Freda Bedi, by Wikipedia

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Philip Toynbee
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 6/25/19

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20 September 1980

PHILIP TOYNBEE, writer, observes in his journal:

"Sudden wild nostalgia for my earliest, cloudiest Communist days; the pamphlet John Cornford sent me at Rugby, a black silhouette of Lenin with arm outstretched against a field of deep maroon; the Parton St bookshop; my first meeting of the October Club at Oxford... How clearly it all comes back to me now, those passionate longings for brotherhood with the whole world and the conviction that my own emancipation, freedom, growth were directly dependent on working for that glorious fraternity. What wild and confident happiness! Never for a moment have I felt this kind of ecstasy from any of my religious aspirations. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive - however false the dawn."

-- Days Like These, by Ian Irvine

Philip Toynbee
Born: Theodore Philip Toynbee, 25 June 1916, Oxford, England, UK
Died: 15 June 1981 (aged 64), St Briavels, Gloucestershire, England, UK
Occupation: Writer, columnist
Children: Polly Toynbee
Parent(s): Arnold J. Toynbee

Theodore Philip Toynbee (25 June 1916 – 15 June 1981) was a British writer and communist. He wrote experimental novels, and distinctive verse novels, one of which was an epic called Pantaloon, a work in several volumes, only some of which are published. He also wrote memoirs of the 1930s, and reviews and literary criticism, the latter mainly via his employment with The Observer newspaper.

Life

He was born in Oxford; his father was the historian Arnold J. Toynbee, and his maternal grandfather was Gilbert Murray. He was educated at Rugby School, where he became rebellious, reacting against the public school system. Inspired by the example of Esmond Romilly, later a friend, he ran away, returned shortly and was expelled.<[1] He later wrote a memoir of Romilly, and Jasper Ridley (1913–1944), entitled Friends Apart. Through Romilly, Toynbee met Jessica Mitford, who became a close friend after Esmond died in WWII. He was also influenced by bookshop owner and would-be encourager of the young radical element, David Archer, whom he met through David Gascoyne.

At Christ Church, Oxford in the late 1930s he became the first communist president of the Oxford Union, at the height of its apparent success and social acceptability. He visited Spain at the end of 1936, at the start of the Spanish Civil War, in a student delegation. He was said to have been beaten up by Mosley's Blackshirts at a fascist meeting.[2] In 1938–39 he edited the Birmingham Town Crier.

He married twice: in 1939, to Anne Powell and in 1950, Sally Smith. In the early 1940s Philip and Anne lived a bohemian life in London's Fitzrovia, and Philip was drinking heavily. At that time they knew Lucian Freud, Donald Maclean and Robert Kee, Henrietta Moraes and others from David Tennant's Gargoyle Club in Soho. Toynbee was later to be found, with Benedict Nicolson, in the Wednesday Club consisting of raffish male writers, artists and journalists.[3] In 1945 they moved to the Isle of Wight, for a fresh start. They had two children, the second being Mary Louisa, better known as the journalist Polly Toynbee. Anne later married Richard Wollheim shortly after divorcing Philip in 1950.[4] As a foreign correspondent with The Observer, Philip then traveled to Tel Aviv, where he met Sally, who was a secretary for the American Embassy there.

During the 1950s he continued to work for The Observer, and was one of the more prominent intellectual figures in British life (perhaps to be compared with Edmund Wilson in the United States, for example). In an article written for The Observer in 1961, he notoriously proclaimed the irrelevancy of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord Of The Rings, just prior to its paperback publication in America and subsequent cultural phenomenon:

"There was a time when the Hobbit fantasies of Professor Tolkien were being taken very seriously indeed by a great many distinguished literary figures. Mr. Auden is even reported to have claimed that these books were as good as War and Peace; Edwin Muir and many others were almost equally enthusiastic. I had a sense that one side or the other must be mad, for it seemed to me that these books were dull, ill-written, whimsical and childish. And for me this had a reassuring outcome, for most of his more ardent supporters were soon beginning to sell out their shares in Professor Tolkien, and today those books have passed into a merciful oblivion."[5]

In the early to mid-1970s, Toynbee underwent a personal crisis, slowly entering into a period of deep depression. He had become increasingly concerned about ecological matters and this, along with his own ideological temperament, took him into the controversial decision to initiate a self-sufficient farming community. His family and friends thought this decision to be close to insane, considering as they did his privacy and routine-loving nature. The community quickly became a commune when Toynbee, Sally and their youngest daughter moved out, into a large cottage nearby. Nonetheless Toynbee and Sally continued to have a great deal of contact with the communards, and along with both spouses' active alcoholism, it frequently caused considerable tension in their marriage.

Toynbee's depression was sometimes immobilising and prevented him from enjoying his day-to-day life and work, and the regularity of his book reviews was sometimes interrupted as he struggled with the depression and the treatment he insisted on receiving for it – against the advice of his GP and consultant – namely, ECT (Electroconvulsive therapy). He finally got the go-ahead for the treatment, which he received in Bristol in the summer of 1977.

The two books which followed the ECT consisted of the journal writings which Toynbee decided to edit and send off for publication. These largely revolved around his search for some kind of spiritual meaning. It could be said that this arose out of his wish to find some purpose for the deep misery of his worst depression. He was strongly urged to stop drinking alcohol and occasionally managed short periods of abstinence. Yet he never really wanted long-term abstinence enough to make any real success of this. He was as a whole capable of great self-discipline, but needed to want his objectives with intense singular-mindedness in order to achieve them.[citation needed]

The two journal books were entitled Part of a Journey (covering 1977 to 1979) and End of a Journey (1979 to 1981). They were very well thought of by a number of readers, some of whom were already interested in matters spiritual, self-searching and vaguely Christian. For them and others, his best writing style shone throughout those pages, with its ready humility and gentle self-mockery.

He died at his home in St Briavels, Gloucestershire, with most of his family (he had five children altogether) at his bedside.

Toynbee genealogy

The Toynbees have been prominent in British intellectual society for several generations (note that this diagram is not a comprehensive Toynbee family tree):



Joseph Toynbee
Pioneering otolaryngologist

Harriet Holmes

Arnold Toynbee
Economic historian

Harry Valpy Toynbee

Gilbert Murray
Classicist and public intellectual

Lady Mary Howard

Arnold J. Toynbee
Universal historian

Rosalind Murray
1890-1967

Antony Harry Toynbee
1914-39

Philip Toynbee
Writer and journalist

Anne Powell

Lawrence Toynbee
b. 1922

Josephine Toynbee

Polly Toynbee
Journalist

Works

• The Savage Days (1937)
• A school in private (1941)
• The Barricades (1943)
• Tea with Mrs. Goodman (1947) (U.S. edition title: Prothalamium: A Cycle of the Holy Graal)
• The Garden to the Sea (1953)
• Friends Apart, A Memoir of Esmond Romilly & Jasper Ridley in the Thirties (1954) re-published in (1980)
• The Fearful Choice: a debate on nuclear policy (1958)
• Pantaloon or the Valediction (1961) verse novel
• Underdogs: Anguish and Anxiety, Eighteen Men and Women Write Their Own Case-Histories (1962) editor
• Comparing Notes: A Dialogue Across a Generation (1963) with Arnold J. Toynbee
• Thanatos, a Modern Symposium at which Nine Characters Argue at Quarles (1963) with Maurice Richardson
• Two Brothers: the fifth day of the Valediction of Pantaloon (1964) Pantaloon verse novel
• A Learned City: the sixth day of the valediction of pantaloon (1966) Pantaloon verse novel
• Views from a Lake: the seventh day of the Valediction of Pantaloon (1968) Pantaloon verse novel
• Age of the Spirit: Religion as Experience (1973)
• Distant Drum: Reflections on the Spanish Civil War (1976) editor
• Part of a Journey: An Autobiographical Journal, 1977-79 (1981)
• End of a Journey An Autobiographical Journal 1979-81 (1982)
• Towards the Holy Spirit: A Tract for the Times (1982)

Notes

1. Boadilla by Esmond Romilly, The Clapton Press, London, 2018 ISBN 978-1999654306
2. Pakenham, Frank.Born to Believe. Cape, 1953, p.83
3. Claire Harman "BOOK REVIEW: Ten years of lunching: 'In the Fifties' by Peter Vansittart", Independent on Sunday, 18 June 1995
4. Emma Tennant Obituary: Anne Wollheim, The Guardian, 27 November 2004
5. Fuller, Edmund. The Lord Of The Hobbits: J.R.R. Tolkien, originally printed in Books With Men Behind Them (Fuller, Random House, 1962), and reprinted in Tolkien And The Critics: Essays on J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord Of The Rings (ed. Neil D. Isaacs and Rose A. Zimbardo, Notre Dame Press, 1968).

References

• Faces of Philip; a memoir of Philip Toynbee (1984) Jessica Mitford

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From student 'red' to right-wing warmonger
by Randompottins.blogspot.com
April 20, 2011

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.

The vigilance, albeit belated, of the British security service provides a window on the membership and activities of the October Club. Cambridge student communism in the 1930s spawned a celebrated cluster of Soviet agents at the heart of the British establishment. When this became apparent twenty years later with the defection to Moscow of two senior figures in British intelligence, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, MI5 became alarmed about how little they knew about Oxford communists at that time. They resolved to find out -- and were assiduous in approaching one-time members of the October Club who might be happy to share information about their former comrades. They were fortunate that the club's founder -- an American, Frank Strauss Meyer -- had recanted of his student communism and was happy to cooperate. [33] And still more valuable for MI5, another onetime member of the October Club, Francois Lafitte, divulged the names of all the Oxford student communists he could recall. Freda and Bedi were both on the list -- 'Seemed to me both to be close fellow-travellers. They married and went to Lahore ... ' -- and so too was Sajjad Zaheer, a 'very capable Indian and close friend of Olive Shapley.' [34]

Meyer and others established the October Club at the close of 1931, as a left-wing breakaway from the Labour Club. 'We decided to organize the October Club quite on our own, with the idea of using it to attract those interested in Communism and forming a guiding group inside it,' Meyer told MI5. 'At the beginning we had considerable contempt for the official Communist Party' -- a suspicion which was reciprocated. The Communist Party of Great Britain was at the time a small, workerist and distinctly sectarian force of a few thousand members. [35] By the spring of 1932, the October Club's core of ten or twelve activists had joined the party, and after its first year of activity that number had doubled and the club's membership was in the hundreds. In its early months, the October Club achieved attention with a string of big name speakers, one of whom, H.G. Wells, was subject to barracking for being critical of Moscow. Escapades such as singing the communist anthem 'The Internationale' at an Armistice Day service to honour the war dead and street fights with fascist students earned the club a certain notoriety. The political atmosphere at the time was highly charged, and the Oxford Union's resounding endorsement in February 1933 of a motion 'that this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country' caught global attention; the Daily Express lamented that 'the woozy-minded Communists, the practical jokers, and the sexual indeterminates of Oxford have scored a great success with the publicity that has followed this victory.' In the wake of that controversy, a book on Young Oxford and War was rushed out, edited by V.K. Krishna Menon and with contributions from students of various political loyalties. Dick Freeman, a founder of the October Club, wrote about the radicalisation of Oxford students, and the emotional and political impact of the reception and support given in October 1932 to unemployed hunger marchers from the north -- for many students the first direct experience of the poverty and misery of those without work. [36] The October Club made a political impact out of all proportion to its numbers. Michael Foot, an Oxford student (and a Liberal) at the time and later a leader of the Labour Party, commended it as 'the most lively and enthusiastic club in Oxford.' [37]

Freda, along with many October Club stalwarts, had started out as a member of the Labour Club and then gravitated towards the breakaway group. 'The idealism of our generation was the idealism of helping the underprivileged,' she recalled. 'If the Labour Club to which I belonged ... had any meaning, it was showing that we cared if people hadn't got enough food when they took the government dole, and we did care if the hunger marchers went all the way from Reading to London, we cared if there were children in the slums with no shoes and that children hadn't got enough food.' Her years in Oxford, she said, were 'radical years ... we used to attend all the clubs like the Labour Club and later on the more extreme October Club ... The whole atmosphere was electric with social demands and social change. We were, as it were, the Depression generation.' [38] Both Freda and Bedi attended the socialist G.D.H. Cole's lectures and Harold Laski's seminars on Marx and -- in a joint activity which served to demonstrate both their intellectual and personal compatibility -- they scoured the British Library to track down Marx's journalism about India.

-- 2: The Gates of the World. The Lives of Freda: The Political, Spiritual and Personal Journeys of Freda Bedi -- EXCERPT, by Andrew Whitehead

The rise of the student left at Cambridge was part of a wider shift among the student generation. At University College London (UCL), the Gower Socialist Society was formed in autumn 1931. A Marxist society was set up at the LSE [London School of Economics], which would later involve Peter Floud, Michael Straight and briefly John Cornford, before the latter two went up to Trinity College. In Oxford, at the end of 1931, Frank Strauss Meyer, a wealthy American postgraduate and Dick Freeman set up the October Club, inspired by the Soviet revolution and without any official help from the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). The October Club for a while matched the activities of the Cambridge communists. Its founding objective was: ‘the study of communism in its world, social, economic and cultural aspects.’ [21]

Meyer had previously been an active member of the Oxford Labour Club and had set up a ‘Marxist study group; after becoming impatient with the Labour Party and the left.’ Freeman was a friend of the left Labour intelligectual John Strachey and had ‘worked on a collective farm in Russia the summer before, coming back full of enthusiasm.’ Meyer explained that he and Freeman (and others they nominated) would have ‘complete control over its policies and activities.’ Through their contact with the CPGB leaders they initially used the Party as a vehicle for organizing speakers and Meyer claimed that Emile Burns, the Party’s head of propaganda, ‘was taken aback by the whole thing and didn’t know quite what to do about it.’ [22]

The major breakthrough in bringing together the different communist student organizations took place at [James] Klugmann’s house in Hampstead during the Easter vacation in 1932, when his parents were away. The meeting followed a circular from Harry Pollitt, the Communist Party’s general secretary, which – almost certainly acting on Comintern instructions – encouraged the formation of student cells. Klugmann, Kitty and Maurice Cornforth set up the meeting in discussion with the Party leadership at King Street. Present at this meeting were representatives from the communist cells and societies of Cambridge, UCL, the LSE and the October Club, as well as Clemens Palme Dutt from the Party leadership, and Dave Springhall, who had recently been at the International Lenin School in Moscow and had just been elected to the Party’s Central Committee. [23] Springhall, a tough-talking organizer, would later be convicted for espionage and expelled from the Party. At this time he was a rising influence in the leadership, with a special interest in cultivating Comintern links and along with Clemens Palme Dutt would be one of Klugmann’s main contacts at King Street while he was at Cambridge. The meeting established a National Student Bureau – with Meyer its first secretary – and identified the need for a stronger communist strategy in the universities in order to win leading positions, bring in outside speakers and dominate existing left and labour associations. This strategy quickly paid off, with more cells, members and a growing communist presence beyond the three largest centres (Cambridge, Oxford and the LSE) to include 12 more universities in Britain. They also set up their own newspaper the Student Vanguard, which replaced the Outpost (a Cambridge communist paper), and was edited by Meyer, Guest and Cornforth.

This strategy strengthened communist presence in the colleges as a rival to Labour student associations, culminating in the disaffiliation of the CUSS and other bodies from the University Labour Federal (ULF) and the creation of the Federation of Student Societies the following year. For all present at the Lancaster Road meeting, the message was clear: they were joining an international political organization with roots in the October Revolution which drew its inspiration from the Soviet Union. No one present at the meeting would have been in any doubt that the Party had close underground links with Moscow, though these were regarded as official and authorized by the Party. [24]

Despite his now firm communist convictions, Klugman was not yet an open communist. In fact he did not officially join the Party until the following year. Like Donald Maclean, his decision not to join earlier was partly the result of familial pressure; to varying degrees, they both lived in the shadow of their fathers. Maclean had endured growing tensions with his father, who had served as a minister in what his son saw as Ramsay MacDonald’s ‘traitorous’ National Government. Despite this, Maclean felt unable to join the Communist Party until his father’s death in June 1932. Klugmann’s father was not a government minister but a respected businessman and free trader. Klugmann had experienced many arguments at home about his and his sister’s political views. Only after his father’s death on Easter Saturday, 26 Marc 1932, did he feel sufficiently liberated to make the full commitment that his politics were now demanding.

***

James Klugmann was on the way to becoming an open communist, as he would remain for the rest of his life. It was not unusual to take part in communist activity prior to officially joining the Party. Much of the work of the Student Bureau, like that of the Party as a whole, operated in clandestine ways; according to Frank Strauss Meyer, it communicated on a ‘strictly conspiratorial basis,’ involving ‘mail drops, coded references to individuals’ and secretly maintaining its HQ in a private apartment, with records held in code. [1] This is not surprising. Communists had until recently regularly been imprisoned for perceived subversive activities in the General Strike or agitation among servicemen. The Hampstead meeting had an immediate effect in Oxford just weeks later when a group of ten leading communist students joined the CPGB, and attendances at October Club meetings grew rapidly, resulting in an estimated rise from around 150 to 300 by the end of 1932. Oxford communists would soon be strengthened by the arrival of Bernard Floud and Philip Toynbee, who would go on to be leading officers. According to Meyer, by the end of its first year the October Club had around 25 actual Communist Party members and links to various other left-wing associations. Meyer went down from Oxford in June 1932 to take up a research position with the social anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski at the LSE, where he continued his communist activities, leaving Freeman in charge of the October Club. [2]

Meyer found that the LSE suited his political activities, and his role as secretary of the CPGB’s Student Bureau enabled him to coordinate political activities, leading the LSE communist ‘unit’ into – in his words – ‘a powerful organization which eventually controlled most of the student activities of the School and was able to achieve my election as President.’ [3] The expansion of communist influence in university colleges and the work of the Student Bureau led to more united work, supported by the growth of radical student literature. The Student Vanguard newspaper offered a forum for discussion of communist activities across the country, with the tone of the new journal reflecting the rapidly changing political atmosphere. It proclaimed, ‘The Student Vanguard makes no pretence at impartiality. It is written by students who are convinced that conditions in every section of social existence are more and more facing a radical alteration in society.’ [4]

Much urgency was given to opposing war, following the League of Nations’ inability to prevent Japan’s invasion of the Chinese region of Manchuria and the rise of fascism and militarism during 1933. At the Oxford Union in February, the motion ‘This House will in no circumstances fight for king and country’ was passed with a large majority, an unprecedented development described by Winston Churchill a few days later as ‘shameless and squalid,’ and the subject of virulent attacks on communists and pacifists by the conservative press. In fact, the procrastination of the League of Nations had weakened the pacifist case for many on the left, a growing number of whom were now looking towards the Soviet Union for an alternative. Maurice Dobb’s visits there had informed his politics. At the Cambridge Union in May 1932, in a debate which revived the union from its ‘smug contentment’ and ‘air of aggressive Victorian prosperity,’ [5] Dobb spoke in favour of the motion ‘That this House sees more hope in Moscow than Detroit.’ He spoke enthusiastically of the increase in literacy, the Five Year Plan and the yearly increase in production, contrasting it with the millions of unemployed in America, gangsterism and the consequences of capitalist crisis. According to the reviewers, it was ‘an outstanding speech, […] the most interesting and competent speech that the house has heard for a long time.’ [6] The motion was passed by 62 votes to 36 and contributed to growing confidence amongst students on the left. One of the speakers against was George Kitson Clark, Klugmann’s personal tutor. Despite the difference in their political views, Kitson Clark was to remain an important friend to Klugmann, offering support and advice on his academic career and future plans, and they would spend early evenings together discussing world affairs. Kitson Clark argued, no doubt with some difficulty given the depression and rising unemployment, that the worker was ‘better protected’ in England than in Russia. [7]

-- The Shadow Man: At the Heart of the Cambridge Spy Circle, by Geoff Andrews

TAKING its title from Meyer's column in the right-wing National Review, this book deals with his part in the making of American Conservatism.

