OPINION:
CONSERVATIVE HEROES: FOURTEEN LEADERS WHO SHAPED AMERICA, FROM JEFFERSON TO REAGAN
By Garland S. Tucker III
Foreward by Amity Shlaes
ISI Books, $27.95, 224 pages
Garland S. Tucker III, chairman and CEO of Triangle Capital Corp. and author of “The High Tide of American Conservatism: Davis, Coolidge, and the 1924 Election,” has written profiles of 14 men, several of them largely forgotten, who played a prominent role in keeping conservative principles alive during often hostile periods.
As Amity Shlaes points out in her foreward, his intention to reclaim Thomas Jefferson as a conservative is “not a move of which today’s Jefferson-shy Grand Old Party is likely to approve.” But while Mr. Tucker acknowledges the flaws, his Jefferson is the Jefferson of the first inaugural address, in which he spoke of “a wise and frugal government,” which would leave men “free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.”
Nor will Mr. Tucker’s inclusion of John C. Calhoun, along with Nathaniel Macon and John Randolph, be entirely welcome, primarily because of their support of slavery, for which they’ve paid a heavy historical price. As Mr. Tucker acknowledges, they “employed their considerable gifts in defense of an ignoble cause.” But, he writes, they also helped keep alive and provide a philosophical base for the “Old Republican principles of limited government, the separation of powers, and liberty.”
The themes of taxation and regulation run through each of these profiles. Grover Cleveland, a Democrat who became the only president to serve out two non-consecutive terms, earned praise for fighting well-entrenched machine and political bosses, and left the country with a sound dollar. As Mr. Tucker puts it, Cleveland “breathed new life into the old Jeffersonian concepts of economy, limited government, strict constructionism, and personal liberty in the face of an ascendant, combative progressivism.”
The same can be said of another of Mr. Tucker’s heroes, Calvin Coolidge, whose life and accomplishments, well documented in Amity Shlaes’ “Coolidge,” demonstrated “a career-long commitment to individual freedom, limited government, and reduced taxation.”
Josiah W. Bailey, a Democratic senator from North Carolina, led the push to preserve those values in 1937 with what was called “The Conservative Manifesto,” in many ways a forerunner of “A Contract With America,” articulating “the importance of free enterprise, limited government, and the separation of powers.”
John W. Davis, a former congressman from West Virginia, solicitor general, Woodrow Wilson’s ambassador to the Court of St. James, and the Democratic nominee for president in 1924, losing to Calvin Coolidge in a landslide, ended his career as a highly successful lawyer, arguing against New Deal legislation so effectively that FDR labeled him “Public Enemy Number One.”
Through the 1930s, Mr. Tucker writes, as the GOP continued to take heavy political drubbings, conservative Democrats like John Davis led what congressional opposition there was to the New Deal. But with the election of Robert Taft to the Senate in 1938, “the Republican Party began a revival as the conservative party in America.”
“Through force of character and intellectual dominance, Taft molded the Republican congressional delegation into a cohesive, conservative force. But he was unable to wrest control of the national party from the eastern, liberal wing.”
By 1950, Lionel Trilling, the highly respected critic and essayist, pronounced conservatism dead: “In the United States at this time liberalism is not only dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is a plain fact that there are no conservatives or reactionary ideas in general circulation.”
And in 1952, the somewhat smug liberal political scientist Herbert McClosky, quoted by Mr. Tucker, took it an elitist step further. Conservatism, he declared, was found “most frequently among the uninformed, the poorly educated, and so far as we can determine, the less intelligent.”
But then came Bill Buckley, “God and Man at Yale” (published by Henry Regnery, who helped keep conservative literature and thought alive during the years of liberal hegemony), the hysterical liberal national reaction, and finally, in 1955, National Review.
At National Review’s 25th anniversary party in 1980, the year in which Ronald Reagan assumed the presidency, George Will summed it up in this way: “Before there was Ronald Reagan there was Barry Goldwater, and before there was Barry Goldwater there was National Review, and before there was National Review there was Bill Buckley with a spark in his mind, and the spark in 1980 has become a conflagration.”
Mr. Tucker’s chapter on Buckley, Goldwater, and Reagan — “The Conservative Triptych” — is especially well done; and taken as a whole, “Conservative Heroes” should serve as a reminder to conservatives of all stripes that they share elements of a vibrant philosophical and intellectual tradition rooted in a belief in the primacy of the individual, liberty and limited government.
• John R. Coyne Jr., a former White House speechwriter, is co-author of “Strictly Right: William F. Buckley Jr. and the American Conservative Movement” (Wiley).
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