Refusing to be Forgotten

The Civil War is arguably the most momentous event in the history of the United States. Only 160 years ago, a political, social, and constitutional crisis and the ensuing military conflict could have ended the existence of today’s global superpower as a single country. Textbook presentations of the Civil War are often superficial and partisan: the North, led by a noble and enlightened leader, abolishes the unjust and inhumane social system of the South, thereby advancing the progress of liberty, equality, and justice. However, as is the case for all dramatic stories, another tale has been told. According to this alternative narrative, the “war between the states” was an act of unjust military conquest and the imposition of a malevolent authority; the ‘invasion’ of the South, rather than progress, should be viewed as a violation of the principles enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, especially the right of people to alter or abolish a government which they perceive as destructive to their rights.¹

Unsurprisingly, this alternative interpretation of American history has been advocated by many Southerners, particularly Southern conservatives. As the history of the American South is almost exclusively and reductively identified with slavery, racial segregation, and racism, Southern conservative thought has been significantly distorted and discredited through guilt by association. And yet, as Melvin E. Bradford phrased it, the South “refuses to be forgotten or, conceptually, completely subsumed under larger (national) categories. As a thing apart it continues to have an amazing hold on the American imagination, and indeed on the imagination of all who are interested in American history and literature.”² The Agrarians, a group of poets, historians, and social critics centered around Vanderbilt University, attempted to reinterpret and reexamine both Southern history and Southern tradition in the late 1920s. Through scholarly and literary works, they defended their region against its caricatured image as “a bastion of ignorance and a citadel of reaction.”³ In 1930 they published I’ll Take My Stand, a volume of essays that swiftly produced impassioned debate in intellectual circles and acquired the status of a Southern manifesto. As the introductory “Statement of Principles” noted, while the essays resulted from individual work and could be read independently, they all supported “a Southern way of life against what may be called the American or prevailing way.”⁴ The Agrarians rejected simplistic concepts of the Southern tradition that envisioned only slavery and cotton plantations. For them, the region represented and embodied values that had once been cherished and shared by the vast majority of Americans. In fact, they presented the South as the true repository of those values and virtues that constitute Western civilization. Their intention was to reveal the richness and diversity of the then marginalized Southern tradition and demonstrate the relevance and importance of a number of its elements for modern American society. What is often overlooked, however, is that the Agrarians’ work was not only a rebuke to critics of the South, but also its sentimental defenders, those who idealized the Old South, presenting cotton plantations as earthly idylls where slaves spent their evenings happily singing by the fireside and lived harmoniously with their owners.

Their efforts resulted in an impressive, yet little-known critique of modernity: a modernity with scientism, industrial capitalism, and the “gospel of progress” as defining features. At the same time, their writings provided a critical account of American national development after the Civil War. According to their analysis, the South’s unique culture and still prevailing rural way of life had enabled the region to escape the most disastrous effects of industrial urban civilization: commercialization, social atomization, the vulgarization of culture, and destruction of the natural environment. While many advocates of the “New South” attempted to demonstrate the region’s rapid development since the Reconstruction Era, and thus its increasing similarity to the North, Agrarians presented the South as more humane and in fact superior to the North precisely due to its stubborn refusal to modernize. Their critique represents an important contribution to American social, political, and economic discourse; a contribution that makes us more aware of the diversity that characterizes the American political and intellectual tradition.

The main purpose of this book is to explore this contribution and reconsider the place of Southern conservatism in the broader context of the American political tradition. However, I do not aspire to a complete analysis of Southern conservatism.⁵ Rather, I focus on the political thought of Melvin E. Bradford (1934–1993), a professor of English at University of Dallas. Clearly, this requires justification. A native-born Texan, Bradford was the direct disciple of an original Agrarian, Donald Davidson, at Vanderbilt University, and many scholars view him alongside Richard M. Weaver as one of the most important and talented continuers of the Agrarians’ political and intellectual tradition.⁶ As Clyde Wilson has declared, the importance of Bradford’s work in sustaining Southern conservative and agrarian scholarship is undeniable:

