Abstract
Electoral defeats and long-standing differences of principle have separated the strands of conservatism held together for so long by the leadership of William F. Buckley and Ronald Reagan. Libertarians, who place their conception of liberty and individual choice above all else, have gained adherents due to dissatisfaction with the steadily increasing power of modern government. Traditionalist conservatism’s emphasis on virtue and moral restraint, sometimes rooted in religion, distances it from the moral relativist orientation typical of libertarianism. The neoconservative understanding of human nature and dedication to an activist foreign policy, both built on a version of American exceptionalism, are often rejected by both libertarians and traditionalists.
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Notes
For recent discussions of this idea, see Peter Berkowitz, Constitutional Conservatism: Liberty, Self-Government, and Political Moderation (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2013); “The Mount Vernon Statement: Constitutional Conservatism; A Statement for the 21st Century,” accessed July 22, 2013, http://www.themountvernonstatement.com; and “What Happened to the Constitution?,” special Issue, National Review, May 17, 2010, 24–46.
The academic literature on Progressivism is immense. More accessible recent critiques are Thomas West and William Schambra, “The Progressive Movement and the Transformation of American Politics,” Heritage Foundation, First Principles Report No. 12, July 18, 2007, accessed July 22, 2013, http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2007/07/the-progressive-movement-and-the -transformation-of-american-politics; and “The Four Horsemen of Progressivism: The Men Who Created Our World,” National Review, December 31, 2009, 33–45. A fine scholarly work is Ronald J. Pestritto, Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005).
See generally, Paul D. Moreno, The American State from the Civil War to the New Deal: The Twilight of Constitutionalism and the Triumph of Progressivism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
Johnathan O’Neill, “The Idea of Constitutional Conservatism in the Early Twentieth Century,” in Constitutionalism in the Approach and Aftermath of the Civil War, eds. Paul D. Moreno and Johnathan O’Neill (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 202–22.
Irving Babbitt, Democracy and Leadership (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1924), 5, 252, 305.
Ibid., 247, 246.
Ibid., 248.
Stephen C. Brennan and Stephen R. Yarbrough, Irving Babbitt (Boston: Twayne, 1987), 122.
Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind, 6th ed. (Chicago: Regnery, 1964 [1953]), 63, 96, 44.
M. E. Bradford, “What We Can Know for Certain: Frank L. Owsley and the Recovery of Southern History,” Sewanee Review 78 (1970): 664, 668. See also M. E. Bradford, “Frank L. Owsley,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume Seventeen: Twentieth-Century American Historians, ed. Clyde N. Wilson (Detroit: Gale, 1983), 336–42.
Twelve Southerners, I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (New York: Harper, 1930). The 12 Southerners were Donald Davidson, John Gould Fletcher, Henry Blue Kline, Lyle H. Lanier, Stark Young, Allen Tate, Andrew Nelson Lytle, Herman Clarence Nixon, Frank Lawrence Owsley, John Crowe Ransom, John Donald Wade, and Robert Penn Warren. Two informative studies are Edward S. Shapiro, “Frank L. Owsley and the Defense of Southern Identity,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 36 (1977): 75; and Michael O’Brien, The Idea of the American South, 1920–41 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 162–84.
Harriet Chappell Owsley, ed., The South: Old and New Frontiers; Selected Essays of Frank Lawrence Owsley (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1969), 186, 187.
Andrew Lytle, foreword to The South: Old and New Frontiers, xiii–xiv; and M. E. Bradford, “The Heresy of Equality: Bradford Replies to Jaffa,” Modern Age 20 (1976): 62. See also O’Brien, American South, 180–81.
Murray N. Rothbard, The Betrayal of the American Right (Auburn, AL: Ludwig Von Mises Institute, 2007), 18.
Albert Jay Nock, Our Enemy, the State (New York: Morrow, 1935), 158–74.
