Uncovering the First Wave of Conservative Media - Part 2

Hemmer’s book, “Messengers of the Right” (2016) casts a much wider net than her dissertation, focusing on a number of other major figures who shaped the first wave of conservative media. These are interwoven in the book. But let’s stick for the moment with Clarence Manion.

Manion (1896-1979) came from a Democratic family and remained comfortably within that allegiance until midway through the New Deal, when he found his ambitions for political office thwarted. He shifted from a proponent of the New Deal to critic. But his real departure from the Roosevelt camp came with his opposition to FDR’s policy of intervention in the looming Second World War. Manion joined the America First Committee—and incidentally became Dean of the University of Notre Dame Law School, a post he held from 1941 to 1952 and attempted to transform into something of an enclave for conservative thought.

Although the attack on Pearl Harbor crushed the America First movement, in the immediate postwar era Manion became a vocal critic of the United Nations and the numerous collective security agreements (NATO, for instance) that operationalized the Truman Administration’s Containment policy. Manion objected to the expansion of government that characterized the emerging national security state, disdained the effort to make the United States a world policeman, and advocated for a return to what he regarded as America’s traditions of godly morality, individual liberty, and limited government—a constellation of values he identified as “Americanism.”

Manion set forth these views in “The Key to Peace: A Formulation for the Perpetuation of Real Americanism” (1950), the first of his several books and one that struck a chord with many Americans—enough to make it a best-seller and give him the fame and influence he had so long craved. Manion embarked on an extended speaking tour, which proved so successful he resigned his post as law school dean to devote himself full-time to political activism. Nominally still a Democrat, he backed Ohio’s Senator Robert Taft—“Mr. Republican”—for the 1952 GOP presidential nomination. Eisenhower got the nod instead, and won the election, upon which he appointed Manion head of the “Commission on Intergovernmental Relations,” which was essentially Ike’s way of placating his political right flank. But Manion alienated Eisenhower with his support for another Ohio Senator, John Bricker, a prominent critic of Ike’s foreign policy. In 1954 Eisenhower forced Manion to resign.

By this time Manion was disillusioned with both political parties and consequently the political mainstream. As a way to champion his creed of “Americanism” he created the Manion Forum of Opinion, which went live on 29 radio stations in October 1954. Too controversial to attract business advertisers, Manion’s weekly show—each consisting of 15-minute speeches—depended instead on some 400 fellow true believers to sponsor it. The technique worked. Hemmer notes that the show remained on the air for 25 years, racking up nearly 1,300 broadcasts in all. The show provided a platform for a number of conservative activists, of whom the best known today was William F. Buckley, Jr.

Almost 60 when he launched the Forum, Manion lived to age 83, becoming in effect the elder statesman of movement conservatism. But he was far from the only such figure. My next post will consider some of the others.