Uncovering the First Wave of Conservative Media - Part 3

The other main players in the modern conservative movement emerged at about the same time, embodied the same alienation from mainstream politics, and had the same mission: to restore genuine conservatism to the Republican Party.

At this distance it may be hard to recall how similar the Republican and Democratic parties once were. Both were in broad agreement on numerous issues: anti-Communism (though not nearly enough for the taste of purists), acceptance of the “guarantor state” created by the New Deal, and a foreign policy built around military containment. Each included conservative, moderate, and liberal politicians, and their differences focused on how best to operationalize a common centrist agenda rather than to stake out distinctive ideological positions. Their relations in Congress were marked by what now seems a golden age of comity.

This so-called Establishment was overwhelmingly white and male, and it excluded a huge number of Americans, particularly women and African Americans, who spent the 1960’s in a determined bid to breach the edifice. But to conservatives like Clarence Manion the exclusion of women and Blacks was more or less as it should be. What drove them up a wall was their own exclusion from the halls of real political power—indeed, their status as near pariahs.

Aside from Manion, two figures stand out as founders of the first wave of conservative media: Henry Regnery and William F. Buckley, Jr. We’ll take Regnery first.

The life of Henry Regnery (1912-1996) followed a trajectory similar to that of Manion. Like Manion, he was well educated—Manion had a law degree from Notre Dame, Regnery had a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from Harvard—and like Manion he was initially a Democrat and a fan of the New Deal. But he too became disillusioned with the New Deal, broke with the FDR Administration over its interventionist foreign policy, and joined the America First Committee. The US entry into World War II destroyed America First but failed to alter Regnery’s evolving conservatism and his growing suspicion that liberal elites molded public opinion and that an alternative voice was urgently needed. In 1944, therefore, Regnery co-founded “Human Events,” a newspaper—which still survives online and is staunchly pro-Trump—that took its name from the first clause of the Declaration of Independence: “When in the course of human events…” It was a way of reclaiming, as Manion would do, the mantle of “true Americanism.”

Then in 1947 Regnery founded Regnery Publishing (which also still survives), as a means of combating “the reigning intellectual orthodoxy.” It put out a steady stream of conservative works, the first of which critiqued Allied treatment of Germany and the emerging postwar order. They didn’t sell well but Regnery didn’t care. His goal was not to reach a mass market but rather to influence opinion makers. He nonetheless published a surprise hit by a brilliant young intellectual, William F. Buckley, Jr. (1925-2008). Entitled “God and Man at Yale” (1951), it was not exactly a best seller, but it did achieve exactly the kind of impact that Regnery had in mind when he created Regnery Publishing—and if movement conservatism has a founding text, it is “God and Man at Yale.”

I’ll deal with Buckley next time.