Tonsor: America: Liberal or Conservative at the Founding?

I.

A heavy overcast settled over the Huron Valley. Expecting a cold rain at any moment, I sought shelter in Haven Hall. My hope was to intercept Tonsor coming down from his office, then to accompany him on the walk across the Diag to class. I had the proverbial "deep question" for him. Seeing him emerge from the elevator in his Paddington Bear hat, I greeted him and after pleasantries put my subject before him:

"Professor Tonsor, I am interested in how you think about the American founding. A political philosopher I'm reading says that America was the product of the Enlightenment, meaning that it was founded as a classical liberal nation. According to this view, conservatism in America is just classical liberalism's 'right wing,' pushing for freer markets in a free-market system and smaller government in a federal system. American conservatives are thus not like European conservatives who, in reaction to the French Revolution, sought to restore the ancien regime with its monarchy, mercantilism, and three orders. Since that old-world conservative tradition never existed in the U.S. after the founding, what we call 'conservative' on this side of the Atlantic looks much different from conservatism in Europe. Do you think that conservatism in America is just classical liberalism's right wing and nothing more?"

Tonsor responded: "The question, as you ask it, is not well framed. It tries to make the founding an 'either-or' event: liberal or conservative? But the interpretive methods that characterize the humanities encourage us to think not in terms of 'either-or' but in terms of 'both-and.' Complex events elicit divergences of interpretation. Note that I use the plural, "divergences" of interpretation. Given human incomprehension, it is rare to have just one interpretation that is intellectually sufficient.[1]

"Were we all liberals then? Were we all liberals in 1776 and 1787? That's what you're asking. From the viewpoint of the political philosophers who see the founding as the outcome of debate during the Enlightenment, we were liberal. But is there another way of reading the Founding? Taking in the longer perspective of Western civilization, we might ask: Were we conservative in any sense that is prior to and separate from liberalism? And the answer to that question is, yes, most definitely, if you consider the founders' inheritance from the ancient world and Christendom." 

I said, "That longer perspective is what Russell Kirk achieved in The Roots of American Order."[2] 

"There are many who have looked at the American founding in a longer perspective -- Wilson Carey McWilliams, for instance.[3] But since you are taken with Russell Kirk's argument, Mr. Whitney, I'd like you to elaborate."

Oh, my. I was taken aback when Tonsor suddenly lobbed the question back to me -- it was unusual for him to do so. But since I was the one who had just teed up Kirk's Roots, I had to run with it. The ideas in The Roots were once considered mainstream in the academy,[4] and I had read the book with enthusiasm before moving to Ann Arbor. But in the 1980s the book was hardly ever referenced much less taught in American and Western civ surveys. This presented problems for a graduate student. In the company of the methodological gatekeepers in Michigan's history department, it was best not to cite Kirk's Roots since his thesis was considered out-of-date at best; and racist, sexist, classist, and elitest at worst.

Taking a deep breath I said: "There is truth in the claim of the political philosophers. Since we were the first nation established in the modern age, our political economy was liberal from the start. In the first place, we didn't have a feudal or mercantile economy. We had a modern free-market system that owed much to Adam Smith and the Enlightenment. 

"Second, we didn't have a feudal or absolutist monarchy. Instead we had a mixed constitution that was the result of enlightened reflection [5] on liberal philosophers like Locke and republican thinkers like Montesquieu; the resulting federated polity balanced the primacy of the individual (seen in the liberalism of the Bill of Rights) with the primacy of civic virtue (seen in the republicanism of the Northwest Ordinance, Article III), and did so within a framework of innovative checks and balances to thwart the tyranny of the majority (seen in the Constitution of 1787). 

"Third, we didn't have a social order that looked like the ancien regime with its aristocratic privileges, noble titles, and laws upholding primogeniture. Traditionalist European conservatives -- Joseph de Maistre, Louis de Bonald, and Pio Nono -- hated what we were. They condemned 'Americanism.' Our natural aristocracy renewed itself each generation in a relatively mobile society where most could rise due to merit and a little luck. So, yes, in all these fundamental ways, we were not a conservative European nation but a modern liberal one that owed its founding institutions mostly to the Enlightenment."

"Fine, but is there another way of reading the founding?" asked Tonsor in his laconic way.

"Yes," I said, "there's also truth in the claim that our founding was conservative -- deeply conservative in ways that were prior to and separate from liberalism. Our modern liberal roots, strong as they are, do not tell of deeper roots still. America's deeper cultural roots are revealed in our unwritten constitution, our habits of the heart, and our syncretic worldview -- a fusion that holds in dynamic tension the living traditions of ancient Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome, as well as medieval London."

"I'm surprised," said Tonsor, "that you stop at medieval London. Remember that Protestant and Catholic thinkers were engaging the Enlightenment in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Archbishop Fenelon, Bishop Berkeley, John Locke, John Witherspoon -- they sifted the Age of Reason in light of what Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, and London had to teach.[6] Out of that dynamic tension, out of that struggle between those who argued for continuity and those who argued for change, emerged the Founders' syncretic worldview. The intellectual leaders of the American founding -- Adams, Jefferson, Franklin, Hamilton, Madison, Dickinson, Wilson -- stood atop the pinnacle of that worldview." 

One thing about my conversations with Tonsor: He always kept my mind on the stretch. There was no resting with him. I had never read any Dickinson or Wilson and in fact did not know that they were intellectual leaders of the founding.

