Tonsor: Introduction: Move to Ann Arbor I

I. 

The calendar flipped to Sunday, August 2, 1987. The thought that it might be my last Rocky Mountain sunrise, after 15 years of living on the Front Range, made a wave of grief well up in my throat. 

Sunrise, Rocky Mountain National Park, southwest of Fort Collins

A sweet intoxicant, these Colorado sunrises. The emerging light on the pinkish granite of the mountaintops recalled some verse composed by a Colorado College poet, Katharine Lee Bates. In 1893, in a bloomer, she ascended the pink summit of Pikes Peak. Though exhausted, she took in the view and was inspired to write, "Oh, beautiful, for spacious skies...."[1]

Oh beautiful indeed: What on earth was I thinking -- to trade the Rockies for the Rust Belt? To make matters worse, several of my newest neighbors in Fort Collins hailed from Michigan. They reported that the economic hardships there had given rise to a mordant assessment of the future: Would the last person out of Michigan please turn off the lights? 

No matter. I decided to swim against the current, betting that my future would be better if I continued my education not at a land grant school but at a public ivy. 

Colorado State University -- the Oval

Now, I do not want to convey the wrong impression. I had received an excellent education at Colorado State; my history, literature, and German professors had been first rate, and I think of many of them fondly to this day. But Michigan was ranked one of the top universities in the world and, given the difficult job market for new Ph.D.s in European intellectual history, I'd need the cache Michigan boasted. It was time to go.

The day before, a few family and friends helped me pack a 20-foot U-Haul for the long-awaited adventure. It struck me as funny to look at that truck and realize, once the cargo door was shut, that my entire material existence -- mostly books, too many books, as my sore arms attested -- could be squeezed into a few hundred cubic feet.

The sun was still hanging low over the High Plains when I climbed into the cab of the truck to begin the 1,244 mile journey from university housing at Colorado State to university housing at Michigan. The plan the first night was to lay over in Lincoln, Nebraska; the second night, in the south suburbs of Chicagoland; and the third, in my new home in Ann Arbor. I felt excited, nervous, and crazy all at once. I stood at the edge of my personal Rubicon -- it was Interstate 25. Once crossed, was there no turning back?

II.

When my emotions are in a high boil, I try and settle by taking on an intellectual puzzle that focuses my mind on something besides limbic turmoil. For the three-day drive to Michigan I set myself the task of reading a troika of essays by Stephen Tonsor, the man who would soon become my graduate advisor. I picked three pieces that were published roughly a decade apart from one another -- 1964, 1975, 1985 -- to see what changed and what didn't in Tonsor's interests and insights. 

The night before setting out on the leg between Fort Collins and Lincoln, I read "The United States as a Revolutionary Society."[2] Somehow it just felt right to start with this essay. Tonsor's piece promised to deliver a first-rate intellectual puzzle. It was audacious for a conservative to argue in 1975, on the eve of America's bicentennial, that our nation renewed itself through periodic social revolutions. Such a line of thought was more likely to come from the typewriter of Tonsor's most famous student radical, Tom Hayden of SDS, than from a stick-in-the-mud right-winger. Why did he write it?

To get to Ann Arbor I had to go through a place called Lincoln. The 16th president's namesake on the Nebraska prairie made me wonder how social revolution might be linked to Lincoln's presidency. There was abundant material with which to work. Lincoln will forever be associated not only with the liberation of four million Blacks; not only with abolishing the institution of chattel slavery on American soil; not only with atonement for the Founders' sins; not only with the greatest uncompensated transfer of "property" in U.S. history; but also with the far-reaching alteration of the Constitution. Did Tonsor believe that the three great Civil War amendments were accelerants to the fiery social upheavals to come -- farmer unrest, labor unrest, anarchist terror, women's suffrage, the Civil Rights movement, and the Sixties' protests?

Was the first Republican President, Abraham Lincoln,
a key figure in furthering America's legacy of periodic social revolutions?

Juxtaposed to this last point was a counterpoint. My journey would take me through some of the most conservative parts of the fruited plain, the lonely vastness of the Great Plains as well as the rural Midwest straddling the 98th Meridian (more or less the line from Mitchell, SD, to Grand Island, NE, to Hutchinson, KS). Would Tonsor's intellectual history of America crash head-on into the reality of the historical geography I was traveling through?

III.

