A DEFENDER OF SOUTHERN CONSERVATISM: M. E. BRADFORD AND HIS ACHIEVEMENTS.(Review)

First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life, June, 1999

A DEFENDER OF SOUTHERN CONSERVATISM: M. E. BRADFORD AND HIS ACHIEVEMENTS. Edited by CLYDE N. WILSON. University of Missouri Press. 192 pp. $29.95.

M. E. Bradford of Texas died, still a relatively young man, in 1993, and left behind admirers and some bitter enemies. In the tradition of the Southern Agrarians, he defended in literature and political philosophy a superior way of life that he believed had been destroyed by the ideological equalizers led by Abraham Lincoln and his ilk. At the beginning of the Reagan Administration, he and others thought he was slated to head up the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the defeat of his candidacy became a cause celebre defining the division between "neocons" and "paleocons." Most of the essays in the book are...

Read the rest of this article with a Free Trial at HighBeam Research.

Premium Content Partnership | HighBeam Research provides an in-depth online archive library of reference works.