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: 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 #18 -- Marx and Marxism

As the November gloom set in over Ann Arbor, as the days grew shorter, as low clouds were drawn across the sky like a gray wool curtain, I found it necessary to fight a hibernation instinct I didn't know I had. I was not psychologically prepared for the onset of bleak days because, for the prior fifteen years, I had lived along the Colorado Front Range where the late fall and winter are reliably sunny.

Adding to the gloom of the autumn was the persistent cough I'd developed after Halloween. It was diagnosed by one of the U of M doctors as adult-onset asthma. Michigan's climate, combined with the stress of grad school, was taking a toll.

Shortly after Thanksgiving I made the trek to Tonsor's office, wondering how Michiganders survived such dark weather and short days. "I feel as if I'm in internal exile," I told him, and to my surprise he laughed. Raising my arms as if to plead to the gods, I asked, "When will these dark clouds go away?"

The "bare ruined choirs" of mid November

Tonsor reached for a book at the same time that he began quoting lines of verse:

     "That time of year thou mayst ... behold
     When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
     Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
     Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang."

I had taken enough English literature as an undergraduate to recognize Shakespeare's "bare ruined choirs," but I could not locate the lines. Seeing that my memory was flailing, Tonsor opened a tome and said, "Sonnet 73." Handing me the open book, he added, "Or perhaps it is the resignation in Rilke's 'Autumn Day' that better captures the mood: Herr: es ist Zeit.... / Legt deinen Schatten auf die Sonnenurhen.... [Lord, it is time ... to shroud our sundials in shadows....][1] In any case, Mr. Whitney, the clouds will keep you indoors, reading your books. Think of how much more history you will learn at Michigan than at Berkeley or Boulder!

"But for your question about the cloud cover, I must introduce you to a former student of mine, Tony Sullivan. He works at the Earhart Foundation and he is an avid weather watcher. Tony will tell you about the jet stream moving south out of Canada this time of year, steering everything from Alberta clippers to Panhandle hooks through our region like roaring freight trains. Even when no front is present, the cool westerlies that flow over Lake Michigan pick up moisture and feeds the clouds that cover the Lower Peninsula. The gloom is reinforced by moisture flowing down from Hudson Bay this time of year. But -- when Hudson Bay freezes over in December, and parts of Lake Michigan freeze over in February and March, we will actually get more sunny days because the surface ice doesn't conduce to cloud formation. That's why it's cloudier now, but will be sunnier later in the winter. I assure you: You will learn the patience of Job and get through these months."

The Huron River in the late fall

As a former geography major, I very much appreciated that my graduate advisor could talk about Michigan's weather and climate. He knew and loved nature just as I did. It was a point of connection outside of the books and course of study.

Cloud cover aside, on this day I was looking forward to Tonsor’s lecture on Marxism. Not only would it be enlightening, but I thought it might give me insights to push against the cultural Marxism then regnant in grad school. Not that the Marxists in our department felt smug. Somebody had posted an apocryphal Antonio Gramsci quotation on the bulletin board outside the main office:

“The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born: Now is the time of monsters.” ~Antonio Gramsci

Later another bloke came along, inserted a caret, and wrote "Reagan" next to "monsters." Yawn.

U of M's Angell Hall across State Street

By 1987 Marxist proclamations of proletarian triumph at the end of history became the butt of jokes. That catchy line -- “The last capitalist we hang will be the one who sold us the rope” -- just didn't sound clever anymore. Ever since President Reagan had the temerity to speak of the Soviet Union as an Evil Empire that was destined for the ash heap of history, Marxists had been playing defense. Reagan, cheerfully playing offense, poked fun at the last remaining Marxists who were hunkered down on American campuses. It's why they hated him so. "How do you tell a Communist?" the Gipper joked. "Well, it's someone who reads Marx and Lenin. How do you tell an ex-Communist? It's someone who understands Marx and Lenin."

