Absolutely wonderful. Guest thanks for being here. Host and best of success on your next book. I cant wait to read it. [laughter] guest thank you. Host i cant wait to read it. Its going to be another changemaking book. Guest i hope so. Host thank you. Cspan, created by americas Cable Television companies and brought to you as a Public Service by your cable or satellite provider. Bradley birzer, 1953 publication of the conservative mind, what was the reception . Guest pretty incredible, actually. Far more so than anyone would have expected including kirk and his publisher. When it came out, it came out in may of 1953, and it took about a month for it to catch on. But once it did, it really just caught fire. Its roughly 7580 publications in the englishspeaking world, major ones. Everything from the chicago trib and the New York Herald tribune, New York Times, london times, times literary supplement. They all reviewed it, sometimes two or three times. Going through the summer, kind of feeling like maybe they hadnt done it justice the first time. So it caught fire in a way that most academic books never even dream of doing. And kirk had, certainly, as a young man had hoped he would have a good career, but it went well beyond what he was expecting, and it really put his publisher, henry regnery, on the map as well. Host who is kirksome. Guest well, russell kirk was born in 1918 to an intellectual but very poor family in plymouth, michigan. And his family had always really, well, they go all the way back to 1623 on his mothers side. They had come over to to plymouth, into massachusetts in 1623 and a pretty typical american story where they had been originally very devout in their puritanism, but as they had migrated west, they had gone kind of secular and then, like a lot of intelligent, working class families intelligent in the sense of meaning wellread literate families at the end of the 19th century, they really embraced a kind of spiritualism; seances, talking with the dead, tarot cards. Thats the kind of atmosphere that kirk grew up in. So always books, no money but very interested in not just ideas here, but very esoteric ideas as well. He end up getting a full score hallship scholarship to Michigan State. He probably could have gone anywhere. He graduated from Michigan State in 1940, went off, got an mba from duke university, fairly new University Still at that point, was drafted into the military for five years, didnt get out until 1946. Then he taught at Michigan State, and then he went on to the university of st. Andrews in scotland and wrote the conservative mind. And his reputation, as i said a few moments ago, thats really when it explored with the publication of the conservative mind, which was just his dissertation which is kind of wild to think about that, that that did so well. From that point forward be, from 1953 until his death in 1994, he was very much regarded as the intellectual touchstone or fountainhead for kind of modern american conservativism. Best known up to the goldwater movement. Once the goldwater Many Movement 1964 fizzled with the kind of fiasco of the election, his, kirks reputation went down as well, and it never fully recovered even by the time of his death many 1994. He wasnt where he was in, say, 1962. But had a good run, certainly, and was very influential during that entire time. Host what were some of the ideas in the conservative mind that were revolutionary or at least taught . Caught the attention . Guest he would have said they were counterrevolutionary. He was worried. I think its important to put him in the context of his times. He was very deeply worried about the rise of fascism, about the rise of nationalism and communism, all of these ideologies. And kirk believed that in the american character, what he would have called the american mission, there was a sense that was really given to us through people like George Washington and john adams that our job was not to make the world anew, but to preserve the best of the western tradition, to preserve best of socrates or of plato or aristotle, to preserve the best of st. John or st. Augustin. And he really thought that the founders, being very classically educated, were giving us something very old in a very new form. So he didnt think, for example, of, say, america against hitler or america against stalin. He thought of america as something separate that was above. Not an equal, but above stalin and hitler. But it was our duty to kind of take these guys out and to keep ideologies down as low as possible. They were, for him, even good ideologies, good ideologies, even they were dehumanizing at some level. He thought reality was just too complicated for that. So the conservative mind is truly that. He wants to conserve what has come before, and, you know, i think probably in 2016 this sounds a bit trite, but in 1953 it was pretty revolutionary. This was prevatican ii, and kirk was not catholic at this point. He would become catholic much later on, but his language sounds very catholic. He talked a lot about the dignity of the human person, talked a lot about personalism, idea of community at times where those were not popular words in america or at least theyd been forgottennen. And kirk saw those as more than equal to fascism and communism, they were better. So it wasnt a one to one correspondence be, our american way of life. Properly understood, trumped all of that left and right for him. Host were the ideas in the conservative mind accessible . Guest they were. And i think thats one of the reasons he became and, again, this was lost to us now, but he was a house to hold name in the 1950s household name. And not just here, but throughout