"Dr. Kirk," I said, "does speak to our moral and spiritual formation. When Americans go to church or temple on Sunday, we are walking into the space inspired by premodern, illiberal religions that originated in the Near East between two thousand and three thousand years ago.[7] In theory liberalism is neutral when it comes to religion. It claims to have no necessary or sufficient need for citizens to believe in the God of the Christians or the God of the Jews. Yet Judeo-Christian moral norms and spiritual comfort have been a cornerstone of our culture from the start."

"Yes," said Tonsor. "To paraphrase Tocqueville: 'I doubt whether man can ever support at the same time complete religious indifference and complete political freedom. I am inclined to think that if he lacks faith, he will be a subject. But if he believes, he has the chance to be free.' Liberalism, he thought, cannot exist in some theoretical cultural vacuum. It needs religion to prop it up."[8]

Sucking in a larger breath, I said: "Another example Dr. Kirk explores comes from our intellectual formation. When young Americans read Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and others who inform our defense of reason and discourse, they are entering a space inspired by premodern, pre-liberal philosophies that originated in the eastern Mediterranean more than two thousand years ago.[9] Liberalism does not mandate what must be taught. It tries to be value free when it comes to knowledge. It claims to have no necessary or sufficient need for citizens to pursue the ancient classics that originated prior to and separate from liberalism. Yet we know that deep engagement with the 'great books' expands the competence of citizens to assess the human condition and to judge current events."

Tonsor weighed in: "So it seems that, in addition to religion, liberalism needs the interior reflection encouraged by the humanities to prop it up." 

"I think so, yes," I said in agreement. "Still another example in Kirk comes not from the Anglo-Saxons so much as from medieval England after the Conquest. Liberals would like to take credit for many of the developments that have contributed to ordered freedom in the modern age -- the common law, stare decisis, Parliament, habeas corpus, trial by jury, and other individual rights that were later adopted by liberalism.[10] In truth, they cannot. There was no -ism called liberalism when these rights and innovations appeared in the Middle Ages. Yet their absence today would be unthinkable in liberalism's public square."

Tonsor objected: "Stop right there. Using the term, 'public square,' is such a banal descent into cliche."[11]

"Okay," I said, trying to disguise my pique. Unfortunately, I was becoming used to Tonsor's gratuitous criticism of the way I said things. At the same time, I figuratively slapped my forehead since the word "okay" also made him peevish. If ever I wanted to drive him nuts I could say: "The public square is okay." 

It was probably a good thing that I did not have time to dwell on Tonsor's peevishness since we had mounted the stairs and were entering the classroom. I was proud of myself for making the case that classical liberalism could not fully account for the American mind. Using Kirk, I had pulled back the curtain on our founders' deeper conservative roots -- evidenced by the living traditions they embraced from Semitic Jerusalem, Mediterranean Athens, cosmopolitan Rome, and Germanic London. Conservatism was not just the right wing of classical liberalism but something much richer.

II.

After Tonsor slapped his satchel down on the table at the front of the class, he came back to the desk into which I was settling. "You know, Mr. Whitney, we must talk more about The Roots. It's a beautiful work in conception but a flawed work in execution."

My professor's words reminded me of something I'd read between Fort Collins and Ann Arbor the previous summer. At the beginning of the road trip to Michigan I had grappled with Tonsor's "The United States as a 'Revolutionary Society,'"[12] and it occurred to me then that his 1975 essay might be a critique of Kirk's 1974 book. Both were written in anticipation of America's bicentennial celebration, and both sought to plumb the meaning of the American experience. 

Tonsor's thesis was that the American founding revitalized Britain's governing principles and thus could be seen as a conservative event. However, in the process of revitalizing Britain's governing principles, the American founding also unleashed the ideas of liberty and equality to an unexpected degree. After 1776, the empire of liberty would spread as never before. Also after 1776 and especially after the four Civil War years culminating in 1865 -- what Lord Acton called "the Second American Revolution"[13] -- the empire of equality would spread as never before. The American founding, paradoxically, was just as much an act of revolution as it was an act of conservation. Looking back, Kirk had focused on the American founding as a fusion of the living traditions of four old cities -- Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, and London. Looking forward, Tonsor saw the American Revolution as a launchpad that took man's aspiration for more liberty and more equality to new heights. It was both-and: both a conservative and an innovative event; both a stroke for liberty and a stroke for equality.

Given my admiration for both men, I needed to come to terms with the tension between Kirk's and Tonsor's interpretation of the founding era. Each in his own way seemed to sound the right note. Could their notes be harmonized? The Roots was one of my favorite works of history, plumbing the subjects I liked to think about most. It played no small part in my decision to pursue graduate studies in history. The Roots was also an important work since it preserved an interpretation of American history that was important to keep alive, somewhere, anywhere, in the postmodern academy that dismissed it amid a swarm of deconstructing "narratives." But Tonsor's insight was also critically important to understanding how America became the country she was. Could I keep the thought of both men in dynamic tension? 

Kirk published the Roots in 1974 in anticipation
of America's bicentennial celebration.

