The Anti-Teleocrat. - Review - book reviews

National Review, Feb 21, 2000 by Forrest McDonald

A Defender of Southern Conservatism: M. E. Bradford and His Achievements, edited by Clyde N. Wilson (Missouri, 192 pp., $29.95)

THE breadth and depth of the late M. E. Bradford's scholarship was little short of awesome. As an English professor at the University of Dallas, he taught graduate courses in Anglo-Saxon literature, Chaucer, the Medieval lyric, the 16th century, Shakespeare, the 17th and 18th centuries, the English novel, Romanticism, Victorian poetry and prose, American literature, and modern literature. And though he was trained as a literary critic, he taught himself the entire range of the history of Western Civilization, becoming at home with the Greeks and Romans, the Renaissance, Tudor and Stuart England, and, most impressively, the American founding era. In these various fields he published prolifically: A checklist of his books, articles, and reviews-including some three dozen pieces in NATIONAL REVIEW-runs to 26 closely set pages.

Diffuse as Bradford's studies were, this excellent new collection of essays makes it clear that they rarely strayed from a central theme: the values inherent in being a committed defender of Southern Conservatism. (Bradford insisted on the distinction "between a conservative who is also a Southerner and a Southern Conservative.") The book is a tribute to the man and his work, but not in the sense of a Festschrift. Rather, after an introduction by Clyde Wilson and a charming account by Tom Landess of Bradford's teachers at Vanderbilt, it consists of analyses of aspects of Bradford's writing by nine scholars. The essays are a pleasure to read, and taken as a whole they are an educational experience.

As for Bradford's brand of conservatism, it was in part the traditionalist sort espoused by Edmund Burke, John Dickinson, and Russell Kirk, but it was tempered by the views of the Vanderbilt Fugitive Agrarians. Like the Agrarians, Bradford was skeptical of the advantages of unbridled industrial and financial progress at the expense of agriculture and rural and small-town life, and he believed, with them, that the decay of the great cities, the proliferation of crime, the rape of nature, the decline of the family, and the denigration of romantic love into mere lust were the inevitable fruits of that progress. Indeed, toward the end he concluded that loyalty to family, community, place, tradition, and heritage had declined so far that conservatism was not enough-hence the title of his 1990 book, The Reactionary Imperative.

Though he was a massive figure of a man, built on the proportions of an All-Pro lineman, Bradford was of a reasonable, gentle, even sweet disposition, except when attacking fashionable but pernicious ideas. On those occasions he became, while still reasonable, utterly merciless. He attributed the nation's fall from grace to a number of causes but especially to two doctrines that sound appealing in the abstract but are in reality alien to and corruptive of our traditional norms.

The first is the ideal of universal human brotherhood. In an early and revolutionary article about a Faulkner short story, Bradford railed against the commitment to "the communal anonymity of brotherhood," which is an abnegation of one's duty to one's actual kin. Borrowing from Albert Schweitzer, he added that all brothers in the family of man are either "younger brothers or older brothers," that some men are inevitably responsible for others and cannot "abandon them" to an abstract equality that does not and cannot exist. Or, as he put it elsewhere, "we have no social connections with any man if we have the same obligations to all."

His second bete noire was equality: The "hue and cry over equality of opportunity and equal rights leads, a fortiori, to a final demand for equality of condition," and only an all-powerful national government would have the means to achieve such equality. Equality of opportunity he characterized as foolish and chimerical, "the antonym of every legitimate conservative principle." It was "nothing less than sophistry to distinguish between equality of opportunity (equal starts in the 'race of life') and equality of condition (equal results). For only those who are equal can take advantage of a given circumstance. And there is no man equal to any other," except in the eyes of God.

Those words were written in response to Professor Harry Jaffa's claim that Abraham Lincoln was the great American hero for rightly folding the Declaration of Independence into the Constitution, completing the latter instrument by infusing it with the natural-law principle that all men are created equal. The debate lasted several years and led to Bradford's most audacious undertaking, an attack on that sacred icon, the Great Emancipator. To be sure, as Bradford made himself into an expert on Lincoln he became convinced that the man was a "dishonest" and duplicitous "pseudo-Puritan," the "American Caesar of his age." But his gravest misdeed, in Bradford's eyes, lay in his contribution to transforming the Constitution from a "nomocratic" instrument, a structural and procedural body of law designed to govern government itself, into a "teleocratic" one, aimed at bringing about a particular kind of society. This destroyed the original constitutional order, and for that offense Bradford could find no forgiveness.