E. Merrill Root was one of the founders of National Review and an early contributor, notable for his defense of Ayn Rand against Whittaker Chambers’s withering criticisms and his critical analysis of collectivism in higher education. Root was a distinguished figure — a renowned poet, a professor of English literature, a Quaker pacifist, and a fervent anti-communist; he had published eleven books of poetry and studied with Robert Frost. As Buckley’s column attests, Root, starting with his 1952 article “Darkness at Noon in American Colleges,” had done much to draw attention to the crisis of liberal conformity on college campuses in the 1950s.
Professor E. Merrill Root of Earlham College in Indiana is a man generous and kind beyond description. He is also sensitive and independent. One wonders, under the circumstances, why he should have left the world of philosophy and poetry, to which he is devoted, and about which he has written with beauty and penetration. But he did — and in order to peel off layer after layer of dialectic and shibboleth and studied bonhomie from the Liberal image of itself to have a look at an underworld of cynics and schemers and nihilists and planners who are busy not only taking the meaning out of life, but also the grace and the joy. The first offense provoked the philosopher in Root; the second, the poet. Now Mr. Root has written a book for Devin-Adair on Collectivism on the Campus.
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