_________________

Notes

[1] Tonsor thought that the most difficult problems of modern history did not usually involve what happened but why it happened. Rarely was there just one correct interpretation of why a historical event or movement occurred. Sifting a variety of interpretations was thus a fixity in Stephen Tonsor's thought. He demonstrated appreciation for different interpretations in one of his first publications after graduate school, when he assembled and compared then-current interpretations of Nazism: Stephen J. Tonsor, National Socialism: Conservative Reaction or Nihilist Revolt? (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1959). The pamphlet is in a series called "Source Problems in World Civilization." In a statement that serves as the foreword, the publisher explains that the task of the historian "is essentially one of selection ... for it is only through selection that knowledge can be arranged in meaningful and usable patterns." Tonsor's pamphlet is a selection of the most compelling interpretations of the philosophical and ideological roots of Nazism. Tonsor concludes: "Perhaps the variety and contradiction in the four major interpretations of National Socialism [in this pamphlet] suggest the difficulty involved in reaching conclusions concerning any historical event or movement. Moreover, these are only four among many interpretations.... If the judgments of [conflicting students and historians] are sometimes ambiguous or slow in coming, perhaps the fault lies in mankind's incomprehension rather than in history's opaqueness." (pp. i, 26, 27).

[2] Russell Kirk, The Roots of American Order (Malibu: Pepperdine University Press, 1974). 

[3] Wilson Carey McWilliams, The Idea of Fraternity in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973). This award-winning book treats some of the same themes as Kirk's Roots and Tonsor's "The United States as a 'Revolutionary Society,'" but precedes them both.

[4] For an earlier statement of Kirk's basic thesis, see the address by the former president of the American Historical Association, Carlton J. H. Hayes, "The American Frontier -- Frontier of What?" December 27, 1945, American Historical Review, vol. 50, no. 2 (January 1946): 199-216, at URL https://www.historians.org/about-aha-and-membership/aha-history-and-archives/presidential-addresses/carlton-j-h-hayes. 

[5] Alexander Hamilton, Federalist Papers, 1 and 9, 1787. 

[6] For a recent study of the traditionalists' confrontation with the Enlightenment, see Ulrich L. Lehner, The Catholic Enlightenment: The Forgotten History of a Global Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

[7] Kirk, Roots, chaps. 2, 5.

[8] Stephen J. Tonsor, "Et tu, brutish?" Christian Science Monitor, April 9, 1979, p. B36.

[9] Kirk, Roots, chaps. 3-4.

[10] Kirk, Roots, chap. 6.

[11] Both Tonsor and I were alluding to a recently published book by Richard John Neuhaus, The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1984).

[12] Stephen J. Tonsor, "The United States as a 'Revolutionary Society,'" Modern Age, vol. 19, no. 2 (spring 1975): 136-45.

[13] Stephen J. Tonsor, "Quest for Liberty: America in Acton's Thought," Introduction by James C. Holland (Grand Rapids, MI: Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty, Occasional Paper No. 1, 1993).

Tonsor: Conservative Movement: Revolution on the Right

I.

Among the reasons I chose to study history at Michigan was the opportunity to attend a Big Ten university. I'd heard Michigan referred to as a "public ivy" -- that is, it combined the excellence of an ivy league education with the extracurriculars of a Big Ten university. Its academic rankings had long been stellar. Michigan was consistently recognized as one of the top public universities in the world. It and Berkeley were consistently ranked the top two public universities in the U.S. And its history department was consistently regarded as one of the top five in America. I figured I'd need the university's elite status to win a good academic post in a tough job market.

Bo Schembechler coached at Michigan from 1969-1989.

Besides Michigan's elite academic status, and besides the opportunity to study with Stephen Tonsor, I'll admit that there was another reason I wanted to go to Ann Arbor. An advisor back in Colorado had said, "If you can go to a top 10 university with a top 10 football program, then it's the best of both worlds. Football Saturdays will be a good way to blow off steam while you're trying to get through a tough course of studies." How prescient that advice proved to be. 

It happened that Michigan had the winningest program in college football -- it was the best of the best -- ahead of such storied programs as Notre Dame, Texas, Nebraska, and Ohio State. I'm not ashamed to admit, as a lover of college football, that its elite status held no small appeal. In the Bo Schembechler era, I had chosen to become a "Michigan Man." The famous fight song, The Victors, branded the Michigan Man as "the leader and the best." So the football legacy was just one more element in the total Michigan package. 

Monday, October 12, 1987, was Columbus Day. I was feeling cranky. Over the weekend my Wolverines had lost to rival Michigan State under a gloaming sky. Not only did we lose the Paul Bunyan Trophy to our rival in East Lansing, but we also tumbled out of the AP poll, from 12th into college football oblivion. (We would have to wait until we beat Alabama in the Hall of Fame Bowl to end the season ranked a respectable 18th nationally, but that was ten weeks in the future.) 

America's largest collegiate arena, Michigan Stadium -- the Big House -- as it appears today.

But Tuesday was a new day that changed my mood and filled me with anticipation. Ronald Reagan's vice president, George H. W. Bush, announced that he was running to be the 41st president of the United States. Bush made the announcement in my hometown of Houston, Texas, and I was happy that he was a candidate. My family lived in the 7th Congressional District when Bush first ran for office. I had met him as a ten year-old boy at a little airport on the outskirts of the Bayou City. It was on a Sunday afternoon in May. In the south Texas heat, he had his suit jacket slung over his left shoulder when he approached my dad and me to talk. He was tall and when he shook my hand he looked me in the eye. I liked this man, George Bush, and I grew to respect his sense of duty and commitment to public service.

