Henry Regnery: a public private man

THOSE WHO BLINK FREQUENTLY, irritated by today's ideological mote, may have missed it. But in the trend of its popular thought and culture, in social inclination and political preference, the decade of the Eighties has taken on a decidedly conservative cast,

It's probably not pure enough for some of our more committed comrades. And this may be just as conservative as it gets. Nevertheless, it's here, having blown in with Ronald Reagan and showing some signs of lingering into the Nineties and perhaps beyond.

Where did it come from? Politically, there are numerous sources-Taft, Goldwater, Nixon (much more than we're yet able to admit), the New American Majority, the Old Right, the New Right, the New New Right, the Neoconservatives (perhaps we could call them the Left Right or, eventually, the Left Right Left), all arriving at the same point at about the same time at the end of the Seventies and joining together in the somewhat unlikely phenomenon of Reaganism.

Spiritually also it was fed by a variety of sources, among them a book by Russell Kirk entitled The Conservative Mind, published in Chicago in 1953 by Henry Regnery. According to Regnery, it was Kirk's book that gave the postwar conservative movement "its name and, more important, coherence."

Two years earlier, Regnery had published another book which was to become central to the conservative movement. The book was God and Man at Yale, the author Wm. F. Buckley Jr. It was an expensive book, costing Regnery as it did his contract with the Great Books Foundation. But the investment paid off, for, as Regnery- put it, Bill Buckley "has not only served ever since as an inspiration and a rallying point, particularly to student generations; he has given [the conservative movement] a style and rhetoric of its own, and has done more than anyone else to reconcile potentially conflicting viewpoints into a coherent intellectual force."

It has been the sometimes bewildering variety of "potentially conflicting viewpoints," characteristic of conservative thought, that typifies the books published over four decades by the Henry Regnery Company (now Regnery Gateway, and still publishing). Despite the conflicting viewpoints, however, Regnery's books were all selected, as he puts it, "for being in accord with the traditional values of Western civilization."

Some of the Regnery titles of the early years now awaken only dim and musty memories. There is the matter of immediate postwar German rehabilitation, for instance, a theme running through the works of a number of early Regnery authors, among them Victor Gollancz and Freda Utley. There are also the World War II revisionists, mostly notably William Henry Chamberlin, Charles Callan Tansill, and Admiral Husband Kimmel.

Their works explored such issues as what Holmes Alexander has called "the unconstitutional Atlantic war" and "the Pearl Harbor coverup." True, many of these arguments, postwar manifestations of pre-war positions taken by such groups as the America First Committee, which Henry Regnery's father helped found, are decidedly dated -in fact became dated on the day that Hitler declared war on the United States. However, those books did serve a purpose, one which present-day muckrakers should find laudable. In an article in Reason, Justus D. Doenecke put it this way: "Although few historians today accept Regnery's brand of revisionism, his books did much to crack official history . . . stressed the constitutional limits upon presidential war-making, and pointed out the conscious and calculated deception by the nation's highest leadership."

REGNERY'S CONTRIBUTIONS transcend that of publishing unfashionable authors crowded out by accepted theories of history, however. Even on the Right, causes are not always lost. And during the years of intellectual exile, Regnery played a central role in keeping conservative thought alive, publishing or reissuing, in addition to Kirk and Buckley, the works of James Burnham, Richard Weaver, James Jackson Kilpatrick, Felix Morley, Albert Jay Nock, Frank Meyer, Willmoore Kendall, Wilhelm Roepke, and Whittaker Chambers, to name a few.

Russell Kirk, writing to Regnery in 1952 of a new era in which an "enlightened conservatism" must play a role, had this to say about Regnery's unique contribution: "The struggle will be decided iii the minds of the rising generation-and within that generation, substantially by the minority who have the gift of reason. I do not think we need much fear the decaying 'liberalism' of the retiring generation. . . . But we need to state some certitudes for the benefit of the groping new masters of society. More than anyone else in America you have been doing just this in the books you publish." A most moving and prescient tribute, and one which goes a long way toward explaining the conservative cast of the Eighties. We owe a great deal. to Henry Regnery and his books.

We also owe Henry Regnery a good deal for his bookMemoirs of a Dissident Publisher, published in 1979 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. It is handsomely produced and elegantly written, the style, like Regnery himself, direct, unaffected, deceptively simple, and surprisingly witty. For the most part, reviewers were highly appreciative, with especially intelligent commentaries by Doris Grumbach in the New York Times and Edmund Fuller in the Wall Street Journal.