the English Speaking world. One of my favorite stories about kirk is in august of 1953 he went over to meet, he went over to england, wanted to meet t. S. Eliot. And elliot was performing one of his plays for the first time in edinburgh, and so kirk went up to edinburgh, and while he was there staying at a bed and breakfast, the hotel clerk asked him, are you the dr. Russell kirk, the author of the conservative mind . [laughter] and kirk was just absolutely flabbergasted that anyone would know him like that. And it turned out that the owner of this bed is and breakfast had just gotten the Time Magazine issue where the entire magazine section was devoted to kirks book. So thats but i think that tells us quite a bit, that kirk was that well known. He was on the Eric Sevareid show, he was on cbs all the time, being interviewed on the radio, so throughout all the 1950s, he really was a household name. Plus, he had a regular syndicated column in the 60s and 70s, and people knew him through that as well. One interesting thing, you didnt ask this directly, peter, but he also wrote short stories and horror fiction. And a lot of people who know his Horror Stories stephen king writes about him but a lot of people have no idea that hes also the kirk that wrote the conservative mind and vice versa. So he had strange audiences. But, yeah, he was well known in a lot of different circles in america in the 50s and 60s. Host were his Horror Stories good sellers . Guest they were. Theyre weird, as you would expect. Theyre horror. And theyre horror not in a kind of gentle way, though he called them rather gothic. Theyre brutal. And they really its not accidental that the publisher of h. P. Lovecraft also published kirks early fiction. So these are deeply, i mean, theyre antidemonic, but theyre demonic portions, theyre very forces, theyre very dark. This isnt just a ghost story, these are very involved and very complicated and certainly very in the way that stephen king would be today, that kind of just sheer. Mccrory is in sheer horror. Host were talking with Bradley Birzer, author of this book, russell kirk, american conservative. Conservative mind, 1953, at yale guest 1951 from buckley, yes. Host was there a connection between the publication dates of those books and the two men in. Guest ing im sure it helped. You know, 1953 was a really interesting year for conservativism because it wasnt just kirk publishing the conservative mind, but robert necessary bit, one of the great conservatives of that day about the same age as kirk, he published his book, the quest for community, which is just a great Standard Book for conservativism, became that certainly starting in 1953 when it was published. Other books came out that year, ray bradbury, his book fahrenheit 451 came out, Arthur Bester wrote a book called the demolished man. All of these books really kind of created a whole, and i think kirks was the most important because it gave voice, and it was, as you asked earlier, very accessible to all kinds of people. But there was a lot going on in 53. It was really a kind of miraculous year for thought. And it made conservativism respectable in a way that it hadnt been for a couple of generations. Everything up to that point had really been liberalism, and it could be a conservative liberal arism or a radical liberalism, but it was all liberalism until you had these people, buckley two years earlier with god and man at yale, yeah, it was all happening at once. The great book new science of politics in 1952, leo strauss, his book in 1953. So, yeah, incredible year in all kinds of ways. Host was the conservative movement in america an Actual Movement at that time . Guest well, thats a great question, and its very hard to answer because if it was a movement, it was one of the most decentralized movements in american history. It really wouldnt be until goldwater, through the creation of the goldwater movement at the end of the 1950s up until the Goldwater Campaign of 64, it really wasnt until goldwater came in and kind of unified it all. I think kirk had unified things in intellectually, but no one kirk didnt have the charisma to pull together a kind of organization, nor would he have had the talent or skill to do it. In fact, he was terrible at that and knew that as well. He was purely an academic in that sense. But goldwater really had the charisma and, of course, he had the background in the national guard, hed been a businessman, and, you know, he just there was something about him and his look. Kirk was not a good looking man by any means whereas goldwater, of course, had that chiseled face. And i think he was able to pull things together and really pull together a coalition of libertarians and conservatives and anticommunists together in the late 50s. So if there was a movement, peter, it took about five or six years to coalesce. And it only coalesced around goldwater, i think. Which is kind of odd. Starts off as a non, maybe even antipolitical movement, but then quickly for it to become anything, it becomes politicized as well as political. Host so russell kirk, william f. Buckley, friends, competitors . Guest yeah, both. Buckley was as even though he was catholic, is so he could never be totally blue blood, he was as blue blood as it would be possible for a new england catholic to be in the 1950s. Of course, ivy league educated. Kirk was the antithesis of that, coming out of poverty, not catholic. He was protestant, but spiritualized, an odd form of protestantism at that. With Michigan State, had never really traveled into the east, certainly had no connection to new york publishers whereas the buckleys, oil money coming out of texas, they, of