Some Hope for the Rising Generation

As I muse on Mr. Johnson’s State of the Union address—or any of his major policy statements for that matter —I tend to believe that we are in a fallen state. That dreary President and that dreary speech! All the old liberal chestnuts are there, although Mr. Johnson found trouble persuading even himself that they are edible: cultural exchange with the Soviets, interminable talks about disarmament, amorphous schemes to feed all the world, etc., etc. Congress clearly is bored; and the Great Society nonsense is one immense boredom. After putting Mr. Johnson aside, however, I leafed through some slim magazines, and was heartened. (Until that moment, I had felt as did a character in Arthur Morrison’s novel A Child of the Jago: “1 wish 1 was dead—an’ owned a coffeeshop.”) These periodicals were the products of young conservatives, short of money but full of ideas. Three or four years ago, the liberal authorities confidently predicted that conservatism among the rising generation, as represented by this spate of little journals, would be a mere ephemeral phenomenon. But the “conservative mood” has declined to expire.

One of the new productions is On the Right at Miami, a quarterly published by the Miami Conservative Club, Warfield Hall, Miami University, Oxford, Ohio. (There also are active conservative students at the University of Miami in Florida, but this is another lot.) One may subscribe for $1.20 a year. Well-printed and well-edited (by an undergraduate, Mr. Jim Roberts), the first number is promising. On the Pacific coast, conservatively inclined scholars and students publish Western Politica ($2 a year, quarterly, Box 3528, Stanford, California), a serious journal with some remarkably good contributors. In the first number (Spring 1966), Professor Milorad M. Drachkovitch’s “The ‘New Left’ in the U.S.” is notable. The plumpest and most widely circulated magazine is The Intercollegiate Review, published six times a year by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 629 Public Ledger Building, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania ($4 per year), and edited by the able Mr. Robert Ritchie. Its serious attention to literature deserves emulation. In the November-December number, 1966, is Professor Louis Brevold’s critical essay on T. S. Eliot, “Poet in Pinstripes,’ which no one ought to ignore. Those redoubtable conservative brothers Messrs. Richard S. Wheeler and Timothy J. Wheeler edit and publish Rally, perhaps best described as a monthly by and for recent conservative college graduates—that is, the young veterans of the conservative revival. It is published at P.O. Box 7068, Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, and costs $5 a year. Its seventh number (December 1966) is full of information, including a forceful article by an Indian contributor, Miss Sudha Shenoy (formerly president of the Old Whig Society at the London School of Economics), “India’s Coming Famine.” The New Guard, the monthly journal of Young Americans for Freedom (1221 Massachusetts Avenue N.W., Washington, D.C., $3 for students and $5 for non-students) is edited by the versatile Mr. David Franke, who is also its ablest contributor; it is now seven volumes old. Insight and Outlook, the oldest of student-edited conservative periodicals, continues to flourish at the University of Wisconsin (150 Langdon Street, Madison, Wisconsin, six times a year, $2). Its present editor is Mr. Jared Lobdell. In last summer’s number, Mr. William C. Dennis, now a graduate student at Yale, published an interesting analysis, “The Testimony of George F. Kennan.” Slighter newsletters produced by college conservative societies are fairly numerous. One of the better recent ones is Pensée, published by the Student Academic Freedom Forum, 422 College Center, Portland State College, in Oregon (students, 75¢; others, $1.50); it is concerned principally with matters that students confront on the campus, such as the military draft. All the preceding publications are both professedly and genuinely conservative—that is, strongly attached to the traditions and prescriptions of civilization. The only student journal of a distinctly “libertarian” character (given to doubting the economic orthodoxy of Herbert Hoover and F. A. Hayek) is the New Individualist Review, for several years the work of graduate students (chiefly) at the University of Chicago.

RK

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Russell Kirk

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As I muse on Mr. Johnson’s State of the Union address—or any of his major policy statements for that matter —I tend to believe that we are in a fallen state. That dreary President and that dreary speech! All the old liberal chestnuts are there, although Mr. Johnson found trouble persuading even himself that they are edible: cultural exchange with the Soviets, interminable talks about disarmament, amorphous schemes to feed all the world, etc., etc. Congress clearly is bored; and the Great Society nonsense is one immense boredom. After putting Mr. Johnson aside, however, I leafed through some slim magazines, and was heartened. (Until that moment, I had felt as did a character in Arthur Morrison’s novel A Child of the Jago: “1 wish 1 was dead—an’ owned a coffeeshop.”) These periodicals were the products of young conservatives, short of money but full of ideas. Three or four years ago, the liberal authorities confidently predicted that conservatism among the rising generation, as represented by this spate of little journals, would be a mere ephemeral phenomenon. But the “conservative mood” has declined to expire.

One of the new productions is On the Right at Miami, a quarterly published by the Miami Conservative Club, Warfield Hall, Miami University, Oxford, Ohio. (There also are active conservative students at the University of Miami in Florida, but this is another lot.) One may subscribe for $1.20 a year. Well-printed and well-edited (by an undergraduate, Mr. Jim Roberts), the first number is promising. On the Pacific coast, conservatively inclined scholars and students publish Western Politica ($2 a year, quarterly, Box 3528, Stanford, California), a serious journal with some remarkably good contributors. In the first number (Spring 1966), Professor Milorad M. Drachkovitch’s “The ‘New Left’ in the U.S.” is notable. The plumpest and most widely circulated magazine is The Intercollegiate Review, published six times a year by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 629 Public Ledger Building, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania ($4 per year), and edited by the able Mr. Robert Ritchie. Its serious attention to literature deserves emulation. In the November-December number, 1966, is Professor Louis Brevold’s critical essay on T. S. Eliot, “Poet in Pinstripes,’ which no one ought to ignore. Those redoubtable conservative brothers Messrs. Richard S. Wheeler and Timothy J. Wheeler edit and publish Rally, perhaps best described as a monthly by and for recent conservative college graduates—that is, the young veterans of the conservative revival. It is published at P.O. Box 7068, Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, and costs $5 a year. Its seventh number (December 1966) is full of information, including a forceful article by an Indian contributor, Miss Sudha Shenoy (formerly president of the Old Whig Society at the London School of Economics), “India’s Coming Famine.” The New Guard, the monthly journal of Young Americans for Freedom (1221 Massachusetts Avenue N.W., Washington, D.C., $3 for students and $5 for non-students) is edited by the versatile Mr. David Franke, who is also its ablest contributor; it is now seven volumes old. Insight and Outlook, the oldest of student-edited conservative periodicals, continues to flourish at the University of Wisconsin (150 Langdon Street, Madison, Wisconsin, six times a year, $2). Its present editor is Mr. Jared Lobdell. In last summer’s number, Mr. William C. Dennis, now a graduate student at Yale, published an interesting analysis, “The Testimony of George F. Kennan.” Slighter newsletters produced by college conservative societies are fairly numerous. One of the better recent ones is Pensée, published by the Student Academic Freedom Forum, 422 College Center, Portland State College, in Oregon (students, 75¢; others, $1.50); it is concerned principally with matters that students confront on the campus, such as the military draft. All the preceding publications are both professedly and genuinely conservative—that is, strongly attached to the traditions and prescriptions of civilization. The only student journal of a distinctly “libertarian” character (given to doubting the economic orthodoxy of Herbert Hoover and F. A. Hayek) is the New Individualist Review, for several years the work of graduate students (chiefly) at the University of Chicago.