NEWLY-released documents from MI5 reveal the security apparatus' concern about writer Cyril Connolly, harmonica player Larry Adler, who had come to this country to get away from McCarthyism, and the popular scientist and TV broadcaster Dr. Jacob Bronowski -- described as "a communist in all but name" in one early report.

Another person in their sights, perhaps less surprisingly, though less well known this side of the water, was Frank Strauss Meyer. Described by one Oxford University communist contemporary as 'The founder of the student Communist Party movement in the UK', Meyer, originally from Newark, New Jersey, was formerly a Princeton alumnus, though he found that American institution snobbish and antisemitic.

He arrived in the UK in August 1928 and enlisted at Balliol College, Oxford, in October 1929. On graduating he transferred to the London School of Economics (LSE) to read for a PhD, but as the National Archive blurb notes, he was "expelled from the LSE in March 1934 for selling copies of the 'Student Vanguard', a left-wing student newspaper he founded, and was subsequently deported in June 1934".

This is only part of the story, though it is interesting to note that at that supposed bastion of radicalism, while Sir William Beveridge was director and the Fabian 'Marxist' Harold Laski (who went on to help found the Left Book Club in 1937) was teaching politics, the Communist Party was banned from using meeting rooms, and Meyer could be expelled for selling his papers.

But there was a particular item in that paper that caused upset. It said that overseas students at British universities, particularly from "the colonies", were the subject of spying and reports about their political activities, and alleged that at LSE this job had been entrusted to a former Indian police inspector among the staff. Though it did not name names, his identity would not have been too difficult to guess.

Mind you, both the Iraqi Communist Party and the semi-Trotskyist Lanka Sama Samaja Party in Ceylon (Sri Lanka to be) owed their foundation in the 1930s at least partly to LSE graduates.

During his time in the UK Frank Meyer was founder and first President of the 'October Club', a committee member of the Oxford University Labour Club, and President of the Marxist Society and Students Union at LSE. It is said that John Cornford, who did much to establish student communism at Cambridge in the 1930s, was a protégé of his. Cornford was killed in action in Spain in December 1936, having just turned 21.

Frank Meyer, from his return to the USA in 1934 until 1945, remained active in student-related communist affairs. But turning against the authoritarianism of the Soviet Union, he was to become like the former CP-USA leader Jay Lovestone and the ex-Trotskyist James Burnham, a bitter enemy of communism, ready to support other kinds of authoritarianism, albeit in the name of libertarianism. He appeared as a witness before the Subversive Activities Control Board in 1952. In 1961, Meyer published The Moulding of Communists: The Training of the Communist Cadre in which he expounded the view that the communist movement was unlike any movement seen before.

In his review of the book, Murray Rothbard observed:

"Frank S. Meyer is by far the most intelligent, as well as the most libertarian-inclined, of all the National Review stable of editors and staff. …. But tragically, Meyer is also of the war-mongering crew of intellectuals on the Right, perhaps the most frankly and apocalyptically war-mongering of them all…. Meyer's libertarian inclinations are fatally warped by his all-consuming desire to incarcerate and incinerate all Communists, wherever they may be. Meyer is, therefore, an interesting example in microcosm of the swamping of any libertarian instincts on the current Right-wing by an all pervading passion for the Great Crusade to exterminate Communists everywhere."

Though the Hitler-Stalin Pact before the war had fuelled James Burnham and Max Schachtman's argument that they were confronting authoritarianism, and hence that American democracy was a lesser evil, the Cold War right would lend its support, in the name of "freedom", to any corrupt regime, colonial power or brutal dictator, so long as they appeared to protect American interests and stand up to the unprecedented evil that was totalitarian "communism".

Influenced by writings such as Friedrich A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, Meyer shifted his allegiance between 1945 and 1952, from non-Communist left through Democrat and finally to Republican. Hayek, an Austrian who had joined LSE staff a couple of years before Stern was expelled, was an early exponent of the doctrinaire "free enterprise" views we have come to know as Thatcherism. He condemned the British Liberal Party for being prepared to form part of a Lib-Lab government under Callaghan. Ronald Reagan claimed him as a major source of ideas.

For the American Right, Frank S. Meyer is known less for his youthful escapade at LSE than as a pioneer thinker, who tried to bring together the opposites of conservative belief in order, often religious, and individualist libertarianism. This was "Fusionism". In his 1962 essay "The Twisted Tree of Liberty," Meyer asserted a "common source in the ethos of Western civilization," which included conservative and libertarian thought, caused the political discourse which created "the fusion that is contemporary American conservatism."

Every capitalist wants to impose order, on his own business and then if ambitious, on a whole industry, and in time of crisis at least, upon a world economy, while all the time resenting any "bureaucratic" interference with his own freedom. Similar contradictions can be seen between states, and among spokespersons for governments. But at an intellectual level, Meyer could advocate a symbiosis, conservatives and monetarists who admired Milton Friedman (who opposed the existence of the Federal Reserve) and supporters of Alan Greenspan (who has become head of it). Neo-conservatives like Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz saw the light.

In the late 1960s Meyer did take up a fight against one Republican president, albeit a dead one, whom other Americans regardless of party might have treated as sacrosanct. In a debate over the role of Abraham Lincoln with conservative Harry V. Jaffa. Meyer argued that Lincoln's abuses of civil liberties and expansion of government power should make him anathema to conservatives, while Jaffa defended Lincoln as a continuation of the Founding Fathers.

Lincoln had after all to wage a war against the backward Southern plantocracy, who would not listen to reasoned appeals, and were only interested in staying in power and keeping America backward. This also required discipline on his own side, before the States could be united, free farmers and labour expand, and the slaves be freed from slavery. This could be an embarrassing piece of history to explain away when telling other people not to follow what America did, but only do what its leaders say.

All the same, though against the draft, the libertarian Meyer was in favour of war on China to free its people to do as they are told by America, and of a 'preventive' first use of nuclear weapons.

Here in Britain we might observe how some former Lefts and Tory Rights have been able to meet on the "libertarian" bridge, though so far the travel direction only seems to be one way . And interestingly it was Frank S. Meyer who first used the expression "There is no such thing as society" which Mrs.Thatcher thought such a clever epigram.

On his death bed, apparently, Meyer the libertarian made his peace with absolute authority, and converted to Catholicism. By then I suppose he had not much use for his freedom and thought he might need forgiveness.

http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/news ... il2011.htm

http://www.conservativeforum.org/EssaysForm.asp?ID=6270

http://delong.typepad.com/egregious_mod ... on-fr.html

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/200 ... ed_stories

http://www.lewrockwell.com/mcmaken/mcmaken69.html

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James Klugmann
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 6/25/19

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.

The release of James Klugmann’s Security Service (MI5) files in 2002 has been invaluable in the research for this book…. Material is normally only released after 50 years and the files themselves are only released after the death of the subject. This means we do not know what other material was held by MI5 on Klugmann beyond the early 1950s. (The relevant Special Operations Executive (SOE) files were released in 1997, though earlier War Office material alluded to some SOE activities)….

Much of the relevant material from the KGB and Soviet Intelligence archive in Moscow has either not been available for researchers or subject to restricted or intermittent access. I am grateful therefore for the pioneering work carried out by Nigel West with the help of Oleg Tsarev in making public details of KGB/NKVD files held on British agents, which provided evidence of James Klugmann’s recruitment by Soviet intelligence and the role he played in the subsequent recruitment of John Cairncross…..

they provide a range of insight into different parts of his life during the Cold War period. The files contain material from telephone checks on his home and at the Communist Party’s King Street, Covent Garden offices in central London – as well as transcripts from meetings picked up by hidden microphones placed in the King Street meetings rooms – copies of mail obtained by Home Office warrant; Special Branch reports written up from public meetings attended by their officers and details of observation provided by MI5 ‘watchers.’ The first serious interest taken by MI5 in Klugmann’s activities occurred during the student delegation he led to China in 1938. Thereafter, the file includes correspondence related to his controversial role in the Special Operations Executive during World War II – including a long and particularly revealing debriefing with CPGB official Bob Stewart that MI5 recorded in August 1945 and the frank exchanges between MI5 and his SOE superiors – and subsequently during the Cold War when he was regarded as a security threat. The disappearance of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean sparked increased MI5 surveillance, as did other developments concerning the Cambridge spy circle, while his work on behalf the Party, as its expert on Yugoslavia and Eastern Europe, in contacts with Eastern European embassies, and in his other work in the leadership of the Party, was regularly monitored.

***

On an early spring evening in 1937, two university friends met at the entrance to Regent’s Park in London. They were among the most brilliant linguists of their generation and had recently left Cambridge with outstanding prospects. They shared common interests in French and German literature which had sustained their friendship after university. Their left-wing politics had further brought them together in the resistance to the rise of Nazism in Germany, and at a time of acute international political crisis they were both committed to the anti-fascist movement.

John Cairncross was Scottish, slim and engaging, if a little taciturn. He had just taken up a post at the Foreign Office. He was 23 years old. His friend James Klugmann was shorter, Jewish and slightly chubby. He was over on a brief visit from Paris, where he was researching French literature and working for an international student association. He was 25 years old.

On this particular spring evening, as they made their way towards a more secluded part of the park, Klugmann’s demure wit, avuncular personality and political enthusiasms were absent. An awkward few minutes of uneasy pleasantries came to an end as another figure stepped forward from the trees and Klugmann, after introducing him to his younger friend, promptly made his excuses and slipped away into the shadows. Cairncross and Klugmann would not meet again for 30 years, both their friendship and their own futures tainted by the consequences of those few minutes in Regent’s Park. The visitor was Arnold Deutsch, introduced by his code name ‘Otto,’ who in the same park three years earlier had recruited Kim Philby to Soviet intelligence.

For Cairncross, whose attraction to communism did not last beyond Cambridge and who had never taken out a Party membership card, the meeting meant the beginning of an espionage career he had not sought and did not expect to be thrust upon him. For Klugmann, another reluctant spy, who had already decided to dedicate his life to communism, this untimely and distasteful rendezvous had been ordered by the British Communist Party leadership. His friendship with Cairncross and his growing reputation in the communist movement – it was the Communist International (Comintern) in Moscow which funded his role as leader of the World Student Association – meant that he was the only one who could deliver the young Foreign Office official to Soviet intelligence….

Following the wider availability of archives and the erosion of Cold War polarities, it is no longer possible to omit the question of espionage from the wider history of that period….

A brilliant pupil who excelled at an early age and won all the prizes at Gresham’s School, an outstanding Cambridge student destined – according to his professors and peers – for an academic career, Klugmann eschewed personal ambitions and put his immense intellectual talents at the service of the Communist Party. This was not a unique decision, given the ultimate sacrifices made by his close friends John Cornford and David Guest who died in the Spanish Civil War. However, for him it meant a lifelong commitment as a communist intellectual. At its peak it took him from talent-spotting at Cambridge to leading the international student movement in Paris and a unique role in the Special Operations Executive (SOE) with its origins in the ‘boat university’ he set up en route to Cairo and culminated with his sermons to exiled Croatian communists as they prepared for dangerous assignments. He was a brilliant teacher, and a lucid and eloquent exponent of Marxism and the Communist Party’s policy; the hopes he invested in the future drove his lecturing, writing and research.

As the leading communist student of his generation Klugmann found himself both intellectual mentor to his Cambridge comrades and sought after by the Comintern. It was the combination of these two realities, at a time of more tenuous political loyalties, that dragged him briefly – and reluctantly – into the espionage world, an experience that would haunt him for the rest of his life.

His commitment came with severe costs for his personal and political allegiances. As a ‘Cold War’ intellectual whose loyalties to Moscow shaped many of his political judgments in the early 1950s, he was obliged to meet intelligence agents and Eastern European embassy officials at the time he himself was being pursued by British intelligence, following the disappearance of his friends Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean. In 1956, a year of turbulent and tumultuous events in the communist world, he was found wanting by those who had considered him with ‘intellectual guru’ in earlier years and now looked to him for leadership. Instead, he put his loyalty to the Party before his better judgment and for a while reverted to what for him was the unenviable role of the Communist Party functionary. The expert on Yugoslav communism and friend of Tito and the partisans was required by his party – under pressure from Moscow – to denounce his former ally, which he achieved through a very disingenuous work, From Trotsky to Tito….

Eric Hobsbawm, who knew him better than most, has written, ‘He gave nothing away.’ [1]

***

The rise of the student left at Cambridge was part of a wider shift among the student generation. At University College London (UCL), the Gower Socialist Society was formed in autumn 1931. A Marxist society was set up at the LSE [London School of Economics], which would later involve Peter Floud, Michael Straight and briefly John Cornford, before the latter two went up to Trinity College. In Oxford, at the end of 1931, Frank Strauss Meyer, a wealthy American postgraduate and Dick Freeman set up the October Club, inspired by the Soviet revolution and without any official help from the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). The October Club for a while matched the activities of the Cambridge communists. Its founding objective was: ‘the study of communism in its world, social, economic and cultural aspects.’ [21]

Meyer had previously been an active member of the Oxford Labour Club and had set up a ‘Marxist study group; after becoming impatient with the Labour Party and the left.’ Freeman was a friend of the left Labour intelligectual John Strachey and had ‘worked on a collective farm in Russia the summer before, coming back full of enthusiasm.’ Meyer explained that he and Freeman (and others they nominated) would have ‘complete control over its policies and activities.’ Through their contact with the CPGB leaders they initially used the Party as a vehicle for organizing speakers and Meyer claimed that Emile Burns, the Party’s head of propaganda, ‘was taken aback by the whole thing and didn’t know quite what to do about it.’ [22]

The major breakthrough in bringing together the different communist student organizations took place at Klugmann’s house in Hampstead during the Easter vacation in 1932, when his parents were away. The meeting followed a circular from Harry Pollitt, the Communist Party’s general secretary, which – almost certainly acting on Comintern instructions – encouraged the formation of student cells. Klugmann, Kitty and Maurice Cornforth set up the meeting in discussion with the Party leadership at King Street. Present at this meeting were representatives from the communist cells and societies of Cambridge, UCL, the LSE and the October Club, as well as Clemens Palme Dutt from the Party leadership, and Dave Springhall, who had recently been at the International Lenin School in Moscow and had just been elected to the Party’s Central Committee. [23] Springhall, a tough-talking organizer, would later be convicted for espionage and expelled from the Party. At this time he was a rising influence in the leadership, with a special interest in cultivating Comintern links and along with Clemens Palme Dutt would be one of Klugmann’s main contacts at King Street while he was at Cambridge. The meeting established a National Student Bureau – with Meyer its first secretary – and identified the need for a stronger communist strategy in the universities in order to win leading positions, bring in outside speakers and dominate existing left and labour associations. This strategy quickly paid off, with more cells, members and a growing communist presence beyond the three largest centres (Cambridge, Oxford and the LSE) to include 12 more universities in Britain. They also set up their own newspaper the Student Vanguard, which replaced the Outpost (a Cambridge communist paper), and was edited by Meyer, Guest and Cornforth.

This strategy strengthened communist presence in the colleges as a rival to Labour student associations, culminating in the disaffiliation of the CUSS and other bodies from the University Labour Federal (ULF) and the creation of the Federation of Student Societies the following year. For all present at the Lancaster Road meeting, the message was clear: they were joining an international political organization with roots in the October Revolution which drew its inspiration from the Soviet Union. No one present at the meeting would have been in any doubt that the Party had close underground links with Moscow, though these were regarded as official and authorized by the Party. [24]

Despite his now firm communist convictions, Klugman was not yet an open communist. In fact he did not officially join the Party until the following year. Like Donald Maclean, his decision not to join earlier was partly the result of familial pressure; to varying degrees, they both lived in the shadow of their fathers. Maclean had endured growing tensions with his father, who had served as a minister in what his son saw as Ramsay MacDonald’s ‘traitorous’ National Government. Despite this, Maclean felt unable to join the Communist Party until his father’s death in June 1932. Klugmann’s father was not a government minister but a respected businessman and free trader. Klugmann had experienced many arguments at home about his and his sister’s political views. Only after his father’s death on Easter Saturday, 26 Marc 1932, did he feel sufficiently liberated to make the full commitment that his politics were now demanding.

***

James Klugmann was on the way to becoming an open communist, as he would remain for the rest of his life. It was not unusual to take part in communist activity prior to officially joining the Party. Much of the work of the Student Bureau, like that of the Party as a whole, operated in clandestine ways; according to Frank Strauss Meyer, it communicated on a ‘strictly conspiratorial basis,’ involving ‘mail drops, coded references to individuals’ and secretly maintaining its HQ in a private apartment, with records held in code. [1] This is not surprising. Communists had until recently regularly been imprisoned for perceived subversive activities in the General Strike or agitation among servicemen. The Hampstead meeting had an immediate effect in Oxford just weeks later when a group of ten leading communist students joined the CPGB, and attendances at October Club meetings grew rapidly, resulting in an estimated rise from around 150 to 300 by the end of 1932. Oxford communists would soon be strengthened by the arrival of Bernard Floud and Philip Toynbee, who would go on to be leading officers. According to Meyer, by the end of its first year the October Club had around 25 actual Communist Party members and links to various other left-wing associations. Meyer went down from Oxford in June 1932 to take up a research position with the social anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski at the LSE, where he continued his communist activities, leaving Freeman in charge of the October Club. [2]

Meyer found that the LSE suited his political activities, and his role as secretary of the CPGB’s Student Bureau enabled him to coordinate political activities, leading the LSE communist ‘unit’ into – in his words – ‘a powerful organization which eventually controlled most of the student activities of the School and was able to achieve my election as President.’ [3] The expansion of communist influence in university colleges and the work of the Student Bureau led to more united work, supported by the growth of radical student literature. The Student Vanguard newspaper offered a forum for discussion of communist activities across the country, with the tone of the new journal reflecting the rapidly changing political atmosphere. It proclaimed, ‘The Student Vanguard makes no pretence at impartiality. It is written by students who are convinced that conditions in every section of social existence are more and more facing a radical alteration in society.’ [4]

Much urgency was given to opposing war, following the League of Nations’ inability to prevent Japan’s invasion of the Chinese region of Manchuria and the rise of fascism and militarism during 1933. At the Oxford Union in February, the motion ‘This House will in no circumstances fight for king and country’ was passed with a large majority, an unprecedented development described by Winston Churchill a few days later as ‘shameless and squalid,’ and the subject of virulent attacks on communists and pacifists by the conservative press. In fact, the procrastination of the League of Nations had weakened the pacifist case for many on the left, a growing number of whom were now looking towards the Soviet Union for an alternative. Maurice Dobb’s visits there had informed his politics. At the Cambridge Union in May 1932, in a debate which revived the union from its ‘smug contentment’ and ‘air of aggressive Victorian prosperity,’ [5] Dobb spoke in favour of the motion ‘That this House sees more hope in Moscow than Detroit.’ He spoke enthusiastically of the increase in literacy, the Five Year Plan and the yearly increase in production, contrasting it with the millions of unemployed in America, gangsterism and the consequences of capitalist crisis. According to the reviewers, it was ‘an outstanding speech, […] the most interesting and competent speech that the house has heard for a long time.’ [6] The motion was passed by 62 votes to 36 and contributed to growing confidence amongst students on the left. One of the speakers against was George Kitson Clark, Klugmann’s personal tutor. Despite the difference in their political views, Kitson Clark was to remain an important friend to Klugmann, offering support and advice on his academic career and future plans, and they would spend early evenings together discussing world affairs. Kitson Clark argued, no doubt with some difficulty given the depression and rising unemployment, that the worker was ‘better protected’ in England than in Russia. [7]

Like many of his contemporaries, Klugmann had been excited about the events taking place in the Soviet Union. This sense of enthusiasm and optimism was not confined to the economy but included the wider society, revolutionary ideals and the notion of progress they embodied:

Literature, art, the whole culture of the Soviet Union, was dominated by construction, great buildings, great damns, great schemes. The novels were full of it, the hero was the hero of construction, the villain, the saboteur. And this contrasted with ‘poverty in the midst of plenty,’ the destruction of wealth that was taking place under capitalism in its crisis. [8]

What Klugmann saw as the Soviet Union’s ‘cultural achievements’ included the silent films of the era – he had already seen some of the early socialist and avant-garde cinema with Donald Maclean in London in school holidays at the end of the 1920s. Now he devoured the silent films of the Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein, notably Battleship Potemkin and October, and Vsevolod Pudovkin’s ‘revolutionary trilogy’: Mother, The End of St Petersburg and Storm Over Asia.