As the serrated knife-edge of the Front Range faded in my rearview mirror, I needed to shake off the emotional detritus that had settled over my spirits like a High Plains dust storm. My questions about Tonsor's essay provided the needed distraction.

Tonsor wrote that his was a "rather daring thesis." Really? Daring to whom? Not to the historians in his department. At Michigan Tonsor was surrounded by Old Leftists, New Deal liberals, and New Leftists who would not view his thesis as daring at all. 

Edmund Burke's view of the American Founding appealed to
traditionalist conservatives. The Burkean view was that
it was "a revolution not made, but prevented."
(See http://www.mmisi.org/ma/29_04/kirk.pdf)
Tonsor thought this a gross simplification of the Revolution.

Then it occurred to me: In Modern Age Tonsor was writing not to the typical academic historian but to his friends in the Philadelphia Society[3], about as conservative a professional audience as one could find. Most members of Philly Soc viewed the Founders as reluctant revolutionaries. Indeed, the Constitution they framed reinforced conservative practices and institutions in the new republic, including the most backward and ugly of them all -- chattel slavery -- so odious that the word "slaves" is not even mentioned in the document; instead the Framers made an oblique reference to "all other Persons." Tonsor, I realized, was writing a corrective to the conservative boilerplate he heard at Philadelphia Society meetings.

"It is important," averred Tonsor, pushing the point, "that we demonstrate clearly the truly revolutionary character of the events of 1776 and their continuing impact on American society." To back his testimony, Tonsor called two witnesses who were not usually brought in for a conservative's defense: Charles and Mary Beard. These prominent progressives believed that

Mary Ritter Beard (1876-1958)

"the American Revolution was more than a war on England. It was in truth an economic, social, and intellectual transformation of prime significance -- the first of those modern world-shaking reconstructions in which mankind has sought to cut and fashion the tough and stubborn web of fact to fit the pattern of its dreams."[4]

Even more startling was Tonsor's next assertion, aimed I think directly at his conservative friends who, he believed, did not have a sound grasp of our nation's historical DNA: 

"But even without the Beards' respected view we know that there was a genuine revolution because we live out its enduring consequences and its continuing ramifications. Indeed, one of our least admirable contemporary attitudes is our retreat from the novelty and the implications of our revolutionary heritage and our search (a vain one to be sure) into what we think to be the quiet reaches of the past for a golden age of tranquility. Surfeited on change we imagine that at some golden moment in some imagined American Camelot men were free of the necessity to choose and to change; the necessity that the original revolutionary transformation of our society has imposed on all of us. While the Left sees insufficient change ... the Right rejects those changes which necessarily follow from the principles of the revolution."[5]

The Right got it wrong, for the ability of American society to absorb revolutionary change, argued Tonsor, was written into America's very political institutions and charters: 

"in the final analysis, it is our basic institutions and the founding instruments of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution which have perpetuated our values and given our system its elasticity and its dynamism."[6]

Tonsor believed the Founders were reluctant rebels -- in fact, he conceded that "Few, if any, revolutions have been so conservative in their inspiration" -- but rebels they were:

"... [O]nce those liberties and historical rights were taken seriously, once they had become the central principle of a new polity, they changed and transformed the whole texture of American political and social life. It was, indeed, as though the American Revolution had salvaged the great vital principle that stood at the heart of the English historical experience and had given it new life and meaning....  

"Sometimes an act of conservatism is a truly revolutionary action. The concrete realization of specific liberties, no matter how partial or incomplete, was in the instance of the American Revolution the great device by which liberty permeated the totality of American life in the years that were to come. That process has not ended and I would like to remind you that success as well as failure exacts a price."[7]

That such passages flowed from the pen of a "conservative" historian vexed me. I wasn't sure how to square the essay with the reputation of its author. But as there was no internally logical flaw in the argument, I counted myself fortunate to have encountered the piece early in my graduate education. The Michigan professor was not just correcting some mistaken notions that conservatives held about American history; he was issuing a warning to those conservatives, a warning not reflexively to condemn the revolutionary tradition in our heritage.

IV.

Already from his essay I surmised three things about my new graduate advisor. First, Tonsor was going to call history exactly as he saw it. He wasn't afraid to cite the work of progressives when it had merit. He certainly was not going to worry about what his conservative friends would think if he did so. The scholar should have the courage to follow the evidence where it leads, regardless of the political stripe of the people supplying the evidence. Indeed, sifting through the merits of different perspectives is the only way to get closer to the truth.

