“M.E. Bradford, Professor of Politics and Literature at the University of Dallas, is generally regarded as the most important philosopher the South has produced since Richard Weaver.”
In my last Substack I mentioned a magazine deadline that had my full attention. I finished the piece and filed it a week ago, along with photos that made me blow the dust off my “real” camera. I’ll share it when it’s announced. This week a large envelope arrived in the mail; inside was an old issue of Southern Partisan. Also, it wouldn’t sit right with me if I didn’t mention the assassination of Charlie Kirk. I’m praying for his family, especially his wife and two children. I’ll leave it there. I am Scots-Irish and my blood is stirred.
The following transcription is from Tom Landess’ interview with M.E. Bradford (1934 – 1993), published in Southern Partisan 5.2 (1985).
The author of three volumes of political thought and several truckloads of literary criticism on Southern writers, he is a frequent lecturer, television pundit, and has engaged in formal debate with scholars who have presumed to challenge the South’s view of American political history. In these debates—none of which has yet ended in a duel—he has shown such wit and knowledge that on at least one occasion his enemies actually conceded his victory, speculating gloomily that he must have memorized the entire American microfiche collection. Indeed some of his greatest admirers are scholars like Eugene Genevese who disagree with him on virtually every important point but nonetheless respect his keen integrity and fair-minded dissent.
The occasion for this interview is the publication in early summer of a new volume of political essays entitled Remembering Who We Are (Publisher: The University of Georgia Press, Athens, Georgia 30602); but in a frank, free-ranging discussion Professor Bradford talks not only about the book but also about current politics, the region’s recent history, and the difficulties he has encountered as a Southern conservative in a profession dominated by Northern liberals.
Professor Bradford was interviewed in his study in Irving, Texas by Associate Editor Tom Landess, who knows too much about him not to get straight answers.
PARTISAN: This is your third political book in the past five years, yet your academic discipline is Southern literature. You’ve published even more in that area than you have in politics. So why are you now regarded as “M.E. Bradford, the political philosopher”?
BRADFORD: I think it’s probably because people in the intellectual establishment get more excited about heresies of political theory than they do over heresies buried down inside a work of fiction. These people could care less about the social implications of Faulkner’s The Reivers or of Stark Young’s So Red The Rose; too often they’re contemptuous of literature, or to put it another way, they don’t feel threatened by fringe comments on novelists who are outside of their own established canon, from Thoreau and Norman Mailer.
PARTISAN: But when you say something about Lincoln, that excites them.
BRADFORD: Oh, my, yes.
PARTISAN: Let’s talk about some of your heresies. You’re “anti-ideological.” In fact, a good deal of your political philosophy is directed against the modern preoccupation with an abstraction like equality. Why is that the case?
BRADFORD: I think I write so much about political theory because in our time you have to struggle constantly to keep from being overwhelmed by the political side of things, the cost of which is living under someone else’s politics. In our day, politics is the queen of the sciences and if you’re engaged in the study of literature or sociology or theology eventually everyone forces you to relate your discipline to politics.
PARTISAN: There’s nothing wrong, is there, with politics in the old Aristotelian sense? You’re talking about “ideological” politics. So how would you distinguish between the two?
BRADFORD: Well, in making this distinction I like to use a phrase borrowed from the British political theorist Michael Oakeshott, who said that modern politics is “teleocratic,” that is, it is oriented toward accomplishing certain utopian ends, forcing everybody into conformity with some grand scheme or plan designed to do us good whether we like it or not.
PARTISAN: These schemes are always abstract, aren’t they?
BRADFORD: As a matter of fact, they are like the vast plans conjured up by the Projectors in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels—they float around on a big flying island and send messages down to the poor folk below, whom they threaten to squash if they’re not obedient. What they send down are schemes for converting dung into gold, making water flow uphill, and other worthy projects.
PARTISAN: Another one of your heresies is your distrust of “absolute democracy.” You believe in demосracy that’s qualified by certain specific restrictions and you tend to view the founding of the American Republic as a “not-so-democratic” occasion. How are we not as democratic as some people would like to think we are?
