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