communist Chambers became one of Marxism’s fiercest, and most effective, intellectual opponents. Chambers insisted throughout his life that the Hiss trial only symbolized the deeper religious struggle in which all of humanity was engaged and he approached this struggle with the zeal of a convert. After his death in 1961, Chambers became something of an icon in conservative circles—a martyr to the cause who had sacrificed his fortune and reputation for his faith, and who had set himself right with God by atoning for his Communist past. His theory of historical determinism gave the conservative anti- communist cause a distinctive urgency and Witness became one of the “founding texts” of the movement. Chambers influenced not only important intellectuals like Buckley, but also conservative politicians such as Barry Goldwater and future president Ronald Reagan. Like Chambers, Will Herberg, the final major player in the religious transformation of conservatism, came from a Marxist background. After leaving Jay Lovestone’s Communist faction in the late 1930s, Herberg turned to his Jewish heritage for the answers he had once sought in Marx. Throwing himself headlong into his new religious views, Herberg achieved distinction as a theologian and sociologist, and brought this expertise to the conservative movement in the late 1950s. While Chambers’ theory provided conservatism with an overarching view of world history, Herberg would apply theology to specific issues, bringing existentialist, Niebuhrian, and Hebraic modes of religious thinking to new conservative causes. 6 Although they had distinct voices, emphases, and concerns, Buckley, Chambers, and Herberg were united by their common project of moving American conservatism in a religious direction, and all three did so from a common platform— Buckley’s journal of opinion, National Review. Before the founding of the magazine in 1955, no united conservative movement existed—enclaves of intellectuals opposed the various aspects of liberalism, but they remained fragmented and undirected until National Review brought these disparate voices together. 5 According to most historians of conservatism, the magazine shaped, and defined intellectual conservatism for a generation. Historian George Nash goes so far as to declare that “the history of reflective conservatism in America after 1955 is the history of the individuals who collaborated in—or were discovered by the magazine William F. Buckley, Jr. founded,” and columnist Robert Novak has recently asserted that National Review “was Bill Buckley’s vehicle that created the modern conservative movement.” 6 Since the conservative movement was primarily intellectual in nature before 1964, historians generally concur with Nash’s 5 Previous anti-liberal forums included the newsletter Human Events, H.L. Mencken’s The American Mercury, and especially Albert Jay Nock’s The Freeman, which functioned as the most important precursor to National Review (future editors Frank Meyer, Suzanne LaFollette, and John Chamberlain were veterans of The Freeman). William Rusher referred to The Freeman as a “John the Baptist publication” that prepared the way for National Review. Harry Kreisler interview with William Rusher, 25 April 1990, “The Conservative Movement: Conversation with William Rusher, Former Publisher of the National Review.” Conversations with History series, Institute of International Studies, UC-Berkeley. For a participant’s reflection on the centrality of National Review to conservatism, see Jeffrey Hart, The Making of the American Conservative Mind: National Review and its Times (Wilmington: ISI Press, 2005). 6 Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, since 1945 (NY: Basic Books, 1976), 153, 185; and Robert Novak, The Prince of Darkness: 50 Years of Reporting in Washington (NY: Crown, 2007): 592-3. 7 assessment—National Review defined the conservative movement in its early years. 7 A fundamental battle raged in American culture and intellectual life regarding the role of religion in politics and National Review was both an important effect of these underlying currents and an efficient cause in giving them expression. While other conservative founders also contributed to the religious transformation of conservatism, Chambers, Herberg, and Buckley stand out as the most influential, effective, and persistent voices in assuring that religion would play a central rather than a peripheral role in the incipient movement. Consequently, they serve as an ideal lens through which one can view this transformation. In a general sense, this work is the story of how a religious-conservative nexus took shape at mid- century, but more specifically, this is an intellectual history of these three conservative “founding fathers” and an inquiry into how they brought their faith to bear on conservative political concerns. 7 This includes historians of the movement, Paul Gottfried and John P. Diggins. “National Review,” writes Gottfried, “dominate[d] the world of conservative letters,” by “absorbing” other conservative publications and “eclipsing its predecessors.” See Paul Gottfried, The Conservative Movement (Boston: Twayne, 1988), 3. For Diggins, who wrote a history of communists-turned-conservatives, National Review defined conservatism to such a degree that intellectuals could not be considered “true conservatives” unless they participated in Buckley’s enterprise. See Diggins, Up from Communism: Conservative Odysseys in American Intellectual Life (NY: Columbia UP, 1994): xvii, xxii. Also see Chapter 10: “The Postwar Intellectual Right.” According to contemporary political observer, E.J. Dionne, “Ronald Reagan could not have become, well, Ronald Reagan, if William F. Buckley Jr. and his allies at National Review magazine had not spent years developing modern conservatism's core ideas.” E.J. Dionne, “The Left’s Big Ideas,” Washington Post, 25 April 2006. Also see, Gregory L. Schneider, Cadres for Conservatism: Young Americans for Freedom and the Rise of the Contemporary Right (NY: NYU Press, 1998). While most histories of the conservative movement endorse Nash’s contention that conservatism began as an intellectual movement, they also agree that the movement went political in the early 1960s. Hence, most histories of 1960s conservatism rightly focus on political action, but also tend to overlook the intellectual story of how the meaning of the conservative ideal, which activists and politicians worked to implement, itself changed. Sociologist Jerome Himmelstein offers an economic interpretation of conservatism that dissents from this standard view and sees the conservative coalition as reflecting economic interests, but his interpretation does not account for the origin of the ideas that conservative activists worked to implement, nor does it explain the conservative drift of many middle and lower-class Americans whose economic interests might have better aligned them with liberals. Himmelstein, To the Right: The Transformation of American Conservatism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 8 Even after National Review emerged as a banner around which conservatives could rally, right-leaning thinkers failed to offer a positive definition of conservatism. As late as 1959 Buckley lamented that conservatives were “bound together for the most part by negative response to liberalism,” and that, philosophically, “there [was] no commonly-acknowledged conservative position.” 8 Anti-liberalism, more than a united conservative program, kept the movement together and even in their efforts to move conservatism in a religious direction, Buckley, Chambers, and Herberg continued in this mode. Not only did this approach have polemical value, but also it shielded them from having to address the inconsistencies in their own ideas. The anti-liberal approach gave the conservative cause much of its rhetorical power. Focus on a common enemy unified the evolving Right in ways that their ideals alone could not—for, as this study will show, their ideals often contradicted one another. In order to understand the religious evolution of conservatism, then, one must also understand the evolution of liberalism. Mid-century liberalism transformed in response to the postwar crisis it faced—a crisis that conservatives effectively exploited in capturing the discourse of religion-in-politics as their own. While philosopher John Dewey’s ideas of progress, faith in intelligence, and the ability of humans to scientifically solve problems represented the aspirations of liberalism in the early twentieth century, the promise of Deweyan liberalism was greatly weakened after World War II when intellectuals were able to catch their breath and reflect on the economic depression, tyranny, and war they had just witnessed. To 8 William F. Buckley, Jr., Up from Liberalism (NY: McDowell, Obolensky, 1959), xv, 192. 9 philosopher Hannah Arendt, the postwar years seemed “the first possible moment to articulate and to elaborate the questions with which my generation had been forced to live for the better part of its adult life: What happened? Why did it happen? How could it have happened?” 9 The rise of Hitler, the scientific slaughter of millions in gas chambers, the development of nuclear weapons, and the threat posed by Soviet Russia threw into question liberal notions of social progress. “The excessively optimistic estimates of human nature,” said prominent theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, “are a source of peril to democratic society; for contemporary experience is refuting this optimism.” 10 Walter Lippmann, a key player in the intellectual life of both the progressive and Cold War eras, joined the chorus, claiming that modern society was “deeply diseased.” 11 Atomic scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer noted that “knowledge brings power, and that among the powers may be the power to do evil.” Humans had made great strides in science, he said, but were faced with the “graver problems of good and evil,” things that they, in spite of their technical proficiency, knew very little about. 12 The West found itself at a moment of crisis as people everywhere questioned their faith in science and moral progress. Summarizing the general 9 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism [1951] (NY: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., 1966), p. viii. 10 Reinhold Niebuhr, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness: A Vindication of Democracy and a Critique of its Traditional Defense [1944] (NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1960), p. xii. 11 Quoted in Francis Biddle, “Walter Lippmann and Reality,” TNR (14 Nov 1955): 13-15. Lippmann had expressed these sentiments to Biddle in a personal letter. Lippmann had earlier referred to his progressive-era ideas as naïve in the introduction to his book The Good Society (Boston: Little, Brown, & Co., 1937). 12 J. Robert Oppenheimer, “Science and Modern Society,” TNR (6 Aug 1956): 8. 10 feeling of his time, liberal historian Eric L. McKitrick wrote that crisis was built into “the very thinking” of the writers of his generation. 13 In the United States, this crisis also meant a crisis for the dominant political ideal—liberalism. American liberalism, said the editors of the Catholic magazine, Commonweal, was at a turning point and “facing its gravest moral crisis, possibly the survival of all fine things it ha[d] so far accomplished.” In order to survive, liberalism had to find a basis in something more dependable than the optimistic experimentalism of John Dewey. They also noted that the appeal of liberalism to religious persons was waning. Liberalism had long stood for “care and concern for the least members, affirmation of the common bond, and the political role of individual conscience” and thus had “given expression to many of the lasting aspirations of the Judeo-Christian tradition,” but they also noted that, “in the general murky atmosphere of moral relativism, pragmatist and errant secularism” of the postwar years, this liberal religious concern “seemed almost a coincidence.” 14 Political philosopher John Hallowell also commented on the crisis, saying that, under the influence of liberalism, many people undoubtedly developed too sanguine a view of the natural impulse of men to do good and consequently were plunged into despair when the liberal view of man was proved by the force of historical events to be too optimistic. 15 13 Eric L. McKitrick, “Is There an American Political Philosophy?” TNR (11 Apr 1955): 22. 14 “The State of Liberalism,” CW (23 May 1952): 163-64. For a diagnosis of the crisis from the perspective of a politically-liberal conservative (one who adhered to philosophical conservatism but supported political liberalism), see Peter Viereck, The Shame and Glory of the Intellectuals (Boston: Beacon, 1954), 78-138. 15 John Hallowell, “The Meaning of Majority Rule,” CW (23 May 1952): 168. 11 Many commentators agreed that the moral authority of liberalism found itself under serious challenge after World War II. But this challenge did not simply cause liberalism to die, rather liberalism adapted to the postwar crisis by evolving in new, more adequate directions. Gifted thinkers emerged to qualify Deweyan optimism while retaining what was best in his basic philosophy. This included, most prominently, theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., the intellectual leaders of a “New Liberalism” that would move their political ideals beyond what they considered a “naïve” Deweyan past. Although liberalism faced a postwar crisis, it had in previous decades appealed to religious Americans in both theory and practice. Liberal theorists argued that Christianity taught the equality of all human beings under God while unregulated capitalism created massive inequalities and undermined the “brotherhood of man.” Jesus and his followers lived humbly and poor, while the capitalist class lived lavishly and rich. The laissez-faire system of selfish individualism seemed opposed to the Judeo-Christian ideals of sacrifice, community, and selfless giving. Many religious thinkers sought to mollify such evils through active regulation of industry, pro-labor legislation, and the creation of social welfare programs. Thus, government could help society meet Jesus’ commandments to provide for the poor, live equally, and lift the lowliest to the position of the highest. The application of Christian religion to politics, many religious Americans believed, required a liberal political program. 12 This liberal-religious connection also held in practice as the majority of religious Americans—Protestant, Catholic, and Jew—aligned with the Democrats during the Roosevelt era, a fact that religious historians like Mark Noll, Martin Marty, and John McGreevy have all demonstrated. 16 For Catholics, says McGreevy, the New Deal focus on economic planning seemed a perfect implementation of Pope Pius XII’s economic teachings. The 1930s represented not only the triumph of liberal ideas, but also “a high point for the Catholic-liberal alliance.” 17 Religiously- political 18 Protestants likewise believed that the New Deal had successfully taken the rough edges off of a heartless capitalist system and given Christian aid to millions of Americans. Roosevelt’s state intervention, it seemed, not only worked economically, but also made the country a godlier place. Before World War II, the religious-liberal alliance was indeed strong and without serious challengers. Meanwhile, conservatism, which in the 1930s referred to vestiges of the free- market individualism of the nineteenth century, seemed antithetical to Christian principles. 19 Most Americans viewed conservatives as those who favored business 16 Mark Noll, A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s, 1992), 308; Noll, The Old Religion in a New World (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s, 2002), 132-3, 158; and Martin Marty, “The Twentieth Century,” in Mark Noll, ed., Religion and American Politics (NY: Oxford UP, 1990), 328, 330-1. 17 John McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (NY: Norton, 2003), 152-53 18 I use the term “religiously-political” to refer to those Americans who were religiously devout, politically active, and who brought their religious beliefs consciously to bear on their political ideals. This does not include all religious believers, nor does it include all believers who were also active in politics. It was possible for a U.S. citizen to hold deep religious commitments, but also feel it proper to leave religious beliefs and politics in separate realms. Religiously-political, then, refers to a specific class of people who found justification for their politics in their religious beliefs, and whose beliefs led them to their political conclusions. 19 For such uses of the word “conservative” in typical political discourse, see Marquis Childs, Washington Post, 11 Sep 1945, 10; Delbert Clark, “Republicans Face a Great Decision,” New York 13 interests over the public interest and sought to preserve outworn political forms that could not cope with modern challenges. Religious justifications for laissez-faire, mostly formulated in the nineteenth century, were all but forgotten by the 1930s: the advent and persistence of the Great Depression had diminished their appeal. As the thirties wore on, pro-capitalist Protestants increasingly shunned political involvement, leaving Social Gospel and Christian Realist ideas dominant. Protestant defenses of capitalism seemed a relic of the past and irrelevant to the new and widely-felt challenges of modern industrial life. Not coincidentally, those intellectuals who most vigorously opposed the New Deal were themselves either indifferent or openly hostile to religion. Novelist and anti-New Dealer Ayn Rand, a well-known atheist, saw faith as a form of irrational mysticism, an illusion that kept humanity from advancing. Rand and her followers rejected all systems that taught humans to sacrifice their happiness in the name of altruism and selflessness. Christianity and other religions, she argued, merely served as pretexts for the weak to bind down the strong with the cords of “collectivism.” Thus she placed religion in the same evil collectivist category as liberalism and Communism. 20 Likewise, libertarian journalist H.L. Mencken of the Baltimore Sun, was notorious as one of America’s greatest critics of faith. As the key reporter at the Times, 20 Jun 1937, 97; Henry Steele Commager, “Can Roosevelt Draw New Party Lines,” New York Times, 4 Sep 1938, 73; “Liberals,” a letter from anonymous reader to editor of Washington Post, 5 Aug 1944, 4; and George Gallup, “Survey Sees Trend to Conservatism,” New York Times, 29 Jun 1938, 7. 20 See Jennifer Burns, “Godless Capitalism: Ayn Rand and the Conservative Movement,” Modern Intellectual History (November 2004): 1-27. For an introduction to Rand’s philosophy of selfishness, see Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness (NY: New American Library, 1964). 14 Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925, he employed his famous wit and caustic language to attack the fundamentalist views put forward by William Jennings Bryan and other opponents of Darwinian Theory. Ex-Marxist philosopher Max Eastman also accompanied his attacks on the New Deal with attacks on religion. Other pre-1945 conservatives, such as Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig Von Mises, John Dos Passos, Rose Wilder Lane and others, while not overtly anti-religious like Rand, Mencken, and Eastman, held no visible religious beliefs themselves and certainly did not factor faith into their theories. Given the seemingly cruel implications of conservative political theory and the anti-religious attitudes of many of its exponents, one understands why applying faith to politics led most religiously-political Americans— and most secularly-political Americans—to liberalism before 1945. In these years, conservatism correlated with wealth more than religiosity. 21 Unfortunately, no comprehensive historical study of New Deal-era libertarians exists; hence, the absence of religion in this strand of “proto- conservatism” remains unexplored. For instance, Anti-New Deal libertarian, Albert Jay Nock rejected religion in mid-life and based his political ideas on secular foundations. Nock wrote for American Magazine and H.L. Mencken’s American Mercury before founding the libertarian magazine, The Freeman, where he touted Henry George’s “single tax” theory and the virtues of classical education. In spite of 21 See Sean Wilentz, “Uses of The Liberal Tradition: Comments on ‘Still Louis Hartz after All These Years,’” Perspectives on Politics (2005): 117-120. 15 the influence he would exert on future religious conservatives (most notably William F. Buckley, Jr.), Nock himself remained agnostic in religious matters. 22 Clearly, the challenge for Buckley, Chambers, and Herberg was a serious one: liberalism had a strong connection with religion, while much conservatism was seen as hostile to faith. To confront this challenge, the three turned the tables on liberalism by deflecting attention away from poverty and redistribution of wealth, and charging that liberalism stood for the principles of “statism,” “relativism,” and “secularism”—ideas that they claimed all grew out of a godless worldview. These three religious conservatives took the longstanding “trunk” of conservatism—anti- statism—developed a religious justification for it, and then grafted on the “branches” of anti-relativism and anti-secularism. A focus on these perceived weaknesses in liberalism became the central strategy by which conservatives turned their movement in a religiously-based direction. Because it framed the conservative approach to religion, this three-pronged attack on liberalism will constitute the structural frame for this dissertation. The attempts of Buckley, Chambers, and Herberg to give religious justifications for anti- statism will be covered in chapters 1 and 2, while chapters 3 and 4 will examine their capture of religiously-based “anti-relativism” as a conservative ideal. Chapters 5 and 6 will consider the conservative crusade against secularism and the more open 22 See Michael Wreszin, Memoirs of a Superfluous Anarchist: Albert Jay Nock (Providence: Brown UP, 1972); and Robert M. Crunden, The Mind and Art of Albert Jay Nock (Chicago: Regnery, 1964). Also see Nock’s own famous autobiography, Memoirs of a Superfluous Man (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1943). For more on Mencken, see Terry Teachout, The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken (NY: HarperCollins, 2005). 16 avowal of religiosity that accompanied it. Treating anti-statism first and anti- secularism last puts the topics in a general chronological order as well. Along with an examination of this anti-liberal strategy for “religionizing” the Right, this work will also show the instabilities, tensions, and contradictions that the adoption of new conservative principles created. As conservatives claimed anti- relativism and anti-secularism as their own, these new causes worked against their original goal of reducing state power. The branches thus tended to poison their own trunk. If conservatism remains an unstable coalition, these instabilities can be traced back to the new meaning it took on from 1945-1964. Generally, conservatives coped with these inconsistencies by downplaying the contradictions and finding common cause in aversion to liberalism. As the leader of the movement, Buckley allowed the contradictions to co-exist in the name of flexibility and broad appeal. This strategy worked in the short term: conservatives sacrificed ideological purity to polemical effect and, by stating their position in anti- liberal terms, they succeeded not only in putting liberalism on the defensive in moral and religious matters, but also in holding the conservative movement together in spite of glaring contradictions between their different goals. Of course, liberalism itself defied conservative categorizations, as thinkers such as Niebuhr and Schlesinger took liberalism beyond its association with the ideas conservatives ascribed to it; however, conservatives continued to equate liberalism with a Deweyan outlook, even while they failed to engage the instrumentalist philosophy that the liberal philosopher advanced. Thus, they misrepresented Dewey and often ignored 17 Niebuhr and Schlesinger, but conservative attacks need not have been coherent or philosophically tenable to be effective. By ignoring the strengths of their opponents as well as their own internal contradictions, conservative intellectuals demonstrated their willingness to mobilize ideas as weapons in the social struggle. Their ideological prowess allowed ideas to propel action: in the last decades of the twentieth century they captured political power, but, ironically, the price of power was the exposure of the movement’s fissures. Conservatism moved in a more religious direction from 1945-1964, but in a more unstable and self-contradictory direction as well. The thesis that the modern conservative-religious nexus was created in the postwar years runs counter to two widespread interpretations of the subject. The first sees an essential and timeless connection between religious faith and right-wing politics. Historian Leo Ribuffo, for instance, in his book The Old Christian Right, views religion as central to Right-wing politics throughout the twentieth century, and draws a connection between a handful of anti-Semitic Christians in the 1930s, and the Religious Right of forty years later. 23 By skipping from the Old Right of the 1930s to the New Right of the 1970s, Ribuffo minimizes the novelty of the conservative intellectual departure in the postwar years. A second interpretation sees the beginnings of the conservative-religious connection in the 1970s with the rise of the Religious Right. This view correctly conceives of conservatism as an evolving coalition, but misses the foundational role 23 See Leo Ribuffo, The Old Christian Right: The Protestant Far Right from the Great Depression to the Cold War (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1983). Another who saw conservatism as inherently religious in nature was the most important chronicler of the conservative past, Russell Kirk. 18 of the intellectual conservatives in the two decades from 1945-1964. The New Christian Right of the 1970s did not inaugurate religious conservatism out of nowhere. It may have wished it could: the intellectual foundation provided by Buckley, Chambers, Herberg and the National Review proved to be an unstable platform for the formidable edifice of the Religious Right. 24 This dissertation also departs from the standard interpretation of conservative anti-statism. First, unlike most historians of the conservative intellectual movement, I refer to those who opposed government expansion in this era as “anti-statists” rather than libertarians. I find this classification more clearly delineates what it meant to be a conservative, for all conservatives opposed state expansion, while libertarians were only a narrow group who advocated taking anti-statism to a radical extreme. Historian George Nash sees libertarianism as the “limited government” branch of conservatism, but such a view obscures the fact that all conservatives shared the goal of limited government in the postwar years; indeed, it was the limited-government outlook that bound conservatives together. Nash presents libertarianism as merely one conservative characteristic among three—the other two being traditionalism and anti-communism—while I see anti-statism as the dominant characteristic that continued to define the movement throughout the twentieth century. Undoubtedly, by 1964, anti-relativism and anti-secularism had become 24 It must be noted that the religion of Buckley, Chambers, Herberg and other early conservatives differed markedly from that of Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and other religious activists of later decades whose appeal was charismatic and emotional rather than intellectual. Like conservatism, “religion” is a problematic term with various meanings according to time and place. Nevertheless, as later chapters will show, these postwar conservative intellectuals left the concept of religion vague and indefinite as a way to attract even those whose approach to faith differed from their own. A basic commitment to belief in a transcendent God was sufficient overlap for the conservative coalition. 19 important conservative causes, but an opposition to expanding state power remained a test of fellowship for members of the movement. Such postwar intellectuals as Peter Viereck and Clinton Rossiter, for instance, called themselves conservatives and shared the Burkean traditionalist philosophy of Russell Kirk, but their desire to “conserve” the expanded government legacy of the 1930s made them ideological enemies of the postwar Right. They were generally shunned by the Buckley crowd. 25 Second, unlike other historians, I categorize anti-communism with anti- statism since most conservatives saw their foreign policy as an extension of their domestic limited-government concerns—moreover, anti-communism was not just a foreign policy stance. By 1964, most conservatives believed that in both their anti- statism and anti-communism they fought the same enemy: the freedom-destroying, overweening state. While historians like Paul Gottfried, Lee Edwards, and George Nash see opposition and tension between the distinctive libertarian and anti- communists strands of conservatism, one will search the history of the postwar Right in vain for an anti-communist who was not also (to one degree or another) an anti- statist in domestic matters. Nash points to arguments between “anti-communists” such as James Burnham and “libertarians” such as Frank Meyer to highlight the differences among 25 Likewise, Russell Kirk (a man mildly opposed to the New Deal) and Murray Rothbard (a quasi- anarchist libertarian) could both be defined as “anti-statists” since they both leaned in the same direction, albeit to different degrees. Of course, anti-statists could even wish to expand state power in specific instances while generally preferring limited government involvement in society (especially in economic affairs). The term “libertarian” would be as inadequate to describe all conservatives as the term “socialist” would be to describe liberals, since not all anti-statists were as radical as “libertarianism” implied and not all liberals were as radical as socialism implied. 20 the camps they represented, but underestimates the binding importance of their fundamental commitment to limited government. 26 Meyer believed in the necessity of radically limiting government because it infringed upon individual rights, while Burnham believed in the necessity of cautiously limiting government and focusing on the Communist menace. Yet for all of their differences as to “why” and “how much,” Meyer and Burnham both viewed Communism as statism abroad and liberalism as statism at home. Both men opposed liberalism and communism for the same reasons and their differing priorities and emphases does not erase this fundamental connection. While conservatives may have disagreed amongst themselves as to how far to go in limiting government and why it was necessary, they all agreed that the growth of government should be stopped and/or reduced. By neglecting to see anti-communism in anti-statist terms, historians compound their mistake by missing the difference between conservative and liberal anti-communism. Many liberals opposed communism with as much intensity and passion as anyone on the Right (this would include Cold Warriors Sidney Hook, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Reinhold Niebuhr), but the two sides, in spite of their common enemy, differed in their primary motives. 27 While liberal anti-communists generally emphasized Soviet expansionism and repression of individual rights in their critique of communism, conservative anti-communists generally criticized the Soviet Union for the same reason they criticized the New Deal—they believed it 26 Nash, 159-160. 27 Indeed, according to historian John Patrick Diggins, liberal Sidney Hook outdid anyone on the Right in anti-communist passion. He was, says Diggins, “America’s most vigilant anti-communist intellectual.” Diggins, Up From Communism, 168. 21 centralized power, infringed on private property rights, and made slaves of citizens. The difference between conservative and liberal anti-communism, then, was not so much one of vehemence or commitment, but one of underlying political philosophy. Finally, since anti-statism carries a broader meaning than the traditionally- used term “libertarianism,” I present a classification schema that accounts for the variations within this overarching anti-statist umbrella of the postwar years. This division helps us understand how Buckley, Chambers, and Herberg reconciled opposition to state power with their religious perspectives, and indicates whence they took their inspiration. I break down anti-statist thought into three heuristic types named after the enlightenment figure that best embodied that particular mode of argument. First, “Smithian” anti-statists opposed state expansion for “efficiency” reasons. Like their hero Adam Smith, these thinkers believed that government growth tended to dampen economic productivity. High taxes, stiff tariffs, and cumbersome regulations diminished incentives to produce and prevented the smooth operation of the specialization and trade that had produced the “wealth of nations.” They believed that “big-government” inevitably caused the economic pie to shrink, thus making all parties worse-off. Smithians defended their limited-government principles on the grounds that they “simply worked,” and not for any compelling moral or philosophical reason. For Smithians, the efficiency and productivity of limited government were reasons enough to accept it as a political doctrine. Applying their ideas to the politics of the time, Smithians of the 1940s attacked the New Deal on the grounds that it had hurt the economy—the Great 22 Depression was not caused by intrinsic flaws in the capitalist system, but was actually created and perpetuated by government mismanagement. Smithians like Max Eastman had converted to conservatism because of the “experimentally-proven failure” of government to solve social problems. Likewise, Chicago School economist Milton Friedman turned away from his earlier socialist inclinations when, as a young government worker, he perceived inefficiencies that resulted from New Deal planning. Carl Snyder indicted FDR’s programs as the cause of economic stagnation during the Great Depression in his 1941 book Capitalism the Creator, and journalist Isabel Paterson’s God of the Machine argued (contra Marx) that political policies rather than economic conditions, had the most important effect in determining the course of history. Stifling government policies, said Paterson, had caused the failures and ultimate downfalls of the great civilizations. Since Smithians often tended toward pragmatism in their outlook, a philosophical stance later seen as “relativism” on the Right, and focused heavily on material acquisition, the religious conservatives drew upon Smithian arguments less than those of the other schools in making their faith-based case for anti-statism. Indeed, the Smithian conception of economics put forward by William Graham Sumner and Herbert Spencer in the 19 th century had driven many to equate laissez- faire economics with the “godless” ideas of Charles Darwin. Although Buckley and others continued to argue for the efficiency of free markets, they subordinated these arguments to other modes when making the religious case for limited government. 23 As one might expect, Smithians in the conservative movement saw their influence wane as the tendency towards religiosity increased in the late 1950s. 28 Unlike the Smithians, “Burkeans” resisted government expansion for philosophical rather than economic reasons. Like their inspiration Edmund Burke, these anti-statists distrusted government power because they distrusted the human reason that supposedly directed the government. Burke opposed the French Revolution because of its rationalist roots, and Burke’s anti-statist legatees took state planning as “abstract” for the same reason. Burkeans believed that a healthy epistemological skepticism demanded that humans refrain from tampering with the levers of power since humans, however well-informed, could never fully predict the consequences of the use of that power. Thus, human fallibility demanded that state power remain limited so that mistakes do as little damage as possible. Because of the constraints on rationality, Burkeans believed it better to rely on the spontaneous order of the market instead of the rational planning of meddling government officials. Society was best left to grow organically and undirected. Burkeans demonstrated the most anti-utopian sentiments of all anti-statists. Smithians, with their claims that universal prosperity awaited societies if only government would step aside and unleash the market, could often sound as naïve and utopian as the socialists they denounced. Burkeans on the other hand, with their 28 The Smithian label would also fit most free-market economists, members of the “law and economics” movement (most prominently, judge Richard Posner), Public Interest neoconservatives (e.g. Irving Kristol, James Q. Wilson, and Francis Fukuyama), and supply-side pundits. In each case, these figures saw capitalism as either morally neutral or problematic, but accepted as an empirical fact that free markets simply outperformed other systems. This was expressed most famously in Kristol’s cautious endorsement of anti-statist ideas in his book Two Cheers for Capitalism (NY: Basic Books, 1978). 24 emphasis on human limitation, believed nations could not achieve perfection even if they followed Smith’s prescriptions. They could only hope to maximize freedom and minimize suffering through the devolution of decision-making power to those whom the decisions would affect. The stress they placed on “limitation” would make Burkean ideas appealing to religious conservatives who wished to emphasize human “sin” as a relevant political concept. Indeed, it was through this overlap of Burkean and Niebuhrian beliefs that Herberg was able to convert to market economics and defend them on religious grounds. The most important Burkean anti-statists in the U.S. during the 1940s were immigrant economists of the Austrian School, such as Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. Hayek in particular inspired thousands of conservatives with his book, the Road to Serfdom, which presented, for many, the definitive word on the limitations of government planning. 29 While Smithians focused on market efficiency, and Burkeans dwelt on the salutary power of tradition, “Lockeans” focused on morality. Using arguments similar to those given by John Locke in his “Second Treatise on Government,” these thinkers opposed state expansion because they believed it necessarily infringed upon a moral good—individual liberty. By using the language of “rights” (similar to that found in the Declaration of Independence penned by Locke-disciple Thomas Jefferson), Lockeans emphasized protecting individuals from domination by the state. By 1945, virtually all Americans agreed that slavery was immoral and yet, said the Lockeans, did not state confiscation of individual property amount to the 29 Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1945). 25 same thing? To Lockeans, government should be viewed as at best a necessary evil: it was evil in its infringement upon freedoms, but necessary to prevent internal and external threats from destroying the liberty of its citizens. Even were rational planning possible (as the Burkeans claimed it was not) and even if state control of the economy were efficient (as the Smithians claimed it was not), the Lockeans would still have opposed state expansion because of its intrinsic threat to individual freedom. The Lockean defense of the limited state had many proponents in the 1940s. Journalist Albert Jay Nock (who exerted a powerful influence on Buckley) put forward his defense of individual liberty in his books Our Enemy, the State and Memoirs of a Superfluous Man. 30 John Chamberlain, a writer for Life and Fortune magazines, and novelist John Dos Passos, two other recent converts from socialism, likewise argued against the enslaving effects of centralized state power. Journalist Rose Wilder Lane (daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder) wrote of government threats to individual autonomy in her book The Discovery of Freedom and in numerous articles for mass publications, while her friend, novelist Ayn Rand, towered above all other Lockeans in influence. In The Fountainhead, and later in the ultra-best selling Atlas Shrugged, Rand made a moral case for capitalist individualism that moved millions of (usually young) readers to embrace her brand of anti-statism. 31 Since many anti-statists used a combination of Smithian, Burkean, and Lockean arguments in their writings, one might claim that it is unfair to apply a 30 Nock, Our Enemy, the State (NY: Morrow, 1935). 31 Lane, The Discovery of Freedom: Man’s Struggle Against Authority (NY: John Day, 1943); Rand, The Fountainhead (NY: Bobbs-Merrill, 1943). 26 single label to such individuals. Whatever the merits of this objection, it is also clear that each tended to emphasize one particular mode of argument over the others. Hence, I categorize anti-statists who used multiple justifications according to the rationale most emphasized in their writings. Milton Friedman, for instance, in his bestselling book and television show Free to Choose, 32 often spoke of individual rights and the rational limitations to planning, but his primary emphasis was on the efficiency of markets and how state interference in the economy had led to poverty and stagnation both in the U.S. and abroad. Because of this emphasis, I label Friedman a “Smithian” even though he clearly sympathized with many Burkean and Lockean ideas as well. Lockean and Burkean arguments played heavily in the religious case for conservatism made by Buckley, Chambers, and Herberg. Buckley used Lockean arguments to create a space for individualism within the Catholic tradition by locating an overlap in the natural rights tradition they shared. Herberg emphasized human epistemological limitation in making a case for the cautious use of state power, while Chambers saw this focus on human limitation, and the consequent need for faith in God, as the principle that united conservative domestic and foreign concerns. It is to these intersections of anti-statism and faith that I now turn. 32 Friedman, Free to Choose (New York : Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980). 27 Chapter 1 Anti-Statism I : Buckley and the Quest for Catholic Individualism William F. Buckley, Jr. stands out as the most prominent religiously-political intellectual to harmonize religious faith with domestic anti-statist ideas in the postwar years. In this chapter, I argue that Buckley did for Catholicism what Protestants had begun doing generations earlier—reconciling their faith with the idea of limited-government. By employing Catholic symbols, concepts, and teachings that he believed justified a classically liberal economic order, Buckley opened up anti-statist arguments to his fellow Catholics and helped move capitalism beyond its traditional association with Protestantism. 1 To accomplish his task, Buckley at first used “Lockean” modes of anti-statist thinking that emphasized “moral choice” and natural rights, concepts that found corollaries in Catholicism, and later drew from Catholic predecessors such as Jose Ortega y Gasset and G.K. Chesterton. Buckley succeeded in finding enough points of contact between libertarian assumptions and Catholic teaching to create a space for a minimal-government politics in his religious 1 In the following chapter, I will refer to Buckley’s views as “anti-statist,” “limited government,” “libertarian,” and “free market”: all of these terms denote a preference for lesser government as opposed to the twentieth-century liberal view that preferred a greater role for government in society (particularly in economic affairs). While limited-government ideas had implications for all realms of political activity, the economic realm was the most controversial and the only realm in which Buckley had to defend himself at length. Few, for instance, attacked Buckley’s support for freedom of religion, nor did he often engage in debates on that question because belief in religious freedom was generally uncontested and shared by Left and Right alike. Ideas about “economic freedom,” on the other hand, were controversial and widely-contested. Libertarians tended to focus on economic matters both because economic freedom seemed the freedom most under attack in the New Deal era, and because they believed that economic freedom was the cornerstone of other freedoms. “Without economic freedom,” said Buckley in 1959, “political and other freedoms are likely to be taken from us.” William F. Buckley, Jr., Up From Liberalism (1959; NY: Bantam, 1968), 156. 28 tradition and helped pave the way for a surge in Catholic political conservatism later in the century. Buckley’s attempt to reconcile Christianity and classical liberalism only became specifically Catholic when he was attacked by members of his own faith. Initially, as a way to invite political pluralism on the Right, Buckley based his individualism on general principles accepted by most Christians. In his first book, God and Man at Yale (1951), Buckley openly declared his individualist and Christian commitments, and claimed that the two were fundamentally linked. 2 Early on, he drew primarily on Lockean Albert Jay Nock for inspiration, claiming that a place could be found for explicitly individualist thought in the Catholic tradition. But later, under the influence of such Catholic thinkers as Jose Ortega y Gasset and G.K. Chesterton, Buckley modified his anti-statist views to make them compatible with more communal ideas that appealed to Catholic sensibilities. In either case, Buckley worked to undermine a deeply-entrenched consensus among Catholic intellectuals that previously excluded a limited-government point of view. As Buckley reconciled Catholicism and twentieth-century libertarian ideas, he largely ignored the longstanding Protestant-individualist tradition in America. Such Protestant luminaries as J. Gresham Machen, Bruce Barton, and Russell Conwell had, earlier in the century, argued for the minimal state on Christian grounds, but Buckley’s writings show little of their influence. But Buckley did not 2 Early on, Buckley used the term “individualism” to refer to his political philosophy. However, “individualism,” as we shall see below was a problematic word because of its implication that those who did not share his limited-government views did not respect the dignity or primacy of the individual. 29 need this tradition. 3 In his formative years, his father showed him an example of Catholic-Christianity in practice, while Nock gave him the theoretical basis for reconciling Christianity and individualism. Furthermore, the basic teachings of his own Catholic tradition provided him with plenty of anti-socialist ideas that he could rework into a defense of individualism. His father, William F. Buckley, Sr., a wealthy Catholic oilman and personal example of both Catholic piety and economic individualism, worked himself up from poverty to wealth twice in his life and instilled in his children the idea that, in the free-enterprise system, anyone with gumption and faith in God could succeed. He also remained active in the local parish, attended mass at least weekly, and carefully lived his life according to the demands of the Catholic religion. 4 Buckley Sr., a man of action rather than ideas, found no conflict between his political, business, and religious activities. Such an example of the practical harmony of Catholicism and anti-statist politics would profoundly shape William, Jr.’s adult outlook. Though his father inspired him through example, Buckley’s theoretical justification for limited government came from a family friend—journalist Albert 3 See James McCosh, Our Moral Nature (NY: Scribner’s, 1892), 40; J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism (NY: Macmillan, 1923), 11; and “Communism Denounced: Henry Ward Beecher’s Opinions on the Labor Question,” New York Times, July 30, 1877, 8. Conwell famously admonished the auditors of his “Acres of Diamonds” speech to “get rich,” for money, he claimed, was power to do God’s work, and coercive government practices took that power away. In a similar spirit, Bruce Barton’s bestselling book, The Man Nobody Knows (1925), portrayed Christ as a marketing genius who created a global business empire using techniques applicable to modern Americans. In their writings and speeches, Barton and Conwell’s individualist leanings skirted Social Gospel issues and made Jesus a champion of worldly success. For further discussion of Protestant defenses of limited government, see Mark Noll, A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdman’s, 1992), 429-434. 4 For a discussion of his Father’s religiosity and the impact it had on his own religious and political development, see Buckley, Nearer My God: An Autobiography of Faith (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1997), 18-24. 30 Jay Nock. “My father was a friend of Albert Jay Nock,” Buckley remembered in later years, “who, silver-headed with the trim moustache and rimless glasses, was often at our house in Sharon, Connecticut.” Nock only lived a short distance away from the Buckley home and found many opportunities to visit and share his free- market views with the family patriarch. Although young William first avoided the aged libertarian as “too professorial,” by age fifteen he had changed his mind. In about 1940, Buckley had begun reading Albert Jay Nock, from whom he “imbibed deeply the anti-statist tradition which he [Nock] accepted, celebrated, and enhanced.” 5 Born in 1870 in Scranton, Pennsylvania and raised in Brooklyn, Nock studied for the ministry and was ordained an Anglican pastor at the age of 25. In 1905, he left his position as a clergyman to work as a journalist and eventually abandoned his religious faith completely. Yet his individualism remained. Although an agnostic by age 35, Nock took his individualist views to the Nation magazine where he criticized Roosevelt’s New Deal for infringing upon individual liberty and then in 1920 left to found The Freeman magazine which quickly became the most visible journal of libertarian opinion of its time. As an anti-New Deal journalist, Nock focused on the immorality of state action and the importance of retaining the inviolability of individual choice in a world growing increasingly statist. Since, in Nock’s view, all government action required public resources, and public resources meant taxation—a form of institutionalized theft—all state action was necessarily immoral and the government, 5 Buckley, “The Meaning of Heritage,” NR (22 Nov 1999): 42. 31 by its very nature, was an enemy to human society. 6 Nock’s credo, which he borrowed from Jefferson, read, “In proportion as you give the state power to do things for you, you give it power to do things to you.” 7 Nock, like Jefferson, did not decry the growth of state power because he loved the capitalist mode of production (i.e. he was not a Smithian); he opposed the state because of its coercive (and therefore immoral) nature and its tendency to trample on individual rights. Not only was government action itself immoral, said Nock, but individual political freedom, compatible only with a limited state, was a necessary prerequisite for individual moral action. Since the government, according to Nock, “becomes a moral arbiter and forces morality according to a pre-determined code,” he believed it interfered with the individual’s capacity to direct their own life and exercise the free will that was theirs by nature. 8 Thus, Nock stood squarely within the “Lockean” school of anti-statism and, like other Lockeans, believed that one could not behave morally if compelled to do so. Moral activity meant freely undertaken activity. Nock’s government vs. freedom paradigm became the foundation of Buckley’s own anti-statist philosophy. Especially in his earliest days as a public figure, Buckley would quote Nock at length and invoke his authority on almost any occasion when defending “individualism” against liberal and socialist forms of 6 These sentiments were clearly revealed in the title of Nock’s most famous book, Our Enemy, the State. 7 Albert Jay Nock, Memoirs of a Superfluous Man (NY: Harper and Brothers, 1943), 4, 291, 298, 307. 8 Nock, “Radical Individualism: The State as Enemy,” in Gregory Schneider, ed., Conservatism in America, since 1930 (NY: NYU Press, 2003), 31. 32 “collectivism.” 9 Even in his later years, Buckley would still recall the power Nock’s Memoirs had on him when he was just a teenager. 10 Through Nock, Buckley also gained an appreciation for others of the American tradition who were likewise suspicious of state power. “I remember in the work of Nock, and in the work of American historical figures he cited,” recalled Buckley in 1999, “of that heritage, the presumptive resistance to state activity”—this included Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Henry George (whom Buckley always counted as an influence, in spite of the Left’s appropriation of his legacy), Frank Chodorov, and Nock’s friend H.L. Mencken. 11 Decades after Nock’s death, Buckley assembled an anthology of conservative writing, in which he included two selections by his individualist mentor—the only one besides Whittaker Chambers to be so honored. Such treatment testifies to the fact that these two men probably had a greater impact on Buckley’s intellectual development than any other thinkers. 12 9 For Buckley’s early uses of Nock’s individualist arguments, see Buckley, God and Man at Yale: The Superstition of Academic Freedom (1951; Chicago: Regnery, 1977), 193; Buckley, “A Young Republican: The Party and the Deep Blue Sea,” CW (25 Jan 1952): 391; Buckley, “Two to Get Ready,” Human Events (8 Apr 1953): 1-5. For continued references to Nock in his later writings, see Buckley, “A Fortnight with Murray Kempton,” (1962) in Rumbles Left and Right: A Book about Troublesome People and Ideas (NY: Putnam’s, 1963), 179; and Buckley, “The Suicide of the West,” syndicated column, 9 May 1964, 2, HD, l; Buckley, “New York and the GOP” NR (16 Nov 1965): 1014; Buckley, Overdrive: A Personal Documentary (NY: Doubleday, 1983), 63-72; Buckley, Up From Liberalism, 101; Buckley, eulogy delivered at Frank Chodorov’s funeral, in Buckley, The Jeweler’s Eye: A Book of Irresistible Political Reflections (NY: Putnam’s, 1969), 310; Buckley, “Chilean Ferment,” (4 Feb 1971) in Buckley, Inveighing We Will Go (NY: Putnam’s, 1972), 183. Nock’s influence on Buckley is also seen in their mutual admiration for “single-tax” theorist, Henry George. 10 Buckley, “The Dynamic IMP,” NR (13 Dec 2004): 46. 11 Buckley, “Heritage,” 42. 12 Buckley and Charles Kessler, Keeping the Tablets: Modern American Conservative Thought (NY: Harper & Row, 1988), 111-24 (“Anarchist’s Progress”) and 431-41 (“Isaiah’s Job”). 33 Yet Nock was an agnostic. How could he have influenced Buckley’s attempt to reconcile Christianity with individualism? Buckley answered this by pointing out that, in spite of his unbelief, Nock had incorporated the very words of Jesus into his political philosophy. The teachings of Jesus, Nock maintained, “had been purely individualistic” since Christ taught “that if everyone would reform one (that is to say, oneself) and keep one steadfastly following the way of life which He recommended, the Kingdom of Heaven would be co-extensive with human society.” To Nock, true Christianity would not demand that society compel others to reform, but would allow the locus of moral agency—the individual—to reform him or herself. This, he taught, was “the only way society [could] be improved,” and “Jesus apparently regarded the individualist method as the only one whereby the kingdom of heaven [could] be established.” 13 Although Nock no longer held formal religious beliefs, said Buckley, his teachings about the compatibility of Christianity and individualism were still valid and useful for the reconciliation of religion and politics. “Mr. Nock had left the discerning to suppose that he had abandoned his sometime commitment to Christianity,” said Buckley, but Nock had not abandoned “the secular transcription of the Christian idea, which is that all men are born free and equal.” 14 Just as Upton 13 Nock, Memoirs, 307. 14 Buckley, “Heritage,” 44. 34 Sinclair, another agnostic, had turned to the words of Jesus for support of socialism, so Nock turned to the words of Jesus for support of individualism. 15 Ironically, Nock would have his greatest influence on American politics through the Catholic Buckley, even though the older man reviled the Catholic Church as an anti-individualist organization. Catholicism, Nock believed, had been responsible for the metaphysical confusion that took the pure, individualistic doctrines of Christ and, through “Post-Pauline metaphysics” corrupted them to advocate collectivism. 16 Buckley, using arguments learned from Nock, would try to dispel this very position even as most of his fellow Catholics agreed with Nock that their faith and individualism were incompatible. In spite of his respect for Nock’s Christian individualism, Buckley believed that Nock’s secularization of Christian teachings, even in the service of individualism, ultimately rendered them ineffectual. Any attempt to separate God’s teachings from an actual love of God, he said, was not “philosophically reliable,” for the teachings ultimately depended upon a commitment to the religion in which they were found. 17 The state was immoral, because it infringed upon the freedoms of the 15 In his famous novel, The Jungle, Sinclair argued that his brand of communism fully embodied the teachings of Jesus Christ. In chapter 31, he maintained that Jesus was “the world's first revolutionist, the true founder of the Socialist movement; a man whose whole being was one flame of hatred for wealth, and all that wealth stands for,--for the pride of wealth, and the luxury of wealth, and the tyranny of wealth; who was himself a beggar and a tramp, a man of the people, an associate of saloon- keepers and women of the town; who again and again, in the most explicit language, denounced wealth and the holding of wealth…who drove out the businessmen and brokers from the temple with a whip! Who was crucified--think of it--for an incendiary and a disturber of the social order!...This was Jesus of Nazareth!” Upton Sinclair, The Jungle [Enriched Classics Edition] (1906; NY: Pocket Books, 2004). 16 Nock, Memoirs, 295-298, 300. 17 Buckley, “Heritage,” 44. 35 individual, Nock had said, but Buckley pushed this a step further and asked the metaphysical question of why society should value the freedoms of the individual at all? Why should individual volition remain the primary political concern rather than utility maximization (as in the writings of Bentham) or the demands of the collective? Without religion, said Buckley, one finds no answer. Libertarian politics presupposed a personalist metaphysical view that valued the individual above all else, but this metaphysical view, in turn, depended upon belief in the existence of God—a Supreme Person who endowed His children with infinite value. Buckley found this personalist basis for political liberty in his own Catholic tradition. Belief in a “divine spark,” said Buckley, guaranteed the Lockean rights that Nock had taught him. 18 Like Jefferson, Buckley believed it necessary to invoke a creator as a foundation for the Lockean “equal rights” of all men, for human status as equal beings depended upon the rights bestowed upon them by the deity. 19 Libertarians valued individual freedom as a moral good, but Buckley grounded that “moral good” in a Christian understanding of the individual as metaphysically autonomous and existing prior to the group. Because Christianity saw humans as ultimately free by virtue of the “divine spark” within them, which made their volition sacred and set them apart from nature, Christians, including Catholics, could understand the human self as transcending and ultimately independent of causal 18 Indeed, Yale literary critic Harold Bloom sees belief in a human spark of divinity as the essence of the trans-denominational “American Religion” that he outlines in his book, The American Religion (NY: Simon & Schuster, 1992). 