BRADFORD: Well, people who wish to make us out democratic simply take American politics to be derived from one sentence in the Declaration of Independence, abstracted from the rest of that document and understood in a certain pernicious way–all men are created equal. That’s all the politics we seem to have these days, yet the Constitution ignores that sort of premise and says almost nothing about equality. And the people who drew it up made it the premise of their labor that unbridled democracy was terrible and was to be avoided at all costs. They met in Philadelphia in order to check or halt the excesses of democracy. Instead, they hoped to create something that would prevent it from ever coming into being. I am undemocratic in that spirit.
PARTISAN: How did the Founding Fathers attempt to check democracy?
BRADFORD: First of all, take the idea of majority rule. It took only a majority of the states represented in the Great Convention to get something put into the Constitution. And it took only a majority of those who were represented in nine state ratifying conventions to give the Constitution the force of fundamental law. In the wake of what they decided, however, it now takes three-quarters of the states to modify that document and before that can occur other steps must be taken as well. It’s very difficult to amend the Constitution. It takes an overwhelming majority of those in the present generation to outvote what’s been done in the past. It’s a presumption, an undemocratic presumption of the superior wisdom of those who drew the thing up in the first place.
PARTISAN: You also on occasion speak out against a certain kind of freedom. You have an essay in this collection called “More Freedom Than We Want.” What about that?
BRADFORD: Yes, it was in the Intercollegiate Review originally. I discussed some classic westerns, Shane and Red River, both novels made into classic films. I talk about these works in particular and about other images of life on the frontier as they show up in Western American literature. The most valuable thing about our classic documents is that they show that freedom which is not contained in some sort of institutional structure is a dreadful burden, something that human beings flee from after they’ve tried it a while. It looks tantalizing in the distance, the same way the mountains of Western states look wonderful and tempting; but once you get there and you’re all by yourself or you’re up against some wild creature or unprincipled adversary, then freedom becomes terrifying. It’s in the Stephen Crane short story “The Bride Comes To Yellow Sky.” Once society grows up it has to have institutions, it has to give up that dangerous adolescent stage where it doesn’t recognize the necessity for law and custom to give freedom meaning.
PARTISAN: In the light of that, as we’re conducting this interview, the New York Grand Jury has just indicted Bernhard Goetz. Everybody tends to think that he’s a hero. And in a sense, he is. In the same mold of John Wayne and Alan Ladd in those films. Have we gotten to that point again; are we back to an absence of normative institutions?
BRADFORD: Shane has to ride out of the valley after he has killed the gunslinger, because having performed the heroic act, made necessary by the absence of society, by the state of nature, he’s isolated himself from the rest of the community, which is now a little bit afraid of him. to have institutions, it has to give up that dangerous adolescent stage where it doesn’t recognize the necessity for law and custom to give freedom meaning.
PARTISAN: Isn’t that just what has happened to Goetz? Isn’t it true that New York City has been reduced to a state of nature–at least the New York subway?
BRADFORD: Yes, in the New York subway they live in a state of nature. People there are not protected against the violent, who are sentimentalized by our courts and legislators. So when Goetz takes the law into his own hands–when he becomes a law unto himself because there is no law–he isolates himself and becomes a little terrifying to the rest of us, even though we may admire him at the same time. I think that’s part of the ambivalence about Goetz. We recognize that if all of us had to carry a gun and defend ourselves it would be too great a strain for us to bear so we draw back from the image of Goetz and his smoking revolver.
PARTISAN: Are Southerners still better off than people in New York City?
BRADFORD: I think people in the South are decidedly better off. For one thing, the kind of terrorizing of the general population that’s possible in the great cities of the North is still very difficult in the South, because when threatened beyond a certain point, a Southerner defends himself in good conscience and with a certain amount of enthusiasm. That’s why they’ve never been able to work “the protection racket” in cities and small towns in the South. Even a tailor running a tailor shop is liable to have a gun there someplace. He doesn’t have to hire anybody to take care of his “personal business.” He’ll take care of it himself, thank you.
PARTISAN: Isn’t that what Goetz did? Aren’t you suggesting that that’s all right down here but not up there?
BRADFORD: In a way, yes. The social and legal institutions of the South support the individual’s right to defend himself. In New York, no one carries a visible rifle in the back of his pickup truck–which means that what Goetz did there threatened the sentimental pacifism of the social and legal ambience. Down here nobody would have brought Goetz to trial, because he would have been within his rights, as defined by the unwritten law.
PARTISAN: Maybe it’s just because it’s a subway. Suppose there was a subway that ran from north Dallas through the central city and into south Dallas. Would you feel uncomfortable riding through south Dallas or do you think that the black people there would behave better than the black people in New York?
