Upstream: The Ascendance of American Conservatism
In his tribute to the life of Henry Regnery delivered before the Philadelphia Society in 1996, Stephen Tonsor summarized concisely the contributions the great Chicago publisher had made to conservatism: “politics, community and personal life; these were the three areas in which Henry’s conservatism was most manifest.”
The apple didn’t fall far from the tree. In Upstream, Alfred Regnery has delivered a solid political and intellectual narrative of American conservatism which combines all the features contained in Tonsor’s apt description of Regnery père. Combining primary and secondary sources with a few personal vignettes, Regnery has found a way to describe how conservatism developed into a formidable force in the nation by the end of the twentieth century.
He begins by showing just how dominant liberalism was in America at the end of World War II, and how negligible conservatism was in turn. “Culturally,” Regnery writes, “America was a conservative land in 1945. Values, manners, even the way politics was conducted was conservative…. Today’s permissiveness would have been considered 1945’s scandal; and the social views of most voters, by today’s standard, would have been considered conservative.” Regarding politics, however, the situation was very different. “If the society was culturally conservative, its politics were far to the left,” Regnery writes. The blame for this lay with the intellectuals and small groups of politicians who were in power, using the Great Depression and the War to advance the collectivist creed.
Regnery here joins other chroniclers of conservatism in too readily dismissing the efforts of early New Deal critics as foundational to the later conservative ascendance in America. Whatever he thinks of those like the Southern Agrarians, the New Humanists, and individualists like Albert Jay Nock, he concludes that they were “isolated” and did not constitute a movement. Rather, he focuses on the now traditional narrative established by George H. Nash relating how conservative intellectuals responded to liberalism, developing a libertarian, traditionalist, and anticommunist critique of the liberal state. This spadework Upstream: The Ascendance of American Conservatism by culminated with the founding of National Review in 1955 and the first stirrings of political activism with Barry Goldwater and the Young Americans for Freedom. It continued all the way to the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.
Regnery tells a very good story and he relies both on the published record and his personal contacts with leading figures in the movement to tell it. Several of the personal stories are quite charming, including the tale of how the young Regnery attended the tenth anniversary of the Mont Pelerin Society and rode through the Swiss countryside in a rented Cadillac limousine with his father and Liberty Fund founder Pierre Goodrich “droning on about free markets and free trade” while the youngster daydreamed about riding his bicycle. Or, of the time when William F. Buckley first visited the Regnery household and played a jazz rendition of “Three Blind Mice” on the Steinway grand piano, to the delighted Regnery children. “My parents, on the other hand, were stunned. Here was my father’s young, star author, the one who would put his company on the map… playing this forbidden tune…. Mr. Buckley was, of course, the favored guest from that day on.”
One wishes for more of this throughout the narrative—colorful portraits of the various intellectual fi gures who made up the conservative movement either when Regnery came into contact with them as a youngster or later through his involvement in YAF and the Reagan administration. How many conservatives can recount such experiences? But the book is not a memoir; rather, it is a serious history of conservatism’s development, and the balance struck between the personal, intellectual, and the political turns out to be just about right.
About half-way through the book Regnery dispenses with conventional narrative and focuses on the impact conservatism has made on fundraising, publishing, the law, religion, and market economics. Rather than recount these developments chronologically, Regnery profiles several of the key individuals and organizations which typically do not get discussed in the traditional narratives.
Especially important is Regnery’s discussion of the role of foundations, the result of wealthy donors and “men of ideas, men who participated in the development of the movement and became intellectual partners in the enterprise.” Among these individuals was William Volcker, a Kansas City wholesale dry goods supplier, who channeled his fortune into the creation of the Volcker Fund, which endowed the Mont Pelerin Society, gave support to conservative academics, and subsidized chairs at universities for F.A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and others. He discusses his father’s role as a book publisher, one who often had to subsidize books himself (or seek the help of others to do so). Harry Earhart, a motor oil executive, established the Relm-Earhart Foundation to subsidize individuals dedicated to studying and preserving Western culture and liberty. Thousands (including this author) have benefitted from the munificence of the Earhart Foundation. These are just a few of the profiles Regnery gives to showcase the tremendously important role such foundations have played in conservative history.
Yet, as Regnery shows, conservative foundations pale beside the assets and wealth of liberal foundations, which include, ironically, the Pew Charitable Trusts (J. Howard Pew was an important early investor in conservatism, but after his death the Trust was shanghaied by liberals and now is one of the largest foundations on the Left), the Carnegie Endowment, the Ford Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation. Better to spend down the assets and go out of business—sadly occurring all too frequently among conservative foundations these days—than to allow the next generation to move the foundation away from the vision of the founders.
Regnery’s other important contribution involves his discussion of how conservatives have viewed the courts and the Constitution, and what action they have taken to preserve the intention of the framers regarding the powers granted— and not granted—therein. As an attorney himself—Regnery worked in the Reagan Justice Department—it is not surprising that he views this as a central part of the conservative story. Indeed, so much seems to rest on conservative control of the judiciary that he concludes the book with the story of Harriet Miers and the revolt by a group of conservatives in Congress against her nomination to the Supreme Court by President George W. Bush, concluding that “[they] could not have done what they did without the resources of a movement that had been cobbled together over the past sixty years, and with assets in every part of American culture.”
This was not always the case. Conservatives viewed with disdain the Warren Court’s efforts to rewrite the Constitution. Regnery argues that “several liberal Supreme Court justices, in large part, rewrote the American Constitution in such a way as to make it virtually unrecognizable and, in so doing, polarized the Left and the Right more than any other single force in the country.” He recaptures the reasons for conservative disenchantment with the Warren Court’s activism, delineating the process that began with Brown vs. Board of Education (1954) and moved on to prayer in schools, the right to privacy, crime, and abortion. What could conservatives do about the Court? Aside from winning control of Congress or the executive branch, there was not much to be done. Or so it seemed.
But then conservatives started building the organizations and the networks—liberal journalist Sidney Blumenthal would refer to this as a “counter-establishment”— which made the process of using power that much easier once power was attained. The conservative legal movement grew. Conservative public-interest law firms challenged the power of liberal legal groups and the regulatory power of government. Conservative law students built their own network of students and professors, the Federalist Society, to contend with the liberal dominance in law schools and the American Bar Association. These developments proved instrumental later on when President Bush appointed two Federalist Society alumni to the Supreme Court, Justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito. Ideas had consequences, but so too did organizations.
If there is one common theme to the wide variety of histories of American conservatism it is that institution-building is one of the great successes of the movement. An old joke from the early 1970s was that one could count the number of conservatives in Washington, D.C., on one hand. No longer; conservatives have proven remarkably adept at building organizations, funding them and sustaining them during times when conservatism is riding the crest of political power and when it is not. We hear a lot these days about yet another conservative crack-up. Upstream shows how adaptable conservatives have been in the past and how they will, most likely, continue to adapt in the future.
Alfred Regnery is well positioned to document this phenomenon. He was literally present at the creation of the conservative movement. Given his father’s stature in the movement’s history, he was a benefi ciary of the intellectual exposure he received (whether or not he would rather have been riding his bicycle) as well as his own active role in shepherding the movement as a publisher, attorney, and activist. His elegant history attests to the development of a political and intellectual movement whose best days are still ahead: upstream.