I embraced Reagan's determination to defeat Soviet communism. In 1984-'85, I had won a Fulbright scholarship to then-West Germany, and had traveled to Berlin/East Berlin with many questions about Soviet communism. The experience at Checkpoint Charlie and my walks along the River Spree, where I saw crosses of all the Germans who were murdered trying to flee the oppression of East Germany, seared me. I was openly anti-communist, which drew me to the like-minded Stephen Tonsor. But our shared conviction would be the source of a brewing battle royal in grad school.

I knew from our talks that Tonsor was feeling vindicated by the exhaustion of Marxist theory and practice. His insights into Marx and Marxism generated some of his best content as a historian and some of his finest rhetoric as a teacher. From my notes and revisions, the following are the highlights of his lecture to our class.

From Tonsor the intellectual historian and biographer:

“Let’s get one thing out of the way at the outset. Both Marxism and capitalism are dedicated to the revolutionary transformation of society.[2] No other economic system more efficiently satisfies man’s material wants than capitalism. If a society wants pornography, the free market will deliver it with greater efficiency and in greater quantity than any other system. So Marx was correct in discerning the revolutionary forces unleashed by capitalism. It has transformed the world and it has displaced traditional society and its institutions. One need not be a dialectical materialist in order to understand the scope and the meaning of the changes; nor need one believe that all historical changes result from changes in the ‘mode of production’ in order to agree with and appreciate the insight of Marx.”[3]

Camille Pissarro, "The Factory at Pontoise" (1873)

“To understand the modern age, you have to understand the profound impact the Industrial Revolution had on European society. The image of the factory tended to replace all other images of community.[4] In a significant sense, Marx was furnishing Europeans with a moral critique of the Industrial Revolution. He was hardly alone. Every -ism was offering some moral critique of the Industrial Revolution. Anarchism, liberalism, nationalism, progressivism, socialism, communism, Marxism, Leninism, Stalinism, fascism, Nazism – each decried the breakdown of community in the shadow of the factory; each offered a blueprint for how to put community back together; and each tried to answer the question, Who should be in that community?”

“Both Marx and Engels were under thirty when they wrote the Communist Manifesto, a document whose revolutionary rhetoric embodied nearly every intellectual current of the age. True to the theory of its authors that there is an unbreakable link between theory and practice, the Manifesto not only reflected history but made it. In the 140 years since its publication, it has become one of the central documents of our times, inspiring faith, dedication, contempt, and hostility in nearly equal amounts. To understand the Manifesto is to understand what most of the shrill and discordant debates, civil wars, and ideological conflicts have been about since.”[5]

Karl Marx (1818-1883)

“There can be no denying that Karl Marx was a genius. But like most geniuses, he had a complex and contradictory personality. Throughout his life he saw himself as Prometheus chained to a rock by an angry Zeus. His abiding personal struggle was to break out of his chains and attain absolute freedom. This Promethean image also explains his bohemian temperament and why he found it difficult to live by the rules of conventional society and morality. It is no surprise that he became a revolutionary. He was descended from rabbis on both sides of his family, and it has been observed that there must have been a close connection between the Old Testament prophets’ call for justice – Judaism’s apocalyptic and chiliastic tradition – and Marx’s secular vision of a perfected society that comes through a revolutionary ‘day of the Lord.’”[6]

“Karl Marx was unwilling to play second fiddle in any orchestra. He quarreled with men as much as he quarreled with the gods and the rulers of society. He could not bear contradiction or defiance – it evoked vituperative hatred – and the secret of Engel’s long friendship with Marx lay in the younger man’s willingness to play a totally subservient role.”[7]

“As happens to many strong-willed men, Marx would be frustrated by the reality he hoped to change. The revolutions of 1848 did not prove to be the turning point for which Marx had hoped. European history did indeed turn, but it turned to the right. Until 1917, though the influence of Marx increased, the ‘commanding heights’ in Western society were still held by political conservatives.”[8]

From Tonsor the cultural critic:

“As with any great statement concerning the human condition, the Communist Manifesto cannot be read without taking sides. Its words will not let us suspend judgment or defer commitment or condemnation. Karl Marx came not to bring peace but a sword.”[9]

"In the modern age, when Jews have abandoned Judaism, more than a few of them have followed Marx's path. That is to say, they do not abandon Judaism's messianic tradition. Rather, they secularize the messianic tradition and create materialistic substitutes such as Marxism, socialism, Bolshevism, and other justifications for class warfare or for confronting bourgeois culture."