II.

These two events -- Michigan's football game and Bush's campaign announcement -- set the stage for my conversation with Stephen Tonsor on October 15th. When the bus delivered me to the central campus, a light dusting of frost was melting on the Diag. My advisor was scheduled to hold office hours but I arrived a little early at Haven Hall that morning. As I scanned the bulletin board on his door, I discovered a New Yorker cartoon I hadn't seen before. It showed three people looking out of a high-rise window down into a cramped courtyard below. One was the cigar-smoking realtor, and the other two were a couple trying to decide if the apartment was right for them. Many floors down, in the dark narrow courtyard, grew a pathetic little tree. The realtor was trying to close the sale: "You got a tree in this yard. It ain't every house got a tree in its yard." I could see why Tonsor, with his Teutonic love of nature, found amusement in a cartoon that took a swipe at the sterility of modern urbanization. 

On assignment for LIFE in 1950, Alfred Eisenstaedt took "Drum Major,"
arguably the most famous photograph ever taken at the University of Michigan.
The picture has been called the photographer's Ode to Joy.

After Tonsor arrived he invited me to sit down and asked how things were going. Wondering if he followed Michigan football, and probing whether we could lighten the relationship a bit, I responded that I was unhappy that the Wolverines had lost the Paul Bunyan Trophy to our rival up in East Lansing. Before I could finish the thought, he waved my words off. "College football -- huh! Why do you waste your time? The sport is a throwback to the most primitive hominids. The very idea of throwing pigskin! Why, it was probably invented by the missing link. It would be well to ban the sport from higher education. I never had one of these gladiators in my classes who excelled -- not one.[1] And too many weekends this time of year, throngs of hooligans trespass onto my property and throw beer cans into my yard." He became so agitated he was veritably rocking.

I felt dressed down, a little ashamed to be grouped with so lowly a creature as "the missing link." It would not, of course, change my behavior because I loved football. But since there wasn't much I could say after that outburst, I tried to laugh off my professor's contempt and move quickly to the second and more serious topic at hand. It turned out that the two topics were related because each settled its contests with a clear winner and a clear loser. Michigan's most famous football player, Gerald R. Ford, liked to say this about sports and politics: "Every morning I read two sections of the newspaper. First I read about the heroes -- the athletes in the sports section. Then I read about the villains -- the crooked politicians in the front section!"

III.

"I am a relatively new Republican," I revealed to Tonsor. "So I was pleased with the announcement yesterday that Vice President Bush is running for the White House. Do you think he has a good chance? Not since the 1940 election has a party captured the Oval Office more than two elections in a row."

Tonsor's expression behind his glasses was Sphinx-like. I wondered if my support of the vice president disappointed him.

I soon got my answer. "I have a love-hate relationship with American politics. Rough-and-tumble doesn't even begin to describe the spectacle. Coleridge observed, 'In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in folly.' Look at the folly in Washington, DC. Our politicians, Democrats and Republicans alike, are such little people and have made a swinish mess. It gives me no pleasure to say it, but even our President stoops low to conquer.[2]

"I am amazed that so many people who are attracted to politics think they can be morally pure in that arena. Politics in a democracy is still politics. It's about getting the power, the votes, to enact one coalition's agenda. To achieve such a majority usually requires horse trading. So politics in our democracy is a cauldron of compromise. There is no moral purity in it. Looking for purity in the political process is like looking for purity in a sewer. It's necessary to civilization, but it's still a mess!"

I was obviously striking out trying to find suitable topics for conversation this day. It was not my finest Dale Carnegie moment.

"Now, Bush," he said. "Bush will face fierce competition. He is conservative but not a conservative like Ronald Reagan, which makes a difference."

My brow furrowed and Tonsor explained that lots of people are conservative, but that does not make them a conservative -- a movement conservative, that is. The indefinite article alters the meaning.

"What unites most people on the right, whether they are movement conservatives or the conservative Everyman," said Tonsor, "is the willingness to submit to reality." Chuckling he added, "Irving Kristol mordantly observed that 'a neoconservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality.' Apparently not mugged enough!"

I laughed and was happy to feel the mood lighten. I'd never make the mistake of bringing up football again. 

"Modern politics make strange bedfellows, Mr. Whitney. The New Deal coalition I grew up in relied on an alliance between the intellectuals and the labor unions. It held solid from 1932 to 1948, and then again in 1960 and 1964. Something similar has happened on the right.

"The modern Right -- the Reagan Right -- consists of various factions that are in productive tension with one another. I see the cultural conservatives in the mix if not at the center. These are highbrow intellectuals. They tend to be Roman and Anglo Catholic. They read T. S. Eliot and William F. Buckley. They listen to Bach and Haydn. They write and lecture in an effort to influence the Zeitgeist.

"In productive tension with highbrow cultural conservatives are the working-class and middlebrow populists and party activists who love their country. The political temperament of these patriots is formed in their families, churches, and 4-H. They go by various names -- Everyman, the Forgotten Man, the silent majority, the moral majority. They are Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt. They glean their political attitudes from Rotary Club meetings, school board elections, and local newspapers. Their conservative temperament is reinforced by TV westerns like Death Valley Days and movies like Patton. The two factions do not make friends easily -- their cultural tastes often diverge -- yet they will ally with one another against the intrusions of the state and the condescension of liberal elites. Everyman just wants to be left alone and have his rights respected.