19 Buckley, Overdrive, 217. 36 forces and society in ways that unbelievers could not. 20 Buckley believed that this religious view of human freedom naturally translated into a political system that would hold the preservation of individual liberty as its primary goal, but the welfare state was willing to tax and regulate the individual in the name of the “public good.” 21 To Buckley, “compulsory participation in any enterprise is wrong because human freedom is diminished” and human freedom stood at the heart of Christian moral teaching. 22 Assuming that the only alternative to religion was materialism, Buckley argued that a lack of religious faith would “denude the individual of the divine spark” and thus leave them open to political subjugation. 23 Without that divine spark, the individual could claim no more value or intrinsic worth than any other cog in the modern machine and could be enslaved and ultimately sacrificed as a mere means to other ends. In this way, Buckley believed that materialism tended “naturally to advance the claims of the collectivity over those of the individual as the focal point of social effort” because it had inevitable dehumanizing effects and 20 Dewey had earlier made the same claim and chided his fellow naturalists for believing in an outdated individualist conception of politics that corresponded with an outdated supernaturalist philosophy. John Dewey, “Anti-Naturalism in Extremis,” PR (Jan-Feb 1943): 41. 21 Buckley expressed his personal commitment to free moral choice in a kind of “manifesto” on the concluding page of his anti-statist opus, Up from Liberalism. He declared, “I will not cede more power to the state,” he declared, “I mean to live my life an obedient man, but obedient to God, subservient to the wisdom of my ancestors; never to the authority of political truths arrived at yesterday at the voting booth.” Buckley, Up From Liberalism, 176. 22 Buckley, “The Strange Behavior of America,” NR (26 Aug 1961): 114; Buckley, God and Man at Yale, 3; Buckley, “The Assault on Whittaker Chambers,” NR (15 Dec 1964): 1102. Buckley, Introduction to Did You Ever See A Dream Walking?: American Conservative Thought in the Twentieth Century (NY: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970) p., xxxii; and Buckley, “Strange Behavior,” p. 114. As Buckley would often claim in evaluating the work of his friend John Kenneth Galbraith, generosity with other people’s money was not true generosity (See, for example, Overdrive, 195). 23 Buckley, “Jean-Paul Sartre Wins the Nobel Prize,” (29 Oct 1964) in Jeweler’s Eye, 214. 37 without a religious understanding, individualists had no metaphysical defense against this trend. 24 On the principle of the “divine spark,” Buckley built his anti-statist political edifice and in this way, grounded his individualism in Christianity. But Buckley too easily equated the value ascribed to the individual in Christianity with political individualism. One could agree with Buckley that Christianity placed individual well-being as the end goal of all human action, but that position permitted a whole spectrum of political conclusions. 25 In asserting that metaphysical individualism (the “divine spark” of Christianity) led directly to political individualism (i.e. libertarianism), Buckley mistook semantic coincidence for logical necessity. Reinhold Niebuhr, for instance, agreed with Buckley’s emphasis on the Christian value given to the individual, but he also argued that Christianity recognized the interdependence of the individual and society. Since external factors could either create the conditions to enable or limit individual success, “the individual and the community were related to each other on many levels,” and had reciprocal claims upon one another. “The highest reaches of individual consciousness and awareness,” said Niebuhr, were “rooted in social experience and [found] their ultimate meaning in relation to the community.” For 24 Transcript of November 1, 1972 episode of Firing Line, “Christianity and Capitalism,” HI, Box 61 (218), Folder 68, 3; and “The Week,” NR (29 Jul 1961): 38; and Buckley, “The Assault on Whittaker Chambers,” 1102. 25 As will be seen below, this is why Father John Ryan’s political views are so instructive in comparison to Buckley’s. 38 Niebuhr, the individual was the product of the whole socio-historical process, and individual decisions grew out of and found their “final meaning” in the community. 26 Niebuhr did not deny the primacy of the individual in Christian thought, but he believed that one’s personhood as guaranteed by Christianity was only developed fully in relation to society and that a society which created the conditions of individual economic success could properly make demands on persons without denying or infringing upon their individuality. In a similar fashion, other Christian liberals challenged Buckley’s individualism on the grounds that it bestowed a fictional “atomized” status upon persons that went against the Christian tradition. 27 Buckley had determined that a belief in the “divine spark” within each human necessitated a politics that saw the individual in terms independent of her or his surroundings, but he failed to confront the most basic challenge to his assumption: that the self was largely a function of social factors and, consequently, each individual had intrinsic obligations to society. This formidable challenge went to the core assumption upon which his political edifice rested. Buckley also overlooked the possibility of an atheistic anti-materialism. He assumed a necessary connection between immaterial existence and a belief in God, but some of his contemporaries rejected both materialism and religion. Novelist Ayn Rand, for instance, an avowed opponent of religious “mysticism,” was also an opponent of materialist philosophy. For Buckley, this was an impossibility since he 26 Reinhold Niebuhr, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness: A Vindication of Democracy and a Critique of its Traditional Defense (1944; NY: Scribner, 1960), 50. 27 “Christianity and Capitalism,” 5. 39 believed that one must ground individual autonomy in something higher (God), 28 but to Rand individual volition was a metaphysical given that required no more explanation than Buckley’s God did. Buckley ascribed an independent, self-existent status to God, so why could one not do the same with the dignity and agency of the individual? Ironically, Rand the atheist and Buckley the Catholic both saw their libertarian politics as an extension of their belief in transcendent freedom. Rand hated “collectivism” for exactly the same reasons Buckley, Chambers, and Herberg did—its materialist premises. Communists, she said, “believe there isn’t such a thing as a soul or a mind, there’s only your body. It is materialism. They believe that you are not a man, but a collection of atoms.” Rand, like Buckley, claimed that this erroneous materialistic view led to Soviet collectivist politics, whereas American capitalism grew out of a “romantic” belief in the autonomy of the individual. 29 Rand and Buckley fundamentally agreed on the philosophical basis of libertarian politics, but disagreed about the metaphysical grounds for this philosophy. The specter of Marx that loomed over the twentieth century caused many to assume that atheism, materialism, and collectivism were necessarily connected, when, in fact, some believed that were not. 28 One of her most widely-read collections, The Romantic Manifesto, was dedicated to opposing the materialist idea in literature and art. Ayn Rand, “What is Romanticism,” in The Romantic Manifesto (NY: Signet, 1971), 99-122. 29 Phil Donahue interview with Ayn Rand, 16 May 1979, New York City, as seen in film Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life (1997). Rand was widely known for having rejected religion because it was “mystical,” by which she meant irrational. What was less known was that Rand rejected materialism for the same reason. When believers asked Rand to justify the value of individual autonomy on a prior cause, she asked them to do the same with their God. 40 But even though his upbringing and religious background was Catholic, Buckley’s early individualism seemed contrary to Catholic teaching, a fact that critics both inside and outside of his faith noted. Although he had absorbed much of the anti-socialist tradition from the Catholic teachings of his upbringing he had learned to reconcile Christianity and individualism primarily from Nock: hence, the arguments for his position came from a generic reading of the New Testament. McGeorge Bundy’s famous review of God and Man at Yale in The Atlantic made Buckley’s “hiding” of his “special allegiance” to Catholicism a major point of attack. Dwight Macdonald was also baffled that a Catholic was peddling “Calvinist” (individualist) economics. But Buckley defended himself by arguing that his particular faith did not matter. There was nothing “distinctively Catholic” about the points he had made since he “had used no criteria unacceptable to Christians of any denomination.” As one trying to gain allies from a wide base of religious traditions on the Right, Buckley consciously kept his principles as generic as possible and thought it irrelevant to advertise his Catholicism. 30 Protestant libertarians, who answered to no papal encyclicals, wore the label “individualist” as a badge of honor. To appeal to these Protestants, Buckley needed to speak to them in their preferred terms. Calling himself an “individualist,” while upsetting to Catholics, would help him find common ground with prominent Protestant anti-statists like John Chamberlain, Wilhelm Röpke, and Henry Hazlitt—intellectual luminaries whose 30 Buckley, Miles Gone By: A Literary Autobiography (D.C.: Regnery, 2004), 69-71; and Buckley, “The Changes at Yale: A Response to McGeorge Bundy,” The Atlantic (Dec 1951): 78-82. 41 support Buckley needed to give his magazine (and the movement that followed it) visibility and appeal. But Buckley’s fellow Catholics believed his particular faith was relevant, and argued that his politics betrayed the deepest principles of his religion. Bundy and Macdonald had both considered the idea of Catholic individualism an absurdity, and, given the thrust of Catholic thinking at the time, one understands why—virtually all Catholic intellectuals and clergymen of the time themselves agreed that the social teachings of their faith demanded support for the liberal politics embodied in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. 31 Even the unbeliever Nock thought that the advent of Protestantism had brought with it a culture of individualism to challenge the collectivism fostered by Catholicism. Historian Patrick Allitt has shown that Catholic intellectuals played a major role in the conservative movement in the 1960s, but the very idea of Catholic political conservatism had been unthinkable just twenty years before. 32 In order for Catholic intellectuals to assume their position as major players on the Right, the liberal monopoly on Catholic social thought in America would have to be broken and Buckley did more than anyone else to accomplish this task. 31 “In its economics,” said Bundy, God and Man at Yale was “distinctively un-Catholic.” See “McGeorge Bundy Replies,” The Atlantic (Dec 1951): 84. John McGreevy refers to a “Catholic- liberal alliance” that reached its high point in the 1930s. John McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (NY: Norton, 2003), 153. As Francis E. McMahon wrote, “reforms like social security and labor legislation…were the minimum demands for the survival of America as a free and prosperous people.” Francis E. McMahon, “The Liberal-Conservative Debate,” Catholic World (Nov 1959): 89. 32 Patrick Allitt, Catholic Intellectuals and Conservative Politics in America, 1950-1985 (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993). 42 The Catholic mainstream found its primary justification for political liberalism in two papal encyclicals. Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum (1891) gave birth to modern Catholic social teaching by proclaiming the rights of workers to organize and receive “just wages,” as well as the need for the state to promote the interests of the poor and “provide for the welfare and the comfort of the working classes.” Rerum took particular aim at those capitalists who treated “human beings as mere instruments for money-making.” But Leo also rejected socialism in explicit terms, saying that socialism must be utterly rejected, since it only injures those whom it would seem meant to benefit, is directly contrary to the natural rights of mankind, and would introduce confusion and disorder into the commonweal. The first and most fundamental principle, therefore, if one would undertake to alleviate the condition of the masses, must be the inviolability of private property. 33 On the fortieth anniversary of Rerum, Pope Pius XI issued Quadragesimo Anno, which reaffirmed the principles outlined in Rerum and made them more relevant to the conditions of the worldwide depression. 34 While the Catholic mainstream emphasized those aspects of Rerum and Quadragesimo that called for increasing the power of government, Buckley would focus on those aspects of the encyclicals that hinted at government limitation. The majority of Catholic intellectuals believed that political liberalism was the application of papal social teachings to American conditions. Most prominent among these thinkers was Father John Ryan—the most outspoken and visible 33 Rerum Novarum: Encyclical of Pope Leo XIII on Capital and Labor, (15 May 1891) ¶15. Copy available at: http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/leo_xiii/encyclicals/documents/hf_l- xiii_enc_15051891_rerum-novarum_en.html 34 See Kevin E. Schmiesing, Within the Market Strife: American Catholic Economic Thought from Rerum Novarum to Vatican II (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004), 15-17. 43 representative of the Catholic Mainstream. As head of the National Catholic Welfare Conference, Ryan wrote articles favoring the New Deal on religious grounds, counseled President Roosevelt on matters of social justice, and lobbied for public support of a state-guaranteed “living wage” for workers. 35 To Ryan, Roosevelt’s efforts to establish a “reformed capitalism” perfectly embodied the “middle way” economics of Rerum and Quadragesimo Anno. Ryan believed that laissez-faire represented one extreme and full socialism represented the other—in the middle was the perfect blend that the Popes advocated, which coincided, in his mind, with the basic principles of New Deal liberalism. There was no question in Ryan’s mind that Catholicism, when applied to social life, demanded the expanded government activity in economic affairs that liberals proposed. 36 According to Catholic journalist Kevin Lynch, Buckley, as one who advocated political individualism and attacked the very idea of the welfare state, stood “in clear contradiction to Catholic moral teaching on social doctrine.” Notre Dame professor Francis E. McMahon observed that, according to Rerum Novarum, “the public administration must…provide for the welfare and comfort of the working classes,” but by criticizing the very idea of the welfare state, Buckley’s “economic 35 Ibid., 71-89. Ryan “welcomed the New Deal enthusiastically” and maintained that “the function of the state must expand under the imperial orders of truth, morality, and justice.” 36 Because of Ryan’s prominence, I will use him as the primary spokesman for the Catholic Consensus when relating it to Buckley’s position below, even though most prominent Catholics also supported the New Deal order. This included the editors and contributors to the three major Catholic journals of opinion: America, The Catholic World, and Commonweal. Although the editors of Commonweal sometimes gave Buckley space to express his opinions in their pages, they also openly stated that “our beliefs and attitudes are not [Mr. Buckley’s]” and “our sympathies lie elsewhere.” See “Catholics: Conservative and Liberal,” CW (16 Dec 1960): 307. 44 ideas clash[ed] with the encyclicals of Leo XIII or Pius XI on the reform of the social order.” 37 If Buckley blatantly ignored the teachings of the Holy Fathers, how could he consider himself a faithful Catholic? Father Christopher Fullman speculated that Buckley did so by completely divorcing his religion from politics. “Buckley’s religious notions have no bearing whatsoever on his economic convictions,” said Fullman, and he kept his religion and economics in “separate and airtight compartments.” It was inconceivable to Fullman that a Catholic could actually have arrived at individualist conclusions from Catholic assumptions: good Catholics understood the “godless” nature of Adam Smith’s economics; no Catholic could embrace classical liberalism while remaining true to their faith. Other Catholics believed that Buckley was either ignorant or evil—he had not read the Papal encyclicals or the history of working-class suffering, or he was “inhumane” and “had no heart.” Because the range of acceptable political opinion among Catholics was clearly restricted to liberal positions, Buckley’s free-market views were met with considerable hostility. 38 Buckley could not hope to overthrow mainstream Catholic liberalism; it was too deeply entrenched. He could, however, try to broaden the scope of acceptable Catholic opinion enough to encompass his anti-statism by avoiding the term “laissez- 37 Kevin Lynch, CSP, review of Up From Liberalism, Catholic World (Nov 1959): 133. McMahon, “Liberal-Conservative,” 91. 38 Christopher E. Fullman, “God and Man and Mr. Buckley,” Catholic World (May 1952): 105-07. Also see Leo Ward, “Buckley’s Attack on Yale,” CW (15 Feb 1952); Edward Hussie, “Introducing Mr. Buckley,” Catholic World (Aug 1952); and Vernon Miller, Dean Catholic U. School of Law, letter to the editor, CW (13 Jan 1961): 413. 45 faire” to describe his views and by emphasizing Catholic teachings that had been overlooked. “Are we so certain,” he asked rhetorically, “that there is a consensus among theologians on the true nature of the state?” “Are the writers of the Commonweal, America, and the Catholic World right in telling me, as so many of them are fond of doing, what to think?” 39 Although Buckley could not revoke papal pronouncements, he could argue that they were more flexible and open to interpretation than mainstream Catholic thinkers allowed. The Popes, Buckley pointed out, had only given general guidelines on political matters and had not endorsed specific parties or policies. Moreover, his own Catholic tradition provided him, if not with individualism, at least with sufficient suspicion of state power for him to work with in crafting a Catholic alternative to the dominant liberalism. Since the late 19 th century, Catholic thinkers and clergy had consistently opposed socialism on the grounds that it tended to conceive of life in economic rather than spiritual terms. Socialism, they claimed, centered humans on the here and now, rather than their spiritual destiny, and thus gave predominance to the material aspects of life. The Church had a long tradition (extending back to Aquinas and beyond) of defending the necessity and sanctity of private property, which socialism undermined by its very nature. Catholics had also taught that socialism increased covetousness for the goods of others and promoted a form of economic determinism that denied the hand of God in history. 40 39 Buckley, “The Catholic in the Modern World: A Conservative View,” CW (16 Dec 1960): 310. 40 For examples of the arguments of Catholic anti-socialists see Aaron I. Abell, American Catholicism and Social Action: A Search for Justice, 1865-1950 (South Bend: U of Notre Dame P, 1963), 137-188 (“Not Socialism—But Social Reform, 1900-17”); Abell, “The Catholic Factor in the Social Justice 46 To locate his own politics within the Catholic tradition, Buckley focused on these aspects of the Catholic tradition. Buckley noted that “the Holy fathers have emphasized the importance of the institution of private property” and that both Rerum and Quadragesimo had declared property a “natural right” which governments must respect and protect. 41 While liberals often rejected the idea of property rights as conventional—established only as a product of human laws and traditions—or unnecessary, Buckley believed that the Popes took his side in the matter: they endorsed property rights as an absolute given to man by God for all times and all places. Catholic traditions taught, he said, that “basic human rights [including private property] are natural or God-given, not the product of any document or government.” 42 Modern industrial conditions had not and could not “anachronize” the importance or reality of these rights. 43 In his Nockian view, the emphasis on private property implied limited government. Nock had taught Buckley that since all state action necessarily infringed upon property rights, then the more actions governments took, the more private property rights they would violate. In affirming the sanctity of private property, Buckley claimed that the Popes had also given sanction to a major pillar of classical liberalism (i.e. the Lockean ideals he had learned from Nock). Locke had Movement,” in Thomas Timothy McAvoy, Roman Catholicism and the American Way of Life (South Bend: Notre Dame UP, 1977); Antoine Clarke, Catholic Socialism: Christianity Without God, Society Without Man, Religious Notes no. 9 (1999): 1-4; and entry “Socialism” in the Catholic Encyclopedia <http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14062a.htm>. 41 Buckley, “Father Fullman’s Assault,” Catholic World (Aug 1952): 331. 42 Buckley, “Rights Civil and Uncivil,” NR (4 Jan 1956): 4. 43 Buckley, “Conservative View,” 310; and Transcript of November 16, 1980 episode of Firing Line, “The Conflict: Christianity Versus Capitalism,” HI, Box 67 (218), Folder 438, 3. 47 declared the rights to “life, liberty, and property” as those that all humans possessed in the state of nature and those rights which the legitimate state should not infringe upon; indeed, the state existed only to protect those individual rights. Since, God- given property rights constituted the “metaphysical limitations of government action,” Buckley argued, there existed a logical connection between property rights and limited government. Since he interpreted papal endorsement of property rights as giving Catholic-based support to his political views, Buckley felt he had found a way to bridge the divide between Catholic teachings and the classical liberalism of Nock. 44 But Buckley only considered property rights in a Lockean sense, and did not take into account the way that other Catholics, like John Ryan, saw “natural rights” in broader terms. Father Ryan agreed with Buckley that “man possesses rights because of his dignity as a person,” but believed that this dignity demanded the right to a basic standard of living as well. Buckley saw the Thomist tradition as endorsing Lockean property rights as eternal and absolute, but to Ryan, Thomism taught that humans had natural rights higher than those advocated by Locke.45 The right to a decent livelihood was something that Buckley’s narrower Lockean rights would not grant. Ryan accepted the need for private property, but this did not mean only the protection of property in its current (mal)distribution, but also expanding property 44 “Christianity Versus Capitalism,” 1-6; and Buckley, The Governor Listeth: A Book of Inspired Political Revelations (NY: Putnam’s, 1963): 127. 45 John A. Ryan, The Norm of Morality: Defined and Applied to Particular Actions (DC: National Catholic Welfare Conference, 1944), 15, 44. 48 holding to include those who had little or none. The poor had property rights as well as the rich, said Ryan, and since rights carry with them concomitant duties the rich had an obligation to spread property rights to the less fortunate. Catholics should work to expand ownership beyond its concentrated form because of property rights, not in spite of them, said Ryan, and this could best be accomplished through the implementation of a “living wage.”46 Those in the Catholic mainstream, like Ryan, had never rejected private property rights as Buckley implied, but only conceived of them in a broader sense. Furthermore, while Buckley accused his critics of ignoring property rights as a Catholic teaching, he never mentioned that the Popes also emphatically rejected “the idols of [classical] liberalism.” Buckley had hoped to tie the Catholic “natural law” tradition of Aquinas and the Scholastics to Lockean liberalism, but the Popes had explicitly anticipated and pre-empted this possibility. As Catholic critic John Cogley pointed out, Buckley’s views were more Augustinian than Thomistic because of his “original sin theory of the state.” He conceived of government as intrinsically evil (like humans themselves) and therefore requiring strict limitation. 47 More direct and unambiguous than his focus on property rights, was Buckley’s invocation of the principle of “subsidiarity”—a preference for local over centralized power and institutions. Libertarians opposed the centralization of state power, said Buckley, and, under the principle of subsidiarity, the Popes did as well: 46 Harlan R. Beckley, Passion for Justice: Retrieving the Legacies of Walter Rauschenbusch, John A. Ryan, and Reinhold Niebuhr (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press 1992), 145, 160-174. 47 Found in a column Cogley wrote summarizing the growing variety of Catholic social thought. Cogley, “A Harmony of Politics and Theology,” New York Times (27 Sep 1953): 368. 49 It is wrong to withdraw from the individual and commit to the community at large what private enterprise and industry can accomplish. So, too, it is an injustice, a grave evil and a disturbance to right order for a larger and higher organization to arrogate to itself functions which can be performed efficiently by smaller and lower bodies 48 Roosevelt’s liberal policies did both, said Buckley, and by supporting the New Deal, Catholic liberals had also supported an expanded role for the central government at the expense of local governments and institutions; something that Quadragesimo had warned specifically against. This focus on subsidiarity, however, may have been irrelevant to the political situation of the time. Subsidiarity only demanded that Catholics prefer the actions of a local body against a central body when all other things were equal, but the Great Depression may have created an extraordinary circumstance in which centralization was justified. The Pope opposed unnecessary centralization, but, in the opinion of most Catholic intellectuals, the Great Depression had made centralization necessary. Buckley also attempted to bring his “divine spark” argument to bear on the question of Catholic politics. “The Popes have repeatedly urged the importance of the individual in the age of the machine” Buckley declared; and this Catholic teaching ultimately put the rights and freedoms of individuals ahead of the collective. 49 Buckley also maintained that the generic “divine spark” argument overlapped with the emphasis on “moral choice” in Catholic thought. “Faced with a moral choice,” said Article 6 of the Catholic Catechism, 48 Buckley, “Father Fullman’s Assault,” 331. 49 Buckley, “Strange Behavior,” 114. 50 conscience can make either a right judgment in accordance with reason and the divine law or, on the contrary, an erroneous judgment that departs from them…Man has the right to act in conscience and in freedom so as personally to make moral decisions. He must not be forced to act contrary to his conscience [italics mine]. Similarly, Nock had taught Buckley that “freedom is a precondition of morality,” and that the state forces morality according to a pre-determined code rather than leaving the actor to choose the good according to their own conscience. 50 For Buckley, the Catholic emphasis on voluntarism and agency appeared to mesh with the Nockian emphasis on uncompelled virtue. On the grounds that Catholicism demanded that the individual conscience remain free to make moral choices, Buckley opposed the welfare state as a form of “compulsory virtue” which robbed individuals of their right to freely choose charitable giving. “How can virtue merit divine recognition,” Buckley asked in response to Father Fullman, “if man’s responsibility to society is extorted from him by a tax collector backed by a police force?” 51 Buckley’s opponents denounced him as “inhumane” and “heartless” for his opposition to the welfare state, but how, he wondered, does a compulsory system that forces individuals to give charitably make one moral? Would not the compulsion implicit in state activity destroy the morality of the action itself? 52 50 Nock, Memoirs, 31, 114; and Nock, selections from Our Enemy The State in Gregory L. Schneider, ed., Conservatism in America, since 1930 (NY: New York UP, 2003), 38, 41-2. 51 Buckley, “Father Fullman’s Assault,” 333. 52 Buckley, Up From Liberalism, 174; Buckley, The Governor Listeth, 130. 51 Although Buckley believed that state expansion robbed moral decisions of their validity, and that the implication of Catholic teachings on human nature validated individualism, Father Ryan and other Catholic liberals emphasized the same teachings and drew different conclusions. Where Buckley saw classical liberalism as the outgrowth of theological “individualism,” Ryan and other members of the Catholic mainstream saw further support for liberalism. Like Buckley, Father Ryan made the “fundamental dignity of human personality” the starting point of his whole theory of justice, but to Ryan, recognition of individual dignity would lead Catholics to support his own plan of using the state to ensure a living wage. 53 State economic relief was not a matter of “compelling charity” in his view, but rather one of ensuring human dignity and expanding the domain of choice for those who, because of economic circumstances, had their individual choices narrowly circumscribed. 54 The worth of the individual would best be protected, Ryan argued, by reforming the economic structure, not perpetuating its injustices. Far from denying the individual in the name of collectivism as Buckley claimed, mainstream Catholic thinkers believed that their liberalism would enhance the dignity of the individual through state action, not in spite of it. As an agent of social change and economic redistribution, the government, they believed, could expand economic possibilities and opportunities and thus aid the individual in self- realization. While Buckley saw economics through the lens of the individual vs. the 53 See Ryan’s autobiography, Social Doctrine in Action (NY: Harper & Bros., 1941). 54 Patrick W. Gearty, The Economic Thought of Monsignor John A. Ryan (D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1953). 52 collective, others countered that Catholic teaching did not lend itself to such a simplistic division. Like Niebuhr, most Catholic thinkers believed that the individual did not exist independent of social understanding, but that individual dignity was found through an interactive web of rights, obligations, and relationships. The individual could not be considered as a subject divorced from context. Against Buckley’s cry that the state posed a threat to the individual, members of the Catholic Mainstream argued the opposite—that the Catholic understanding of the dignity of the individual demanded greater state action. 55 Buckley’s defense of “moral choice” also depended upon a narrower meaning of the word choice than it did when used by other Catholics. When an individual’s available life options were limited by severe economic disadvantage, their capacity to make moral choices were also restricted. Buckley’s fellow Catholics accepted his emphasis on upholding individual choice, but also believed that moral choices were made within a system of constraints determined by social conditions, and that unjust conditions and economic deprivation restricted choice even more than governments did. Buckley had tried to connect the realms of religious and economic decision making, but the nature of those realms differed substantially: individuals made religious choices with unlimited possibilities whereas possibilities in economic choice were delimited by the constraints of available resources at one’s disposal. Nobody disputed the importance of “individual choice” in Catholic teachings, but Buckley used the word to refer to choices without 55 Ryan, The Norm of Morality, 20-45; Cogley, “A Harmony,” 368; Fullman, “God and Man,” 105- 07; Beckley, Passion for Justice, 160-174; Ward, “Buckley’s Attack;” Hussie, “Introducing Mr. Buckley.” 53 constraint, while other Catholic thinkers used the word to refer to increased possibilities. Nevertheless, Buckley summarized the ways that he believed his “un- Catholic” economic views found decisive support in Catholic teaching in a National Review editorial: National Review believes in the primacy of the individual. So do the Popes… National Review believes in private property. So do the Popes… National Review believes that no political agency should undertake a job which can be performed by a private agency; and that no political agency of higher instance should undertake any job which a lesser political agency can undertake. So do the Popes. 56 In all of the above, Buckley saw papal affirmation of his Lockean principles and concluded that only a short distance divided his Catholicism from the ideals he had learned from Nock. In spite of his effort to carve out a space for libertarian politics among Catholics, it seemed that Buckley’s pleas fell mostly on deaf ears. His early inability to persuade other Catholics of the validity of his economic views did not stop him from grasping for allies within the faith. He claimed that “numerous Catholic conservatives, including priests, monsignors, bishops, and cardinals” were sympathetic to his position, but the only one of prominence Buckley managed to name was Father James Gillis, a former editor of The Catholic World. 57 Gillis had indeed objected to many of the provisions of the New Deal, but had done so quietly, without belligerence, and without objecting to the idea of the welfare state itself. He agreed with Buckley that the welfare state, as it existed, had “removed the 56 Buckley, “Strange Behavior,” 114. 57 Buckley, “A Very Personal Answer to My Critics,” Catholic World (Mar 1961): 363; Buckley, “Conservative View,” 307; and Buckley, “Strange Behavior,” 115. 54 individual from a position of importance in the scheme of daily life,” but did not openly support economic individualism. 58 Like Gillis, Father James Keller, a professor at Notre Dame, criticized the New Deal, but did not question the welfare state in theory. Curiously, Keller used a “Smithian” argument against Roosevelt’s policies, arguing that the president’s high taxes and regulations on business had hurt economic productivity, reduced the availability of jobs, and actually exacerbated the suffering of the American poor. Keller and Gillis hardly challenged the Catholic mainstream, but they did show that there was at least some dissent from it and that Buckley was somewhat familiar with their alternative views. 59 But contemporaries and later historians overlooked the views of both Gillis and Keller because of the mildness of their critique, their moderate tone, and lack of public prominence. Gillis and Keller did not attack the idea of government involvement in the economy itself; they only quibbled at the New Deal as a less- than-ideal form of political organization. Furthermore, Gillis and Keller had avoided using the word “individualist” when describing themselves, knowing the negative connotations it carried among their fellow Catholics. The mild criticisms proffered 58 See Richard Gribble, Guardian of America: The Life of James Martin Gillis, C.S.P. (NY: Paulist Press, 1998), 163. 59 Buckley would later acknowledge Keller’s influence on his own anti-statist thinking in a column, “Libertarians at Play” (syndicated column, 31 May 1994, HD, 2). Schmiesing, Market Strife, 116. “Historians of American Catholicism [as well as his contemporaries],” says Schmiesing, “have not paid much attention to Keller, but his work represents a significant and unique contribution to Catholic economic thought.” 55 by Gillis and Keller hardly caused a stir and seemed insignificant exceptions that proved the Catholic mainstream rule. Buckley, on the other hand, unabashedly called his views “individualist” in these years and did not just critique the substance of the New Deal as a program, but attacked the idea of the welfare state altogether, even finding Hoover’s palliative measures contrary to individualist principles. While Gillis and Keller were careful to criticize the New Deal in the name of helping the poor, Buckley openly flouted Catholic traditions and defended the virtues of the rich. 60 Buckley’s early, direct, and radical challenge to the Catholic Mainstream set him apart from Gillis and Keller and meant that his reputation as “the arch-spokesman for Catholic conservatism” was well-deserved. 61 He was the first major postwar figure who attempted to reconcile Catholicism and individualism, even if not the first to argue that Catholicism and socialism were incompatible. 62 But challenging the Catholic Mainstream did not mean rejecting it altogether. Buckley only asked that it be opened to include his position. Since the Pope was for private property, against centralization of government power, and against unnecessary regulation as much as he was for remedial planning, state welfare, and 60 Buckley, “Let the Rich Alone,” (30 Dec 1967) in Jeweler’s Eye, 274; and Dwight Macdonald, “Scrambled Eggheads on the Right,” C (Apr 1956): 367-73. 61 T. McKieran, Letter to the Editor, CW (13 Jan 1961): 410. According to Commonweal Buckley was “widely regarded by ‘conservative’ Catholics as the best they have to offer in this country” (See December 16, 1960 issue, 304). 62 Both Keller and Gillis grew more vocal and anti-statist after Buckley’s foray into politics, suggesting that, even as they influenced Buckley, Buckley also influenced them. Gillis eventually read and endorsed the positions of National Review and Keller published a book on Catholic anti- statism and advised the libertarian-leaning Goldwater. Gillis letter to the editor, NR (19 Nov 1955): 24; and Schmiesing, 143-44. 56 the rights of labor, said Buckley, then the Catholic Mainstream should move beyond monolithic liberalism and open up to anyone who endorsed some form of mixed economy. The Popes clearly advocated a middle alternative to both socialism and laissez-faire, but they left open the question of what the compromise between the two would look like. Ryan and other Catholics had arbitrarily declared their position as the official middle ground endorsed by the Popes, while Buckley believed that the Papal middle encompassed a broad range of political views that could include his own views as well as Ryan’s. To show that he fit within the broad middle that Catholic teaching allowed, Buckley noted that, although the Popes advocated property rights, they did not spell out in detail exactly what constituted an infringement upon them. Faithful Catholics could have honest disagreements about this. “One man may say the point is reached when the state commandeers 50 per cent of a man’s property. Another man may say the point is not reached until the state commandeers 90 per cent. Both men may be Catholics in good standing.” The encyclicals suggested only that one must not go too far in either the direction of socialism or laissez-faire, but how far was too far and what was the precise happy medium between the two extremes? To Buckley, the Popes, by leaving such questions open, had also left Catholic social teaching open to a variety of interpretations as to how they applied in particular circumstances. There should be room for honest differences of opinion among Catholics and competing voices could “continue to argue [political] questions on 57 empirical grounds.” 63 Two Catholics could disagree on political questions, and “both spokesmen, in good conscience, can understand themselves as being in harmony with the broad social directives of the Vatican.” While his opponents had claimed that Buckley’s anti-statism defied Catholic teaching, Buckley argued that the lack of specifics and broad phraseology of the encyclicals allowed for legitimate differences of Catholic political opinion—including those advocating more limited government. 64 Instead of dismissing the Catholic Mainstream as wrong, Buckley took the approach of asking that it be expanded to include his views. Of course, in order to fit into the mainstream, Buckley himself had to accept the fact that the Popes had indeed declared the necessity of state intervention in the economy. This he did and claimed as early as God and Man at Yale that it was necessary for the state to break monopoly power and serve as an arbiter between competing interests. 65 Yet in spite of these few concessions, Buckley almost always condemned government action, giving the appearance that he only advocated some state action to satisfy his fellow Catholics that he did, in fact, believe what the Popes asked him to. But this was not complete insincerity on Buckley’s part—by 1961, he had undergone subtle transformations in his thinking and even as he wrote his most 63 Buckley, “Strange Behavior,” 114. 64 Ibid., 115; and Buckley, “A Conservative View,” 309. If Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin could remain within the consensus even though they leaned in the direction of socialism, Buckley asked, why could he not remain a “good Catholic” while leaning just as strongly in the direction of anti- statism? 65 Buckley interview with Will Herberg, 10 Jan 1974, Folder 229, Will Herberg Papers, Drew University Special Collections, Madison, New Jersey. 58 forcible responses to Catholic attacks he was also falling under the influence of Catholic communitarian thinkers G.K. Chesterton and Jose Ortega y Gasset. 66 From the 1960s onward, they would inform his anti-statist thinking as profoundly as Nock had in earlier years. Indeed, so deep was the influence of Ortega that Buckley actually began and intended to publish a book on the Spanish philosopher’s ideas, but, as a synthetic polemicist rather than a philosopher, Buckley was not up to the task—he shelved the project after a few months. Nevertheless, Ortega’s influence upon him remained. While Buckley had previously couched his anti-statism in the Lockean terms he had learned from Nock, now, under the influence of Chesterton and Ortega, he qualified his earlier Lockean individualism. Beginning in the early 1960s he often spoke of the dependence of the individual upon circumstances, and the duties and the debts persons owed to society and historical predecessors. Openly acknowledging Ortega’s views, Buckley now saw the individual more as the ungrateful beneficiary of institutions and cultural codes created by predecessors than the unconditioned free being whose choice took philosophical priority over other considerations. “The nerve that Ortega struck,” Buckley said, “was that of a community that saw the terrible truth of indictment: modern man, the swaggerer, unconscious of his dependence on what went before, insouciant toward the blessings others contrived for him, and ignorant of any sense of obligation to reach out and extend the great circuit to another generation.” 67 Indeed, Ortega’s Mass man, he affirmed, “drifts 66 Buckley, “Strange Behavior” (1961) and “A Very Personal Answer” (1961). 59 parasitically through life without any sense of reciprocal obligation to his patrimony.” 68 Ortega’s teachings about the impact of circumstance on the individual worked to temper the pure individualism of his earlier years. Under the influence of Ortega and Chesterton, Buckley even dropped his cherished Nockian label “individualist.” This, of course, helped him fit in with Catholicism much better, for, in Rerum, the Pope had explicitly condemned political “individualism” and referred to the “errors of individualist economic teaching” as a “poisoned spring.” There was no way around this. Buckley had made a half-hearted attempt to defend his earlier “individualism” by distinguishing between the “programmatic” individualism of National Review and the “philosophical” individualism promulgated by Ayn Rand and Herbert Spencer, saying that the Pope’s criticism referred more specifically to the latter, not the former, but this was conjecture on Buckley’s part, and even those who agreed with many of his positions (such as Gillis and Keller) avoided using the un-Catholic-sounding label. 69 It is not coincidental that as Buckley made his greatest push to find acceptance for his views in Catholic circles that he also dropped his earliest self-designation. From 1961 onward, Buckley generally used the term “individualist” or “individualism” as a term of opprobrium, even taking pains to say in subsequent editions of God and Man at 67 Buckley, letter to the editor, Sea History (1 Jul 1977): 3. 68 Buckley, foreword to Philip Weld’s Moxie (Boston: Little, Brown, & Co., 1981), viii; and Buckley, “On the Perspective of the Eighteen-year-old,” 4 Jun 1969, in Let us Talk , 129. 69 “Very Personal Answer,” 364-65. 60 Yale that what he advocated as “individualism” in his 1951 book might better be understood as a preference for “free market economics.” 70 Buckley’s turn against the philosophical individualism of his youth was not independent of historical circumstance. The first hints of New Left radicalism (beginning with the Beatniks) had already appeared by 1961 and Buckley saw that philosophical “individualism” could have Left-wing as well as Right-wing implications. As early as 1959, he had referred derisively to “the Beats who indulged their sloppiness as a symbol of their individualism” and continued to voice his disgust for the countercultural movement. 71 Chesterton had warned against the tendency of everyone to indulge their own “potty little selves” (a line Buckley quoted many times in the sixties) and now Buckley was witnessing the fruits of such individualistic thinking. With the growth of the New Left, Buckley became convinced that politically it was not enough simply to do what one wanted—choice needed to be tempered by respect for historically-developed societal norms. The individualist attitude had become too much associated with the antinomianism of the Left for Buckley to any longer use it to describe himself. 72 Murray Rothbard, whose 70 Buckley, God and Man, xii-xiii. When others continued to use the word “individualism,” Buckley took care to clarify that it was the “conservative brand of individualism” being referred to. Buckley, “Barry Goldwater and the Thunder on the Right,” in Rumbles, 32. After 1960, “libertarian” became his preferred term for his anti-statist positions, rather than the anti-Catholic sounding “individualism.” In his October 24, 1993 interview with Brian Lamb on C-Span’s Booknotes, Buckley was asked “have you always called yourself a libertarian?,” to which he responded, “off and on… from time to time I stress the fact that I'm conservative and, every now and then, that I'm a libertarian. And there's a certain amount of libertarian -- well, in most of what I write there's a certain amount that is oriented to, “Does this augment or diminish human liberty?” 71 Buckley, “What To Do About Sloppy Dress? Forbid It,” NR (17 Jan 1959): 463. 61 unrepentant “individualism” Buckley had earlier agreed with, now became an adversary, for Rothbard himself saw the New Left as a glorious uprising against stifling conformity and saw its rejection of social conventions as a refreshing repudiation of collectivist thinking. 73 Whereas the earlier “individualist” Buckley completely rejected any state claims over the individual, he later advocated a program of forced public service. This became the backbone and most controversial of the “four reforms” he advocated in a 1973 book outlining a political program for the seventies. 74 His new Chesterton and Ortega-inspired views did not necessarily make him less of an anti-statist, but they qualified his previous ideas and provided him with a new philosophical rationale for limited government to add to his earlier Lockeanism. Ortega taught us, he said, that mass man had lost a sense of purpose and become self-centered, hedonistic and without meaning. From Ortega, Buckley came to believe that the welfare state and growth of government were as much a function of meaninglessness (a religious problem) as a denial of individual rights (another religious problem). 75 His reading of Chesterton and Ortega did not eliminate his 72 Buckley, “The Impending Revolt,” syndicated column, 29 Apr 1964, 1, HD; Buckley, “Tour’s End,” syndicated column, 3 Jun 1969, 1, HD; Buckley, “Hair,” syndicated column, 30 Jun 1970, 2, HD. 73 Buckley, “introduction,” to Buckley, ed., Did You Ever See a Dream Walking?: American Conservative Thought in the Twentieth Century (NY: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970), xxiii. Rothbard, said Buckley, was a dogmatic individualist, and “Chesterton reminds us that many dogmas are liberating because the damage they do when abused cannot compare with the damage that might have been done had the whole peoples not felt their inhibiting influence 74 William F. Buckley Jr., Four Reforms—A Guide For the Seventies (NY: Putnam’s, 1973). 75 Buckley, “Tall in the Saddle,” The Sunday Herald Tribune Book Week, 11 Jul 1965, 13. 62 earlier anti-statism, but extended it to encompass a more Catholic defense of the limited state based on the need for meaning among modern humans rather than on individual rights. It turned his anti-statism in new directions that better harmonized with Catholic teachings and further allowed him to find room for anti-statism within the mainstream of Catholic opinion. 76 Yet even as Buckley’s thought evolved in a more Catholic-sounding direction, Pope John XXIII issued a third encyclical on social relations, Mater et Magistra (1961), that specifically undercut many of the ideas on the reconciliation of Catholicism and libertarianism that Buckley had previously advanced. Mater stated that private property rights entailed a social obligation and that the state’s primary raison d’etre was the realization of “common good in the temporal order” by “working actively for the betterment” of the poor. Since Mater restricted much of the flexibility that Buckley claimed Rerum and Quadragesimo left open, he dismissed the encyclical as “a venture in triviality” and predicted it would become a “source of embarrassed explanations” for the Church in later years. So removed had Buckley become from Catholic Social teaching that, in a 1978 essay for The New Republic, he even argued that the Church should give fewer political directives and remain focused on spiritual matters. 77 76 Buckley, “Very Personal Answer,” 364. As his critics charged, Buckley “claim[ed] theoretical acceptance of the social thought expressed in papal encyclicals while denying its applicability in almost every specific situation,” but to Buckley, this was a dogmatic pre-determination of what that application was. Buckley, “A Venture in Triviality” CW (25 Aug 1961): 460. 77 Buckley, “The Pope I want,” TNR (26 Aug 1978): 15-17. 63 His dismissive attitude towards Mater throws into question much of his project. Buckley’s attempt to broaden the Catholic mainstream had rested on the idea that he was just as committed to Papal teachings as those on the other side, but only interpreted those teachings differently. In exchanges with his fellow Catholics, he stressed that his politics grew out of his religion, rather than vice versa, yet his casual dismissal of Mater cast doubt on his intentions. 78 Undoubtedly Buckley (like many Catholics who use birth control, for example) differentiated between binding and non-binding papal teachings, but he never outlined why Mater was not binding while earlier anti-government teachings were. But Buckley’s ability to present what were considered un-Catholic economics in Catholic terms was one manifestation of his greatest strength. Historian John Wesley Young has argued that Buckley’s personal wit, charm, and intelligence gave a sophisticated face to a political position often seen as anti-intellectual and without humor while J. David Hoeveler views Buckley as a charismatic “father figure” who held a diverse movement of competing personalities and temperaments together through interpersonal skills and leadership. 79 But more important than either of these traits was Buckley’s ability to synthesize competing ideas and make the differences appear insignificant compared to surface similarities. More than just his personal affability kept conservatism together—Buckley could effectively locate and exploit the overlap and points of commonality (however superficial) between multifarious 78 “The Week,” NR (29 Jul 1961): 38; and “Mater Si, Magistra No!” NR (12 Aug 1961): 77. 79 John Wesley Young, “William F. Buckley, Jr.: Conservatism with Class,” Mark J. Rozell & James F. Pontuso, eds., American Conservative Opinion Leaders (Boulder: Westview Press, 1990): 47-66; and J. David Hoeveler, “William F. Buckley, Jr.: Paterfamilias,” in Watch on the Right: Conservative Intellectuals in the Reagan Era (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1991): 23-50. 64 and often-contradictory currents of thought (including anti-statism and Catholicism) and thus bring persons of many views, temperaments, and persuasions into his movement. While doing this, he learned to deflect attention from philosophical shortcomings by focusing on the problems of liberalism. Catholics would be able to overlook a particular papal teaching, for instance, when reading a Buckley polemic against liberals who ostensibly wished to take away God-given property rights through expanded government anti-poverty programs. His intellectual analyses did not need depth or even theoretical consistency in order to energize a movement, he only had to turn those who read his work against the liberal alternative. Nothing unites humans like a common enemy, and Buckley knew how to use this principle to his advantage. For instance, there was a wide divide between Aquinas and Locke at a fundamental intellectual level, but Buckley satisfied himself and others in the movement that the two philosophers aligned in their common emphasis on Natural Rights. An appropriate, deeper examination of the writings of Aquinas and Locke would have revealed the Thomist-Lockean divide that many of his opponents recognized, but Buckley glossed over such differences as irrelevant. Likewise, for the sake of the movement, Buckley could claim that Christianity demanded individualism, without adequately accounting for the social nature of the self, the influence of community on individual development, or the problematic connection between religious personalism and philosophical individualism that Christianity seemed to imply. Buckley’s synthetic anti-statism never moved beyond 65 the polemical into the philosophical, but polemics better served the purposes of the conservative movement. For this reason, Buckley’s achievement was significant. He raised important objections to the Catholic Mainstream and broke the liberal monopoly on Catholic social thought. 80 Knowing they had Buckley as a precursor, later Catholics, such as Michael Novak, Richard John Neuhaus, and William J. Bennett, found their transition to the Right more natural. 81 If Buckley’s efforts had made anti-statism palatable to Catholics, it also made Catholicism palatable to anti-statists. Conservatives Frank Meyer, Russell Kirk, Willmoore Kendall, Jeffrey Hart, and James Burnham all converted to Catholicism in the latter half of the twentieth century. Without a space within the Catholic mainstream for anti-statist thinking, these figures might have remained outside the Church. Buckley, as the most prominent figure to effect such a reconciliation, stands out as the central character in 80 In this, he followed a tradition of “Americanization” in Catholic thought. Since Catholics became a significant presence in America in the late 19 th century, numerous intellectuals had reconciled Catholic teachings to core American ideas. Orestes Brownson gave a Catholic defense of Unionism during the Civil War; French emigrant Jacques Maritain extended Catholic neo-Thomism to the American concepts of “rights” and democracy, and Buckley’s contemporary, John Courtney Murray, harmonized Catholicism with religious pluralism. Buckley applauded the work of these “Americanizers” and carried on their cause. Maritain, according to Buckley, taught that it was intolerable for any Catholic to “claim to speak in the name of Catholicism and imply that all Catholics as such should follow their road.” Thus, Maritain appealed to his belief that the Catholic political consensus should be widened (Buckley, “Conservative View,” 310). By using religious concepts to justify his libertarian politics, Buckley contributed to this “Americanization of Catholicism” and worked out a plausible means by which Catholics could maintain their commitment to their faith as well as the most individualistic aspects of the American economic system. For a discussion of Catholic “Americanization” efforts see McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom, 204-06. 81 Other Catholics who accepted anti-statism after Buckley’s pioneering work would include Robert Bork, Antonin Scalia, Gary Wills (briefly), George Weigel (and other writers for Crisis magazine), Peggy Noonan, and Dinesh D’Souza. For Buckley’s influence on Bork and Scalia, see Robert Bork, “Antonin Scalia and his Critics: The Church, The Courts, and the Death Penalty,” First Things (Oct 2002): 8-18. 66 the story of the rise of Catholic conservatism in the late twentieth century and the broader harmonization of religion and anti-statism that preceded it. 67 Chapter 2 Anti-Statism II: Chambers and The Anti-Communist Faith Before World War II, conservatives were not only united in their opposition to Roosevelt’s “statist” policies, but most also opposed his “interventionist” foreign policy as well. The iconic man of the Right, Sen. Robert Taft, as well as organizations like the Liberty League and America First, objected to government involvement in foreign affairs as much as they objected to government involvement in the economy. Two decades later, the tables had turned. Conservatives had become the most strident of interventionists, even criticizing the liberal strategy of containment as insufficient and demanding “rollback” of communist influence around the world. In the following chapter I will examine how the religious ideas of Whittaker Chambers matched this transformation in conservative foreign policy. A new postwar enemy and a religiously-based view of that enemy created a new approach to foreign policy on the Right. Conservatives went from being a movement best represented by the isolationist Senator Taft to a movement best represented by the interventionist Senator Goldwater. 1 1 As Brian Doherty writes in his recent history of the libertarian movement, “most of the antiwar forces ended up opposing Roosevelt fully, not limiting themselves to his foreign policy.” Brian Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement (NY: Public Affairs, 2007), 60-61. In his collection on prewar conservatism, Robert Crunden shows his figures were bound together not only by a distrust of the state, but by anti- interventionism. Robert M. Crunden, ed., The Superfluous Men: Conservative Critics of American Culture, 1900-1945 (Austin: U of Texas P, 1977). According to the Encyclopedia of Conservatism, “from the 1930s to the early 1950s, conservatives were strong in isolationist ranks.” Standard bearers of the Right, such as Herbert Hoover, and Senator Taft, even opposed the Cold War doctrine of containment as a too-aggressive foreign policy. See Bruce Frohnen, Jeremy Beer, Jeffrey O. Nelson, eds., American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2006), 444. Even Buckley had been an America Firster before the outbreak of World War II. Sam Tanenhaus, “Athwart History: 68 In addition, I will argue that Chambers developed a religiously-based historical determinism that shaped the development of conservative intellectual life, but also brought tensions and contradictions to the movement. Chambers provided conservatives with a religious justification for their charge that liberalism and Communism were fundamentally linked. This conception, however, mischaracterized liberalism as it existed in its postwar form and created further contradictions in the conservative movement. Those on the Right advocated fighting liberalism on the domestic front by reducing the size and scope of government, while they simultaneously advocated fighting Communism abroad by expanding government power to defeat the statist foe. Chambers’ followers misinterpreted his ideas in their quest to create an alternative to liberal Cold War policy and found themselves undermining their domestic goals as a result. Strident anti-communists on the Right challenged containment on the “Chambersian” grounds that the logic of history moved in the direction of Communism. Since they took from Chambers the view that Communism was expansionist by nature and growing stronger with time, the threat had to be destroyed before it spread any further: it had to be pre-empted by decisive, immediate action. But Chambers’ was an historical determinist 2 who believed that the conclusion of the modern era was predetermined by historical laws. The conservatives at National Review accepted his view that Communism advanced with How William F. Buckley, Jr. Turned Against the War—And His Own Movement,” TNR (19 Mar 2007): 32. 