If the Soviet Union was the country which had made the first communist revolution, then Klugmann turned his thoughts to Germany for the next. In addition to studying German at university, he had taken vacation language classes in Munich and Berlin as well as occasional family holidays to Wiesenbronn and was impressed by the way in which Marxism had influenced German left-wing culture. He was an ‘addict’ of German expressionist theatre and had become well acquainted with the works of Bertolt Brecht, Georg Kaiser and Ernst Toller, and would see their plays at the Festival Theatre in Cambridge, or when he was back in London, at the Gate Theatre in Villiers Street, Charing Cross. In the plays of Brecht and Toller Klugmann found a deep revolutionary culture. [9]

It was therefore a terrible shock – a ‘bombshell’ – to hear of Hitler’s advance in January 1933 and the dismantling of the progressive advances made by the German left. This was probably the event which finally triggered Klugmann into joining the Party a month later. The Reichstag fire and the rise of Nazism in the German elections had crystallized the threat of fascism and war. His Marxist beliefs, shared and nurtured in regular discussions with Kitty, Maurice Cornforth, David Guest, Kiernan, Maclean and others, now had a much wider audience and he was proving himself an able theoretician and organizer.

-- The Shadow Man: At the Heart of the Cambridge Spy Circle, by Geoff Andrews

Norman John Klugmann (London, 27 February 1912 – London, 14 September 1977), generally known as James Klugmann,[1] was a leading British Communist writer who became the official historian of the Communist Party of Great Britain.

Background and Early Career

Born Norman John Klugmann, in 1912 in Hampstead, he later adopted the name James His father was a tobacco pipe merchant, the family lived on Haverstock Hill, Hampstead, London. His sister Kitty Cornforth was also a committed Communist, marrying Maurice Cornforth. Harry Hodson, in his memoirs, recalls visiting the Klugmann family home and recounts of James Klugmann, that "his background was impeccably bourgeois."

Educated at The Hall School, Hampstead, Gresham's School and Trinity College, Cambridge (at both of which he was a friend and contemporary of the spy Donald Maclean), Klugman joined the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in 1933 whilst studying at Cambridge, where he won a double first.

Klugmann was at pains to deny any connection with spying during his lifetime and a long period of secret service surveillance on him threw up no obvious proof. He had however been on the fringes of such activity, which no doubt gave rise to suspicion, along with his university friendships of some of those who were involved in espionage. With the defection of Vasili Mitrokhin it was revealed that Klugmann was a KGB agent, under the codename MER, who was instrumental in recruiting the Cambridge Five.[2]

In 1935, Klugmann gave up an academic career to become Secretary of the World Student Association, based in Paris, travelling widely across the world. This role, which involved the building of the Popular Front against fascism, first attracted the attention of the British Security Service (MI5). The Service's description of James for its operatives, which was put on file around 1938, said: "Height about 5 ft 8 in (173 cm), light build, broad brow, small featured face, fuzz of greyish hair, probably wears glasses, not remarkably Jewish but rather foreign appearance."

In 1936 Klugmann met Arnold Deutsch, the head of recruitment for NKVD agents based in England. Deutsch's main objective was to get Klugmann to help recruit John Cairncross as a spy. Klugmann became an important figure in the network. However, as he was known to the police as an active member of the Communist Party of Great Britain meant that he was not used as a spy. However, he was given the codename MAYOR and was used to compile reports on other agents.[3]

Deutsch reported to Moscow: "Mayor (James Klugmann) is a party functionary who devotes himself entirely to the party. He is a quiet and thoughtful man. Modest, conscientious, industrious and serious. Everybody who knows him likes him and respects him…. He is known to the British police as an active communist. He is used to legal work and therefore incautious. But if his attention is drawn to this he will act as required." [4]

Career in Yugoslavia with Special Operations

He had joined the Royal Army Service Corps as a private in 1940 but, having a natural flair for languages, he was soon transferred to the Special Operations Executive (SOE), who apparently ignored his communist sympathies. It was claimed by the official historian of SOE that when Klugmann was recruited into SOE by Brigadier Terence Airey (an old boy of his school), MI5 reported that he was not known to them. In fact, the relevant files had been destroyed at Wormwood Scrubs by a German air raid.[5] In February 1942 Klugmann was posted to the Yugoslav Section of SOE as an intelligence and coordination officer, based in Cairo. Klugmann became critical of the Serb Royalist leader General Draza Mihailovic, who was the chief beneficiary of British aid and support in the resistance movement in Yugoslavia. Klugmann's reports influenced thinking at the Political Warfare Executive, Secret Intelligence Service (M16), the Foreign Office, and BBC.[citation needed] He suggested that the Communist leader Tito and his partisans were killing more Germans than Mihailovic's Cetniks despite smaller numbers.

Churchill switched his support to Tito (see Yugoslavia and the Allies). Some eight understrength Wehrmacht divisions and Bulgarian and Croatian Ustase units were employed in Yugoslavia during 1943 and 1944 fighting the partisans. Yugoslavia was the only country during World War II that liberated itself with little military assistance from the Allies. Although this move was one favoured by Stalin, Tito and Stalin later fell out and became bitter critics. Klugmann rose to the rank of major, an unlikely outcome given his general disposition. He was under constant surveillance, suspected of being an NKVD agent along with Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean and Anthony Blunt, all of whom he knew at Cambridge, and one of whom, Maclean, had been a friend at Gresham's. Proof of this was found in the KGBs archives and it is confirmed that John "James" Klugmann was a KGB talent-spotter and agent who was instrumental in recruiting the Cambridge Five.[6] During his time in SOE and later whilst a civilian in UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration) in Yugoslavia he supported Soviet aims.

Post-war career

Klugmann remained a devout Communist all his life and went on to play a significant role in the CPGB becoming responsible for the Education branch. After his wartime service, he became a member of the executive committee of the British Communist Party and editor of Marxism Today. Michael Straight (later owner and editor of The New Republic and chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts), an American who had studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, and who had become friends there with Blunt, Kim Philby, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess described Klugmann as "a warm-hearted and compassionate intellectual whose commitment to Communism left him no time for such minor preoccupations as taking a bath or cleaning his fingernails."

One of the most active and overt British communists of his generation, Klugmann became an influential left-wing journalist after the war and wrote the first two volumes of the official History of the Communist Party of Great Britain, which was continued by Noreen Branson. He also wrote the controversial From Trotsky to Tito justifying, to a British communist audience, policy towards Tito's Yugoslavia.

Books by James Klugmann

• The History of the Communist Party of Great Britain: Formative and Early Years 1919–1924 (Vol. 1) ISBN 0-85315-372-8
• The History of the Communist Party of Great Britain: The General Strike 1925–26 (Vol. 2) ISBN 0-85315-374-4
• Wall Street's Drive to War (Communist Party, 1950)
• From Trotsky to Tito (Lawrence & Wishart, 1951) ASIN B0006DBG3G
• The Peaceful Co-existence of Capitalism and Socialism (People's Publishing House 1952) ASIN B0007K14QM
• Dialogue of Christianity and Marxism (Lawrence & Wishart, 1967) ASIN B000G9OYD4
• What Kind of Revolution?: A Christian-Communist Dialogue (Panther, 1968) ISBN 0-586-02580-4
• The Future of Man (Communist Party of Great Britain, 1971) ISBN 0-900302-20-8
• Marxism Today: Theoretical and Discussion Journal of the Communist Party (Communist Party of Great Britain, 1975) ASIN B0006DLHUI

External links

• James Klugmann Archive at marxists.org
• History of the Communist Party of Great Britain
• Books by James Klugmann at Amazon.com

Notes

1. Concise Dictionary of National Biography
2. The Mitrokhin Archive Vol.I pg. 82-85
3. Biography of James Klugmann
4. Arnold Deutsch, report on James Klugmann (April 1937)
5. Foot, M.R.D. (1999). The Special Operations Executive 1940–1946. Pimlico. pp. 46–47. ISBN 0-7126-6585-4.
6. The Mitrokhin Archive Vol.I pg.82-85

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Bernard Floud
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 6/25/19

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Bernard Francis Castle Floud (22 March 1915 – 10 October 1967) was a British farmer, television company executive and politician. He was the father of the economic historian Sir Roderick Floud.

Early life

He was born in Epsom, Surrey, the son of Sir Francis Floud, the British High Commissioner to Canada and was educated at Gresham's School in Holt, Norfolk, and Wadham College, Oxford. He served in the Army from 1939 to 1942, then as a wartime civil servant in the Ministry of Information from 1942 to 1945. At the end of the war, he moved to the Board of Trade before leaving the Civil Service in 1951 to become a farmer in Essex.

In 1937, Floud had joined the Labour Party. He was a Labour councillor in Kelvedon Hatch Parish Council from 1952 to 1961 and Ongar Rural District Council from 1952 to 1955. From 1955, he was an executive with Granada Television. He also fought Chelmsford for the Labour Party at the 1955 general election and Hemel Hempstead at the 1959 general election. He was Chairman of the Independent Television Labour Relations Committee in 1963. His son, Professor Sir Roderick Floud, was Provost of Gresham College 2008–14.

Parliament and death

Floud was elected to Parliament in the 1964 general election for Acton, gaining the marginal seat from the Conservatives with a majority of 2,599, and was re-elected in 1966 with an increased majority of 4,941. He was depressed after the death of his wife Ailsa after a long illness in January 1967 (Christopher Andrew erroneously states in the first edition of his book and on the basis of MI5 files that she committed suicide; this statement was removed from the second edition), and he too had suffered from ill-health for some time. In March he agreed to undergo psychiatric treatment, but had a relapse in June, and after a holiday in August he returned to his constituency work.

Harold Wilson had mentioned that he was considering appointing Floud to the government, and MI5 was asked to approve his security clearance. Although Wilson had a standing policy to deny MI5 the right to interrogate MPs, the service strenuously objected; Wilson subsequently allowed an interrogation after being sent a brief on Floud. Floud had been friends with many Communists while at Oxford, and was directly named by two separate inactive agents as having worked as a spy in the past, handling recruitment. The interrogation by Peter Wright was intense, lasting two days and producing neither an admission nor denial of guilt, even when Wright explained that without any further clarification on the matter, MI5 would be forced to deny him the clearance for the appointment.[1] He returned to work shortly after the conclusion of the second day of questioning, but upon leaving his office at Granada Television he said he was "unable to go on". The next day, 10 October 1967, he killed himself[2] allegedly by taking an overdose of barbiturates[3] and also gassing himself with Carbon monoxide at his St Pancras home. He was 52 years old.

Acton was regained by the Conservative Kenneth Baker in the subsequent by-election in March 1968.

Accusations of espionage

The author Chapman Pincher, in Their Trade is Treachery (1981), alleged that Floud had been presented by MI5 with evidence that he had worked for the KGB and recruited others to its service. This was firmly rebutted in a letter to The Times by his sister-in-law Jean Floud. The claim that Floud had been presented with evidence was repeated by Wright in 1987 upon the release of his autobiography, Spycatcher.

Wright's account is disputed by Professor Christopher Andrew in The Defence of the Realm: the authorised history of MI5.[4] On the basis of MI5 files, Andrew states that Wright and another MI5 agent interviewed Floud in the autumn of 1966 and finally in March 1967, culminating in an interview on 20 March 1967 at which Floud was told that: "because of lack of frankness about his past Communist associations, he was regarded as a 'full security risk' and could not therefore be given security clearance. Floud can have been in little doubt that his prospects of a ministerial career had gone." Andrew suggests that this "added to his despair" arising from a long-standing depressive illness and his wife's death. Andrew concludes that "Save for the personal tragedy with which it was associated, the investigation of Floud was of less importance than it seemed to the Security Service at the time. There was – and is – no evidence that he had any Communist contacts after 1952. His pre-war contacts with Soviet intelligence are also unlikely to have been of great significance, though it would have been very different" if Jenifer Fischer Williams, later wife of H.L.A. Hart, whom Floud had recruited to the Communist cause, had decided to become a Soviet agent, instead of leaving the Party and pursuing a career with the Home Office and later Oxford University.

Floud's elder brother Peter Floud, one-time Keeper of the Department of Circulation in the Victoria and Albert Museum, was also among those identified by Peter Wright as linked to the suspected Oxford Ring as well as Jenifer Hart, an Oxford academic. Another person linked to the ring was Phoebe Pool, who admitted passing messages to the Floud brothers from the KGB spy-handler "Otto", identified as Arnold Deutsche. Peter Floud died suddenly at the age of 48.[5]

References

1. Wright, Peter and Paul Greengrass. Spycatcher, Viking Press, 1987. p. 264-266.
2. Macintyre, Ben; Bird, Steve (13 May 2009). "Civil servant Arthur Wynn revealed as recruiter of Oxford spies". The Times. London. Retrieved 15 June 2009.
3. "British secret files on Nigeria's first bloody coup, path to Biafra". Media Trust. 7 August 2016. Archived from the original on 30 March 2017. Retrieved 30 March 2017.
4. Andrew, Christopher The Defence of the Realm: the authorised history of MI5 (Allen Lane, 2009) pp.538–541.
5. Macintyre, Ben; Bird, Steve (13 May 2009). "Civil servant Arthur Wynn revealed as recruiter of Oxford spies". The Times. London. Retrieved 8 February 2011.
• Who's Who of British members of parliament, Volume IV
• Who's Who 1967 (A & C. Black, London, 1967)
• The Times, 14 October 1967
• The Times, letter by Jean Floud, 30 March 1981

External links

• Hansard 1803–2005: contributions in Parliament by Bernard Floud

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Frank [Strauss] Meyer (political philosopher)
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 6/25/19

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Frank Meyer

Frank Straus Meyer (/ˈmaɪ.ər/; 1909–1972) was an American philosopher and political activist best known for his theory of "fusionism" – a political philosophy that unites elements of libertarianism and traditionalism into a philosophical synthesis which is posited as the definition of modern American conservatism. Meyer's philosophy was presented in two books, primarily In Defense of Freedom: A Conservative Credo (1962) and also in a collection of his essays, The Conservative Mainstream (1969). Fusionism has been summed up by E. J. Dionne, Jr. as "utilizing libertarian means in a conservative society for traditionalist ends."[1]

Personal life

Meyer was born to a prominent business family of German Jewish descent[2] in Newark, New Jersey, the son of Helene (Straus) and Jack F. Meyer.[2][3] He attended Princeton University for one year and then transferred to Balliol College at Oxford University where he earned his B.A in 1932 and his M.A in 1934. He later studied at the London School of Economics and became the student union's president before being expelled and deported in 1933 for his communist activism.[4]

Like a number of the founding senior editors of National Review magazine, Meyer was first a Communist Party USA apparatchik before his conversion to political conservatism. The experiences as a communist are reported in his book, The Moulding of Communists: The Training of the Communist Cadre, 1961. Meyer began an "agonizing reappraisal of his communist beliefs" after reading F.A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom while serving in the U.S. Army during World War II, and made a complete break in 1945 after fourteen years in active leadership service to the communist party and its cause.[5] Following the war, he contributed articles to the early free market periodical, The Freeman, and later joined the original staff of National Review in 1955.

The rise of the student left at Cambridge was part of a wider shift among the student generation. At University College London (UCL), the Gower Socialist Society was formed in autumn 1931. A Marxist society was set up at the LSE [London School of Economics], which would later involve Peter Floud, Michael Straight and briefly John Cornford, before the latter two went up to Trinity College. In Oxford, at the end of 1931, Frank Strauss Meyer, a wealthy American postgraduate and Dick Freeman set up the October Club, inspired by the Soviet revolution and without any official help from the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). The October Club for a while matched the activities of the Cambridge communists. Its founding objective was: ‘the study of communism in its world, social, economic and cultural aspects.’ [21]

-- The Shadow Man: At the Heart of the Cambridge Spy Circle, by Geoff Andrews

After completing his turn to the right, Meyer became a close adviser to and confidant of William F. Buckley, Jr., the founder and editor of National Review, who in the introduction to his book Did You Ever See a Dream Walking: American Conservative Thought in the 20th Century, 1970, gave Meyer the credit for properly synthesizing the traditionalist and libertarian strains within conservatism starting at the magazine itself.[6] Meyer wrote a column "Principles and Heresies" that appeared in each issue of the magazine, was its book review editor, and acted as a major spokesman for its principles.

Meyer married the former Elsie Bown. They had two sons, John Cornford Meyer, a lawyer, and Eugene Bown Meyer, who became a president of the Federalist Society. Both of his sons hold international titles in chess. John is a FIDE Master, while his younger brother Eugene holds the rank of International Master, which is right below Grandmaster.

Meyer converted to Catholicism just before he died of lung cancer in 1972.

Meyer was known in conservative and libertarian circles for his nocturnal lifestyle – Buckley among others has recalled (in Miles Gone By: A Literary Autobiography) that Meyer would sleep by day and be on the phone by night on behalf of his journalism and activism. His bright intellect and passionate presentation won him a broad following among conservative intellectuals in the 1960s and 1970s, who promoted it individually and through the organization he co-founded, the American Conservative Union, and through other modern conservative institutions and think tanks influenced by him including The Heritage Foundation, The Fund for American Studies, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute and Young America's Foundation.

Philosophy of history

The most important place to begin placing Meyer in context is an article he wrote titled "Western Civilization: The Problem of Political Freedom" that closes his 1996 In Defense of Freedom and Related Essays. As a thinker in what Hayek[7] called the "critical rationalist" philosophical school that is the more empirical one as contrasted with the "constructivist rationalism" of a priori deductivism, Meyer's understanding of world history is central to his philosophy. Meyer's essential argument is explicitly based upon philosopher Eric Voegelin's multi-volume Order and History that all world history until more modern times was composed of "cosmological" societies that unified all social activity under one controlling myth subsuming society and the state in one common understanding and power monism. Meyer labeled these societies "tightly unified"[8] in their mores, culture, economies, religion, and government, suppressing all contradictory understandings.