"The modern Right also includes the anti-communists -- people like James Burnham and Whittaker Chambers. They can favor a large national security state in order to fight totalitarianism. This puts them in productive tension with the libertarians in the party. They are anti-statists who want free markets to be the spine of the body politic and its political economy. Milton Friedman and the Chicago School are at the center of their work.

"The mostly Jewish neocons in Manhattan have been important, but they exist in productive tension with the Protestant evangelicals in their suburban and rural churches. The preservation of the state of Israel is one of their shared concerns.

"Finally there is the Establishment, which tends to be conservative but is best characterized as opportunistic. Jefferson warned us to beware this class -- the so-called money men. The monied Establishment is centered in our commercial capital, New York City, and exerts influence in our political capital, Washington, DC. It is rent-seeking. That is to say, these bigwigs hire lawyers and accountants and lobbyists who bend the system -- its laws, tax write-offs, corporate welfare, and administrative rules -- in their favor. It's where the loopholes come from. While both parties court the Eastern Establishment, they'd soon abandon the Republicans if the Democrats seemed more likely to do their bidding."

I opened my looseleaf binder and scribbled out some notes as quickly as I could. By my count, Tonsor mentioned seven GOP factions that existed in 1987:

• cultural conservatives
• populists
• anticommunists
• libertarians
• neocons
• evangelicals
• Establishment 

Seeing how furiously I was writing, Tonsor kindly paused for a moment before picking up the thread.

"In their Old Right iteration, the conservatives did not even have a name. When I was your age, there was nothing like a Reagan conservative. Still, right-leaning intellectuals served in an important capacity. They were the loyal opposition to the progressivism of Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom and Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. To understand them I recommend that you read Albert Jay Nock -- perhaps his essay on "Isaiah's Job" in the April 1936 number of The Atlantic, or his libertarian take on Thomas Jefferson. Two additional Old Right leaders you might look into are the humanists, Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More. Russell Kirk provides excellent summaries of Babbitt and More in his seminal work, The Conservative Mind. These humanists confronted modernity without altogether rejecting it. They reminded Americans of the need for continuity in an age of change, for virtue in an age of liberty, for duties in an age of rights, for being in an age of becoming, for the spiritual in an age given over to the material -- all necessary elements to a humanely ordered freedom. As eloquent as the Old Right was, as powerful as it was culturally, the alliance rarely succeeded in capturing the imagination of the Forgotten Man in enough numbers to win major elections.[3] Indeed, in their wilderness years between 1932 and 1948, the Old Right lost five presidential contests in a row.

"There is a reason for that. If you look at these prewar conservatives who opposed Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal -- H. L. Mencken, Albert Jay Nock, Irving Babbitt -- they were of a libertarian cast of mind, disciples of Thomas Jefferson and John Stuart Mill. The worldview of these classical liberals was elitist and agnostic. Without churches, these prewar conservatives did not connect with the lived traditions of God-fearing Americans who made up the vast majority of the nation's electorate.[4]

"World War II changed the world. And as more and more people grew weary and wary of the active-state liberalism of the New Deal, there arose the second iteration of the Right. It is the current postwar conservative movement and it has been led by estimable thinkers -- Friedrich von Hayek, Richard Weaver, Russell Kirk, and William F. Buckley Jr. It also includes one of my mentors, Frank Meyer, as well as one of my closest friends, Henry Regnery, whom Caroline and I go to visit in Chicago and in Three Oaks. These intellectuals began a movement in the 1950s when National Review gave them an intellectual commons to discover each other and to debate in common cause. In the early days they were a scattered elite, mostly libertarians, anticommunists, and cultural conservatives who sought to expand freedom, security, and virtue respectively. Their aims did not fit well with the programs of the liberal cognoscenti. So they had to swim upstream against the current of liberalism which dominated America's elite.

"As George Nash points out in his Conservative Intellectual Movement in America -- a fine book, by the way -- the philosophical right was in search of a political man to match. A man who could shake up the Republican status quo and wrest the party from the Eastern Establishment. They found their man in Goldwater in 1964. Well, he lost. After we licked our wounds, we went back to work to change the climate of opinion. The conservative movement made steady inroads in the national conversation in the late 1960s and early 1970s due to a series of shocks to the nation for which the New Deal coalition had fewer and fewer credible answers. Assassinations, urban riots, campus unrest, failure in Vietnam, the Warren Court, energy crises, Watergate, stagflation, malaise, the Berger Court -- all this disorder made the average American anxious. By 1980 an alliance of intellectuals, politicians, and right-leaning citizens was strong enough to put Reagan in the White House and to keep him there in 1984. Vice President Bush will argue that he can best extend Reagan's legacy of ordered freedom. As I say, he is not a conservative, but he is conservative enough and a good man, congenial and competent."

IV.

"Now that you are living in Michigan, you should also know about the so-called Macomb County Democrats who have been seminal to Reagan's victory. Macomb County is less than an hour's drive away, north of Detroit. Its bedroom communities are home to the factory workers who man the assembly lines of the Big Three. To understand them culturally, you have to remember that these voters are the children of the Forgotten Man of the 1930s. They are registered Democrats, socially conservative, and mostly Catholics, and they feel abandoned by what was once the New Deal coalition. I understand these people, because my family was also working class and put their hopes in FDR. But as the New Deal Coalition kept moving left, especially during the presidency of Lyndon Johnson, there was increasing distance between liberal elites and the children of the Forgotten Man. As a result, they voted with their feet. They have realigned themselves with the Republicans and cast their lot with the GOP.