2 I use the term “historical determinism” to refer to the general basis of Chambers’ thought, but Chambers himself never gave a specific label to his view of history or theory of communism. 69 history and accordingly advocated immediate action against the “growing threat,” but failed to acknowledge that, in Chambers’ view, all such action against Communism was ultimately futile. Conservative use of Chambers’ historical determinism to justify the anti-determinist rollback policy created a paradox that they never addressed. Those who cited Chambers as a major inspiration and formative influence on their anti-communist thinking included such conservative luminaries as Buckley, William Rusher, Barry Goldwater, Ralph De Toledano, and Ronald Reagan. 3 But most important in specifically developing the conservative rollback strategy was James Burnham—a friend of Chambers, an ex-Communist, and the designated foreign policy theorist at National Review. 4 Partially because of Chambers’ influence, Burnham conceived of the world in bi-polar terms and saw Communism as a monolithic entity expanding with history towards world domination. 5 Through 3 For the influence of Witness on Goldwater and Rusher, see William Rusher, “The Draft Goldwater Drive: A Progress Report,” NR (10 Sep 1963): 185-87; Rusher, The Rise of the Right (NY: Morrow, 1984): 324-28; Barry Goldwater, The Conscience of a Conservative (1960; Princeton: Princeton UP, 2007): x; and Rusher, “Publisher’s Statement,” NR (27 Jul 1957). For his influence on Nixon, see Richard M. Nixon, “Plea for an Anti-Communist Faith,” The Saturday Review (24 May 1952): 12-13. Conservative columnist Robert Novak has also said that Witness, which he read while in the service in 1953, had the greatest impact on him of any book he ever read. C-Span interview with Robert Novak, “Writing Life: Robert Novak,” 22 Jul 2007; and Novak, The Prince of Darkness: 50 Years of Political Reporting in Washington (NY: Crown, 2007): 20. Not only was it the “greatest spur to [his] thinking,” but he added that he was “not alone” in this, but that over the years he had found numerous politicians, pundits, and intellectuals “who had been alarmed, entranced, and always inspired by Witness.” 4 Burnham outlined the strategy in James Burnham, “The Policy of Liberation,” American Mercury (Jan 1953): 3-15; Burnham, “Liberation: What Next?” NR (19 Jan 1957): 59-62; and most fully in James Burnham, Containment or Liberation? An Inquiry into the Aims of United States Foreign Policy (NY: J. Day, 1953). 5 For the impact of Chambers on Burnham’s strategic thinking, see Daniel Kelly, James Burnham and the Struggle for the World: A Life (Wilmington: ISI Press, 2002); and Chambers to Buckley, 10 Mar 1957, in OF, 136-37. 70 Chambers, Burnham came to view liberals as adherents of the same underlying Faith-in-Man delusion that motivated Communists and he believed that this ideology needed to be fought both at home and abroad. Like Chambers, Burnham believed that both Communism and liberalism would eventually put humans into chains of bondage through ever-expanding systems of government compulsion. If his fellow conservatives misinterpreted Chambers’ theory of history, later scholars have ignored it altogether. Recent writers have attempted to revive Chambers’ reputation as an important thinker, but none has yet addressed the continuing centrality of historical determinism to his thought and the ways that this formed the backbone of his anti-communist philosophy. Chambers was not simply the poetic voice of anti-Communism as journalist Hilton Kramer contends, but was the major theoretical inspiration for postwar conservatives. In this sense, Chambers’ historical determinism is not only the foundation of his thought, but also the aspect least understood by his followers, detractors, and later historians. By ignoring Chambers’ historical theory, scholars have failed to fully assess his contributions to the development of conservatism, but by recovering Chambers’ historical theory, I will show the ways in which his ideas were used and misused in the design of conservative foreign policy. 6 6 “Whittaker Chambers,” says biographer Sam Tanenhaus, “more than any other intellectual, awakened the American public to the danger of totalitarianism and his anticommunist doctrine spelled out as early as 1945 shaped the worldview of many postwar conservatives, including that of Ronald Reagan.” Art critic Hilton Kramer claims that Chambers has been denied his proper literary standing because of his role in the Hiss case [Kramer, The Twilight of the Intellectuals: Culture and Politics in the Cold War Era (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1999)]. While the attempts of each of these historians to expand scholarly interest in Chambers as an intellectual has had the salutary effect of pushing scholars to look beyond Chambers the witness to recognize Chambers the writer, they confine their studies to his literary gifts, while largely ignoring the substance, implications, and context of what he was saying. Chambers the witness and writer continue to overshadow Chambers the historical theorist. 71 Chambers developed his historical-determinist outlook both during his years as a Communist and later as a writer and editor at Time magazine. As a member of the Communist Party in the 1920 and 1930s, Chambers had become thoroughly immersed in historical-materialist theories and, while he would later leave Marxism, Marxism never entirely left him—historical determinism remained central in his consciousness long after he denounced his earlier activities. Chambers later confessed that, even as a conservative he “remained under the spiritual influence” of his Marxist teachers, but that their teachings had “simply blended with that strain in the Christian tradition to which it is akin.” 7 Christians had long held eschatological views in which history moved towards a final millennial endpoint and this paralleled the Marxist belief in the movement of history towards the classless society. Chambers never relinquished his belief in historical directionality, but combined his Marxist/Hegelian sensibility with the interpretive categories of his newfound religious faith. In Marxian theory, the dialectics of class conflict drive history through various stages until the resolution of all conflict is found in a system without contradictions—Communism—but Chambers turned Marx on his materialist head Because of this, conservatives themselves have not yet realized how much intellectual debt they owe to Toynbee, Spengler, and even Marx. While I show in this chapter that Chambers was a systematic thinker, he was not a systematic presenter—he had hoped to summarize his historical theory in a magnum opus book, Cold Friday, but never got past a series of evocative, image-laden introductions. What he had intended as a systematic history wound up being yet another series of poetic vignettes, combined with some letters, journal entries, and papers discovered after his death. Granville Hicks rightly notes that Cold Friday was intended to be “a more systematic statement of Chambers’ philosophy” that he was never able to complete—both because of his premature death, and a lack of ability in systematic expression to accompany his systematic vision of history. Granville Hicks, “The Final Search for Meaning,” Saturday Review (2 Jan 1965): 25. 7 Whittaker Chambers to William F. Buckley, Jr., 30 Aug 1954, OF, 52. 72 and argued that ideas, not matter, determined the course of history. 8 Mind (which he often equated with spirit) dominated each historical epoch and all material changes existed “first within our minds,” meaning that history advanced according to “beliefs which offer[ed] an explanation of the meaning of the world.” 9 While Marx believed that the material determined the mental, Chambers believed that the mental dominated the material. Chambers’ conversion to Christianity not only caused an internal change of heart, but altered his historical outlook as well and led him to place ideas, rather than matter, at the center of the human story. 10 Chambers’ view of history applied to revolutions as well. Whereas Marx claimed that revolutions began with economic privation, Chambers claimed that social revolutions first began as spiritual and intellectual revolutions. According to Marx, the increasing concentration of the means of production and the resultant immiseration of the working class would produce a final revolution that would usher in an era of Communism, but Chambers noted that intellectuals (like himself, Alger Hiss, and Arthur Koestler) were more likely to embrace Communism than poor workers. 11 Against Marx who saw revolution arising from the working classes, 8 Chambers to Ralph de Toledano, 24 Jan 1956, in NU, 219. This also set Chambers apart from the seminal libertarian historian, Isabel Paterson, who argued in her history of the world, The God of the Machine (NY: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1943), that government policies had determined the course of history. While Marx saw history progressing according to material forces, and Isabel Paterson saw history progressing according to political forces, Chambers saw mind as the force that drove history. 9 CF, 297, and 303; and W, 83. To Marx, those who controlled the means of production would control history; to Chambers, those who controlled the force of ideas, controlled history. “In the war between Communism and capitalism,” he said, “books are weapons” (W, 79). 10 Chambers, “Age of Exploration,” Life (22 Mar 1948): 94; CF, 92. Mind even determined modern destruction since, “ruin takes place in men’s souls before it is made visible in the rubble of cities.” 11 W, 8. 73 Chambers asserted that “the forces of revolution in the West are an intellectual proletariat.” 12 A Marxist eschatological view that saw history in materialist terms became a Christian eschatological view that saw history in spiritual terms. Both contemporaries and later historians have claimed that when Chambers converted to Christianity, he had exchanged belief in history for belief in God; in reality, he had synthesized the two. 13 Chambers’ experience in the Hiss trial also led him to believe in the primacy of ideas. Communism had provided hope and meaning in a “dying world” to the young Chambers, but offered him no prospect of material gain (indeed, even his harshest critics conceded that Chambers made considerable financial sacrifices to become a Communist). Later, during the Hiss trial, he believed that the “poor, common folk” were more likely to accept his own story than the wealthy elites and intellectuals who tended to support Hiss. 14 All of this led him to conclude that it was through “the conversion of minds that [Marxism] advances to the conquest of mass bodies and their living space.” 15 When it came to human motivation, he believed, Marx had it backward yet again: mind determined matter and superstructure 12 CF, 12-13, 44. 13 See, for example, Philip Rahv, “The Sense and Nonsense of Whittaker Chambers,” PR (Jul-Aug 1952): 475. 14 Chambers to Buckley, 5 Aug 1954, in OF, 43. “On the one side” of the division in America “are the voiceless masses with their own subdivisions and fractures. On the other side is the enlightened, articulate elite which, to one degree or other, has rejected the religious roots of the civilization.” W, 616, 635, 793-4. He claimed to have felt the support of “the plain men and women of the nation” during the Hiss trial while he believed that the members of elitist establishments funded and participated in his defamation. 15 CF, 72. 74 determined infrastructure, not vice versa. “Man’s mind,” he said in Witness, “is man’s fate.” 16 Unlike Marx, however, Chambers predicted a gloomy endpoint to history. This pessimistic outlook came both from his upbringing and the traumas of the Hiss trial. Although the jury and a consensus of later historians had found Hiss guilty, Chambers had endured attacks and smears from many of the country’s “best and brightest.” 17 “How can any community in which toleration and support of Hiss is each time automatic, irrepressible, predictable—how can such a community find the force and virtue (it comes to that) to save itself in greater matters?” he wrote to Buckley. It could not, he concluded, and his pessimistic prognostications for humanity were further solidified. 18 From his own point of view, the attacks against him revealed a deep malady infecting Western civilization that would ultimately prove fatal. 19 16 W, 10. Other historical theorists have proposed their own candidates for the “motor of history”: for Hegel it was the universal rational spirit, for Alexandre Kojeve (and his follower, Francis Fukuyama) it was the thymotic desire for recognition, for Toynbee, it was the dialectic of challenge-response, and most recently, Robert Wright has seen history moving according to the dynamic of non-zero-sum interactions. 17 Whittaker Chambers, “The Hissiad: A Correction,” NR (9 May 1959): 45-46. Although recent research has solidified a historical consensus about Hiss’s guilt (See appendix to Sam Tanenhaus, Whittaker Chambers: A Biography (NY: Random House, 1997)), a handful of scholars and journalists continue to assert his innocence. This was visible at a recent New York University conference that revisited the trial (“Alger Hiss & History,” Conference at New York University, 5 Apr 2007). 18 Chambers to Buckley, 22 Apr 1957, in OF, 155; and Chambers, “The Hissiad,” 45. 19 Chambers to Duncan Norton Taylor, 10 August 1952, in CF, 7. For an example of a standard attack on Chambers, see Kingsley Martin, “The Witness,” New Statesman and Nation (Jul 1952), in Patrick A. Swan, ed., Alger Hiss, Whittaker Chambers, and the Schism in the American Soul (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2003), 101-06. Martin used the release of Witness to rehash all of the charges the Hiss defense made during the trial—Chambers was mentally unstable, sexually obsessed with Hiss, and a pathological liar. To Kingsley, Chambers’ memoirs only cemented the conclusions he had drawn previously, viz: Chambers was an archetype of that “disappointed strata of society which hates all those of established reputation” and whose status anxiety and neuroses drove them to irrational hatred 75 Chambers’ pessimistic historical determinism was further entrenched during his days as a writer and editor for Time magazine. Here, as a book reviewer, foreign affairs columnist, and senior editor, Chambers wrote articles on the most important “big picture” historians of the early twentieth century. Of these, Arnold Toynbee influenced Chambers most profoundly. From Toynbee, Chambers reinforced his view that mind, not matter, determined history and he came to accept “civilizations” rather than nations as the most useful units for grand historical analysis. Like Toynbee, Chambers came to view the decline of civilizations as a form of “suicide” as the failure to meet internal challenges left the civilization vulnerable to the destruction finally caused by external pressure. 20 Burnham would later credit Chambers with his own use of this term (and many of his ideas) in a book on liberalism entitled, Suicide of the West—an influential work, but, as always, one that drew selectively from Chambers. 21 But Chambers departed from Toynbee in certain respects. He employed Toynbee’s “organic” metaphor at times, but he more frequently viewed the unfolding of history as a mechanical process and referred to modern civilization as a “machine.” He believed that “a mechanizing world…is by force of the same and envy of those who had succeeded and belonged to the established order (e.g. Hiss). Furthermore, said Martin, Chambers’ book was dangerous for it would enflame the angry masses that shared his “status anxieties” and give another weapon to the McCarthyite witch-hunters who threatened Civil Liberties. Whittaker Chambers may not have been Hitler, Martin concluded, but Witness had “much in common with Mein Kampf” (p. 106). 20 Chambers, “The Challenge,” Time (17 Mar 1947): 81; Chambers, “The Devil,” Life (2 Feb 1948): 82-85; Chambers, “Crossroads,” Time (1 Jul 1946): 58; and Chambers, “In Egypt Land,” Time (30 Dec 1946), in GR, 140. 21 James Burnham, Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism (NY: John Day Co., 1964). 76 necessity, a revolutionary world.” 22 Since all politics logically followed the faith a society embraced, modern politics would necessarily reflect modern Faith in Man. In our “machine age,” said Chambers, societies rejected Christianity “in favor of a new faith, secular, exclusively rational, and scientific, which set man at the center of man’s hope.” To Chambers, “Communism, socialism, and related forms [were] only logical political developments of this revolution.” 23 While Toynbee held a cyclical view of history in which civilizations rose and fell, Chambers believed that history would instead have a final “endpoint,” in which one ideology would triumph over all others. 24 Two other “declensionist” historians also influenced Chambers’ historical determinism—Henry Adams and Oswald Spengler. Chambers saw Henry Adams as the pre-eminent historical seer of the previous century, but that he was limited by his 19 th century perspective. Adams had lived long enough to glimpse modernity, but not to witness its full forces or tragic fruits. Adams had seen the potential of the dynamo, but did not live to behold the full impact of the age it symbolized. Chambers believed that the added perspective of another half century of history would allow him to further provide answers to the questions that Adams had posed. 25 Like both Spengler and Adams, Chambers questioned the value of “scientific progress” as well. While science undoubtedly created material comforts, Chambers 22 CF, 61. 23 CF, 93-95. 24 Chambers, “Challenge,” 74, 76; Chambers, “The Devil,” 83-84; and CF, 312. 25 CF, 169-170. 77 believed that it also created chaos by undermining human traditions and certainties. He would share the historical determinism of Toynbee, Spengler, and Adams, but with the distinctive pessimism and technophobia of the latter two. 26 Like Marx, Chambers believed that history moved towards a pre-determined historical outcome, but unlike Marx (and like Spengler) he believed that this outcome would be a dystopian one. Chambers the Marxist and Chambers the Christian both believed that Communism would ultimately triumph, but the former saw this as a system of freedom, the latter as a system of slavery. Chambers quoted Spengler to his friend Duncan Norton Taylor saying, “Only dreamers believe that there is a way out. Optimism is cowardice. We are born into this time and must bravely follow the path to the destined end.” 27 Thus, he combined Marxist inevitability with Spenglerian gloom. Most historians refer to Chambers as a pessimist, but given his view of world history, they might more accurately call him a fatalist. While Reagan and others saw Chambers as a great proponent of fighting “godless Communism,” Chambers’ schema said nothing about the West being godly, nor did he believe the West deserved to be saved. To Chambers (as to Spengler) the death of the West had been foreordained. 26 Chambers to Norton Duncan-Taylor, 2 April 1954, in CF, 223-24; CF, 214; and Chambers, “Crossroads,” 58. 27 Chambers to Duncan Norton-Taylor, 2 April 1954, in CF, 224; and James G. Miller; Jessie L. Miller, “Review of Witness—Whittaker Chambers,” University of Chicago Law Review (Spring 1953): 599. If Buckley’s emphasis on individual works sounded distinctively Catholic and Herberg’s emphasis on idolatry sounded distinctively Jewish, Chambers’ emphasis on pre-destination sounded distinctively Protestant. 78 Largely because Chambers’ devotees have misused his legacy, historians have also misinterpreted Chambers, viewing him as the foremost advocate of the God vs. godless outlook that he openly rejected. Chambers repeatedly tried to dispel this myth by claiming that the West was every bit as infected with “faith in man” philosophy as the Soviet Union. 28 “Though I hold Communism to be evil,” he said late in life, “I did not believe that it was simply stipulated that God was on the side of the West.” Indeed, he wrote to Buckley, “It is idle to talk about preventing the wreck of Western civilization. It is already a wreck from within.” But even while accepting Chambers’ worldview, Buckley simultaneously opposed “any substitute for victory” in the Cold War, a victory that Chambers declared impossible. 29 Thus, both his followers and historical interpreters have distorted the legacy of Chambers, seeing him as a Cold Warrior who wanted the Godly West to defeat their godless adversaries, when he repeatedly ridiculed such a view. 30 If Chambers threw out Marxian hope for a better future, he always retained his Communist distaste for liberalism. As historian John Patrick Diggins has shown, numerous ex-communists held one ideal constant throughout their dramatic journeys 28 See, for instance, James J. Farrell, The Spirit of the Sixties: The Making of Postwar Radicalism (NY: Routledge, 1997), 40; Norman Podhoretz, Ex-Friends (NY: Free Press, 1999), 70; and Lance Morrow, Second Drafts of History: Essays (NY: Basic Books, 2006), 140. Historian of conservatism Jennifer Burns also perpetuates this stereotype. See, Burns, “Conservatism Reborn: From Reagan to Bush II” May 3, 2006, podcast, available at <www.jenniferburns.org>. 29 “The Magazine’s Credenda,” NR (19 Nov 1955): 6. 30 CF, 11, 46. The conservative who proclaimed the “God vs. Godless” approach to the Cold War most vocally was L. Brent Bozell. See Garry Wills, “God and the Cold War,” CW (20 Oct 1961): 95. 79 from far Left to far Right: a hatred of liberalism. 31 Chambers followed this pattern, but his own anti-liberalism and fatalism were further enhanced by the Hiss trial, where he came to believe that liberals were responsible for pro-Hiss sympathy, and the degree to which it took hold showed how depraved the West had become. Chambers’ followers also misunderstood his emphasis on “faith.” They believed that he had set up a dichotomy between a civilization based on atheism (Communism) and a civilization based on religion (The West), but Chambers rejected such a categorization, for it supposed that there was such a thing as a “faith- free” civilization. Societies lived and died by faith, he said, and humans did not have the choice to live without it, they only had the choice of which of two faiths they would embrace—Faith in God or Faith in Man—both of which promised meaning, hope, and even salvation to believers. The religious choice was inevitable and all- important: every person and every society had to ask itself which it would worship, “God, or man?” 32 In his belief that humans could not escape faith, Chambers’ analysis of religion in politics approximated that of Herberg. To Herberg, everyone worshipped something, but the object of their worship was either transcendent and absolute (God) or something relative and contrived by humans (an idol). 33 Both men, like many American intellectuals caught in the existentialist currents of the postwar 31 John P. Diggins, Up from Communism: Conservative Odysseys in American Intellectual Development (NY: Columbia UP, 1994). 32 W, 4, 13; CF 144, 183-93, 247. 33 Will Herberg, “Faith and Existence: An Existential Approach to Religion,” lecture to Denver University Student Assembly, 19 January 1955, Will Herberg Papers, Drew University Special Collections, Madison, New Jersey, folder 182, 1-2. 80 years, drew heavily on Russian novelist Dostoevsky who had instilled this belief in them. “Man must worship something,” Dostoevsky had said in The Possessed, a book that both Chambers and Herberg listed among their favorites, “if he does not worship God he will worship an idol made of wood or of gold or of ideas.” 34 The connection to Dostoevsky was an important one in Chambers’ development, and one that friends and critics alike would take note of. Historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and novelist John Dos Passos remarked that Witness had a distinctively “Dostoyevskyan” flavor, while journalist Philip Rahv went further and structured his entire review of the book around the Chambers-Dostoevsky connection. “The influence of the Russian novelist is literally everywhere in the book,” he said. 35 Chambers’ friend Charles Thompson even drew biographical parallels between the two writers, noting that Chambers, like Dostoevsky, had been an atheistic socialist and revolutionary before having a moment of Christian awakening and turning decisively against his former faith. Chambers claimed to have learned more about Communism from Dostoevsky’s The Possessed than from entire libraries on Marxism. He kept a copy of this book with him during the Hiss trial and gave inscribed copies to friends as if it were sacred scripture. 36 34 Dostoevsky, The Possessed [1872], Constance Garnett, trans. (Chesterton, SC: BiblioBazaar, 2006). 35 Chambers to Duncan Norton-Taylor, 14 September 1954, in CF, 229; Colm Brogon, “The Comfort of Cold Friday,” NR (29 Dec 1964): 1153; Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., “Whittaker Chambers and His Witness,” Saturday Review (24 May 1952): 40; Rahv, “Sense and Nonsense,” 472; and CF, 180, and 209. 36 Craig Thompson, “The Whittaker Chambers I Know,” Saturday Evening Post (15 Nov1952): 121. Dostoyevsky was just one of many Europeans who influenced Chambers. In fact, so dominant were European writers in Chambers’ thinking that Arthur Schlesinger remarked that Witness had an “un- American intensity” about it. Schlesinger, “Whittaker Chambers,” 9; and Rahv, “Sense and Nonsense,” 472. Also see CF, 163. 81 Like Dostoevsky (and Herberg), Chambers claimed that humans either placed their faith in God, or in their own capacities, in which case they set themselves up as an alternative to God as the creative force in the world. “Faith in Man” differed from atheism in that the former only implied an indifference to God, not an open rejection of Him (Chambers consciously avoided using the term “Godless Communism”). Faith in man was not an absence of faith, but a positive substitution of faith in a transcendent Supreme Being for faith in human intelligence. 37 The human psyche could not live without either one or the other. Herberg had called humans “homo religiosus”—religious beings by nature—while Chambers maintained that “the human mind tirelessly seeks a reason to live and a reason to die” meaning that “religious faith is a human necessity.” Both believed that humans could choose where to place their faith—in God or Man—but not whether to have faith at all. 38 The belief in the inevitability of faith deeply informed the political-religious views of both Chambers and Herberg. While Herberg was concerned primarily with the political implications of idolatry in the present, Chambers extended his analysis of faith back in time. Chambers believed that there was an inverse correlation between faith in God and scientific advance: each scientific discovery strengthened human confidence in itself and weakened reliance upon the Creator. 39 As a cumulative enterprise, science 37 W, 9. 38 W 4, 11, 486. 39 Although he did not refer to it as such, Chambers’ ideas constituted a form of “secularization” theory, which holds that as societies modernize and increase in education and technology, belief in the supernatural (i.e. that which falls outside the domain of scientific reasoning) declines. While most 82 inevitably explained ever more aspects of existence, expanding its domain until finally encroaching on the human realm and crowding out all that was mysterious and divine in experience. As science progressed, human regard for the technological, empirical, and material increased, while regard for the spiritual, transcendent, and human decreased. When scientific explanations spread to the human domain, said Chambers, individuals become objectified and those with Faith in Man then tend to manipulate humans as they would any other scientific objects. Because the Faith in Man infection spread with science, a cumulative enterprise, it was inherently expansive and Faith in God declined with each advance. While his disciples believed that the Godly West could win the Cold War, Chambers did not believe the West was Godly, and he believed that the logic of history had pre- selected it to lose. 40 Chambers saw this historical determinism working itself out in past epochs. Since he believed that Faith in God declined with the passage of time, the further into the past one looked, the more blessed the age. The Middle-Ages, for Chambers, was a superior era dominated by God-centered people possessed of childlike sweetness, and vitality. Absent the infections of science, they sought their miracles and salvation through God, not in human artifices. The spatial centrality of their cathedrals stood as a testimony of their devotion to God and symbolized the secularization theorists, according to religious sociologist Rodney Stark, view secularization as the inevitable “outgrowing” of “the infantile illusions of religion,” Chambers believed it a tragedy in which mechanized, de-personalized humans gave up the mystery and highest values of life for the meaninglessness of Faith in Man. Rodney Stark and William S. Bainbridge, The Future of Religion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 1. 40 CF, 309; and W, 25. 83 spiritually centered lives they led. 41 But the Renaissance planted seeds of heresy that sprouted and flourished during the Enlightenment—the great turning point of history—when “the belief that man, by the aid of science, can achieve a perfection limited only by his mind” began to spread. 42 During the Enlightenment, this new faith, “whose deity was reason, whose ritual was science, and whose high priests were the philosophes” had formed and become transnational. Enlightenment science did not exist independent of society, but served as the all-encompassing ideal that determined economics, culture, and politics. In summary, “the enlightenment was the intellectual chemistry whose gradual precipitate was the modern mind—secular, practical, utilitarian.” 43 After the expansion of Enlightenment thinking throughout the 19 th century, said Chambers, the world enjoyed the “final human party”—the Edwardian Era (1900-1910)—the last stage of history in which humans could enjoy the benefits of science without having to face up to the consequences. 44 The internal contradictions of Faith in Man had finally caught up with humanity in the modern age as technology created more problems than it could 41 Chambers, “The Sanity of St. Benedict,” CW (19 Sep 1952): 575-78; Chambers, “The Middle Ages,” Life (7 Apr 1947): 67-84; Chambers, “Medieval Life,” Life (26 May 1947): 65-84; and W, 134. 42 Chambers, “The Glory of Venice,” Life (4 Aug 1947): 209-16; and W, 9. 43 Chambers, “The Age of Enlightenment,” Life (15 Sep 1947): 75, 90; and Chambers, “The Devil,” 80-81. Chambers’ great error in his treatment of liberalism was essentialism, but this same critique applies to his analysis of history as well. He saw historical eras as distinct and historically given rather than as useful analytic categories created by historians. The Enlightenment, for instance, is an amorphous concept that has many branches, meanings, and manifestations, but Chambers saw it as a distinct and well-defined historical epoch. For more on the various meanings of the Enlightenment, see, for instance, Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments (NY: Knopf, 2004). 44 Chambers, “The Edwardians,” Life (17 Nov 1947): 75, 92, 94, 97-98. 84 solve. 45 In the twentieth century, “the sheer mass and complexity of historical error [was then] too great to be coped with by the mind in the form of good intentions.” 46 Like Henry Adams, Chambers saw that human power (represented by Adams’ dynamo) had outrun the control of ordering authority (represented by Adams’ Virgin). In the modern age, said Chambers, Western civilization would see a final transformation from a traditional Christian culture to a secular, scientific culture. 47 Modern humans, holding science rather than God infallible, reduced everything beautiful and meaningful to chemical actions in brain, thus destroying the transcendent dignity of the individual and making humans indifferent to the deaths of millions. 48 The “Nightmare of modern life” would create a total denial of spirit causing a widespread view of humans as only “the most intelligent of animals.” Once humans were reduced to animals, they would prove themselves “to be more beastly than any beast” as the genocidal actions of Hitler, Stalin, and other modern tyrants demonstrated. The world was at mid-century, he believed, on the brink of the 45 Foremost among these problems were the reconciliation of economic security with political liberty, and the atomic bomb (the threat of total human annihilation). Chambers, “Christmas 1945,” Time (24 Dec 1945): 56; Chambers, “Problem of the Century,” Time (24 Feb 1946): 98; Chambers, “Crossroads,” Time (1 Jul 1946): 52-53; Chambers, “Missiles, Brains, and Mind,” NR (28 Feb 1959): 547; and W, 8. 46 Chambers, journal entry for 17 August 1953, in CF, 27. 47 CF, 92-3; and W, 449. 48 Chambers, “The Tragic Sense of Life,” Life (28 Apr 1947): 104; Chambers, “Peace & Papacy,” Time (16 Aug 1943): 60-62; Chambers, “The New Pictures: ‘Ninotchka,’” Time (6 Nov 1939): 76; and W, 769. 85 culmination of history—a worldwide revolution of which World Wars I and II were only the first shocks, presaging even greater destruction and a new dark age. 49 What his followers never accepted, despite Chambers’ repeated claims, was that not only did Faith in Man increase with time, but that Communism was the inevitable culmination of this historical process. Preferring belligerence to theoretical consistency, conservatives at National Review ignored Chambers view that if God did not exist, it followed that Communism or “some suitable variant of it” was right and since secularism was spreading with history, so was Communism. 50 “The basic view of reality is much the same” between the communist and scientist, Chambers maintained, for both saw the world in terms of greater control: one in the material realm, and one in the human realm. Ultimately, the tool of social control, the state, would expand with historical inertia until an omnicompetent state would come to dominate all human activity; this, by definition, would be Communist world control. “The machine ha[d] made the economy socialistic,” and it would only become more so as the machine of history continued on its inevitable course. 51 Chambers saw the modern age in terms of crisis—the moment when one historical epoch would inevitably give way to another through violent change—but his conservative followers understood “crisis” to mean a moment of decision: a 49 Chambers, “The Sanity of St. Benedict,” 578; CF, 147-53, and 254; W, 13, 17-19. 50 CF, 69. 51 Chambers to Willi Schlamm, September 1954, in CF, 233; Chambers to William F. Buckley, Jr., September 1954, in CF, 238. “Capitalism, whenever it seeks to become conservative in any quarter, at once settles into mere reaction—that is, a mere brake on the wheel, a brake that does not hold because the logic of the wheel [history] is to turn.” 86 crucial moment when the West would need to marshal its strength to confront and stem the tide of Communist advance. 52 While conservatives uncritically accepted and misapplied Chambers’ historical theory, his political opponents subjected it to critical examination. Conservatives, preoccupied with taking the high ground in the Cold War, were more apt to latch onto Chambers’ theory as justification for that position, while liberals, more concerned with avoiding the absolutist mentality that led to totalitarianism, were more apt to criticize it. Liberals believed that, like Marx, Chambers erred in viewing history in such simplistic terms: faith worked no better for explaining all of history than did class warfare. A crude reductionism that saw all historical variables as a function of one underlying principle was inadequate to explain the infinite complexity of the totality of human events. If the modern world came down to a mere contest between evil Faith in Man and good faith in God, then how was one to explain the numerous unbelievers fighting against Soviet Communism and the numerous believers who acquiesced? The anti-communist, atheist philosopher Sidney Hook, appreciated Chambers’ courage and fully accepted his testimony against Hiss, but rejected his theory because it recklessly lumped all unbelievers together, whatever their particular political position. Hook, like Irving Howe, pointed out that both religious and unreligious persons had spoken out against tyranny throughout history, and faith in God appeared to have no bearing on one’s 52 Burnham advocated this in his book Containment or Liberation? (NY: J. Day, 1953). 87 anti-Communism in practice. 53 Religious people, said Hook and Howe, were no more likely to be anti-communist than secular people. Partisan Review editor William Phillips expressed similar sentiments. He denied Chambers’ assertion that “religious faith [was] the only force genuinely opposed to Communism” since the struggle against Communism both at home and abroad had “been effectively carried on by many organizations and dedicated individuals whose primary appeal has not been as representatives of established religion.” He, like Hook, pointed to the dedicated anti-Communist work of such notable agnostics as John Dewey, Max Eastman, and Arthur Koestler to refute Chambers’ God vs. Man dichotomy. 54 Chambers’ historical thesis thus seemed to have been falsified by history. Unlike the above liberals, Historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. saw value in Chambers’ ideas to the degree that one could equate Faith in Man and human hubris, but he agreed with them in his view that conservatives and Christians were just as likely to be seduced by overweening pride as were liberals or atheists. Agreeing with Chambers, Schlesinger conceded that Faith in Man may indeed have been the problem, but agreeing with his fellow liberals, Schlesinger saw that Faith in God was not necessarily the solution. 55 53 Sidney Hook, “The Faiths of Whittaker Chambers,” New York Times (25 May 1952): BR1-3; and Howe, 503. Many “left-intellectuals” said Howe, “fought a minority battle against Stalinism at a time when both [Chambers] and Hiss were at the service of Yagoda and Yezhov.” 54 William Phillips, “In and Out of the Underground: The Confessions of Whittaker Chambers,” American Mercury (Jun 1952): 97. 55 Schlesinger, “Chambers & His Witness,” 40-41. 88 Chambers responded by saying that his critics simply did not understand the starting point of Communism. In connecting Communism to Faith in Man (which he, in turn, connected to materialism), Chambers claimed that he had only reiterated what Marx and Engels themselves had taught: their whole system was premised on the materialism they learned from Feuerbach. Chambers’ critics could point to particular atheist anti-communists, but this did not change the fact that the underlying philosophy upon which Communism was based remained materialism. Marx had asserted that materialist premises led to communist conclusions, and Chambers simply agreed with him. 56 But this rebuttal did not address the main point that his critics had made. Hook, Phillips, Howe, and Schlesinger had not claimed that Chambers misunderstood Marx, nor that Marxism demanded materialism. What they had challenged was the idea that rejecting faith in God necessarily led one to embrace Marxism and that this simple view could explain history. True, all committed Marxists were materialists, but it did not logically follow that all committed materialists were Marxists. Chambers answered his critics by re-asserting the former, but his theory implied the latter. Even as liberals rejected the categories upon which Chambers’ historical theory rested, they also rejected his determinism. Chambers’ historical view had not only conceded defeat to totalitarianism, but, even worse, it marginalized the significance of individuals and their moral agency. Because history moved 56 CF, 206. 89 according to predetermined laws, Chambers said, people were like “flies clinging to the walls of a cyclotron”—their actions were largely determined by historical laws and could not change their eventual fate. 57 When playwright Sol Stein wanted to dramatize Witness for the theatre, Chambers refused to allow the production on the grounds that Stein saw the story as one of persons instead of forces. 58 In the end, individual actions were irrelevant and futile as humans acted only within the constraints of the particular faith that dominated their epoch. 59 For Chambers, the march of history was analogous to a machine and individuals were mere cogs within it. According to his HUAC testimony, Chambers never even begrudged Alger Hiss his actions since Hiss was, like all humans, “caught in the tragedy of history.” 60 Both he and Hiss were justified in their actions, he said, because tragedy was not a conflict of right and wrong, but a conflict of right and right. 61 He also lamented Russia’s program of de-Stalinization for fear that it would lead to a belief that Stalin, rather than Faith in Man, was responsible for Soviet totalitarian atrocities (a position that James Burnham also adopted). 62 If, indeed, Marx had trivialized the value of 57 Chambers to Ralph and Nora de Toledano, 2 Jan 1956, in NU, 209. 58 Chambers to Ralph de Toledano, 27 Dec 1955, in NU, 202. 59 CF, 38. 60 For this quote and a report of the trial, see “Burden of Proof,” Time (6 Sep 1948). 61 Chambers to Ralph de Toledano, 27 Dec 1955, in NU, 201. 62 Chambers, “The End of A Dark Age Ushers in New Dangers,” Life (30 Apr 1956): 148-50, 153-54, 156, 158, 160, 165, 168; and Burnham, “The Third World War,” NR (11 Apr 1956): 24. 90 individuals as incidental to the material forces of history (as Buckley and Herberg would claim) had not Chambers done the same? Since such a view directly contradicted the “free-will” view on which conservatives based their religious libertarianism, conservatives once again drew selectively from the implications of Chambers’ ideas to support their policies. Viewing Communism as expansive by nature allowed them to advocate rollback, but viewing individual will as ultimately insignificant would have trivialized the very foundation of their “Lockean” rationale for limited government. Anti-statists like Buckley justified a Christian individualism on the grounds that state expansion infringed upon individual will, but he never criticized Chambers for trivializing this theological core upon which their religious anti-statism rested. Conservatives ignored the fact that Chambers’ actual ideas worked contrary to some of their most cherished assumptions, but they needed both Chambers’ historical determinism and Lockean free will to mobilize a wide range of intellectuals to their side and build up the movement. Theoretical consistency would have forced them to sacrifice one or the other. Even if conservatives would not criticize or fully accept the implications of Chambers’ historical determinism, his ideological opponents would. According to Partisan Review editor Phillip Rahv, one had to preserve the domain of free will to hold persons accountable for their actions. Chambers’ left no room for this; his theory enthroned doctrines (the two brands of faith) and trivialized individual decisions. Rahv believed that Communist ideals alone could not account “for the behavior of real live Communists” any more or less “than the original idea of 91 Christianity [could] account for the behavior of real, live Christians.” For Rahv, ideas did not exist independently of people who believed in and acted upon them. Neither Communists nor Christians were good or evil by virtue of the doctrine they espoused, as Chambers implied, but by the good or evil they did. One would be foolish to try to “deduce the practices of the Holy Inquisition from the Sermon on the Mount,” said Rahv, and by marginalizing the individual in his historical schema Chambers had “absolved the very worst men of responsibility for their crimes in order all the more justifiably to implicate the values and ideas they profess.” 63 Left-wing journalist Irving Howe agreed. In Chambers’ religious view of history societies were judged according to the faith they upheld, but humans should judge a society instead “according to its actual treatment of men.” In Chambers’ view, said Howe, “Voltaire, Jefferson, Lenin, Roosevelt, Hitler, Stalin” were all equally responsible for the modern crisis, for they were all equally “indifferent to God.” 64 In his zeal to implicate Faith in Man for human misery, Chambers had seemingly made individuals morally neutral—mere pawns in the game of independent historical forces. Chambers based his whole theory on determinism, the uselessness of individual decision and the inevitability of defeat, and yet conservatives who drew on his legacy based their domestic and foreign policies on the reality of individual will and the possibility of victory. It was precisely Chambers’ dichotomous view of history that led him and other conservatives to reject the liberal foreign policy strategy of containment. 63 Rahv, “Sense and Nonsense,” 476-77. 64 Irving Howe, “God, Man, & Stalin,” Nation (24 May 1952): 502-04. 92 Formulated by Russian ambassador George Kennan in the famous “long telegram” of 1947 (and later the “X article” published in Foreign Affairs), containment proposed to counteract Soviet aggression by applying counter-pressure at strategic and constantly shifting points of engagement. But Kennan’s containment rested upon the assumption that, although Soviet Communism was expansionist, it was also a complex phenomenon combining cultural, historical, economic, and national- interest considerations with Marxist ideology. 65 Kennan rejected the concept of containment when countries were “described in terms that refer to some vague ‘Communism’ in general and do not specify what particular Communism is envisaged,” 66 but for Chambers, there was only one Communism—the independently and fully developed Faith in Man ideal that existed independently of national, cultural, and economic factors. Indeed, this was the very idea that determined history. For Kennan Communisms were many, but for Chambers Communism was monolithic: the universal, logical endpoint for any society that embraced Faith in Man. This made the differences between various manifestations of Communism trivial. 67 Kennan’s realist view held that the Soviets would act according to a mix of self-interest and ideological considerations, but to Chambers, the logic of history 65 George Kennan, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” Foreign Affairs (Jul 1947). A copy of the article can be found at the Foreign Affairs website. Note, that Kennan’s article was entitled “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” not “The Sources of Communist Conduct.” In Kennan’s mind (but not in Chambers’), this made a significant difference for policy. 66 George F. Kennan, Memoirs, 1925-1950 (Boston: Little, Brown, & Co., 1967), 366-67. 67 Chambers to Buckley, 16 Apr 1957, in OF, 149-50; Chambers to Buckley, 21 Mar 1957, in OF, 143; Chambers to Buckley, 6 Nov 1956, in OF, 119-20; and Chambers, “Some Untimely Jottings,” NR (27 Sep 1958): 200; CF, 289-92, 297. 93 drove Communism inexorably outward as Faith in Man expanded its domain. Thus, the Soviets were bent on world conquest whether they knew it or not—the individual decisions and rational choices of leaders and diplomats did not matter. The Communist nations, in spite of their differences, were all of one mind, and the activities of any Communist nation were, by nature, connected to that of all others. Whereas Chambers believed that Communism acted with a force of its own—the force of history—Kennan’s containment saw communist countries as autonomous strategic threats independent of their ideology. 68 Their differing views led Chambers and Kennan to make different predictions about the future. Chambers saw the strength of Communism winning out over all ideological competitors, while Kennan believed that, on the contrary, the Soviet Union would buckle under the weight of its own contradictions. To Kennan, containment would keep the Soviets at bay until their ideology imploded, but in Chambers’ mind, the West would collapse after Faith in Man had rotted civilization from within. For Chambers, it was not a matter of if the West would fall to Communism, but only a matter of when, for Communism posed a threat that was inevitable and implacable. 69 Liberals who adhered to containment, said Chambers, misunderstood the nature of totalitarianism, and this misunderstanding was reflected in their mistaken foreign policy. 68 This view of communism led Chambers to see Mao Zedong as necessarily “a Moscow-directed Chinese communist,” while Kennan (and later Chambers’ best politician-friend, Richard Nixon) saw Mao as a man with interests and nationalist goals that could set him at odds with the Soviets (Thompson, 116). 69 Chambers, “To Temporize is Death,” 470. 94 Chambers’ opposition to containment inspired many conservatives to adopt a more aggressive anti-communist stance and gave others an ideological construct that supported the rollback idea. Since Communism constituted a form of slavery, they said, then each person living in a region dominated by the Soviets found themselves in a condition of servitude. Did not these peoples deserve “liberation” as much as antebellum American slaves had? 70 Rollback, Burnham believed, would provide this liberation. It sought “freedom for the peoples and nations now enslaved by the Russian-centered Soviet state system—freedom for all the peoples and nations now under Communist domination, including the Russian people.” Rollback, a policy based on an understanding of Communism as inevitably expansionist and poised to conquer the world, would strike early before the Soviets could mobilize sufficiently to win the coming war, a war that neared with each passing day of history. “Moscow has not been ready for general war,” Burnham declared, and it was therefore imperative that the U.S. “capture the initiative for the free world” before the Communists could ready themselves. 71 Containment, on the other hand, would give the advantage to the Soviets, allowing them to grow in strength, enslave greater portions of the world, and eventually dominate the United States militarily, for, as Chambers claimed, their 70 Like Chambers, Burnham believed that conservatives had to fight the “struggle for the world” on both the domestic and foreign fronts since liberalism, if not stopped, would lead to “The Suicide of the West” (the title of his last book). James Burnham, The Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism (1964; Chicago: Regnery, 1985). “The principles of liberalism and Communism,” he said, “largely overlap” (p. 290). For more on his views on the liberal/communist connection, see Kelly, 284. 71 Burnham, “Policy of Liberation,” 15. 95 strength and aggression were a function of time. While rollback advocated meeting the Soviets in an inevitable war sooner rather than later, said Burnham, containment advocated standing by and waiting as they became too strong to overcome. As such, the defensive policies of containment “would be a direct prescription for defeat,” and defeat was unthinkable since “too much is at stake—indeed, the world is at stake.” The Chambersian ideas of world destiny, communist expansion-by-nature, and imminent apocalypse were all present in Burnham’s rollback strategy, but he never accepted the full implications of historical determinism: he accepted the historically- expansive nature of Communism, but still believed in the possibility of victory. If 21 st century neoconservatives would make famous the doctrine of “pre-emption,” it had been articulated previously by one of the major proto-neocons in the early days of the Cold War. 72 Ironically, Burnham, who did the most to turn Chambers’ religious theory into a foreign policy strategy, was not himself a religious believer. While this might seem surprising, it parallels Arthur Schlesinger’s relationship to Reinhold Niebuhr: Schlesinger may not have accepted the truth claims of Christianity, but he still believed that the social application of Niebuhr’s Christian insights could benefit society. Likewise, Burnham accepted Christianity as the greatest system of social wisdom and ethics in history and believed that all humans (believers and unbelievers alike) ignored Christian teachings at their own peril. In this case, he applied a 72 Historian David Noon has concluded that recent neoconservative foreign policy discourse largely continues the ideals and modes of reasoning developed during the Cold War. After September 11, 2001, neoconservatives simply revived their Cold War concepts and applied them to the new “Islamic threat.” David Noon, “Cold War Revival: Neoconservatives and Historical Memory in the War on Terror,” Mar 2006, copy in possession of author. 96 religious theory of history (that of Chambers) to an understanding of Communism and developed his “rollback” strategy accordingly. 73 Rollback became the official conservative foreign-policy position at National Review. From the first issue onward, the editors proclaimed with Burnham that the United States had a duty to liberate communist countries. “We consider ‘co- existence’ with Communism neither desirable nor possible, nor honorable;” they declared in the magazine’s founding credenda, “we find ourselves irrevocably at war with Communism and shall oppose any substitute for victory.” 74 Buckley later said in an intellectual exchange that, “we are our brother’s keeper to the extent that we help free him from [Communist] slavery.” Like Burnham, Buckley advocated rollback because he believed “that the assumptions of Communism [were] such as to make coexistence impossible.” 75 After establishing a friendship with Chambers in the early 1950s, Buckley would adopt Chambers’ “machine” metaphor and often blamed “the machine” for the denial of the “divine spark” that led to modern collectivism, even as Chambers himself denied the individual the power to act in significant ways. 73 Burnham, Suicide, 74-87, 138-39. Like Chambers, Burnham declared that liberals were those who lacked an understanding of Judeo-Christian “original sin.” For more on Burnham’s views of Christianity, see Kelly, 235, 290. A respect for the social value of religion without acceptance of its truth claims put Burnham in the company of Straussian neoconservatives in this respect. Eventually, however, Burnham would convert to Christianity, thus bringing into harmony his social and metaphysical views. 74 “The Magazine’s Credenda,” NR (19 Nov 1955): 6. 75 Buckley, “Conservative Journalism,” 573; and Buckley, “The Strange Behavior of America,” NR (26 Aug 1961): 114, 117. We are in an “implacable war with atheistic Communism,” said Buckley borrowing language from Witness, and the enemy, by nature, could not be contained. An understanding of the world situation required active military intervention to diminish the Communist sphere of influence. 97 Thus, Chambers’ historical theory deeply informed and supported the conservative foreign policy of rollback but, in the end, Chambers’ own convictions put him as much at odds with rollback as with containment. In order to believe in the possibility of either containing or defeating Communism one had also to reject the idea of historical necessity, the very foundation of Chambers’ thought. Although Chambers counted Burnham as a close friend and was sympathetic to his intentions, Chambers believed that Burnham’s rollback strategy accented the West’s “immortal will to win” the Cold War, even as he claimed that “this will does not exist.” Burnham, Chambers said, “refuse[d] to suspend his assaying of reality,” and refused to acknowledge “that the socialist trend in history is irreversible.” 76 Eventually, Chambers’ differences with his followers at National Review became great enough that he left the magazine to return to full-time life as a farmer (and briefly as an undergraduate at the local college). As an opponent of liberalism and a self-declared “man of the Right,” Chambers had joined National Review in 1957, bringing prestige and literary gifts to the conservative intellectual cause. 77 But later in the decade he came to believe that Burnham and Buckley had no real understanding of what history held. They were under the delusion that the West could win when history had already logically decreed that the West would lose. But if Chambers really believed in historical determinism, was he not as guilty as other conservatives of denying the implications of his own theory? Chambers had proclaimed the triumph of Communism as an historical inevitability, 76 Chambers to Buckley, 23 Jan 1957, in OF, 128; and Chambers to Buckley, 7 Jul 1957, in OF, 185. 77 He rejected the label conservative for the machine-age made “conservation” futile. 98 and yet he worked assiduously to prevent Communist domination of the West. As a Christian, Chambers claimed to know he was “leaving the winning side for the losing” in the war of faiths, but then spent the remainder of his life in the anti- communist cause—exposing Hiss, writing anti-communist articles, and even advising politicians. If he really believed in the futility of the struggle against Communism then why did he engage in all of these activities and fight a battle that was already lost? Although other conservatives never found a way out of the paradox created by the application of Chambers’ insights to policy, Chambers found his own solution by turning to the then-popular philosophy of existentialism. As early as his days writing for Time in the early 1940s, Chambers had begun peppering his prose with references to such thinkers as Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, Soren Kierkegaard, and Albert Camus, all of whom often expressed existentialist views. 78 Camus in particular helped Chambers to reconcile struggle with determinism. In the Myth of Sisyphus Camus had used the tragic Greek hero to illustrate the necessity of human striving in the face of certain defeat. Chambers claimed that, like Sisyphus, he struggled not because he could alter the outcome of history, but because the struggle justified itself—it was its own end. By combining Christianity with existentialism, Chambers came to believe that even if the redemption of society was futile, one could still find personal redemption by defying fate. The West was 78 Chambers to Buckley, 3 Jan 1959, in OF, 233; Chambers to Ralph de Toledano, 23 May 1951, NU, 41; CF, 325; and W, 83, 506. Chambers to Duncan Norton-Taylor, 22 February 1953, in CF, 17-18; Chambers to Duncan Norton-Taylor, 6 March 1953, in CF, 18-20; and Chambers to Duncan Norton- Taylor, 17 March 1953, in CF, 20-22, and CF, 194-95, 214, and 280. 