Another thing that surprised me about Tonsor -- surprised me in light of what I expected a conservative to be -- was his unvarnished realism, his lack of sentimentality, when investigating the past. There was no golden age. Not even America's founding constituted a golden age. He loathed the conservative tendency to conjure one into existence in order to go off on all that has gone wrong in the present. I suspected that Tonsor was an Augustinian Christian -- i.e., he believed that human nature is a constant, always and everywhere subject to the same venal and mortal sins. So the good old days were not that good. The temptation to fall for a politics of nostalgia -- to create the myth of a golden age, no matter how understandable in a Time of Trouble -- is a perverse form of ignorance. It was more benighted even than the poor mass of humanity staring at the back wall of Plato's cave. 

Third, America was at least as revolutionary as it was conservative, and the two impulses were in dynamic tension with one another. It seemed Tonsor was saying that the dynamic tension was not such a bad thing. It beat traditionalism, which is the dead faith of the living, and it beat neophilia, which is the love of change for its own sake. Both traditionalism and neophilia lead to cultural despair. The truth about modernity reveals itself somewhere between these two extremes. Thus the historian should embrace the dynamic conservative-revolutionary tension that has shaped our institutions and worldview. It is the historic reality.

Again: In this essay there was no blanket dismissal of progressive scholars, no argument for some mythical golden age, no blind eye to the benefits of our nation's revolutionary heritage. The more I thought about it, the more I suspected that Tonsor was not just correcting conservatives in general, but rebutting Russell Kirk in particular. Kirk's Roots of American Order was also written in anticipation of America's bicentennial, having been published one year earlier, in 1974.[8] Without saying as much, Tonsor's essay amounted to an assault on Kirk's thesis.

Russell Kirk (1918-1994)

I must confess that the implicit attack on Kirk gave me mixed feelings. Tonsor had expressed deep admiration for Kirk in the 1950s. By the 1970s they had irreconcilable differences on the meaning of the American Revolution. 

I also had mixed feelings because The Roots was one of my favorite books, combing as it did the sands of ruins for the glories of Western civilization. It was the history of just that civilization that I wanted to teach. From my jejune perspective, Kirk's book was Whig history at its finest. Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, London -- all would have a salutary influence on the American founders. Kirk's world-historical view of America appealed to me. It was big. It was unapologetic. It was compellingly argued. And it was one of the reasons I wanted to pursue the formal study of history in a graduate school close to Russell Kirk. His home up in Mecosta, Michigan, was in the middle of the Lower Peninsula's stump country. After reading Tonsor's essay, Mecosta suddenly seemed a world apart from Ann Arbor. 

During the drive to Lincoln I did not get around to Tonsor's view of our sixteenth president and social revolution. There was not really enough material in the essay to answer that question. I did ponder the idea, expressed in a history seminar back at CSU, that the three Civil War amendments were both the cause and effect of significant changes in our way of thinking. The war started the process of transforming Americans' view of each other and their government. Thus serial social revolutions were not unthinkable after 1865.

V.

By the time the U-Haul was rolling into the parking lot of a cheap motel on the west side of Lincoln, I was asking myself: Was Tonsor the conservative people made him out to be? It would not trouble me if he were not conservative; intellectual integrity eschews party lines. What I liked about "The United States as a Revolutionary Society" was that it showed Tonsor's determination to steer clear of ideology. His goal was not to defend an -ism but to practice good history. His conservative bona fides notwithstanding, he did not trim his sails to please his right-wing friends at National Review. That was important to me. Given my need to please people, I was fortunate to have the role model I thought I had found in Stephen Tonsor.

I climbed down from the truck's cab, noticeably stiff and cranky. Lincoln felt oppressively humid, closed in by gray. I had been watching a blanket of stratus clouds unroll over the landscape for several hours. But it didn't matter. I had grown too dull and hungry and exhausted to think anymore.

__________

[1] Gleaves Whitney, Colorado Front Range: A Landscape Divided (Boulder: Johnson Books, 1983), p. 3.  

[2] Stephen J. Tonsor, "The United States as a Revolutionary Society," Modern Age (spring 1975): 136-45.