David Jayne Hill, “The Crisis in Constitutionalism,” North American Review 198 (December 1913), 769–78; reprinted in David Jayne Hill, Americanism: What It Is (New York: Appleton, 1916), 49–82. The remainder of this chapter incorporates material first published in Johnathan O’Neill, “Constitutional Maintenance and Religious Sensibility in the 1920s: Rethinking the Constitutionalist Response to Progressivism,” Journal of Church and State 51, no. 1(2009): 24–51, 33–50.
This is the major emphasis of Winfield S. Bollinger, “Constitutional Review, 1917–1929,” in The Conservative Press in Twentieth-Century America, eds. Ronald Lora and William Henry Longton (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1999), 75–86. It should also be noted that The Constitutional Review was not entirely free from the xenophobia that sometimes characterized the era’s response to immigrants. But after reading all thirteen volumes, I was somewhat surprised at the infrequency of such sentiments and occasional statements of just the opposite.
A strong revisionist statement with attention to most of the literature is David N. Mayer, “The Myth of ‘Laissez-Faire Constitutionalism’: Liberty of Contract in the Lochner Era,” Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly 36 (2009): 217. A leading work is David E. Bernstein, Rehabilitating Lochner: Defending Individual Rights against Progressive Reform (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). See also, David E. Bernstein, “Lochner Era Revisionism, Revised,” Georgetown Law Journal 93 (2003): 1; and Gary D. Rowe, “Lochner Revisionism Revisited,” Law and Social Inquiry 24 (1999): 221.
Mark Warren Bailey, Guardians of the Moral Order: The Legal Philosophy of the Supreme Court, 1860–1910 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2004), 34.
Ibid., 61, 23.
Ibid., 62–68.
Ibid., 117–27.
Floyd E. Thompson, “Some Dangerous Tendencies in Government,” CR 7 (July 1923): 167 (quote); and Vosburgh, “Have We Outgrown,” 79 (quote).
Calvin Coolidge, “Address at the Celebration of the 150th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence,” Philadelphia, July 5, 1926, accessed July 22, 2013, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=408.
James A. Van Osdol, “Future Organization and Defense of the Constitution,” CR 13 (July 1929): 121.
James A. Van Osdol, “The Duty of the Bar in Preserving Constitutional Government,” CR 7 (October 1923): 227, 233.
James M. Beck, The Constitution of the United States (New York: Doran, 1924), 273.
William W. Morrow, “The Americanism of the Constitution of the United States,” CR 4 (January 1920): 21, 32.
John McDuffie, “Dangerous Tendencies in Our Government,” CR 12 (April 1928): 61, 68. This thought is similarly expressed in Sidney St. F. Thaxter, “Some Aspects of the Doctrine of State Rights,” CR 9 (January 1925): 26.
Judge Wallace McCamant, “The Constitution Maintained is Freedom Preserved,” CR 8 (January 1924): 15, 23. The internal quotation seems to echo Rudyard Kipling, “Recessional” (1897), available at The New Readers’ Guide to the Works of Rudyard Kipling, http://www.kipling.org.uk/poems_recess .htm, accessed July 22, 2013.
For other scriptural allusions on the subject of fidelity, see Sutherland, “Principle or Expedient,” 198; and Editorial, “Congress and the Constitution,” CR 7 (January 1923): 35–36.
Van Osdol, “Duty of the Bar,” 236; and James M. Beck, “The Political Philosophy of George Washington,” CR 13 (April 1929): 65.
Cordenio A. Severance, “The Attack on American Institutions,” CR 6 (April 1922): 96, 101; Thaxter, “State Rights,” 26; and Lex J. Kirkpatrick, “The Building and Preservation of the American Republic,” CR 10 (January 1926): 10, 21.
Elihu Root, Addresses on Government and Citizenship, ed. Robert Bacon and James Brown Scott (1916; repr., Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1969), 419, 502 (referring to the Constitution and “our free democracy”).
Henry Cabot Lodge, The Democracy of the Constitution and Other Addresses and Essays (1915; repr., Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1966), 86–87, quoting Sir. 44:1–15; reviewed in CR 1 (July 1917): 125–26. Most of the same lines were quoted for the same purpose in Charles Warren, The Trumpeters of the Constitution (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester, 1927), 7–8.