BRADFORD: Well, I think that they would behave much better. However, maybe there’s something about a subway that causes Southerners to resist the whole idea. The idea of mass transportation in the South hasn’t gotten anywhere. That’s changing a little now here in Dallas, and we’re going to have a few more metropolitan busses, but not many.
PARTISAN: Since we’ve been tip-toeing nearer and nearer to racial questions, let’s talk about the events of the past thirty years beginning with Brown vs. The Board of Education and moving on into the era of Jesse Jackson. Do you feel that the changes that have come about in the South over the past thirty years have made a substantial difference in the way Southerners think and feel and behave? Or do you think we’ve simply altered surface arrangements and kept relationships between the races essentially the way they were, say, in the Era of Good Feeling?
BRADFORD: Oh, I think decidedly the latter. And I think blacks and whites agree on most matters. Some of the changes have not been as troublesome as we expected them to be, and some of them have been worse than anyone could have imagined. Note, for example, the black reaction to social experiments like bussing. Here in Dallas there’s as much black opposition as there is white; yet it’s impossible to be opposed to massive bussing without being called racist by Yankee social engineers. I’ve been opposed to bussing since it began. I’ve watched the name-calling, and occasionally I’ve been called names myself. But the rhetoric has been changing in recent years. The people who imposed bussing on the unwilling of both races are part of an era that’s passed into memory. Everyone recognizes that, but they’ve not yet figured out how to withdraw gracefully. When they do, bussing will cease.
PARTISAN: Within the last year and half, a federal court finally ruled in Chicago that the schools simply could not be integrated, that nobody wanted it, and so the courts gave them permission to not integrate. People don’t realize the degree to which the North is segregated, do they?
BRADFORD: No. It’s a big state secret. But the federal courts have dealt more kindly with them from the beginning. And they have a rationale–it’s called a “besetting interest.” It’s a blank check for the courts to do any damn thing they please. In this case, they’ve been talking about a besetting interest and setting aside some of the implications of Brown.
PARTISAN: Do you think they’re about ready to make an accommodation and admit that certain things can’t be done?
BRADFORD: Before William French Smith left office he initiated an action in Norfolk, Virginia which was a great groundbreaker. It was the first time since all this began that the government of the United States has gone on the attack against already-established bussing plans. In Norfolk they’re calling for the dismemberment of a bussing plan that’s been operating there for years. They want to go back to neighborhood schools.
PARTISAN: Are they doing that on the grounds that bussing according to quota is racially motivated?
BRADFORD: They’re doing it on the grounds that it doesn’t work. They’ve tried it for years and the sophistical reasoning that used to go into these things seems to have gone by the board. They do make the argument that Norfolk, Virginia has in good faith done everything it could to have a unitary system, and since an hour and a half is wasted coming and going to school, these schemes have lost all meaning and authority. Now the government says that in order to have enough money, enough public support for public schools, it’s important to stop harassing the whites to the point where they leave the public schools and their parents cease to feel any identity with public education and refuse to vote any money for it. They’re saying now that if we don’t stop bussing there won’t be any bond issues and nobody will know how to read.
PARTISAN: A few years ago, you were active in George Wallace’s campaign, and you received a lot of flack from it. Was it worth it–your entrance into partisan politics?
BRADFORD: Well, just let me say that I make no apology for what I did at that time. Governor Wallace made it possible for those who supported him to make a political statement, to express their dissatisfaction with the iron hold of ideology over public policy. He helped in those two campaigns to bring about some of the vast shifts which finally turned the country around in ‘80 and ‘84. I think there’s a line running from Goldwater’s campaign in ‘64 to Wallace’s in ‘68 and ‘72 to Reagan in ‘76, ‘80 and ‘84. And that’s not to imply an identity among those three public men. Wallace–the old Wallace–was more of a Populist than the other two.
PARTISAN: In the light of that, you have maintained in your writings that Populist candidates have arisen where a significant political sentiment was being ignored by both political parties and that in this respect Populism is a healthy thing. Otherwise the people’s dissatisfaction might manifest itself in more terrible and destructive ways. Nonetheless, doesn’t George Wallace’s conduct over the past ten years seem to indicate what a lot of people have said about the Populists past and present? That all they want is to win votes and that when the wind shifts they’re in there trimming their sails to fit the times?