The numerous company who hoped that the Southern conservative tradition was dead received a stunning setback in Bradford’s career. No scholar of our time, or perhaps any time, has described a continuing Southern identity on a broader canvas or with profounder insight. No man of letters has affirmed the positive value of that corporate tradition with greater energy, ingenuity, and persistence. Bradford’s deliberate confrontation of the modern “vision of mind as the proper model of society,” by a defense of the traditional ground of the South, was carried out for three decades with great skill on the unfriendly terrain of modern academic discourse.⁷

However, Bradford did not merely reaffirm an inherited tradition: his literary and political studies creatively developed and extended the Agrarians’ ideas. His political writings in particular constitute a necessary complement to the intellectual tradition formulated in I’ll Take My Stand. Although formally trained in literary criticism, Bradford’s formidable political and historical knowledge—backed by his study of rhetoric—enriched the vision of the Twelve Southerners, many of whom were poets, historians, philosophers, and literary scholars. As James McClellan stated, “until the emergence of Bradford, who took the debate back to the Founding, the cultural critique of the Nashville Agrarians was incomplete. With Bradford, then, I’ll Take My Stand comes into full flower, and the Anti-Federalist tradition acquires a new meaning and significance.”⁸ Thus, although it is correct to see the author of Remembering Who We Are as the most important disciple of the Agrarians, as Clyde Wilson has suggested, it is also possible that with a longer perspective they will be viewed as Bradford’s predecessors.⁹ He has not only produced the most impressive and comprehensive contemporary summation, or synthesis, of the Agrarians’ thinking, but also an independent exposition of contemporary Southern conservative tradition. With Bradford, as McClellan maintained, “the brief for the South reaches a new plateau, and the case for Southern conservatism rises to a level not seen since the days of Randolph and Calhoun.”¹⁰

Therefore, the scholarly output of Melvin Bradford is necessary material for any analysis of contemporary Southern conservative thought. At the same time, however, it is challenging material: all readers will be struck by the depth and breadth of this multidisciplinarian’s canon.¹¹ Alongside his university studies in English and American literature, his interests included philosophy, rhetoric, religion, classical studies, politics, and history. According to Kenneth Cribbed, only Russell Kirk could match Bradford in the “sheer expansiveness of his erudition.”¹² In an age of narrow scholarly specialization, Bradford reinvigorated the vocation of man of letters, taking a stance on every matter he deemed important.

The abundance of topics that Bradford discussed was matched by his intellectual and historical inspirations. As well as his debt to the Nashville Agrarians, Bradford openly acknowledged the influence of Trevor Colbourn, Russell Kirk, Daniel Boorstin, Willmoore Kendall, Michael Oakeshott, Eric Voegelin, and Richard Weaver.¹³ For Bradford, the Southern tradition held not only political but also intellectual benefits. As he observed when discussing the role of the National Endowment for Arts and Humanities: “[a]rt and learning are never simply national phenomena. They are always part of a continuum with an ancestry that is antecedent to a particular regime and a posterity that may outlive it regardless of its origins in a particular place and time.”¹⁴ Thus, his concern with intellectual tradition, apart from its scholarly purpose, also had an important ethical dimension. For Bradford, studying tradition was effectively an act of civil piety. Throughout his academic career, he argued that “[b]oth our doctrine and our hope are rooted in a particular history as inherited through the process by which they were formed and by means of which they are regularly refined. It is a process which has also taught us not to be ingrates. For among us loyalty has always been more important than conceptual rigor.”¹⁵ Therefore, studying political and cultural tradition was something more than a purely theoretical or scholarly occupation for Bradford. It was, so to speak, the manifestation of a certain type of intellectual as well as characterological disposition, embodying the idea of a “faithful heart.”¹⁶ It is this disposition that prompted Kenneth Cribb to characterize Bradford as a “philosopher of memory,” who “counseled us to know ourselves, not through introspection, but through recollection.”¹⁷