"Perhaps you're familiar with Stanley Greenberg's study of Macomb County Democrats that came out a couple of years ago [1985]. He is a Harvard Ph.D. and a liberal pollster who tries to explain the recent electoral shift in American politics, which reflects a deeper cultural shift in American life. The important point is that the electoral realignment could occur because first there was an intellectual realignment. An elite coterie of conservative thinkers articulated the frustrations and aspirations of the Forgotten Man, and politicians took note. These conservatives -- in places like Sharon, Connecticut; Mecosta, Michigan; Woodstock, New York; and Three Oaks, Michigan -- helped bridge the cultural divide with Macomb County. That's one reason 1980 and '84 came about, because of an impressive new political coalition that has put, and kept, a conservative in the White House.

"So George Bush's task is to be populist connect with Macomb County. As Macomb goes, so goes the GOP. If he and the conservative elite can connect with the voters in Macomb County, the right will do just fine in American politics in 1988. Maybe conservatives will, too."

In my head I recast Tonsor's formulation to make it more alliterative: If conservative philosophers can connect with right-wing politicians, who in turn can connect with ordinary people in places like Macomb County, then the right will do just fine in American elections.

After listening to Tonsor's magisterial overview of the American right, it occurred to me that I now had another reason to be grateful for choosing Michigan. It was blind luck, but I was discovering that I had a front-row seat to the conservative intellectual movement in America -- not just in Tonsor's Haven Hall office, not just in the nearby Earhart Foundation on Plymouth Road, but also in Mecosta (Russell Kirk), Three Oaks (Henry Regnery), North Adams (Philadelphia Society), Hillsdale (the college), and Midland (Mackinac Center for Public Policy). Each of these men and institutions was contributing to the change in the climate of opinion that was transforming American politics in places like Macomb County. I was witnessing a realignment as profound as that which occurred in the 1930s, when the New Deal coalition arose. Now the New Deal coalition was unraveling, and the new Reagan coalition was taking its place. To be a witness to this "revolution" was invigorating tonic indeed for a newly arrived Michigan Man.

_____________________

Notes

[1] Stephen J. Tonsor to Henry Regnery, May 18, 1985, p. 5; letter in GW's possession, courtesy of Alfred Regnery.

[2]Stephen J. Tonsor to Henry Regnery, July 25, 1987, p. 4; letter in GW's possession, courtesy of Alfred Regnery.

[3] Tonsor seemed to use the term, "Forgotten Man," mostly in the way that Yale professor William Graham Sumner used it in his seminal 1876 article by that title, to refer to ordinary citizens who are forced to pay for government reforms that benefit a minority to which they do not belong. Franklin Roosevelt redefined the term in one of his early fireside chats. By "Forgotten Man" FDR referred to the vast majority of people who were left behind when capitalist oligarchs enriched themselves at the workers' expense.

[4] Mark C. Henrie, "Traditionalism," American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia, ed. Bruce Frohnen, Jeremy Beer, and Jeffrey O. Nelson (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2006), pp. 870-71.

Tonsor: Introduction: Second Call -- The Tragedy of Lord Acton

In late July, shortly before loading a 20-foot U-Haul and moving to Ann Arbor, I phoned Tonsor again, seeking his advice about which professors to look up once I was at Michigan. Then I broached a topic from our first conversation that I hoped to resume: Lord Acton as a giant of modern intellectual history and cultural criticism.

“Professor Tonsor, our last conversation sparked me to read an essay in which Acton said that liberty is more about morals than about politics and --"

Tonsor jumped right in: “Acton said that liberty is so holy a thing that God Himself was forced to permit evil that liberty might exist.[1] Think of it this way, Mr. Whitney. Animals live in the realm of necessity. Human beings also live in the realm of necessity – we have to bend to gravity and answer the need for food and water – but we live in the realm of freedom, too. A person’s dignity, a person’s nobility, resides in his using freedom to act morally. A person can only act morally if he is taught the difference between right and wrong and is free to choose between good and evil.”

Lord Acton (1834-1902)

Tonsor paused. I could hear him breathing now. “It follows that a primary aim of education is to learn how to exercise liberty within the bounds of the moral life.[2] A primary aim of politics is to preserve liberty as the organizing principle around which the other values in society must be ordered.[3] And a primary aim of historical research is to chart man's enduring efforts to decrease the realm of necessity and increase the realm of liberty. In Acton's mind it all coheres.”

That précis, I thought, was brilliant. The man speaks in perfectly formed paragraphs.

“Acton thought the historian should be a hanging judge?" I ventured.

“The most severe hanging judge,” said Tonsor, punching the word severe. “He was fond of saying that a man’s life must be measured against its low-water mark, the one act of evil that outweighs all good.[4] Let a man criminate himself. History is better written from private letters than from public chronicles.[5]

“Acton’s reputation as a hanging judge was undoubtedly helped by the fact that he had a better nose for gossip than almost any other Victorian.[6] Gossip was the oxygen the Victorian Age inhaled. It should be said that historians in every age have inclined their ear to gossip. Take Suetonius, Procopius, or Boccaccio. People read such authors to be titillated by Eros and to satisfy their curiosity about the mechanics of sex.”