BRADFORD: That doesn’t fit some of the Populists of the past at all, because some of them went down with all flags flying and all guns blazing.
PARTISAN: Who?
BRADFORD: Well, the first that comes to mind is Alfalfa Bill Murray up in Oklahoma who never gave an inch his whole life.
PARTISAN: Did he ever lose?
BRADFORD: Surely. The last thing he did at the end of his public career was to stump for Strom Thurmond in ‘48. He was always a conservative Populist. He persisted in it at a time when he was embarrassing his son, who was the leader of the regular Democrats in Oklahoma.
PARTISAN: Anybody else?
BRADFORD: W. Lee O’Daniel, Governor and Senator from Texas.
PARTISAN: Aren’t a lot of these Populists the very people you despise–egalitarian ideologues, fanners of the flames of envy?
BRADFORD: That’s always the real question. Bill Murray wasn’t. O’Daniel wasn’t. Neither was Tom Watson. I think that Watson pretty much stayed with one position throughout his public life.
PARTISAN: He changed on the race issue, though, didn’t he?
BRADFORD: Oh, only a little. He changed in his perception of what kind of a threat that issue might become to the people of Georgia. At one point, early in his life, he thought that it would be possible to include blacks in the political process without having blacks become pawns. And he changed in his perception on that subject. That’s the way he explained it. But Watson, at the end of his life, was the ultra-respectable leader of the Democratic Party in Georgia and a United States Senator. What happened was that instead of the Democrats changing Tom Watson, he changed the Democratic Party of his day. He imposed upon it a definition of respectability without giving much ground. There’s no doubt about it: Many of the Populists were opportunists. A lot of people in Southern history have gone through a Populist phase and then given up on it. Almost all Southern politicians know how to act the part of the injured Populist chieftain when the times call for it. If you look at the behavior of the fire-eaters right at the time when John Brown’s raid was largely approved all across the North in 1860, you see the old established political leaders of the South fighting off the call to secession over and over again. Most of the Populist leaders in 1860 were very high-born gentlemen. They were not sons of the wild jackass. They knew how to put on the armor of the people right at that moment and to roar back and forth across South Carolina saying, “Now you see the old-time politicians were only interested in being ‘in’ and didn’t really care what the Yankees did to us.” They ate their opponents alive and everyone turned around and ran very rapidly toward a secession convention.
There’s a lot of evidence that most of the leaders of the South, as it moved toward secession, fell in line, adopting the position that led to the withdrawal of their states from the Union. In this, I include Alexander Stephens and Jefferson Davis, both of whom were very reluctant to see secession. However, they soon realized that if they didn’t agree to secession then the fire-eaters who had adopted the Populist rhetoric were just about to get them thrown out as men taking their orders from Massachusetts and New York. One doesn’t think of Jefferson Davis as a Populist, but it’s very difficult to find a major Southern politician who doesn’t have a Populist phase somewhere in his life. They all know how to play that game. The fundamental question is whether or not the strategy of Populism so hems in the person who practices it, that he’s forever compromised from following a more responsible line.
PARTISAN: The academic community has always been predominately ideological, and tyrannically so. We all know stories that illustrate how little academics really believe in academic freedom. So how has your position as a Southern conservative affected your career as a teacher and scholar?
BRADFORD: To begin with, my career as a college teacher has been in small institutions or new schools, outside of the academic mainstream, despite the fact that I’ve published enough books and articles to qualify me for consideration by a major university.
PARTISAN: Do you know for certain that you have lost opportunities for major appointments, because of your political views?
BRADFORD: Yes. I know of several instances.
PARTISAN: Have you ever been pressured at institutions where you were employed?
BRADFORD: Yes, I was forced out of a position once because I supported a friend who was a Republican running for congress.
PARTISAN: Are Southern colleges as guilty of this sort of thing as Northern colleges?
BRADFORD: Yes, I think they’re worse, because most of them are governed by presidents and deans who are interested in politically reforming the region. The businessmen who control these colleges never catch on.
PARTISAN: You supported Reagan in 1980 and were proposed by famous conservatives and by fifteen or more U.S. Senators to be chairman of the National Endowment of the Humanities; but you were shot down in the final days. Do you feel that the fact that you were maligned in the press and specifically the object of a whispering campaign and outright lies is the result of being Southern? And if so, has it been worth it?