course, had all kinds of connections with the kennedys. So, yeah, again, the catholic thing held them down to a certain extent, but buckley because of his demeanor and personality was able to overcome that. But buckley knew, and i i think this was really interesting, he knew he had to have kirk onboard National Review. So he went out in the early 1950s, and i may not be remembering this right, peter, i think it was in 1955, but they met at a bar not too far from kirks to house. And it was there that they kind of formulated what National Review would be. Kirk, who could be extremely bullheaded about things, did not want to be on the masthead. And the reason he didnt want to be on the masthead, this seems so esoteric to us now, but a number of the people that buckley had recruited were excommunists, and kirk just did not trust excommunists, and he did not want to be associated with them as all. Max eastland, james burnham, frank meyer, a number of these people who had been american bolsheviks but certainly communists, kirk just did not trust them. He was okay with buckley doing this, but he didnt want his name associated even though now we always associate buckley and kirk together. But it was that little bit of well call it priggishness that it was a littled odd. Host well, you do describe him as a luddite, a fabulist, a stoic. Guest yes. I would keep all of those things. In terms of being a luddite, he did not like modern technology. He hated the phone. The telephone, he would just curse it. He didnt like answering it, didnt like it when it rang. It was, for him, a really an abominable creation, and he used to jokingly, i assume, you know, make fun of Alexander Graham bell and this guy was a curse on the human race and so forth. But he had no problem carrying his typewriter and, you know, where do we at what point do we say this is technology, this is not . Everywhere he went he typed, and he could type 120 words a minute. I had the privilege of going new his letters, maybe one out of 500, maybe one out of 1,000 has a typo. [laughter] the guys he was incredible at that. So there were certain technologies i think he kind of loved to hate, and there were other technologies he accepted quite a bit. But he was always a stoic. Theres no question about that. Host what is a stoic . Guest well, a stoic, stoicism comes out of the fall of greece. And so it comes out of the time period between the fall of greece and the rise of the roman republic. It was a philosophy that argued that the world is pretty much hell, and you just have to accept even pain and suffering. Its good in and of itself. And kirk, that was very much kirk. Theyre weird stories i dont know how much you want to get into this, peter, but there are very famous stories where he fell into a river once when he was canoeing, and he just allowed himself to sink to the bottom. He thought it was his time and didnt bother him at all. [laughter] it was his time, he was going to go, and he really, all of his life he kind of almost to a bizarre extent he seemed to have no fear of death. And that was a very stoic attitude. I dont think it was just cultivated. It was cultivated, but i think there was something inherent in kirks personality as well. He could get very hotblooded at times, but it was rare. He generally was just very calm, didnt show a lot of emotion. It came out in his writing but not in his personality. And thats his stoicism, i think. Host whats a fabulist . Guest well, thats his Science Fiction side. So from his earliest days, and i think we have to keep this in perspective as well, throughout the 30s and 40s, Science Fiction was regarded as something barely above trash or pornography. And partly its because where you would buy it. It was almost always sold by small new york publishers and magazine cult format. And youd have the sex stories next to the cowboy and the Science Fiction stories. So youd have books geared towards teenagers right next to pretty nasty stuff. So it got that reputation because it was sold in drugstores and so forth. And it was not, you know, even when s. C. Lewis, you know c. S. Lewis, one of the great christian apologists, hed lost a lot of people. A lot of people thought, you know, hes flirting with satanism, and other people just thought it was low brow and tacky. But kirk from the very beginning had no problem with that, and he loved people like ray bradbury, robert heinlein. A lot of these figures that were becoming respectable, but Science Fiction was still pretty marginal. So kirk didnt just write Science Fiction, he was actually writing horror which was a step worse than Science Fiction at the time. So his fabulism, he would have seen it as no different than mark twain in connecticut yankee. But for a lot of people when they thought of Science Fiction or horror, they didnt think mark twain, they didnt think chesterton. They thought just some grubby thing that you might find in a bad part of the drugstore. So for kirk to embrace that, thats and a lot of conservativisms and conservatives and libertarians specifically went into Science Fiction because they never would have made it at that time in Mainstream Media because it wasnt respected. So they had to go with these second and thirdrate publishers. And thats how they made their reputation. And, obviously, by the 60s then Science Fiction is taking off, and to this day its one of the main genres. You cant imagine going into a barnes noble without having a huge section of Science Fiction. But thats purely us. That would not have been kirks childhood, for example. Host was russell kirk accessible to the media, to students, etc. , up through his death . Guest you would think he wouldnt be