99 beyond salvation, but the individual was not and Chambers could find meaning and personal ennoblement in that struggle against Communism by giving his witness for Faith in God and against Faith in Man. 79 Chambers often compared his struggle against Communism to Jonah’s situation in the Old Testament. Like Chambers, Jonah had suffered because of his transgressions, but found personal redemption by bearing witness to those whose destruction was already pre-ordained. The salvation of Nineveh was not in question in the Old Testament story, but Jonah’s own personal salvation was. Chambers believed that his struggle might redeem him from his previous sins against God (his years in Communism), even if his efforts to fight Communism would do nothing to alter the fate of the West. 80 But Chambers not only struggled against fate by fighting Communism, he also did so through personal rejection of aspects of modern life. Even if he realized one could not defeat the inevitable advance of “the machine,” one could at least retreat from it and thus forestall having to face its manifestations. If modernity and urbanization were the demographic, technological, and economic harbingers of the inevitable advance of Communism, then Chambers could at least remove himself physically from its consequences: he did this by purchasing a Maryland farm and 79 Chambers to Ralph de Toledano, 23 May 1951, NU, 41; Chambers to Ralph de Toledano, 27 July 1951, NU, 45; Chambers to Buckley, 9 Apr 1961, in OF, 295; Chambers to Buckley, 14 Aug 1958, in OF, 210-11; and Chambers to Buckley, 5 Aug 1954, in OF, 43; CF, 46; and W, 5, 506, 763. 80 Chambers, “Jonah,” in CF, 265-68. Witness, he said, was the effort of a man to hurl himself against the rationalism which must destroy the world and seems to be on the point of doing so. It was a lunge against Communism chiefly as the logical, the inevitable epitome of that rationalism [italics in original]. Chambers to Ralph and Nora de Toledano, 31 Dec 1955, in NU, 204-5. 100 living out his days in a pre-modern agricultural setting. His farm was both a refuge from “the machine” and the Faith-in-Man disposition from which it sprung. 81 Because farming represented pre-modernity, it became something of a spiritual pursuit for Chambers. He often spoke of a trilateral relationship between God, man, and soil that made his farming more than a hobby or source of income, but a ritual defiance of the machine age. 82 Chambers also refused to have a telephone or electrical power in his home (until late in life when his editor insisted) because electricity, the physical force by which the modern age operated, symbolized and worked in tandem with the spiritual force that would enslave the world. In his daily habits as well as his chosen vocation, Chambers made subtle protests against Faith in Man. 83 Like Henry Adams, Chambers also saw symbolic resistance to modern life in ancient structures. On a trip to Europe, he contemplated medieval castles as great citadels standing against the forces of modernity. This paralleled Adams’ reflections on the Abbey church of Mont-Saint-Michel. As a witness against modernity, Chambers saw in these ancient castles, a symbol of his own life. He also saw the same in a sturdy outcropping of stone on his farm that he named “Cold Friday.” This formidable rock had preceded Chambers coming by thousands of years and would 81 W, 277, 519. 82 Chambers to Willi Schlamm, [undated] 1954, in OF, 54-60; and CF, 3-5. 83 Chambers to Ralph and Nora de Toledano, 1 Feb 1950, NU, 11-12; Chambers to Ralph de Toledano, 6 Jul 1950, 27; and Thompson, 118. 101 continue to defy the march of history for centuries to come, just as his witness would remain in defiance of modernity long after he had left the earth. 84 In such existential resistance, Chambers had found a way out of the paradox of choice and necessity, but his fellow conservatives never did. They accepted Chambers’ view that Communism was expansionist by nature, but ignored his conclusions about the final outcome: they continued to believe that the Cold War struggle could redeem the world. Buckley often argued, like Chambers, that “faith in man” advanced along with “machine civilization,” but he also believed that the West could triumph given sufficient spiritual will and the adequate application of military force. 85 Future President Ronald Reagan also drew selectively from Chambers. Through Chambers, Reagan came to believe that “the crisis of the Western world exists to the degree in which the West is indifferent to God” and that “the real crisis we face today is a spiritual one; at root, it is a test of moral will and faith.” 86 While invoking Chambers’ ideas and language, Reagan departed from the historical theorist in asserting that Communism, not Christianity, was destined for failure. “It is the 84 CF, 14, 284; W, 517; and Thompson, 116. 85 See, for instance, Buckley, “India and the Perishing West,” NR (21 Dec 1955): 6. 86 Ronald Reagan, “Remarks at the Annual Convention of the National Association of Evangelicals in Orlando, Florida,” 8 Mar 1983, in Gregory L. Schneider, ed., Conservatism in America since 1930: A Reader (NY: New York University Press, 2003), 361. In this same speech, Reagan openly endorsed Chambers’ God/Man dichotomy as well: “Whittaker Chambers, the man whose own religious conversion made him a witness to one of the terrible traumas of our time, the Hiss-Chambers case, wrote that the crisis of the Western world exists to the degree in which the West is indifferent to God, the degree to which it collaborates in Communism’s attempt to make man stand alone without God. And then he said, for Marxism-Leninism is actually the second oldest faith, first proclaimed in the Garden of Eden with the words of temptation, ‘Ye shall be as gods’” (p. 361). 102 Soviet Union that runs against the tide of history by denying freedom and human dignity to its citizens” he declared in his 1982 speech to the British Parliament. 87 Accepting Chambers’ diagnosis of the crisis as a spiritual one, Reagan nevertheless rejected the gloomy prognostications of the ex-communist and asserted that liberal democracy, not Communism, had the logic of history on its side. Thus, said the President, “the march of freedom and democracy would leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history.” 88 Although consciously influenced by Chambers, Reagan’s view of history had more in common with that of political scientist Francis Fukuyama who believes that the self-contradictions of all alternatives would leave liberal democracy the only ideological option standing at “The End of History.” 89 Chambers talked as if Communism were inevitable, but his followers acted as if it could be defeated. 90 Perhaps, in the end, Chambers was merely posturing: playing the role of prophet of doom for dramatic effect. As biographer Sam Tanenhaus has shown, Chambers was not above such theatrics. 91 He may have believed deep inside, with 87 Brian Lamb interview with Buckley, 30 Jun 2002, C-Span American Writers Series, “Russell Kirk and William F. Buckley; The Conservative Mind and God and Man at Yale.” In this interview, Buckley spoke of the “enormous influence” that Witness had on himself, Reagan, and the other leading lights of the conservative movement. 88 Ronald Reagan “Speech to the British Parliament,” June 8, 1982. For a text of this speech, see Patrick Ruffini, “Reagan at Westminster: The Origins of Anti-communist Idealism,” Presidential Communication (May 1999): 38, 42. 89 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (NY: Avon, 1992). 90 John P. Diggins, in his recent biography of Reagan, attributes such attitudes to an innate “Emersonian” temperament that deeply influenced Reagan for both good and ill. Diggins, Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom, and the Making of History (NY: W.W. Norton, 2006). 91 Tanenhaus, Whittaker Chambers, 301, 307. 103 his followers, that victory over Communism was possible, but that talk of “inevitability” would create a sense of urgency that would catalyze counterrevolutionary forces into action. But nothing in his writings would indicate that this was the case. At his most optimistic, he advocated policies that might have helped forestall the advance of Communism, but remained critical of anyone who spoke of victory. For Chambers, apocalypse was nigh, while, for his followers, the threat of apocalypse he presented provided them with an emotional rallying point for a combative Cold War foreign policy. But not all of the contradictions in Chambers’ thought came from misapplication. An inherent tension existed in his formulation of domestic and foreign anti-statism as the same cause: when put into practice, the two goals contradicted each other. In order to defeat Communist “statism” abroad, one had to expand the power and scope of the state at home (through military buildup, surveillance, propaganda, etc.). If expanded government created slavery, as Lockeans like Buckley believed, then one had to enslave (to one degree or another) the domestic population via taxation in order to free foreign peoples. This contradiction became most visible after conservatives finally took power in the 1980s. President Reagan engaged in a dramatic and expensive military buildup that contravened his promises to reduce the size of the federal government. Reagan had come to office declaring that government was not the solution to America’s problems, but was itself the problem (typical conservative anti-statist sentiments), yet he left office with government having vastly expanded in the name 104 of defeating Communism. 92 Thus, Reagan’s foreign goal—defeating Communism— destroyed his domestic goal—government limitation—and the conservatism which saw the two as the same pursuit failed to come to terms with this internal contradiction. The eighties deficits were, in that sense, a logical result of Chambers’ theory. Historian John Judis has viewed Chambers as the precursor to Reagan in his political pragmatism, but he can better be described as Reagan’s precursor in the paradox of anti-statism. 93 This central contradiction in postwar conservatism depended upon the communist-liberal tie that Chambers made so central to his thought. Although many before Chambers had made the same connection on the grounds that both ideologies advocated greater state action, Chambers went deeper into the philosophical basis for each. Such journalists as H.L. Mencken, J.B. Matthews, and Albert Jay Nock, as well as conservative organizations like The Liberty League and America First, had often compared Roosevelt’s New Deal “statism” to the Bolshevik program and by the 1940s, the idea that socialism was “liberalism in a hurry,” had become a common cliché on the Right. 94 92 Ronald Reagan, “Inaugural Address,” 20 Jan 1981, in Schneider, 342-43. Diggins argues that Reagan was the first “big government conservative,” but fails to recognize that this was a function of the paradox of anti-statism that had emerged in the postwar years, not because Reagan consciously desired big government. Diggins, Ronald Reagan, 303-42. 93 John Judis, “The Two Faces of Whittaker Chambers,” TNR (16 Apr 1984). 94 For information on conservatives during the Roosevelt era who saw the New Deal as an attenuated form of Bolshevism, see Doherty, 21-66. However, these prewar anti-statists, because of their isolationism, maintained a consistency of thought that conservative anti-Communism would destroy. Conservatives prior to World War II saw isolationism and anti-statism as two sides of the same coin. They adhered to isolationism because they rightly feared that intervention in foreign affairs would lead to greater state expansion and infringement on individual freedoms. 105 After the war, conservatives continued to decry liberalism as a variant of socialism. Economist Friedrich Hayek had famously argued that the economic planning of the New Deal put America on the “road to serfdom”: a road that, while slower than Nazi or Communist socialism, moved in the same direction—towards the totalitarian centralization of state power. 95 Likewise, as early as God and Man at Yale (1951), Buckley had used the term “collectivist” to refer to both his Communist and liberal adversaries: each held as a common goal the destruction of free-market “individualism,” said Buckley, one by “violent revolution; the other, [by] a slow increase of state power, through extended social services, taxation, and regulation to a point where a smooth transition could be effected from an individualist to a collectivist society.” Both liberalism and Communism denied the “divine spark” of humanity and therefore “disparage the individual, glorify the government, enshrine security, and discourage self-reliance.” 96 Like Hayek, Buckley believed that the welfare state only differed from the Communist state in the degree and the speed at which it achieved its statist goals: Communism killed individual freedom all at once, while the welfare state destroyed it by attrition. Communist societies “fully enslaved” their citizens while welfare state societies, “partially enslaved” theirs, making the struggle against domestic slavery (liberalism) and foreign slavery (Communism) different battles in the same war. 97 95 Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1944). 96 William F. Buckley, Jr., God and Man at Yale [1951] (D.C.: Regnery, 1986), 46. Buckley carried these ideals with him to National Review. See, for instance, Buckley, “The Ivory Tower,” NR (7 Mar 1956): 23-4. 106 After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Buckley would reflect on the Cold War saying, “Communism was the ultimate challenge to conservatism because it attempted…to challenge all the maxims of liberty and property which we believe in.” Buckley even claimed that conservatives held an anti-communist foreign policy for the same reason that American Jews held a pro-Israel foreign policy: in both cases, foreign concerns were extensions of domestic values. 98 In the prewar years, conservative isolationism seemed a logical outgrowth of conservative anti-statism, but after the war the same domestic views (limited government) led conservatives to embrace an opposite foreign policy. The new enemy and a new view that saw that enemy in anti-statist terms led to the transformation of conservative ideology. Chambers, more than any other thinker, helped bring conservatism into the webs of anti-statist contradiction that would become apparent in the 1980s as the federal government ballooned to defeat Communism even as conservatives preached the virtues of limited government. 99 Unlike others in the movement, however, Chambers found a commonality in something deeper than “statism.” The desire for an expanded state, said Chambers, was only a surface symptom of a more fundamental spiritual malady that united liberals and Communists—Faith in Man. To Chambers, a society’s Faith in Man— 97 Buckley, “Conservative Journalism,” CW (4 Mar 1955): 573; Buckley, Up From Liberalism [1959] (NY: Bantam, 1968), 160, 169-170; and Buckley, God and Man, lx-lxi. 98 Lamb interview with Buckley, 30 Jun 2002. 99 For more on the connection between pre-war conservative anti-statism and isolationism, see Robert Dallek, The American Style of Foreign Policy: Cultural Politics and Foreign Affairs (NY: Knopf, 1983): 117-21. 107 faith in human reason and its capacity to solve social problems—not only led to the expansion of science and control over the natural realm through technology and industrialization, but also to the expansion of control over the social realm through the state. 100 Since both liberalism and Communism held Faith in Man as their underlying philosophy, their political “statism” was only an outward manifestation of this deeper common ideal. “Communism,” Chambers said, “and a good deal of what in America passes, for reasons of political expedience, by the name of Liberalism have common origins in the historical insights and (to one degree or another) in the [materialist] doctrines of Karl Marx.” Liberalism and Communism shared a Faith in Man and only differed “about the problem of violence or coercion, how it is to be applied in the socializing processes, in what amounts, at what point.” Chambers endorsed Dostoevsky’s belief that “socialism is from its very nature bound to be atheism,” and, to Chambers, this included socialism’s little brother, liberalism. 101 Chambers’ particular expression of the liberal-communist connection became one widely adopted on the Right. 102 100 CF, 322-23. 101 Ibid., 74, 164, 242. Distrust of state power because of his more fundamental distrust of human reason put Chambers in Herberg’s “Burkean” anti-statist camp. Not surprisingly, both Chambers and Herberg were deeply influenced by postwar existentialism which, with its focus on irrationalism, lent itself to the Burkean line of thinking. 102 For instance, both William Rusher (publisher of National Review and the leader of the “Draft Goldwater” movement) and Ronald Reagan quoted Chambers’ denunciation of Communism and liberalism as a common vision “of man’s mind displacing God as the creative intelligence of the world.” Rusher, “Publisher’s Statement,” 101; and Reagan, “Remarks at Annual Convention,” 361. Under the influence of Chambers, Newsweek journalist Ralph de Toledano also spoke of “the short road from liberalism to Communism” (see, for example, Toledano, “The Context of Liberalism,” NR (9 Nov 1957): 421-23). 108 Chambers had become convinced of the liberal-communist connection during the Alger Hiss case when it seemed that the most prominent liberals in the country stood up for the Communist spy. Secretary of State Dean Acheson, for instance, had famously declared, even after Hiss’s conviction, “I will not turn my back on Alger Hiss;” a remark, that Chambers said, could not “be dismissed simply as an upwelling of personal feeling” for it revealed something deeper. Liberal Supreme Court justices Felix Frankfurter and Stanley Reed served as character witnesses for Hiss while President Truman himself called the entire Hiss Case a “Red Herring,” cooked up by Republicans for political gain. 103 Chambers believed that these examples of liberal sympathy for Hiss were not coincidental, but indicative of ideological kinship and a common Faith in Man philosophy. 104 In equating Communism and liberalism, Buckley, Hayek, and other anti-New Dealers employed the common polemical tactic of defining an entire system of political beliefs by a single characteristic. They found a single overlap (however superficial) between an element of a position of their adversaries and an extreme manifestation of that element in a totalitarian society, and then declared a fundamental identity between their enemy and either Nazism or Communism. Such 103 Chambers to Ralph de Toledano, 25 Sep 1951, in NU, 61; and W, 469-472, 560, 739-41. Just as it appeared to Chambers that “secular liberals” were more likely to defend Hiss, he also believed that it was not coincidental that those willing to pursue the Communist spy were religious (Richard Nixon and Thomas Murphy). In fact, Chambers believed that since Nixon was a “Quaker by birth” he “had an ear for the ring of truth.” W, 555. 104 Chambers to Ralph de Toledano, 17 Aug 1951, in NU, 54; Chambers to Ralph de Toledano, 25 Sep 1951, in NU, 61. Chambers even accused the Truman administration of deliberately covering up the Hiss case: “a part (but not all) of the Justice department tried to save Hiss by indicting me!” he said. While the Hiss trial caused many liberals to rethink their own simplistic definitions of liberalism, the trial caused Chambers to entrench his own. See David Goldknopf, “Liberal Cachexia: Its Cause and Cure,” TNR (6 Mar 1950): 12-15; and W, 574, 675-80, 695. 109 thinking ascribed an “essence” to liberalism that liberals themselves rejected, but worked to intensify anti-liberal feeling among conservatives. Buckley’s detractors would classify him with book-burning Nazis because he would propose moderate restrictions on free speech at private institutions, but now he turned the same polemical device against his liberal adversaries by classifying them with Communists. 105 Chambers’ attempt to find a common “essence” shared by liberalism and Communism proved as inadequate as that of other conservatives. Buckley saw the liberal-communist connection as statism while Chambers saw it as Faith in Man, but in either case they invented a straw-man liberalism that failed to capture its actual meaning at that historical moment. In the postwar years, liberalism itself was evolving such as to make Chambers’ charges of Faith in Man misdirected. 106 Chambers characterized liberals as those who believed in the power of reason to solve all problems and those who embraced modernity and technological advance, but even as he did so the most important postwar liberal intellectuals would specifically repudiate both of these ideals. The writings of Niebuhr and Schlesinger revealed attitudes towards Communism, and even what Chambers considered Faith- in-Man thinking that differed dramatically from Chambers’ characterization. Although Schlesinger, like Chambers, saw political positions as timeless essences, he 105 See, for example, McGeorge Bundy, “The Attack on Yale,” The Atlantic Monthly (Nov 1951): 52; Frank D. Ashburn, “‘Isms’ & The University,” Saturday Review of Literature (15 Dec 1951): 44-45; and Robert Hatch, “Enforcing Truth,” TNR (3 Dec 1951): 19. 106 For examples of liberals grappling with the meaning of their changing politics in light of the Hiss case, see Diana Trilling, “A Memorandum on the Hiss Case,” PR (May-Jun 1950), in Swan, 27-48; and Leslie Fiedler, “Hiss, Chambers, and the Age of Innocence,” C (Aug 1951), in Swan, 1-26. 110 also accepted that liberalism had changed in important ways during the previous decade. Schlesinger believed that the liberalism of the early twentieth century, an amalgam of the Social Gospel and John Dewey’s philosophy, held that “the organized social intelligence could be counted on to work out definite solutions to the great political and economic issues.” Chambers might have fairly ascribed a “Faith in Man” mentality to this earlier liberalism, but Schlesinger also argued that a “New Liberalism” had replaced this earlier version in the postwar years. Schlesinger’s New Liberalism left behind the belief in the innate goodness of humans, and rejected the notion that applied intelligence could conquer war, greed, and inequality. New Liberalism was instead founded on Reinhold Niebuhr’s “searching realism” that saw inevitable human flaws and limitations. Niebuhr’s views “gave new strength” to American liberalism and rejected the “supposition that ‘scientific’ analysis of society could produce impartial and uncontaminated results.” 107 Schlesinger even openly claimed that he “basically sympathized” with Chambers’ diagnosis of the ills of modern life. While Schlesinger disagreed that the problem was necessarily a religious one, he agreed with the idea that human hubris was at the root of totalitarianism and that free societies needed to distance themselves from this destructive human flaw. While Chambers had earlier pronounced Schlesinger’s The Age of Jackson a typical statement of liberal Faith in Man, Schlesinger pointed out that the book had voiced very “Chambers-like” 107 Schlesinger, “Reinhold Niebuhr’s Role in American Political Thought and Life,” in Charles Kegley and Robert Bretall, eds., Reinhold Niebuhr: His Religious, Social and Political Thought (NY: Macmillan, 1956), 97-98, 101. 111 sentiments in its cautioning about the flaws in human nature (e.g. “He who would act the angel acts the brute”). 108 Whereas for Chambers, Faith in Man constituted the essence of liberalism, Schlesinger saw two competing variants fighting for the soul of liberalism—one idealistic and conciliatory in foreign policy, the other realist and anti-communist. Schlesinger acknowledged that many of Chambers’ criticisms of liberalism applied to the “dough-face” and “popular front” liberals he opposed, but contended that his own brand had accepted a more humble approach to politics. As philosopher Horace Kallen wrote, Schlesinger’s “fighting faith” consciously rejected previous liberal illusions and, in this sense, Schlesinger spent most of his book The Vital Center doing exactly what Chambers had done in Witness: attacking Faith-in-Man liberalism. 109 As previous intellectual histories have made clear, the late 1940s and early 1950s would see the triumph of Schlesinger’s New Liberalism. 110 Not only would the Cold-Warrior Truman defeat the “dough-face” Wallace for the 1948 Democratic nomination, but by 1951, organizations like the Americans for Democratic Action and the Congress for Cultural Freedom (founded and led by such liberal anti- communists as Schlesinger, Niebuhr, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Sidney Hook) 108 Schlesinger, “Chambers and His Witness,” 40; and Chambers, “The Old Deal: A Review of Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.’s The Age of Jackson,” Time (22 Oct 1945): 103-04, 106. 109 Schlesinger, “Chambers and His Witness,” 45-46; and Kallen, “Review of The Vital Center,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (Jan 1950): 245-46. 110 This story has been told most recently by Kevin Mattson in his book When America was Great: The Fighting Faith of Postwar Liberalism (NY: Routledge, 2004). 112 would move the center of gravity among liberals away from any trace of Communist sympathy. But Schlesinger’s New Liberalism drew heavily from the most important thinker in the Cold War Liberal tradition, Reinhold Niebuhr, whom Chambers had identified as an ally against liberalism. As the author of a famous Time cover story on Niebuhr, Chambers viewed the Protestant theologian as a kindred spirit who had seen the dangers of modern life and the problems that Faith in Man had created. 111 Chambers noted that Niebuhr drew heavily from the same theistic existentialists (especially Dostoevsky) that had so influenced his own thought, and that he recognized the same paradoxes, limitations, and irrationalities inherent in human nature. Niebuhr, said Chambers, had restored virility to Christianity and provided a social philosophy that swam against the currents of Faith in Man that dominated the western mind. 112 Chambers had even favorably contrasted Niebuhr to the liberals of the time: while liberals believed that “man is essentially good…because he is rational,” said Chambers, Niebuhr countered “that man is sinful and needs redemption.” To the easy optimism of liberalism, Niebuhr “was saying with every muscle of his being: No.” Niebuhr, said Chambers, reminded the world what liberal optimism had forgotten: man is by the nature of his creation sinful” and his life “is inevitably tragic.” Chambers would later state that the “Niebuhr essay was…in many ways…a statement of my own religious faith at the time” and discovering 111 Chambers, “The Devil,” 77-78. 112 Chambers, “Faith for a Lenten Age,” Time (8 Mar 1948): 70-72, 74-76, 79. Niebuhr would later write Chambers to congratulate him on the article and approve of its content, W 505-507. 113 Niebuhr was something of a second conversion for him. 113 Even when Niebuhr criticized Republicans, Chambers considered his remarks on target. 114 Yet even as Chambers proclaimed Niebuhr’s ideas the antidote to liberalism, these same ideas had themselves become liberalism. According to Schlesinger, The New Liberalism, as distinguished from the Old, “had discovered a new dimension of experience - the dimension of anxiety, guilt and corruption. (Or it may well be, as Reinhold Niebuhr has brilliantly suggested, that we were simply rediscovering ancient truths which we should never have forgotten).” 115 Indeed, Schlesinger credited Niebuhr with providing the New Liberalism with its most important insight, “that man was, indeed, imperfect, and that the corruptions of power could unleash great evil in the world.” The doctrines of postwar liberalism did not grow out of Faith in Man, as Chambers charged, but out of a recognition of human sinfulness. The causes of postwar liberalism came not from a trust in human goodness, but from recognition of human evil. Chambers’ attack on liberalism rang hollow because he assailed it for being the opposite of what it had become. 116 Thus, Chambers’ own outlook and that of postwar liberals had more in common than he ever acknowledged. Clearly, Chambers was not ignorant of 113 Clarence Pickett, “Chambers as Quaker,” Saturday Review (14 Jun 1952), 32; and W, 505-507. 114 Chambers to Buckley, 10 Mar 1957, in OF, 137. 115 Note that these are almost the exact words that Chambers used in the paragraph above, showing that Niebuhr exerted a comparable influence on both Schlesinger and Chambers. Chambers even used Niebuhr’s terms from time to time (referring to antagonists in fiction as “Children of Darkness,” for instance). See Chambers, “Big Sister is Watching,” NR (28 Dec 1957): 594-95. 116 Schlesinger, The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom [1949] (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1998), xxi, xxil. 114 Niebuhr’s importance to liberals, and yet he continued to attack their philosophy as defined by Faith in Man. He did so on the grounds that even if Niebuhrian rejection of Faith in Man had come to define liberalism, the political causes espoused by liberals proved that they still held the same Faith in Man views they always had, in spite of protestations to the contrary. For Chambers, the most prominent indicator of continued Faith in Man among liberals was their enduring support for the New Deal and further expansion of government control over the economy. Since it sought to remake the world by transferring power from business to government, said Chambers, the New Deal was by its nature a Faith in Man undertaking: its centralization of state power rested on an assumption of human malleability and government as a tool with which to remake society. The New Deal, he said, grew out of the materialism of the moderate left, which, in the end, was of the same nature as the materialism of the radical left. 117 Chambers also believed that many communists staffed New Deal agencies and thought this more than coincidental as well: Communists exploited liberal sympathy to their common philosophy by working through liberal institutions and recruiting in their circles. To Chambers, liberals might protest that they rejected “Faith in Man” but their support for the New Deal proved otherwise. 118 Beyond his rejection of their sincerity, Chambers, like Buckley, also understood that grouping liberals and Communists together had important polemical value: attacks on liberalism would, as always, unite and impassion the conservative movement. What could gain allies to 117 Chambers, “A Westminster Letter: To Temporize is Death,” NR (23 Nov 1957): 308-12. 118 Chambers to Ralph de Toledano, [undated] 1953, in NU, 102; and W, 380, 619-622. 115 the conservative cause more than the idea that liberals and communists were allies, even if they did not recognize it? But New Liberals rejected Chambers’ assumption. While he saw the New Deal as a manifestation of Faith in Man, Niebuhr saw the New Deal as precisely the opposite—the political product of a philosophy that rejected Faith in Man. For Chambers, Faith in Man was inevitably associated with an expansion of government power, but for Niebuhr, a rejection of Faith in Man would require that humans distrust all concentrations of power: business as well as government. By using the government to check the power of business, said Niebuhr, the New Deal had actually institutionalized a distrust of human intentions. Christian realism, not Faith in Man, led Niebuhr to wish to balance power between social realms, for the limited goodness of human nature required that power had to be checked against power. It was precisely because of human flaws that Niebuhr and Schlesinger advocated using government power to counterbalance that of business, not in spite of them. Both Chambers and his liberal counterparts could hold the same basic beliefs while also holding different opinions of the New Deal. Niebuhr’s position strengthened the case against Chambers, for it showed that faith alone could not explain political commitments. 119 But to Chambers, the New Deal not only implemented Faith in Man, it also constituted a revolution on the same order as the Russian revolution of 1917. The “deepest purpose” of the New Deal, according to Chambers, “was not simply reform 119 Reinhold Niebuhr, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness: A Vindication of Democracy and a Critique of its Traditional Defense (NY: Scribner’s, 1944). 116 within existing traditions, but a basic change in the social and power relationships within the nation.” It was a “social revolution,” but more insidious because New Dealers were revolutionists who only knew half what they were doing (unlike Communists). 120 A revolution like the New Deal was still a revolution, and “that the revolution was not complete was only of incidental interest,” since, in the end, “the two kinds of revolutionists [Bolsheviks and New Dealers] are one” 121 Schlesinger countered that, on the contrary, the New Deal was not a revolution, but had in fact prevented one. Since economic decay would lead the masses to accept radical political action, the emollient measures of the New Deal prevented the social unrest that may have led to revolution. To Schlesinger, Roosevelt’s economic program provided the answer to Communism by staving off revolution through pragmatic measures that minimized the effects of capitalist instability. While Chambers had seen Communism as a lethal dose of poison and the New Deal as the same poison administered by degrees, Schlesinger believed that the New Deal was the “middle way” antidote to Communism. 122 But beyond their support for the New Deal, Chambers also saw continued Faith in Man among liberals in their enthronement of science and celebration of modern life. Once again, however, the moving target of liberalism evaded 120 Chambers, “A Republican Looks at His Vote,” NR (22 Nov 1958): 328; Chambers, “A Westminster Letter: To Temporize is Death,” NR (23 Nov 1957): 308-12; W, 472, and 619-622; and CF, 13. 121 Chambers to Ralph de Toledano, [undated] 1953, NU, p. 102. “In the name of liberalism,” said Chambers, the socialist revolution had been “inching its icecaps over the nation for two decades” (W, 9). 122 Schlesinger, “Chambers and His Witness,” 39. 117 Chambers’ shot. Whatever faith in technology liberals had shown earlier in the century had given way to a more restrained and cautious view in the postwar years. Niebuhr lamented that “[American] culture is threatened from within by the preoccupation of our nation with technology.” The “spiritual crudities of a civilization preoccupied with technics,” he said, had degraded American culture and hardly represented an advance over those of “the pastoral and rustic crudities of frontier civilization.” Although Niebuhr was not as relentless as Chambers in his criticism of technological civilization, both men denied that the “same engineers who mastered ‘nature’” could achieve mastery over the social realm and solve the problems of the “vast historical drama” of humanity. 123 Science may have been able to make great strides in solving the problems of the physical world, but the human realm remained recalcitrant. So skeptical was liberal Granville Hicks of modern life that he shared Chambers’ language in referring to the modern era as one in which “man was treated as a machine, not as a human being.” He saw that the proliferation of technology had increasingly enmeshed humans in stultifying webs of technological interdependence. Like Chambers, Hicks even repudiated city life for a more rural environment that remained less infected by technology. 124 Chambers’ acknowledgement that Hicks’ review of Witness was “an intellectual and compassionate understanding quite beyond any other liberal’s who ha[d] dealt with 123 Reinhold Niebuhr, “Our Country & Our Culture: A Symposium,” PR (May-Jun 1952): 303. 124 Granville Hicks, “How We Live Now in America,” C (Dec 1953): 506, 510-512. 118 the subject” showed that he understood that liberalism had moved beyond a caricature that he nonetheless continued to promote. 125 Even Hannah Arendt, a liberal intellectual that Chambers openly despised, also demonstrated the skepticism of modernity shown by other postwar liberals. 126 While Witness had provided conservatives with their standard interpretation of totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism had done the same for the liberal viewpoint. Although a vocal critic of Chambers’ “dogmatism,” Arendt shared his view that the roots of totalitarianism could be traced to the dislocations of modern life. She believed that when old forms, parties, and classes broke down around the turn of the century, European mass man arose—lonely, isolated, atomized, and willing to submit to the totalitarian temptation. 127 Having been left without structure and traditional forms of identity, modern humans acquired an appetite for political organization as a way to find meaning; thus, Nazism and Bolshevism turned these structureless humans into mass humans of the total state. 128 In this sense, Arendt agreed with Chambers—the dislocations of modernity were at least partially responsible for the origins of totalitarianism. 125 Chambers, journal entry for 17 August 1953, in CF, 26. So pervasive had suspicions of technology become among liberals that Franz Borkenau had to write an article in C re-assuring his fellow liberals that civilization would survive its proliferation. Spengler and Toynbee (and their disciples like Chambers and Aldous Huxley) were overly pessimistic in seeing so many parallels between ancient civilizations that collapsed and our own, he said. Franz Borkenau, “Will Technology Destroy Civilization?,” C (Jan 1951): 20-26. Liberals held many of the same anti-technology views that Chambers did. 126 Chambers to Nora De Toledano, 19 Mar 1953, NU, 108-09. 127 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism [1951] (NY: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1966), 314. 128 Ibid., 311, 323. 119 Schlesinger shared Arendt’s jaundiced view of modernity. In his important Cold War book, The Vital Center, Schlesinger claimed that industrialism had given the world “incomparable economic achievement,” but had also left a “thin, deadly trail of anxiety.” Modern life, like a double-edged sword, provided humans with greater means and access to resources, but also caused monumental dislocations that left people without a sense of stability or order. Schlesinger believed that humans turned to totalitarianism as a way to escape this anxiety. Indeed, “the flight from anxiety,” he said, lay “at the bottom of the totalitarian appeal” for totalitarian forms of political organization promised a life of regiment and discipline in which anxiety would disappear. 129 For Schlesinger, as for Chambers and Arendt, totalitarianism was a product of modern life. The difference between postwar liberals and Chambers, then, lay not in disagreements over who was “pro” or “anti” science and modernity, but whether the costs of science would ultimately outweigh the benefits. Chambers saw totalitarianism as an outgrowth of humanist and rational thinking, but Philip Rahv observed that Communism had taken hold in countries like China and Russia populated by citizens “untrained in habits of social responsibility and unformed in the traditions of humanist and rational thought.” Chambers blamed Stalin’s crimes on “three centuries of enlightenment rationalism,” but did so without noting that the Russia that produced Stalin had less than one century of enlightenment rationalism behind it. In his historical theory, Russia and China should have both lagged behind 129 Schlesinger, Vital Center, 54-58, 243. 120 the more scientific West on the road to totalitarianism, and yet the opposite had occurred. To Chambers, humanism, born in the Renaissance, had been the first step in an historical journey that would overthrow God and lead to destruction, but Rahv saw humanism as the first step toward the widespread critical thinking that gave the West its best defense against tyranny. 130 While Chambers could argue with liberals about the possibility of living without faith, Chambers could not fairly charge liberals as those who celebrated modern life without restraint. As the ideas of these prominent intellectuals show, liberals generally believed that technology had to be restrained by humility and an appreciation for its limitations and dangers. Liberals had a greater trust in science and enlightenment thinking than Chambers, but the most important liberal voices still tempered this with a healthy suspicion and understanding that science had limits. Once again, Chambers had slung his rocks at a target that was no longer there. But his mischaracterizations of the liberal enemy did not change the influence his liberal-communist connection had on the Right. His fellow conservatives drew upon Chambers to show that liberalism and Communism were tied not just in a surface “statism” but in an underlying view of the world that put faith in man instead of God. Yet by equating liberalism and Communism, conservatism tied itself in conceptual knots. Those on the Right were caught with the paradox that, by viewing 130 Hicks, 62-65; and Rahv, 481. 121 both Communism and liberalism as forms of liberty-destroying statism, they had to destroy liberty in order to save it. 131 Tensions, misapplications, and contradictions like those mentioned above were probably inevitable in a theory that aspired to predict the fate of humanity and explain nothing less than the totality of world history, but the legacy of Chambers’ ideas for conservatism were important nonetheless. 132 The political views that grew out of this strange blend shaped conservative thinking and helped frame their approach to the Cold War. Chambers was more than a famous witness, and more than an able writer whose prose gained converts to anti-Communism, he was also a visionary who saw the scope of history as having a religious pattern and political implications. His faith-based theory gave a religious basis to conservative foreign policy and shaped the direction it would take, even as it entrenched an important logical contradiction at the heart of postwar conservative thought. 133 131 “As a libertarian,” Buckley feared “the kind of state that was needed to make apartheid work,” but did not fear the kind of power needed to root out domestic Communism (“South African Fortnight,” NR Jan 15, 63; p. 17-23. 132 Ironically, some conservatives have declared a rejection of historical determinism the essence of conservatism. “Burkean” conservatives see epistemological limitation and historical contingency as constituting the “conservative soul.” For a recent example of this view, see Andrew Sullivan, The Conservative Soul: How We Lost it, How to Get it Back (SF: HarperCollins, 2006). Among Chambers’ contemporaries, members of the Austrian School of economics opposed historical determinism (or “historicism” as they called it) most strongly. See Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (1957; NY: Routledge, 2004), 3. 133 Chambers’ theory looks particularly mistaken in the 21 st century as the West finds itself at war not with a “Godless” foe, but with groups whose very religion drives most of their animus towards the West. Would Chambers have taken the side of radical Islam in its war against the West because many of them hailed from pre-modern, god-centered societies? Probably not, and yet his theory would have allowed no other position. 122 Chapter 3 Anti-Relativism I: The Conservative Capture of Anti-Relativism In the postwar years, the two sides of American political debate began to rethink their ideological and even philosophical foundations. On one side, many liberals repudiated Deweyan philosophy for the Christian realism of Reinhold Niebuhr, while conservatives turned back to traditional metaphysical realism. My focus in this chapter is on those political conservatives who pushed their movement in an anti-modernist direction at this time by rejecting both Niebuhr’s tragic liberalism and Dewey’s sunnier liberalism for a return to the metaphysical truths they believed could be obtained through timeless natural law or time-tested tradition. They associated pragmatic experimentalism with the cultural disarray and political dissolution of the Weimar Republic, and believed that, in order to stand up to the new totalitarian threat posed by Communist Russia, society would have to reject the “relativism” that they attributed to liberalism. It is common to link conservatism with philosophical foundationalism in the current era and assume that that those who believe in eternal verities are natural conservatives, but as this chapter will show, this has not always been the case—the modern joining of anti-statism and philosophical foundationalism occurred in the 1950s. 1 Before World War II there was no intrinsic connection between cultural and 1 To refer to the anti-relativist position, I will variously use the terms “foundationalism,” “metaphysical realism,” or “absolutism.” These are terms that conservatives themselves used to describe a general belief in universal truths or values beyond the contingent, positivist findings of science. 123 political conservatism, but postwar conservatives broadened their movement beyond anti-statism to encompass an anti-modern cultural stance. This meant that conservative ideas had wider appeal, but it also created another contradiction: in asserting absolute truth, conservatives often rejected the free exchange of ideas as an appropriate method, leading them to support government suppression of certain “wrong” viewpoints and censorship of disreputable ideas, even as they continued to fight the state in the name of individual rights. As always, conservatives couched their views in oppositional terms. Finding it easier to attack relativism than to defend an alternative position, conservatives spent their energies pointing out liberal shortcomings. In particular, they assailed the doyen of pragmatists—John Dewey—as exemplar of the liberal mentality. Political conservatism aimed for a higher intellectual cachet through spokespersons like Buckley and Chambers, but resorted to superficial attacks on liberals as amoral relativists whose ideas were responsible for genocide and war. Buckley believed that the liberal concern with method showed a lack of attention to the ends to which that method should be put. They promoted a philosophical belief in the “ephemerality” of truth derived from agnosticism. 2 For Buckley and conservatives, liberalism, relativism, and godlessness were all related. The relativism implicit in liberal doctrine, added Russell Kirk, made it a continuation of Jacobinism and other destructive persuasions. Although conservatives at times attempted to define their movement in positive terms using the language of universal truth, they lapsed into 2 Buckley, Up from Liberalism, 5, 24, 98-106, 111-16, and 152. 124 default denunciations of liberal relativism and largely failed in this pursuit. 3 They did, however, succeed in attracting many to their political movement—religious adherents of all stripes fled “relativistic” liberalism for what they perceived as the more truth-friendly conservatism. 4 Until the 1940s, it was possible for political liberals to agree with a critique of pragmatism, which some like philosopher Mortimer Adler and University of Chicago president Robert Maynard Hutchins thought promoted nihilism and totalitarianism. Likewise, until the 1940s it was possible for political conservatives to reject anti-modernist calls for a return to metaphysical realism. But with the religious turn in conservatism in the 1950s it became increasingly hard to find a philosophically pragmatic political conservative or a philosophically foundationalist political liberal. Only in the rise of the religiously based conservative movement in the postwar years did cultural and political conservatism come into close alignment. 5 Asserting a new religious identity, conservatives trumpeted their distaste for philosophical relativism along with their hatred for overweening state power. As always, Buckley led the charge to define conservatism in terms of “enduring truths.” In his most notable attempt to sum up the meaning of conservatism, Buckley would claim that “Professor [Richard] Weaver’s definition of 3 Kirk, “Burke at Work,” NR (18 Dec 1962): 477. 4 George M. Marsden, “Afterword: Religion, Politics, and the Search for an American Consensus,” in Noll, ed., 387. 5 Cultural conservatism as I use the term here, stood for a disposition to cling to the certainties of the past in all realms of life: moral, aesthetic, literary, educational, religious, etc. Conservatives wanted a return to timeless, metaphysical absolutes and a pre-modern philosophical sensibility (adherence to the “permanent things,” in the words of Russell Kirk) that put tradition ahead of inquiry. 125 conservatism as ‘a paradigm of essences towards which the phenomenology of the world is in continuing approximation,’” was “as noble and ingenious an effort” as any he had ever seen. 6 Liberals, on the other hand, were to Buckley less anchored than the conservative in what we like to think of as ‘central and fixed’ ideas having to do with liberty, order, and transcendence. The liberal fancies himself more empirical and less tied down to orthodoxy. To Buckley and other conservatives, those who rejected timeless truths were “relativists,” and relativism was now another evil (like state power) that conservatives opposed. 7 Before 1945, on the other hand, political conservatives held 19 th -century individualist economic ideas, but usually rejected metaphysical realism. Indeed, the most influential economic conservatives of the time (e.g. Friedrich Hayek, H.L. Mencken, and Ludwig Von Mises), adhered to philosophical views similar to Dewey’s. For Dewey, knowledge did not imply the possession of timeless principles; rather, knowledge was contingent, fallible, and tied to problem solving— conceived broadly as the practice of inquiry to resolve problems confronted in any domain, whether scientific, religious, or aesthetic. Likewise, Roosevelt critic H.L. Mencken, a self-proclaimed Nietzschean, scoffed at the idea of eternal truths while the philosophy of the Austrian school economists, with its emphasis on 6 Buckley, “Notes Toward an Empirical Definition of Conservatism,” 10 Oct 1963, in Buckley, The Jeweler’s Eye: A Book of Irresistible Political Reflections (NY: Putnam’s, 1969), 11; and Buckley, introduction to Did you Ever See a Dream Walking: Conservative Thought in 20 th century America (NY: Bobbs Merrill, 1970), xvii. 7 Buckley was asked what it meant to be a conservative in 2002. He replied “allegiance to founding ideals and rejection of the relativism seen on the other side.” C-Span interview with Buckley for “Russell Kirk and William F. Buckley; The Conservative Mind and God and Man at Yale,” C-Span American Writers Series, 30 Jun 2002; and Buckley, “For Dr. Kilpatrick, on his 85 th ,” NR (1 Dec 1956): 7. 126 epistemological contingency and the importance of testing ideas by their practical consequences (as seen in Mises’s “praxiology”), had much in common with Dewey’s instrumentalism. Journalist Walter Lippmann similarly based his 1937 critique of the New Deal on the inevitable limits to knowledge that prevented effective economic planning. 8 Each of these economic conservatives, not coincidentally, was religiously agnostic. If anything, before 1945 the conservative philosophical tradition had tended in the direction of philosophical fallibilism. Burke himself relied on tradition and longstanding institutions precisely because of his distrust of the ability of human reason to apprehend the kind of eternal truths that the French revolutionaries claimed to promote. Hence, the brand of anti-statism that I label “Burkean” demanded a limitation of state growth precisely because of a focus on epistemological uncertainty. Lest we conclude that pragmatism (a culturally liberal stance) leads inevitably to liberal politics, one must remember that two major European theorists of epistemological fallibilism—Karl Popper and Michael Oakeshott—as well as later American thinkers (such as W.V.O. Quine, Richard Posner, and Andrew Sullivan) would embrace conservative economic positions precisely because of their fallibilist epistemology. Meanwhile, some political liberals before 1945 rejected the pragmatism of John Dewey as politically dangerous. University of Chicago philosopher Mortimer 8 Walter Lippmann, An Inquiry into the Principles of The Good Society (Boston: Little, Brown, & Co., 1937). Lippmann, however, would later revise his position and accept a form of metaphysical realism in his book The Public Philosophy (Boston: Little, Brown, 1955). 127 Adler, who shared Dewey’s vision of economic and political democracy, 9 also denounced the cultural liberalism of the modern professoriate. The positivism of the professors, said Adler, had corrupted modern culture by rejecting the metaphysical truths that told humans what ends to pursue and how they should order society. Against this “cultural disease,” Adler called for a re-enthronement of metaphysics “as the supreme subject matter in the domain of natural knowledge.” Positivism, he said, posed a more serious threat to democracy than did the “nihilism of Hitler” and only a return to the pre-modern philosophy that placed metaphysics above science could prevent further cultural corruptions. 10 He was joined in his denunciation of cultural relativism by other politically-liberal neo-Thomists, such as University of Chicago President Robert Maynard Hutchins and philosopher Jacques Maritain. 11 The distinction between political and cultural liberalism becomes important here. While Adler and Hutchins unquestionably shared the liberal goals of the New Dealers, they hesitated to use the term “liberal” to describe themselves because their 9 Mortimer Adler interview with Mike Wallace, American Broadcasting Company, 1958, Fund for the Republic, The Mortimer J. Adler archive available from Radical Academy website. In this same interview, Adler even expressed his disgust for the conservative movement: “I regard that right wing as the most reactionary and subversive force of good government you could have in this country. That right wing would want to restore us to the kind of primitive, unjust, laissez-faire capitalism -- the kind of robber-baron capitalism of each man for himself, devil take the hindmost -- which does not conform to the idea of political liberty in the good life, in the good society.” This, he said, stood in contrast to his own belief that a “free and classless society…could be brought about by economic and political democracy.” 10 Adler, “God and the Professors,” Vital Speeches of the Day (1 Dec 1940): 100-102. 11 Other liberal thinkers, such as Lewis Mumford and Waldo Frank, also criticized pragmatism, but not from the philosophically foundationalist point of view that Hutchins, Adler, and Maritain did. Instead, they criticized Deweyan pragmatism on the grounds that it stifled imagination and failed to account for the tragic aspect of existence. Their critique of pragmatism resembled more that of Niebuhr than Adler. Lewis Mumford, “The Corruption of Liberalism,” TNR (29 Apr 1940): 568-73; Waldo Frank, “Our Guilt in Fascism,” TNR (18 May 1940): 603-8; Sidney Hook, “The Failure of the Left,” PR (May-Jun 1943): 166. 128 cultural outlook differed so dramatically from Dewey’s (whom they considered the leading cultural liberal). Adler, for instance, attacked “liberals” for their relativism in cultural matters, even as he shared their political goals of expanded state action in the economy. Likewise, Hutchins was often attacked as a “conservative” in education since he rejected Dewey’s experience-centered method for a more content- based Great Books approach, but in political matters he adhered to the liberal consensus, even becoming infamous in conservative circles for his dramatic assertion that that under senator McCarthy’s reign of terror, it had become dangerous to contribute money to Harvard University and that University professors were “silenced by the general atmosphere of repression.” 12 Buckley, even though he later considered Hutchins an ally in their common views on education, attacked him consistently as a member of the “liberal establishment” in political matters. 13 Like Adler and Hutchins, Maritain also hoped for further economic reforms and expanded democracy, but believed that such required the “spiritual energies” of the Judeo- Christian religious tradition and its natural law teachings. 14 Unlike in later years, cultural and political conservatism were, at this time, distinct from one another. Thus, the early 1940s debate over relativism was largely an internecine battle among political liberals. Even while sharing political goals, liberals differed as to 12 Hutchins, “Are Our Teachers Afraid to Teach?” Look (9 Mar 1954): 28; and Hutchins, “Freedom of the University,” Ethics (Jan 1951): 95. 13 Buckley, Up From Liberalism (1959; NY: Bantam, 1968), xxv, 19, 60. Buckley even dedicated an episode of Firing Line to Hutchins entitled “Re-evaluating a Famous Liberal” in which he applauded Hutchins’ educational methods, but disputed his politics (broadcast November 3, 1989, Program S0832, HI). 14 Jacques Maritain, “Religion and the Intellectuals III,” PR (Apr 1950): 324. 129 whether or not moral absolutes were necessary for their attainment. Adler, Hutchins, and Maritain believed that the natural laws of the Thomistic tradition gave the moral certainty necessary for expanded Democracy, while Dewey believed that this same goal was best served through an instrumentalist conception of the common good. In this sense, the major players involved in the prewar debate over the validity of timeless truth were political liberals in good standing. The liberal criticism of relativism before 1945 gave way to conservative criticism after the war. Those on the Right began to charge liberals with “relativism” even as they continued their charges of “collectivism,” “socialism,” and “statism.” 15 A number of important conservative thinkers helped bring about this union of conservative politics and anti-relativism. Among the most prominent was University of Chicago philosopher Richard Weaver whose book Ideas Have Consequences became a classic of conservative thought. Like Adler and Chambers, Weaver saw the medieval era as superior to the modern since it was not yet infected with relativistic thinking. In the early Middle Ages, he said, western humans held metaphysical certainties that gave order and meaning to existence, but, beginning with the nominalism of William of Occam, many began to believe that essences, categories, and ideas had no reality outside of their use in language. 16 Occam's 15 While George Nash focuses on conservative “traditionalism,” the impulse he described went beyond just adherence to tradition; rather, it was rather a general opposition to the liberal method that denied timeless truth. When conservatives spoke of conserving tradition, they usually referred to the “permanent things”—the metaphysical certainties—that traditions delivered. George Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement In America, Since 1945 (NY: Basic Books, 1976), 57-83. 16 Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1948), v. That liberals and socialists endorsed and applauded Weaver’s book, underscores the degree to which metaphysical certainty had not yet established its association with conservative politics. See, for instance, W.A. Orton, review, C (May 14 1948): 119. Also see the praise given by Paul Tillich and Reinhold 130 nominalism had led man to reject metaphysics in favor of a purely materialistic view of the world and in so doing had paved the way for the abolition of the metaphysical foundation for morals. With his claim that concepts were mere words with no independent existence, only utilitarian value, Occam paved the way for later positivists, and pragmatists who recognized no reality outside of the experiential realm. The embrace of nominalism was thus an abandonment of a belief in an independent, transcendental, and objective moral order. 17 Unfortunately, said Weaver, the nominalist thinking of Occam had come to fully saturate modern life. The relativist belief that man is the measure of all things was responsible for the atrocities that humanity had witnessed in the last decade. Indeed, said Weaver, he had written Ideas Have Consequences “out of concern for the millions over the earth, in bread lines, in bombed homes, in prison camps, whose sufferings, material and spiritual, are traceable to the kind of pragmatism” that dominated western intellectual life. 18 Once modern humans gave up the idea of transcendent truth, said Weaver, nothing was justified that did not “serve convenience,” and there remained no “court of appeal against subversion by pragmatism.” 19 The salvation of Western society depended upon the reversal of this Niebuhr that appears on the dustjacket of the 1959 edition. At the time of the book’s release, there was nothing politically conservative about what Weaver had written, but shortly he would become a household name in Goldwater conservative circles. Before his death in 1963, Weaver was a central player in the movement, frequently writing pieces for National Review and Modern Age, and lecturing to conservative gatherings sponsored by the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists and Young Americans for Freedom. 