Ira Jewel Williams, “The Attack upon the Supreme Court,” CR 7 (July 1923): 143, 148.
Nicholas Murray Butler, Is America Worth Saving? (1920; repr., Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1972), 24; and Albert Marrin, Nicholas Murray Butler (Boston: Twayne, 1976). Butler’s view of the American political tradition was articulated in Building the American Nation (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1923).
Michael Kammen, A Machine That Would Go of Itself: The Constitution in American Culture (New York: Vintage, 1987 [1986]), 204, 229, 253, notes Beck’s use of the phrase but regards it as a mere “battle-cry” or “refrain.”
James M. Beck, “The Anniversary of the Constitution,” CR 13 (October, 1929): 186,189; and George Grote, A History of Greece, new ed., 8 vols. (London: John Murray, 1862), 3:131–32. Constitutional morality was necessary to “protect” the constitution from those who would “alter” it. Grote, A History of Greece, 3: 131–32.
Grote countered earlier histories that had favored England’s traditional balanced constitution over Greek democracy. Frank M. Turner, The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), 206–8, 214–16. For uses of the idea of constitutional morality, see Zevedei Barbu, Democracy and Dictatorship: Their Psychology and Patterns of Life (New York: Grove Press, 1956), 49–52; and Willmoore Kendall and George W. Carey, The Basic Symbols of the American Political Tradition (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1970), 98, 118, 147–50. Closer to Beck’s own time, see Westel W. Willoughby and Lindsay Rogers, An Introduction to the Problem of Government (Garden City, NY: Doubleday/Page, 1927), 58, 308; and W. Y. Elliot, The Pragmatic Revolt in Politics (New York: Macmillan, 1928), 154–55, 155n16, 161.
Beck, Constitution, 269; Beck, “A Rising or a Setting Sun?” CR 8 (January 1924): 10, 13; Beck, “Philosophy of Washington,” 71, 73; Beck, “Anniversary,” 190; Beck, Our Changing Constitution (Williamsburg, VA: College of William and Mary, 1927), 27–28; and James M. Beck, May It Please the Court, ed. O. R. McGuire (1930; repr., Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1970), 193, 198.
James M. Beck, The Changed Conception of the Constitution (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester, 1925), 63–64, 13, quoting Aristotle, Politics [1310a12].
Editorial, Constitutional Review 1 (April 1917): 2 (quotes); Editorial, “The National Association for Constitutional Government,” Constitutional Review 1 (April 1917): 35–37.
Samuel P. Weaver, “The Constitution in Our Public Schools,” The Constitutional Review 11 (April 1927): 105; Editorial, “Teaching Constitutional Government,” The Constitutional Review 5 (April 1921): 120; Editorial, “The Observance of Constitution Day,” The Constitutional Review 4 (January 1920): 46; and Editorial, “Popularizing the Federal Constitution,” The Constitutional Review 4 (October 1920): 235.
Charles Warren, The Making of the Constitution (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1937 [1928]), 804.
Ibid., 5, 69–95; Warren, Trumpeters, 53–55.
James Madison, “Federalist no. 49,” in The Federalist, by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, ed. Jacob E. Cooke (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 340.
C. Bradley Thompson, “James Madison and the Idea of Fundamental Law,” in America and Enlightenment Constitutionalism, eds. Gary L. McDowell and Johnathan O’Neill (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 261. A fine analysis of this issue is Charles R. Kesler, “Natural Law and the Constitution: The Federalist’s View,” in Constitutionalism in Perspective: The United States Constitution in Twentieth Century Politics, ed. Sarah Baumgartner Thurow (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1988), 166, 172–73, 178.
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O’Neill, J. (2013). Constitutional Conservatism during Progressive Era. In: Postell, J., O’Neill, J. (eds) Toward an American Conservatism. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137300966_2
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