It was reassuring for me to hear references to authors with whom I was familiar (but it surprised me to hear him speak of the mechanics of sex). As an undergraduate back in Colorado, I had read Suetonius, the Roman author of Lives of the Caesars, a masterpiece of gossip parading as history, a smutty collection of the scandals surrounding the first eleven Roman emperors. Likewise I was familiar with Procopius, the Byzantine historian who wrote not just official chronicles of the Emperor Justinian but also the sordid Secret History, which is full of invective against the members of the royal family. No one knows how true these accounts are, but they are good reads to slip into a stack of monographs – like the mayonnaise between slices of dry bread.

Tonsor continued: “The people who are drawn to the salacious details in Suetonius and Procopius are the same people who read TV Guide. You will not find them grappling with Acton. Yet he is the model of rectitude when it comes to historical research and writing."

Cambridge University Library

TV Guide? I smiled at Tonsor's sarcasm -- he brandished his weapon of choice skillfully.

“During Acton’s lifetime," he continued, "the discipline of history was flowering because of the archives that were opening up all over Europe. Acton himself took part in this flourishing. He donated a thousand boxes of his own notes and research to the Cambridge library. I’ve gone through a good many of the documents to examine everything from his morals to his methods.[7] It’s staggering to trace all the directions his mind went. When it came to advising historians attempting to write history, Acton's advice was, Don’t! Instead visit Purgatory![8] It was his way of getting scholars to understand the arduous journey they were about to embark upon. I hope, Mr. Whitney, that you have also prepared for the journey."

I had, but did not feel like saying so since Tonsor had served on the committee that admitted me. Perhaps in the pause Tonsor sensed I was at a bit of a loss, so he continued to dilate on Acton's advice: “History done well requires almost superhuman talent and effort. In the first place, Acton charged researchers to be open to evidence that does not fit the thesis; to turn over every last stone and get multiple perspectives if they want to know what really happened in the past. In so many words he cautioned against what the social scientists call ‘confirmation bias’; his notes recall a scene in Dante’s Paradise, in which St. Thomas Aquinas warns the Pilgrim that 'opinion -- hasty -- often can incline to the wrong side, and then affection for one's own opinion binds, confines the mind.'[9]

One of Gustave Doré's exquisite prints made for Dante's Divine Comedy

            “In the second place," Tonsor continued, keeping my mind on the stretch, "Acton charged historians to make out a better case for the other side than they are able to make out for themselves.[10] Cultivate the ability to drive the prosecutor’s case into a corner, and with equal skill to drive the defense’s case into a corner. Transpose the nominative and accusative and see how things look then![11]

“Acton did not suppose that the strenuous effort to understand both sides would lead to the exoneration of murder, injustice, and deceit. Not at all. Out of his elementary sense of decency and justice, he demanded that the historian administer a fair trial. But a trial there must be.[12]

“So,” I asked, “how did Acton square the scientific view of history then emerging with his insistence on moral judgment in historical writing?” I was not idly asking the question to linger on the phone. As an apprentice historian, I really needed to understand.

“You mean the old fact-value debate,” said Tonsor firmly, “the modern divide between objective facts that can be universally verified and subjective values that vary from person to person and from culture to culture. For Acton, the distinction was not so cut and dried. When it came to historical narrative, it was not ‘either-or’ but ‘both-and.’ Both the facts uncovered in the archives, and the moral assessment of human behavior. They were both the stuff of history, properly understood. Acton approached history this way because, like most Victorians, he believed in a universal natural law that could be apprehended by reason and enforced by conscience. This belief enabled him to sidestep differences in doctrine presented by the Axial Age religions. The main thing was to understand the ethical commands common to them all. The prohibition against murdering the innocent, the obligation to follow one’s informed conscience, the Golden and Silver rules – these universal commands to man’s conscience formed the basis of his moral judgments. It is probably accurate to infer that Acton’s moral reasoning was more informed by Kant than by Jesus.”[13]

Karl Jaspers's term, "Axial Age," describes the brilliant spiritual leap
humankind took around the world some 2,000-2,500 years ago.

“So," I pressed, "Acton would regard the universal commands of conscience sort of like ‘value facts’? In other words, because the Golden Rule is universal among the world’s major religions, it is tantamount to a fact? By extension, if I am pulling all of this together, it means that the most basic requirement of freedom is the right to obey the commands of conscience, to do what one ought. Or, as John Adams said, liberty is a power to do as we would be done by.”[14]

“Yes,” Tonsor said with emphasis. “To do as we would be done by.”

“Now,” Tonsor continued, “nobody ever accused Acton of being a saint in his personal life. Goodness is as far from sanctity as cleverness is from genius. Acton was personally cloaked and choked by the moral law as one might be squeezed into a suit of armor two sizes too small.”[15]

I did not know exactly how to understand the analogy, but I went on to ask whether Acton struggled with the Church.

Pio Nono (Pope Pius IX): no fan of Acton's

“Indeed! And the Church with Acton! In Acton the hierarchy confronted a petulant son, especially when it came to the doctrine of papal infallibility. Acton had a mischievous side -- he enjoyed tweaking the lion in his den, so Pio Nono was no fan of his. Acton was especially disliked by Ultramontanist toadies who prostrated themselves before the pope and scurried at his every twitch. Acton was a devout Catholic, to be sure. But he was not passionately Catholic. I’ll take the thought a step farther. The absence of religious enthusiasm may have been what made Acton tolerable to be around. He was the one you wanted to sit next to at dinner parties.