Following Lord Acton's "Liberty in Ancient Times" Meyer found only two historical "stirrings" where this cosmological unity was even temporarily breached. In Athens, Socrates used his vision of the cave to discover a reality behind its cosmological reality as interpreted by its democratic authorities, which challenged them by viewing ideal forms as the real repository of truth beyond the myths of its culture. The unity was challenged so fundamentally that it turned upon the prophet, killed him and returned to the previous unity. Abraham likewise rejected the cosmological unity of Ur and claimed a God that was independent of and more powerful than its myth, which Moses reinforced years later by rejecting Egyptian cosmological society, to establish a Jerusalem whose prophets likewise challenged state and society, with Nathan even forcing the monarch to admit evil and repent. Still, the representatives of state power generally ignored or restricted the challengers and, in any event, a new cosmological state, Rome, ended both stirrings and established an even stronger cosmological unity.

Caesar became the "sanctified symbol of the cosmos," in Meyer's terms,[9] and came to dominate the known world. About the same happened in China, India, Persia, the Americas and the rest. Modern times did not break the unity until a small voice in Rome's hinterlands cried out "Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's and to God the things that are God's." The Incarnation, the "flash of eternity into time," Meyer labeled it,[10] effectively severed the unity through its concrete effects and proved even more empirically enduring in Europe than Caesar. Yet it did not create a new unity but a "tension"[11] between empirical power and a mystical power sourced from another world but energizing this one. In Europe are "two sets of tensions" of church and state contested and later added other tensions from cities, towns and estates that culminated in a Magna Carta demanding that no single force unify the rest, creating the conditions for freedom under agreed upon law rather than a single state-enforced cosmological way.

The idea of dividing power to allow freedom within its tradition was only partially realized in Medieval Europe[12] and was later challenged fundamentally by the rise of national monarchies and parliaments that claimed a divine or popular right and power to reconstitute itself in new cosmological or utopian forms to retrieve the sense of order and unity promised by monism. Before the tension was tamed in England, it was transferred to America where it was protected by its colonial isolation, allowing the tension and balance of power between freedom and tradition to reach its zenith in the United States Constitution.[13] The utopian temptation to return to the cocoon of cosmological or radical unity, however, survived even in the U.S.[14]

Whether reform was from Woodrow Wilson,[15] or more foreign influences such as Rousseau, Hobbes, and Machiavelli, these saw division of power and the tradition that sustained its tension as the central societal problem of modern times, with the task of reform to remove these impediments to a restored unity. To Meyer, the task of conservatism was to preserve the tension of the Western tradition to protect human freedom, which was inherently pluralist.

Freedom and tradition

In his most influential book, In Defense of Freedom, freedom was defined in what Isaiah Berlin would label "negative" terms as the minimization of the use of coercion by the state in its essential role of preventing one person's freedom from intruding upon another's. While left-utopianism was considered the immediate threat to the survival of this freedom, Meyer aimed at a "New Conservatism" as the principle protagonist against liberty from the right in his day. This new conservatism viewed society as an organism whose agent was the national government rather than the states or private entities.[16] The new conservatives were less statist than the left and even rhetorically supported freedom, but it was a freedom defined as an end rather than a means,[17] with Meyer using Clinton Rossiter's 1955 definition of positive freedom in his Conservatism in America as his major foil.[18]

Meyer argued that virtue could reside only in the individual.[19] The state should protect freedom but otherwise leave virtue to individuals. The right of others to freedom must be respected by the individual even if the state does not respect it.[20] The state has only three legitimate functions: police, military, and legal system,[21] all necessary to control coercion, which is immoral if not restricted. There is an obligation to others but it is individual, for even the "Great Commandment" is expressed in individual form: God, neighbor and oneself are each individual.[22] Virtue is critical for society and freedom must be balanced by responsibility but both are inherently individual in form.[23] Forced values cannot be virtuous.[24] The question of how to preserve moral order is important but would take "another book,"[25] which he never wrote. Yet even when the state takes properly limited acts to protect freedom, tradition will necessarily shape every such decision.[26]

Freedom by itself has no goal, no intrinsic end.[27] Freedom is not abstract or utopian as with the utilitarians, who also make freedom an end rather than a means.[28] A utopia of freedom is a contradiction in terms.[29] In a real society, traditional order and freedom can exist together only in tension.[30] To retain the essentiality of both freedom and tradition, the solution to the dilemma is "grasping it by both horns."[31] The solution is a synthesis of both, even in the face of those such as Leo Strauss[32] who argue that no such synthesis is possible or even logical. Donald Devine has argued Meyer's synthesis is a first principle or axiom that is as valid as Strauss's monist first principle and relates this to Hayek's critical rationalism philosophical tradition and those he identifies with it such as Aristotle, Cicero, Thomas Aquinas, Montesquieu, John Locke, Adam Smith and Lord Acton.[33]

Traditionalist critics

Meyer's attempt at synthesis was questioned by those representing both constituent parts. Traditionalists were provoked by Meyer's negative statements about two of their favorites, Robert Nisbet and Russell Kirk, which Kirk reciprocated by calling him "an ideologue for liberty".[34] Meyer, however, did refer to both as "serious" thinkers,[35] a Meyer footnote[36] even conceded Kirk "in recent years" had been more supportive of freedom, and he called Kirk's views on freedom itself "excellent".[37] Meyer also conceded that both Nisbet and Kirk primarily desired only local as opposed to national or even state community power "to their credit" but they could be chided even then for not understanding that the rationale for local community is that local government is more based upon freedom.[38]

The traditionalist Rossiter rather than Kirk or Nesbit was Meyer's target.[39] Meyer even granted the New Conservatives were correct that virtue is "the most important of problems".[40] The fundamental problem was that Rossiter insisted upon a "positive freedom"[18] that changed freedom from a means to an end, just as did the utilitarian libertarians. Contrary to the Catholic philosopher Stanley Parry's claim that Meyer did not even recognize the family as a natural community,[41] Meyer called the family and state "necessary associations".[42] The family was different from all other institutions since children were not full individuals and thus required protection and limited rights.[42] He argued that the state actually had been a hindrance to both virtue and the family rather than their champion. As far as educating children, prior to state control schools taught virtue and the truths of Western civilization and now do not.[43]

Fellow National Review editor Brent Bozell[44] criticized Meyer for demanding a "maximum freedom" and for arguing that freedom is necessary in order to act virtuously. Meyer did not make either claim. He actually wrote that total freedom was impossible.[45] He did not say that freedom was necessary for virtue but only that forced virtue is not virtuous. A forced act may be objectively virtuous in some sense but not for the individual who is forced to act. Meyer's concern was that to give the state the power to define virtue is to have no standard for virtue at all. Its definition would change with every change in power distribution. One cannot give the state the definition of virtue or there is no virtue – there is only power. Actually, Bozell at the end recommended a social policy based upon the moral principle of subsidiarity, which is not all that different from Meyer's position.

A Parry article[46] argued that the Meyer libertarian critique was correct about the state and reform did necessitate a revision of tradition once the previous vision had lost its energy. Pure restoration would be reactionary and impossible once broken. Restoration required a new "prophet" who would have to convince people freely to adopt the revision, not to rely upon force, which simply cannot be inspiring enough for substantial change. It is necessary to take what is good from the present tradition, remove what has been abused and proclaim the revision as a renewed tradition, which must specifically convince the "individual members of a multitude" in order for a true synthesis to revitalize society.[47]

In the late 1960s, Meyer engaged in a continuing debate over the status of Abraham Lincoln with Harry V. Jaffa. Jaffa faulted Meyer for blaming Lincoln for the "destruction of the autonomy of the states".[48] Meyer argued that Lincoln's abuses of civil liberties and expansion of government power should make him anathema to conservatives, while Jaffa defended Lincoln as in the tradition of the Founding Fathers. Slavery, segregation and African American civil rights were seen as the defining case against fusionism's relevance to modern times because of the insistence by Meyer and others at the time that states rights be preserved even in the face of these demands.[49]

Harry V. Jaffa[50] argued that neither state nor national sovereignty was clearly established in the Constitution but no American president has in fact operated on the assumption that state power was preeminent, giving the Constitution a nationalist orientation. Once in position to act nationally, all presidents have exercised national power. Some of the cited presidents did act in favor of states rights but mostly as state officials or former presidents than when in power, such as Thomas Jefferson or James Madison. Meyer replied that in fact the states had power and even caused a Civil War, which was more accurately labeled as a war between the states.

Meyer argued that limited national power, state autonomy, and decentralism were the essence of the Constitution as far as government was concerned.[38] Lord Acton considered federalism the unique contribution of America to the historical understanding of freedom. Certainly that force has atrophied over time and even Meyer conceded some 14th Amendment limits to state actions. But he maintained with National Review editor James Burnham[51] that the Federal Courts were not supreme. Separation of powers was the essence of the Constitution, very much including the states whose checks and balances were still alive in his day in the effective if partial state nullification of national court cases and laws.[52]

Libertarian critics

Some libertarians vigorously joined in criticizing Meyer's conclusion that both ideological libertarianism and traditionalism were distortions of same Western tradition and that both undermined freedom.[53] Meyer specifically censured libertarian favorites Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill for setting freedom as an end, not unlike the New Conservatives, only the ends were different.[28] Meyer argued that utilitarian libertarians today use court power to force "freedom" ends with such vague phrases as due process and equal protection and manipulating utopian versions of freedom of the press, religion and speech.[54] Pure libertarians assume they know what "freedom" is and that the state should enforce their vision through the courts. Meyer argued that freedom by itself had no end, no purpose other than as a means for people to freely choose their own ends.[27]

Ronald Hamowy[55] argued Meyer's synthesis cannot hold because there was a fundamental difference between a classical liberalism that promoted markets and freedom and a traditionalist conservatism that resisted it. But that view was refuted historically by the fact that the first industrial revolution began in Clairvaux in 1115 with a more scientific agriculture and advanced water-powered machinery, beginning capitalism in a fundamentally traditional and even feudal society. Murray Rothbard[56] was viewed favorably by Meyer for his recognition of the importance of tradition in reasoning, especially his support for St. Thomas Aquinas and his view that Enlightenment "hatred" for the medieval Catholic Church weakened freedom.[57] Rothbard was only criticized as too pessimistic in his view of the courts as the "final power" compared to Meyer's view that separation of powers left no one branch in charge and that each has power against the others, including the Congress and the states against the national courts.[58]

Rothbard, in fact, argued that Meyer's fusionism was actually the natural law-natural rights branch of libertarian thought which Rothbard himself and other true libertarians followed.[59] Libertarian journalist Ryan Sager in 2007's The Elephant in the Room: Evangelicals, Libertarians, and the Battle for the Soul of the Republican Party reviewed Meyer's work favorably and called for a principled revival of Meyer's fusionism to save the embattled party following its 2006 electoral defeats.

Meyer's philosophical synthesis

Rothbard's argument that Meyer was simply a libertarian and not a synthesizer, someone who was somewhat confused about the nature of tradition, can be criticized in return for forcing tradition into his philosophy through the back door by calling it "common sense." Rothbard insisted morality was already part of libertarianism as he understood it – the "Aristotelian-Lockean natural rights wing," as he labeled it, as opposed to the "utilitarian-emotivist-hedonistic wing." Yet, is not the proper response to this: who is the manqué? Is not the popular understanding of libertarianism (the Libertarian Party, for example) precisely the precepts of the "hedonistic wing?" With common sense and natural rights (and even St. Thomas Aquinas) as part of his libertarianism, could not Rothbard just as well be labeled as a fusionist manqué, or simply as a fusionist, since his synthesis did not follow the predominant utilitarian/emotivist wing of libertarianism?

Paul Gottfried[60] criticized Meyer's fusionist synthesis from the traditionalist, realist right by charging that it is impossible to say that Meyer's fusionism had worked. It rejected many elements of a comprehensive fusionism that could have created a movement that achieved great things but failed in this by purging powerful voices on the right who did not follow its party line. Meyer rested his view of freedom upon "Christian metaphysics" as did Rothbard, Gottfried argued, making Meyer's philosophy of history too "rough" to attract many of the Old Right who were more realist, secular and pragmatic. Rejected by the fusionist right these tended to see themselves as martyrs to their principles, especially excluded by the neoconservatives who controlled access to intellectual funding and prestige. Gottfried called for a new more comprehensive fusionist alliance based upon "similar" Meyer-like principles that could now include a second generation Old Right that "no longer extols an active government even in principle," a coalition that would only exclude the nationalist, pro big government neoconservatives.

Joseph Bottum[61] "cannot see how to put the cracked egg of conservatism back together. There seems no place in America these days for Frank Meyer fusionism, or even Ronald Reagan's big-tent Republicanism." Gottfried's paleocons reject "True Man" as understood by St. Augustine and most libertarians reject religion, which is the life of the Western state, Bottum argued, and both libertarians and traditionalists elements of the Meyer fusion today tend to dismiss the need for an aggressive foreign policy. Bottum instead offered a new "tension" between religion and the Enlightenment, a new fusionism of religious traditionalists and secular "foreign policy neoconservatives" as they have been gathered at The Weekly Standard magazine, where he was an editor. He was sensitive that this might be viewed as a "fairly cynical bargain" manipulated by the neoconservatives but insisted it resulted from "mutual persuasion" in debate with the social conservatives. The nature of the agreement is unclear except in a presumed joint opposition to abortion. Yet, even Bottom conceded that when the religious faction questioned the legitimacy of the Court in its failure to end abortion, the neoconservatives attacked it ruthlessly for questioning the government's legitimacy. While Bottum argued the coalition survived the controversy, it is unclear whether the two can manage the legitimacy question since it is primary for the neoconservatives and only at best secondary for the religious traditionalists.

It was the classical liberal F. A. Hayek in "Freedom, Reason and Tradition"[62] who most systematically and relentlessly pursued the nature of a libertarian/traditionalist synthesis but was loath to give it a label. He began by distinguishing between two views of human reason, a speculative/rationalistic/utopian and an empirical/evolutionary/institutional one, which was "particularly conspicuous" in their different assumptions about human nature.[63] The former viewed intelligence and goodness as natural to individual man while the latter argued that institutions must be created so that "bad people could do least harm." While not arguing for this on religious grounds, he acknowledged his empirical position was "closer to the Christian tradition of the fallibility and sinfulness of man, while the perfectionism of the rationalist is in irreconcilable conflict with it".[64]

To Hayek, like Meyer, freedom and tradition were fused. "Paradoxical as it may appear, it is probably true that a successful free society will always in large measure be a tradition-bound society," for a free society needs customs, laws and institutions whose observance is a "necessary condition" for freedom.[65] Freedom is the means but the "values into which we are born supplies the ends which our reason must serve".[66] This fusion was believed essential not only to social life but to thought, science and to reason itself. Without that dualism, there would have been no historical freedom.[67] It was not a coincidence that Hayek was the one who first led Meyer to arrive at his mature philosophy.

Ronald Reagan influence

As Ronald Reagan assumed the pinnacle of power of the presidency in 1981, in his first speech to an audience of his conservative allies in Washington, he reminded them of their roots. After listing "intellectual leaders like Russell Kirk, Friedrich Hayek, Henry Hazlitt, Milton Friedman, James Burnham, [and] Ludwig von Mises" as the ones who "shaped so much of our thoughts," he discussed only one of these influences at length.

"It's especially hard to believe that it was only a decade ago, on a cold April day on a small hill in upstate New York, that another of these great thinkers, Frank Meyer, was buried. He'd made the awful journey that so many others had: He pulled himself from the clutches of The [communist] God That Failed, and then in his writing fashioned a vigorous new synthesis of traditional and libertarian thought – a synthesis that is today recognized by many as modern conservatism."

As he recalled him, the new president outlined the ideas Meyer synthesized as the principles motivating this new conservative movement.

"It was Frank Meyer who reminded us that the robust individualism of the American experience was part of the deeper current of Western learning and culture. He pointed out that a respect for law, an appreciation for tradition, and regard for the social consensus that gives stability to our public and private institutions, these civilized ideas must still motivate us even as we seek a new economic prosperity based on reducing government interference in the marketplace. Our goals complement each other. We're not cutting the budget simply for the sake of sounder financial management. This is only a first step toward returning power to the states and communities, only a first step toward reordering the relationship between citizen and government."

"We can make government again responsive to the people by cutting its size and scope and thereby ensuring that its legitimate functions are performed efficiently and justly. Because ours is a consistent philosophy of government, we can be very clear: We do not have a separate social agenda, separate economic agenda, and a separate foreign agenda. We have one agenda. Just as surely as we seek to put our financial house in order and rebuild our nation's defenses, so too we seek to protect the unborn, to end the manipulation of schoolchildren by utopian planners, and permit the acknowledgement of a Supreme Being in our classrooms just as we allow such acknowledgements in other public institutions."[68]

The essence of this fusionist synthesis was "cutting the size and scope" of the national government and "returning power to the states and communities" to allow the traditional "social consensus," its "robust individualism," and the free market to restore prosperity and civic vitality. Ronald Reagan took Meyer's idea of this Western synthesis into government and could claim some success in translating it into power, at least for a while. Its future, however, must be viewed as more problematical.

Works

• The Moulding of Communists: the training of the Communist cadre, New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1961.
• In Defense of Freedom: A Conservative Credo, Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1962
• Left, Right and Center: Essays on Liberalism and Conservatism in the United States, ed. by Robert Goldwin, Frank Meyer, et al., Chicago: Rand, McNally, 1965
• The Conservative Mainstream, New Rochelle: Arlington House, 1969.