17 Weaver, Ideas, 2-5. 18 Richard Weaver, Letter to the Editor, New York Times (21 Mar 1948): 29. 19 Weaver, Ideas, 35-40. 131 trend and to conservatives fell the task of combating modern relativism by asserting ontological realism. Only by restoring belief in transcendence, said Weaver, could western peoples survive the present crisis and avert further catastrophes. Like Adler, Weaver also tied his metaphysics to supernatural religion, declaring that the “realist” tradition with which he had taken his stand was also a Christian tradition. 20 Although the decline in metaphysics was responsible for the decline in morals, said Weaver, the decline of metaphysics had followed the decline of religious belief. Since faith led one to the contemplation of higher, spiritual concepts and ideals that existed above the flux of material existence, metaphysical thinking was necessarily religious thinking. Without religion, there could be no transcendence, said Weaver, and without transcendence, there could be no ontological realism; thus, ethics depended upon aligning one’s behavior with the natural law that existed independent of humans and this required recognition of the source of that law—God himself. His advocacy of a return to metaphysics was, at bottom, advocacy of a return to supernatural religion. 21 Although the term “supernatural religion” might seem redundant, Dewey himself made a distinction between “natural” and “supernatural” religion. Dewey 20 Ibid. 21 Reviewers of Ideas Have Consequences explicitly noted that Weaver was calling for a return to God, and that this his views approximated those of the earlier anti-relativists, Adler and Hutchins. J.O. Hertzler spoke of Weaver’s continual resort to “Hutchinesque” and “Adleresque” cliches and assumptions, and the nostalgia for and flight to the ideas and “conditions” of the Middle Ages. Hertzler, review of Ideas Have Consequences, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (July 1948): 144; W. E. Garrison, review of Ideas Have Consequences, The Christian Century (May 5 1948): 415; and Howard Mumford Jones, “Listing Mankind’s ‘Wrong Turnings,’” The New York Times (22 Feb 1948): 4. 132 never rejected the value of religion and religious experience, only the supernaturalism that many religious thinkers associated with it. The disagreement between foundationalists and pragmatists often seemed like a religious disagreement, but from Dewey’s point of view, supernaturalism, not religion, created the problem. For Dewey it was possible (and desirable) for humans to adhere to natural religion (an ideal he tried to promote in his book A Common Faith) that recognized the power, validity, and value of religious experience, but rejected a supernatural basis for those religious experiences. Like Weaver, German émigré philosopher Leo Strauss also became a conservative hero, even though his writings were concerned exclusively with philosophical questions and said nothing of the limited-government core of conservatism. His attack on “historicism” and other outlooks that denied natural right (put forward by modern philosophers like Locke, Hobbes, and Machiavelli— the fathers of liberalism) energized conservatives against liberal “relativism” as much as Hayek had energized them against liberal “statism.” His most important anti-relativist book, Natural Right and History, became a conservative classic, despite the fact that it contained not a word about the political concerns of 1950s conservatives. 22 In later years, disciples of Strauss, such as Allan Bloom, would gain fame and esteem among conservatives, not by engaging political issues, but by continuing their assault on cultural liberalism. 23 Clearly, a shift had occurred on the 22 Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1953). 23 Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (NY: Simon & Schuster, 1987). 133 Right as conservatives now considered universal truth a movement cause as much as limited government. Eliseo Vivas, another philosopher who brought metaphysical realism to conservatism, attacked John Dewey more directly than either Weaver or Strauss. In The Moral and the Ethical Life, 24 Vivas dedicated almost half of the book to arguing that Dewey’s relativism had tragic implications for any society that embraced it. Like Weaver, Vivas believed that, to be authoritative, moral values had to have an “ontic” status as independent of human life and that, in turn, ontic values were guaranteed by Divinity. “Values are real and antecedent to our discovery of them,” but the “secularistic direction of the Zeitgeist” threatened these values. Earlier in life, Vivas had himself adhered to Deweyan pragmatism believing that it served to diminish intellectual provincialism and national hubris, but he had later come to believe that pragmatism posed greater problems than it solved. Pragmatism, he said, implied that there were no rational standards with which to judge one action as better than another. Dewey—the quintessential modern nominalist—in promoting these vicious amoral doctrines, was guilty of “monstrous nonsense,” for, whether he knew it or not, he “advocated the destruction of all the values that [were] basically constitutive of our civilization.” As a former Deweyite himself, Vivas turned against the instrumentalist philosopher with the distinctive vehemence of an apostate and even used the term “crypto-fascist” to describe his quondam mentor. 25 For Vivas, the pragmatist rejection of eternal values paved the way for nihilistic movements like 24 Vivas, The Moral and the Ethical Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950). 25 Ibid. viii-ix. 134 Nazism to take root. Vivas took these views into the conservative movement where colleagues often turned to him when looking for ammunition against pragmatism. 26 Dewey, near death when Vivas’ book was released, never personally responded to his attack, but his disciple Sidney Hook did. 27 Unlike Dewey, Hook avoided the word “absolutist” when referring to those absorbed with “eternal values,” but shared Dewey’s belief that the mindset that sought truths beyond the realm of empirical verification was potentially authoritarian. According to Hook, since Vivas saw pragmatism as a set of “anti-human and barbaric” doctrines, his unspoken implication is “that those who profess them should be purged.” Although the political persuasion of the “Platonists” may have changed—he was dealing with political conservatives now instead of reformers like Adler—Hook’s reply remained the same: doctrinaire thinking gave rise to totalitarian behavior and the dogmatism implicit in Vivas’ metaphysical certainty would lead inevitably to authoritarian politics. 28 But Hook, like Weaver and Vivas, also associated metaphysical realism with religious belief. One could not separate religious faith from the need for infallibility, said Hook, 29 and the absolutist call for a return to a medieval worldview (religious 26 See, for instance, Russell Kirk, “John Dewey Pragmatically Tested,” NR (21 Jun 1958): 12; and Nash, 47-8. 27 Not coincidentally, Hook had earlier come to the defense of pragmatism when it was under attack from Adler and he now saw Vivas’ attack as “reminiscent of the line taken by Mortimer Adler” ten years before. Sidney Hook, “A Case Study in Anti-Secularism,” PR (Mar-Apr 1951): 233. 28 Ibid.; and Hook, “The Failure of the Left,” PR (May-Jun 1943): 167. John Dewey, “Anti- Naturalism in Extremis,” PR (Jan-Feb 1943): 36. 29 Hook, “The New Failure of Nerve I,” PR (Jan-Feb 1943): 2. For a retrospective on his earlier debate, see Sidney Hook, “Religion and the Intellectuals II,” PR (Mar 1950): 229. 135 and Platonic) also demanded a return to the medieval political order, complete with inquisitions and the burning of heretics. Religion inevitably accompanied dogmatism, said Hook, and dogmatism led to the suppression of “wrong” (alternative) viewpoints. The theist claimed nothing less than the authority of an invisible, unverifiable supreme being to ensure that they were “absolutely right” in their convictions. Who was more likely to tolerate other viewpoints: the secular pragmatist who wanted to settle questions through democratic inquiry and open dialogue, or the dogmatic believer who knew the will of God with certainty? Thus, Dewey and Hook affirmed that supernaturalism, not science, had been “the source of violent conflict, and destructive of basic human values.” 30 Although his critics blamed his pragmatic naturalism for social problems, Dewey believed that these same problems were the product of anti-naturalistic thinking. All “dogmatic absolutists,” he said, had to ask themselves who was to decide the absolutes to which humans would adhere. Supernaturalists turned to the authority of an omniscient God. 31 The person in possession of absolute truth from such an authority would naturally attempt to impose that truth on others, thus contravening the democracy, openness, and pluralism upon which social advance depended. 32 Weaver and Vivas had indeed denounced relativism, but had not 30 Sidney Hook, “The New Medievalism” TNR (28 Oct 1940): 604-06; Hook, “New failure,” 5; John Dewey, “Religion and the Intellectuals,” 133; and Hook, “A Case Study in Anti-Secularism,” PR (Mar-Apr 1951): 233. 31 Dewey, “Anti-Naturalism,” 37. 32 Ibid., 36; and Edward A. Purcell, Jr., The Crisis of Democratic Theory: Scientific Naturalism and the Problem of Value (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1973), 219-223. For a discussion of the degree of conversion among postwar intellectuals and the new seriousness with which religion 136 provided a means of deciding which infallible truths were to replace Dewey’s naturalist experimentalism. In his own attacks on relativism, Buckley followed Weaver and Vivas by emphasizing the principle of metaphysical certainty and tying it to religious belief. Like others, Buckley set up John Dewey as the arch-villain who best represented the pernicious trends towards “atheistic relativism” in academe and society at large: “the teachings of John Dewey and his predecessors have born fruit,” he said, “and there is surely not a department at Yale that is uncontaminated with the absolute that there are no absolutes, no intrinsic rights, no ultimate truths.” 33 Buckley also consciously allied himself with previous anti-relativists, in spite of his disagreement with their politics, declaring that America needed more intellectuals like Jacques Maritain to combat those like John Dewey, for Dewey’s world was one in which humans would have no ground on which to prefer one moral choice to another. Like Vivas and Weaver, Buckley saw Dewey’s relativism as the source of totalitarianism and “a monument to the ravages of the first 50 years of this century.” 34 But Buckley’s criticisms revealed more about his own lack of familiarity with Dewey’s writings than the actual implications of pragmatism. While Buckley saw pragmatism as an “anything goes” philosophy that provided no moral insight, in was treated, see the four part symposium “Religion and the Intellectuals,” that appeared in the February, March, April, and May-June, 1951 issues of Partisan Review. 33 Buckley, God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of ‘Academic Freedom’ (1951; D.C.: Regnery, 1986), 25. 34 Ibid., 160; and William F. Buckley, Jr., George Rice, Jr., Robert Dubois, and Bob Gordon; Radio Panel, “On Academic Freedom and Other Topics,” Crossexam, recorded in early 1960s (exact date uncertain). Available at Intercollegiate Studies Institute lecture library website. 137 actuality, moral concerns were at the center of Dewey’s entire project. Indeed, one can read his whole corpus of writings as an attempt to put morals on a scientific ground and promote a naturalist ethics for broad social application. Dewey’s critics assumed that science could never provide moral knowledge, but Dewey disagreed and sought to base social life on experimentalism. The scientific method, he argued, guided the community in evaluating the most worthy solutions to best serve tangible human purposes. Values, said Dewey, only exist in the context of human concern and, since one could test the value of an ethical proposition experimentally by observing its success in fulfilling human desires, ethics could be as scientific as any other field. While Dewey’s critics charged that his theories “led inevitably to justifying government by brute force and to denying all those rights and freedoms which we term inalienable,” Dewey asserted that his naturalism “finds the values in question, the worth and dignity of men and women, founded in human nature itself, in the connections, actual and potential, of human beings with one another in their natural social relationships.” 35 In ignoring Dewey’s considerable attention to ethics, critics had erred in confusing his dismissal of absolute morals with a dismissal of morality itself. While these critics demanded that morals have an independent “ontic” status, Dewey and Hook maintained that all values existed in the context of the experience of sentient organisms. To Dewey, the “absolutist” need for morals to be “eternal and immutable” was an unjustified and “childish” obsession. 36 Why, Dewey asked, 35 Dewey, “Anti-Naturalism,” 28, 32. 138 should morals be timeless, unchangeable, and universally applicable in order to be valid? By making a metaphysical case for what “ought to be,” absolutists had failed to realize that “ought” is dependent on actual conditions—the needs of the situation and the actual problems that need solving. Since “timeless absolutes,” could have no bearing on the needs of the situation at hand, humans had to settle value conflicts as they actually arose rather than ascribing universal status to them. 37 Vivas had attacked Dewey for being unable to give a reason “that goes beyond expedience,” why he preferred democracy to totalitarianism, but to Dewey the justification for democracy was found within, not outside, the realm of human concern. Morality was futile if not framed with regard to actual conditions. While absolutists ignored human needs in favor of a concern for metaphysical truths when it came to ethics, said Dewey, values determined through experiment should guide human action. 38 But Buckley charged pragmatism more specifically with failing to distinguish between means and ends. 39 He often said that liberalism 40 had method but no 36 Sidney Hook, “A Case Study in Anti-Secularism.” PR (Mar-Apr 1951): 232-45. 37 Dewey, “Anti-Naturalism,” 36-7. Dewey generally referred to those who attacked him as “anti- naturalists,” but often called them “absolutists” as well. If “relativism” had become the favored epithet conservatives applied to liberals, then “absolutism” became the favored epithet liberals applied to conservatives. 38 Quoted in Nash, 48. 39 This contention, of course, was an old one and had been most famously articulated by cultural critic Randolph Bourne, who saw Dewey’s support of World War I as a consequence of this fatal flaw in pragmatic thinking. Dewey’s disciples, said Bourne, “are making themselves efficient instruments of the war-technique, accepting with little question the ends as announced from above.” Dewey’s philosophy may have provided the means of “intelligent control,” but lacked the “poetic vision” necessary to appropriate ends. Values, in Dewey, were subordinated to technique. Randolph Bourne, “Twilight of the Idols,” (1917) in David Hollinger and Charles Capper, eds., The American Intellectual Tradition, Vol II: 1865 to the Present, 3 rd ed. (NY: Oxford UP, 1997), 181-88. 139 ultimate substance, direction, or final goal towards which to strive. Since liberals extended pragmatic philosophy into the political realm, he said, their ideal state would be one in which voting and dissenting were the only politically-desirable ends. Method without ends was meaningless, said Buckley, and liberalism, as a methodological approach to politics, could provide insight into “how” best to do something, but could not give insight as to “what” should be done or why. While liberalism had once been informed by a “healthy American pragmatism,” it had now “deteriorated into a wayward relativism.” 41 He did not explain why, in his view, pragmatism had once been “healthy,” a thought that ran counter to all of his writing on the subject. That ill-fitting adjective discloses a good deal about Buckley’s style of thought—journalistic, quick-hitting, polemical, but not scholarly or deliberative. Buckley’s attack was an old one and Dewey had responded to such criticisms by maintaining that naturalism could provide the ends towards which humans should strive. Humans, said Dewey, frame concrete, practical goals—ends in view—and the highest end in view was the human experience of growth. Growth was the end that transcended a particular situation and was achieved through the democratic way of life in which persons would find self-realization in communal action and participation. The ethical end of democracy preceded the process of evaluation and experimentation, for democracy was itself the social method by which communities 40 In his polemical quest to capture anti-relativism for conservatives, Buckley had, by the late 1950s, begun to use the terms “liberalism” and “pragmatism” interchangeably. 41 Buckley, Up From Liberalism (1959; NY: Bantam, 1968), 134, 168; and Buckley, “On Academic Freedom and Other Topics.” 140 determined their values. Since democracy, in its openness, participation, and communal nature, was the form of social organization corresponding to the method of scientific inquiry, the rejection of democratic ends was no more justified than the rejection of the scientific method. While Buckley charged pragmatism with a moral relativism that could not condemn genocide, slavery, murder, etc., Dewey argued that in his schema such things were unthinkable as the democratic way of life presupposed a respect for the freedom of individuals to choose to grow as they saw fit. Indeed, so strong was Dewey’s commitment to moral ends that he criticized the New Deal as insufficiently devoted to the democratic ends of society. Its haphazard policy-making was not “pragmatic,” because it had no working hypothesis through which to better attain the democratic goal towards which it strove. 42 Buckley and other conservatives failed to engage this basic fact of Dewey’s philosophy and, once again, revealed their tendency to polemicize rather than engage adversaries. Instead of turning to inquiry and human need to determine values, Buckley claimed that humans should turn to tradition. Conservatives, said Buckley, “make a critical assumption, which is that those truths that have already been apprehended are more important to cultivate than those undisclosed ones” that liberals sought. 43 Conservatism was, he said, 42 Robert Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991), 441. 43 Buckley, Up From Liberalism, 133. 141 the tacit acknowledgement that all that is finally important in human experience is behind us; that the crucial explorations have been undertaken, and that it is given to man to know what are the real truths that emerged from them. Whatever is to come cannot outweigh the importance to man of what has gone on before. Liberalism, on the other hand, said Buckley, “denies metaphysics and relies primarily on positivism and pragmatism” for its “truths,” thus making important “not the truths themselves, but the blasted search for them!” 44 Buckley understood that, for Dewey, democracy was tied to epistemological method, but believed that a democratic approach to truth only established truth by consensus. It created a competition between ideas in which whatever idea a given group “voted” for was deemed true. “Democracy,” he said, “is the lubricant of relativism” and to the degree that relativism meant leaving truth open to revision, Dewey would not have disagreed. However, Buckley continued, Democracy (like the United Nations) is a procedure, not a policy; yet in it all the hopes of an intellectual era were vested. Many intellectuals tended to look upon democracy as an extension of the scientific method, as the scientific method applied to social problems. In an age of relativism, one tends to look for flexible devices for measuring this morning’s truth. Such a device is democracy; and indeed, democracy becomes epistemology. 45 Unlike the liberals who remained mired in the contingency of knowledge, said Buckley, “people should become more certain about the purposes of human existence so that they should cease to be explained purely in the methodological terms which liberalism of course relies upon exclusively.” 46 While the 44 Ibid., 132. 45 Buckley, “The Breakdown of Intellectuals in Public Affairs,” in George B. de Huszar, ed., The Intellectuals: A Controversial Portrait (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1960), 495 46 Ibid., 133; and Buckley, “On Academic Freedom and Other Topics.” 142 liberal/pragmatist looked forward to future consequences for guidance, the conservative looked back to the discoveries of the past; the “settled truths” that were no longer open to debate. Absolute truths discovered in the past took precedence, in Buckley’s mind, over the contingent truths of the future. It was understandable that Buckley would focus his energies on the weaknesses of “liberal relativism” since his own alternative was highly inadequate. Buckley’s traditionalist epistemology only left open the question, “which traditions?” Tradition itself could not constitute a valid epistemology for traditions were many and often contradictory. Buckley never presented a case for tradition qua tradition as a source of authority and left unanswered the questions of which truths were settled, why they were settled, and who settled them. Adler believed that the “Great Books” of the Western tradition contained the timeless truths that society should build upon, yet the books on his list contained ideas that flatly contradicted one another. For instance, in Adler’s canon, one finds the works of both Adam Smith and Karl Marx, both Kierkegaard and Hegel, and both Rousseau and Burke. Which among these contradictory thinkers provided the “discovered truths” that the Western world ought to embrace? As Adler’s own Great Books show, the discoveries of the past were hardly as settled as Buckley claimed. The Great Books provided readers with a variety of perspectives that great thinkers of the past had grappled with, not a body of settled truths. While Buckley, Weaver, and Vivas succeeded in making appealing charges against pragmatism as a method, they failed to provide a substantive argument for an alternative. Seeking absolutes in tradition seemed to leave at least as many unanswered questions as did pragmatism. 143 Even more damning for Buckley, some of his views substantiated the consistent pragmatist charge that “absolutism” led logically to the political enforcement of an established orthodoxy. From the time of his appearance in public life with God and Man at Yale, critics denounced Buckley’s ideas as “authoritarian” and even “fascistic.” According to Frank D. Ashburn, Buckley’s politics demanded a “return to authoritarianism” while the young Yale graduate’s ideological kin were Dr. Goebbels and the hooded Klansmen of the South. Buckley’s “notion of freedom is the right to do what he approves” said Robert Hatch in the New Republic, and his ideas, like those of other absolutists would lead inevitably to the political enforcement of truth. Another critic of Buckley, Selden Rodman, claimed that absolutism and free speech were inversely correlated, and, since Buckley believed in absolutes, he necessarily opposed free speech. 47 But while these charges were unsubstantiated when leveled against Weaver or Vivas, in Buckley’s case, these charges were somewhat justified. Buckley concluded that it was a superstition to believe “that the free exchange of opposite ideas midwives the truth.” 48 Under the influence of his mentor at Yale, Willmoore Kendall, Buckley came to believe that the open society, most famously associated 47 Frank D. Ashburn, “Isms and the university: Two Reviews of God and Man at Yale,” Saturday Review (15 Dec 1951): 45; Robert Hatch, “Enforcing Truth,” TNR (3 Dec 1951): 19; and Selden Rodman, “’Isms’ & the University,” Saturday Review of Literature (15 Dec 1951): 18. Some of those, like McGeorge Bundy, showed the ambiguity of their own commitment to pragmatism as they attacked Buckley’s absolutism even while declaring his views “absolutely wrong.” McGeorge Bundy, “The Attack on Yale,” The Atlantic (Nov 1951): 51. 48 Buckley, “Remarks on a Fifth anniversary,” 1 Jan 1960, in Buckley, Rumbles Left and Right: A Book About Troublesome People and Ideas (NY: Putnam’s, 1963), 86. The free exchange of ideas, says Buckley, “does not yield truth or edification.” 144 with John Stuart Mill, was unsustainable and that there should be a limit to acceptable speech and opinion. Willmoore Kendall has now become a legendary figure in the story of early conservatism. 49 Universally regarded as brilliant, 50 the child-prodigy Kendall entered college at age 13, graduated four years later, and then attended Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. After returning from England, Kendall completed a Ph.D. in political philosophy at the University of Illinois after which he worked in government intelligence during the war. He accepted a professorship at Yale in 1947 and published groundbreaking works on democratic majoritarianism, John Locke’s theories, and the role of virtue in political order. 51 Kendall’s philosophy was most notable for its rejection of the entire “rights” tradition that was so central to American political discourse, including those rights cherished by the Left (free speech) and the Right (private property). Instead of a politics devoted to preserving rights, Kendall proposed a politics devoted to enforcing the unobstructed will of the majority. In his doctoral dissertation and most 49 Jeffrey Hart and Priscilla Buckley both dedicate entire chapters of their memoirs to Kendall and his eccentric personality. See Jeffrey Hart, The Making of the American Conservative Mind: National Review and its Times (Wilmington: ISI Press, 2005); and Priscilla Buckley, Living it Up With National Review: A Memoir (Dallas: Spence Publishing Co., 2005). 50 He was so regarded by liberals as well as conservatives. His work, according to political scientist Eugene Forsey, was “highly important,” perhaps even “revolutionary,” and constituted a “major contribution to the history of democratic political theory.” See Eugene Forsey, review of Willmoore Kendall’s John Locke and the Doctrine of Majority Rule, The American Journal of Sociology (Jun 1942): 136-37. 51 Kendall may best be remembered for his “cantankerous streak” that destroyed his most cherished friendships. “One by one,” wrote one of his conservative confreres, Kendall “stopped speaking to his colleagues”—this applied, obviously, to his associates at Yale with whom he disagreed on nearly everything political, but also to his conservative allies who rejected one or more of his idiosyncratic positions. See Priscilla Buckley, 17; and Jeffrey Hart, “The ‘Deliberate Sense’ of Willmoore Kendall,” The New Criterion (Mar 2002): 76-82. 145 well-known book, John Locke and the Doctrine of Majority Rule, Kendall turned the English philosopher on his head by rejecting the idea that Locke championed individual rights, and argued instead that Locke believed in the need for a democratic majority to curb minority rights in the name of the greater social good. 52 The majority, in general and in the long run, said Kendall, would tend towards proper application of the moral law. This meant that Locke was right to make majority rule the central principle in political organization since the power of the majority was the greatest force for political justice and harmony. 53 While these hyper-democratic sentiments might seem to have allied Kendall with many liberals who emphasized the primacy of democratic rule, Kendall used majority rule to justify a “closed society” in which some opinions were deemed “out of bounds.” If the American system truly exalted the will of the majority, said Kendall, then an anti-communist American majority would remain well within its constitutional and ethical rights in suppressing the speech and actions of those in the communist (or any other) minority. He vigorously attacked the idea of the “open society” believing that such a society implied that all ideas were equal when, in reality, the democratic consensus would determine which “settled truths” were no 52 Such a dramatic revision of standard Lockean interpretation was particularly revolutionary in the postwar years when “liberal consensus” ideas largely dominated the study of the American past. Scholars from Louis Hartz to Richard Hofstadter saw Lockian liberalism as the guiding ideal of the entire American political tradition, and Kendall challenged the very foundation of this paradigm. Louis Hartz, Richard Hofstadter, and Daniel Boorstin are widely viewed as the most important “consensus” historians. See, especially, Hartz’s exemplary book The Liberal Tradition in America (NY: Harcourt, Brace, 1955). 53 Willmoore Kendall, “The Two Majorities,” Midwest Journal of Political Science (Nov 1960): 317- 345. 146 longer open to debate. Kendall’s “The ‘Open Society’ and Its Fallacies” 54 was his most direct attack on both John Stuart Mill and Sir Karl Popper, the two most prominent advocates of openness. To Kendall, Weimar Germany perfectly illustrated the flaws of the open society in that a commitment to unrestricted free speech had allowed Hitler’s ideas to receive an equal hearing in public discourse when they should have been declared “outside the bounds of acceptable discourse” and suppressed. A commitment to openness and the rights of an evil minority, said Kendall, had created the greatest disaster in human history—World War II. Would it not have been preferable to have restricted the free speech “rights” of a few Nazis? 55 Kendall attacked openness as not only undesirable, but also unattainable. While some might have claimed that a society should remain open to all ideas, Kendall believed this to be a logical impossibility since, in the end, every society had limits on speech, and, whether explicit or not, every society required some kind of orthodoxy, a frame of limitations within which the exchange of ideas and opinions could take place. The founding fathers, for instance, whose wisdom Kendall reverenced above all others, spoke of “self-evident” truths that created the starting point for political discussion and were themselves outside the realm of debate. Ultimately, “unlimited freedom of speech and the open society” were “not real alternatives,” said Kendall, they were a fantastic illusion. The only option was to democratically select which orthodoxies to embrace and then suppress out-of-bounds opinions accordingly. Communist ideas lay outside the bounds of permissive speech 54 Found in The American Political Science Review (Dec 1960): 972-79. 55 Kendall, “Open Society,” 977. 147 in Kendall’s mind, and were thus not entitled to protection from the will of the majority. The Bill of Rights, he said, “did not anticipate something like the Communist Party.” 56 Kendall summed up his political philosophy and its relationship to McCarthyism in a much-repeated anecdote from which conservatives drew inspiration in later years. The Yale faculty called a meeting to discuss McCarthyism. After listening for two hours, Kendall raised his hand and told of an exchange he had recently had with a campus Janitor: “‘Is it true, professor, dat’ dere’s people in New York City who want to…destroy the guvamint of the United States?’ ‘Yes, Oliver, that is true,’ Willmoore had replied. ‘Then why don’t we lock em’ up?’” Kendall told his colleagues that he had heard more wisdom in that insight than he had during the entire faculty meeting. 57 This closed-society view deeply informed Buckley’s outlook. 58 In God and Man at Yale, Buckley had notoriously argued that Yale’s founding ideals (Christianity and individualism) should form the boundaries of acceptable discourse for the university. 59 Without such limits on speech, said Buckley, students were left with the liberal idea that there are no final truths—an unacceptable situation that 56 Ibid., 976, 979. 57 Buckley, introduction to 1977 edition of God and Man at Yale (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 1977), vi-vii. Also see Nash, 120-22, 229-31; John A. Murley and John E. Alvis, eds., Willmoore Kendall: Maverick of American Conservatives (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2002); and Buckley’s novel The Redhunter (Boston: Little, Brown, 1999). 58 Buckley, God and Man, vi. “Kendall had greatly influenced me as an undergraduate,” Buckley said. 59 Ibid., 157-159. 148 would lead to nihilism. Thus, he opposed academic freedom to the extent that it meant that “all ideas should start equal in the race.” 60 Certain truths were settled and deserved a privileged position in academic inquiry. While, in his first book, Buckley had suggested that his Kendallian ideas be applied to a private institution (Yale), after the founding of National Review, Buckley favored extending these ideals to society at large by legally restricting “unacceptable speech” in the public sphere when conditions demanded it. 61 He also solicited articles from those who shared his views on limiting speech. “The classical attempt to defend freedom of speech,” said political philosopher Walter Berns in a National Review article, “is a piece of bad political philosophy.” Like Kendall (a fellow Straussian) Berns claimed that the First Amendment was an “afterthought” to the Constitution and that the Bill of Rights needed to be kept in perspective as less than binding. 62 At National Review, an opposition to unrestricted free speech became a guiding principle meaning that conservative Kendallianism applied in practice as well as theory. National Review conservatives also demonstrated their willingness to enforce a public orthodoxy in their sustaining of Joseph McCarthy in his crusade to rid American institutions of the “Communist menace” even as the Wisconsin senator assaulted basic American civil liberties using the government apparatus. The 60 Buckley, “On Academic Freedom and Other Topics.” 61 In general, though, Buckley came to believe in the right of disagreement except in extreme circumstances. See William F. Buckley, Jr. debate with Bishop James A. Pike on Firing Line, “Prayer in the Public Schools,” 23 Apr 1966, HI, Box 50 (218), folder 002, 19. 62 Walter Berns, “Baloney and Free Speech,” NR (22 Apr 1961): 367. 149 National Review editors opened up their pages for McCarthy to publish his anti- communist rants and Buckley and his brother-in-law, L. Brent Bozell, published a book-length defense of the senator and his actions under the title McCarthy and His Enemies (1954). 63 Even though McCarthy was sometimes reckless in his tactics, they argued, his overall goals were justified and his “courage” admirable. “A general dedication to free speech,” Buckley said, “does not commit a society to making available to its enemies the instruments of its own destruction” and if a conflict arose between a fundamental societal value and free speech, the wise society would take the side of the fundamental value. On that premise, McCarthy’s suppression of Communist speech was justified in the name of majority rule and social preservation. 64 Conservative support for McCarthy seemed to confirm liberal fears that, indeed, absolutism led inevitably to tyranny. In their McCarthyism, said Dwight Macdonald, the “doctrinaire right” had shown precisely what the logical outcome of their position was. 65 Buckley’s critics certainly overstated his “totalitarian” propensities, but his adherence to Kendall’s theory of the closed society and his support for McCarthy made the charges at least partially true. 63 Buckley and Bozell, McCarthy and His Enemies: The Record and Its Meaning (Chicago: Regnery, 1954). 64 Buckley, “Let the Intellectuals Take it from Here,” NR (17 Jun 1961): 371. 65 These National Review “conservatives” said critic Dwight Macdonald, were actually “McCarthy nationalists” and their pseudo-conservative absolutism would inevitably lead to the diminishing of civil liberties. Dwight Macdonald, “Scrambled Eggheads on the Right: Mr. Buckley’s New Weekly,” C (Apr 1956): 367-9. 150 But was the connection between philosophical absolutism and McCarthyism a necessary one? Would a fixed-truth mentality always lead to the suppression of “heresy” (unorthodox opinions) as Hook and Dewey had claimed? The case of Whittaker Chambers shows that the problem was more complicated than liberals thought. Although Chambers probably received more vitriol for his “absolutism” than any other figure on the Right, his philosophical views differed from those of other conservatives. Chambers divided human societies and persons into two distinct categories: those with faith in God, and those with faith in man. But this classification only divided persons according to the use of their intrinsic religious disposition and said nothing about metaphysical certainty or settled truths. Although he, like Adler and Weaver, looked romantically upon the medieval age, Chambers did so for different reasons: Weaver admired the pre-nominalist mentality of the medieval peoples while Chambers admired how they placed God at the center of their lives (in contrast to the “man-centeredness” of modern times). 66 Unlike most in the debate over pragmatism, Chambers’s primary concern was not the battle for or against “timeless truths,” but the battle between materialism (man) and the soul (God). Faith-in-Man philosophy, he believed, was inevitably materialistic and, therefore, inevitably tyrannical. Materialism led people to see humans as objects of control, like any other material object in the universe, and this devaluation of the person (not necessarily epistemological relativism) led to totalitarianism. Dewey, who rejected the materialist label, may not have disagreed 66 Whittaker Chambers, “The Middle Ages,” Life (7 Apr 1947): 67-84; and Chambers, “Medieval Life,” Life (26 May 1947): 65-84. 151 with him on this point. 67 While Buckley looked to tradition as the epistemological source of absolutes, Chambers only claimed, without elaboration, that religion gave a belief in something called a soul that could recognize mass slaughter as an objective evil. 68 Chambers, then, turned to religion not to guarantee metaphysical certainties (as Weaver, Adler, and Buckley did), but to give a transcendent value to the human person. In this, his views approximated Herberg’s more than they did Buckley’s. Yet in spite of the important distinction between the “two faiths” outlook of Chambers 69 and the “enduring truths” realism of Buckley, liberal pragmatists treated them as of the same nature and given to the same oppressive tendencies. In moving from Communism to conservatism, said Hannah Arendt and John Strachey, Chambers had not moved far at all. He had rejected the certainties of Communism, said Arendt, but had now taken up the certainties of anti-communism with equal vigor (what these were, she did not say) and, having achieved “transcendent” knowledge, Chambers believed that he “kn[e]w the end and therefore [could] decide freely about the means.” John Strachey, in an article entitled “The Absolutists,” called Witness the “latest addition” to an absolutist literature industry. His black/white worldview was similar to the Communist worldview: both were “competing absolutist faiths” 70 who felt justified in using “totalitarian means in order to fight totalitarianism.” Chambers, according to Arendt, favored the police state, 67 Dewey, “Anti-Naturalism,” 28-31. 68 W, 82. 69 Ibid., 4. 70 John Strachey, “The Absolutists,” The Nation (4 Oct 1952): 291-3. 152 total government surveillance, suppression of free speech, and the silencing of all viewpoints but his own, said Arendt (sounding like Vivas when speaking of pragmatists), and in this posed a “clear and present danger to society.” 71 Arendt and Strachey set their own “experimental” attitude in contrast to the “absolutists of both left and right.” 72 Other liberals, although more restrained and sympathetic to Chambers than Arendt or Strachey, largely agreed with their diagnosis. While Chambers had claimed that “Faith in Man” posed the most serious threat to western civilization, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. argued instead that “only those who believe in absolute values can achieve the conviction of infallibility which permits tyranny and murder; and that, if there is anything from which the pragmatist flinches, it is the hypostatization of his own tentative, fragmentary, and incomplete views into dogmatic fanaticism.” It was not relativism that had created Stalin and Hitler, but fidelity to abstract principle. 73 Granville Hicks believed that Chambers was not even 71 Hannah Arendt, “The Ex-Communists,” CW (20 Mar 1953): 595-99. Other liberals made the comparisons between Chambers and Hitler a matter of routine. See John Strachey, “The Absolutists,” The Nation (4 Oct 1952): 291-93. Also See Kingsley Martin, “The Witness,” The New Statesman and Nation (19 Jul 1952). For Strachey, Chambers’ view that Communism was “absolutely evil” made him an “absolutist.” Needless to say, this statement oversimplified Chambers view, but even if true, it shows that Chambers’ absolutism was of a much different order than the metaphysical realism of Buckley, Vivas, and Weaver. 72 Strachey, “Absolutists,” 292-3. 73 Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., “Whittaker Chambers and His Witness,” Saturday Review (24 May 1952): 41. Also see Philip Rahv, “The Sense and Nonsense of Whittaker chambers,” PR (Jul-Aug 1952): 473) 153 eligible to fight communism, for one cannot fight dogma with dogma and only pragmatic openness was capable of meeting the threat of communism. 74 In their ascription of metaphysical certainty to Chambers, his liberal assailants proved themselves as unfamiliar with his actual ideas and policy positions as Buckley had been with regard to Dewey. Chambers noted this, and claimed that Arendt in particular had based her attack on “flimsy evidence” and “preposterous” assumptions. 75 Arendt claimed that Chambers wished to enforce his “absolute political ends,” but provided no evidence for the charge. 76 If Buckley and others at National Review had, through their support for McCarthy, confirmed the liberal suspicion that anti-relativism meant oppression, the case of Whittaker Chambers shows that there were exceptions. Chambers openly and frequently denounced both McCarthy and his methods and the continued support National Review gave to the Wisconsin senator kept Chambers from joining the magazine until after McCarthy’s death. 77 Chambers recognized that McCarthy was hardly an ally in the anti-communist cause, but a threat to it. “One way whereby I can most easily help Communism,” he said “is to associate myself publicly with 74 Granville Hicks, “Whittaker Chambers’s Testament,” New Leader (26 May 1952): 66; and Elmer Davis, “History in Doublethink,” Saturday Review (28 Jun 1952): 91-92. 75 He refused even to answer the charges made against him, and only noted that, in making them, Arendt was behaving less like an intellectual and more like “one of those Central European women who has read too much and has nothing to sustain it except an intensity which shakes her like an electric motor that is about to shake loose from its base.” Whittaker Chambers to Nora De Toledano, 19 Mar 1953, NU, 108-09. De Toledano believed that Arendt wrote the piece for personal gain. According to De Toledano, Arendt had attacked Chambers because her husband had lingering communist sympathies. Nora De Toledano to Whittaker Chambers, 22 Mar 1953, NU, 112. 76 Arendt, “Ex-Communists,” 597. 77 Like Chambers, conservative poet T.S. Eliot also refused to join National Review because of its ties to McCarthy. See Hart, Conservative Mind. 154 Senator McCarthy.” 78 Like Schlesinger, Chambers recognized that those who posed the greatest danger to his cause were often those who claimed to be a part of it. Just as Schlesinger saw that the naiveté and pro-Soviet attitude of Henry Wallace threatened to ruin liberalism, so Chambers believed that the recklessness, demagoguery, and bullying of McCarthy threatened to ruin conservatism. But Chambers proved more tolerant than his fellow conservatives in other ways as well. Unlike Kendall and Buckley, who believed that Communists should have their legal rights restricted, Chambers argued that they should be allowed to travel, speak, and enjoy the liberties of any other citizen. If conservatives would not afford this privilege to those with whom they disagreed, he said, at some point “it might be the spokesmen of the Right whose freedom… is restricted.” Chambers even said that his nemesis, ex-communist spy Alger Hiss, deserved the protection of civil liberties that all Americans enjoyed. 79 But even had Chambers adhered to the same principles of metaphysical certainty as Buckley, it is not logically necessary that he would have demanded the imposition of his absolutes, as Hook and Dewey claimed, for it is possible for a person to believe they know the ultimate ends that humans should desire (e.g. Christian conversion, salvation, or the classless society) but also believe in the freedom to accept or reject those ends. One can respect the means of liberal society 78 Chambers to William F. Buckley, Jr., 7 Feb 1954, OF, 26; Chambers to Ralph de Toledano, 6 Apr 1953, NU, 115; and Chambers to Henry Regnery, 14 Jan 1954, in OF, 24-5. One reason that some liberals had been so adamant about Hiss’s innocence was their feeling that Chambers’ accusations had created the hysteria that made McCarthy possible; now, ironically, Chambers, like Dr. Frankenstein, repudiated the monster he had created. 79 Chambers, “The Hissiad: A Correction,” NR (9 May 1959): 45-46. 155 (freedom) while deploring the ends to which those means may be put (material gratification, hedonism, atheism, etc.). To claim otherwise was to make an unwarranted connection between epistemology and political theory. What Hook, Dewey, and other pragmatists had asserted, then, was not a logical necessity, but an hypothesis that, as good pragmatists, they should have left open to empirical verification. They had claimed that “supernaturalism” or “dogmatic absolutism” necessarily entailed the authoritarian desire to compel others to accept those beliefs. The supernatural mindset, said Dewey, is “absolutist and totalitarian,” but the pragmatists who denounced Chambers did not bother to test this hypothesis in practice. 80 If they had, they would have found millions of religious Americans, absolutely convinced of the truth of their creeds, who were nonetheless strongly committed to religious freedom and political pluralism. Hook had earlier complained that Vivas had put forward the hypothesis that “secularistic naturalism coarsens moral sensitivity and blinds those who hold it to the tragedies and injustices of our time” without bothering to test the claim. 81 And yet, applying the same assertion to supernatural absolutism, shows that Hook had succumbed to the same error. Pragmatist claims that belief in absolute truth led inevitably to authoritarianism and suppression of alternative views thus failed both in theory and in practice. 82 80 John Dewey, “Anti-Naturalism,” 36 81 Hook, “Case Study,” 234-5. 82 The editors at Commonweal noted this in their piece “The Critics and the Absolutes” (20 June 1952, p. 259). They pointed out that the “intolerance and closed mind” that liberals attributed to Chambers 156 But Buckley made the same mistake as his pragmatist adversaries and by tethering metaphysical realism to a rejection of the closed society, he played right into their hands. Like pragmatists, he overlooked the possibility that one could believe in final truths, but also wish to leave others free to accept or reject those truths. The closed society and epistemological absolutism were not as connected as either Buckley or Dewey liked to believe. Libertarian journalist John Chamberlain understood this when asking rhetorically, “Is it so impossible to separate the ‘public philosophy’ (the things that are Caesar’s) from the ‘private philosophy’ (the things that are God’s)?” 83 A closer examination of Chambers and others like him would have showed that it was not. Buckley later confessed that his support for McCarthy had been a mistake— Chambers had been right—but he never repudiated the general Kendallian principles upon which it was based, thus creating yet another of the internal contradictions that plagued late twentieth-century conservatism. 84 From Nock, Buckley came to believe the Jeffersonian maxim that “the legitimate powers of government extend only to those acts that are injurious to others,” and that governments act unjustly when they go beyond this core function. From Kendall, on the other hand, he came to believe that individual freedoms must be curbed in the name of virtue and majoritarian was not a “necessary philosophical adjunct of belief in unchanging absolutes,” but a psychological phenomenon quite distinct from one’s personal beliefs. 83 John Chamberlain, “All Over the Lot,” NR (24 Oct 1959): 430. 84 William F. Buckley, Jr., “The End of Whittaker Chambers,” Esquire (Sep 1962). He also acknowledged that McCArthy had hurt the anti-communist cause by his exaggerations. C-Span interview with Buckley, 30 Jun 2002, “Russell Kirk and William F. Buckley; The Conservative Mind and God and Man at Yale,” C-Span American Writers Series. 157 consensus. These two principles were in fundamental conflict in both conservative theory and conservative practice. Buckley was committed to individual rights (Nock), but also committed to curbing individual rights in the name of public orthodoxy (Kendall). Buckley consistently declared the efficacy of markets over planning in economic affairs, but rejected that same efficacy when it came to the market of ideas. Ultimately, the two mentors who impacted Buckley the most also provided him with the irreconcilable impulses that made his commitment to both individual freedom and metaphysical truth seem contradictory indeed. 85 As conservatives came to embrace anti-relativism in the postwar years while maintaining their previous commitment to anti-statism, Buckley’s contradiction became that of the movement as a whole. In the mid-twentieth century, liberals had been those who advocated using government to achieve the liberal values of economic justice and racial equality, while conservatives were those who believed the government should not promote values at all. But as the anti-relativism adopted by conservatives in the postwar years expanded its influence within the movement, this would slowly change. Whatever conservatives had sacrificed in philosophical coherence in their early years, however, they gained in rhetorical advantage. In making the anti- relativist cause their own, Buckley and his confreres put liberals on the defensive in 85 Buckley’s ambivalence towards John Stuart Mill (a hero at times and a villain at others) reflects his own ideological self-contradiction. While Mill consistently argued for limiting government in the name of individual liberty, Buckley wished to have his libertarian cake and eat it too. He favored imposing orthodoxy using government power while also keeping government power out of the private sphere. See, for instance, Buckley, Up From Liberalism, 154. 158 moral and religious matters in ways that still resonate. 86 Conservatives would henceforth have in their arsenal the charge of “moral relativism” to fire at political adversaries whenever concerns about societal decadence arose even if they were never able to square their own anti-relativism with anti-statism in the political realm. Religious Americans of all denominations fled “relativistic” liberalism for what they perceived as the more “truth-friendly” conservatism. 87 Liberals, meanwhile, who tried to combine openness to religion with secular commitments found themselves besieged in the newly-charged religious atmosphere. 86 Note that the term “values voters” today generally refers to cultural conservatives, as if values played no role in informing liberal political positions. This shows the degree of rhetorical success conservatives have achieved in anti-relativism. 87 George M. Marsden, “Afterword: Religion, Politics, and the Search for an American Consensus,” in Mark Noll, ed., Religion and American Politics (NY: Oxford UP, 1990): 387. 159 Chapter 4 Anti-Relativism II: Herberg & The Boundaries of Conservative Orthodoxy By 1964 conservatives had asserted belief in timeless absolutes as a central conservative principle, but they left the precise nature of such beliefs unexplored. When assembling their anthologies of conservative thought in the early 1960s, both Buckley and his colleague at National Review, Frank Meyer, invoked such concepts as “eternal verities,” “discovered truths,” and a “paradigm of essences,” as unifying conservative characteristics, but never fully defined them. Conservatives had become those who opposed relativism, but what exactly constituted relativism remained open to interpretation. This strategy allowed conservatism to remain open to a wide variety of positions while still claiming the cause of anti-relativism as their own. Most Americans, after all, disliked the ideas of relativism and uncertainty and could endorse such concepts as “timeless values” and “objective truth” as worthwhile slogans. A new emphasis on timeless absolutes in the conservative movement was enough to drive a few confirmed pragmatists from the movement, but it was open- ended enough to draw in adherents from a variety of persuasions. Virtually anyone with complaints about relativism could find a home in conservative ranks. Thus, it worked to the conservatives’ advantage to leave their definition vague. I will argue in this chapter that Herberg, as a self-described “theocentric relativist,” both exemplified and helped reinforce the indeterminacy of anti- 160 relativism when he joined the conservative movement in the early 1960s. Herberg became a central figure on the Right and the most important religious thinker at National Review, yet his own views on timeless truths differed considerably from those of Buckley, Weaver, Vivas, Meyer and other conservatives. 1 Contrary to much of the scholarship examining his thought, I will argue that Herberg was more relativist than absolutist and that this relativism, not absolutism, led him into the conservative ranks. 2 Having taken the basics of his thought from Reinhold Niebuhr, Herberg adhered to the same form of pragmatism, that is, he rejected all metaphysical certainties, declaring “I am a relativist about everything except God.” 3 After coming to National Review, however, his views on the transcendence of God and the possibilities this opened for morality overshadowed his relativism. Even as he dismissed the idea of “absolute truth” held by many of his fellow conservatives, he emphasized his commonality with them by joining the conservative chorus in denouncing liberal relativism. 1 Most conservatives, such as Vivas, Weaver, Meyer and Buckley, described their position as a form of “metaphysical realism” (in the tradition of Aquinas and Plato), or belief in enduring truths and values. Since they often spoke of the possibility of apprehending absolute truths, it is legitimate to refer to their position as “absolutism.” 2 The prevailing historical view of Herberg is that his penchant for absolutism took him inevitably to conservatism. Harry Ausmus makes this argument central to his book Will Herberg: From Right to Right (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1987), and John Patrick Diggins presents a variant of it in Up From Liberalism: Conservative Odysseys in American Intellectual Development (NY: Columbia UP, 1994). Diggins argues further that a hunger for absolutism characterized those on both the far left and far right, causing many ex-Marxists to move immediately from “from the revolutionary Left to the militant Right, without so much as pausing in the ‘Vital Center.’” He claims that this pattern characterized Will Herberg, but overlooks the facts that Herberg did belong to the liberal Vital Center, holding political positions that would be considered “Cold War liberal” for the entire 1950s decade, and that his rejection of absolutism, rather than his embrace of it, led him ultimately to the Right. Diggins, Up From Communism, 14. 3 Dennis T. Regan interview with Will Herberg, undated, faculty folder 3, HP, 2. 161 The case of Herberg shows that a surface patina concealed profound philosophical divergences among conservatives. Conservatives had indeed adopted anti-relativism as their own cause, but they set the threshold low enough that anyone willing to denounce the moral decay of society could qualify, including the theocentric-relativist Herberg. Agreement about a common liberal enemy on the Right overshadowed the lack of agreement on a precise definition of relativism. Through Herberg, conservatism also expanded its appeal to post-war Americans by selectively appropriating the most exploitable aspects of Cold War liberalism—the Burkean critique of rationalism offered by Reinhold Niebuhr. This borrowing of Niebuhrian insights made conservatism recognizable and appealing to those who distrusted the sole emphasis on free-market libertarianism that had characterized conservative thinking in the pre-war years. The development of Herberg’s unique form of conservative relativism, his journey to the Right, and the impact this had on conservatism is best understood by viewing him in relation to others who addressed similar questions at this time. This included the conservatives mentioned in the previous chapter, as well as the most important liberal thinkers of his era: John Dewey and Niebuhr. It was by imitating Niebuhr, rejecting Dewey, and finding common ground with conservative absolutists that Herberg found his own distinctive place in conservatism and broadened the bounds of anti-relativist discourse on the Right. That Niebuhr influenced Herberg’s post-Marxist thought more than any other figure is indisputable. After the Hitler-Stalin pact and the Moscow Trials, Herberg, like so many other Marxists, had a “crisis of faith,” leading him to search for answers 162 elsewhere. Through his reading of Niebuhr he came to accept the existence of God both as a reality and as an explanation for the perennial moral ambiguity in a modern civilization pleased by its scientific progress. Although Herberg initially planned to convert to Christianity, Niebuhr persuaded him to remain true to his Judaic heritage instead. From that point on, Herberg, like Niebuhr, saw a fundamental kinship between Judaism and Christianity as allied forms of “Hebraic” religion whose basic teachings had complementary, rather than contradictory, features. 4 So profound was Niebuhr’s influence that Herberg scarcely wrote a paper or gave a public address in which he did not directly acknowledge the Protestant Theologian, and in the opening pages of Judaism and Modern Man he declared that the careful reader would find Niebuhrian insights on every page. 5 In spite of later political divergences, Herberg never consciously broke from Niebuhr on fundamental principles and considered himself a true Niebuhrian for the remainder of his life. Most importantly, Herberg learned from Niebuhr that supernatural religion and absolutist epistemology need not go together. While Dewey and his disciples (and, of course, his conservative opponents) believed that supernatural religious beliefs necessarily led one to a belief in timeless truths, Niebuhr taught Herberg that genuine supernatural religion presupposed a humility before the Divine. Only God 4 Will Herberg, “The Council, The Ecumenical Movement, and the Problem of Aggiornamento,” Address at the Golden Jubilee National Newman Congress, 3 Sep 1965, Faculty File 2, HP, 1. 5 Herberg, Judaism and Modern Man: An Interpretation of Jewish Religion (NY: Atheneum, 1977), 1. The degree of personal relationship between the two men has been a matter of some historical debate. Harry Ausmus believes that Herberg tended to overstate his association with Niebuhr, and that the contact between the two men was limited. Whatever the extent of the relationship, both men referred to the other as a personal friend. See, for example, Niebuhr, “The Varieties of Religious Revival,” TNR (6 Jun 1955): 14. 