“Marx maintained that his system was ‘scientific’ rather than utopian. Of course, every charlatan realizes how great an advantage the adjective ‘scientific’ lends to any theory. Marx meant, however, that his system was scientific because it was inevitable, because its coming into being was causally determined. Whereas the dreams of utopians were dependent upon the puny efforts of men for their realization, ‘scientific socialism’ was written into the very order of the cosmos. It was the next sequent event in the womb of time, to paraphrase Hegel. Why this was true is, of course, what the rhetoric of the Communist Manifesto seeks to demonstrate. To make a socialist future no less certain than tomorrow’s sunrise was no small feat of apologetic art. We are still waiting for the inevitable to take place, and socialism, utopian or scientific, has, now that we have seen its partial realization, lost something of its appeal.”[10]

Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937)

"When Marx's theory of history showed itself to be toothless -- it had little analytical or predictive bite -- later generations of Marxists shifted the focus. One of the most important shifts was achieved by the Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci, who argued that Marxism could transform the culture. Withering away in prison in 1915, Gramsci wrote:  

Socialism is precisely the religion that must overwhelm Christianity.... In the new order, Socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches, and the media by transforming the consciousness of society.[11]

"With that quotation in mind, ladies and gentlemen, you might go to the third floor of Haven Hall, to the main office of our history department, and take note of the large poster off the elevator proclaiming that the study of history is about -- transformation."

"You should also be familiar with Leon Trotsky. To young American leftists, he was the most brilliant and attractive of the Russian Revolutionaries -- a veritable brain trust. Yet he was seen by his comrades in the U.S.S.R. as a little too cerebral, a little too critical, a little too global in his imagination. As a result of his criticism of Soviet communism, Stalin had Trotsky exiled and then murdered in Mexico City. He was stabbed to death by one of Stalin's agents, a Spanish communist wielding an ice pick."

From Tonsor the philosopher and logician (remember, he studied philosophy as an undergrad):

“Marxism contradicts itself. Is it not ironic that the Communist Manifesto, which argues that history is shaped by material economic forces, supplied the decidedly non-material ideas that after 1848 were themselves to become shaping forces?”[12]

“One can argue convincingly that most of the experience of the nineteenth century was an attempt to broaden and deepen the meaning of human freedom, to take man, insofar as possible, out of the realm of necessity and to place him in the realm of freedom. Thus the German idealist Immanuel Kant was preoccupied with the problems of freedom and necessity. Confronted with the reality and necessity of natural causal laws, Kant sought for a realm of human experience where these laws did not prevail; where man could be the actor rather than the acted upon. That’s the nineteenth-century context of the Marxian project. When Marxists speak of alienation, they simply mean that man is prevented from realizing himself by the social, economic, and religious institutions that he has created. They are like gravity and the other laws of nature in that they limited man’s freedom. It follows that revolution is needed to break the chains of the economic, social, and religious institutions that bind him to the realm of necessity. That, at bottom, is the Marxian project.”[13] 

“It is richly ironic that history would appoint Friedrich Engels to be Marx’s collaborator. Do you think Engels was living among the proletariat, suffering at their side, and singing 'The Internationale'? He was not and did not. Engels was the scion of a Manchester textile manufacturer and lived off the profits of his capitalist father. In London he resided in the fashionable Primrose Hill district, surrounded by all the bourgeois comforts of the day. Perhaps even more richly ironic is that Marx was supported for much of his adult life by these same capitalist profits that Engels made available to him.[14] They apparently had no qualms about biting the hand that fed them.”