[3] Stephen Tonsor, along with Russell Kirk, was among the founders of the conservative Philadelphia Society, a professional association that formed during Republican nominee Barry Goldwater's star-crossed pursuit of the presidency in 1964. See http://phillysoc.org/. Tonsor delivered the third lecture at the first organizational meeting of the society. Also see http://phillysoc.org/tps_meetings/1964-organizing-meeting-in-indianapolis/. 

[4] Charles Beard and Mary Beard, Rise of American Civilization (p. 296); quoted by Tonsor, "Revolutionary Society," p. 137.

[5] Tonsor, "Revolutionary Society," p. 137; my emphasis in italics.

[6] Tonsor, "Revolutionary Society," p. 145.

[7] Ibid.

[8] See especially the two books by Russell Kirk with which I was familiar when I headed off to Ann Arbor in August 1987: The Roots of American Order (Malibu, CA: Pepperdine University Press, 1974); and The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot, 7th ed. (Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway, 1986).

Tonsor #8 -- 1505 Morton Ave.

She was standing at the front door with a warm smile and an extended hand. Already at hello, it was apparent that Caroline Tonsor was diametrically different from her husband. In physical appearance they were not at all like the cartoon of the married couple that aged alongside each other until they looked exactly alike. Quite the contrary. He was stocky; she was slender. He had short gray-white hair; she, long dark brown hair. His eyes were lighter, impatient, and discerning;[1] her eyes, darker, approachable, and kind.

I would soon learn that their personalities were as different as their looks. Where he came off as forceful and judgmental, she was soft-spoken and accepting. Where he was the know-it-all, she asked questions. Where he liked to sprinkle his conversation with something that surprised, even outraged, she was happy with quiet displays of wit. The differences between the two is perhaps best summed up by the fact that students, among themselves, always referred to him as "Tonsor," to her as "Caroline."

What with her down-home likability, I soon cottoned to Caroline. She looked to be about the age my mother would have been had she been alive. And because my parents had divorced, I couldn't help but wonder if the Tonsors' marriage were like so many between two diametrically different people who nevertheless made the union work.

Their two-story house was modest, with a living room and dining room that seemed typical of a wood-frame dwelling built around 1920. Caroline playfully called it their "summer cottage."[2] Whatever the main floor lacked in size it made up in warmth, owing to three things that worked in concert to give the space an outsized coziness. First were the wingback chairs on either side of the hearth. Great stacks of books and papers formed columns around the left chair. There was no question who sat upon that throne! Second was a Bach fugue playing in the background, which perfectly suited the home of a humanities professor. Third were the delightful sprays of flowers by the fireplace, at the front window, and on the dining room table. They spread sweet fragrance throughout the downstairs.

Caroline noticed me looking closely at a bouquet. "Gardening," she said, "is Stephen's magnificent obsession."

"No," Tonsor protested, "it's a maddening obsession. The weather quite literally almost killed us. It was an extraordinary summer of extreme heat and drought that did not break until mid August, when the blessed rains returned.[3] Up to that point we and the flowers were all wilting together."

Flowers filled the house.

Recalling the mention of grandchildren during the walk, I asked Caroline whether they got to see their children and grandchildren often. She told me that her oldest daughter had been visiting recently with her two children. One of them went to football camp; the other to band camp, at Interlochen.[4]

Tonsor added, "During the summer and on holidays our house is often full of children and grandchildren. They love the fireplace. I am certain that it creates part of the mystique of grandmother's house. Two things are my special province: the garden and the fireplace. To quote a line from Robert Louis Stevenson, 'Flowers in the summer, fires in the fall.'"[5]

"Yes," said Caroline, "and the fireplace always smokes. I suppose it does look mysterious!"[6]

Perhaps wanting me to feel at home, Caroline added that it had long been her husband's custom to invite students over for lunch.[7]

"Yes," said Tonsor. "Back in the sixties, Tom Hayden sat on that couch. He was improbably named, he told me, after St. Thomas Aquinas!" Tonsor waved off the thought as if he did not care one whit that Tom Hayden had sat on his couch.[8]

I followed Tonsor into the dining room. He moved a fat novel off the table to a nearby bookcase and motioned me to sit down. "I've been reading Trollope," he said. "His women are boring. He does an excellent job at depicting them but they are dull and trivial people. The only interesting ones, Lizzy Eustace and the Countess Neroni, are petty criminal types. Come to think of it, most of his men are dull and trivial, too."[9]

"Caroline, it looks as if you've cooked up a storm in the kitchen!" Tonsor exclaimed with much pleasure. We sat down to a hearty lunch, as he had promised: pot roast, potatoes, carrots. The surprise came when Tonsor poured me a glass of sherry. In a professor's house, that was a first.

