Regnery celebrates 50 years in publishing

Human Events, May 1, 1998 by Regnery, Alfred S

Alfred S. Regnery, president and publisher of Regnery Publishing, Inc., delivered the following remarks at the 50th anniversary dinner of Regnery Publishing, Inc. The gala celebration was held Wednesday, April 15, at the Carlton Hotel in Washington, D.C. William F. Buckley, Jr., offered after-dinner remarks based on his lasting and warm relationship with the Regnerys and an as-yet-unpublished novel about conservatism in the 1950s (see cover box).

The first catalog issued by the Henry Regnery Co., in the spring of 1948, proclaimed that "it is our purpose to publish good books, wherever we find them." The catalog went on to say that the company would "attempt to contribute to the reestablishment of the interchange of ideas and opinions that had been characteristic of the Western tradition and that was indispensable if civilization was to recover from the shattering experience of World War II."

Although times have changed in the last 50 years, our purpose remains much the same. Just as the Regnery company continues, it continues to publish books which, as my father announced he would in 1948, run in "direct opposition to the dominant current of the time."

The history of the Regnery Publishing Company is really in the list of books printed in your program. As with everything in Washington designed to circumvent full disclosure, you have only a partial list.

I wish I could talk about many of the books on that list, indeed, all of them. But that would take days, or weeks, and so I am going to talk about just a few, a few that I think are representative of our mission, and a few which will tell you just a little bit about the influence our little company has had.

Being publishers of serious nonfiction, as our product is called by book people, we at Regnery Publishing have the luxury of being in one of the very few industries in the world which makes a product which endures without wear through time. One of the few industries in the world which deals with ideas, and one of the few industries in the world which can make a difference about the shape of the world and the way people live. Our little company, which year to year has probably had revenues substantially less than the bar in this hotel, set out to have an impact on modern history, on the way people think about history, on the preservation of liberty in our world, and on the political process. I will let you decide whether we succeeded, even to a small degree, in that quest.

The first book my father published-Blueprint for World Conquest-was a collection of the founding documents of the Communist International-the Cominternoriginally published in the early twenties, but by 1948 virtually impossible to find. An errant State Department official and an expert on communism, who had been exiled to the nether regions of the department because the administration's experts preferred their own illusions to reality, spirited them out of the department and, to the consternation of official Washington, the documents soon appeared in book form. Although it was the first book, it certainly set the tone for what was to follow and which does, I hope, continue on today: We provided information much needed to the public, and information that many people would prefer remained locked in the drawer.

During the first decade-throughout the late forties and the fifties-the Henry Regnery Co., as it was then called, quickly became a voice that was welcomed by many, and which was painful to others. It thrived in the process, and created much controversy. The books addressed the great issues of the day, among them freedom, world communism and foreign policy, higher education, capitalism and the free economy, the dominant thinking about World War II.

Our early authors made up a veritable who's who of the early conservative movement: Russell Kirk, Bill Buckley, Frank Meyer, Freda Utley, Richard Weaver, Wilmoore Kendall, James Burnham, John Chamberlain and many others. Our large house in suburban Chicago became, in fact, a sort of Midwestern outpost for the traveling conservative intellectual, and our large round dinner table a place where many of the ideas now in vogue but then only pipe dreams were regularly discussed.

Many of the books published in those early days were, in fact, in "direct opposition to the dominant current of the time." As I learned, in fact, as I grew up in his house, my father was not one to make such pronouncements and then to ignore them.

Let me recall just a few of those titles which left their mark, and books which ran against the current.

There was Adm. Husband E. Kimmel's book, for example, published in 1955. Kimmel was the Navy's commanding officer in Pearl Harbor in December 1941, and the one FDR was able to have officially blamed for the success of the Japanese attack and, in the process, attempted to exonerate himself and his administration. Admiral Kimmel's book, which told how the Roosevelt Administration had used every means at its disposal to hide the true facts (something that may even still go on in Washington), caused a media sensation, and although Kimmel was never officially cleared, publication of his book, and the subsequent publicity, let the world know the facts of the situation, and forever changed the debate about Pearl Harbor.