because he hated technology so much, or at least he said so. He didnt drive a car, though he had no problem with the train or flying. [laughter] that was fine. But he always made students drive him to the airport, which was pretty funny, in grand rapids or even when he taught here at hillsdale. Students would have to drive up to mccost that and bring him back. Host how far is that . Guest about two and a half hours. Thats a five hour trip for somebody. That would be quite a burden. Plus that student would probably have to come back, so its even more than that. But, yeah, he traveled everywhere. He was a huge part of his income just came from traveling to colleges and speaking. So he was gone almost half of the year he would be traveling every year until his health got too bad. And he had a number of positions at prestigious places, but he would usually just do them for a semester. Places like the university of chicago offered him at least three times a fulltenured professorship. He just said no over and over again. Host if one says they are a kirkian, what does that mean and whats the reaction . Guest ing yeah. I have friends who would call themselves kirkians. I actually dont think there is such a thing. I mean, i believe in my friends, but i dont think the title is a proper title. Kirk was adamantly anticonformist, and thats, i think, something we also forget about conservativism because its changed so much. But when conservativism arose in the 50s, it was very much against mass culture, it was against conformity, against suburban culture. Jack kim back, we think of him as a radical beat. He was a deeply, deeply very, very conservative man. Not his art, but his own politics, his own views on things. And that was not in the 1950s, most conservatives were worried about this mass homogenization of americans, especially american males and teenagers. They were worried about that. And kirk certainly comes out of that, yeah. He comes out of that tradition. Buckley, you know, in man and god at yale, hes, he used the term individualism. But it was a kind of radical, anticonformist understanding. So there was a lot of that tradition, and i think kirk very much embraces that anticonformism through the end of his life. We havent talked about his personality much, but he carried with him most of his life, he carried a sword stick that he could wield if he needed to, and he was actually pretty good at it. Often carried a revolver with him. He always wore a threepiece, he actually walked across morocco and north africa in the summer of 1963 wearing a tweed threepiece and a fedora because he thought this is what i should do. [laughter] hes truly a bizarre, quirky figure in that sense but definitely not in any way, shape or form fitting into the american mold of the time. Host and as you say, as should be clear in this book, kirk would never measure up to the stereotypes of conservatives. Guest yeah. I dont think so. I think most Young Conservatives want to pick up kirk and kind of find out, well, what should defense be, what should education policy be or tax policy. Its not there. And that goes back to your other question, peter. I think thats why there is no kirkian, and i dont think kirk would want there to be kirkians. I think kirks understanding, which was a deeply humane understanding, was that you, peter, should be peter. You should be the best peter god or nature means for you to be. And my job as a teacher or friend or professor or father, whatever it is, my job is to bring that unique gift you bring to the world out of you. Its to lev leaven you. He wants people to be fully themselves. Thats what i think fits with the conservativism of the 50s that was so beautiful. You cant imagine ray bradbury wanting anyone to be like him. [laughter] he wanted them to be weird, eccentric, individual, and that was part of that kind of interesting libertarian streak of the 50s, that anticonform bist streak. Host what would Russell Kirks reaction be, do you think, to 2016 . [laughter] guest youre going to get in me many trouble with this question. Kirk would be aghast. You know, for him good discussion is what were doing. Its not a sound bite, its not yelling, its not having a graphic popup on the tv quickly and we move on. Its not who can speak more loudly than the other person. I think there are a lot of people in the media, left, right, whatever, that he just would be he would find abhorrent. This is not what we do. He was very, again, kirks not an idealogue, hes not a conformist. He loves people like great socialist norman thomas. He was one of his good friends. And partly because they traveled together, and they would have debates. What were doing, except it would be more of a debate. And they would go to colleges and have an hour or twohour discussion and talk about ideas and work these things out. And the idea that we could decide something in a moment or in the five second spot before we get to the commercial, you know, thats not kirk. And, of course, we just lost, i think, even though he was loud, it was part of his personality, we just lost john mcloughlin. No matter how crazy he could be, think about how he had the panel. Theres mcloughlin, he had two on the left, two on the right. And he may interrupt them, but they had an hour to talk, they had this kind of discussion, and they could be fun and they could, you know, the canon was fun. They could be playful with one another. But in the end, you can imagine they all went out and had a beer or a drink, and there wasnt that animosity. And thats hard to the imagine. And, you know, not to get anyone in trouble in particular, but i love george will. And when i saw him on the Oreilly Factor