163 had access to absolutes, while humans, living in a fallen world fraught with self- seeking and the will to power, were interested, not neutral, and certainly without absolute knowledge. Since “it is always through some particular center of power that the human community is organized,” said Niebuhr, “or from some particular viewpoint that meaning is given to the course of history,” human perspective, unlike God’s, occupied the self-aggrandizing position of the situated self. 6 Indeed, the partiality of human perspectives made claims of “absolute knowledge” a form of pride and idolatry. “God,” Niebuhr always reminded his readers, “though revealed, remains veiled; his thoughts are not our thoughts nor his ways our ways.” Claims to absolute truth, to Niebuhr, did not accompany religious beliefs as conservatives often claimed, but accompanied the kind of pride that true religion should oppose. Faith for Niebuhr helped humans understand that the transcendence of God placed absolute truths beyond human reach. Niebuhr openly acknowledged that one might accurately call his views “pragmatic,” since he stood in the tradition of a previous theistic pragmatist, William James. In this sense, historian Robert Westbrook’s assertion that Niebuhr and John Dewey held similar views is a valid one. 7 6 Reinhold Niebuhr, “On Freedom, Virtue, and Faith,” (1949) in This is My Philosophy (NY: Harper & Bros., 1957), 270. 7 Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1952), 173; Niebuhr, Beyond Tragedy: Essays on the Christian Interpretation of History (1937; NY: 1965), 44- 45; Ronald H. Stone, Professor Reinhold Niebuhr: A Mentor to the Twentieth Century (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992), 206; Edward J. Purcell, Jr., The Crisis of Democratic Theory: Scientific Naturalism and the Problem of Value (Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 1973), 243; and Robert Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991), 523-32. 164 While Buckley believed in the human capacity to apprehend certain absolute, timeless truths, Herberg believed with Niebuhr and Dewey that human truths “neither deserve nor can stand absolutization.” 8 Belief in divine sovereignty, to Herberg, meant that “only God is absolute,” and that “everything which is not God is ‘relativized.’” 9 In a lecture appropriately entitled “What Religion Cannot Do” Herberg asserted his Niebuhrian belief that religion cannot endow us with a special wisdom which delivers us from the perplexities of deliberation and decision…On the contrary, religion ought to make us even more acutely aware of the variety, depth, and complexity of our problems, and of the folly of pretending to easy solutions, or indeed of claiming that there are final solutions at all. In short, religion cannot turn us into God: on the contrary, it is warning us that we are men not God and that we must work out our responsibilities within the possibilities, limits, and ambiguities of the human situation. 10 Whereas Buckley admonished humans to cling to discovered “certainties,” Herberg believed with Niebuhr that religion should remove pretensions to such certainties. In this sense, Herberg was, with Niebuhr, a nominalist of the kind that Weaver detested. Herberg’s relativism even led him to criticize major figures in the development of conservative anti-relativism. Leo Strauss remains a central figure in postwar conservatism, largely because of his role in inspiring conservative attacks on relativism, and yet Herberg disagreed vociferously with his philosophy. Herberg accepted much of the criticism of nihilism that Strauss provided in Natural Right and History, but he rejected the idea that Strauss’s approach to natural rights was the 8 Herberg, Judaism, 33. 9 Herberg, Judaism, 65. 10 Herberg, “What Religion Cannot Do and Must Not Pretend to Do,” date uncertain, HP, Folder 8.1, 1. 165 proper answer, for it assumed that final knowledge was possible for man—an idea that Herberg denied. One could only escape nihilism in the Biblical emphasis on God’s transcendence. 11 His rejection of absolutism also led Herberg to criticize Civil Rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr., and Catholic theologian John Courtney Murray. Both of these thinkers believed that their political beliefs grew out of their natural law philosophies, while Herberg rejected such modes of understanding. While he sympathized with “the historical intention” of natural law philosophy and “the effort to establish enduring structures of meaning and value to serve as fixed points of moral decision in the complexities of the actual situation,” Herberg ultimately denied natural law because the apprehension of eternal truth was not as rational and clear as King, Murray, and other natural law theorists assumed. 12 Ironically, Herberg found his space for absolutism in the criticism of naturalism he shared with Niebuhr. According to Niebuhr, naturalists like Dewey failed to account for human freedom and the propensity to sin. Herberg concurred saying that Dewey’s “gospel of social intelligence” was a deceitful illusion because it was “untrue to the facts of life” and failed to “answer the critical question of how evil institutions could possibly have arisen if man is really good.” 13 On what grounds did Dewey “trust” human nature and why did humans deserve trust if they 11 Herberg, notations in margins of page 28 of Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History, 28, read 4 Jun 1954, HP. 12 Herberg, “Ambiguist' Statesmanship,” Worldview (Sep 1960): 7. 13 Herberg, Judaism, 172. 166 were free to choose evil? Like Niebuhr, Herberg argued that Dewey failed to realize the fact that free will gave humans “infinite potentiality for good or evil.” Both Herberg and Niebuhr believed that naturalism, unable to account for freedom, failed to adequately distinguish the biological from the human realm. Without an understanding of this free will, one could not account for sin, and without accounting for sin, explanations of social behavior would remain inadequate, untrue to life, and ultimately damaging. 14 While scientific naturalists like Dewey proclaimed that “life travels upward in spirals,” said Herberg, there was no more empirical evidence to support such a theory than there was to support Spencer’s social Darwinism. While Dewey claimed to have broken with the Spencerian outlook, Herberg believed that the naturalist philosopher still maintained Spencer’s “unshakable faith in the redemptive power of history.” 15 But Herberg ultimately departed from Niebuhr. He drew on Niebuhr’s insights, but forced them into a relative-absolute schema that Niebuhr himself did not use. Herberg agreed with his mentor that humans living within history were, unlike God, inevitably stuck in a world of limited perspectives, but he forced this view into a Platonic and un-Niebuhrian formulation. To Herberg, no human ideas, institutions, principles or ideologies could ever be absolute, for “the affirmation of the divine sovereignty taken seriously means, of course, that only God is absolute,” and “it 14 Niebuhr, “On Freedom,” 270-72, 275; Niebuhr, Irony, 84-5, 87; Herberg, Judaism, 93 15 Herberg, “Capitalism and Socialism in the Light of the Judeo-Christian Ethic,” lecture-Kibbutz Sollel, 16 Aug 1947, HP, 1-2; Herberg, Judaism, 70, 169; and Herberg, Judaism, 200-01. 167 implies immediately that everything which is not God is ‘relativized.’” This included “everything in the world, every society, institution, belief or movement” for it was all “infected with relativity.” 16 Herberg fit into the conservative movement because he adhered to the absolutism vs. relativism framework that conservatives used in their war against liberalism and claimed to have found a compromise position between them, but Niebuhr generally avoided this classification altogether. Herberg adopted a theistic pragmatism that confounded both the absolutists and relativists who saw religion and metaphysics as inseparable, and yet he took this understanding in an absolutist direction that Niebuhr did not. As a more dialectical thinker than Herberg, Niebuhr focused on the dualism, paradox, and irony in the human situation, a focus that kept him from going too far with any given insight. He had indeed argued against Dewey that humans were supernatural beings, but he was quicker than Herberg to remind himself of the ways that humans were also creatures. Having a double identity—sinners, but sinners made in the image of God—humans not only held the potential for sin, but also sainthood; religion held redemptive powers, but could also lead to self-righteousness and fanaticism. This dialectical sensibility in Niebuhr’s thought never allowed him to unmoor an assertion from its opposite. Herberg, on the other hand, lacking such restraint took aspects of Niebuhrian thought into realms that Niebuhr himself never dared go, a fact that Niebuhr noted of his friend and disciple. 17 Although Herberg 16 Herberg, Judaism, 65. 17 Reinhold Niebuhr, “America’s Three Melting Pots,” New York Times (Sep 25, 1955): BR6; Niebuhr, review of Judaism and Modern Man, New York Herald Tribune, 16 Dec 1951, BR8. 168 claimed to have arrived at his limited absolutism through Niebuhr’s insights about human limitation, he cast aside other Niebuhrian insights in doing so. Niebuhr’s dialectical sense kept him a realist, but Herberg’s lack of such a sense made him a limited absolutist. Herberg used the term “theocentric relativism” to describe his own position since it best captured his attempt to harmonize a commitment to unconditioned value with an instrumental approach to human concerns. 18 To Herberg, Niebuhr’s argument for freedom allowed humans to transcend the natural world as they partook of God’s nature. The “divine image” impressed upon humans, said Herberg, was manifest in the individual’s “freedom and capacity for decision that gives him power to make or mar life, to serve God or to defy him.” In their spiritual freedom (their transcendence of the causal order of the natural world), humans revealed the portion of Divine glory that made possible their “fellowship with God.” 19 “God,” said Herberg, “transcends all relativities of nature and history;” He is beyond time and change, utterly unconditioned or caused, but in covenant-making, the essence of Hebraic religion, limited humans could establish “genuinely personal relations” with their creator. 20 Herberg’ understanding of individuals as capable of interaction with the Divine further distanced him from Dewey’s naturalism. While Dewey saw the 18 Regan interview with Herberg, 2. 19 Herberg, Judaism, 54, 73. 20 Herberg, “What Judaism Means to Me (My Faith as a Jew),” undated, HP, folder 189, 4; and Herberg, Judaism, 48-9, 54. 169 human self as a product of natural social relations, Herberg saw the self as a product of divine relations. 21 He agreed with Niebuhr that “spirit is will, freedom, decision,” but he also drew on Martin Buber in his claim that “the reality of the human self is grounded in its relation as a ‘thou’ to the absolute ‘I’ which is God.” 22 This “I- Thou” relationship with the Absolute not only gave humans freedom, but also infinite value. “Man, in the words of scripture, is created ‘in the image of God,’” said Herberg, and “from this conception of the divine image in man” flowed all aspects of life that humans spoke of as “the spiritual dimension of existence.” Specifically, the image of God impressed upon humans meant that “every person is of infinite worth.” 23 The twentieth century saw an increased tendency to treat humans as objects to be exploited, oppressed, and massacred, but this trend could be undone through a biblical understanding that saw humans as transcending the natural world in their relationship to God. Herberg agreed with Buckley’s claim that naturalism underlay the ravages of the twentieth century, but while Buckley attributed this to the inability of pragmatism to assert the reality of absolute metaphysical concepts, Herberg attributed it to the inability of naturalist pragmatism to affirm the validity of the “I-Thou” relationships that presupposed a subjective existence apart from the natural world. In grounding human worth in a Divine relationship, Herberg had made the “leap” into absolutism. He consistently maintained that nothing in the human realm 21 Herberg, Judaism, 71. 22 Ibid., 50, 71, 73. 23 Herberg, “Capitalism and Socialism,” 2. 170 was absolute, but the infinite value of the person, as something bestowed by the Absolute God, was unconditioned by human concerns and timeless in its validity—it was an absolute exception to the relativist rule. In this way, traditional biblical theology gave nothing less than “absolute worth” to all humans. Herberg was, indeed, a relativist about everything except God, but this included those to whom God had given a portion of his glory—humans created in His image. 24 By establishing the human person and nothing else in absolute terms, Herberg believed he had also established a foundation for absolute ethical precepts. The value of the human constituted the only legitimate absolute in a world of relativity, but from this one absolute Herberg extracted a set of “divine imperatives”: If all persons held infinite worth from a divine source, then all human relationships should be characterized by the same “I-Thou” respect that characterized human relationships to God. From Buber, Herberg had learned that one could see an “I-it” infecting all human violence and exploitation, while one could see “I-thou” underlying all human righteousness. 25 While both the pragmatists and absolutists of the previous chapter had argued that totalitarianism grew out of either an absolutist or relativist mindset, Herberg maintained that totalitarianism grew out of the “I-it” mindset, which subverted the “I-Thou” mentality that should characterize human relationships. 24 Herberg, “Personalism and Democracy,” undated, HP, folder 189, 2; Herberg, “Capitalism and Socialism,” 2; and Herberg, Judaism, 54. 25 Herberg, Judaism, 112. 171 This “I-Thou” relationship demanded that in human relationships, “love of fellow-man must be universal and unconditional.” 26 Although the value of the person was the only worldly absolute, it logically followed that this value placed absolute demands on interpersonal (“I-Thou”) relationships. This made universal the “moral imperative” to “love God and love your neighbor.” 27 If the value of the person was absolute, then the obligation to love that person was absolute as well. In taking such leaps beyond pragmatism into absolutism, Herberg aligned ever-closer with metaphysical realists on the Right. Yet the obligation of love also demanded justice, since justice was “the institutionalization of love in society.” The divine imperative of love required “that every man be treated as a Thou, a person, an end in himself, never merely as a thing or a means to another’s end. When this demand was “translated into laws and institutions under the conditions of life in history,” said Herberg, justice arose. 28 The commandment of love, he maintained, was both the source of all justice and “the ultimate perspective from which the limitations of every standard of justice may be perceived.” Herberg acknowledged the Kantian flavor of his reasoning and often used Kant’s ethical formulation to express this singular absolute: “every man is to be respected as an absolute end in himself.” 29 In Herberg’s mind, Dewey had failed to fully justify the criteria by which particular value judgments should be made, while 26 Ibid., 108. 27 Regan interview with Herberg, 2. 28 Herberg, “Christianity and Social Policy,” HP, folder 8.1, 2; and Herberg, Judaism, 148. 29 Herberg, “Personalism,” 2; and Herberg, Judaism, 107. 172 Herberg had established, on divinely-ordained foundations, the absolutes of love and justice as the cornerstones of all moral decisions. Thus, Herberg had drawn a limited absolutism from Niebuhr’s critique of naturalism. Unlike those absolutists who asserted epistemological certainty, Herberg believed that his own absolutism grew out of an understanding of human “limitations.” 30 The inability of naturalism to adequately account for human behavior revealed the transcendent nature of humans, the transcendence upon which the value of the person was based. For Herberg, holding certain limited ends as absolute while maintaining a relativist perspective allowed him to avoid the pitfalls of both relativism and absolutism. While pragmatists had feared that absolutism would lead to a political imposition of whatever ideals one held as absolute (e.g. a classless state, the kingdom of God, national greatness, racial superiority) and absolutists feared that absent metaphysical truths moral anarchy would reign, Herberg asserted that the value of humans was the only absolute end, the only absolute ideal, and the only timeless principle that could never be sacrificed to another end or ideal. In Herberg’s moral vision, the pragmatist fears that tyrants would oppress in the name of an ideal would thus be obviated, as would the anti-relativist fears of moral decay, for there were neither absolutes (beyond personal value) to impose nor a lack of moral ends to pursue: the dignity of the individual would always remained the end-in-view. While Dewey seemingly tried to turn means into ends and Buckley tried to establish a range 30 Herberg, Judaism, 74. 173 of absolute ends, Herberg believed he had overcome both by viewing the person as the only absolute end and the obligations this entailed as the only ethical certainties. Yet Herberg’s limited absolutism departed markedly from that of previous conservatives. Unlike Adler, Weaver, Vivas, Buckley and other anti-relativists who asserted a multiplicity of absolute ideas, such as natural laws, natural rights, or political principles, as “settled truths,” Herberg claimed that, in our world of relativity and flux, the value of the individual constituted the only absolute. All else (social institutions, society, the state) were “in the final analysis merely means” and could only be justified as such. Buckley demanded a metaphysical realism, in which absolute truths existed independent of humans and only awaited discovery, but Herberg rejected metaphysical absolutes, arguing that they could not exist independent of the human person, for the value of the human person was itself the absolute. While Weaver, Adler, and Buckley sought a return to a medieval pre- nominalism like that of Aquinas or Plato, Herberg explicitly rejected such doctrines on the grounds that they “claimed too much for human reason and therefore allowed too little to the contingent factors of history.” 31 There was a wide divide between the very limited absolutism of Herberg and the full metaphysical realism of other conservatives, yet their lack of distinct criteria allowed them still to accept him as an anti-relativist ally. Herberg was not content only to assert his own limited brand of absolutism, he further maintained that some form of absolutism was inevitable for all humans. 31 Herberg, “Personalism,” 2; and Herberg, Judaism, 146-48, 243. 174 Drawing on German-American theologian Paul Tillich, Herberg argued that all humans exalted some object, ideal, or institution as their “ultimate concern”—their absolute. This inevitable human search for meaning and “grounding of one’s being” only left open the question as to whether they would hold the transcendent God as their absolute or some relativity of the human world (an idol). Humans could have faith in God or a secular alternative, but have faith they must. While Dewey believed that Americans should shun absolutes for pragmatic experimentation and Buckley believed that Americans should embrace absolutes as guides for action, Herberg believed that humans, by virtue of being humans, did not have a choice in the matter. 32 Niebuhr shared this perspective to a degree. Like Herberg, he saw that modern humans had developed a number of secular alternatives to religion, such as Dewey’s naïve and disproven faith in the “religion of progress.” 33 For scientific naturalists, said Niebuhr, “the idea of historical progress became [their] effective religion,” but an inadequate one since there was no mystery about the cause and source of evil. Secular religions ascribed evil to “the lag of social institutions, the lag of nature itself, bad government, faulty education, and ignorance,” but in this, they were not too different from Marxists who held the same religious faith in the redemptive power of history. In Marxism, said Niebuhr, religion and science were “combined in such a way that the modern cult of science is brought completely into 32 Herberg, “Faith and Existence,” undated, HP, folder 182, 1-2; Herberg, “The Challenge and Decision of Faith,” undated, HP, folder 182, 1; and Regan interview with Herberg, 1-2. 33 Niebuhr, “Varieties,” 15. 175 the service of an existential faith.” For that reason, said Niebuhr, Marxism held such a widespread appeal and had proliferated faster than any religion in history. Like Herberg, Niebuhr believed Marxism was idolatrous, for it generated what in Christian terms is regarded as the very essence of sin. It identifies the interests of a particular self or of a particular force in history with the final purposes of the God of history. God, in this case, is of course the dialectic which gives meaning to the whole. In this, both Herberg and Niebuhr saw that even the supposedly pragmatic or irreligious often snuck religion and absolutes in back door. 34 Nevertheless, it is still inaccurate to call Niebuhr an absolutist. Herberg saw in human transcendence the possibility of absolute ethics, but Niebuhr always affirmed that humans existed within the natural world, even as they transcended it. While Herberg focused on the spark of divinity in humans, Niebuhr reminded readers that “man is not simply a creator but also a creature.” 35 Humans were indeed free as Herberg emphasized, but Niebuhr cautioned against overestimating the degree of human freedom and forgetting that humans were also creatures. 36 In his pursuit of absolutes, Herberg tended to overlook the “creature/historical” side of humanity, while to Niebuhr, the “creature” side of humanity was inseparable from the transcendent. To Niebuhr, the transcendent self meant freedom which, in turn, meant evil, guilt, irony, and tragedy; while to Herberg the transcendent self meant trans-historical value and absolutist morals. Herberg asserted individual freedom 34 Niebuhr, Irony, 121-122, 128. Also see, Niebuhr, “On Freedom,” 279. 35 Niebuhr, Irony, 153; and Niebuhr, “On Freedom,” 272. 36 Niebuhr, Irony, 167-68. 176 and the absolutes that followed without restraint, but Niebuhr’s skepticism and focus on the paradoxical aspects of human nature would keep him from taking this step. If transcendence was Herberg’s focus, the paradox of transcendence was Niebuhr’s. Herberg’s differences with Niebuhr also owed much to the existentialist aspects of his philosophy. 37 Niebuhr noted that Herberg’s existentialism went beyond his own, as Herberg posited a radical distinction between being-for-itself (human existence) and being-in-itself (objective existence). 38 Herberg’s absolute personalism demanded an emphasis on the utter distinctiveness of the self, while Niebuhr continued to emphasize the human duality that would restrain absolutist tendencies. Herberg’s existentialism led him to see human life in terms of “grounding” and the ways in which the person grounded in God possessed absolute attributes, but Niebuhr’s realism led him to see human life in terms of tragedy and irony in which pretensions to absolutism, even absolute morals, constantly undermined themselves: striving for ethical behavior inevitably created unethical results. 39 Although Herberg never disparaged Niebuhr or his ideas, he did believe that Niebuhr never went far enough in asserting the existentialist ideal of unconstrained freedom at the core of the human self. 40 For Niebuhr, freedom was 37 Herberg even edited a book in praise of four existentialist theologians who had influenced his thought. Will Herberg, Four Existentialist Theologians: a reader from the works of Jacques Maritain, Nicolas Berdyaev, Martin Buber, and Paul Tillich (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1958). 38 Reinhold Niebuhr, review of Judaism, 8. 39 Herberg, Judaism, 40. 40 Herberg, “Some Comments on ‘Faith and History’ by Reinhold Niebuhr,” 19 May 1949, HP, folder 189, 1-2; and Herberg, Judaism, 40. 177 always tempered by the dialectic of necessity, but the existentialist Herberg saw freedom as the essence of one’s humanity and the source of ethical certainty. In spite of these disagreements, Niebuhr never openly broke with Herberg or repudiated his philosophy as a perversion of his own. He called Judaism and Modern Man—the work in which Herberg had most fully presented his theocentric relativism—a “milestone in American religious thought,” and a “remarkably profound and searching exposition.” The book, said Niebuhr, could have “no other effect than to stimulate the most thoughtful adherents of faith and the doubters in both the Christian and the Jewish world.” Niebuhr applauded Herberg even as the disciple took an “absolutist leap” that the master would not. 41 This absolutist leap, however cautious, allowed Herberg to find common philosophical ground with others on the Right. In spite of such beliefs, Herberg continuously re-affirmed the pragmatic aspects of his thought. While a “higher law” beyond space and time made absolute demands upon humans, he claimed, they were still mired in total relativity in the attempt to actualize these absolutes. Niebuhr had asserted that the perils of human error meant that “a wise community will walk warily and test the effect of each new adventure before further adventures” and Herberg approached politics in the same way. 42 41 Niebuhr, review of Judaism, 8. 42 Reinhold Niebuhr, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness: A Vindication of Democracy and a Critique of its Traditional Defense [1944] (NY: Scribner, 1960), 117. 178 Even as Herberg rejected Dewey’s denial of ultimate ends, he accepted the instrumentalist method in all other respects. Herberg believed that Dewey failed to provide solid ends towards which his method should strive, even as he succeeded in seeing the contingency of all human programs and plans, and laying out the proper means by which humans might attain social betterment through an instrumentalist approach to problems. Herberg, like Dewey believed that the “good” is given in experience “after a responsible estimate of consequences” and held that the determination of a particular course of action was entirely contingent upon circumstances and human concerns. Dewey’s disciple Sidney Hook believed that, in approaching public problems, one must ask herself not what timeless principles govern the political order, but rather, “what kind of economic institutions, under the given conditions, will best serve to sustain the values of personality-in-community, with due regard to the technical requirements of production?” 43 The meaning and value of any particular program or idea was for Herberg, as for the pragmatist, given in experience. Like the pragmatists, Herberg saw ideas and institutions as tools for human use rather than as eternal verities. “All systems and programs were but the contrivance of men,” said Herberg, and “none could claim any final validity.” 44 The ends (social justice) were absolute, but the means to secure those ends could never claim absolute status or permanent validity. Institutional structures and programs 43 Herberg, Judaism, 152; and Sidney Hook, “A Case Study in Anti-Secularism,” PR (Mar-Apr 1951): 233. 44 Herberg, Judaism, 151. 179 might be the best under a given set of circumstances, but they would never be the “last word” in how best to achieve social justice. 45 Humans had an absolute imperative to seek social justice based on the divine imperative of love, but in pursuance of this absolute, only relative possibilities were available. The goal of justice was embedded in social context, said Herberg, so relativities, ambiguities, and even injustices would be inevitable in the pursuit of it. 46 According to Herberg, One could have absolute certainty about the desired ends of social justice, but only pragmatic experimentation could determine the best course of action. For instance, humans could experiment with a variety of economic arrangements in their quest for “social justice,” but the “ultimate criterion in economics,” for Herberg, “is that which governs life in all its aspects: the degree to which human persons are treated as ends in themselves, of equal worth and dignity as children of God and bearers of the divine image.” 47 The criterion was absolute, so there was an absolute standard by which to judge human actions, but the means of realizing the absolute (like all human pursuits) had to be determined through experiment and testing. One could turn to Hebraic religion for the ends of social justice, but not for the policies to achieve social justice. One must relate concrete social policy to divine imperatives, but one had to take care not to equate a social policy with those divine imperatives. 48 If his commitment to religiously-grounded 45 Ibid., 154. 46 Ibid., 113, 150. 47 Ibid., 152. 48 Herberg, “Christianity and Social Policy,” 2; and Herberg, Judaism, 109-111. 180 absolute ends allied him to Adler and Buckley, his commitment to pragmatic experimentation in decision-making allied him with Dewey and Hook. In this, Herberg believed he had found a way to “make pragmatic and utilitarian judgments without taking either pragmatism or utilitarianism as final.” 49 While he believed that Dewey’s inability to establish universal ends could never provide an adequate basis for human morality, he also believed that typical absolutists failed to recognize the contingency of human knowledge and political beliefs. Buckley, for instance, saw Jeffersonian rights as unconditioned and absolute, but Herberg saw these as human constructs that may or may not have been useful in securing the absolute ends of human dignity. He maintained the absolute ends that pragmatists lacked, while still rejecting the metaphysical certainty characteristic of others on the Right. Herberg found affinity to the anti-relativists in his declaration of absolute ends, but was purely Deweyan in his belief as to how those ends were to be pursued. His “theocentric relativism” remained as relativistic as theocentric. 50 This is not to say, however, that Herberg had created a perfect “middle way” that bridged the chasm between pragmatists and absolutists—his “theocentric relativism” leaned more heavily in Buckley’s direction than Dewey’s. Indeed, even though he repudiated “natural law” theory as not sufficiently pragmatic, in later years he still applauded the natural law theorists as allies because they, unlike Deweyan 49 Herberg, Judaism, 111. 50 Regan interview with Herberg, 2. 181 naturalists, recognized a “higher law” beyond human relativity. While he, like Niebuhr, rejected “natural law” reasoning on the grounds that humans, “ravaged by the egocentric corruption of sin, had their reason too clouded to discern the natural law,” he still sympathized with natural law theorists because they, like he, believed in transcendent moral principles. 51 The philosophical mode by which they arrived at a belief in those principles differed, but Herberg believed it of utmost importance to appeal to absolute principles. When pragmatism and transcendence competed with each other in his mind, Herberg, especially at National Review, came to emphasize transcendent morals much more than he did pragmatic method. In theory, Herberg claimed to inhabit a middle ground that drew from both philosophies, but in practice, he increasingly sided with the absolutists as he moved deeper into the conservative camp. Herberg’s entire thought was defined by the tension between relativism and absolutism, but after arriving in the conservative movement, he strongly emphasized the latter and muted his emphasis on the former. In previous years, he had criticized what he saw as two equally pernicious tendencies: one that ascribed absolute status to human concerns, ideas, and programs, and the other that saw no binding moral authority beyond human convention. After joining a movement increasingly defined by absolutism, he focused almost entirely on the latter. For example, two of his first articles for National Review discussed natural law theory. In these articles, Herberg continued to voice his disapproval of natural 51 Herberg, “Conservatives, Liberals, and the Natural Law II,” NR (5 Jun 1962): 438, 458. 182 law, but he also now declared his sympathy for its overall aims. As a member of the conservative movement Herberg focused on the points of agreement between his ideas and those of natural law theorists—both held the “conviction that all man-made law stems from a source beyond man, from a ‘higher law.’” 52 His continuing relativism prevented him from embracing natural law, but he now treated natural law theorists more as allies than adversaries. 53 Herberg also disagreed with other forms of absolutist thinking on the Right, but he believed that a shared religious view and a conviction that the value of the person transcended the natural world, made these differences insignificant beside these all-important similarities. 54 Not coincidentally, Herberg only flexed his relativist muscles when criticizing the remaining natural law theorists on the liberal side of the political spectrum. In particular, he turned his old relativism against Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights activists who looked to natural law to justify civil disobedience. Herberg saw in this, as in the Social Gospel, the dangerous absolutist tendency to enthrone and deify a particular political program, when all such programs were infected with relativity. “Even the best and most righteous human cause,” he said,” is never simply the cause of God,” but King and the civil rights leaders implied that theirs was. 55 Through a religious understanding, one could recognize the moral 52 Herberg, “Conservatives, Liberals, and the Natural Law, I,” NR (5 Jun 1962): 407. He also spoke favorably of natural law thinking in Herberg, “The Case for Heterosexuality,” NR (7 Oct 1969): 1008. 53 Herberg, “Conservatives, Liberals, and the Natural Law, II,” NR (28 Jun 1962): 438. 54 For other examples of Herberg’s emphasis on the absolutist side of his thought at NR, see Herberg, “Secularization and the Collapse of Meaning,” NR (23 Aug 1966): 839; Herberg, “The Bounds of Public Morality,” NR (3 Jun 1969): 545-6; Herberg, “Conservatives and Religion: A Dilemma,” NR (7 Oct 1961): 232; Herberg, “‘Pure’ Religion and the Secularized Society,” NR (10 Sep 1963): 188; 183 imperative that human dignity demanded, but the way to achieve this remained veiled. 56 Herberg agreed with the basic goals and purposes of Civil Rights demonstrators (social justice), but he disagreed with their absolutization of civil disobedience as “simple good” vs. “simple evil.” 57 King, however, was more Niebuhrian than Herberg gave him credit for. He did not see his program as absolute or “simple good vs. evil” any more than Herberg viewed his own in those terms. Rather, King distinguished between just and unjust laws, and urged a program of conscious disobedience of unjust laws on the assumption that one would accept the consequences of such disobedience. Such a program was not absolutist, but deemed necessary by King to create the nonviolent tension necessary for growth. But like Buckley, King did appeal to God-given rights in his quest for racial justice—something Herberg’s relativist side never allowed him to accept. 58 Even as Herberg emphasized his absolutist commonalities with conservatives, other conservatives emphasized their absolutist commonalities with Herberg. The National Review tribute to Herberg after his death focused on his convictions about the “supreme value of the human personality,” while ignoring the relativist aspects of his thought. Herberg, they noted, shared with other 55 Herberg, discussion notes, “Church and Politics,” 1965, folder 8.1, HP, 3. 56 See Herberg, “A Religious ‘Right’ to Violate the Law?” NR (14 Jul 1964): 579-80. Note that Herberg did not criticize similar tendencies on the Right. 57 Herberg, discussion notes, “Christianity, Race, and Civil Rights,” folder 8.1, HP, 6-7. 58 Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” 16 Apr 1963, in Joyce Carol Oates, ed., The Best American Essays of the Century (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 266-8. 184 conservatives the assurance that “a religious foundation was essential to a wise political philosophy” and that a person could not be “regarded as an incommensurable end in himself if he is essentially and totally a configuration of physical particles”—he must have a supernatural essence. 59 Herberg the absolutist was on display when spoken of by conservatives while Herberg the relativist had faded from view. Nevertheless, were it not for his relativism, Herberg never would have joined the conservative movement in the first place. Harry Ausmus argues that Herberg’s drift to conservatism was inevitable given the “absolutist” cast of mind he shared with those on the Right, but while Herberg believed that the transcendence of the individual provided an absolute basis for morality, these convictions had little to do with his Rightward shift. Indeed, as the case of King makes clear, there was nothing inherently conservative in holding beliefs in transcendent ideals. Since political processes, for Herberg, were always infected with relativity and one could never “absolutize” a particular political program, his absolute ends neither allied him de facto with the political Left or Right, for Left-Right divisions were, in Herberg’s schema, relative categories that one could adhere to pragmatically and contingently, but never claim as an absolute position. One could decide, in good faith, that the Left had the better means by which to secure social justice or one could decide that the Right had better solutions, but one could not claim that either the Left or Right had final claim to truth. While he began with the belief that the solutions of 59 Lewis S. Feuer, “Herberg as Political Philosopher,” in “Will Herberg: A Tribute,” NR (5 Aug 1977): 883. 185 the Left best achieved his goals (in his socialist phase from roughly 1939-1951), he ended his life believing that the Right had the superior means for achieving these same ends. He altered his views on which means would best achieve his ends (Right vs. Left), but the absolute ends remained the same and did not determine his political persuasion as both Ausmus and Diggins suggests. 60 In making this political shift, once again, the ideas of Reinhold Niebuhr loomed large. From the realist Niebuhr, Herberg had come to believe that because of the human propensity to sin, concentrations of power posed an inherent danger to order and freedom. Niebuhr, ever the dialectician, saw that the capacity for good was inevitably shadowed by a capacity for evil. Niebuhr believed that human potential was as likely to create tyranny as freedom, and therefore prudence would dictate that human power be restrained. While Dewey sought the best political order, the Niebuhr of the postwar years only sought the “least evil,” for sinfulness inhered in all human institutions and all concentrations of power. 61 Herberg agreed: human potential should not be released, but restrained. Since politics was power and power corrupted; the best humans could hope for would be a political order that “constitute[d] a lesser evil than another” in light of the absolute criterion of justice. In political matters, Herberg concurred with the pragmatists that politics was the business of experimentally finding the way to solve 60 Will Herberg, interview with William F. Buckley, Jr., 10 Jan 1974, HP, folder 229; and William F. Buckley, Jr. to Will Herberg, 11 Nov 1969, HP, Correspondence 1960-1970 folder. 61 Niebuhr, Children of Light, 109-113. 186 problems, but as a realist, he saw those problems as more intractable than many of those pragmatists suggested. 62 To solve the problem of power, Niebuhr and Herberg believed in using institutional checks. Since human nature could not be trusted with power, then power itself needed to be curbed. This could only be done by pitting the concentrations of power in the world against each other. “There is no wisdom so broad or virtue so strong that it can completely escape the corruptions of self interest,” said Herberg, and “Justice requires an equalization of power” that can be accomplished by “diffusing it widely through society” and “blocking and restraining power with power.” 63 Niebuhr believed that government and business represented the two greatest concentrations of power and therefore the two greatest potential threats to freedom. Society needed both public and private power so that the one could act as a defense mechanism against the other and the “least evil” political order would strike a healthy balance between the two sectors. 64 Repudiating his earlier socialism, Niebuhr maintained in the postwar years that “some forms of a ‘free market’ are essential to democracy. The alternative is the regulation of economic process through bureaucratic-political decisions. Such regulation, too consistently applied, involves the final peril of combining political and economic power”—a dangerous blend. 65 Just such a combination of unchecked economic and state power 62 Herberg, “Conservatism, Liberalism, and the Western Tradition,” an address delivered at New York University, 25 May 1970, HP, Faculty File 4, 3; and Herberg, Judaism, 111. 63 Herberg, “Capitalism and Socialism,” 1; and Herberg, Judaism, 149, 175. 64 Niebuhr, Children of Light, 109. 187 had created the Soviet Union, the regime which Niebuhr considered “the worst hell of tyranny men have ever invented.” 66 The state existed, said Herberg, not to liberate humans, but to preserve them “from the consequences of their own sinful depredation and self-destruction.” 67 Herberg and Niebuhr both believed that human potential was as likely to create injustice as justice. By contrast, Dewey believed (consistent with his optimistic faith in human nature) that checks on power needlessly limited the government from performing its useful functions. For Dewey, the state was a tool through which humans applied democratic intelligence to the problems that concerned the public at large. Rigid, codified restrictions on government power (like the U.S. constitution) shackled the current public with an instrument of problem solving devised to solve the problems of a public 150 years before. 68 Restrictions on government power, to Dewey, were restrictions on public effectiveness. Whereas the government, for Dewey, was a useful tool; Niebuhr and Herberg saw the government as a problematic concentration of power, subject to corruption and abuse, and requiring limitation and constant vigilance. In spite of a common pragmatic outlook, a basic difference in views of human nature led to completely different political philosophies. Given the abuses of human power that had created the oppression and war of the previous decade, it is no wonder that Niebuhr’s political answers seemed more adequate than Dewey’s in the 65 Niebuhr, Irony, 93. 66 Quoted in Will Herberg, “Loyalty and Security in Historical Perspective,” TNR (11 Apr 1955): 21. 67 Herberg, “Freedom and Order: Law and Dissent,” undated, HP, folder 4.8, 1. 68 Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (NY: Henry Holt, 1954), 37-74. 188 postwar years. Dewey’s view of human nature simply did not square with the recent experiences of human evil and the tragic effects that concentrations of government power could have. Liberals consequently turned away from Dewey as their leading light to the more realist approach to politics offered by Niebuhr. As always, Herberg took a Niebuhrian insight further than Niebuhr himself. A belief in the need to limit both the public and private sector logically committed Herberg and Niebuhr to the “mixed economy,” but exactly what would that mix look like? When did government power become too concentrated and destroy social justice and how much should one limit the private sector in the name of the public good? Niebuhr’s philosophy left these questions open to experimental application in particular circumstances. Herberg took from Niebuhr the conviction that “some degree of restriction of government power to its necessary spheres” was crucial to the preservation of freedom, but “necessary spheres” was a subjective term that could lead to either less or more government. 69 While Niebuhr had presented a political philosophy, he had not (nor dared he) present as settled a specific political program—he was much too pragmatic for that. Such particulars of politics as the balance between public and private power could not be deduced from timeless principles, they could only be determined through the Deweyan method of problem solving. Only by evaluating the specifics of the situation, considering the possible alternatives, and then, based on empirical evidence, selecting the alternative with 69 Herberg, “Personalism,” 3. 189 preferable consequences could one determine when and how to limit government or business. Thus we see that, even in his conversion to conservatism, Herberg never changed his fundamental convictions. His Niebuhrian political philosophy remained, but he altered his view of how to pragmatically apply those ideals. Although he had been tending rightward throughout the 1950s, beginning the decade as a socialist, but spending most of it as a Vital Center liberal, he finally found himself in agreement with conservatives more than liberals at decade’s end. Niebuhr and Herberg agreed on the fundamental principle of “constitutionalism” in political matters, but they disagreed on empirical grounds as to how and to what degree to check each potential threat. After 1960, Herberg believed with increasing vehemence, that freedom depended upon limited government. While he continued to emphasize the prevalence of human sin late in life, he emphasized the sin of private institutions less and the sin of public institutions more. Increasingly, he saw the government, rather than the business sector as the power that posed the greatest threat to freedom and required the strongest checks against it. Since Herberg believed that conservatives better understood the threat of government, he believed they better passed his pragmatic test of how best to curb power. 70 Early in his career, Herberg had considered himself a “Niebuhrian socialist,” believing strongly in using the state to counter the power of propertied interests, but later in his career, even as he maintained the same perspective on the need to check 70 Herberg, “Paul’s Teaching on Powers,” undated, HP, folder 8.1, 1-4; Herberg, “Freedom and Order,” 4, 7; and Herberg, “The Great Society and the American Constitution Tradition,” Modern Age (Summer 1967): 231-35. 190 power, he believed that the state posed the greater threat. 71 Although he remained consistent in challenging those who attempted to equate Christianity with any given social policy, he now saw Social Gospelers, rather than classical liberals, as embodying that tendency. 72 Thus, Herberg actually left Niebuhr’s liberalism on Niebuhrian grounds. Still, Herberg never embraced free markets as a “positive good,” but continued to stress, like Niebuhr, that markets were the lesser of two evils. Until his death, he retained his affection for the working class, supported labor unions, and made economic justice a central concern; he had only changed his views that such goals were best served by less government action, not more. 73 “Collectivism seems more moral and Christian,” he said in a 1965 lecture at Northwestern University, “but in performance and consequences it is the opposite. It is both inefficient and destructive of freedom.” 74 In joining conservatism, Herberg had come to share Buckley’s free market views, but he still disagreed with Buckley’s limited- government reasoning. Buckley’s belief that humans were endowed by their creator with immutable and eternal rights to life, liberty, and property made his free market views timeless and applicable to all situations. He believed in limiting the state more because of 71 Herberg, “Freedom and Order,” 1. 72 Herberg, “Christianity and Social Policy,” 2. 73 See, for instance, Herberg, “Conservatism, the Working Class, and the Jew,” Ideas (Winter-Spring 1970): 25-29. 74 Herberg, unpublished manuscript of article for Laurence G. Lavengood, ed., Moral Man and Economic Enterprise (Northwestern UP, 1968), given as an address at Northwestern University, 15 Apr 1965, HP, folder 225. 191 Lockean principle than for concerns over the checking of power (after all, he never made it a priority to place limitations on business power) while Herberg, on the other hand, believed that the contingency of knowledge and the limitations humans faced living in a relative world demanded that they find out what would best promote justice. Herberg believed, in the sixties and seventies, that limited government best accomplished this. While Buckley’s commitment to metaphysical certainty may have been responsible for his free market views, Herberg’s commitment to pragmatism was responsible for his. Their differences were typical of those between the Lockean and Burkean anti-statist positions. 75 It is only through reference to his Niebuhrian pragmatism that one can understand Herberg’s ideological journey. Against the assertions of Diggins and Ausmus, Herberg’s journey to conservatism resembles less that of Richard Weaver, (who abandoned socialism for newfound absolutist convictions), and more that of Deweyan Max Eastman who claimed to have abandoned socialism not because of a fundamental shift away from his pragmatism, but because pragmatism itself showed “statism” to have been an experiment that failed. 76 After his shift to the Right, Herberg continued to try to minimize the differences between himself and his mentor even as Niebuhr remained, for all of his criticisms of liberalism, a central (perhaps the central) player in liberal intellectual 75 But like Buckley, Herberg believed that he could differ with others of his same philosophical persuasion (Catholicism in Buckley’s case, Neo-Orthodoxy in Herberg’s) when it came to political particulars. As Buckley believed that the Catholic consensus left room for his views as long as he accepted some state regulation, Herberg believed that his Niebuhrian ideals left room for the free market views as long as he defended them in terms of curbing excess power. 76 Max Eastman, “Am I Conservative?” NR (28 Jan 1964): 57. 192 life in the fifties and early sixties. In 1951, at the time he wrote Judaism and Modern Man, Herberg assumed a position to the left of Niebuhr on the political spectrum as he still hoped for a form of theistic socialism to emerge, but ten years later he had moved well to the right of his mentor in political matters. 77 But even as he denounced his earlier political convictions, Herberg still retained the core philosophy that he had held as a socialist and was determined to show that Niebuhr shared his “conservatism.” To Herberg, the essence of conservatism was not limited government, but a Burkean recognition of human limitation. Edmund Burke, the founding father of classical conservatism, opposed the revolutionaries in France because of their naïve faith in “human rationality and virtue.” Burke, recognizing the imperfectability of humans and the limitations of reason, preferred instead customs and traditions as a guide in political and social matters. History and tradition, for Burke, provided the possibilities and limitations of statecraft and liberals ignored such constraints, believing instead that “human rationality and virtue would be quite sufficient to solve all human problems.” To Herberg, such a view bound eighteenth-century liberals (French revolutionaries) to those liberals of the twentieth century like Dewey. 78 On such grounds, Herberg, without objection from Niebuhr, claimed his mentor for the conservative cause, even if not for the movement. To Herberg, both Burke and Niebuhr rejected the liberal-rationalist view which saw society as a machine to be rationally ordered, and preferred instead the conservative-historical 77 Herberg, “The End of a Schism: Socialism and Religion,” 22 Nov 1947, HP, folder 189. 78 Herberg, “Reinhold Niebuhr: Burkean Conservative,” NR (2 Dec 1961): 379. 193 view, which saw society as an organism, an historical “community of destiny arising out of the ‘deliberate election of ages and generations.’” To Herberg, Niebuhr’s conservatism grew out of his “appreciation of the organic factors in social life in contrast to the tendencies stemming from the Enlightenment which blinds modern man to the significance of these factors.” To Herberg, the organic vs. mechanical conceptions of society formed a major fault line between conservatism and liberalism and Niebuhr’s preference for the former put him in the conservative category. 79 While liberals believed in remaking society along rational lines, said Herberg, Niebuhr and Burke believed that history circumscribed both the limits and possibilities of reason. Society could not “be remade at will,” but as an historical structure society was continually “remaking itself.” Like Burke, Niebuhr saw the best political disposition as one that maintained a proper balance between a preservation of the desirable within society and the prudent improvement of the undesirable. Most importantly, Herberg believed that the “political philosophies of both Burke and Niebuhr were “rooted in a profound Christian understanding of the nature of man in society” and both saw man and society “in their full historicity,” and took “with utmost seriousness the operations of original sin in the historic life of mankind.” Although Herberg admitted that “Niebuhr identified with many causes sponsored or supported by liberals,” he also noted that favoring reforms supported by liberals hardly made one a liberal in the final judgment. “Without necessarily 79 Will Herberg, “Conservative, Liberalism, and the Western Tradition,” speech at New York University, 25 May 1970, HP, Faculty Folder 4, 4-5. 194 endorsing all of Niebuhr’s political judgments on current questions,” Herberg concluded, “I submit that Niebuhr’s general outlook pretty well meets the Burkean standard.” 80 He might have added that, in spite of their now-considerable political differences, Niebuhr’s general outlook also met the “Herbergian” standard. Herberg’s attempt to make conservatives more welcoming towards Niebuhr bore substantial fruit. Before Herberg’s arrival at National Review, conservatives saw Niebuhr as “just another liberal,” but after Herberg’s arrival, conservative mentions of Niebuhr were almost uniformly positive. 81 They quoted him approvingly, not only as a highly-regarded religious thinker, but also as one who condemned radicalism and understood order as a precondition of justice. 82 Buckley wrote that he hoped college students would read Niebuhr in order to counter the “pernicious” anti-religious ideas taught by their professors. 83 It is not coincidental that after Herberg’s tenure as religion editor at National Review, those who followed him at the position—Michael Novak and Richard John Neuhaus—were followers of Niebuhr and former liberals. 84 In bringing Niebuhrianism to conservatism, Herberg had helped create a more open movement, even if a less consistent one. 80 Herberg, “Reinhold Niebuhr,” 379, 394. 81 See review of Sin and Science: Reinhold Niebuhr as Political Theologian by Holtan Odegard, NR (1 Sep 56); and “The Week,” NR (9 Feb 1957): 122. 82 Buckley, “Watts, Where is That?,” Syndicated Column, 21 Sep 1965, HD, 2. Niebuhr flatly observes, said Buckley, that “on the political level, the value of justice takes an uneasy second place behind that of internal order.” 83 Buckley, Up From Liberalism, 54-73. 84 See Buckley, “Introduction” to Michael Novak, Moral Clarity in a Nuclear Age (Nashville: T. Nelson, 1983),14-15). Buckley, “Remarks at a Gala,” NR 31 Dec 1986: 21. 195 But Herberg did not need to claim Niebuhr as a Burkean; Niebuhr himself had already done so. Niebuhr had long proclaimed his reverence for the great conservative founder and his principles and believed that one of the central problems of the time was that modern humans, like late eighteenth-century rationalists, had strayed too far from Burkean principles. “America has developed a pragmatic approach to political and economic questions which would do credit to Edmund Burke, the great exponent of the wisdom of historical experience as opposed to the abstract rationalism of the French Revolution” he said. 85 Indeed, as Herberg had claimed, Niebuhr’s disagreements with Dewey stemmed from the instrumentalist philosopher’s rejection of Burkean realism and anti-rationalism. “The real difficulty in both the communist and the liberal dreams of a ‘rationally ordered’ historic process,” Niebuhr said, “is that the modern man lacks the humility to accept the fact that the whole drama of history is enacted in a frame of meaning too large for human comprehension or management.” 86 Burkean sentiments indeed. But if Herberg had defined conservatism in terms of such human limitation, the absolutist currents being introduced into the conservative movement by Buckley, Weaver, Strauss, and others seemed to work contrary to these views. If Burke focused on contingency and limitation, like Niebuhr, then classical conservatism itself was based on a form of pragmatism: a rejection of the very rational certainty characteristic of so many absolutists on the postwar Right. What was the metaphysical certainty conservatives now embraced if not the very rationalism that 85 Niebuhr, Irony, 89. 86 Ibid., 88. 196 Burke renounced? In one of the central ironies of modern political history, the conservative movement set absolutism up as a central principle, while the classical conservatism formulated by Burke firmly rejected just such an application of metaphysical certainties to politics. Buckley accepted Burke’s philosophy as sufficiently attuned to “timeless truth” to be considered conservative, but he himself accepted a more rationalistic absolutism than Burke ever would have. In this sense, the “liberal” Niebuhr turned out to be a better Burkean “conservative” than even Buckley himself. By keeping his distance from more extreme free market views, Niebuhr was also a better Burkean conservative than Herberg. While Herberg came to believe through experience that free markets secured human justice better than socialism or liberalism, he ignored Burke’s warning that liberty itself was power. While the “liberty” of the free market could be seen as creating human dignity, Niebuhr and Burke recognized the irony that liberty (including economic liberty) could sow the seeds of its own destruction by dissolving the virtue and bonds of community that made economic freedom possible in the first place. 87 In embracing the free-market as the “lesser evil,” Herberg forgot Niebuhr’s teaching that “political strategies [rightly] deal with outer and social checks upon the egoism of men and of nations” and that even freedom itself needed restraint. 88 In his acceptance of laissez-faire, Herberg had become almost as much a naïve “Child of Light” as Dewey and the 87 Niebuhr, Irony, 91. 88 Niebuhr, Children, 182. 197 Marxists. 89 Even while Herberg tried to minimize the distance between himself and his master, their political differences remained as did a philosophical difference that Herberg would not acknowledge. The case of Herberg is thus an important one for the history of conservatism in that it reveals at least one figure on the Right who attempted to grapple and even sympathize with both absolutism and relativism at their strongest and implement elements of both. While Buckley had misrepresented Dewey and completely avoided Niebuhr, Herberg attempted to fully use the insights of Niebuhr, and borrow generously from Dewey even while rejecting many of his claims. Herberg’s theocentric relativism, while not a totally successful synthesis, represented an important conservative attempt to bring a more sympathetic understanding of pragmatism to the Right. Not only did the relativist streak in Herberg’s thinking defy the simplistic “absolutism” ascribed to him by previous historians, but his focus on uncertainty and the contingency of knowledge, more than his absolutism, accounts for his journey into the conservative movement. Most importantly, the case of Herberg shows that, in spite of the new, emerging requirement that conservatives reject relativism, the exact nature of anti- relativism was left vague enough to allow a variety of positions on the Right, including even Herberg’s theocentric relativism. Conservatives had a common enemy—the nihilism that threatened American society—and believed that only their common commitment to a trans-human standard of value could stop it. Conservative 89 Ibid., 106. 