During his lifetime, Bradford published more than 200 articles and reviews and was the author or major contributor to over 20 books.¹⁸ This abundance poses a challenge for any scholar attempting to synthetize Bradford’s scholarly legacy and necessitates a degree of selection. For the purpose of this book, I focus almost exclusively on Bradford’s political thought and his interpretation of American political tradition, and thus, do not discuss his biography and engagement in political and social issues. Primarily an essayist, Bradford never wrote a single political treaty. His political thought must therefore be reconstructed from scattered texts, which frequently—in a fashion typical of his erudite writing style—discuss a vast array of topics: from history to literature, from rhetoric to politics.

Bradford’s writings do not constitute a systematic political doctrine and this book does not attempt to present them as such. However, the issues he discussed can be categorized under certain recurring themes, and these are reflected in the structure of this book. Chapter One reconstructs the most important elements that constitute the Southern tradition, as understood and celebrated by Bradford and his predecessors. The Nashville Agrarians perceived the South as the true embodiment of western civilization, in contrast to a North that had deviated from the original political experience of American union. A significant amount of Bradford’s political writings constitutes an attempt to trace the process of derailment from the original American political tradition. For Bradford, Abraham Lincoln played a central role in this process and Chapter Two documents his extensive critique of the sixteenth president, both as a president and, especially, a rhetor. Bradford was convinced that Father Abraham bore responsibility for both a calamitous degradation of American political discourse and the transformation of a limited government—as originally devised by the Framers—into a “teleocratic” instrument, intent on building ‘a city upon a hill.’ Bradford itemized Lincoln’s political and rhetorical abuses, contrasting these with the “original intentions” of the Founding Fathers, and the Framers in particular. Chapter Three presents Bradford’s understanding of the original American political regime. In a fashion typical for many Southern conservatives, he argued that the way the founding era was presented in twentieth-century scholarship was grievously distorted. To fully understand the Founders’ intentions, we should devote more attention to the views and thoughts of antifederalists and carefully study the proceedings of state-ratifying conventions, which gave original and legally binding meaning to the American Constitution.

The majority of Bradford’s political writings have been published in various essay collections and these provide the main source base for my analysis. I will critically discuss the major currents of his political thought and identify these in the broader context of the Southern conservative tradition. In fact, his writings—as well as his political activity—could be perceived as an attempt to introduce a powerful Southern voice into the post-war American conservative movement.¹⁹ However, his political thought, although strongly rooted in the Southern tradition, was intended to enrich the entire American republic. On a more general level, it contributed to a fundamental debate on the character and identity of Western political culture as a whole. Bradford was deeply convinced that, in his scholarly enterprise, “the fate of more than the South lies in the balance.”²⁰

Bradford perceived American history as a drama, with the Founders and the leaders of North and South during the Civil War wrestling with the great issues presented by such authors as Shakespeare and Dante.²¹ He argued, for example, that “[i]t is possible to take the text of the Massachusetts ratification and read it as a completed action, a formal structure with complication, peripeteia, and dramatic resolution—in other words, as a literary whole.”²² In another essay, he presented the Great Convention as “a comic action” and James Madison as a “classically comic figure” in the Aristotelian sense of the term.²³

Bradford was a humanist who understood politics, literature, and the work of a historian as ethical pursuits towards the cultivation of man, in a manner close to the classical concept of paideia. Liberal education, therefore, is an important part of civic education. Politics and learning are closely interrelated. For Bradford, art and learning constituted the core of what we call civilization. Therefore, unlike technology, they should be treated as ends in themselves:

They foster intelligence and a sense of the forms which mirror to us the hidden structure of the human condition but are not directly instrumental or therapeutic. The National Endowments should therefore serve the arts and humanities, not their audience or their custodians. They must look backward in order to look forward if they are to see to it that the universe of discourse inhabited by our national leadership, within which our national decisions are made, is not so dominated by what Matthew Arnold called the “barbarians” (the men of power) or the “Philistines” (the men of business)²⁴