References

1. E. J. Dionne, Jr., Why Americans Hate Politics, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991, p. 161.
2. "Why Are Jews Conservative?". investigations and fantasies. 2014-09-29. Retrieved 2018-10-15.
3. https://issuu.com/renatos.grun/docs/in_ ... of_freedom
4. William C. Dennis "Foreword" in Frank S. Meyer, In Defense of Freedom and Other Essays, Indianapolis, Liberty Fund, 1996
5. Dennis, pp. xii–xiii
6. pages xxxiii
7. "Kinds of Rationalism," Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1967
8. In Defense, 210
9. In Defense, 221
10. In Defense, 219
11. In Defense, 220–01
12. In Defense, 222
13. In Defense, 223–
14. In Defense, 215–6
15. The Study of Administration, Washington, D.C., Public Affairs Press, 1955; originally published 1887
16. In Defense, 57
17. In Defense, 74
18. In Defense, 75
19. In Defense, 78
20. In Defense, 83–84
21. In Defense, 100
22. In Defense, 82
23. In Defense, 69
24. In Defense, 121
25. In Defense, 81
26. In Defense, 84–86
27. In Defense, 157
28. In Defense, 79–80
29. In Defense, 87–8
30. In Defense, 98
31. In Defense, 80
32. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History 1953
33. Donald J. Devine. America's Way Back, Wlimington, Delaware, ISI Books, 2012, Ch. 6
34. Russell Kirk, "An Ideologue of Liberty," Sewanee Review, April–June 1964, 349–350
35. In Defense, 3
36. In Defense, 59
37. In Defense, 125
38. In Defense, 123
39. In Defense, 5
40. In Defense, 127
41. Stanley Parry, "The Faces of Freedom." Modern Age, Spring 1964, 208–210
42. In Defense, 134
43. In Defense, 141
44. Brent Bozell, "Freedom or Virtue?" in Freedom and Virtue: The Conservative/Libertarian Debate, edited by George W. Carey, Wilmington, Delaware: ISI Books, 1998, 20–37
45. In Defense, 84
46. Stanley Parry, "The Restoration of Tradition," Modern Age, Spring 1961, 125–138
47. In Defense, 137
48. In Defense, 842
49. Jonathan Adler's "Frank Meyer: The Fusionist as Federalist" Publius, Fall 2004
50. Harry V. Jaffa, "Lincoln and the Cause of Freedom," National Review, September 21, 1965, 827–828 and 842
51. James Burnham, Congress and the American Tradition
52. Meyer, "The Attack on the Congress" in The Conservative Mainstream
53. In Defense, 156
54. Meyer, "The Court Challenges the Congress," "Confusion in the Court," "Other-Directed Champion of Other-Directed Court," "The Constitutional Crisis," and "Frank v. Maryland: The Knock on the Door," in The Conservative Mainstream
55. Ronald Hamowy, "Liberalism and Neo-Conservatism: Is a Synthesis Possible?" Modern Age Fall 1964, 350–359
56. Murray Rothbard, "Conservatism and Freedom: A Libertarian Comment." Modern Age, Spring 1961, 217–220
57. In Defense, 218
58. Meyer, "The Revolt Against Congress" and "The Attack on the Congress," in The Conservative Mainstream
59. Murray Rothbard, "Frank S. Meyer: The Fusionist as Libertarian Manqué." Modern Age, Fall 1981, 352–363
60. Paul Gottfried, "Toward a New Fusionism? The old right makes new alliances" Policy Review, Fall 1987, 64–70
61. Joseph Bottum, "Social Conservatism and the New Fusionism." in Varieties of Conservatism in America, edited by Peter Berkowitz. Stanford, Hoover Institute Press, 2004, 31–47
62. F. A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1978, 54–70
63. Hayek, 60
64. Hayek, 61
65. Hayek, 61–2
66. Hayek, 63
67. Hayek, 69
68. Ronald Reagan, "Address to the Conservative Political Action Conference," March 20, 1981, "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2012-01-10. Retrieved 2012-01-29.

Further reading

• Preble, Christopher (2008). "Meyer, Frank S. (1909–1972)". In Hamowy, Ronald (ed.). The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE; Cato Institute. p. 328. doi:10.4135/9781412965811.n200. ISBN 978-1-4129-6580-4. LCCN 2008009151. OCLC 750831024.

External links

• Ronald Reagan, "Address to the Conservative Political Action Conference," March 20, 1981

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Part 1 of 2

William F. Buckley Jr.
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Buckley at the second inauguration of US President Ronald Reagan in 1985
Born William Francis Buckley
November 24, 1925
New York City, New York, U.S.
Died February 27, 2008 (aged 82)
Stamford, Connecticut, U.S.
Occupation
Editorauthorpolitical commentator
Alma mater Yale University
Subject
American conservatismpoliticsanti-communismespionage
Spouse Patricia Taylor Buckley
(m. 1950; died 2007)
Children Christopher Buckley
Relatives
James L. Buckley (brother)
Patricia Buckley Bozell (sister)
Reid Buckley (brother)
L. Brent Bozell Jr. (brother-in-law)
L. Brent Bozell III (nephew)
William F. B. O'Reilly (nephew)
Military career
Service/branch United States Army
Years of service 1944–1946
Rank Second Lieutenant
Battles/wars World War II

William Frank Buckley Jr. (born William Francis Buckley;[1] November 24, 1925 – February 27, 2008) was an American public intellectual and conservative author[2] and commentator. In 1955, Buckley founded National Review, a magazine that stimulated the conservative movement in the late-20th century United States. Buckley hosted 1,429 episodes of the public affairs television show Firing Line (1966–1999), the longest-running public affairs show in television history with a single host, where he became known for his transatlantic accent and wide vocabulary.[3]

Buckley wrote God and Man at Yale (1951) and more than fifty other books on diverse topics, including writing, speaking, history, politics, and sailing. Buckley's works include a series of novels featuring fictitious CIA agent Blackford Oakes. He also penned a nationally syndicated newspaper column.[4][5]

Buckley referred to himself as either a libertarian or conservative.[6][7] George H. Nash, a historian of the modern American conservative movement, said Buckley was "arguably the most important public intellectual in the United States in the past half century. For an entire generation, he was the preeminent voice of American conservatism and its first great ecumenical figure."[8] Buckley's primary contribution to politics was a fusion of traditionalist conservatism and classical liberalism; that fusion laid the groundwork for a rightward shift in the Republican Party, as exemplified by Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan.

Buckley was born November 24, 1925, in New York City, the son of Aloise Josephine Antonia (Steiner) and William Frank Buckley, a Texas-born lawyer and oil developer.[9] His mother, from New Orleans, was of Swiss-German, German, and Irish descent, while his paternal grandparents, from Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, were of Irish ancestry.[10] The sixth of ten children, Buckley moved as a boy with his family to Mexico,[11] and then to Sharon, Connecticut, before beginning his formal schooling in Paris, where he attended first grade. By age seven, he received his first formal training in English at a day school in London; his first and second languages were Spanish and French.[12] As a boy, Buckley developed a love for music, sailing, horses, hunting, and skiing. All of these interests would be reflected in his later writings. Buckley was homeschooled through the eighth grade using the Calvert School of Baltimore's Homeschool Curriculum.[13] Just before World War II, at age 12–13, he attended the Jesuit preparatory school St John's Beaumont in England.

Buckley had nine siblings, including eldest sister Aloise Buckley Heath, a writer and conservative activist;[14] sister Maureen Buckley-O'Reilly (1933–1964), who married Gerald A. O'Reilly (the CEO of Richardson-Vicks Drugs); sister Priscilla L. Buckley (author of Living It Up With National Review: A Memoir, for which William wrote the foreword); sister Patricia Buckley Bozell, who was Patricia Taylor's roommate at Vassar before each married; brother Reid Buckley, an author, debate-master, and founder of the Buckley School of Public Speaking; and brother James L. Buckley, who became a U.S. Senator from New York and was later a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.[15]

During the war, Buckley's family took in the future British historian Alistair Horne (son of Sir Allan Horne) as a child war evacuee. He and Horne remained lifelong friends. Buckley and Horne both attended the Millbrook School in Millbrook, New York, graduating as members of the class of 1943. Buckley was a member of the American Boys' Club for the Defense of Errol Flynn (ABCDEF) during Flynn's trial for statutory rape in 1943. At Millbrook, Buckley founded and edited the school's yearbook, The Tamarack; this was his first experience in publishing. When Buckley was a young man, his father was an acquaintance of libertarian author Albert Jay Nock. William F. Buckley Sr., encouraged his son to read Nock's works.

As a youth, Buckley developed many musical talents. He played the harpsichord[16] very well, later calling it "the instrument I love beyond all others".[17] He was an accomplished pianist and appeared once on Marian McPartland's National Public Radio show Piano Jazz.[18] A great admirer of Johann Sebastian Bach,[17] Buckley said that he wanted Bach's music played at his funeral.[19]

Military service, higher education, and the CIA

Buckley attended the National Autonomous University of Mexico (or UNAM) in 1943. The following year, upon his graduation from the US Army Officer Candidate School, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the United States Army. In his book, Miles Gone By, he briefly recounts being a member of Franklin Roosevelt's honor guard upon the President's death. He served stateside throughout the war at Fort Benning, Georgia; Fort Gordon, Georgia; and Fort Sam Houston, Texas. In an infamous television debate with Gore Vidal (see below), Buckley told Vidal: "Stop calling me a crypto-Nazi, or I'll sock you in the face. I was in the infantry during the last war." To which Vidal answered: "You were not. I was. You were not." [20]

At the end of World War II in 1945, Buckley enrolled in Yale University, where he became a member of the secret Skull and Bones society[21][22] and was a masterful debater.[22][23] He was an active member of the Conservative Party of the Yale Political Union,[24] and also served as Chairman of the Yale Daily News and as an informer for the FBI.[25] Buckley studied political science, history, and economics at Yale, graduating with honors in 1950.[22] Buckley excelled on the Yale Debate Team; under the tutelage of Yale professor Rollin G. Osterweis, Buckley honed his acerbic style.

In 1951, along with many other Ivy League alumni, Buckley was recruited into the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA); he served for two years, including one year in Mexico City working on political action for E. Howard Hunt;[26] who was later jailed for his part in the Watergate affair. The two officers remained lifelong friends.[27] In a November 1, 2005, column for National Review, Buckley recounted that while he worked for the CIA, the only employee of the organization that he knew was Hunt, his immediate boss. While in Mexico, Buckley edited The Road to Yenan, a book by Peruvian author Eudocio Ravines.

Marriage and family

In 1950, Buckley married Patricia Aldyen Austin "Pat" Taylor (1926–2007), daughter of Canadian industrialist Austin C. Taylor. He met Taylor, a Protestant from Vancouver, British Columbia, while she was a student at Vassar College. She later became a prominent fundraiser for such charitable organizations as the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, the Institute of Reconstructive Plastic Surgery at New York University Medical Center and the Hospital for Special Surgery. She also raised money for Vietnam War veterans and AIDS patients. On April 15, 2007, Pat Buckley died at age 80 of an infection after a long illness.[28] After her death, Buckley seemed "dejected and rudderless", according to friend Christopher Little.[29]

William and Patricia Buckley had one son, author Christopher Buckley. They lived at 778 Park Avenue in Manhattan.[30]

Religious views

See also: Mater si, magistra no

Buckley was raised a Catholic and was a member of the Knights of Malta.[31] He described his faith by saying, "I grew up, as reported, in a large family of Catholics without even a decent ration of tentativeness among the lot of us about our religious faith."[32] When he attended Millbrook School, Buckley was permitted to attend Catholic Mass at a nearby church despite the school's Protestant affiliation. As a youth, he became aware of anti-Catholic bias in the United States through reading American Freedom and Catholic Power, a Paul Blanshard book that accused American Catholics of having "divided loyalties".

The release of his first book, God and Man at Yale, in 1951 was met with some specific criticism pertaining to his Catholicism. McGeorge Bundy, dean of Harvard at the time, wrote in The Atlantic that "it seems strange for any Roman Catholic to undertake to speak for the Yale religious tradition". Henry Sloane Coffin, a Yale trustee, accused Buckley's book of "being distorted by his Roman Catholic point of view" and stated that Buckley "should have attended Fordham or some similar institution".[33]

In his 1997 book Nearer, My God, Buckley condemned what he viewed as "the Supreme Court's war against religion in the public school" and argued that Christian faith was being replaced by "another God ... multiculturalism".[34] As an adult, Buckley regularly attended the Tridentine Mass in Connecticut.[35] He disapproved of the liturgical reforms following the Second Vatican Council.[36] Buckley also revealed an interest in the writings and revelations of the 20th Century Italian writer Maria Valtorta.[37] In his spiritual memoir, Buckley reproduced Valtorta's detailed accounts of Jesus Christ's crucifixion; these accounts were based on Valtorta's visionary experiences of Christ and the mystical revelations she recorded in her book The Poem of the Man-God.

First books

God and Man at Yale


Buckley (right) and L. Brent Bozell Jr. promote their book McCarthy and His Enemies, 1954

Buckley's first book, God and Man at Yale, was published in 1953. A critique of Yale University, Buckley argued that the school had strayed from its original mission. Critics viewed the work as miscasting the role of academic freedom.[38] Buckley himself credited the attention the book received in the media to the "Introduction" written by John Chamberlain, saying that it "chang[ed] the course of his life" and that the famous Life magazine editorial writer had acted out of "reckless generosity."[39] William F. Buckley Jr. was referred to in the novel The Manchurian Candidate by Richard Condon in 1959 as "that fascinating young man who wrote about man and God at Yale."

McCarthy and His Enemies

In 1954, Buckley and his brother-in-law L. Brent Bozell Jr. co-authored a book, McCarthy and His Enemies. Bozell worked with Buckley at The American Mercury in the early 1950s when it was edited by William Bradford Huie.[40] The book strongly defended Senator Joseph McCarthy as a patriotic crusader against communism. The book asserted that "McCarthyism ... is a movement around which men of good will and stern morality can close ranks."[41] Buckley edited The American Mercury in 1951 and 1952, but left after perceiving newly emerging anti-Semitic tendencies in the magazine.[42]

National Review

Buckley founded National Review in 1955 at a time when there were few publications devoted to conservative commentary. He served as the magazine's editor-in-chief until 1990.[43][44] During that time, National Review became the standard-bearer of American conservatism, promoting the fusion of traditional conservatives and libertarians. Examining postwar conservative intellectual history, Kim Phillips-Fein writes:

The most influential synthesis of the subject remains George H. Nash's The Conservative Intellectual Tradition since 1945 ... He argued that postwar conservatism brought together three powerful and partially contradictory intellectual currents that previously had largely been independent of each other: libertarianism, traditionalism, and anticommunism. Each particular strain of thought had predecessors earlier in the twentieth (and even nineteenth) centuries, but they were joined in their distinctive postwar formulation through the leadership of William F. Buckley Jr. and National Review. The fusion of these different, competing, and not easily reconciled schools of thought led to the creation, Nash argued, of a coherent modern Right.[45][46]

Buckley sought out intellectuals who were ex-Communists or had once worked on the far Left, including Whittaker Chambers, William Schlamm, John Dos Passos, Frank Meyer and James Burnham,[47] as editors and writers for National Review. When Burnham became a senior editor, he urged the adoption of a more pragmatic editorial position that would extend the influence of the magazine toward the political center. Smant (1991) finds that Burnham overcame sometimes heated opposition from other members of the editorial board (including Meyer, Schlamm, William Rickenbacker, and the magazine's publisher, William A. Rusher), and had a significant impact on both the editorial policy of the magazine and on the thinking of Buckley himself.[48]

Defining the boundaries of conservatism

See also: Conservatism in the United States

Buckley and his editors used National Review to define the boundaries of conservatism and to exclude people, ideas or groups they considered unworthy of the conservative title.[49] For example, Buckley denounced Ayn Rand, the John Birch Society, George Wallace, racists, white supremacists, and anti-Semites.

When he first met author Ayn Rand, according to Buckley, she greeted him with the following: "You are much too intelligent to believe in God."[50][51] In turn, Buckley felt that "Rand's style, as well as her message, clashed with the conservative ethos"[52] and he decided that Rand's hostility to religion made her philosophy unacceptable to his understanding of conservatism. After 1957, he attempted to weed her out of the conservative movement by publishing Whittaker Chambers's highly negative review of Rand's Atlas Shrugged.[53][54] In 1964, he wrote of "her desiccated philosophy's conclusive incompatibility with the conservative's emphasis on transcendence, intellectual and moral," as well as "the incongruity of tone, that hard, schematic, implacable, unyielding, dogmatism that is in itself intrinsically objectionable, whether it comes from the mouth of Ehrenburg, Savonarola—or Ayn Rand."[55] Other attacks on Rand were penned by Garry Wills and M. Stanton Evans. Nevertheless, Burns argues, her popularity and her influence on the Right forced Buckley and his circle into a reconsideration of how traditional notions of virtue and Christianity could be integrated with all-out support for capitalism.[56]

During the 1950s, Buckley worked to remove anti-Semitism from the conservative movement and barred holders of those views from working for National Review.[57]

In 1962, Buckley denounced Robert W. Welch Jr. and the John Birch Society in National Review as "far removed from common sense" and urged the Republican Party to purge itself of Welch's influence.[58]

Views on race and segregation

In the 1950s and early 1960s, Buckley opposed federal civil rights legislation and expressed support for continued racial segregation in the South. In Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace, author Nancy MacLean states that National Review made James J. Kilpatrick—a prominent supporter of segregation in the South--"its voice on the civil rights movement and the Constitution, as Buckley and Kilpatrick united North and South in a shared vision for the nation that included upholding white supremacy".[59] In the August 24, 1957 issue of National Review, Buckley's editorial "Why the South Must Prevail" spoke out explicitly in favor of temporary segregation in the South until "long term equality could be achieved". It argued that "the central question that emerges ... is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas where it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes—the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race."[60][61][62] Buckley opined that temporary segregation in the South was a good idea at the time (in 1957) and the black population lacked the education, economic, and cultural development to make racial equality possible. Buckley claimed that the white South had "the right to impose superior mores for whatever period it takes to effect a genuine cultural equality between the races".[63][64][65][66] Two weeks after that editorial was published, another prominent conservative writer, L. Brent Bozell Jr. (Buckley's brother-in-law), wrote in the National Review: "This magazine has expressed views on the racial question that I consider dead wrong, and capable of doing great hurt to the promotion of conservative causes. There is a law involved, and a Constitution, and the editorial gives White Southerners leave to violate them both in order to keep the Negro politically impotent."[67][68]

Politico indicates that during the administration of Lyndon B. Johnson, Buckley's writing grew more accommodating toward the civil rights movement. In his columns, he "ridiculed practices designed to keep African Americans off the voter registration rolls", "condemned proprietors of commercial establishments who declined service to African Americans in violation of the recently enacted 1964 Civil Rights Act", and showed "little patience" for "Southern politicians who incited racial violence and race-baited in their campaigns".[69] However, Buckley continued to downplay structural racism and place a large amount of blame for lack of economic growth on the black community itself, most prominently during a highly publicized 1965 debate with African-American writer James Baldwin at the Cambridge Union.[70][71] In the late 1960s, Buckley disagreed with segregationist George Wallace and debated against his segregationist platform on Firing Line.[72]

Buckley later said he wished National Review had been more supportive of civil rights legislation in the 1960s.[73] He grew to admire Martin Luther King, Jr. and supported the creation of a Martin Luther King, Jr. Day national holiday memorializing him.[57] In 2004, Buckley told Time, "'I once believed we could evolve our way up from Jim Crow. I was wrong. Federal intervention was necessary.'"[69]

Buckley attempted in 2004 to clarify his earlier comments on race, saying: "[T]he point I made about white cultural supremacy was sociological." Buckley also linked his usage of the word advancement to its usage in the name NAACP, stating that "[the] call for the 'advancement' of colored people presupposes they are behind. Which they were, in 1958, by any standards of measurement."[74]

Democracy and communism

Buckley's opposition to Communism extended to support for the overthrow and replacement of leftist governments by nondemocratic forces. Buckley supported Spanish authoritarian dictator General Francisco Franco, who led the rightist military rebellion in its military defeat of the Spanish Republic. He called Franco "an authentic national hero," applauding his overthrow of Spanish Republican "visionaries, ideologues, Marxists and nihilists."[75] He supported the military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, who led the 1973 coup that overthrew Chilean president Salvador Allende's democratically elected Marxist government; Buckley referred to Allende as "a president who was defiling the Chilean constitution and waving proudly the banner of his friend and idol, Fidel Castro."[76]

The Buckley Rule

National Review will support the rightwardmost viable candidate.[77]

The Buckley Rule states that National Review "will support the rightwardmost viable candidate" for a given office. Buckley first stated the Buckley Rule during the 1964 Republican primary election featuring Barry Goldwater and Nelson Rockefeller. The Rule is often misquoted and misapplied as proclaiming support for "the rightwardmost electable candidate", or simply the most electable candidate.

