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The Life and Legacy of Russell Kirk George H No. 1035 Delivered June 22, 2007 July 10, 2007 The Life and Legacy of Russell Kirk George H. Nash In the book of Ecclesiasticus it is written: “Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us.” We gather today to honor the memory of a famous Talking Points man, a man who earned his fame by writing about • Russell Kirk’s magnum opus, The Conservative those who, in an intellectual and spiritual sense, were Mind, published in 1953, stimulated the de- our fathers. In the great chain of being that we call velopment of a self-consciously conservative Western civilization, Russell Kirk was a sturdy link. intellectual movement in America. It gave the movement an identity it had previously lacked. Some years ago, a young libertarian wrote a book • Kirk demonstrated that intelligent conserva- entitled It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand. I do not tism was not a mere smokescreen for self- know how many young conservatives in 2007 would ishness, as dismissive liberals charged. It say that their intellectual awakening began with was an attitude toward life with substance the books and essays of Russell Kirk. But certainly and moral force of its own. many in this room can testify to his influence and • He tirelessly reminded his readers that politi- especially to the impact of his masterful book, The cal problems were fundamentally religious Conservative Mind. and moral problems and that social regenera- tion was a goal which required action at lev- As most everyone in this audience knows, The els beyond the political and economic. The Conservative Mind was Russell Kirk’s magnum opus. Conservative Mind endures because it focuses More than 50 years after its publication, it remains in our attention on ends and not just on means. print in several languages. For most scholars, the • Over the next four decades, Kirk churned publication of a book of this distinction would be the out a prodigious torrent of writings that ele- culmination of a career. For Kirk, who was only 34 at vated the tone and substance of conserva- the time, it was just an opening salvo. In the years to tive discourse. He was a bridge-builder to come, he founded two influential journals (Modern the classics of our culture. In the great chain Age and The University Bookman); published a regular of being that we call Western civilization, column for more than two decades in National Russell Kirk was a sturdy link. Review; wrote a major biography of T.S. Eliot and a This paper, in its entirety, can be found at: classic history entitled The Roots of American Order; www.heritage.org/Research/Thought/hl1035.cfm did more than anyone living to revive Edmund Burke The Russell Kirk Lectures as a fountainhead of conservative thought; completed Produced by the B. Kenneth Simon a superb memoir called The Sword of Imagination; and Center for American Studies Published by The Heritage Foundation churned out a prodigious torrent of other writings. 214 Massachusetts Avenue, NE Washington, DC 20002–4999 (202) 546-4400 • heritage.org Nothing written here is to be construed as necessarily reflect- ing the views of The Heritage Foundation or as an attempt to aid or hinder the passage of any bill before Congress. No. 1035 Delivered June 22, 2007 How prodigious? According to Charles Brown, Kirk still essential? Before we can ponder these ques- who has just completed a comprehensive bibliogra- tions, we need a clearer sense of just what kind of phy of Kirk’s works, Dr. Kirk wrote 26 nonfiction conservatism he espoused and of where he fits in the books, 9 volumes of novels and collected short jigsaw puzzle of modern American conservatism. stories, 255 book reviews, 68 introductions and forewords to other peoples’ books, 814 essays and Bookish and Precocious short pieces published in periodicals, and nearly To understand his message, we need to know the 3,000 newspaper columns. Among all the founding messenger. Who was Russell Kirk? He was born in fathers of modern American conservatism, only 1918 in the village of Plymouth, Michigan, a few William F. Buckley Jr. rivaled him in productivity. miles outside Detroit. His father was a railroad engi- Surely, a man of such phenomenal intellectual neer who dropped out of school before the sixth output and versatility deserves to be honored, and grade. In Plymouth, and in the hamlet of Mecosta in so Kirk has been and continues to be. Here at The the “stump country” of central Michigan, Kirk lived Heritage Foundation you will find a portrait of him and grew to young adulthood. A romantic tradition- on the wall. If you exercise your imagination a little, alist by instinct, as it were, he came early to share his you may hear