Hence, Bradford perceived his own scholarship strictly in vocational terms. He acted as “a steward—a custodian of the collective memory of the South and, beyond the South, of the essence of what it means to be an American.”²⁵ In his scholarly occupation he definitely identified with the social role of a poet, as defined by his mentor Donald Davidson, whose task is “to provide continuity, to keep alive those memories without which a civilization soon loses its identity and dies.”²⁶ At the same time, however, he always attempted to address issues “both theoretical and prudential” and always spoke as “both citizen and scholar.”²⁷ In fact, he was convinced the spheres of practical politics and theoretical analysis permeate and influence each other. He openly admitted that in his case, political activity on both a regional and national level also had “its scholarly consequences.”²⁸ In a way, he embodied the ideal of a Southern writer, described by Davidson, who—when the situation requires—is ready to “enter the common arena and become a citizen.”²⁹ He never shied away from engaging in public debate and, occasionally, knowingly assumed the role of provocateur, debunking widely accepted myths. As his letter to Lewis Simpson evinces, Bradford viewed his highly critical lectures on Lincoln, presented at Dartmouth College and other Northeast universities, as a form of intellectual “invasion”, or “‘missionary’ journeys.”³⁰

This approach also influenced Bradford’s scholarly methodology. Having no appreciation of abstract theorizing, his political studies were always based on historical evidence and his teaching was, in his own words, “against authority of the philosopher qua doctrinaire.”³¹ Therefore, while writing on the original intentions of the Founding Fathers, the author of The Reactionary Imperative frequently and extensively quoted Framers representing different states in order to support his interpretation of the founding documents and the American political tradition. This, combined with his insistence on rhetoric and historical context, makes Bradford’s argumentation difficult to simply dismiss, even for someone who does not share his political views.

The author of the Original Intentions was convinced that the starting point for studying and discovering the meaning of fundamental American legal documents, such as the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, should be a reconstruction of their milieu. Knowledge of the historical, political, and rhetorical context is a prerequisite condition for any political or legal scholar attempting to explore the meaning of political statements and documents.³² Bradford’s own eclectic texts are the embodiment of that methodology, relying as they do on textual, biographical, historical, political, and rhetorical analyses.

Bradford was convinced the majority of contemporary scholars committed the great error of ideologically interpreting American history. Rather than reconstructing the crucial events of the founding era, they attempted to confirm their own previously adopted presumptions concerning these events and the Founders’ intentions.³³ Bradford conducted his own scholarship with “a relentless distrust of ideology of dialectics, the argument from definition and all the high, epideictic discourse belonging to the province of philosopher or the purlieu of the theologian,”³⁴ as he detailed in the preface to Remembering Who We Are:

Revealed political truth is not a concept within the scope of my reflections—nor any a priori political principle by which historic regimes may be examined as if they were merely abstract proposals, models subject to theoretical criticism… I acknowledge that there is a place for what metaphysicians do in any thoughtful life… But these kinds of discourse which do little but invoke the normative in vacuo are not what I attempt. In particular, my focus is on the misuse of ultimate terms in political philosophy as these affect the prudential exchanges of public men who are expected to conduct the business of this world and do not enjoy such leisure as would be required if they were to re-invent it each morning—before we decided what to do next.³⁵

Bradford spent much of his life attempting to combat the prevailing manner of writing about the Founders through the prism of “revealed political truths.” On a political level, his analyses were directly aimed at liberal leveling policies, justified by their proponents through the use of philosophical “first principles” such as equality or justice. According to their claims (following the arguments in Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address), the American nation had been devoted to certain truths or values since the moment of its founding. The author of Original Intentions, on the other hand, argued that such claims could not withstand a thorough critique based on historical evidence. According to him, the very notion of politics perceived through the prism of abstract philosophical “first principles” was alien to most of the Founders: