Tom has acted like a PhD thesis advisor to me in referring me to the worst of the worst “right-wing militarists,” which has provided enough information to me to write a book,
The Origins of American Fascism. Though that hasn’t been his intent. His recommendation of this WSJ book review of a bio of the extreme right-winger, and fascist admirer, Willmoore Kendall, as always with Tom’s recommendations, confirms my points.
With Kendall as ideological inspiration for Trumpism. Here, on Kendall’s enthusiasm for censorship:
BLUF: "One idea appears again and again in those essays: that no nation can manage for long without some form of censorship; without, in other words, the ability
to exclude ideas and language it deems to be evil or disloyal. The 1994 reprint of “Contra Mundum,” for instance, includes a sizzling attack on the free-speech absolutism of J.S. Mill’s “On Liberty” and Karl Popper’s “The Open Society.” “In order to practice
tolerance on behalf of the pursuit of truth,” Kendall writes, “you have first to value and believe in not merely the pursuit of truth but Truth itself.” That the 21st-century left has embraced the spirit of Kendall’s critique, albeit while nonsensically denying
the existence of ultimate Truth—even as influential parts of the right cling to Mill’s conception of nations as debating clubs—is one of the strange ironies of our time."
Not such a strange irony, as there are no “parts of the right” which cling to Mills’ advocacy of free speech anymore. Though it is true that the
"21st-century left” has become Kendallian, with their “Hawkishness,” and ever greater enthusiasm for censorship. Almost as much as the Right has (don’t
tell us we once had slaves who weren’t happy in their captivity). Call it “keeping up with the Jones’s, or in this case, the Kendallians/Straussians. But this book review, beyond catching Kendall’s love of censorship (to silence the minority, in his
“majoritarianism”), includes examples of the reviewer’s sloppiness, and Kendall’s as neither Mills nor Popper were as “absolutist” as they were portrayed, and used as “strawmen” by Kendall. And contrary to this: "The book has no index, however—unforgivable.”
The book has an index where the many favorable references to Leo Strauss can readily be found, befitting one of Kendall’s few, and closest, friends.
Kendall took a substantial role as columnist and editor in the early years of National Review. From 1950 until his death he published many scholarly essays on the nature of conservatism, the best of
them appearing in the posthumously published “Willmoore Kendall Contra Mundum” (1971), edited by his third wife, Nellie D. Kendall. One idea appears again and again in those essays: that no nation can manage for long without some form of censorship; without,
in other words, the ability to exclude ideas and language it deems to be evil or disloyal. The 1994 reprint of “Contra Mundum,” for instance, includes a sizzling attack on the free-speech absolutism of J.S. Mill’s “On Liberty” and Karl Popper’s “The Open Society.”
“In order to practice tolerance on behalf of the pursuit of truth,” Kendall writes, “you have first to value and believe in not merely the pursuit of truth but Truth itself.” That the 21st-century left has embraced the spirit of Kendall’s critique, albeit
while nonsensically denying the existence of ultimate Truth—even as influential parts of the right cling to Mill’s conception of nations as debating clubs—is one of the strange ironies of our time.
“Heaven Can Indeed Fall: The Life of Willmoore Kendall,” by Christopher H. Owen, a professor of history at Northeastern State University in Oklahoma, is the first book-length biography of the man. Kendall
was the son of a blind Oklahoma Methodist minister. Willmoore Sr. taught his son to read widely and speak with force. The two argued ferociously about politics and religion and everything else until Willmoore Jr. left for college. As a student in Oxford—he
was a Rhodes scholar—he studied under the philosopher R.G. Collingwood. (The letters between father and son while the latter lived in England, published in 1993 under the title “Oxford Years,” are by turns uproarious and moving and ought to be better known.
The book has no index, however—unforgivable.)
In the late 1930s Kendall taught political philosophy at Louisiana State University—a remarkable fact inasmuch as he then considered himself, variously, a Marxist, a Trotskyist and a communist. There
he began close friendships with the literary critics Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks. Later, living in Chicago while he finished his University of Illinois doctoral dissertation, he hung about with Saul Bellow.
As a young man he seems sincerely to have believed that communist views could cohere with loyalty and patriotism. When he realized so many communists wished America ill—so I read Mr. Owen’s narrative—Kendall
began his move to the right. In any case, his detachment from leftist ideologies began during World War II, when he worked as a propagandist for U.S. intelligence agencies in Latin America (he spoke Spanish fluently).
Kendall had a wonderful talent for making friends and none for keeping them. His superb gifts as a teacher were matched by his talent for alienating colleagues. Buckley’s 1999 novel “Redhunter,” about
the rise and fall of Sen. Joe McCarthy, includes a portrait of Kendall—Professor Willmoore Sherrill—who “was renowned for his ability to infuriate his colleagues and to engross his seminar students.” In 1939, LSU, responding to faculty demanding his dismissal,
declined to renew his contract. In 1961 Yale paid him a sizable sum to leave. His first marriage ended amicably, his second disastrously, the professor finding it difficult to keep his hands off ladies to whom he wasn’t married.
Kendall, particularly in his later years, when alcohol intermittently got the best of him, seemed to search out ways to offend and take offense. He managed to alienate his once devoted student Buckley
by constantly complaining about editorial positions taken by National Review, among them its support for Barry Goldwater. In 1963, piqued that the magazine wouldn’t run a pro bono advertisement for the University of Dallas, with which Kendall was then associated,
he wrote to Bill Rusher, the magazine’s publisher, that he felt about NR “much as I would about an ex-wife of mine who’d become a call-girl.” Buckley finally exploded in a letter in which he remarked that, as for “wives and call-girls, I can only welcome the
news that you have finally learned to distinguish between the two.”
“Heaven Can Indeed Fall” could have used a firmer editorial hand. Mr. Owen’s attempts to answer the obvious question—do we need a scrupulously sourced biography of a man almost no one today has heard
of?—are not convincing. The book’s conclusion, on how Kendall’s friend Carl Albert, whom he knew in England, had become speaker of the U.S. House and embodied Kendall’s ideas on localism, is to my mind completely baffling. Mr. Owen, moreover, shows minimal
appreciation for the best thing about his subject’s writing: its style. He refers off-handedly to Kendall’s “often convoluted prose” and quotes sympathetically the conservative historian Richard Weaver’s admonition to Kendall that his prose too often involved
a “relentless logical progression” and was “too rigorous.” Which, if you’ve ever read Weaver, is rich.
It’s true that Kendall’s prose is not always easy to follow—it combines windy urbanity with a folksy Oklahoma wit—but there is a warmth and a charm in it that urges you to keep up. It is sui generis.
The American right, after all, didn’t rattle midcentury liberalism only by rigor and logical progression. It did so, like a professor engrossing seminar students, by its style.
Mr. Swaim is an editorial-page writer for the Journal.
