George Nash’s Trailblazing Work on American Conservatism Turns 50

T he history of the history of postwar conservative ideas began 50 years ago, more or less. In 1976, Basic Books published The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945. But the story of this go-to title actually started several years earlier. At key steps, three interesting men — an anticommunist liberal Harvard academic who veered right as society veered left, the founding editor of this magazine, and an unconventional book editor who gave it all up to become a licensed clinical social worker — intervened in George Nash’s life to ensure that his doctoral dissertation became his magnum opus.

When Nash set out to obtain his Ph.D. at Harvard University in the late 1960s, the notion of chronicling a movement as new and unfashionable as the postwar right did not strike as the ideal means to accomplish this goal.

The inconspicuous rather than activist conservative Nash read Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences immediately prior to matriculating at Amherst College. He did not encounter intellectual conservatism as unfamiliar ground. But as an “unfolding movement” accompanied by a “relative lack of primary sources,” postwar conservatism seemingly lent itself more to journalism than scholarship.

“I searched for a topic for a while,” Nash explained to National Review Online in a recent interview. “And I thought, maybe I’d write about the progressives or the muckrakers. [Dissertation adviser Donald] Fleming suggested that I look at the conservatives.”

So, in 1971 he set off, with the unlikely imprimatur of a former Americans for Democratic Action liberal, on his unusual academic project. The lack of archival material compelled Nash to rely heavily on interviews. Subjects appeared eager to talk. He mainly asked them about their lives and the intellectual emphasis of certain strains on the right. Frank Meyer, in his colorful life’s coda, characteristically answered questions via telephone. Milton Friedman suggested that Nash buy a ticket next to him on a transatlantic flight to conduct the interview; the cash-strapped graduate student instead submitted questions through the mail that the on-the-go Friedman answered through “systematic responses” via tape recorder. Russell Kirk, Murray Rothbard, and others spoke to him when passing through Harvard.

William F. Buckley Jr., someone born into conservatism rather than vaguely drifting in that direction like Harvard’s Professor Fleming, proved similarly crucial to the project.

“I wrote to him and hoped that I, an unknown graduate student, that he would give me an hour in his office in New York,” Nash reflects. “Instead, on the Monday before Thanksgiving — November 1971 — I had received a phone call, he said, ‘Will you come down to Stamford to my home on the day after Thanksgiving, arrive in the morning, and have lunch?’”

The lunch turned into a six-hour discussion mainly in Buckley’s garage-cum-office with moments of “Bach playing at rock-music decibel levels,” periodic visits up a ramp through a garage-door-panel-turned-dog-entrance from Rowley, and the National Review editor holding court at the opening of a giant U-shaped desk that undergirded a paper mountain. Buckley subsequently opened his personal papers to Nash and provided introduction for him to a wider circle of intellectuals on the right. “He was so welcoming,” Nash remembered. “He was so supportive.”

A third figure crucial to The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 entered Nash’s life several years later.

“There was an enterprising young editor at Basic Books, named Paul Neuthaler, not much older than I was,” Nash explained. “He visited the Harvard campus one day. He knocked on doors, and asked senior professors: ‘What dissertations do you know about?’ ‘What should Basic Books be looking for?’ I think Professor Fleming told him to contact me. So, literally he came to my office door.”

Two weeks after Nash received his printed dissertation, he received a contract from Basic Books. A $2,000 advance soon followed along with what Nash remembers as valuable advice from Neuthaler: “You have to remember what Basic Books’s audience is. Our audience is the intellectually oriented general reader.”

With this in mind, Nash transformed an Ivy League doctoral dissertation into a manuscript suitable for the intellectually curious layman. Before it reached readers about midway into 1976, several events ginned up interest. At an American Political Science Association meeting, Nash joined such heavyweights as Buckley, Harry Jaffa, and Jeffrey Hart on a panel before a packed house. National Review published a lengthy excerpt of the book in its 20th anniversary issue. Positive reviews greeted upon publication, and the influential Conservative Book Club naturally adopted the title.

The book that conservative readers devoured in the summer of 1976 was like nothing else before. Academic treatments of conservatism from Lionel Trilling, Richard Hofstadter, Theodor Adorno, and others had not so much debated as diagnosed their subject. Nash took conservatism seriously as an intellectual movement while carefully avoiding the penchant toward hagiography and cheerleading that characterized the scant available conservative works that documented the postwar right.

“I was conscious of the need to aspire to be objective and not partisan,” Nash explained in a late June conversation. “My role in the book was not to try to take sides, Rothbard vs. Buckley vs. Kirk or whatever, but to spell out the differences and to try to be somewhat detached.”

Rather than the monolith presented by Hofstadter and others, Nash painted a portrait of a dynamic, vibrant movement and its distinct, at times warring, strains.

“For in the early 1950s there was no single right-wing renascence,” The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 explains. “The Right consisted of three loosely connected groups: traditionalists or new conservatives, appalled by the erosion of values and the emergence of a secular, rootless, mass society; libertarians, apprehensive about the threat of the State to private enterprise and individualism; and disillusioned ex-radicals and their allies, alarmed by anti-Communism.”

The taxonomy of conservatus americanus intellectualus eventually added branches, to include social conservatives and a group Nash labeled “right-wing liberals.” He notes, “That term did not catch on.” But “neoconservative” did. Still other subsets, not all of them falling under the “intellectual” rubric, proliferated.

As both an intellectual achievement and a commercial success, the book reincarnated as a Basic Books paperback in 1979 and in subsequent editions published in 1996 and 2006 by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. The book not only continues to find eager readers after a half century, but it remains almost solely responsible for launching a cottage industry in which conservatives rather than people who despise them document the history of their movement. In writing about trailblazers, George Nash became one.