According to National Review's Neal B. Freeman, the Buckley Rule meant that National Review would support "somebody who saw the world as we did. Somebody who would bring credit to our cause. Somebody who, win or lose, would conservatize the Republican party and the country. It meant somebody like Barry Goldwater."[78]

Political commentary and action

Young Americans for Freedom and Barry Goldwater

In 1960, Buckley helped form Young Americans for Freedom (YAF). The YAF was guided by principles Buckley called "The Sharon Statement". Buckley was proud of the successful campaign of his older brother, Jim Buckley, on the Conservative Party ticket to capture the US Senate seat from New York State held by incumbent Republican Charles Goodell in 1970, giving very generous credit to the activist support of the New York State chapter of Y.A.F. Buckley served one term in the Senate, then was defeated by Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 1976.[79]

In 1963–64, Buckley mobilized support for the candidacy of Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, first for the Republican nomination against New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller and then for the Presidency. Buckley used National Review as a forum for mobilizing support for Goldwater.[80]

On the Right

Buckley's column On the Right was syndicated by Universal Press Syndicate beginning in 1962. From the early 1970s, his twice-weekly column was distributed to more than 320 newspapers across the country.

Edgar Herbert Smith Jr.

In 1962, the convicted murderer Edgar Smith began a correspondence with Buckley during which Buckley began to doubt Smith's guilt, later stating that the case was "inherently implausible".[81]

An article by Buckley in November 1965, published in Esquire, drew national media attention:

Smith said he told Hommell during their brief conversation ... on the night of the murder just where he had discarded his pants. The woman who occupies property across the road from which Smith claimed to have thrown the pants ... swore at the trial that she had seen Hommell rummaging there the day after the murder. The pants were later found [by the police] near a well-travelled road ... Did Hommell find them, and leave them in the other location, thinking to discredit Smith's story, and make sure they would turn up?[81]

This brought renewed media interest in a Don Hommell, who Smith claimed was the real killer.[81]

In 1971, Smith was able to have a retrial. He walked free later that year. In 1976, he attempted another murder and was sentenced to life in prison. He also admitted that he had, in fact, committed the first murder with which he had been charged.[82]

Mayoral candidacy

In 1965, Buckley ran for mayor of New York City as the candidate for the new Conservative Party. He ran to restore momentum to the conservative cause in the wake of Goldwater's defeat.[83] He tried to take votes away from the relatively liberal Republican candidate and fellow Yale alumnus John Lindsay, who later became a Democrat. Buckley did not expect to win, and when asked what he would do if he won the race, Buckley responded "Demand a recount."[84] He used an unusual campaign style; during one televised debate with Lindsay, Buckley declined to use his allotted rebuttal time and instead replied, "I am satisfied to sit back and contemplate my own former eloquence."

To relieve traffic congestion, Buckley proposed charging drivers a fee to enter the central city and creation of a network of bike lanes. He opposed a civilian review board for the New York Police Department, which Lindsay had recently introduced to control police corruption and install community policing.[85] Buckley finished third with 13.4% of the vote, possibly having inadvertently aided Lindsay's election by instead taking votes from Democratic candidate Abe Beame.[84]

Break with the Nixon administration

In July 1971, Buckley assembled a group of conservatives to discuss some of Nixon's domestic and foreign policies that the group opposed. In August 1969, Nixon had proposed and later attempted to enact welfare legislation known as the Family Assistance Plan (FAP), which would establish a national income floor of $1600 per year for a family of four.[86] On the international front he negotiated arms talks with the Soviet Union and initiated relations with China, which Buckley, as a hawk and anti-communist, opposed. The group, known as the Manhattan Twelve, included National Review's publisher William A. Rusher and editors James Burnham and Frank Meyer. Other organizations represented were the newspaper Human Events, The Conservative Book Club, Young Americans for Freedom, and the American Conservative Union.[87] On July 28, 1971, they published a letter announcing that they would no longer support Nixon.[88] The letter said, "In consideration of his record, the undersigned, who have heretofore generally supported the Nixon Administration, have resolved to suspend our support of the Administration." Buckley would later go on to join the administration as a delegate to the UN.

Firing Line


Buckley with President Ronald Reagan at Reagan's birthday celebration, 1986


Buckley with Reagan in the Oval Office, 1988

For many Americans, Buckley's erudition on his weekly PBS show Firing Line (1966–1999) was their primary exposure to him and his manner of speech, often with vocabulary common in academia but unusual on television.[89]

Throughout his career as a media figure, Buckley had received much criticism—largely from the American left, but also from certain factions on the right, such as the John Birch Society and its second president, Larry McDonald, as well as from Objectivists.[90]

In 1953–54, long before he founded Firing Line, Buckley was an occasional panelist on the conservative public affairs program Answers for Americans broadcast on ABC and based on material from the H. L. Hunt–supported publication Facts Forum.[91]

Feud with Gore Vidal



When asked if there was one person with whom Buckley would not share a stage, Buckley's response was Gore Vidal. Likewise, Vidal's antagonism toward Buckley was well known, even before 1968.[92] Buckley appeared in a series of televised debates with Vidal during the 1968 Republican National Convention in Miami and the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

In their penultimate debate on August 28 of that year, the two disagreed over the actions of the Chicago Police Department and the protesters at the ongoing convention. In reference to the response of the police involved in supposedly taking down a Viet Cong flag, moderator Howard K. Smith asked whether raising a Nazi flag during the Second World War would have elicited a similar response. Vidal responded that people were free to state their political views as they saw fit, whereupon Buckley interrupted and noted that people were free to speak their views but others were also free to ostracize them for holding those views, noting that in the US during the Second World War "some people were pro-Nazi and they were well treated by those who ostracized them—and I'm for ostracizing people who egg on other people to shoot American Marines and American soldiers. I know you [Vidal] don't care because you have no sense of identification with—". Vidal then interjected that "the only sort of pro- or crypto-Nazi I can think of is yourself," whereupon Smith interjected, "Now let's not call names." Buckley, visibly angered, rose several inches from his seat and replied, "Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I'll sock you in your goddamn face, and you'll stay plastered."[93] Buckley later apologized in print for having called Vidal a "queer" in a burst of anger rather than in a clinical context, but also reiterated his distaste for Vidal as an "evangelist for bisexuality": "The man who in his essays proclaims the normalcy of his affliction, and in his art the desirability of it, is not to be confused with the man who bears his sorrow quietly. The addict is to be pitied and even respected, not the pusher."[94] The debates are chronicled in the 2015 documentary Best of Enemies.

This feud continued the following year in the pages of Esquire, which commissioned essays from both Buckley and Vidal on the television incident. Buckley's essay "On Experiencing Gore Vidal" was published in the August 1969 issue. In September, Vidal responded with his own essay, "A Distasteful Encounter with William F. Buckley".[95] In it Vidal strongly implied that, in 1944, Buckley's unnamed siblings, and possibly Buckley himself, had vandalized a Protestant church in their Sharon, Connecticut, hometown after the pastor's wife had sold a house to a Jewish family. He also implied that Buckley was a homosexual[96] and a "racist, antiblack, anti-Semitic and a pro-crypto Nazi."[97] Buckley sued Vidal and Esquire for libel; Vidal counter-claimed for libel against Buckley, citing Buckley's characterization of Vidal's novel Myra Breckenridge as pornography. After Buckley received an out-of-court settlement from Esquire, he also dropped the suit against Vidal. Both cases were dropped,[98] with Buckley settling for court costs paid by Esquire magazine, which had published the piece, while Vidal, who did not sue the magazine, absorbed his own court costs, but neither had paid each other compensation. Buckley also received an editorial apology in the pages of Esquire as part of the settlement.[98][99]

The feud was reopened in 2003 when Esquire republished the original Vidal essay, at which time further legal action against the magazine resulted in Buckley's being compensated both personally and for his legal fees, along with an editorial notice and apology in the pages of Esquire, again.

Buckley maintained a philosophical antipathy towards Vidal's other bête noire, Norman Mailer, calling him "almost unique in his search for notoriety and absolutely unequalled in his co-existence with it."[100] Meanwhile, Mailer summed up Buckley as having a "second-rate intellect incapable of entertaining two serious thoughts in a row."[101] After Mailer's 2007 death, however, Buckley wrote warmly about their personal acquaintance.

Associations with liberal politicians

Buckley became close friends with liberal Democratic activist Allard K. Lowenstein. Buckley featured Lowenstein on numerous Firing Line programs, publicly endorsed his candidacies for US Congress, and delivered a eulogy at his funeral.[102][103]

Buckley was also friends with economist John Kenneth Galbraith[104][105] and former senator and presidential candidate George McGovern,[106] both of whom he frequently featured or debated on Firing Line and college campuses. He and Galbraith were also popular for their occasional appearances on The Today Show, where host Frank McGee would introduce them and then deftly step aside and defer to the verbal thrust and parry.[107]

United Nations delegate

In 1973, the Nixon Administration appointed Buckley to serve as a delegate to the United Nations, upon which Buckley would later write a book.[108] In 1981, Buckley informed President-elect (and personal friend) Ronald Reagan that he would decline any official position offered to him. Reagan jokingly replied that was too bad, because he had wanted to make Buckley ambassador to (then Soviet-occupied) Afghanistan. Buckley replied that he was willing to take the job but only if he were to be supplied with "10 divisions of bodyguards".[109]

Amnesty International

In the late 1960s, Buckley joined the Board of Directors of Amnesty International USA.[110] He resigned in January 1978 in protest over the organization's stance against capital punishment as expressed in its Stockholm Declaration of 1977, which he said would lead to the "inevitable sectarianization of the amnesty movement".[111]

Views on HIV/AIDS

In an op-ed piece in The New York Times on March 18, 1986, Buckley addressed the AIDS epidemic. Calling it "a fact" that AIDS is "the special curse of the homosexual," Buckley argued that people infected with the disease should only marry if they agreed to sterilization and that universal testing—led by insurance companies, not the government—should be mandatory. Most controversially of all, he wrote: "Everyone detected with AIDS should be tattooed in the upper forearm, to protect common-needle users, and on the buttocks, to prevent the victimization of other homosexuals."[112] The piece led to much criticism; some gay activists advocated boycotting Patricia Buckley's fund-raising efforts for AIDS. William Buckley later back-tracked from the piece, but in 2004 he told The New York Times Magazine, "If the protocol had been accepted, many who caught the infection unguardedly would be alive. Probably over a million."[113]

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Part 2 of 2

Spy novelist

In 1975, Buckley recounted being inspired to write a spy novel by Frederick Forsyth's The Day of the Jackal: "... If I were to write a book of fiction, I'd like to have a whack at something of that nature."[114] He went on to explain that he was determined to avoid the moral ambiguity of Graham Greene and John le Carré. Buckley wrote the 1976 spy novel Saving the Queen, featuring Blackford Oakes as a rule-bound CIA agent, based in part on his own CIA experiences. Over the next 30 years, he would write another ten novels featuring Oakes. New York Times critic Charlie Rubin wrote that the series "at its best, evokes John O'Hara in its precise sense of place amid simmering class hierarchies".[115] Stained Glass, second in the series, won a 1980 National Book Award in the one-year category Mystery (paperback).[116][a]

Buckley was particularly concerned about the view that what the CIA and the KGB were doing was morally equivalent. He wrote in his memoirs, "To say that the CIA and the KGB engage in similar practices is the equivalent of saying that the man who pushes an old lady into the path of a hurtling bus is not to be distinguished from the man who pushes an old lady out of the path of a hurtling bus: on the grounds that, after all, in both cases someone is pushing old ladies around."[117]

Buckley began writing on computers in 1982, starting with a Zenith Z-89.[118] According to his son, Buckley developed an almost fanatical loyalty to WordStar, installing it on every new PC he got despite its growing obsolescence over the years. Buckley used it to write his last novel, and when asked why he continued using something so outdated, he answered "They say there's better software, but they also say there's better alphabets."

Later career


Buckley shakes hands with President George W. Bush on October 6, 2005

In 1988, Buckley helped defeat liberal Republican Senator Lowell Weicker in Connecticut. Buckley organized a committee to campaign against Weicker and endorsed his Democratic opponent, Connecticut Attorney General Joseph Lieberman.[119]

In 1991, Buckley received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President George H. W. Bush. Upon turning 65 in 1990, he retired from the day-to-day running of the National Review.[43][44] He relinquished his controlling shares of National Review in June 2004 to a pre-selected board of trustees. The following month, he published the memoir Miles Gone By. Buckley continued to write his syndicated newspaper column, as well as opinion pieces for National Review magazine and National Review Online. He remained the ultimate source of authority at the magazine and also conducted lectures and gave interviews.[120]

Views on modern-day conservatism

Buckley criticized certain aspects of policy within the modern conservative movement. Of George W. Bush's presidency, he said, "If you had a European prime minister who experienced what we've experienced it would be expected that he would retire or resign."[121]

Regarding the War in Iraq, Buckley stated, "The reality of the situation is that missions abroad to effect regime change in countries without a bill of rights or democratic tradition are terribly arduous." He added: "This isn't to say that the Iraq war is wrong, or that history will judge it to be wrong. But it is absolutely to say that conservatism implies a certain submission to reality; and this war has an unrealistic frank and is being conscripted by events."[122] In a February 2006 column published at National Review Online and distributed by Universal Press Syndicate, Buckley stated unequivocally that, "One cannot doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed." Buckley has also stated that "... it's important that we acknowledge in the inner councils of state that it (the war) has failed, so that we should look for opportunities to cope with that failure."[123]

According to Jeffrey Hart, writing in The American Conservative, Buckley had a "tragic" view of the Iraq war: he "saw it as a disaster and thought that the conservative movement he had created had in effect committed intellectual suicide by failing to maintain critical distance from the Bush administration ... At the end of his life, Buckley believed the movement he made had destroyed itself by supporting the war in Iraq."[124] Regarding the Iraq War troop surge of 2007, however, it is noted by the editors of National Review that: "Buckley initially opposed the surge, but after seeing its early success believed it deserved more time to work."[125]

Buckley was an advocate for the legalization of marijuana and some drug legalization as early as his 1965 candidacy for mayor of New York City.[126][127] He wrote a pointed pro-marijuana legalization piece for National Review in 2004 where he calls for conservatives to change their views on legalization, stating, "We're not going to find someone running for president who advocates reform of those laws. What is required is a genuine republican groundswell. It is happening, but ever so gradually. Two of every five Americans ... believe 'the government should treat marijuana more or less the same way it treats alcohol: It should regulate it, control it, tax it, and make it illegal only for children.'"[128] In his December 3, 2007 column, shortly after his wife's death, which he attributed, at least in part, to her smoking, Buckley seemed to advocate banning tobacco use in America.[129]

About neoconservatives, he said in 2004: "I think those I know, which is most of them, are bright, informed and idealistic, but that they simply overrate the reach of U.S. power and influence."[74][130][131][132][133]

Regarding Donald Trump, he described him in 2000 as a "demagogue" and a "narcissist."[134][135]

Various organizations have awards and honors named after Buckley. The Intercollegiate Studies Institute awards the William F. Buckley Award for Outstanding Campus Journalism.[136]

Death

Buckley died at his home in Stamford, Connecticut, on February 27, 2008 at the age of 82. Initially, it was reported that he was found dead at his desk in his study, a converted garage. "He died with his boots on", his son Christopher Buckley said, "after a lifetime of riding pretty tall in the saddle."[29] Subsequently, however, in his 2009 book Losing Mum and Pup: A Memoir, Christopher Buckley admitted that this account was an embellishment on his part: his father had actually been found lying on the floor of his study after suffering a fatal heart attack. At the time of his death, he had been suffering from emphysema and diabetes.[5] In a December 3, 2007, column, Buckley commented on the cause of his emphysema, citing his lifelong habit of smoking tobacco, despite endorsing a legal ban of it.[129] Buckley's body was buried at the Saint Bernard Cemetery in Sharon, Connecticut, next to his wife Patricia's.[137]

Notable members of the Republican political establishment paying tribute to Buckley included President George W. Bush,[138] former Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich, and former First Lady Nancy Reagan.[139] Bush said of Buckley, "[h]e influenced a lot of people, including me. He captured the imagination of a lot of people."[140] Gingrich added, "Bill Buckley became the indispensable intellectual advocate from whose energy, intelligence, wit, and enthusiasm the best of modern conservatism drew its inspiration and encouragement ... Buckley began what led to Senator Barry Goldwater and his Conscience of a Conservative that led to the seizing of power by the conservatives from the moderate establishment within the Republican Party. From that emerged Ronald Reagan."[141] Reagan's widow, Nancy, commented, "Ronnie valued Bill's counsel throughout his political life, and after Ronnie died, Bill and Pat were there for me in so many ways."[140]

Linguistic expertise

Buckley was well known for his command of language.[142] He came late to formal instruction in English, not learning it until he was seven years old and having earlier learned Spanish and French.[12] Michelle Tsai in Slate says that he spoke English with an idiosyncratic accent: something between an old-fashioned, upper class Mid-Atlantic accent, and British Received Pronunciation, with a Southern drawl.[143]

Rhetoric

Epstein (1972) argues that liberals were especially fascinated by Buckley, and often wanted to debate him, in part because his ideas resembled their own, for Buckley typically formulated his arguments in reaction to left-liberal opinion, rather than being founded on conservative principles that were alien to the liberals.[144]

Appel (1992) argues from rhetorical theory that Buckley's essays are often written in "low" burlesque in the manner of Samuel Butler's satirical poem "Hudibras". Considered as drama, such discourse features black-and-white disorder, a guilt-mongering logician, distorted clownish opponents, limited scapegoating, and a self-serving redemption.[145]

Lee (2008) argues that Buckley introduced a new rhetorical style that conservatives often tried to emulate. The "gladiatorial style", as Lee calls it, is flashy and combative, filled with sound bites, and leads to an inflammatory drama. As conservatives encountered Buckley's arguments about government, liberalism and markets, the theatrical appeal of Buckley's gladiatorial style inspired conservative imitators, becoming one of the principal templates for conservative rhetoric.[146]

Works

Main article: William F. Buckley Jr. bibliography
See also: List of Blackford Oakes novels

Notes

1. From 1980 to 1983 in National Book Award history there were dual awards for hardcover and paperback books in many categories. Most of the paperback award-winners were reprints, including this one.