From Tonsor the wit:

“Ludwig Feuerbach’s work was to have a great influence on Marx, almost as profound an influence as the works of Hegel. Feuerbach’s father had been a professor, and as a young man, Feuerbach studied philosophy in order to pursue an academic career. But he began to break with the Protestant religious tradition of his father and of the academic culture at the University of Berlin. Both his views of religion and his Left Hegelian philosophy blocked him from getting a university appointment after he finished his Ph.D. Like many other radicals of his generation, Feuerbach was unable to find an academic job. So he became a rootless, disaffected intellectual. Imagine how different world history might have been had all these Left Hegelians gotten nice, good-paying jobs at a university. They would have settled for bourgeois comforts and amused themselves playing golf. Instead they became hostile critics of society. Our world could have been spared much grief."[15]

Tonsor had another mordant barb that I did not fully appreciate at the time because I did not know the Jewish term he used. "When revolutionary Jewish thinkers fall away from their religion and adopt a left-wing ideology; when they secularize Judaism and transform the messianic tradition into a radical program; it does not seem to occur to them to sit shivah to mourn the loss of their faith."

His last spear thrust made the class laugh. "You would be amazed at how many died-in-the-wool Marxists have struck it rich writing books and going out on the lecture circuit to talk about class warfare. It turns out they make the best capitalists!"

From Tonsor the poet:

“There is always a considerable distance between the dream of a bright tomorrow and today’s dark reality. In order to be effectively translated into reality, dreams demand a map of how to get from here to there. The Communist Manifesto is such a road map. Today men dream other and more satisfying dreams, and the map drawn by Marx reveals itself to be filled with traps and pitfalls. What remains, then, is a great political poem about the mind of the mid-nineteenth century….”[16]

Marx's Communist Manifesto -- "a great political poem"? These words were some of the most powerful and unexpected I ever heard Tonsor utter.

*     *     * 

After class, another student and I went up to the front of the room to ask questions. He was the student who thought Tonsor looked like the Paddington Bear. When he thanked the professor for a lecture that was critical of Marxism, Tonsor let slip what he really felt about Marxist historiography. With some force he answered: "I have waded around in Marxist sewers for so much of my life that, unfortunately, I now know them too well. The Marxists are resentful ideologues who will not submit to reality. I am thoroughly disgusted with the whole intellectual enterprise. Too bad the Marxist and former Marxist scholars in our universities cannot come down with cholera or at least some disabling disease which would prevent their writing or teaching another damned word. We have had enough. It is time to forget Marxism and get on with the real puzzles and difficulties of life."[17]

Then came my turn came to ask him a question. I was struggling to put the relationship between Marxism and the mainstream of Western intellectual life in the right way. But it proved too big a question to answer on the spot. Kindly he invited me to join him and Caroline for lunch. By the time we were outdoors headed for Burns Park, he spoke in a burst of prose that addressed the matter.

"First let's review the essential insight of the liberal conservative who emerges from the mainstream of Western intellectual life. Recall the lecture in which I mentioned Walt Whitman, who in Song of Myself asked: 'Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)'[18] Whitman expressed the profound truth that the essence of life can be fully encountered only by embracing its opposing forces – its polarities, oppositions, tensions, and contradictions. We have seen how the Romantics sought the organic accommodation of opposites. The impulse to achieve the organic accommodation of opposites is not really new but has been a big part of the Western project since the tenth century. Occasionally writers and artists harness these oppositional forces and integrate, harmonize, or synthesize them. In fact, the organic accommodation of opposites by a sovereign personality, institution, or society is the measure of a dynamic, healthy community.[19] It imparts nobility to our civilization.