198 aversion to liberalism bound them together and allowed them to gloss over philosophical differences. Buckley never mentioned his disagreements with Herberg’s relativism, but spoke instead of the older man’s “erudition,” wisdom, and personal virtue. 90 Undoubtedly, unity of principle was important on the Right, but keeping the principles as loosely defined as possible also meant greater strength of numbers—within broad conservative principles, there was room for considerable disagreement. Just as limited government principles remained important on the Right, even as conservatives left open both the degree and variety of anti-statist principles, so the important principle of anti-relativism remained open to a variety of anti-relativisms. In Herberg one sees that the “absolutism” of the Right showed more variety than critics would allow, just as the blanket term “relativism” hardly accounted for the varieties of anti-absolutist thinking among liberals. As an ex-communist who arrived at conservatism through the pragmatic views of a leading Cold War liberal, Herberg hardly fit the mold that Arendt and Schlesinger had in mind when they castigated absolutism on the Right. Thus, conservatives adopted the strongest ideas of Cold War liberalism—a Niebuhrian critique of rationalism—and made these ideas a part of the general anti-relativism that they developed and turned against liberals in these years. 91 90 Buckley, “The Optimism of Dr. Will Herberg,” NR (21 Apr 1970): 429. 91 Herberg, “Religion and Ethics,” 7 Dec 1949, HP, folder 189, 2. The case of Herberg also shows that the legacy of Niebuhr is a contested one. John Ehrman has argued that neoconservatism owes much to Niebuhr’s philosophy and that the theologian’s influence exceeded even that of the iconic Leo Strauss. John Ehrman, The Rise of Neoconservatism: Intellectuals and Foreign Affairs, 1945- 1994 (New Haven: Yale UP, 1995), 11-16. Currently the battle for the legacy of Niebuhr continues as conservative intellectuals William J. Bennett, Michael Novak, and Richard John Neuhaus (Catholics all) claim Niebuhr as a primary inspiration. In this sense, Herberg was only the first “neoconservative” to use Niebuhrian insights to arrive at conservative positions. 199 Chapter 5 The Growth of Anti-Secularism on the Right After conservatives had turned their anti-statist movement in the direction of anti-relativism, they then adopted a third cause—anti-secularism. Like anti- relativism, anti-secularism would create deep and abiding contradictions in the movement as conservative intellectual leaders found themselves at once demanding limited government while also advocating a greater government role in promoting religiosity. While the contradictions between anti-statism and anti-relativism were difficult to discern, the contradictions between anti-statism and anti-secularism were not. Herberg and Buckley often declared that the powers of government could only legitimately extend to the protection of freedom, but their advocacy of public religion—using government funds to aid private religious schools, establishing religious symbols in public life, and the sponsoring of school prayers—showed their willingness to violate their own anti-statist values in religious matters. A consistent anti-statism would have rejected government intrusions beyond the narrowly prescribed functions they often favored. 1 Contradictions also emerged because of conservatives’ loose usage of the word “secularism.” While the term “secularism” is applied in many ways and carries different meanings dependent upon context, most intellectuals of the time (including the writers at National Review) generally used the word to refer to a removal of religion from the public sphere. Herberg and Buckley opposed this secularism by 1 Will Herberg, “The Bounds of Public Morality,” NR (3 Jun 1969): 545-46. 200 advocating more religion in public life (i.e. “public religion”). Often, however, Buckley and Herberg would claim that “secularists” opposed religion in all realms of life—not just the public. 2 By conflating anti-religion and secularism, they not only distorted the position of their opponents, but they failed to make the distinction between public and private action that their critics often made against them. Buckley, for example, because he opposed the welfare state, found himself under constant attack for his “heartless” and “uncaring” attitude towards the poor, to which he would respond that his concern for the poor was independent of his thinking on the role of the state in such matters. 3 He differentiated between “caring for the poor” and believing the redistribution of wealth via government programs. Opposing state sponsorship of religion did not make one intrinsically anti-religious any more than opposing government-sponsored charity made one uncharitable. Many personally- charitable persons opposed state-mandated charity, while many personally-religious persons opposed state-mandated religion. As their critics often failed to differentiate between charity and public charity, Herberg and Buckley often failed to differentiate between religion and public religion. Although anti-secularism had become a conservative cause by late 1950s, as with anti-relativism, liberals had come to the cause first and it was from them that conservatives took their arguments. This process began in the postwar era with the 2 See, for example, Herberg “Conservatives and Religion: A Dilemma,” NR (7 Oct 1961): 230, in which Herberg begins by denouncing liberals as those who wanted to remove religion from the public square, but then adds the charge that “the liberals naturally shared [the] anti-religious bias” of the Jacobins. 3 See, for instance, Buckley, “An Evening with Jack Paar,” NR (27 Mar 1962): 205-06; and Buckley, “Compassion Then and Now,” syndicated column, 3 Jun 1962, 1-3, HD. 201 private school controversy of the early 1950s. In 1952, Harvard President James B. Conant, having just returned from a trip to Australia at which he observed their “dual system” of education, traveled around the United States speaking in favor of strengthening the American “single school system.” 4 Believing that private schools created creedal and class divisions in society, Conant favored diminishing the power of these schools, which were usually Catholic, and expanding what he saw as democracy-fortifying public schools. Conant’s crusade helped push the question of church-state relations to the center of intellectual debate. In particular, since Conant had directly challenged their institutions, liberal Catholics led the way in refuting his claims. They responded to Conant with two main arguments for private schools that Buckley and Herberg would later adopt, build upon, and apply more broadly to those of public religion. First, they denied the alleged “neutrality” of public schools and called secularism itself a form of religious orthodoxy. The editors of the Catholic magazine Commonweal argued that those who objected to parochial schools wished to replace certain religious dogmas in education with their own equally-dogmatic secularist ideas. 5 Catholic World editor John B. Sheerin claimed that Conant and other secularists had “exalted Democracy into the status of a religion” and taught this substitute faith in the public schools. 6 Conant believed that the survival of democracy depended upon the public school 4 A transcript of Conant’s most well-known speech was published in the Saturday Review as “Education: The Engine of Democracy,” (3 May 1952): 11-14. 5 “Parochial Schools in a Democracy,” CW (18 Apr 1952): 31. 6 John B. Sheerin, “Conant and Catholic Schools,” Catholic World (Jun 1952): 161, 163-65. 202 system because it unified children in their common democratic ideals rather than dividing them by class or creed, 7 but for Sheerin democracy depended on the morality that necessarily came from religion. Secular schools were incapable of sustaining democracy, Sheerin argued, because “the morale of democracy cannot survive the death of morality.” Since any ethical code was meaningless without “the spiritual foundation of that code,” secular schools would be unable to instruct children in moral precepts. 8 Second, Catholics responded to attacks on private schools by denying the very existence of a “wall of separation” between church and state. While they acknowledged that “the state qua state should not prefer one religion to another and use its power accordingly,” these Catholic intellectuals denied that this meant that the government should remain indifferent to all religion. They also believed that, as a matter of historical fact, “a complete separation of church and state” had never existed in the United States. 9 Such “separation” was not mentioned in any of the founding documents and was not the intention of the First Amendment, they said. The idea of a “wall,” said Sheerin writing in Catholic World, was a fiction created by secularists like Conant. 7 Conant, “Education,” 11-13. 8 Sheerin, “Conant and Catholic Schools,” 163-65. 9 “Theology in State Universities,” CW (18 Apr 1952): 35. 203 Other Catholics addressed Conant more directly. 10 Archbishop Richard J. Cushing, who presided over Boston where Conant had made his most famous speech against private education, published an official rebuttal to in the Saturday Review of Books in which he stated his objections to the Harvard president’s position. Far from creating divisiveness and undermining democracy, said Cushing, parochial schools had often been in the forefront of democratic action. For example, Catholic schools had educated black children who were prevented from attending public schools by the very “divisive attitudes” that Conant claimed the public schools worked against. He added that private schools did not compete with the public schools nor diminish their influence, but complemented the common goal of educating children. Not only did Conant overlook the considerable dangers of secularism, said Cushing, but, as the president of the elitist/private Harvard University, he also acted hypocritically in lecturing others about the dangers of elitist/private education. 11 In another tactic that both Herberg and Buckley would later adopt as their own, the Commonweal editors quoted Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas to discredit the idea of a complete separation of church and state. Conant’s widely- reported Boston speech of April 28, 1952 coincided to the day with the controversial Zorach v. Clausen Supreme Court decision, which allowed release-time from public 10 M. Whitcomb Hess, “Conant’s Big-Business Fascism,” Catholic Century (Apr 1953): 25-30; Sheerin, 161-65. 11 Richard J. Cushing, “The Case for Religious Schools,” Saturday Review (3 May 1952): 14. The controversy, while mostly the concern of Catholics, did not escape the notice of Protestant intellectuals as well. See Nathan M. Guptill, “Clash on Public-Private Schools” Christian Century (21 May 1952), 622-3. 204 schools for religious instruction. In his majority opinion, Justice Douglas declared that the First Amendment “does not say that, in every and all respects there shall be a separation of Church and state,” and added that Americans were “a religious people whose institutions presuppose the existence of a supreme being.” 12 The Zorach decision not only heightened public interest in matters of church and state, especially as pertaining to education, but delighted those Catholic intellectuals who favored a greater role for religion in education. 13 Although the above defenders of private school disagreed with Conant on matters of church and state, they were in agreement with him in their support of the liberal political order. Commonweal, a liberal magazine, put criticism of secularism alongside its applause for the New Deal. The editors credited Franklin D. Roosevelt’s reforms for giving democratic capitalism “a new lease on life” even as they denounced secular trends in education promoted by liberals like Conant. 14 As with anti-relativism, anti-secularism began as a liberal cause before conservatives like Buckley seized it as their own. Following in the footsteps of these liberal Catholics (with whom he was then in political agreement), Herberg also turned to issues of church-state in response to Conant and the public school controversy. Specifically responding to Conant’s charge that competing forms of education created “cleavages” in society, Herberg 12 William O. Douglas, Opinion of the Court, Supreme Court of the United States, 343 U.S. 306, Zorach v. Clausen, 28 April 1952, 313. A copy of the opinion can be found at Cornell University “Supreme Court Collection” website. 13 “A Matter of Traditionalism,” CW (16 May 1952): 133. 14 See, for instance, “Creeping Socialism” CW (18 Jul 1952): 355. 205 argued the opposite: that the wall of church and state was actually a wall between Protestants and Catholics, and that an expansion of that wall would expand the hostilities that threatened democratic unity. 15 Herberg argued that “secular” education grew out of an understandable Protestant “distaste for ecclesiastical control.” This Protestant-established secularism left Catholics with no choice but to set up their own alternative school system, a system that was as deserving of public funding as the secular public schools. 16 Although liberal Catholics only asked that their schools be allowed to continue alongside public schools, Herberg went beyond them in asking that taxpayers fund those schools. Although he would later condemn government funding of charitable initiatives, he would continue to advocate government support for private schools, even though both required taxpayer funding and expanded government beyond the limited functions he would later advocate. To justify his position on parochial schools, Herberg used the same basic arguments then current in Catholic circles. In asserting the “myths” of religious neutrality and separation of church and state, Herberg expressed sentiments that circulated within the intellectual world he inhabited. First, Herberg agreed with Father Sheerin that it was impossible to achieve religious neutrality in education. The alleged “neutrality” of public schools, he said, was no neutrality at all, because public schools actually “indoctrinated” a substitute faith, such as the religion of secularism, or, as in Conant’s proposal, the religion of 15 Will Herberg, “The Sectarian Conflict over Church and State: A Divisive Threat to Our Democracy?,” C (Nov 1952): 462. 16 Ibid., 450-52; Herberg, “Justice for Religious Schools,” America (15 Nov 1957), folder, 2, HP. 206 democracy. 17 Far from refraining from teaching religion, said Herberg, the public school system made anti-religion itself the established religion in public education. 18 Conant believed that government schools left religious questions aside, but Herberg, believing this impossible, claimed that they taught the “the counter-religion of secularism.” 19 But Herberg also shared Sheerin’s view that such substitute religions could never give the moral anchor to children that society so needed. Herberg conceded that Conant may have been right in saying that Judeo-Christian religion was unnecessary for a moral society, but only in the same way that a flower could retain its beauty after being severed from its roots. 20 Instruction in moral and spiritual values, said Herberg, if left “ungrounded” in a God-centered faith like Christianity or Judaism, would quickly become corrupted. While he primarily defended Catholics and Catholic schools (something he would continue to do for his entire life, leaving many puzzled that he, a Jew, was one of the greatest defenders of Christianity at the time), Herberg contended that even Protestants were disturbed by the “religious vacuum in public education,” especially considering that a child spent so much time at school and that it exerted a primary influence on her or his mental formation. 21 17 Herberg, “A Religion or Religions: Some Comments on the Programs of ‘Moral and Religious Values’ in the Schools,” 2 Mar 1956, folder 184, HP, 6-7; Herberg, “Sectarian Conflict,” 451; Herberg, “Justice,” 2. 18 Herberg, “Sectarian Conflict,” 458. 19 Herberg, “Justice,” 2. 20 Herberg, “A Religion,” 2. 21 Herberg, “Sectarian Conflict,” 457-458; Herberg, “A Religion,” 4, 6. 207 Second, Herberg denied that the private school issue could be settled by simply invoking the idea of a “separation” between church and state, for, like his Catholic predecessors, he did not believe that such a separation existed. The government had always given money and support to military and prison chaplains, had paid the tuition and expenses of students at church-related universities, and even imposed compulsory chapel attendance at the military academies. 22 The separation of church and state was a longstanding, but pernicious myth. There was not nor had there ever been, said Herberg, a “high and impregnable wall of separation between church and state” and Justice Douglas’ recent Supreme Court opinion only solidified that fact. 23 In his attempt to debunk what he saw as the myth of separation, Herberg turned to the Founding Fathers for help. He quoted Thomas Jefferson as saying that public authorities should not be indifferent to “instruction in religious opinion and duties,” because the relationship between God and Man was the most important aspect of human existence. 24 The Northwest Ordinance of 1787, he pointed out, “laid it down that: ‘religion, morality, and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.’” 25 Clearly, said Herberg, support of religious schooling, 22 Herberg, “Justice,” 3. 23 Herberg, “Justice,” 1; Herberg, “Sectarian Conflict,” 452, 458. 24 Herberg, “Sectarian Conflict,” 452. 25 Ibid., 452. 208 under the intentions of the Founders, was one such way that the state should support religion and morality. The founders, Herberg said, did not intend indifference or hostility to religion when they created the First Amendment, but only intended that the government not prefer one religion to another. 26 Absolute separation of church and state “was never contemplated by the Founding Fathers” he said with confidence, and for that reason had never been the policy or the practice of the various levels and branches of government in the United States. 27 To Herberg, the question was not if the state could support churches—that was proved to his satisfaction by historical and legal precedent—but how the state should support religion and what forms this support should take. Herberg believed that government support for private schools constituted one such form. Herberg also added that religious schools were, in fact, public institutions because they performed a public function. Catholic schools met the criteria of eligibility for government funds because they met standards required by public consensus and educated children according to those standards. They supplied large numbers of children with an education that was accepted everywhere as legitimate in the same way education given at public schools was. 28 An organization, he maintained, need not be run by the government to be a “public” organization, it only needed to be dedicated to public causes, which Catholic schools were. Catholic parents, he said, rightfully complained that they were forced to pay for their 26 Ibid., 452. 27 Ibid., 456. 28 Herberg, “Justice,” 2. 209 Children’s education twice—once through taxation, and one through private school tuition. Herberg extended this blurring of the public/private distinction beyond education to all of society. Religion could never be a purely private matter, he said, because religious beliefs and practices had public consequences and affected the fabric of society. 29 Meanwhile, “those who, like James B. Conant, regard the non- governmental school as essentially improper and undemocratic,” operated with a “conception of democracy that verges on the totalitarian.” 30 While many opponents of private schools unquestionably held anti-Catholic sentiments, Herberg often attributed such motives to anyone who disagreed with his position. Given the cultural milieu of the time, such suspicions were not surprising. In his bestselling books American Freedom and Catholic Power (1949) and Communism, Democracy, and Catholic Power (1951), Paul Blanshard had declared Catholicism intrinsically authoritarian and incompatible with democratic ideals. Blanshard saw Catholic private schools as yet another means to further the Church’s goals of increased political influence and control. He shared Conant’s belief that the parochial school was an “important divisive instrument in the life of American children.” 31 29 “Parochial School Aid Championed,” clipping from Newark Sunday News, 7 Dec 1958, HP, folder 23: Correspondence 1945-59; and Herberg, “Sectarian Conflict,” 452-3. 30 Herberg, “Justice,” 2. 31 John McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom: A History from Slavery to Abortion (NY: W.W. Norton, 2003): 166-69. Intellectuals who agreed with Blanshard on one or more points included Horace Kallen, John Dewey, George Boas, and Lewis Mumford. Common anti-Catholic animus was visible in letters to Herberg as well. See Mrs. George R. Pope to Will Herberg, 9 Jul 1957; Arthur B. Hewson (editor of Rationalist Publications), 10 Jul 1957; Henry L. Wood to Herberg, 210 “Blanshardism” drew battle lines and heightened passions on both sides. Many Protestants and non-believers felt a greater threat from private schools while Catholics felt a greater sense of besiegement, making defense of private schools, and, by extension, anti-secularism, a major issue in Catholic intellectual circles. Before 1952, Catholic journals of opinion, such as Commonweal and Catholic World, had rarely defended private schools, but after Conant’s attacks, they did so regularly. In 1952, the editors noted that “during the past year,” American private schools had been “the subject of widespread discussion and attack;” they responded to this attack by increasing the frequency and intensity of articles and editorials defending private schools and their role in society. 32 In this context of Blanshardism, Herberg assumed that opponents of private education were also opponents of Catholicism. Those who wished to limit private education, said Herberg, were actually bothered by the growth of Catholicism in the U.S. Their supposed convictions about the separation of church and state merely cloaked “a defensive campaign against ‘Catholic aggression.’” The bigotry of Blanshardism, said Herberg, and not the growth of Catholicism or their private schools, constituted the real menace to American freedom. With historian Peter Viereck, Herberg claimed that “Catholic baiting” was the anti-Semitism of the 17 Nov 1957; James Barnett to Herberg, 7 Apr 1958. All of the above letters are found in folder 23: Correspondence 1945-1959, HP. Even as a Jew, Herberg remained throughout his life an opponent of Blanshard and anti-Catholicism. See Will Herberg, “Blanshardism,’ Americanism, Communism, and Romanism,” New Hampshire Churchman (Feb 1952): 6-13; Herberg, “Open Season on the Church?” NR (4 May 1965): 363-4; and Will Herberg, “The Plight of American Catholicism,” NR (27 Aug 1968): 852-3. 32 The April 18, 1952 issue of Commonweal exploded with four articles on topic, all explicitly devoted to repudiating Conant’s attacks. See also “Subversion in our schools,” CW (26 Sep 1952): 601. 211 liberals and that the attack on public schools was only another manifestation of this prejudice. 33 But attributing anti-Catholicism to all who opposed public sponsorship of Catholic institutions was as much a mistake as was Herberg’s lumping together as “secularists” both those who opposed all religion and those who only opposed public religion. Indeed, one could be a believing Catholic even while sharing Conant’s views about public schools. Four members of The American Jewish Committee pointed out this fallacy in a letter repudiating Herberg’s position. By using the term “secular” as he did, Herberg had weighted the dice in his favor. At times, Herberg would call those who held a generally godless outlook on life “secularists,” while at other times he used the term to describe a political position that believed in keeping religious and government matters separate. The Committee members preferred the standard Webster’s Dictionary definition of secularism—“Belonging to the state as distinguished from the church; non-ecclesiastical”—to Herberg’s arbitrary use of the term. By using the word “secularism” in both senses, Herberg tacitly equated those who opposed public religion with those who opposed all religion even though secular persons and institutions were “not necessarily anti-religious.” A personal belief did not automatically translate into a political position, they said. Many of those Herberg denounced as “secular” were actually themselves religious and desired greater religiosity in America, but not through state coercion. A failure to make this distinction remained an error on the Right that, while serving a polemical purpose of 33 Herberg, “Sectarian Conflict,” 453-454, 456, 460. 212 allowing conservatives to attribute “godlessness” to their political opponents, did little to further understanding of alternative positions. 34 Herberg’s use of the Founding Fathers did not go unchallenged either. There was naturally cachet value in claiming the framers of American government as allies in a particular cause, but critics noted that Herberg used their words selectively and sometimes without proper context. While Herberg often quoted Madison’s statements on the intrinsic connections between religion and morality, The American Jewish Committee members countered with other Madison quotes that explicitly and unambiguously warned against public religion. Madison, they said, opposed all official affiliation between religion and civil authority because religion was a matter of private, not public, conscience. 35 Another critic of Herberg’s position noted that Herberg’s “Jefferson quotations” actually came from the Board of Visitors of the University of Virginia, of which Jefferson was only one member, and whose statements, in context, showed him to advocate a position opposite the one Herberg claimed. 36 If he used the words of the founders selectively and without context, a thorough examination of the Zorach majority opinion shows that he had done the same with the words of Justice Douglas. In Zorach, Douglas not only declared that Americans were a religious people, but also re-affirmed the importance of keeping 34 American Jewish Committee (P. Jacobson, M. Kertzer, E.J. Lukas, T. Leskes) to editor of C (Jan 1953): 100; and Herberg, “Sectarian Conflict,” 451. 35 American Jewish Committee, letter, 100. 36 Stanley Lichtenstein, letter to the editor of C (Jan 1953): 102. 213 government as neutral as possible in religious affairs. 37 “There cannot be the slightest doubt that the First Amendment reflects the philosophy that Church and State should be separated,” Douglas said in the very same opinion that Herberg so often quoted, and so far as interference with the ‘free exercise’ of religion and an ‘establishment’ of religion are concerned, the separation must be complete and unequivocal. The First Amendment within the scope of its coverage permits no exception; the prohibition is absolute. 38 Douglas’s actual words, understood in context, were hardly the endorsement of public religion that Herberg had made them out to be. In spite of such problems and inconsistencies, Herberg was at this point in his life more consistent in his positions than Buckley, for he did not yet hold strict limited-government views. As a political liberal, Herberg’s positions, like those of the liberal Catholics he drew from, were reconciled in an expansive view of the state. In the 1950s, he still believed that the state had a vital role in many moral aspects of life, such as ensuring fair wages for labor, redistributing wealth as a charitable function, and regulating industry. To hold such positions and claim that the state should also promote religion was not a radical departure from or contradiction of his basic political beliefs, for he already held a broad view of what the government could legitimately do. Of course, as Herberg’s views about the functions of the state grew more limited and conservative in the 1960s, he found himself caught in the same contradictions as Buckley. 37 American Jewish Committee, letter, 100-01. 38 Douglas, Zorach v. Clausen, 312. 214 But Herberg’s stance on public religion contradicted other aspects of his thought even before he joined the conservative movement. In his writings, he often denounced the “routinization” of religion in modern America even while his own anti-secularism may have contributed to that very problem. Around the time the first issues of National Review came off the press, Will Herberg’s widely-discussed book Protestant-Catholic-Jew was released as well. 39 The book made major contributions to American religious sociology by conceiving of religion as a source of identity to millions of Americans who sought to recover some of their ethnic past while still integrating themselves into the “American Way of Life.” Whereas the Marxist Herberg had previously seen class as underlying human action, he now saw religion as a central category of social analysis. 40 Along with this argument, Herberg also contended that many Americans in the Eisenhower era made the utility of faith, rather than God himself, the object of their religious devotion. Drawing on sociologist David Riesman, Herberg saw other- directed Americans seeking peer acceptance, belonging, and a sense of identity in their religious affiliation, rather than seeking a genuine relationship with the Divine. 1950s religion, Herberg argued in Protestant-Catholic-Jew, was largely superficial and President Eisenhower’s own statements on religion contributed to this problem: 39 Will Herberg, Protestant-Catholic-Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology (1955; Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983) 40 Ibid. Perhaps the best critique of Herberg’s thesis was offered by Nathan Glazer who, while seeing value in Herberg’s argument, believed he overlooked the continuing importance of class in social explanation. See Nathan Glazer, “Religion Without Faith,” review of Protestant-Catholic-Jew by Will Herberg, TNR (14 Nov 1955): 18-21; and Nathan Glazer, “Herberg as Sociologist,” NR (5 Aug 1977): 881-2. Glazer’s famous study done with Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot, further refuted some of Herberg’s major assertions (Cambridge: MIT P and Harvard UP, 1963). Glazer was a critical admirer of Herberg’s work. 215 “our government,” the President said in 1954, “makes no sense unless it is founded upon a deeply-felt religious faith—and I don’t care what it is.” 41 Eisenhower’s words implied that the content of religion did not matter as much as the public utility of religious beliefs. This was a religion of conformism more concerned with social belonging than with orienting one’s life to God. It was a religion without serious commitment, genuine conviction, or “existential decision.” It made Americans complacent instead of challenging them to rise to greater spiritual and moral heights. For Herberg, the social uses of religion moved people away from the total existential commitment that he believed true faith should strive for. 42 But while Herberg lamented the superficiality of American religion, his own political views, if implemented, would likely have added to the problem. What, after all, could contribute to the trivialization of faith more than making religion mandatory and its exercise a matter of government-imposed routine? Herberg deplored using religion as a tool for social ends, but, as shown above, one of the primary reasons Herberg defended public religion was the “social function” it served. Was not such “using” of religion to serve some purpose other than a genuine relationship with God exactly what he had denounced in his masterwork? Herberg never provided satisfactory answers to such questions. Herberg’s new fame also meant greater public exposure to his political ideas and greater controversy over them. After the publication of Protestant-Catholic-Jew the highest media outlets in the country sought his views on religious matters and 41 Herberg, Protestant-Catholic-Jew, 257-59; Herberg, “A Religion or Religions,” 4-6. 42 Herberg, Protestant-Catholic-Jew, 257, 260. 216 U.S. News and World Report, the New York Times, and other publications all profiled him in their pages. 43 While his views had previously only been known and discussed among intellectual elites, they were now known by the public at large. Many average Americans wrote to thank him for the work he was doing, while many more wrote to attack him, sometimes with vitriol that bordered on anti-Semitic. “Why don’t your chuck your titles and go out and do an honest day’s work?” said one angry correspondent, “You are certainly one of the most stupid Jews I’ve ever heard of.” 44 Anti-Catholics wrote to tell Herberg of their surprise that he, a Jew, would favor the positions of an authoritarian organization like the Catholic Church. 45 But far from causing him to rethink his positions, his fame and the attacks that came with it only served to reinforce his anti-secular positions. By 1958 he wrote to a friend that he was “more than ever convinced” of the soundness of his position on public religion and that it was “thoroughly in line with the American philosophy of education and government.” 46 After Protestant-Catholic-Jew, he returned to the 43 See, for example, “Religion in the U.S.—Where It’s Headed: Interview with Dr. Will Herberg, Philosopher, Social Historian,” U.S. News and World Report (4 Jun 1973): 54-60; “Parochial Aid Backed by Jewish Professor,” New York Times (17 Nov 1957): 58. 44 Samuel C. Levin to Herberg, 9 Jun 1957, Correspondence Folder, 1945-1959, HP. 45 James Barnett to Herberg, 7 Apr 1968, Correspondence Folder, 1945-1959, HP. Another could not believe that a friend of Reinhold Niebuhr would take such a position (Charles W. Kegley to Herberg, 26 Nov 1957, HP, Correspondence Folder, 1945-1959). Herberg defended himself saying that they had misunderstood him: he was as opposed to the “‘impatient Catholics’ who do not seem to be able to distinguish between abstract rationality and political possibility” as he was to the militant secularists (Herberg to Rev. Donald J. Curran, 17 Dec 57, HP, Correspondence Folder, 1945-1959. 46 Herberg to Martin R.P. McGuire of Catholic University, 12 Feb 1958, Correspondence Folder, 1945-1960, HP. 217 subject of public religion and promoted increased church-state relations with renewed vigor. 47 In the early 1950s, when Herberg and Catholic intellectuals were beginning to advance anti-secularism arguments, Buckley was making related arguments. In God and Man at Yale (1951) 48 Buckley not only denounced the “collectivism” of the Yale faculty, but also their overreaching “secularism” and general scorn for traditional religious beliefs. In attacking professorial hostility to religion, though, Buckley made clear that his charges only applied to private institutions like Yale. He lamented that a university founded to further the cause of Christianity, now, under the guise of academic freedom, taught atheism instead. Buckley asked that his alma mater return to its roots and re-emphasize the inculcation of Christian principles, but he did not address the subject of church-state relations, only church-university relations. 49 God and Man at Yale examined secularism within a private institution, but had nothing to say directly about the relationship of that private institution to society at large. 47 For examples of pieces Herberg wrote on church-state relations during this period, see Herberg, editorial, Church and State: A Monthly Review (1 Jan 1958): 2; Herberg, “Justice, Democracy, and the State,” The Drew Gateway (1 Jan 1959): 1-2; Herberg, “Justice,” (18 Nov 1957); and Herberg, “A Religion or Religions,” 4-6. 48 Buckley, God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of Academic Freedom (1951; Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 1986). 49 When he was attacked as a political authoritarian, Buckley responded that his book’s recommendations for Yale had nothing to do with national politics, but only the policy of Yale—a private institution. See Buckley, Introduction to 1986 edition of God and Man at Yale, x-l; Buckley, “Father Fullman’s Assault,” Catholic World (May 1952): 328-33; Buckley, “The Changes at Yale: A Response to McGeorge Bundy,” The Atlantic (Dec 1951): 80. 218 In spite of the book’s limited scope, the central contradiction that anti- secularism would bring to conservatism was already apparent. As critics pointed out, Buckley had “managed to identify an attack on dogmatic secularism and academic religious bias with a hearty defense of an economic philosophy,” when in fact, secularism and economics were two different matters. 50 Critics saw that there was no inherent connection between Buckley’s opposition to secularism and his assertion of classically liberal economic principles, but his extension of this crusade to the public sphere would show that the two ideals were actually antithetical. Buckley extended his analysis to questions of church-state when, like Herberg and his fellow Catholics, he responded to the Conant controversy. But, in typical Buckley style, he took a more confrontational and radical approach than others. While Conant only wished to reduce the influence of private schools, Buckley suggested that Americans “devise ways and means of encouraging the proliferation of private schools as the last, best bulwark against the monolith of the new, secular, statist social order [italics in original].” He believed that one way to do this would be through government disbursement of funds to Catholic parents. He agreed with Herberg that parents who felt compelled to send their children to private schools paid twice for their education—once through taxes and once through tuition. The government could solve this problem by rebating to private citizens those funds “earmarked for his public education” and allow them to use those funds to finance 50 McGeorge Bundy, “The Attack on Yale,” The Atlantic (Nov 1951): 50-2; “Yale vs. Harvard,” CW (27 Jun 1952): 285. 219 their child’s education at a school (probably religious) of their own choosing. 51 In making this proposal, Buckley had advocated educational vouchers ten years before Milton Friedman popularized the idea in his book Capitalism and Freedom (1962). 52 In asking for public funding for private schools, Buckley had gone beyond mainstream Catholic intellectuals who now saw him as an extremist inhabiting a position as wrongheaded as Conant’s. Conant hoped to gradually do away with private schools, while Buckley wished to gradually do away with public schools, but liberal Catholics saw both views as problematic. They hoped to preserve the status quo in which a healthy private educational sector existed side by side with a healthy public educational sector. Most Catholic intellectuals rejected as fallacious the notion that a defense of private schools necessarily entailed an attack on the public schools, yet Buckley’s radical proposal gave credibility to the charge and “lent further credence to the idea that every defense of the private school is a subversive attack on the public school system, an idea which is already too widespread.” Conant’s primary antagonist, Archbishop Cushing, explicitly rejected Buckley’s demand for public funds, saying that private funds had their function (the support of private schools), and public funds had their function (the support of public schools). This distinction had operated very well in American history, had kept religious 51 Buckley, “What Price Uniformity?,” Human Events (11 Jun 1952): 5. 52 Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1962), see especially chapter 6, “The Role of Government in Education.” 220 pluralism and Catholicism strong, and society should reject any attempts by either side to change it. 53 Buckley’s foray into anti-secularism in the early 1950s was short lived. After this brief episode defending private schools from Conant’s attacks, Buckley turned his attention to the seemingly more pressing issues of fighting domestic subversion and defending Senator McCarthy. His labors resulted in the publication of the controversial apology for the Wisconsin senator entitled, McCarthy and His Enemies (1954). 54 McCarthy and the “threat of domestic communism” consumed Buckley’s attention to such a degree that even after starting National Review in 1955 he still neglected anti-secularism. This neglect continued until the late 1950s when he and other conservatives fully embraced public religion as a general conservative ideal and began to work diligently to promote religion in public life. Buckley brought in Will Herberg to lead the charge. 55 Herberg’s longstanding concern with religion in education continued and was fueled by two Supreme Court decisions—Engel v. Vitale (1962) and Abbington School District v. Schempp (1963)—but he also moved beyond his narrow concern with education and ventured into other realms of the church-state debate. This included the legitimacy 53 “Yale vs. Harvard,” 285; Cushing, “Case for Religious Schools,” 14; Guptill, “Clash on Public- Private Schools,” 623. 54 Buckley and L. Brent Bozell, Jr., McCarthy and His Enemies: The Record and Its Meaning (Chicago: Regnery, 1954). 55 Since John P. Diggins treats Herberg’s journey to conservatism, not his activities while a conservative, he focuses on other aspects of his thought, e.g. historicism, and not his writings on public religion. Diggins, Up from Communism: Conservative Odysseys in American Intellectual Development (1975; NY: Columbia UP, 1994), 293-302. Harry J. Ausmus gives a catalog summary of Herberg’s articles treating the subject of public religion, but without analysis of their development or sources (Harry J. Ausmus, Will Herberg: From Right to Right (Chapel Hill: UNC P, 1987). 221 of religious symbols in public life, the addition of “Under God” to the pledge of allegiance, and the placing of the motto “In God We Trust” on currency. Although he was by 1961 a full-fledged member of the conservative movement, Herberg retained the same rhetoric used in the private school controversy. He often quoted the founders to support his contention that the separation of church and state was a myth, that religion served an important public function, and that secularism was not neutrality, but the establishment of atheism as the state religion. 56 However, to these Herberg added a new and more original argument against anti-secularism—the need to recognize a “higher majesty” in public life. Beginning with Judaism and Modern Man (1951) 57 Herberg had argued for the continuing relevance of the Old Testament commandment forbidding idolatry to modern peoples. In the early 1960s, he brought this ideal to bear on the debate over public religion, claiming that an idolatrous mindset was a totalitarian mindset. In totalitarian societies, said Herberg, the state had become a false God—an idol that the people worshipped and gave their highest devotion to. Once society enthroned the state as the highest earthly authority, it could then justifiably accrete all power unto itself and subjugate all other realms of life. A totalitarian regime was one that 56 Herberg, “Conservatism, Liberalism, and Religion,” NR (30 Nov 1965): 1088; Herberg, “Religious Symbols in Public Life,” NR (28 Aug 1962): 145; Herberg, “What is Religious Freedom,” NR (29 Nov 1966): 1230; Herberg, “The Separation of Church and State,” NR (23 Oct 1962): 315, 330; Herberg, “Religion and Public Life,” NR (30 Jul 1963): 61; Herberg, “Religion and Public Life II,” NR (13 Aug 1963): 104-05; Herberg, “Conservatives and Religion: A Dilemma,” NR (7 Oct 1961): 230, 232; Herberg, “‘Pure Religion’ and the Secularized Society,” NR (10 Sep 1963): 188-89. 57 Herberg, Judaism and Modern Man (1951; NY: Atheneum, 1977), 185-6, 202-3. 222 refused to recognize any “majesty beyond itself.” 58 Herberg believed that secularism contributed to this totalitarian mindset since it stripped the public square of the Divine authority above the state. A government committed to public religion, on the other hand, officially acknowledged that there was a higher end and higher authority than the state itself. Lincoln’s statement, “this nation under God,” said Herberg, reminded Americans of this principle. 59 Without official public recognition of an absolute God who stood in judgment above the state, the state itself would become an idolatrous absolute and, lacking any logical restraint, would tend to totalitarianism. 60 But as with his views on the superficiality of religion, Herberg’s policy proposals might have had the opposite of their intended effect. Herberg wished to circumscribe government power by putting God in government, but would not giving the state the seeming-sanction of Divine authority lead to the very worship of the state that Herberg deplored? Herberg wanted religion in public life to set something higher than the state, but could it not just as easily lead many to exalt the state on the grounds that God was associated with it? Public religion could lead people to acknowledge a “higher majesty,” but it could also lead many to associate state activity with the divine will, and thus feel that the state’s activities were also God’s activities. Absent public recognition of God, said Herberg, the state would become 58 Herberg, “Religious Symbols,” 145, 162; and Herberg, “Religion in Public Life,” 61. 59 Herberg, “Religious Symbols,” 162. 60 This justification was not entirely novel, though. Catholics had previously made related arguments, but expressed them in different terms. “Without belief in God, just what limitation has been placed on man?,” asked the editors at Commonweal. “The Critics and the Absolutes,” CW (20 Jun 1952): 259. 223 absolutist, but with public recognition of God, the state itself would be claiming the Absolute for its causes and thus find more justification for the exercise of absolute power. How could one oppose the state without feeling they were also opposing God himself? Herberg failed to acknowledge that religious symbols in public were a double-edged sword that could create more, rather than less, idolatrous state worship. Herberg’s unwillingness to consider such possibilities also showed how the assumptions of conservative public religion assumptions often contradicted the assumptions of conservative anti-statists. Herberg, like Hayek and other Burkeans, opposed the expansion of government action in the name of limiting the unintended consequences of those actions. Liberals, said Burkean Michael Oakeshott, failed to understand the law of unintended consequences and for this reason believed in “rationalism in politics.” 61 But anti-secularist conservatives wanted to expand government action through just such an example of top-down government planning and control. On the one hand, the anti-statist Herberg wanted to avoid making the state into an idol by limiting its functions, now, the anti-secularist Herberg wanted to avoid making the state into an idol by expanding its functions. Opposition to modern idolatry motivated both his anti-statism and anti-secularism, and yet the ideals of each fundamentally contradicted one another. Likewise, in proclaiming anti-statism, conservatives saw a sharp line dividing the public and private realms, fearing that public concerns would infringe upon private, individual freedoms. But when proclaiming their anti-secularism, 61 Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (NY: Methuen, 1962). 224 conservatives justified public religion on the grounds that the public and private realms could not and should not be separated (e.g. Herberg’s argument that private schools served a public function). When justifying the expansion of the religious/moral function of government, Herberg often quoted Washington saying that the American republic was designed only for a religious and moral people; and yet, in his anti-statist moments, he often claimed that the government had no business enforcing morality or coercing Christian ideals such as equality and economic justice. In spite of these contradictions, Buckley adopted many of Herberg’s arguments in his own writings on public religion. Before his association with Herberg, Buckley’s anti-secularism had largely lacked theoretical content. He often condemned secularism, but without providing reasons why. After coming under the influence of Herberg in 1961, however, the “no neutrality,” “myth of separation,” and “higher majesty” arguments played prominently in his writings. 62 Buckley often referred to Herberg as his mentor in matters of Church and state, and even after the older man’s death, continued to affirm that Herberg had “best confronted” the advance of secularism and given conservatives means with which to combat this trend. 63 62 For Herberg’s influence on Buckley, see Buckley to Herberg, 11 Nov 1969, and 20 Nov 1969, HP, Correspondence Folder, 1960-70; Buckley, “The Optimism of Dr. Will Herberg,” NR (21 Apr 1970): 428-29; and Buckley, “Mr. Reston’s Revolution,” 9 Sep 1971, syndicated column, 1-2, HD. For Herberg’s influence on the conservative movement, see “Will Herberg: A Tribute,” NR (5 Aug 1977): 880-886. 63 Buckley, “Understanding the Prayer Amendment,” 15 Mar 1980, syndicated column, 1, HD.; Buckley, “Let us Pray,” 21 Apr 1979, syndicated column, HD. 225 Echoing Herberg’s “higher majesty” argument, Buckley claimed that the state would become totalitarian if it prohibited public acknowledgement of a spiritual order and a Divine source of that order. Like Herberg, he often used the words of the Founding Fathers to make his case as well, even quoting the same passages from the writings of James Madison, George Washington, and the Northwest Ordinance that seemed to countenance the idea of public religion. 64 Like Herberg, he also dismissed the idea of a separation of church and state, saying it contravened the will of the founders. 65 He argued that the First Amendment “was not designed to secularize American Life,” but secularist forces had “fanaticized” the First Amendment and made it seem so. Through their distortion of history and disdain for religion, said Buckley, the secularists had almost succeeded in turning the state into “an instrument of secularism.” 66 Like Herberg, Buckley often quoted Justice Douglas to establish an ostensible legal precedent for religion in public life and claimed that public neutrality in religious matters was a myth: “The public square in which we meet,” he said in later years, “simply can’t be empty—of 64 Transcript of “Prayer in the Public Schools: A Debate with Bishop James A. Pike and Mr. William F. Buckley, Jr., ed., National Review,” Firing Line with William Buckley, 24 Apr 1966, HI, Box 50 (218), Folder 002, 14-15, 19. “In probably the single most relevant document that captured the American mood at the time the Constitution was written, the Northwest Ordinance,” Buckley said (a bold, but unjustified statement), “it was set forth, religion morality, and knowledge, as being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.” Buckley, “The Meaning of Heritage,” NR (22 Nov 1999): 45. 65 Buckley, “Understanding the Prayer Amendment,” Universal Press Syndicate, 15 Mar 1984, 1-2, HD. 66 Buckley, “A 24 th Amendment,” Universal Press Syndicate, 8 July 1962, 1; Buckley, “Who Did Get Us Into This Mess,” opening statement in a debate with Murray Kempton, 16 Apr 1963, University of Pennsylvania, in Buckley, Let Us Talk of Many Things: The Collected Speeches (Roseville, CA: Forum, 2000), 72; and Buckley, “The Control of the Schools,” Universal Press Syndicate, 28 Oct 1965, 2, HD. 226 tradition, inherited insights, ideas, and commandments associated with the divine order.” 67 For all of those reasons, Buckley continuously maintained that religion should have a prominent place in the public domain. 68 But even as he made these arguments, Buckley took anti-statist positions that directly contradicted them. The individualist Buckley believed that the state was, by nature, coercive—it could not act at all except under the principle of compulsion— and he rejected any attempts to force the individual against his or her will. He often said he opposed government-sponsored welfare because it “coerced morality,” by removing the individual’s choice as to whether or not to give charitably. Likewise, Buckley and Herberg (and, famously, Senator Goldwater) opposed Civil Rights legislation, not because they opposed racial equality, but because they believed that government-mandated integration imposed morality on private citizens. 69 Absent choice, Buckley often said, the virtue of a particular action (e.g. racial justice and charitable giving.) is rendered null, artificial, and illegitimate. 70 But under this 67 Buckley, “On Fearing the Religious Right,” from Universal Press Syndicate, 4 Jun 1985, 1-2, HD; As Herberg often quoted Justice Douglas to establish the necessity of religion, now Buckley did the same “Well, of course, Mr. Douglas, Justice Douglas said, as recently as ten years ago, quote, we are a religious people. We presuppose [sic] a supreme being.” Like Herberg, he also linked the arguments for later church-state issues to the earlier question of parochial schools: “unless they are rich, [children] have to go to public schools, but those public schools may not even acknowledge the existence of religion through a devotional means.” Buckley and Pike, “Prayer in Public Schools,” 11, 25. 68 For examples of the persistence of his public religion sentiments into his later career, see Buckley, Nearer, My God: An Autobiography of Faith (NY: Doubleday, 1997); Charlie Rose interview with Buckley, The Charlie Rose Show, PBS, 1 Oct 1997. 69 Buckley, “Compassion Then and Now,” The George Matthews Adams Service, Inc., 3 Jun 1962, 1- 3, HD; Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., “Inside Conservatism Looking Out,” a review of Buckley, Up from Liberalism, New York Times (4 Oct 1959): BR 43; and Buckley, “On Politics from the Pulpit,” The George Matthews Adams Service, Inc., 21 May 1964, 1-2, HD. 227 limited-government political outlook, the conservative program of anti-secularism would also “coerce” recognition of divinity, thus making such recognition of God also null, artificial, and illegitimate. Some conservatives protested that coercing religious belief was necessary to maintain the basic morality necessary for public order. Without religion, they said, moral anarchy would reign and result in social anarchy. 71 But, under such “public order” reasoning, many actions conservatives opposed would also find justification. One could just as easily argue that government-mandated racial integration was necessary for the preservation of public order, or that government welfare helped reduce the class antagonisms that would cause social unrest. 72 Harmony between the conservative conceptions of anti-secularism and anti- statism was logically impossible and, because of such fundamental contradictions, it became more expedient for conservatives to demonize liberals rather than defend their own contradictory ideals. They would more often speak out against the “immorality” and “godlessness” of the liberal position than they would defend their own. 73 Nevertheless, a fundamental change in conservatism had brought a third 70 Buckley, Up from Liberalism (1959; NY: Bantam, 1968), 170-71, 176; Buckley, “Let the Rich Alone,” 30 Dec 1967, in Buckley, The Jeweler’s Eye, 275. 71 See, for example, Buckley, “A Playboy’s Philosophy,” 1 Oct 1966, in Jeweler’s Eye, 252; and Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot (1953; D.C.: Regnery, 2001): 245-6. 72 See Buckley, “God Go Home,” NR (2 Jul 1963): 521; and Russell Kirk, “Religious instruction: A Natural Right,” NR (24 Mar 1964); Walter Berns, “School Prayers and Religious Warfare” NR (23 Apr 1963): 315-18. 73 As always in matters of public religion, Herberg led the charge. “At no point,” he said, “is the inner bond between liberalism and Jacobinism so obvious as in their common hostility to religion in public life,” and in their view of religion as a vestige of the past and a product of oppressive superstitions. Herberg, “Conservatism, Liberalism, and Religion,” NR (30 Nov 1965): 1087. 228 pillar of religious argument to Right—anti-secularism—one that would appeal to many religious Americans frustrated by what they saw as a growing trend towards driving God out of public life. 229 Chapter 6 Religious Consolidation on the Right, 1957-1964 From the time Buckley, Chambers, and Herberg launched their first salvos in 1951, conservatism had taken on an increasingly religious cast. First, conservatives developed a religious justification for their longstanding commitment to anti-statism, and then embraced two even more explicitly religious causes. But it was only in the late 1950s and early 1960s that these new religious concerns became tests of fellowship on the Right. In this final chapter, I argue that 1957-1964 were the years during which religious impulses became central to the conservative movement. While most historians look to the late 1970s for the beginning of the conservative- religious nexus, I trace the beginnings to the era of intellectual formation in the postwar years and a consolidation of religiosity in the late 1950s and early 1960s. As Buckley, Chambers, and Herberg pushed conservatism in a religious direction in the fifties, the anti-statist consensus began to weaken. This redefinition created schisms within the movement that forced many of the unreligious out, but also created space for religious intellectuals to find a place at the conservative table. The redefinition also paved the way for the evident theoretical contradictions to become political contradictions after conservatives achieved power in later decades. During its first years of publication, National Review had muted its religious tones to attract those anti-statists to the movement who might not have shared Buckley’s faith. It was not until mid 1957 that National Review even carried articles openly advocating the application of religious ideas to politics. The inaugural issue 230 contained both a “Publisher’s Statement” and a “Credenda” that stated the magazine’s aims—limiting government and fighting the Communists (especially domestic subversives)—but neither mentioned religiosity as a defining conservative characteristic. The new branches of conservatism had not yet been fully grafted on to the trunk. 1 National Review only published one article on the subject of religion in 1955, and only one during 1956—a short, ambiguous paragraph that questioned the actions of Unitarian clergymen who stated opposition to “moral and religious values being taught in schools.” 2 If anything, National Review initially tended to frown upon religion in politics since clergymen often used their positions in the church for liberal advocacy. Contributing editor Frank Meyer, for instance, disgusted at the liberal uses to which Christianity was often put, completely rejected the idea of “Christian politics” in a 1956 article, saying “I would not presume to say what it is to be ‘a Christian in politics,’” since a Christian faith, while it affects one’s actions and worldview, “cannot solve political problems or dictate political theory.” 3 But this would all change in the late 1950s as the editors of National Review suddenly decided to activate their propensity for religion in political life: over two dozen articles advocating religion in public appeared in the magazine from 1957-58. These ranged from outcries against legal attempts to remove the Ten Commandments from public places to condemning secular efforts to ban Christmas 1 “Credenda and Statement of Principles,” NR (19 Nov 1955): 6; Buckley, “Publisher’s Statement,” NR (19 Nov 1955): 5. 2 “Krismas,” NR (26 Nov 1955): 5; and “The Week,” (11 Jan 1956): 4. 3 “Sunday-Supplement Moralist,” NR (4 Jul 1956): 18. 231 symbols. 4 National Review’s increased emphasis on matters of faith also meant a greater emphasis on religion in education. In earlier years, Russell Kirk, Buckley, and Morrie Ryskind had written extensively on the subject, but had confined their pieces to lamenting the decline of standards, the lack of attention to great Western traditions, and the moral relativism of the Dewey-dominated establishment. 5 Beginning in mid-1957, however, they began to claim that indifference to God was a major factor underlying other educational maladies. 