*     *     *

After our fill of lunch and spirited conversation, Tonsor and I walked back to campus mostly in silence. Although the clouds seemed to lift a little, the air remained warm and humid.

Retracing our steps through Burns Park, I reflected on the fast start of my academic career at Michigan. On this first day of classes, it was not yet 2 p.m., and already I'd had the privilege of spending more than four hours with my graduate advisor and meeting his gracious wife who welcomed me to their home. I was eager to report their hospitality to my circle of family and friends. But as an introvert with two glasses of sherry in me, I was starting to flag. It was time to retreat into the labyrinth of Harlan Hatcher Library, where I could jot down insights from my conversation with Tonsor, prepare for my other classes, and tackle Cassirer in light of everything I had learned that morning.

Once back on the Diag, Tonsor broke the spell of our self-enclosed hike. He made an observation that revealed more about who he was. "I have been reading a doctoral dissertation written by one of your colleagues, Mr. Winnie."[10]

I wondered if Tonsor had drunk too much sherry: Winnie? My name is Whit-ney.

He didn't pause, and I wasn't about to interrupt. "At first I did not want to read it. It's long, it's the sixth dissertation from this past year, and I was supposedly on leave. But I must say it is quite fascinating. It is a history of the Cochin family, one of the great French Catholic families of the high bourgeoisie. The dissertation is based on the family archives made available by the present Baron Cochin. They were liberal conservatives, and the historian Augustin Cochin, who died in World War I, could probably best be called a reactionary. They are my kind of people."[11] With that arresting thought, Tonsor faded into the reflections of Haven Hall's glass doors.

So Tonsor was a "liberal conservative" who was happy to be called a "reactionary."[12] Confused? So was I. I knew that I'd eventually have to sort it all out during my study at U of M. But that would come in due course. For now I enjoyed feeling the warmth of the lunch.

__________________

[1] One of Tonsor's former students, who later became a close friend, said that the unsettling effect of Tonsor's thick lenses was to make him peer at you with "the two glass eyes of a fish."
[2] "Summer cottage" is from Stephen J. Tonsor to Henry Regnery, June 16, 1980, p. 3; letter in GW's possession, courtesy of Alfred Regnery. "1920" is from Caroline Tonsor interview with GW, Chelsea, MI, March 15, 2017.
[3] Stephen J. Tonsor to Henry Regnery, July 25, 1987, p. 1; Tonsor to Regnery, August 3, 1987, pp. 2-3; and Tonsor to Regnery, August 17, 1987, p. 1; all three letters are in GW's possession, courtesy of Alfred S. Regnery.
[4] Tonsor to Regnery, August 17, 1987, p. 1.
[5] Tonsor to Regnery, November 17, 1980, p. 1; letter in GW's possession, courtesy of Alfred Regnery.
[6] Caroline Tonsor interview with GW, Chelsea, MI, March 15, 2017.
[7] During these same years, another great European intellectual historian was hosting weekly lunches for his graduate students. At Yale University, Frank M. Turner (1944-2010) took his teaching assistants to Yorkside Pizza near campus. See Frank M. Turner, European Intellectual History from Rousseau to Nietzsche, ed. Richard A. Lofthouse (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), Kindle edition, "Editor's Preface," loc. 132.
[8] Tom Hayden died just weeks after I composed this conversation. See URL http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/25/us/tom-hayden-dead.html?emc=edit_na_20161024&nlid=30564708&ref=cta&_r=0, accessed October 24, 2016.
[9] Tonsor to Regnery, August 3, 1987, p. 3.
[10] Lawrence Hutchinson Winnie, "Aegis of the Bourgeoisie: The Cochin of Paris, 1750-1922," 2 vols., Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, 1988.
[11] Tonsor to Regnery, August 17, 1987, p. 2.
[12] Gregory L. Schneider, "Tonsor, Stephen J.," American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia, eds. Bruce Frohnen, Jeremy Beer, Jeffrey O. Nelson (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2006), p. 862.