"The liberal conservative acknowledges this complex, oppositional reality and cheerfully submits to it. He seeks to achieve a harmony of contradictory principles – the principle of authority and the principle of liberty; the principle of equality and that of natural aristocracy; of individualism and of community; of private enterprise and of cultural, moral, and human values that transcend the market mechanism; of Providence (God’s sovereignty) and human freedom; of transcendence and immanence; of sacred and profane; of time and eternity. He resists the ideologue's temptation to abandon the one principle or the other. Rather, he accepts these contradictory ideals, this dual heritage, as fundamental to the human condition.[20]

"That’s what our best minds have taught. Take Tocqueville and Acton. Together their lives spanned the nineteenth century, and together they elaborated the soundest and most coherent body of modern conservative thought that contemporary conservatives can draw upon. These liberal conservatives embraced the complexity of reality. They accommodated, in their lives and in their thinking, the polarities and contradictory principles that characterize our lives.[21]

Stephen J. Tonsor, pictured in the lower left corner of this 1976 dust jacket,
was one of the more prominent thought leaders in the postwar conservative movement.

"Now, contrast what I’ve said about these liberal conservatives, Tocqueville and Acton, with what I've said about Marx. For the left Hegelians in general and for Marx in particular, the dialectic obliterates opposites. For example, at the end of the dialectical process, reality is not spirit and matter, but only matter. There is social value not in the individual and the collective, but only in the collective. Justice is not satisfied by both freedom and equality, but only by equality. Not both-and, but either-or.

"No question Marxism is an attempt to restore purpose, ends, and values to history. But it does so by flattening human experience, by excluding the vertical element, by excluding Providence. Its hostility to the transcendent is the most telling reason for Marxism's failure. It is difficult enough to reconcile God’s ways to man in the ambiguities, failures, dilemmas, and ultimate unknowability of history; but it is downright impossible to justify the 'rational' course of dialectical materialism when confronted by the events of this century, what with its violence and irrationality.[22]

"Marx’s tragic error, you see, was to turn his back on the accommodation of polarities. His error was to amputate half of each pair of polarities. You can trace the amputation back to Hegel. As the Hegelian dialectic moved forward in time, Reason was supposed to obliterate paradox.[23] What Marx did not see is that man will never eliminate contradictions and irrationality. In contrast to Marxism, conservatism has learned to absorb the polarities in the human condition that Marxism can not."

So, I thought, this was the key, the essential Hegelian and Marxist error, which was to obliterate the nature of reality itself -- a reality which, for the conservative, it is necessary to submit to. It's why I would come to call Tonsor's interpretive principle the hermeneutic of accommodating opposites. My professor wrapped up:

"When William F. Buckley Jr. established National Review in November 1955, its founding editorial declared its mission to stand 'athwart history, yelling Stop!' The history Buckley had in mind was Marx's 'History,' left-Hegelian 'History,' the 'History' with a capital "H" that Marxists thought would unfold inexorably until the day of communism's triumph.[24] Conservatives united around a different conception of history that was steeped in irony, polarities, opposites, and unintended consequences. The most fierce anti-communists in the conservative movement were fulfilling their civilizational mission to save the West from 'History.'"

There it was again, the idea of a "civilizational mission." A good term, that.

A few paces before turning from Lincoln onto Morton Avenue, I thought I caught a glimpse of Caroline in the kitchen window.[25] What a welcome respite a relaxed conversation over lunch would be after all this talk of Marxism, a gray and cheerless ideology that was as oppressive as the clouds that blanketed the Michigan landscape.

*     *     *

After lunch, on our walk back to campus, I asked Tonsor about the remarkable number of ex-communists who changed their minds and became pillars of the postwar conservative movement.

"Ask yourself why that is. Why do men change their minds? It's one of the most fascinating things to know about a person. Whittaker Chambers, James Burnham, Max Eastman, Will Herberg, my mentor Frank Meyer -- each in his own way changed his mind and went from being a communist to being an anticommunist. The migration from communism to conservatism is one of the most remarkable intellectual migrations in the twentieth century. It came about for many reasons. Partly it was an aversion to their own communist past, partly it was because of Stalin's betrayal, and partly it was due to the devolving Cold War after 1945."

