real conservatives hate Freud

Russell Kirk, a true conservative intellectual, hated Freud and in mid-'59 hailed the publication of The Freudian Ethic, an Analysis of the Subversion of American Character by Richard LaPiere, then professor of sociology at Stanford and editor of the McGraw-Hill series in sociology and anthropology. Kirk writes, in part:

The Protestant ethic (a term borrowed from Max Weber), Dr. LaPiere writes, is being supplanted by the Freudian ethic -- that is, a coddling of the human person in the delusion that man is happiest when he is almost back in the womb.

This study contains the keenest demolition of Freudian psychology that I have seen anywhere, particularly the two chapters about Freudian theory and practice in education: "The Progressive School" and "The Adjustment Motif." Going straight to the heart of the matter, Mr. LaPiere finds in a vague and vulgarized Freudian notion of man the principal cause of the failure of modern American education.

My 1950s web site includes the full text of the review. Above: that's Kirk on the left, and William F. Buckley on the right.

silent majority, take 1

Barry Goldwater's book - it wasn't a campaign book but turned out to be - was published, with hurrahs coming from conservatives who felt that Rockefeller would betray them with his entitled eastern Republican-liberalism and that Nixon was good for them on foreign policy (anticommunism) and bad for them on domestic policy (too close to the moderate Ike, who was never really, to them, a true Republican, a fair-enough claim).

The book of course was The Conscience of a Conservative. It sold well despite its origin in Shepardsville, Kentucky, where the Victor Publishing Company put it out. Perhaps sold well because of them. Owning it must have given conservatives a sense of handling a document from the suppressed rightist anti-Washington underground.

"I was born in Arizona in territorial days," Goldwater writes. There's a bit of Daniel Boone about him. He's a throwback, not at all like the eastern establishment guys.

The Baltimore Sun reviewer called G's "hard counsel" a bunch of "nonsense." Walter Lippmann scored G's notion of a "great hidden majority in the country" of a large number of conservatives who don't vote but could take over the country if they wanted. When Nixon used his "silent majority" for anti-antiwar purposes in 1968, he was borrowing from Goldwater, although without real Right license to do so.

The book was a kind of rehearsal for 1964. It criticized increasing central-government paternalism at the expense of individual self-reliance. It offered "new" decentralized government as a solution. If Goldwater had been a real southerner, this call would have been nothing more or less than "states' rights" as rhetoric against African American enfranchisement and equal access to school and law. But because Goldwater was a southwesterner, a region with little to no history of slavery, he could avoid that assumption, even as some southern conservatives embraced him as good for segregation.

Should he join the Nixon ticket in '60 as vice presidential candidate? Russell Kirk, a brilliant super-conservative intellectual, wrote that G was "too good and too important...for that powerless post."

Rocky was a problem for the Goldwaterites. The two men were at opposites ends of Republicanism. Remarkably, they made a joint appearance on Meet the Press in July 1960. I will search for a recording of that!

Creeley has a wish for the right

Sometime in 1960, Robert Creeley had three poems accepted for publication in the conservative anticommunist magazine, the National Review. I know enough about the vicissitudes of periodicals' poetry policies to resist any temptation to ascribe ideological meaning or motives for such a convergence. In fact I believe Hugh Kenner was the poetry editor of Buckley's magazine for a while--perhaps during this time (I will check the fact). While Kenner was (later certainly) infamous for his conservative political views, he was of course a great supporter of the avant-garde tradition in modernism and I'm guessing (but should know) that he admired what Creeley was doing right then in 1960. We know that Kenner admired Creeley at least later (see below).

Anyway, in the February 11, 1961 issue of National Review three Creeley verses appeared and one is:

A Wish

So much rain
to make the mud again,
trees green
and flowers also.

The water which
ran up the sun
and down again,
it is the same.

A man of supple
yielding manner
might, too, discover
ways of water. (p. 83)

In 1983, reviewing Creeley's Collected Poems 1945-75, Kenner wrote this lovely and right-on assertion: "But we take pleasure in words that tell us nothing, pleasure in their shapes and sounds, and also in recognizing that we are not alone and that someone else knows it." And added: "The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein would have been astonished by none of this, but it nudges into terrain where he was rigorous." And finally: "The point, of course, is that the words convey no information to anyone present."

Further on Kenner-Creeley: there's a file of letters between the two in the Kenner Papers at the Harry Ransom Research Center, UT Austin.