“And yet, despite his cosmopolitan ease in conversation, despite his wit at soirees, Acton was probably a very lonely man. He didn’t suffer fools. And his absolute moral stances, his implacable judgments, invariably separated him from other men. A liberal Catholic, he was too liberal for the Catholics and too Catholic for the liberals. He criticized his mentors. He broke off friendships. He quarreled bitterly with the Church hierarchy. Technically and morally, he was probably right in most of his quarrels. But whatever satisfaction he derived from being right must have been offset by the isolation he inflicted on himself from being self-righteous.[16]  

“Acton is the prophet who foresaw our times. He anticipated the dangers of statism. But ironically he is now a setting star – passé and remote. This, it must be said, is a tragedy of his own making. It’s a mystery why he never wrote his planned magnum opus, The History of Liberty – the book he was meant to write. Everyone around him waited years for the work to appear, but it never did and posterity is the worse for it. The History of Liberty has been called ‘the greatest book never written.’[17]

"The greatest book never written"

“The irony is that Acton had already written it in his head. He had penned thousands of pages of notes brimming with material for the book. I’ve seen the material myself.[18] But, reaching the end of his life, he realized he would not compose the work and donated all his research to Cambridge, all his notes that fill literally a thousand boxes. He had to settle on the hope that some enterprising scholar would eventually come along after his death and compose the history of liberty he failed to write. Those boxes are a feeble commemoration of a brilliant mind, a sad testimonial to the tragedy of wasted labor.[19] Socrates, Jesus, Mohammad, Charlemagne – they could pull off going unpublished; Acton could not.”

I listened in silence to this remarkable lesson on Lord Acton and tried to be comfortable with the pause that ensued. But my mind would not be still. What with his dizzying erudition, Tonsor had given me much to ponder. I had never heard a teacher speak in this manner before.

---

Notes

[1] Stephen J. Tonsor, “The Conservative Search for Identity,” in Equality, Decadence, and Modernity, ed. Gregory L. Schneider (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2005), pp. 255-56; Acton's view is line with that of Edmund Burke, who said as much when he wrote, in 1790, “It is better to cherish virtue and humanity, by leaving much to free will, even with some loss to the object, than to attempt to make men mere machines and instruments of a political benevolence. The world on the whole will gain by a liberty, without which virtue cannot exist.” Thanks to Professor Bradley Birzer for reminding me of Burke's quotation.

[2] Stephen J. Tonsor, Introduction, The Legacy of an Education, by James C. Holland (Grand Rapids, MI: Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty, Occasional Paper no. 11, 1997); Kindle edition, loc. 11.

[3] Tonsor, “The Conservative Search for Identity,” in Equality, Decadence, and Modernity, pp. 255-56.

[4] Gertrude Himmelfarb, Lord Acton: A Study in Conscience and Politics (Grand Rapids, MI: Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty, 2015), Kindle edition, Ch. 8, loc. 4138. Himmelfarb's book was particularly helpful in reconstructing Tonsor's and my first conversations on Lord Acton.

[5] Lord Acton, letter to Mandell Creighton, at URL http://oll.libertyfund.org/search/title/2254?q=criminate, accessed August 26, 2016.

[6] Himmelfarb, Lord Acton, Ch. 1, loc. 104.

[7] Himmelfarb, Lord Acton, Ch. 1, loc. 125.

[8] Acton, John Emerich Edward Dalberg (Lord), “Advice to Persons about the Write History,” at The Imaginative Conservative, at URL http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2015/06/advice-to-persons-about-to-write-history.html, accessed August 26, 2016.

[9] Paradiso, Canto 13: 118-20, trans. Allen Mandelbaum.

[10] Acton quoted by Stephen J. Tonsor, “Faculty Diversity and University Survival,” in Tradition and Reform in Education (La Salle: Open Court, 1974), p. 155.

[11] Acton, John Emerich Edward Dalberg (Lord), “Advice to Persons about the Write History,” at The Imaginative Conservative, at URL http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2015/06/advice-to-persons-about-to-write-history.html, accessed August 26, 2016.

[12] Tonsor, “Faculty Diversity and University Survival,” in Tradition and Reform in Education, p. 155.

[13] Tonsor, Introduction, Legacy by Holland, loc. 23.

[14] John Adams, Works, vol. 10; quoted in Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot, 7^th ed. (Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway Edition, 1985), p. 100.

[15] Tonsor, Introduction, Legacy by Holland, loc. 23.

[16] Himmelfarb, Lord Acton, Ch. 1, loc. 125-148.

[17] L. M. Phillipps, Europe Unbound (London, 1916), p. 147n.; quoted by Himmelfarb, Lord Acton, Ch. 1, loc. 114.

[18] Caroline Tonsor interview with GW, Chelsea, MI, March 15, 2017. Ms. Tonsor spoke of a different era when it came to research. She said that the "Xeroxed documents" from the Cambridge University library arrived in Ann Arbor on a continuous roll that she had to divide up with scissors. See the resulting monograph and detailed references in Stephen J. Tonsor, “Lord Acton on Döllinger’s Historical Theology,” Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 20, no. 3 (June-September 1959), pp. 329-52.

[19] Himmelfarb, Lord Acton, Ch. 1, loc. 114.