The Conservatives: Ideas and Personalities Throughout American History
by Patrick Allitt
The Conservatives: Ideas and Personalities Throughout American History was published in May 2009. Yale University Press had commissioned it three years earlier and I had worked on it steadily, causing it swell at one point to 148,000 words then, with drastic cuts, to shrink down to the required length of 110,000. Publication just after the inauguration of President Obama was, in one sense, something of an anticlimax, since conservatism suddenly seemed less important than it had over the previous eight years. On the other hand, the book appeared in the middle of a great era of soul-searching and hand wringing among American conservatives. For them the 2008 election was a jolting reversal and many of the conservative factions were hard at work assigning blame to one-another. Would my work give comfort or ammunition to any of the warring factions?
No. My intention from the outset had been to avoid taking sides, and to write in such a way that the book would be equally useful, and equally informative, to people from every point on the political compass. Rather than start with the conservative opponents of the New Deal in the 1930s, or with the founding of National Review in 1955, as many other historians of conservatism have done, I started way back with Hamilton, Madison, and John Jay as they wrote The Federalist in defense of the new Constitution in 1787. I made the argument that many prominent figures in American history could be understood as conservatives even though they didn’t actually use that noun to describe themselves. Among them were John Marshall, Daniel Webster, John C. Calhoun, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Herbert Hoover.
I added, however, that they were conservatives of many different kinds. For some, defense of Christian civilization was all-important. For others, defense of the free market economy or resistance to Communism mattered most. For others again, such as Lincoln, conserving the Union itself when it was menaced with dissolution was the decisive issue. At different times in the history of the republic, I argued, different interests and institutions appeared to be threatened, and it was therefore appropriate that conservatives should react in different ways. For Hamilton the great point was to strengthen the Federal government to forestall the danger of dissolution. For conservative critics of the New Deal like Hoover, on the other hand, the overriding necessity was to diminish Federal power, lest the Federal government become tyrannical. Conservatism, I argued, is not a set of timeless principles that can be applied in all times and places. It is, rather, situational, constituting an attitude toward social and political change, one that emphasizes prudence, caution, and respect for the inherited wisdom of tradition.
The book has now been in print for about three months and has already received seven or eight reviews, most of them very gratifying. In a few cases, reviewers have simply seized on selected passages that suit their prejudices, and used them as sticks with which to beat their enemies. Others have scolded me for not including their own favorites, or for including people they don’t think deserve a place in the conservative pantheon. On the whole, however, the reviewers have been enthusiastic about what I tried to do and about how I tried to do it. Several note that for the first time someone has written a book about the whole sweep of American conservative history that does not try to take sides, and they admit that the job was worth doing.