BRADFORD: I think that what hasn’t been worth it was allowing the enthusiasm of my friends to deceive me that the world had changed for the better. But I also think it’s been most constructive to discover that it’s not only as bad as I thought, but even worse. The chasm which divides the intellectual community along sectional, political, cultural, and even religious lines is so vast and deep as to be beyond any kind of reconciliation in the foreseeable future. The best that can be achieved is a kind of civil commitment to discourse and disagreement, which was–at one time the basis for all types of scholarly exchange. Unfortunately, I think that only a small number of American intellectuals are now really interested in learning from people who disagree with them. I think that mostly what they’re interested in is winning intellectual skirmishes. I had a taste of all that. The experience of being a national scandal (not simply a scandal confined to the community of scholars who work on American history) was instructive and terrifying all at once.
PARTISAN: Perhaps we should note here that you became a front-page story in The New York Times, that members of the so-called Neo-conservative faction were oozing up and down the hallways of the White House telling people that you were pro-Nazi and an advocate of slavery. They really said that, didn’t they?
BRADFORD: Yes, they told all kinds of delightful little stories. They circulated a little selection of quotations extracted from my work without any kind of accompanying details. A selection of passages that were designed to frighten bureaucrats into believing that the Beast of the Apocalypse was about to be nominated. A little thing called “Quotes from Chairman Mel.”
PARTISAN: And along those lines, let me ask you this: do you not have the impression that (a) Ronald Reagan is the best we can possibly get in this country, and that (b) he ain’t too good?
BRADFORD: Well, he’s not all that I’d have him to be. There’s no question about that, though I don’t know what problems he faces in dealing with the factions of his own party and the entrenched bureaucracy. But what one judges is conduct. However, I’ve supported him unequivocally and will continue to do so.
PARTISAN: We all have, but it hasn’t done us any good, has it?
BRADFORD: Well, I think that the difference between President Reagan’s vote in ‘80 and ‘84 and the insufficient vote earned by President Ford in ‘76 comes mostly from people whose presence in the Republican column is still not being recognized by those who lead the Republican Party.
PARTISAN: You’re from Texas. How do you feel about the fact that James Baker III is the only Southerner in Mr. Reagan’s cabinet?
BRADFORD: Well, I feel the way most Southerners feel: that we’re under-represented in the councils of government. In general, we’re not consulted. Certainly the intellectual community in the region has nothing to say about those posts that really require the presence of an academic. All of that selection comes from the part of the Party that really preferred President Ford to Ronald Reagan in ‘76 and George Bush in ‘80. And some of the people who have come into the Party since the President’s election are far, far to the left of even President Ford. I know what the Bible says about those who come late to the harvest, but that only applies to the kingdom of Heaven. I think in politics that analogy does not obtain; it’s a fatal analogy. I think that if you identify yourself with those who are just barely on your side more frequently than those who are indubitably your friends, then you undermine the enthusiasm for politics that makes good people and work for you.
PARTISAN: Do you think that there is any place for Southern conservatives in the Republican Party as it’s presently constituted?
BRADFORD: I think at the state level, yes. At the national level, I’m not so sure.
PARTISAN: Can we ever go back to the Democrats?
BRADFORD: We can’t go back to the Democrats, so to some extent we’re stranded as we have been throughout a good portion of the history of the Republic.
PARTISAN: Is there any way out of that uncomfortable position?
BRADFORD: It depends on the good judgment of the people with whom we make common cause. One of the national parties will have to decide that we’re to have some input in its councils in proportion to the service we perform on the first Tuesday in November. And that party must be prepared to take the kind of flack from the national press that will come as a result. It’s still the prerogative of the Northeastern press to define the boundaries of respectability that prevent the Republican Party from acknowledging not just Southern conservatives, but by and large any of the more traditional conservatives from other regions of the country.
PARTISAN: But they have a special hate on for us because of historical questions, many of which have long since been resolved.
BRADFORD: That’s right. And because we have the wrong patrimony. We suffer from the great inherited guilt.
PARTISAN: Do you think that we should insure our acceptance into the national consensus by putting this patrimony behind us or should we continue to fight for it in the face of such formidable antagonism?
BRADFORD: I’ve never liked the example of Esau. I think we’ll do better by “remembering who we are.”
Blood is boiling against whom exactly?