echoes of his voice in the Heritage father’s prejudices against the “assembly-line civili- auditorium where he delivered more than 50 lec- zation” already penetrating Michigan under the tures in a little over a decade. aegis of Henry Ford. Sometimes it is hinted that Kirk is slowly becom- Kirk was a shy boy, bookish, and precocious. By ing a forgotten figure. The evidence suggests other- the impressionable age of eight he was devouring wise. Many of his books remain in print, and others the novels of the man he later called his “literary are in the pipeline for republication. Today we cele- mentor,” Sir Walter Scott. The imprint on the boy’s brate the most recent addition to his bibliography: a imagination was indelible. By the time he was ten collection of his most outstanding essays, impres- (he tells us), he had read all of the works of Victor sively edited by Professor George Panichas.1 The Hugo, Charles Dickens, and Mark Twain. By the title of this volume, The Essential Russell Kirk, is dou- time he was a teenager, Kirk’s cast of mind was bly meaningful. It suggests, first, that the essays fixed. Growing up almost as an only child (his one therein contain the essence of Kirk’s teaching, and, sibling, a sister, was seven years younger), he lived secondly, that Kirk himself is essential—essential to in a world of old houses, old villages, old books, American conservatism. I hope you will read this and elderly relatives, many of whom believed in splendid volume and agree. spirits and ghosts. No, Kirk has not been forgotten, nor is he likely After graduating from high school in 1936, Kirk to be anytime soon. And yet there is a sense, at least entered Michigan State College (now Michigan in some corners of the American Right, that in State University), whose spirit of “conformity,” util- 2007, 13 years after his passing, Kirk has come to be itarianism, and “dim animosity toward liberal edu- a figure more admired than studied. Some observers cation” grated against his sensibility. Possessing little have suggested that much of the praise heaped money (the Great Depression was still on), he lived upon Kirk since his death has been “empty homage” frugally, subsisting much of the time on a diet of by people who covet his prestige but care little for peanut butter and crackers, and graduated as a his- his teaching. Others lament that American higher tory major in 1940. education—the recurrent target of Kirk’s fusil- For the next year, Kirk was a graduate student in lades—seems more degraded than ever, at least by history at Duke University, where he wrote a mas- the standards Kirk struggled to uphold. ter’s thesis later published as Randolph of Is Kirk’s conservatism, then, a “live option” for Roanoke. In it he clearly sympathized with the ante- Americans in 2007? To put it another way: Is Russell bellum Virginian’s aristocratic, states’ rights agrari- 1. George A. Panichas, ed., The Essential Russell Kirk (Wilmington, Del.: ISI Books, 2007). page 2 No. 1035 Delivered June 22, 2007 anism. During this year, the young scholar from already an Anglophile in his literary tastes, Kirk fell Michigan began to get acquainted with the conser- deeply in love with his ancestral homeland. There, vative South. He read approvingly the Agrarian he became a connoisseur of ancient castles, old manifesto, I’ll Take My Stand. For the rest of his life country houses, and the lore of old St. Andrews. he considered himself a “Northern Agrarian.” There, and in rural England, which he avidly In the summer of 1941, Kirk found himself explored on foot, he found “the metaphysical prin- working at Henry Ford’s Greenfield Village. Even ciple of continuity given visible reality.” There, Rus- before his experiences at the Ford company, Kirk sell Kirk found a way to live. Some years later, he had developed a distaste for big business, big labor, himself became a country squire, as we shall see, and big government. His year or so at Ford did recreating at the old family house in Mecosta some- nothing to change his attitude. Indeed, his dislike thing of the lifestyle he had cherished in Scotland. of bureaucracy and what he called federal “para- Not without reason did he come to refer to himself sites” was, if anything, increasing. He denounced as “the last bonnet laird of the stump country.” the military draft as “slavery.” He published his The St. Andrews experience affected Kirk in first scholarly article, in which he advocated a another way: It powerfully reinforced his staunchly return to “Jeffersonian principles.” All in all, his classical philosophy of education. Reflecting some was the Midwestern libertarian conservatism of years later upon his St. Andrews days, when he had Senator Robert Taft.
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