There was one additional thing that I wanted to know before leaving the topic of Marxism. What did Tonsor think of the fact that so many of his colleagues c. 1987 were cultural Marxists -- indeed, that so many elite history departments in the U.S. were hiring cultural Marxists who idolized Gramsci.

"I am very worried about the progress of the Marxists in the university. I don't worry about them because of the influence they exercise over students -- which is nil -- but I do worry about the estrangement of the university from the parent society which must follow in the wake of the triumph of the Marxists. It is distressing and there seems to be little or nothing which can be done about it. I shall be an active force for only another four or five years. At this point in my career, I will not be able to do much to counter the Marxists on campus. They are silly people. They will continue to conceive of the university as a teenage gang devoted to adolescent Marxist struggle -- and will damn all who are in disagreement. Never mind that the scholarship -- like Francois Furet's salutary impact on the historiography of the French Revolution -- and the parent society have moved past their stupid ideas."[26]

---

[1] My translation of the opening of Rainer Maria Rilke, Herbsttag, lines 1-2; at this URL, accessed November 22, 2016; my gratitude to Ann Tonsor Zeddies for this reminder, via a Facebook post, November 19, 2016.
[2] Stephen J. Tonsor, “Science, Technology, and Cultural Revolution,” in Tradition and Reform in Education (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1974), p. 49.

[3] Stephen J. Tonsor, Introduction, Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx (Chicago: Henry Regnery Gateway Edition, 1969), p. ixx-xx.

[4] Tonsor, Introduction, Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx, p. xx.

[5] Tonsor, Introduction, Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx, pp. vii-viii.

[6] Tonsor, Introduction, Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx, pp. ix-xi.

[7] Tonsor, Introduction, Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx, p. x.

[8] Tonsor, Introduction, Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx, pp. xi-xii.

[9] Tonsor, Introduction, Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx, p. viii.
[10] Tonsor, Introduction, Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx, p. xxi.
[11] See the quotation and discussion thereon at URL http://quotes.liberty-tree.ca/quote_blog/Antonio.Gramsci.Quote.E447.
[12] Many years after I heard Tonsor’s lecture on Marxism, I was delighted to encounter many of the same observations, including this one in Lloyd Kramer, Lecture 13, “Hegelianism and the Young Marx,” in European Thought and Culture in the Nineteenth Century (Chantilly, VA: The Great Courses, 2001); audio format.

[13] Tonsor, Introduction, Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx, pp. xii-xiii.
[14] Kramer, Lecture 13, “Hegelianism and the Young Marx,” in European Thought and Culture.
[15] Kramer, Lecture 13, “Hegelianism and the Young Marx,” in European Thought and Culture.
[16] Tonsor, Introduction, Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx, pp. xxi-xxii.
[17] Stephen J. Tonsor to Henry Regnery, August 18, 1984, pp. 3-4; letter in GW's possession, courtesy of Alfred Regnery.

[18] Whitman quoted in Stephen J. Tonsor, “The Conservative Search for Identity,” Equality, Decadence, and Modernity (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2005), p. 247.

[19] Tonsor, “The Conservative Search for Identity,” Equality, p. 247.
[20] Tonsor, “The Conservative Search for Identity,” in Equality, pp. 235, 248-49.

[21] Tonsor, “The Conservative Search for Identity,” in Equality, p. 248.

[22] Tonsor, “The Conservative Search for Identity,” in Equality, p. 249.

[23] Tonsor, Introduction, Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx, p. xiii.
[24] David Frum, "Unpatriotic Conservatives," National Review, March 25, 2003; at this URL, accessed November 22, 2016.
[25] Caroline Tonsor to Gleaves Whitney, Grafton, IL, June 26, 2014.
[26] Stephen J. Tonsor to Henry Regnery, February 15, 1986, pp. 3-4; letter in GW's possession, courtesy of Alfred Regnery.