a year ago and they went after each other, it was just disheartening just to see that its just so bitter. And i thought will, i mean, hes a better man than that. But thats the kind of thing that kirk was trying so hard to fight against. That we cant, i cant sit here and demonize you because i disagree. Our job has to be to find that commonality where we can start at First Principles and move from there. Anyone can bash another person. Thats the most vulgar thing possible. We can all do that. But to find the strength of your opponents argument and work with that, thats the hard thing, and thats where i think kirk was genius. Part of that, he was a gentleman, but it was also the way he thought. It was in his nature to try and pull the best out of someone. Host was he an isolationists type . Guest in terms of Foreign Policy . He was very suspicious about any mission abroad. He didnt think, at least for a while, he didnt think world war ii, for example, was an unjust war. He thought that was a good war. If as he looked back on it, he thought there were possibilities the nazis could have been defeated without warfare. Im not qualified enough, my instinct is that doesnt sound right, but he became very leery of any warfare, and he became bitter thats not the right word, because it doesnt fit kirk, but he became distraught in 91 because he believed what reagan did was perfectly fine, but you build it up so you dont use it. Nobody messes with you. And when bush used that army to go into iraq, kirk had real misgivings about that. And spent really the last three years of his life arguing that the republicans were going into this was a fiasco, that it would take a full generation for us to get out of, and this was not where we should be going, and it was very he thought it was extremely antireagan and anticonservative, what bush was doing in iraq. Host so, professor birzer, whats his Lasting Impact . Guest yeah. Host today. Guest well, one of the things i try and bring up in the book, and i debated a lot whether to put this at the beginning or the end. I think kirk is one of those figures, he will either be remembered fully, or hell be totally forgotten. Theres no between with kirk. And a part of that is because kirk is not an original. Well either remember him for preserving great things or look at him and the people he preserved. I think he would be fine if he merely played the role of making us remember burke. Hed be totally fine with that. But i think there is an element, and this is what i ended the book with which was so important to me, but i thought if i started with this, peter, no one will take it seriously. I have never in my life encountered in any person, whether ive read or met in person and i never met kirk, i never met him physically, so i did not know him as a person. I know his widow very well host annette. Guest ye. And i know his daughters, but i didnt know kirk. I have never encountered anyone outside of, say, a Mother Teresa or a john paul ii who was more charitable in his life. And that really hit me as i was reading. I had always suspected that, but once i started going through his papers, from the moment and, of course, remember, he grew up in poverty. Money never meant anything to him, which is funny. Because i think my grandparents, my maternal grandparents living through the depression, money was almost sacred to them. Not in a false, theological way, but they kept it, and they held onto it, and they didnt spend it. Kirk didnt see it that way. For kirk it was no different than having a meal. Heres a good meal, im going to enjoy it and move on. Money was just a thing for him. It was a means to an end, it was not an end in and of itself. And as early as the 1950s where he finally starts coming into money, never, ever had money, in fact, there were days he would live on a Peanut Butter sandwich, they were that poor. But when he finally had money, he just gave it to everybody. It didnt matter. Hed get immigrants writing him who had just landed in america saying i love your book, you know, were trying and they werent begging, they would just tell him their situation. Hed put money in the envelope, send it off to them. Never, ever, ever did he expect any of it back. And he actually is you had asked me earlier about his fiction. His first novel was a New York Times bestseller. He made millions of dollars on it. It went through 17 printings. He made a lot of hundred. When he died, he was basically broke. He wasnt a good financial manager, thats clear. But he also had given almost everything away. And we could say thats irresponsible, and i think in a way it was because he left his widow and his four daughters without an income. But at the same time, they had also willingly gone along during his lifetime helping anybody. So i have one of my favorite colleagues, one of my closest friends here whos in the economics department, he is here strictly because kirk paid for him and his family to get out of yugoslavia when they were under the communists and, of course, they had nowhere to live, so they lived with the kirks. Yvonne is my colleague now because of that, and there were times where kirk had upwards of 18 cambodians, he had, i think, 12 ethiopians at the same time. He had vietnamese. Anybody who needed shelter, they could live with the kirks for as long as they needed. Some of these people lived three or four years in the kirk house until they could get on their feet. Thats extraordinary to think about. So if you asked me, peter, whats the greatest legacy of kirk, that his charity, living this out. That, to me, is just incredible. Host Bradley Birzer is the Russell Amos Kirk chair in american studies at hillsdale colle