References

1. "William Francis" in the editorial obituary "Up From Liberalism" The Wall Street Journal February 28, 2008, p. A16; Martin, Douglas, "William F. Buckley Jr., 82, Dies; Sesquipedalian Spark of Right", obituary, New York Times, February 28, 2008, which reported that his parents preferred "Frank", which would make him a "Jr.", but at his christening, the priest "insisted on a saint's name, so Francis was chosen. When the younger William Buckley was five, he asked to change his middle name to Frank, and his parents agreed. At that point, he became William F. Buckley, Jr."
2. Italie, Hillel via Associated Press. SFgate.com, San Francisco Chronicle, February 27, 2008. Accessed January 18, 2009.
3. The Wall Street Journal February 28, 2008, p. A16
4. Cumulus.hillsdale.edu Archived May 25, 2010, at the Wayback Machine
5. Martin, Douglas (February 27, 2008). "William F. Buckley Jr. Is Dead at 82". The New York Times. Retrieved February 27, 2008.
6. C-SPAN Booknotes October 23, 1993
7. Buckley, William F. Jr. Happy Days Were Here Again: Reflections of a Libertarian Journalist, Random House, ISBN 0-679-40398-1, 1993.
8. Nash, George H. (February 28, 2008). "Simply Superlative: Words for Buckley". National Review Online. Archived from the original on March 3, 2008. Retrieved February 29, 2008.
9. "Ancestry of William F. Buckley".
10. "The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography: Being the History of the United States as Illustrated in the Lives of the Founders, Builders, and Defenders of the Republic, and of the Men and Women who are Doing the Work and Moulding the Thought of the Present Time". University Microfilms. January 1, 1967 – via Google Books.
11. Judis, John B. (January 29, 2001). William F. Buckley, Jr.: Patron Saint of the Conservatives. New York City, NY: Simon and Schuster. p. 29. ISBN 978-0-7432-1797-2. Retrieved June 19, 2016. After leaving Mexico, Will moved his family to New York, where he was raising funds to launch a new oil venture in Venezuela. But he didn't think children should be brought up in the city, and within a year he had bought a forty-seven-acre estate in Sharon, a rustic town of two thousand in the northwestern corner of Connecticut.
12. Buckley, William F. Jr. (2004). Miles Gone By: A Literary Autobiography. Regnery Publishing. Early chapters recount his early education and mastery of languages.
13. "William F. Buckley Jr. – Calvert Homeschooler". Calvert Blog Network – Alumni. Calvert Education. January 28, 2014. Retrieved March 18, 2015.
14. "Aloise Buckley Heath". The News and Courier. January 21, 1967. Retrieved March 11, 2013.
15. John B. Judis, William F. Buckley Jr. (2001) pp. 312–16, 103
16. "Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr.: William F. Buckley Jr. and the Phoenix Symphony - YouTube". https://www.youtube.com. Retrieved January 8, 2019.
17. Once Again, Buckley Takes On Bach . The New York Times. Published October 25, 1992.
18. "Tanglewood Jazz Festival, September 1–3, 2006 in Lenox, Massachusetts". Allaboutjazz.com. Archived from the original on July 6, 2012. Retrieved May 6,2015.
19. "Charlie Rose". Charlie Rose. March 24, 2006. 50:43 minutes in. PBS. Archived from the original on December 16, 2014.
20. "The A-Z of Gore Vidal." The Guardian Retrieved 2019-06-08.
21. Robbins, Alexandra (2002). Secrets of the Tomb: Skull and Bones, the Ivy League, and the Hidden Paths of Power. Boston: Little, Brown. p. 41. ISBN 0-316-72091-7.
22. "'Buckley, William F(rank) Jr. (1925–2008) Biography'". Retrieved February 27, 2008.[dead link]
23. "The Manuscripts and Archives Digital Images Database (MADID)".
24. ""Richard Shapiro Wins PU Debate On Aid To China", Yale Daily News no. 88 January 22 1948 :: Yale Daily News Historical Archive". digital.library.yale.edu. Retrieved April 28, 2018.
25. Diamond, Sigmund (1992). Compromised Campus: The Collaboration of Universities with the Intelligence Community, 1945–1955. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-195-05382-1. Chapter 7 is devoted to Buckley.
26. Buckley Jr., William F. (March 4, 2007). "My friend, E. Howard Hunt". Los Angeles Times. ISSN 0458-3035. Retrieved May 6, 2015.
27. Tad Szulc, Compulsive Spy: The Strange Career of E. Howard Hunt (New York: Viking, 1974)
28. CNN February 27, 2008 Archived June 5, 2008, at the Wayback Machine
29. Buck, Rinker (February 28, 2007). "William F. Buckley Jr. 1925–2008: Icon Of The Right: Entertaining, Erudite Voice Of Conservatism". The Hartford Courant. Archived from the original on March 3, 2008. Retrieved March 1, 2008.
30. Toy, Vivian S. (March 18, 2010). "A Liberal Price Cut". The New York Times. Retrieved March 5, 2019.
31. Phelan, Matthew (2011-02-28) Seymour Hersh and the men who want him committed Archived March 2, 2011, at the Wayback Machine, Salon.com
32. Buckley, Nearer, My God. p. 241
33. Buckley, Nearer, My God p. 30
34. Buckley, Nearer, My God. p. 37
35. Ponte, Lowell (February 28, 2008). "Memories of William F. Buckley Jr". Newsmax. Archived from the original on March 2, 2008. Retrieved February 28,2008.
36. "William F. Buckley on the New Mass". Retrieved July 11, 2008.
37. "William F. Buckley's Fascination with Italian Mystic Maria Valtorta". Retrieved December 25, 2010.
38. Countryman, Vern (1952). Review of "William F. Buckley, God and Man at Yale." The Yale Law Journal, 61.2: 272-83 ("Once upon a time there was a little boy named William Buckley. Although he was a very little boy, he was much too big for his britches.").
39. Chamberlain, John, A Life With the Printed Word, Chicago: Regnery, 1982, p. 147
40. Judis, William F. Buckley Jr. (2001) p. 103
41. Buckley, William F. (1954). McCarthy and His Enemies: The Record and Its Meaning. Regnery Publishing. p. 132. ISBN 0-89526-472-2.
42. Martin, Douglas (February 27, 2008). "William F. Buckley Jr. is dead at 82". International Herald Tribune. Retrieved February 27, 2008.
43. Encyclopedia.com June 10, 1990 Archived January 12, 2009, at the Wayback Machine
44. National Review Archived January 9, 2009, at the Wayback Machine
45. Kim Phillips-Fein, "Conservatism: A State of the Field," Journal of American History, (Dec. 2011) 98#3 pp. 723–43, quote p. 729
46. George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Tradition since 1945 (1976)
47. John P. Diggins, "Buckley's Comrades: The Ex-Communist as Conservative," Dissent July 1975, Vol. 22 Issue 4, pp. 370–86
48. Kevin Smant, "Whither Conservatism? James Burnham and 'National Review,' 1955–1964," Continuity, 1991, Issue 15, pp. 83–97; Smant, Principles and Heresies: Frank S. Meyer and the Shaping of the American Conservative Movement (2002) pp. 33–66
49. Roger Chapman, Culture wars: an encyclopedia of issues, viewpoints, and voices(2009) vol. 1 p. 58
50. "Ayn Rand, R.I.P.", The National Review, April 2, 1982.
51. Baker, Hunter (October 7, 2014). "The Devil and Ayn Rand: Extending Christian Charity to Galt's Creator". The Federalist. Retrieved July 31, 2016.
52. Jennifer Burns, Goddess of the market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, 1930–1980 (2010) p. 162
53. Chambers, Whittaker (December 28, 1957). "Big Sister is Watching You". National Review (online reprint October 12, 2007). Archived from the original on October 13, 2007. Retrieved October 13, 2007.
54. Chambers, Whittaker. "Big Sister is Watching You". WhittakerChambers.org. Retrieved March 18, 2012.
55. William F. Buckley Jr., "Notes toward an Empirical Definition of Conservatism," in Frank S. Meyer, ed., What is Conservatism? (1964) p. 214
56. Jennifer Burns, "Godless Capitalism: Ayn Rand and the Conservative Movement," Modern Intellectual History, (2004) 1#3 pp. 359–85
57. Tanenhaus, Sam, on William F. Buckley, Paper Cuts blog at The New York Times website, February 27, 2008.
58. William F. Buckley Jr., "Goldwater, the John Birch Society, and Me". Commentary(March 2008) online
59. Nancy MacLean, Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace (2008) p. 46
60. Sean Wilentz, The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974–2008 (HarperCollins, 2009) p. 471
61. John B. Judis, William F. Buckley Jr.: Patron Saint of the Conservatives (2001) p. 138
62. Buckley, William F. (August 24, 1957). "Why the South Must Prevail" (PDF). National Review. 4. pp. 148–49. Retrieved September 16, 2017.
63. Judis, William F. Buckley Jr. p. 138
64. Stephen J. Whitfield, A death in the Delta: the story of Emmett Till (Johns Hopkins U.P. p. 11
65. Jeremy Lott, William F. Buckley Jr. (2010) p. 136
66. Joseph Crespinon, In Search of another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution (Princeton U.P., 2007) pp. 81–82
67. Bogus, Carl T. (November 1, 2011). "Buckley: William F. Buckley Jr. and the Rise of American Conservatism". Bloomsbury Publishing USA – via Google Books.
68. Lowndes, Joseph E. (October 1, 2008). "From the New Deal to the New Right: Race and the Southern Origins of Modern Conservatism". Yale University Press – via Google Books.
69. Felzenberg, Alvin. "How William F. Buckley, Jr., Changed His Mind on Civil Rights". POLITICO Magazine.
70. The Riverbends Channel (October 27, 2012). "James Baldwin Debates William F. Buckley (1965)" – via YouTube.
71. "Buckley and Mailer: The Difficult Friendship That Shaped the Sixties". Retrieved June 7, 2015.
72. "Anatomy Of A Takedown: William F. Buckley Jr. Vs. George Wallace". http://www.wbur.org.
73. Felzenberg, Alvin S. (2017). A Man and His Presidents: The Political Odyssey of William F. Buckley Jr. New Haven & London: Yale University Press. pp. 159–60. ISBN 978-0-300-16384-1. I once believed we could evolve our way up from Jim Crow. I was wrong. Federal intervention was necessary.
74. Sanger, Deborah, "Questions for William F. Buckley: Conservatively Speaking", interview in The New York Times Magazine, July 11, 2004. Retrieved March 6, 2008
75. National Review, 10/ 26/57
76. National Review, November 23, 1998
77. Neal B. Freeman. "Buckley Rule – According to Bill, not Karl". National Review Online.
78. Neal B. Freeman. "Buckley Rule – According to Bill, not Karl". National Review Online.
79. Judis, William F. Buckley Jr.: Patron Saint of the Conservatives pp. 185–98, 311
80. Judis, William F. Buckley Jr.: Patron Saint of the Conservatives ch. 10
81. Manning, Lona (October 9, 2009). "Edgar Smith: The Great Prevaricator". Crime Magazine. Archived from the original on January 3, 2010. Retrieved March 10, 2007.
82. Stout, David (September 24, 2017). "Edgar Smith, Killer Who Duped William F. Buckley, Dies at 83". The New York Times.
83. Jonathan Schoenwald, A Time for Choosing: The Rise of Modern American Conservatism (2002) pp. 162–89
84. Tanenhaus, Sam (October 2, 2005). "The Buckley Effect". The New York Times. Retrieved November 12, 2007.
85. Perlstein, Rick (2008). Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America. Simon and Schuster. pp. 144–46. ISBN 978-0-7432-4302-5.
86. Small, Melvin (1999). The Presidency of Richard Nixon. University Press of Kansas. ISBN 0-7006-0973-3.
87. Laurence Jurdem. October 25, 2016. When National Review Finally Had Enough of Richard Nixon: A Chorus of Disapproval:http://laurencejurdem.com/2016/10/when-national-review-finally-had-enough-of-richard-nixon-a-chorus-of-disapproval/ Archived March 12, 2018, at the Wayback Machine
88. Tad Szulc. July 29, 1971. 11 Conservatives criticize Nixon New York Times. page 7. https://www.nytimes.com/1971/07/29/arch ... -they.html
89. Charles R. Kesler and John B. Kienker (2012). Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness: Ten Years of the Claremont Review of Books. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. p. 86. ISBN 9781442213357.
90. "William F. Buckley Jr.: The Witch-Doctor is Dead". Capmag.com. Archived from the original on January 14, 2010. Retrieved May 6, 2015.
91. "MacDonald & Associates: Facts Forum press release". jfredmacdonald.com. Archived from the original on January 12, 2011. Retrieved June 13, 2011.
92. Rosen, James (September 7, 2015). "The Long, Hot Summer Of '68". National Review. 67 (16): 37–42. Retrieved September 28, 2015.
93. Video of the exchange on YouTube
94. Esquire (August 1969), p. 132
95. Vidal, Gore (September 1969). "A Distasteful Encounter with William F. Buckley Jr". Esquire. pp. 140–45, 150. Archived from the original on February 16, 2005. Retrieved February 28, 2008.
96. Colacello, Bob (January 2009). "Mr. and Mrs. Right". Vanity Fair. Retrieved June 22, 2016. In follow-up pieces in Esquire, Buckley focused on homosexual themes in Vidal's work, and Vidal responded by implying that Buckley was a homosexual and an anti-Semite, whereupon Buckley sued and Vidal countersued.
97. "Buckley Drops Vidal Suite, Settles With Esquire". New York Times. September 26, 1972. Archived from the original on January 24, 2016. Retrieved June 22,2016. Mr. Gingrich confirmed that Esquire would publish a statement in its November issue disavowing 'the most vivid statements' of the Vidal article, calling Mr. Buckley 'racist, antiblack, anti-Semitic and a pro-crypto Nazi.'
98. National Review Archived August 26, 2009, at the Wayback Machine
99. "Buckley and Vidal: One More Round". Archived from the original on August 6, 2007. Retrieved July 27, 2007.
100. National Review Archived January 9, 2009, at the Wayback Machine
101. Martin, Douglas (February 27, 2008). "William F. Buckley Jr. Is Dead at 82". The New York Times.
102. Firing Line, "Allard Lowenstein: A Retrospective", Episode #415 ArchivedNovember 4, 2013, at the Wayback Machine, May 18, 1980
103. Buckley, William F. Jr., On The Firing Line: The Public Life of Our Public Figures, 1988, pp. 423–34
104. The Sydney Morning Herald, "Mordant wit perched atop Manhattan society (Pat Buckley, 1926-2007)", Mark McGinness, April 28, 2007
105. The Daily Beast, "Buckley Bows Out of National Review", Christopher Buckley, October 14, 2008
106. C-SPAN, "Conservative v. Liberal Ideology" (Debate: William F. Buckley v. George S. McGovern), Southeast Missouri State University, April 10, 1997
107. Hoover Institute, Stanford University, Library and Archives, The Firing LineArchive Archived April 23, 2015, at the Wayback Machine
108. "William Buckley Reports on a Tour of Duty".
109. Google Video Archived January 6, 2012, at the Wayback Machine
110. Buckley, William F. (April 13, 1970). "Amnesty International". Newark Advocate. p. 4.
111. Montgomery, Bruce P. (Spring 1995). "Archiving Human Rights: The Records of Amnesty International USA". Archivaria (39).
112. The New York Times, "Crucial Steps in Combating the Aids Epidemic; Identify All the Carriers," March 18, 1986
113. New York Times Magazine, July 11, 2004
114. Interviewed by Sam Vaughan (November 24, 1925). "The Art of Fiction No. 146, William F. Buckley Jr". Paris Review. Retrieved May 6, 2015.
115. 'Last Call for Blackford Oakes': Cocktails With Philby, Charlie Rubin, The New York Times, July 17, 2005
116. "National Book Awards – 1980". National Book Foundation. Retrieved 2012-02-28. (With essay by Harold Augenbraum from the Awards' 60-year anniversary blog.)
117. Linda Bridges and John R. Coyne, Strictly Right: William F. Buckley Jr. and the American Conservative Movement (2007) p. 182
118. Shea, Tom (September 13, 1982). "Buckley finds word processing on Z-89 'liberating'". InfoWorld. p. 26. Retrieved January 9, 2015.
119. National Review Archived January 9, 2009, at the Wayback Machine
120. "A Life on the Right: William F. Buckley". NPR. Retrieved May 6, 2015.
121. "Buckley: Bush Not A True Conservative". CBS News. July 22, 2006. Retrieved May 6, 2015.
122. "Season of Conservative Sloth". Archived from the original on June 7, 2007. Retrieved July 27, 2007.
123. "It Didn't Work". National Review. Archived from the original on July 2, 2007. Retrieved July 27, 2007.
124. Right at the end, The American Conservative, March 24, 2008
125. National Review Archived July 17, 2011, at the Wayback Machine
126. "Reason Interview: William F. Buckley" (PDF). Reason: 40–44. March 1983. Retrieved May 24, 2014.
127. "The Openmind: Buckley on Drug Legalization". Retrieved July 27, 2007.
128. Buckley, William F. Jr. "Free weed. The marijuana debate". Archived from the original on August 8, 2010. Retrieved October 26, 2010.
129. Buckley, William F. Jr. (December 3, 2007). "My Smoking Confessional". Retrieved February 28, 2008.
130. Video of Buckley debating James Baldwin, October 26, 1965, Cambridge University; digitized by UC Berkeley Archived December 12, 2010, at the Wayback Machine
131. "The Collected Controversies of William F. Buckley", February 28, 2008.
132. "Where does one Start? A Guide to Reading WFB," Archived March 5, 2008, at the Wayback Machine National Review Online, February 29, 2008
133. Johns, Michael (March 7, 2008). "Michael Johns: Walking the Road that Buckley Built". Michaeljohnsonfreedomandprosperity.blogspot.com. Retrieved May 6, 2015.
134. Buckley, William. "Insights: Politics - The Demagogues are Running". Cigar Aficionado. Cigar Aficionado. Retrieved August 3, 2017.
135. Buckley, William. "On Donald Trump and Demagoguery". National Review. National Review. Retrieved August 3, 2017.
136. "Cornell Review | Buckley Award | Collegiate Network". Legalinsurrection.com. November 19, 2013. Retrieved May 6, 2015.
137. William Frank Buckley, Jr at Find a Grave
138. Bush, George W. (February 27, 2008). "Statement by the President on Death of William F. Buckley" (Press release). Office of the Press Secretary, the White House. Retrieved February 28, 2008.
139. Reagan, Nancy (February 27, 2008). "Nancy Reagan Reacts To Death Of William F. Buckley" (Press release). The Office of Nancy Reagan. Retrieved February 28,2008.
140. Italie, Hillele (February 27, 2008). "Conservative author Buckley dies at 82". Yahoo! News. Associated Press. Archived from the original on March 1, 2008. Retrieved February 28, 2008.
141. Gingrich, Newt. "Before there was Goldwater or Reagan, there was Bill Buckley". Newt.org. Archived from the original on March 6, 2008. Retrieved March 4, 2008.
142. See Schmidt, Julian. (June 6, 2005) National Review Notes & asides. (Letter to the Editor) Volume 53; Issue 2. p. 17. ("Dear Mr. Buckley: You can call off the hunt for the elusive "encephalophonic". I have it cornered in Webster's Third New International Dictionary, where the noun "encephalophone" is defined as "an apparatus that emits a continuous hum whose pitch is changed by interference of brain waves transmitted through oscillators from electrodes attached to the scalp and that is used to diagnose abnormal brain functioning." I knew right where to look, because you provoked my search for that word a generation ago, when I first (and not last) encountered it in one of your books. If it was used derisively about you, I can only infer that the reviewer's brain was set a-humming by a) his failure to follow your illaqueating (ensnaring) logic, b) his dizzied awe at your manifold talents, and/or c) his inability to distinguish lexiphanicism (the use of pretentious words) from lectio divina. I say, keep it up. We could all do with more brain vibrations.")
143. Tsai, Michelle (February 28, 2008). "Why Did William F. Buckley Jr. talk like that?". Slate. Retrieved February 28, 2008.
144. Joseph Epstein, "The Politics of William Buckley: Conservative Ideologue as Liberal Celebrity", Dissent, Oct 1972, Vol. 19 Issue 4, pp. 602–61
145. Edward C. Appel, "Burlesque drama as a rhetorical genre: The hudibrastic ridicule of William F. Buckley Jr.," Western Journal of Communication, Summer 1996, Vol. 60 Issue 3, pp. 269–84
146. Michael J. Lee, "WFB: The Gladiatorial Style and the Politics of Provocation," Rhetoric and Public Affairs, Summer 2010, Vol. 13 Issue 2, pp. 43–76

External references

• Appel, Edward C. "Burlesque drama as a rhetorical genre: The hudibrastic ridicule of William F. Buckley Jr.", Western Journal of Communication, Summer 1996, Vol. 60 Issue 3, pp. 269–84.
• Bridges, Linda; Coyne, John R. Jr. (2007). Strictly Right: William F. Buckley Jr. and the American Conservative Movement. Hoboken: Wiley. ISBN 978-0-471-75817-4.
• Buckley, Reid (1999). Strictly Speaking. New York: McGraw-Hill. ISBN 0-07-134610-4.
• Farber, David. The Rise and Fall of Modern American Conservatism: A Short History (2010) pp. 39–76
• Gottfried, Paul (1993). The Conservative Movement. ISBN 0-8057-9749-1
• Judis, John B. (1990). William F. Buckley Jr.: Patron Saint of the Conservatives. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 978-0-671-45494-4.
• Lamb, Brian (2001). Booknotes: Stories from American History. New York: Penguin. ISBN 1-58648-083-9.
• Lee, Michael J. "WFB: The Gladiatorial Style and the Politics of Provocation," Rhetoric and Public Affairs, Summer 2010, Vol. 13 Issue 2, pp. 43–76
• Miller, David (1990). Chairman Bill: A Biography of William F. Buckley Jr.. New York
• Nash, George H. The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 (2006)
• Winchell, Mark Royden (1984). William F. Buckley Jr. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company. ISBN 0-8057-7431-9.
• Sarchett, Barry W. "Unreading the Spy Thriller: The Example of William F. Buckley Jr.," Journal of Popular Culture, Fall 1992, Vol. 26 Issue 2, pp. 127–39, theoretical literary analysis
• Straus, Tamara (1997). The Literary Almanac: The Best of the Printed Word: 1900 to the Present. New York: High Tide Press. ISBN 1-56731-328-0.
• "Writings of Kirk and Buckley". American Writers: A Journey Through History. C-SPAN. Retrieved March 12, 2016.
• Chris Weinkopf (September 3, 1999). "William F. Buckley Jr". Salon.com. Retrieved May 6, 2015.
• Manning, Lona (October 9, 2009). "The Great Prevaricator". Crime Magazine. Archived from the original on October 8, 2015. Retrieved November 11, 2015.
• Glazov, Jamie. "Miles Gone By". FrontPage Magazine. Archived from the original on January 23, 2013. Retrieved May 6, 2015.
• Hickman, John (April 6, 2007). "Happy is the Columnist who has no History". BaltimoreChronicle.com. Retrieved May 6, 2015.