6 If conservatives had begun to push the movement in a religious direction as early as 1951, then why only now did it begin to take a central and defining place? The shift in emphasis has two explanations. First, the waning of Communist domestic subversion as an issue left a thematic gap at National Review. In its first two years, the magazine devoted much of each issue to defending Senator McCarthy and the quest to root out Communist infiltration in government and other institutions. But in 1957 an issue of National Review entitled “The End of McCarthy” lauded the achievements and “courage” of the recently-deceased Wisconsin Senator, but also admitted that his hour had passed. The issue marked the end of an era for 4 “Court OK’s Xmas,” NR (4 Jan 1958): 6-7; “Thou Shalt Not Get Away With It,” NR (26 Jan 1957): 77-8. Like Herberg and Catholics before them, the National Review editors stated “The Constitutional prohibition relating to separation of church-state does not imply an impregnable wall or cleavage completely disassociating one from the other”. 5 See for instance, Morrie Ryskind, “How to solve the school problem,” NR (15 Sep 1956): 11; “The Week,” NR (13 Oct 1956): 4; Russell Kirk, “From the Academy,” NR (20 Oct 1956): 18; and J.A. Clark, “A Fable,” NR (22 Sep 1956): 7. 6 Russell Kirk, “An Age of Faith and Reason,” NR (15 Mar 1958): 259; “The Week,” NR (25 Oct 1958): 261; Godfrey P. Schmidt, “The Significant Life,” NR (3 Aug 1957): 139; and Buckley, “The Ivory Tower: The Role of the College Chaplain,” NR (11 Jan 1958): 41. 232 conservatives. 7 No longer did they constantly defend McCarthy’s actions and remind readers of the threat Communists posed to America, for, by the late 1950s, McCarthy was dead and the perceived threat seemed to have subsided. The cases of Alger Hiss (1948) and the Rosenbergs (1951) left conservative redhunters in the early 1950s assuming that many more like them remained, but during the next six years, little evidence emerged to substantiate this. At the time of McCarthy’s death, even the militant anti-communists at National Review had to concede that the search for domestic communists should take a back seat to other more pressing issues. 8 The more-pressing issues now seemed to be the dual threats of relativism and secularism. 9 The earliest National Review articles dealing with legal matters inevitably centered on fighting the ACLU, liberal judges, and organizations that protected the “rights” of suspected communists. 10 Beginning in 1957, however, legal discussions began to revolve around religion in society, particularly “secularizing” court decisions. L. Brent Bozell, Buckley’s brother-in-law and a National Review editor 7 See May 18, 1957 issue of NR (the cover read “The End of McCarthy”). 8 National Review even famously distanced itself from those who continued to beat the McCarthy drum in the late fifties. Buckley had early seen the John Birch society as an ally in his cause, but as they continued to speak of subversives in government (even claiming that president Eisenhower was a conscious agent of the communist conspiracy), Buckley publicly denounced the Society and its leader, Robert Welch. Buckley, “Towards an Empirical Definition of Conservatism,” (Oct 1963) in The Jeweler’s Eye (NY: G.P Putnam’s, 1969): 19-22. 9 In Buckley’s 1959 work Up From Liberalism, for example, there is no mention of McCarthy or domestic subversion, but the threat of liberal relativism is addressed on nearly every page. For more on Buckley’s distance from his earlier campaign against domestic Communism, see Buckley, “The End of Whittaker Chambers,” Esquire (Sep 1962): 80, 170. 10 C. Dickerman Williams’ recurrent column “The Law of the Land,” for instance, continuously analyzed the implications of court decisions for fighting domestic communism (e.g. NR (20 Jun 1956): 14). 233 from the beginning, had dedicated virtually all of his 1955 and 1956 columns to the issues of subversion in government, but he now turned to issues more explicitly faith-related. 11 As the issue of domestic subversion died with McCarthy, religious themes emerged to take its place. Second, the changing composition of the movement—through the purging of agnostics and recruitment of believers—had the effect of increasing the religious tone at National Review. The 1957 addition of Whittaker Chambers, who had long- believed that all political problems were, at bottom, religious, had a significant impact on National Review, but even more important was the addition of a Chambers disciple as publisher. As the magazine grew in influence and circulation, Buckley, overwhelmed with both his editing and publishing duties, brought on the religiously- political New York City attorney William Rusher to handle the publishing. Suddenly, in 1957, the three most influential persons at National Review—Buckley, Chambers, and Rusher—shared a conviction that political philosophy was an extension of underlying religious convictions. 12 In the earlier days of National Review, the more eclectic mix of agnostics and believers required that Buckley be more cautious in his religious assertions. But as the unbelievers departed, Buckley 11 L. Brent Bozell, “The Strange Drift of Liberal Catholicism,” NR (12 Aug 1961): 81-5; Bozell, “To Magnify the West,” NR (8 Sep 1961). For another view on Bozell’s increasing blending of religion and politics, see “An Exchange of Views: God and the Cold War,” CW (20 Oct 1961): 95-7. Bozell would eventually move too far on the question of public religion for even National Review, and left the magazine advocating a unification of church and state as in Spain. Buckley, “L. Brent Bozell, Jr., R.I.P.,” NR (19 May 1997). 12 Upon assuming his new duties, Rusher issued a Publisher’s Statement in National Review that began with Chambers’ declaration in Witness which averred that the God vs. Man conflict was the central conflict of the modern age (NR (27 July 1957)). 234 and other believers could more openly declare their anti-secularism without fear of dividing the movement between the religious and unreligious. The purge of unbelievers began with an earth-shaking book review by Chambers. 13 Russian-American novelist Ayn Rand had emerged as one of the nation’s most influential novelists in the 1940s. 14 Her bestselling book The Fountainhead (1943) won her many disciples who followed her individualist philosophy of “objectivism” with religious zeal. But in addition to promoting unfettered capitalism, objectivism was also aggressively atheistic. Rand believed that humans should answer only to the authority of reason; tradition and “mysticism” (i.e. religion), she claimed, only served to blind the gullible and restrain the talented from realizing their potential. Upon meeting Buckley for the first time, Rand declared “you are too intelligent to believe in God,” assuming that any sophisticated young person would see religion as a primitive and stifling illusion as she did. 15 In 1957 Buckley tactically selected Whittaker Chambers to review Rand’s masterpiece, Atlas Shrugged. Chambers ended up attacking Rand even more harshly than Buckley had anticipated. 16 Ayn Rand, Chambers’s review made clear, was not a strategic ally of conservatives, but instead partook of the very nature of the enemy. 13 Nash, 155. 14 In a 1980 Library of Congress Survey, American readers voted Atlas Shrugged the second most influential book in America (second only to the Bible). It remains one of the bestselling novels in American (and world) history. 15 Buckley, “End of Whittaker Chambers,” 152-4. 16 Whittaker Chambers to William F. Buckley, Jr., 8 Oct 1957, OF, 197. Also see Charlie Rose interview with William F. Buckley, Jr., 17 June 2003 (Show aired on PBS and is available from the Charlie Rose website). 235 In spite of whatever political agreements one might find with her, said Chambers, Rand’s atheistic ultra-rationalism fundamentally aligned her with the forces of evil in the world. 17 Communist philosophy, he had written in Witness, was only the most prominent variant of the “faith in man” impulse that threatened the survival of freedom in the world. 18 The message of Atlas Shrugged, he said, promoted this Faith in Man with its “forthright philosophic materialism” and “rejecting of God, religion, original sin, etc., etc.” 19 Since, according to Chambers, Faith in Man led inevitably to totalitarianism, objectivism was no different than Nazism or Bolshevism in its foundational precepts. Given its totalitarian roots, Chambers concluded in a climactic barrage, a voice could be heard “from almost any page of Atlas Shrugged…commanding: ‘To a gas chamber — go!’” 20 In writing this review, not only had Chambers excoriated Rand in severe terms, but also declared that religious commitment, and not celebration of capitalism or any other policy, qualified one as a bona fide conservative. 17 A year earlier, Chambers had made a similar critique of libertarian economist and conservative hero, Ludwig Von Mises. Whittaker Chambers to Ralph de Toledano, 17 October 1956, NU, 280-1. Yet because Mises’s religious views were muted and infrequent, National Review never publicly denounced him as they did Rand. In fact, they published a tribute to him in National Review when he died in 1973. Henry Hazlitt, F.A. Hayek, Lawrence Fertig, and Israel Kirzner, “Tribute to von Mises,” NR (19 Nov 1973): 1244-6. 18 W, see introduction. In the Ayn Rand review, one of his last pieces for NR, Chambers came back to the same principles he had begun with in Witness: the need for Western “faith in God” to match or exceed the Communist “faith in man.” 19 Ibid., 594-95. 20 Chambers even mused to Buckley that he might entitle the review “Du Calme, Madame!.” Whittaker Chambers to William F. Buckley, Jr., 24 Oct 1957, in Buckley, ed., Odyssey, 204. Whittaker Chambers, “Big Sister is Watching You,” NR (28 Dec 1957): 594, 596. 236 The review set off a debate between conservatives who sided with Rand and those who sided with Chambers, which quickly turned into a referendum on agnostics in the movement in general. 21 National Review contributor Merrill Root admired Rand and expressed his disappointment that the magazine would alienate such an influential ally. Root also asserted that Chambers had erred in assuming that Rand’s opposition to religion made her a “materialist.” One could, he maintained, plausibly reject God while still accepting objective morality and spiritual ideals. 22 Chambers had no theoretical answer to this defense. If an atheist could believe in an objective material order without believing in God, there was no reason that she or he could not believe in an objective metaphysical order as well. While some theists assumed that the fact of material existence itself presupposed the existence of a “first cause” (God) to bring the universe into being, atheists accepted the existence of the material universe as an ontological given not requiring a creative act. Atheists could make equal claims in reference to morals or mind: either could, like matter, self-exist as an ontological independent without the need for a creator to bring it into existence. Chambers never made clear why one could accept the existence of material laws (like gravity) without believing in God, but could not accept the existence of immaterial laws (like a respect for human life) without such a 21 According to NR editor Priscilla Buckley (Sister of Bill), the Chambers review occasioned a record- breaking flood of angry letters. Priscilla Buckley, Living it Up With National Review: A Memoir (Dallas: Spence Publishing, 2005), 182. Even though the editors only printed a small fraction of these letters, they filled up the “letters to the editor” section of the magazine for months to come. 22 E. Merrill Root, “What about Ayn Rand,” NR (30 Jan 1960): 76-7. Also see Murray Rothbard to the Editor, NR (25 Jan 1958): 95 and John Chamberlain, “An Open Letter to Ayn Rand,” NR (2 Feb 1958): 118. 237 belief. Since the ancient Stoics, thinkers had promulgated forms of non-religious metaphysical realism, but Chambers ignored this tradition under the assumption that atheism meant materialism, and that materialism meant amorality. He made the God vs. Man dichotomy the foundation upon which he built his entire intellectual edifice, but did not justify the foundation itself. Chambers was at his strongest in evoking emotion through his power of language; he was at his weakest in presenting tightly argued philosophical cases. In the review of Atlas Shrugged, this showed. Although Root had come to Rand’s defense, the most important voices at National Review sided with Chambers, albeit obliquely. Editor John Chamberlain had agreed with the general anti-statist message of Atlas Shrugged, but he wished that Rand would have at least moderated her atheism. Chamberlain believed that she could just as easily have included a Christian in her cast of heroes and “reached the same political conclusions.” 23 But he failed to recognize that this was exactly the problem: Rand’s politics were merely incidental to her rationalist philosophy. The novelist gave her first allegiance to rationalism, just as Chambers gave his first allegiance to “faith in God.” The politics of both writers depended upon more fundamental and cherished philosophical principles and therefore commanded only secondary allegiance. Rand was as uncompromising in her opposition to “mysticism” (religion) as Chambers was uncompromising in his opposition to “Faith in man.” She could no more include a “mystic” in her cast of heroes than Chambers could accept an atheist in his own. 23 Chamberlain, “Open Letter,” 118. 238 Editors Garry Wills, Russell Kirk, and Frank Meyer all made the more convincing case that Rand did not belong in the movement because of her rejection of tradition. 24 Conservatives could ally with an unbeliever, they made clear, as long as she or he at least recognized that religious traditions had a salubrious effect on society. 25 As followers of Edmund Burke, Wills, Kirk, and Meyer believed that a healthy social order required respect for the wisdom of one’s ancestors and the authority of the past. Reason was a valuable tool, they said, as long as it deferred to tradition and operated within its parameters. Rand could not accept this. To her, tradition was the enemy of reason; an illusion that shackled the human potential for greatness. 26 In so declaring, said the National Review editors, Rand severed herself from the very source of her libertarian principles. These traditionalist critiques of Rand were more solidly founded than that of Chambers. Rand could declare belief in metaphysics and morals without God, but 24 Garry Wills, “But is Ayn Rand Conservative,” NR (27 Feb 1960): 139; Russell Kirk to the editor, NR (1 Feb 1958): 118; and Frank S. Meyer, “Why Freedom,” NR (25 Sep 1962): 223. Wills would retain his Burkean temperament even after he had left the movement to become the idiosyncratic “Left-traditionalist” he remains today—Wills continues to call himself “conservative” but consistently supports left-of-center political candidates and positions. For more on Wills’ Left-leaning politics, but continued self-designation as a conservative, see Brian Lamb interview with Gary Wills, 30 December 1990, C-Span Booknotes (transcript available from website); and Gary Wills, Confessions of a Conservative (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1979). 25 For instance, conservatives continued to reverence the naturalist philosopher George Santayana in spite of his disbelief because he “confessed the genius of Christianity, finding in the symbols of the Church truths more lofty than the smug or shallow philosophical babble of his time.” Russell Kirk, “Introduction to the Republication of Santayana’s Essay ‘Natural and Ultimate Religion’,” NR (31 Dec 1963): 561. 26 See, for instance, Rand’s earlier novel, The Fountainhead, in which her hero, architect Howard Roark, thrives in his profession by rejecting all professional traditions and conventions. Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead (1943; NY: Signet, 1993). Because Immanuel Kant had offered a “critique of pure reason,” Rand considered his system “the biggest and most intricate booby trap in the history of philosophy.” See Ayn Rand, “Philosophy: Who Needs It,” an address given to the graduating class at West Point, March 6, 1974, in Rand, Philosophy: Who Needs It (NY: Signet, 1982), 8. 239 also needed to acknowledge the limits of reason and the debt to the cultural predecessors who promoted and established her moral principles. The American individualism that she so loved, for instance, had not arisen solely through rational reflection, but was shaped by hundreds of years of American experience with the frontier (F.J. Turner), abundance (David Potter), and cultural pluralism (Oscar Handlin). The prominent American characteristic of individualism could not be divorced from American political traditions, long-standing institutions, and, yes, even Judeo-Christian values. Capitalist individualism, as Max Weber pointed out, was as much a product of the religion Rand despised as it was the rationalism she loved. In rejecting the very traditions that served as the source of her philosophy and the culture in which her ideas flourished, Rand lived parasitically on a legacy she would not acknowledge. Where Chambers had seen atheism as Rand’s central defect, the other National Review editors saw her concomitant rejection of tradition as most egregious. To the dismay of many conservatives, Whittaker Chambers left NR in the midst of the controversy he had initiated. The Right-wing icon had always felt uncomfortable with the magazine’s rigid tone and anti-Eisenhower positions, but now his health was waning rapidly and he wished to return to finish the college degree he had begun forty years earlier. After two years as the most conspicuous name on the masthead, and after setting in motion a controversy that would result in a re-shuffling of the conservative coalition, Whittaker Chambers retired to his Maryland farm in 1959 and died two years later. 240 Nevertheless, Chambers’s scathing review launched the controversy that had, according to Buckley, succeeded in “read[ing] miss Rand right out of the conservative movement.” 27 The Russian novelist was not the kind to simply accept the conservative snub without holding a grudge. Where she had once spent most of her public energies condemning liberal “collectivism,” she now spent equal time denouncing conservative “mysticism,” and she made an especial point of showing her disgust for William F. Buckley, Jr. by theatrically walking out of any room he entered. 28 The expulsion of Ayn Rand meant that objectivists were no longer welcome at National Review. This included the Rand admirer Murray Rothbard. Rothbard, recently deemed one of the four most influential libertarians of the twentieth century by historian Brian Doherty, 29 had been an enthusiastic participant in National Review from the beginning, but after the Rand expulsion he began to question his association. Rothbard shared many of Rand’s views and was virulently opposed to government action in the moral or religious sphere. Rothbard, although not militantly anti-religious like Rand, did see traditions as stultifying. While Buckley based his new anti-relativism on a traditionalist epistemology, Rothbard rejected conservative traditions of “the Old Order” as “the great and mighty enemy of 27 William F. Buckley, Jr., “Notes Toward,” 14. 28 Buckley, “The End of Whittaker Chambers,” 153; and Ayn Rand, "A Last Survey--Part I," The Ayn Rand Letter 4:2 (November-December 1975); and Barbara Branden, The Passion of Ayn Rand (NY: Doubleday, 1986): 368-69. 29 Brian Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement (NY: Public Affairs, 2007), ch. 5. 241 liberty.” 30 Buckley had come to see conservatism as not only anti-statism, but also as a commitment to the religious principles and timeless absolutes of the pre-modern era. Rothbard, on the other hand, believed that this was exactly why conservatism would die a deserved death—it adhered to a worldview that was outworn in an age when humans were progressing towards greater freedom by throwing those very traditions aside. As Buckley’s movement had become less concerned with liberty and more concerned with faith, a connection to the past became more pronounced, but it was this past that Rothbard believed restrained freedom and kept humans in bondage. Rothbard preached the hope of liberation from a pre-modern age, Buckley preached a return to it. Rothbard favored breaking power structures through a series of revolutions, but Buckley maintained a Burkean opposition to social revolutions. 31 Rothbard came to view conservatism as statist and communitarian, but Buckley saw conservatism as the conservation of the traditional beliefs and institutions necessary for individual liberty. Given the differences between himself and Rothbard that were exposed by the Ayn Rand affair, Buckley proclaimed that Rothbard had become so enamored of anti-statist “dogmas” that he had lost his vision of the religious and metaphysical foundations of liberty. Through his embrace of anti-relativism and anti-secularism, Buckley had come to see the state as a “necessary instrument,” something that the quasi-anarchist Rothbard could not accept. 32 Their common ground had shrunk and 30 Murray N. Rothbard, “Left and Right: the Prospects for Liberty,” Left & Right (Spring 1965): 4-5. 31 Ibid., 7; Buckley interview with Huey Newton, Firing Line, PBS, 11 Feb 1973, HI, program no. S0080. 242 by end of 1960, Rothbard had severed his ties to National Review completely. 33 Buckley wrote an epitaph to the relationship in his movement-defining essay, “Notes Towards an Empirical Definition of Conservatism” (1963). As with Rand, the case of Rothbard showed that an adherence to liberty for liberty’s sake was no longer sufficient to be identified as a movement conservative. “Buckleyites” had to acknowledge the Divine source of that liberty as well. 34 While Chambers had been the major force in ejecting one prominent atheist from the movement (Rand), Buckley played the central role in ejecting another— philosopher Max Eastman. While Chambers’ task was comparatively easy, since Rand was a stranger, Buckley had to alienate a close personal friend. Eastman, the former intellectual all-star of American Communist circles had shed his Marxist beliefs in the 1930s and come to the conservative movement in its earliest days. He befriended Buckley in 1951 and contributed articles to some of the first issues of National Review. Eastman’s wide-ranging mastery of political and philosophical issues—he was still regarded as one of the top authorities on Marxian theory in the 32 Buckley, “Notes Toward,” 217-18. 33 Rothbard’s last article for National Review, “Hazlitt’s One-Two Punch,” appeared in the December 3, 1961 issue (pp. 350-1). 34 The term “Buckleyites” had become a popular label for members of the growing conservative movement. It was used by intellectuals such as Irving Howe as well as politicians such as Richard Nixon. See Irving Howe, A Margin of Hope: An Intellectual Autobiography (San Diego: Harcourt, 1984), 226; and William Rusher, “The Long Detour,” Claremont Review of Books (Summer 2005): 18. 243 country—and his personal connections with the most distinguished minds in the world brought a unique sophistication and cachet to the conservative movement. 35 Until the Ayn Rand controversy, Eastman had found himself in fundamental harmony with his conservative confreres on nearly every particular. He agreed with their blanket denunciation of the “Big Brother Welfare State,” and demanded more aggressive resistance to Soviet Communism. 36 Like other anti-statists, Eastman also saw these commitments as the same fight against state expansion on different fronts. 37 Such convergence of opinion on the question of anti-statism made Eastman a comfortable and important member of the National Review circle in the magazine’s founding years. But early in the 1960s, Eastman saw National Review moving in new directions that left no place for him—conservatism now seemed to be defined by a metaphysical proposition that affirmed “the existence of an objective moral order,” but he did not believe any such moral order existed. Anti-relativist conservatism was explicitly anti-pragmatist, yet Eastman, who had studied with Dewey at Columbia, remained a confirmed instrumentalist throughout his life. Eastman had long believed that “even when you get it out of the hands of the clergymen, metaphysics is still 35 For Eastman’s own account of his considerable intellectual connections, see Max Eastman, Great Companions: Critical Memoirs of Some Famous Friends (NY: Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy, 1959). He included chapters on Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, and Ernest Hemingway among others. 36 “We are fighting this cold war for our life, and we must fight on all fronts and in every field of action” he said in language reminiscent of Whittaker Chambers, Brent Bozell, or Bill Buckley. See Max Eastman, “I Acknowledge My Mistakes” NR (22 Feb 1956): 11-14; Eastman, “Marxism: Science or Philosophy,” New International (Aug 1935): 159-163; and especially, Eastman, Marxism, Is It Science? (NY: W.W. Norton, & Co., 1940). 37 Max Eastman, “Norway: Case History in Socialism,” NR (18 Apr 1956): 9-11. 244 largely…a ‘disguised theology.’” 38 His agreement with conservative anti-statism (including anti-communism) meant little in the face of the more fundamental disagreement over the conservative drift towards religion-based metaphysical realism. 39 His break was not immediate, though. For years, Eastman had tried to reconcile naturalistic pragmatism with conservative politics. 40 He believed that since state expansion had proved to be a “failed experiment” then the open, pragmatic attitude of John Dewey, which led one to view all facets of life in “experimental” terms, would lead one to anti-statist conservatism. 41 But if this was so, why, then, was Eastman virtually the only philosophical pragmatist in the conservative ranks? Contrary to Eastman’s assumption, pragmatists usually favored the expansion of the state, believing that government power could be used as an experimental tool with which to solve social problems, such as poverty, inequality, and social injustice. Eastman’s belief that the welfare state had been “scientifically discredited” because of its “inefficiency” was also problematic. As a pragmatist who believed that humans should approach the world in purely scientific terms, Eastman could not 38 Max Eastman, Great Companions, 260. 39 Max Eastman, “Am I Conservative?” NR (28 Jan 1964): 57. 40 Max Eastman, “The Reaction against John Dewey,” NR (21 Jun 1958): 9. For examples of routine conservative denunciations of Dewey, see Buckley, Up From Liberalism, 151; Russell Kirk, “Conservatives, Too, Have Tenure,” NR (25 Aug 1964): 729 and Russell Kirk, “John Dewey Pragmatically Tested,” NR (21 Jun 1958): 11-12, 23. 41 Eastman echoed Mark Twain in declaring, “I can’t believe in [statism], I know too much about human nature.” See Eastman “Mark Twain and Socialism,” NR (11 Mar 1961): 154. Eastman even claimed that Dewey himself, far from waving the flag of radicalism, had actually functioned as “a stubborn and somewhat fatherly opposition to my youthful impulse to take up with the socialist idea.” Eastman acknowledged that later in life Dewey had leaned towards socialism, but claimed that Dewey’s “life-influence, taken as a whole, was in a contradictory direction.” 245 see that humans assess economic policies in value as well as efficiency terms. The efficiency of a social experiment (such as statism) depended upon the lens of personal values with which one approached the problem. Conservatives like Eastman, for instance, evaluated the efficiency of the welfare state with the assumption that property rights were an indispensable aspect of personal freedom and that forced redistribution of wealth violated those rights. Unsurprisingly, with this assumption in mind, conservatives then “discovered” that greater economic freedom was also more economically efficient. Likewise, liberals began their evaluation of the welfare state with the moral premise that vast inequalities of wealth were inherently unjust. Only after positing the value assumption that redistribution of wealth was desirable did they come to the efficiency conclusion (provided by Keynes) that state redistribution of property augmented aggregate demand and thereby boosted economic growth. Eastman concluded that welfare statism had failed not because he had escaped ideology through pragmatism, but precisely because he adhered to a conservative ideology that valued individual property rights. Equally “scientific” people with competing value assumptions, though, would evaluate the efficiency of government action quite differently. 42 Nevertheless, Eastman’s attempt to find a non-religious basis for conservatism came at an inauspicious moment. The Rand affair had emboldened the editors of National Review and by the early 1960s they were pushing their religious agenda more vigorously than ever. The question for them was no longer if religion 42 Whittaker Chambers voiced a similar critique to Buckley in a December 8, 1958 letter in which he wondered if, given Eastman’s faith in science, he should even consider himself an atheist (in Buckley, ed., Odyssey, 222). 246 would be central to their movement, but only what role it would play. In a speech to conservatives gathered at Madison Square Garden in 1962, the militantly Catholic Bozell declared, in language redolent of Chambers, that the Western battle against Communism was an explicitly “Christian struggle” and that only conservatism, the ideology of faith, was equipped to carry it out. 43 Liberalism, on the other hand, was a philosophy anchored in the ancient heresy of Gnosticism, said Bozell; and liberals believed, along with Communists, “that the salvation of man and of society can be accomplished on this earth.” Unlike liberals and communists, said Bozell, conservatives were motivated by “the central fact of history—the entry of God onto the human stage.” 44 While Bozell focused on the centrality of religion to the anti-communist crusade, another editor, libertarian-conservative Frank Meyer, made faith the central component of his quest for domestic liberty. 45 Conservatism is, he said, rooted in the Christian vision of the nature and destiny of man—of the primary value, under God, of the individual person. From his nature arises his duty to virtue and his inalienable right to freedom as a condition of the pursuit of virtue. 46 43 This speech was published in the April 24, 1962 issue of NR under the title “To Magnify the West,” 285-7. 44 Ibid., 285-7. Although they made similar statements, Bozell and Chambers differed on important fundamentals. The exultant Bozell believed that Christian civilization was advancing and would prevail through conservative triumphs while Chambers, as shown in chapter 2, believed that the West was in its final death throes (see, for instance, Chambers to Ralph de Toledano, 18 October 1960, in de Toledano, ed., 326-7). The mission of Christians, said Bozell, was to magnify the West; for it was God’s civilization and those in the West were “called” to this duty. Chambers disagreed, saying that decadence had rendered Western Civilization unworthy of salvation. Because Americans had embraced liberalism, God was no more on their side than he was on the side of the Soviets, and since the Soviets at least had their faith in man to motivate them, they would prevail in the final conflict. 45 Meyer, “Why Freedom,” 223. 46 Ibid., 225. 247 For Meyer, the conservative goal of virtue through liberty depended upon “the overriding value of the person,” and this value, in turn, depended upon “transcendent considerations,” specifically, “the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.’” 47 This “Christian understanding” of absolute individual rights, said Meyer, defined conservatism and put it in eternal opposition to “liberal” doctrines of materialism, relativism, and positivism; doctrines that Meyer believed responsible for the decline of the West. 48 Eastman rejected both Meyer and Bozell’s religious justification for anti- statism. “Far from being a general gift from God,” he said, the liberties of America were a rare and treasured achievement of human intelligence and will. Meyer’s absolutist certainty, Eastman believed, was bound to destroy freedom since those who believed in absolutes tended, sooner or later, to impose them on others. “To advocate freedom, and then lay down the law as to how men ‘should’ use it,” Eastman wrote in his final article for National Review, “is a contradiction in terms.” 49 Eastman believed that his own theory of pragmatism, on the other hand, allowed human liberty to flourish since it denied permanent, final, and absolute ends and permitted humans to choose their own mode of self-realization. In assessing Meyer’s philosophy, though, Eastman had made the same error as previous anti-absolutists, such as Dewey, Hook, and Arendt. It was possible for a 47 Frank S. Meyer, “The Twisted Tree of Liberty,” NR (16 Jan 1962): 26. 48 Ibid., 24-5; and Meyer, “Principles and Heresies,” NR (8 Apr 1961): 220. 49 Max Eastman, “Am I Conservative?” NR (28 Jan 1964): 57. 248 person to believe they knew the ultimate ends that humans should desire in their private lives, but also believe in the necessity of maintaining political freedom so that humans could choose to accept or reject those ends. One could remain absolutely certain that someone else was making a wrong moral choice, but still remain committed to upholding their right to make that “wrong” choice. Eastman did not accept that Meyer could simultaneously respect the necessity of political liberty even while deploring the ends to which that liberty may be put (e.g. material gratification, atheism, hedonism, greed). Eastman also believed that Bozell’s ostensible “connection between theistic belief and thoroughgoing anti-communism” was equally flawed. If Christianity was the antidote to Communism, the aged philosopher asked, then why were the Christian clergy “giving more help to the Communists than any other profession in America?” And if conservatives believed the struggle against Communism was a world struggle, then, by definition, it could not be a Christian struggle, for most of the world’s people were not Christian. “Are we in truth thinking about a free world,” Eastman asked, “or just a relatively small Christian corner of it?” He also pointed out the troubling historical fact that “God’s will” had often been invoked to justify terrible atrocities. 50 Although Eastman may have overestimated the negative effects of religion on human societies and underestimated its positive effects, his point was a valid one: how could religious belief serve as an all-encompassing solution to 50 Ibid. Since Herberg joined the movement to further emphasize religiosity and Eastman left the movement because of this emphasis, a contrast between the two is revealing. Eastman embodied what conservatism had once been—a movement defined solely by anti-communism and libertarianism— and Herberg embodied what conservatism had become—a movement defined by religiously-based certitudes. 249 tyranny when religion had so often been used throughout history to justify oppression? Thus, Eastman answered the question “am I conservative?” with an emphatic “No”—at least not in the form it had recently taken. As a committed agnostic, Eastman could not, in good conscience, remain in a movement that had recently made religion a defining characteristic. “There are too many things in [National Review],” he wrote to Buckley, “that directly attack or casually side-swipe my most earnest passions and convictions.” While he confessed that he had once been able to “collaborate formally” with the magazine on pragmatic grounds, he now had to withdraw because, in recent years, the religious underpinnings of conservatism had become more assertive. 51 Eastman’s departure saddened Buckley. He realized that the ex-communist had been a valuable ally in their common cause, but he also understood that Eastman’s departure was necessary. “I continue to feel,” he wrote to Eastman, “that you would be at a total loss as to what to criticize in the society the editors of National Review would, had they had the influence, establish in America.” Nevertheless, Buckley concluded, Max Eastman, like his old friends Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, H.L. Mencken, and Clarence Darrow, found religion “intellectually contemptible,” and so it became difficult for him to identify “with a movement in which religion plays a vital role.” 52 The agreement between Eastman and Buckley on political particulars was now overshadowed by their deep 51 As quoted in Buckley, “Notes Toward,” 22-3. 52 Ibid., 23. 250 philosophical differences. 53 In his reflection on the departure of Eastman, Buckley confirmed what Chambers, Bozell, Meyer, and others had claimed: a common aversion to the growth of state power no longer united conservatives; a religious worldview did. Having ejected Rand, Rothbard, and Eastman from the movement, the question arose: could unbelievers remain in the movement at all? For Buckley, the answer was yes. Conservatism could find room for an unbeliever as long as she or he was not also a “God hater.” The “God hater,” in contrast to the respectful agnostic, said Buckley, considered those of faith as somehow intellectually deficient, superstitious, and psychologically immature. Such was the case with Eastman and Rand and for this (not their unbelief) they were unwelcome in conservative circles. One need not believe in God as long as they did not “despise God and feel contempt for those who believe in Him.” Respectful agnostics, on the other hand, could accept the movement in spite of its religiosity because they did not dwell on the religious questions, but focused instead on those matters conservatives agreed upon. The “wide freeway” of conservatism could accommodate agnostics who maintained a proper tone toward religion, but not those who conspicuously despised it. 54 One such “respectful agnostic” was philosopher James Burnham. Like Eastman, Burnham had come to conservatism from New York Trotskyite circles and 53 Historian John P. Diggins notes that when Buckley drew up the prospectus for National Review, he diluted references to “absolutes, natural law, etc.” in order to attract pragmatists like Eastman. But Diggins fails to consider the implications of Buckley’s decision to reverse course three years later. See Diggins, Up From Communism: Conservative Odysseys in American Intellectual Development (NY: Columbia UP, 1994), 343. 54 Buckley, “Notes Toward,” 23-6. 251 had also, like Eastman, carried the religious skepticism of his youth with him to National Review. But Burnham remained an important conservative in good standing during the purge of agnostics for two important reasons. First, Burnham accepted the anti-relativism and anti-secularism that were becoming central conservative causes. He wrote an entire book arguing that liberal relativism would lead to the “suicide of the west” 55 and he favored government sponsorship of religion and lamented the decline of religious faith that inevitably accompanied “societal decadence.” 56 Eastman, on the other hand, not only rejected God, but rejected metaphysical absolutism as well. Burnham at least accepted the latter. 57 Second, unlike Eastman, Burnham kept his agnosticism largely to himself and respected belief as a positive force in society. 58 Even if he could not bring himself to believe in the doctrines of Christianity, Burnham often drew on its insights in formulating his political philosophy, believing that it contained the greatest moral teachings in Western history. 59 Unlike Eastman, Burnham did not treat Christianity as a silly superstition, but as a hypothesis that might “very well be 55 James Burnham, Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism (NY: John Day, 1964). See especially pp. 74-139. 56 Burnham, Suicide, 284. “The decay of religion mean[s] the decay of the west” he said. For more of Burnham’s thoughts on religion, also see Suicide, 14-17, 22, 24, 301. 57 Eastman pointed out that attacking Dewey had almost become a rite-of-passage for conservatives and Burnham, as a good conservative, often obliged. Daniel Kelly argues that the disagreement between Burnham and Eastman over metaphysics stretched all the way back to their days as Trotskyites. Eastman saw Marxism through the lens of pragmatism and science, while Burnham saw Marxism as a set of independent historical laws. Daniel Kelly, James Burnham and the Struggle for the World: A Life (Wilmington: ISI Press, 2002), 52 58 Ibid., 253. 59 Ibid., 87, 138, 203. In this, as Russell Kirk pointed out, Burnham was like George Santayana, a pro-religion unbeliever. 252 true.” 60 For these reasons, Burnham was able to reconcile himself to the religious turn in the movement and keep his conservative credentials in ways that Eastman could not. Although the anti-religion of Rand and Eastman had led them out of the movement, the pro-religious attitudes of other famous thinkers led them in. This included not only Rusher, but also Will Herberg. After the publication of his 1955 book Protestant-Catholic-Jew, Herberg had become widely recognized as the country’s most important religious sociologist. He had been tending rightward ever since his break with Marxism in the late 1930s, and, although he had considered himself a “philosophical conservative” for over a decade, Herberg had been reluctant to join the movement because of its positions against labor and the welfare state. 61 But during the Eisenhower years, Herberg’s growing opposition to secularism set him against many of his former allies and he drifted away from the liberal circles he had belonged to for the previous 15 years. 62 As Herberg shed his affection for the welfare state in the early 1960s, no further impediments stood in the way of his joining the conservative movement. While Herberg consciously joined the conservative movement, the National Review circle began to apply the label “conservative” to other religious luminaries as 60 See Kelly, Burnham, 203, 206, and 362. Perhaps conservatives accepted Burnham’s agnosticism because it always leaned in the direction of faith rather than atheism. Later in life, Burnham speculated that his recently-deceased wife may have survived death and even expressed skepticism regarding the claims of Darwinian evolution. See P. Buckley, Living it Up, 219-20. 61 Will Herberg, Autobiographical Sketch, 21 May 1958, Faculty File, HP. 62 See Will Herberg, “A Religion or Religions: Some Comments on the Programs of ‘Moral and Religious Values’ in the Schools,” March 2, 1956, Folder 184, HP; and Will Herberg, “Justice for Religious Schools,” America (16 Nov 1957), HP. 253 well, often without their consent. John Courtney Murray was widely noted for his role in liberalizing Catholicism by harmonizing its doctrines with the principle of religious freedom (which led to Vatican II), but Buckley believed that Murray’s natural-law Catholicism allied him with conservatives. 63 For Buckley, given the new religious emphasis on the Right, John Courtney Murray’s views on limited government or McCarthyism mattered little next to his belief in religious absolutes. Murray agreed with this assessment sufficiently to allow an article of his to be published in Buckley’s collection of the “best conservative writing of the century.” He also published an article in Russell Kirk’s conservative quarterly, Modern Age. 64 The broadened meaning of conservatism to encompass anti-relativism and anti- secularism allowed a wider range of thinkers, beyond just anti-statists, to be considered “conservative;” even seemingly-liberal figures like Murray now qualified. 65 The conversion of prominent conservative thinkers to religion further turned the movement in a religious direction. Leading Right-wing intellectuals joined President Eisenhower and millions of other Americans in formally joining churches during these years. Russell Kirk was baptized a Catholic after falling in love with a 63 William F. Buckley, Jr., “Nihil Obstat” [review of Murray’s We Hold These Truths] NR (28 Jan 1961): 56. In this review, Buckley called Murray a “man of commanding knowledge,” and a “great thinker” in the natural law tradition. 64 William F. Buckley, Jr., ed., Did You Ever See a Dream Walking? Conservative Thought in the Twentieth Century (NY: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1967). Buckley, “A Long Way from Rome,” New York Times Book Review, 14 May 1967, 8; Buckley, review of We Hold These Truths, NR (11 Jan 1995): 121-2; Buckley, “John Courtney Murray, R.I.P.,” NR (5 Jan 1967): 946-7; and John Courtney Murray, “Freedom of Religion, I: The Ethical Problem,” Theological Studies 6 (June 1945): 231–5. 65 Also, as shown in chapter 4, conservatives also began to apply the label conservative to Cold War liberal Reinhold Niebuhr. 254 young woman of the faith. 66 Willmoore Kendall, the irascible political philosopher who had taught Buckley at Yale, wearied of his hedonistic lifestyle and turned to religion in the sixties, and left Yale for a professorship at the religious University of Dallas. Frank Meyer, always a partisan of religious transcendentalism, had long been reluctant to join a formal denomination, but with the religious fervor sweeping the country and his own death approaching, he too was baptized. Dartmouth literature professor and National Review book review editor Jeffrey Hart underwent a similar journey. 67 In these conversions one can see that the conservative movement rode, rather than resisted, the wave of religious renewal of the time and gained political support by moving in the same direction as the American populace. By 1960, the religious aspects of conservatism were solidified to the point that Buckley, the leader of the movement, openly declared that a politics based upon a religious view of the world now defined conservatism as much as anti-statism. At the National Review fifth-anniversary party in 1960, Buckley, in the evening’s keynote address, noted that intellectual conservatives were a variegated lot who “often conflict[ed] with one another”—this, he observed, was “to be expected among serious and resourceful and inquisitive men”—but in spite of these differences, Buckley also believed that an essential characteristic bound conservatives together: the belief in certitudes and, most importantly, the certitude that “there is a religious 66 Russell Kirk, The Sword of Imagination: Memoirs of a Half-Century of Literary Conflict (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 445-60. 67 George Nash, “The Inside Story,” review of Linda Bridges and John Coyne, Jr.’s Strictly Right, NR (28 May 2007). 255 base in life, and therefore a trans-historical meaning to the human experience.” 68 The movement was now, in Buckley’s words, firmly “planted in a religious view of man.” 69 But what of the previously discussed contradictions that this transformation created? We have already examined the intellectual inconsistencies created by the religious turn in conservatism, but did such problems show when the movement took political form in the mid 1960s? 70 Through a rhetorical sleight-of-hand called “fusionism,” conservatives succeeded in staving off the full political implications of their contradictions in the short term. Formulated by Frank Meyer and adopted by Buckley and Goldwater, fusion sought to combine the new conservative emphasis on timeless religious values with the old conservative emphasis on individual freedom by finding common ground between the two. 71 Meyer believed that humans were defined by their God-given capacity for virtuous choice and choosing virtue was the end to which humans should direct their existence. But Meyer also believed that in order to meet this end legitimately humans must be given the unhindered political freedom to choose the virtuous options instead of the wicked. Christian values, he said, provided the ultimate moral ends towards which humans should strive, but individual liberty constituted the only legitimate political end that a society should 68 William F. Buckley, Jr., “Remarks on a Fifth Anniversary,” in Rumbles Left and Right: A Book About Troublesome People and Ideas (NY: Putnam, 1963), 85-6. 69 Buckley, “Notes Toward,” 24-5; and Buckley, Up from Liberalism. See especially Part II: “The Conservative Alternative, 157-end. 70 Jonathan Schoenwald, A Time for Choosing: The Rise of Modern American Conservatism (NY: Oxford UP, 2002), 4-8. 71 Buckley interview with Brian Lamb, Booknotes, C-Span, 24 Oct 1993. 256 seek to establish. 72 Thus, Meyer claimed to have fused the new religious emphasis with the older anti-statist goal of individual freedom. 73 Fusion, however, did not live up to its promises, for, as a political philosophy, it simply chose in favor of anti-statism. It did not really “fuse” anything. Meyer claimed that his political philosophy advanced both timeless principles of virtue and individual freedom, but these two ideals were mutually exclusive in the political realm: the government would either actively promote virtue, or it would leave humans free to pursue their own virtue; it could not do both. If, as Meyer claimed, freedom “fused” with virtue by creating the preconditions by which one could choose to perform virtuous acts, then freedom also “fused” with vice, since freedom created the preconditions by which one could perform un-virtuous acts. By declaring his a coherent political philosophy by what it allowed one to choose, Meyer had necessarily fused freedom with every possible end to which the means of freedom might have been used. In politics, fusion would only seek to maximize individual freedom, not implement or enforce timeless principles and Meyer’s verbal gestures towards eternal verities failed to change or acknowledge this fact. The “fusionist” failure was a nagging one, but conservative politicians learned to make it work by speaking the language of religion while advancing anti- statism. 74 This strategy worked—conservative religious rhetoric not only attracted 72 Meyer, “Rebel,” 33. Frank Meyer, “Libertarianism or Libertinism,” in Gregory Schneider, Conservatism in America, since 1930 (NY: Oxford UP, 2003), 259. 73 Frank S. Meyer, “A Rebel Finds his Tradition,” in Frank S. Meyer, In Defense of Freedom and Related Essays (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1996), 177 74 See, for instance, John Dos Passos, “The Battle of San Francisco,” NR (28 Jul 1964): 652. 257 many culturally conservative Americans to the movement (especially southern whites disaffected by Civil Rights legislation), but also strengthened their claims that property and other individual rights carried absolute status since, they implied, God himself gave humans these rights. Most importantly, the fusionist consensus made its way into political action primarily through the towering conservative politician of the era—Barry Goldwater. 75 Fusion allowed the purely anti-statist Goldwater to keep anti-relativists in his camp by openly denouncing relativism, but making his actual platform a purely anti-statist one. Absent the moral issues that would emerge later, Goldwater succeeded in appealing to the new cultural conservatives in the movement by asserting the timelessness of rights, while at the same time advocating the limited government principles that would preserve those rights. 76 But the farce of fusionism would be exposed when cultural conservatism took a distinctive political form with the emergence of “values issues” in the 1970s. After Roe v. Wade, conservatives not only took up the anti-abortion crusade, but also opposed euthanasia, gay rights, “immoral” speech, stem cell research, and the Equal 75 Frank S. Meyer, “Conservatism and the Goldwater Consensus,” NR (5 Nov 1963), 386, 413. Goldwater will be conservative, said Meyer, to the degree that he stands for “the freedom of the people, limitation of government, and effective resistance to the Communist drive for world conquest.” Chambers saw, and denounced, Meyers’s demand for consensus five years before it occurred. Whittaker Chambers to Ralph de Toledano, 17 October 1956, in de Toledano, ed., 279. Historian George Nash does not see a fusionist consensus characterizing the Goldwater era. To him, the early 1960s were marked by frantic conservative attempts to achieve philosophical consensus, but without success. To Nash, the 1960s were marked by internecine squabbling, not philosophical unity. Nash overlooks, though, the degree to which fusionism dominated the pages of NR and the Goldwater campaign. Although fusionism did indeed have philosophical competitors on the Right during this time, its dominance was visible enough to make it the philosophical conservative consensus that Nash believes conservatives never found. 76 For more on Goldwater as a “fusionist” candidate, see “Barry Goldwater: Life, Liberty, and Legacy,” Cato Institute Book Forum, 12 July 2007, audio available at Cato website. 258 Rights Amendment. In these instances their opposition to relativism was no longer purely rhetorical—substantive issues had emerged in which they demanded the state take a greater role in enforcing what they considered universal morals. Conservatives found themselves stuck in the contradiction of at once demanding a more limited role for government while also demanding that government power be expanded to promote certain ideals. In the face of moral decline, the state had a new role, consonant with conservative anti-relativism, of forcibly halting that decline. Though early conservatives often emphasized the anti-statist principle that one could not and should not coerce virtue, by century’s end, many conservatives, in the name of anti-relativism, had reversed course. 77 With cultural conservatism now taking form in actual issues, Right-wing politicians had to choose to make either the new religious branches or the old anti-statist trunk their priority. This dilemma was seen in the post-1970s conservative presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. Would they work to limit the size of government in the name of anti-statism or work to expand public religion and conserve timeless values that they believed were under attack by liberal relativists? Reagan would generally lean in the anti-statist direction, thus disappointing the cultural conservatives, while Bush would generally lean in the anti-relativist direction, thus disappointing the anti-statists. Pre 1970s conservatives such as Goldwater had defended states’ rights in the name of limiting federal government power and by claiming that “you cannot 77 Most exemplary of the anti-relativist conservative discourse at century’s end was Judge Robert Bork’s bestseller, Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline (NY: Regan, 1996). 259 enforce virtue,” but in the Bush years they would assert federal authority over the states in the name of anti-relativism and anti-secularism. This reversal was most visible in the Terry Schiavo affair, attempts to block removal of the Ten Commandments from local government buildings, and the call for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. The use of government power to override federalism and promote conservative values worked at odds with the older conservative drive to reduce federal government power. It has often been said in recent years that conservative politicians “pander to their base,” but given the contradictions created with the evolution of conservatism here presented, one must ask the clarifying question “which base?” The anti-statists, upset with recent conservative expansion of government power in the name of religious values, have found themselves as alienated from the movement politicians as liberals. 78 As this dissertation makes clear, the old conservatism (anti-statism) and the new (religiously-based principles of anti-relativism and anti-secularism) existed together uneasily. Although fissures have been showing in recent years, conservative politicians have thus far been able to keep the strains together. But the question remains with regard to the future: will this coalition hold? Will Conservatism collapse under the weight of the contradictions between anti-statism, 78 See, for instance, Ryan Sager, The Elephant in the Room: Evangelicals, Libertarians, and the Battle to Control the Republican Party (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2006); Stephen A. Slivinski, Buck Wild: How Republicans Broke the Bank and Became the Party of Big Government (Nashville: Nelson Current, 2006); Richard A. Viguerie, Conservatives Betrayed: How George W. Bush and Other Big Government Republicans Hijacked the Conservative Cause (Los Angeles: Bonus Books, 2006); Michael D. Tanner, Leviathan on the Right: How Big-Government Conservatism Brought Down the Republican Revolution (Washington, D.C.: Cato, 2007); and Bruce Bartlett, Imposter: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy (NY: Doubleday, 2006). 260 anti-relativism, and anti-secularism, or will it creatively evolve in yet another direction as it did earlier in the century? Such questions will provide interesting material for future historians. The role that religion will play in the movement in the long-term remains unsettled as does the question as to how long the conservative- religious alliance itself will persist. What is settled, however, is that, beginning in the postwar years, conservative intellectuals began to define their movement in religious terms and that this epistemic shift in the meaning of conservatism created both contradictions and conservative political successes. 79 The combination of religion-in-politics and anti- statism that Buckley, Chambers, and Herberg helped develop may not have been intellectually coherent or stable, but it succeeded in unifying various religious persons in their opposition to the “statism,” “relativism,” and “secularism,” that they ascribed to liberals. 79 “By 1968,” writes George Marsden, “the liberal New Deal consensus had broken down…and the counterculture brought down the illusion of a liberal-Protestant-Catholic-Jewish-secular-good citizenship-consensus.” Marsden, “Afterword,” in Mark Noll, ed., Religion and American Politics (NY: Oxford UP, 1990), 387. 261 Bibliography Allitt, Patrick. 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Asset Metadata
Creator Lewis, Hyrum S. (author) 
Core Title Sacralizing the right: William F. Buckley Jr., Whittaker Chambers, Will Herberg and the transformation of intellectual conservatism, 1945-1964 
School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences 
Degree Doctor of Philosophy 
Degree Program History 
Degree Conferral Date 2007-12 
Publication Date 10/04/2007 
Defense Date 08/15/2007 
Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital) 
Tag history of American political thought,OAI-PMH Harvest 
Language English
Advisor Fox, Richard W. (committee chair), Seip, Terry (committee member), Willard, Dallas (committee member) 
Creator Email hyrum_lewis@hotmail.com 
Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m843 
Unique identifier UC1479192 
Identifier etd-Lewis-20071004 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-586281 (legacy record id),usctheses-m843 (legacy record id) 
Legacy Identifier etd-Lewis-20071004.pdf 
Dmrecord 586281 
Document Type Dissertation 
Rights Lewis, Hyrum S. 
Type texts
Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection) 
Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California
Repository Location Los Angeles, California
Repository Email uscdl@usc.edu
Abstract (if available)
Abstract From the end of World War II to the Barry Goldwater presidential campaign of 1964, the meaning of conservatism underwent an important shift as Right-wing thought became increasingly associated with religious belief.  Three conservative intellectuals -- William F. Buckley Jr., Will Herberg, and Whittaker Chambers -- did the most to effect this change and forged a religious-conservative nexus by basing their opposition to the growth of state power in religion, conceiving of anti-communism as an extension of this concern, and claiming opposition to secularism and relativism as conservative causes.  Their efforts drew many religious intellectuals to their side, but ultimately created internal contradictions in the conservative movement that were never resolved and created many of the splits among conservatives that persist into the present. 
Tags
history of American political thought
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University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses
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University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses 
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