External links

• Media from Wikimedia Commons
• News from Wikinews
• Quotations from Wikiquote
• William F. Buckley on IMDb
• Buckley Online, a complete guide to the writings William F. Buckley at Hillsdale College
• Appearances on C-SPAN
• William F. Buckley at Library of Congress Authorities – with 109 catalog records
• William F. Buckley's FBI files, hosted at the Internet Archive: part 1, part 2

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Oxford Majlis
by The Open University
Making Britain: Discover how South Asians shaped the nation, 1870-1950
Accessed: 6/25/19

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.

The Majlis, established in 1896, was the main forum for Indian students at Oxford. It was not overtly political, to the extent of being at times bewilderingly naive. In January 1934, the Oxford Mail ran an eye-catching headline: 'FASCISM NO SOLUTION TO INDIAN PROBLEM -- Oxford Majlis' Decision in Debate With Fascists'. [24] There were other complaints of a lack of nationalist resolve. A student at left-leaning Ruskin College, Terence McCarthy, attended the Majlis's annual dinner at the Randolph Hotel in 1932 and was surprised to discover that a former viceroy of India was the chief guest. He was even more shocked when the peer broke Majlis convention by proposing a toast to the King-Emperor. 'Communist and Nationalist Indians rose to pledge loyalty. Despite all their revolutionary talk, they lacked the guts to brave the eye of Imperial England's hireling. I, a British worker, alone remained seated.' [25]

The Majlis had a chequered existence, with frequent complaints of lack of activity, paucity of membership and close-to-unmanageable debts. It staggered on from one crisis to another. What is the good of the Oxford Majlis?' one Indian student asked aloud in 1931. 'Most members are dissatisfied with it most of the time.' [26] Nevertheless, Dosoo Karaka, at one time president of the Majlis, insisted that it exercised considerable influence.

The little rectory of St Aldate's in Pembroke Street where it meets every Sunday provides an opportunity for the sixty or seventy Indians who come from various parts of that great continent, and who are scattered all over the university, to keep in touch with each other and with the latest developments in India, which the daily newspapers do not fully or accurately report. It is primarily a social body ... Although its membership is restricted to Indians it does not close its doors to others. In fact, its meetings are always attended by outsiders, who come as guests of the members of the club to get something of the Indian environment. [27]

Among the well-wishers and the curious was a regular contingent from St Hugh's. Barbara Castle recounted that Freda 'used to come with us occasionally to meetings of the Majlis, the mock parliament where Indian undergraduates threw themselves into rowdy and often disorderly debates.' [28] That's where bonds of affinity between Freda and her boyfriend developed. Freda's sense of social justice was outraged by the manner in which Indian nationalism was suppressed, and her sense of the spiritual was intrigued by the culture and philosophy of the East.

-- 2: The Gates of the World. The Lives of Freda: The Political, Spiritual and Personal Journeys of Freda Bedi -- EXCERPT, by Andrew Whitehead

Date began: 01 Jan 1896

About: The Oxford Majlis was a debating society founded in 1896 at the University by Indian Students. Following the format of the Oxford Union, and the Cambridge Majlis (founded 5 years earlier), Indian students would meet on Sunday evenings to hold formal debates. They would also hold other social events such as music, dancing and lectures from invited speakers. Each year they would hold a debate against the Cambridge Majlis.

Before Indian Independence, the Oxford Majlis would often take up debates of a political nature relating to empire and Indian’s relationship with Britain. The majority of Indian students at the University felt compelled to be part of the organization and take part in these political debates, even if they were intending to take up positions sympathetic to the British in India such as in the Indian Civil Service. The Majlis was not only restricted to Indian students; Sri Lankan and Burmese students were an integral part of the ‘Indian student’ community before 1947. The India Office and New Scotland Yard kept an eye on the Majlis in the early part of the twentieth century and were particularly concerned about their Communist sympathies in the late 1920s and 1930s.

Connections: Key members from this period include: Solomon Bandaranaike, M. C. Chagla, Govinda Krishna Chettur, Indira Gandhi, Mohammad Habib, Humayun Kabir, Basanta Kumar Mallik, K. P. S. Menon, Frank Moraes, Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy.

Examples of famous speakers to the Majlis in this period: Laurence Binyon, Rajani Palme Dutt, Ernest B. Havell, Sarojini Naidu, Shapurji Saklatvala, Rabindranath Tagore.

Related organization: Cambridge Majlis
Oxford Union

Published works: Bharat [journal]

Secondary works: The Majlis Magazine (Hilary 1986)

Chagla, Mahomedali Currim, Roses in December: An Autobiography, 1st edition 1973 (Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1990).

Chettur, G. K., The Last Enchantment: Recollections of Oxford (Mangalore: B. M. Bookshop, 1934).

Kirpalani, Santdas Khushiram, Fifty Years with the British (London: Sangam Books, 1993)

Lahiri, Shompa, Indians in Britain: Anglo-Indian Encounters, Race and Identity, 1880-1930 (London: Frank Cass, 2000).

Menon, K. P. S., Many Worlds: An Autobiography (London: Oxford University Press, 1965)

Mukherjee, Sumita, Nationalism, Education and Migrant Identities: The England-Returned (London: Routledge, 2009)

Symonds, Richard, Oxford and Empire: The Last Lost Cause? (London: Macmillan, 1986)

Archive source: K. P. S. Menon papers, Nehru Memorial Library, Delhi

L/PJ/12/4 & L/PJ/12/252, India Office Records, Asian and African Studies Reading Room, British Library, St Pancras

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Cambridge Majlis
by The Open University
Accessed: 3/20/20

Date began: 01 Jan 1891

The Cambridge Majlis was founded around 1891 for Indian students at the university. In its early days it met at the home of Dr Upendra Krishna Dutt. The society became a debating organization where Indian students at Cambridge could reason and practise debates, as well as socialize and discuss political matters. It was named after the Persian word for assembly. A number of Indian nationalist politicians came to Cambridge to address the Majlis. The Cambridge Majlis had close links with its Oxford counterpart, founded in 1896, with various joint dinners and debates.

Key individuals:

Upendra Krishna Dutt

Connections:

Members included: Subhas Chandra Bose, K. L. Gauba, Aurobindo Ghose, Fazl-i-Husain, Mirza Abol Hassan Ispahani, Mohan Kumaramangalam, Jawaharlal Nehru, Rajni Patel, Shankar Dayal Sharma.

Notable speakers included: C. F. Andrews, E. M. Forster, M. K. Gandhi, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, Sarojini Naidu, Lala Lajpat Rai.

Related organization:

Oxford Majlis

Secondary works:

Deshmukh, C. D., The Course of My Life (Bombay: Orient Longman, 1974)

Khosla, G. D., Memory’s Gay Chariot: An Autobiographical Narrative (New Delhi: Allied Publishers, 1985)

Kiernan, V. G., ‘Mohan Kumaramangalam in England’, Socialist India, (23 February 1974), pp. 5-7, 36; (2 March 1974), pp. 13-17, 24

Lahiri, Shompa, Indians in Britain: Anglo-Indian Encounters, Race and Identity, 1880-1930 (London: Frank Cass, 2000)

Mukherjee, Sumita, Nationalism, Education and Migrant Identities: The England-Returned (London: Routledge, 2009)

Visram, Rozina, Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History (London: Pluto Press, 2002)

Archive source:

Cambridge Majlis Minute Book, 1932-7, Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge

Programme cards and menus, Saroj Kumar Chatterjee Collection, King’s College, Cambridge

L/PJ/12/4, India Office Records, Asian and African Studies Reading Room, British Library, St Pancras

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François Lafitte: Analyst who highlighted the 1940 refugee scandal
by John Saville
Theguardian.com
Wed 4 Dec 2002 20.46 EST

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The vigilance, albeit belated, of the British security service provides a window on the membership and activities of the October Club. Cambridge student communism in the 1930s spawned a celebrated cluster of Soviet agents at the heart of the British establishment. When this became apparent twenty years later with the defection to Moscow of two senior figures in British intelligence, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, MI5 became alarmed about how little they knew about Oxford communists at that time. They resolved to find out -- and were assiduous in approaching one-time members of the October Club who might be happy to share information about their former comrades. They were fortunate that the club's founder -- an American, Frank Strauss Meyer -- had recanted of his student communism and was happy to cooperate. [33] And still more valuable for MI5, another onetime member of the October Club, Francois Lafitte, divulged the names of all the Oxford student communists he could recall. Freda and Bedi were both on the list -- 'Seemed to me both to be close fellow-travellers. They married and went to Lahore ... ' -- and so too was Sajjad Zaheer, a 'very capable Indian and close friend of Olive Shapley.' [34]

-- 2: The Gates of the World. The Lives of Freda: The Political, Spiritual and Personal Journeys of Freda Bedi -- EXCERPT, by Andrew Whitehead

It was his work, in the late 1930s and early 1940s, with Political and Economic Planning (PEP), a leading institute for the study of social questions, that shaped the career of François Lafitte, who has died aged 89. The professor of social policy and administration at Birmingham University (1958-80), he also chaired the British Pregnancy Advisory Service from 1968 to 1988.

Yet it was in 1940 that he published his best known work: the Penguin Special, The Internment Of Aliens. This highlighted the governmental panic in the round-up of political refugees from fascism. His account of the often appalling living conditions of their internment provoked widespread comment and shame.

There were a number of progressively minded intellectuals in and around PEP who were seriously concerned with the future of social provision for the ordinary people of Britain. There was a growing dissatisfaction with Winston Churchill's wartime coalition government on social questions, and the expectation of change was increasingly explicit. The success of the left-of-centre radical Common Wealth party in wartime byelections was testimony to those expectations. This success increased the hopes and aspirations of François - who was rejected for military service on health grounds - and many of his colleagues.

His arguments for improved social provision took a new public form when, in 1943, he joined the Times as a leader writer on social policies. In 1945 he published a somewhat concentrated survey, Britain's Way To Social Security, which indicated both the failures of existing arrangements, and the nature of the changes required.

His writing for the Times was much encouraged with the election of Clement Attlee's Labour government in the summer of 1945. During the years of that administration he was quite close to certain ministers and their civil servants. His commentaries remained sympathetic but by no means uncritical. He also continued to chair some PEP research groups.

François was born in France to a French mother, Françoise, and an American father, a syndicalist John Collier, who had met and had had a short affair with Françoise while they were both in London. She returned home to give birth in the year before the outbreak of the first world war. Her son took her family name.

François was educated first at the College Municipal in Maubeuge, close to the Belgian border, and then in London at St Olave's Grammar School, in Southwark. His mother had returned to London to live with Havelock Ellis, the psychologist of sex and sexualities. Throughout his life François sometimes indicated that he thought of himself as an adopted son of Havelock, who died in 1939.

all social hygiene, in its fullest sense, is but an increasingly complex and extended method of purification—the purification of the conditions of life by sound legislation, the purification of our own minds by better knowledge, the purification of our hearts by a growing sense of responsibility, the purification of the race itself by an enlightened eugenics, consciously aiding Nature in her manifest effort to embody new ideals of life. It was not Man, but Nature, who realized the daring and splendid idea—risky as it was—of placing the higher anthropoids on their hind limbs and so liberating their fore-limbs in the service of their nimble and aspiring brains. We may humbly follow in the same path, liberating latent forces of life and suppressing those which no longer serve the present ends of life....

social hygiene is at once more radical and more scientific than the old conception of social reform. It is the inevitable method by which at a certain stage civilization is compelled to continue its own course, and to preserve, perhaps to elevate, the race....

The great movement of social reform during the nineteenth century, we thus see, has moved in four stages, each of which has reinforced rather than replaced that which went before: (1) the effort to cleanse the gross filth of cities and to remedy obvious disorder by systematic attention to scavenging, drainage, the supply of water and of artificial light, as well as by improved policing; (2) the great system of factory legislation for regulating the conditions of work, and to some extent restraining the work of women and of children; (3) the introduction of national systems of education, and the gradual extension of the idea of education to cover far more than mere instruction; and (4), most fundamental of all and last to appear, the effort to guard the child before the school age, even at birth, even before birth, by bestowing due care on the future mother. ...

Our sense of social responsibility is developing into a sense of racial responsibility, and that development is expressed in the nature of the tasks of Social Hygiene which now lie before us.

It is the control of the reproduction of the race which renders possible the new conception of Social Hygiene.

-- The Task of Social Hygiene, by Havelock Ellis

After school, François entered Worcester College, Oxford. There he joined the October Club. Most of this Marxist group were card-carrying members of the Communist party, and François himself remained in the party until later in the 1930s when he resigned following the Moscow trials and the execution of leading Bolsheviks.

He was still in the party on graduation and, after some time in Vienna, he was active for the Communist party in the East End of London. It was not a successful period of his life, and he was recalled and transferred by the CP to work with the International Miners Federation as a research assistant. After a year or so, and following his exit from the party, in 1938 he applied successfully for a research position with PEP, which had been launched in the early years of the decade.

From 1943 to 1958 he stayed with the Times. In 1958, came the appointment at the University of Birmingham. He enjoyed teaching, and for three years he was dean of his faculty. During his academic years he wrote relatively little on what might be called his traditional subjects, but he developed a close interest in the problems of family planning.

He was especially concerned with the provision of public authority advice on all matters of birth control and abortion. In 1960 he was appointed chair of an FPA working party and in September 1963 his report, Family Planning In The Sixties, was published. It was these interests that dominated the last decades of his life.

François had married Eileen Saville in 1939, after a few somewhat tempestuous years, when Eileen's parents discovered that she was having a close relationship with François and Eileen left the family home. It was to be a happy marriage, broken by the suicide of their only son, Nicholas, in his late 20s, a tragedy which inevitably deeply affected them.

Lafitte was not always an easy person to be with, and it was his cheerful wife who greatly helped with visitors when matters became difficult. But they made a wide range of friends who were always ready to help. When Eileen died in 1996, François was faithfully looked after by a quite remarkable group, both young and old. It was a tribute to them both.

François Lafitte, social policy analyst, born August 3 1913; died November 21 2002

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Francois Lafitte, 1913-2002
Francois Lafitte, pioneering social policy analyst, worked to widen access to family planning during the 1960s.
by University of Birmingham
Blue Plaque Guide

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.

Photograph of Francois Lafitte. 1969

Francois Lafitte was Professor of Social Policy and Administration at the University of Birmingham from 1958–80 where he became interested in the matter of family planning; an area in which there was little public authority advice at the time. Lafitte was particularly concerned with matters of birth control and abortion.

Lafitte was influential in shaping post-war social policy. He cared deeply about social provision for ordinary people and was highly critical of the Family Planning Association’s failure, as he saw it, to reach couples of lower socioeconomic groups. In 1960 he was appointed chair of the Family Planning Association working party and in 1963 co-authored the influential Family Planning in the Sixties, which lead to the Family Planning Act in 1967. He also chaired the British Pregnancy Advisory Service from 1968 to 1988 and continued to campaign for improved social conditions throughout his life.

Lafitte described himself as ‘a young man of no importance who tries to be a good European’. While working for the leading institute for the study of social questions, Political and Economic Planning (later the Social Policy Institute), Lafitte’s produced his most widely known work: The Internment of Aliens, a Penguin Special published in 1940. It was the first book to bring the public’s attention to the mass and indiscriminate internment of German-speaking refugees and political exiles in Britain following Holland’s occupation by the Nazis in 1940. A number of Lafitte’s own friends had struggled against the Nazis in Germany and Austria and were later imprisoned in France and Britain as ‘enemy aliens’.

Shortly after joining The Times newspaper in 1943 to write about social policy issues, Lafitte published Britain’s Way to Social Security, which highlighted problems with the existing approach and recommended a raft of changes.

Social scientists at Birmingham continue to have an impact on every aspect of society. Their work explores many challenges including exploring the needs of new migrants, refugees and global communities; the well-being of children and families; improving lives and the security of those living in transitional and developing countries to the future of UK public services.

Lafitte with Arthur Collis and some final year Social Administration undergraduates, on University library steps. 1979


Britain’s Way to Social Security 1945
This Matter of Breeding James Seth Memorial Lecture 1974
The Internment of Aliens 1940

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Joseph Chamberlain


Joseph Chamberlain Memorial Clock Tower (Old Joe)

As High Commissioner, Milner was subordinate to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, a post held at that time by Joseph Chamberlain, who was already acquainted with Milner. They had fought Home Rule together in the election of 1886 and had both been in Egypt in 1889. They already agreed on most of the important issues of the day, combining, like other members of the Milner Group, advocacy of social welfare and imperialism. Moreover, both were strong believers in union with Ireland and a new tariff policy based on imperial preference. When Chamberlain joined Lord Salisbury's government as Secretary of State for the Colonies (1895-1903), he was eager to accept the suggestion that Milner be sent to South Africa. As Colonial Secretary, Chamberlain did a number of things that won the complete support of Milner. Among these we might mention the new constitution for Jamaica (1899), the federation of the Malay States (1895), and the creation of the Commonwealth of Australia (1900). When Chamberlain resigned from the Colonial Office in 1903 on the issue of tariff reform, the post was offered by Balfour to Milner. The latter refused in order to complete the work he had started in South Africa.

-- The Anglo-American Establishment: From Rhodes to Cliveden, by Carroll Quigley