Remembering Who We Are

a reading list

Remembering Who We Are: Observations of a Southern Conservative by M.E. Bradford was published in 1985 by the University of Georgia Press. Similar to many of Bradford’s writings, this book is not easy to find, but definitely worth the effort. One of the many benefits of reading great books is the discovery of other books worthy of a spot on your shelf or reading list. 

My goal is to detail Bradford’s sources he mentions throughout the book—books, articles, and authors. Several works are mentioned in numerous chapters but I only list them once. Professor Bradford is well acquainted with important thinkers, the Classics, and Original Sources for the subjects he covers (e.g. the Antifederalists, Edmund Burke, John C. Calhoun, Greek and Roman Philosophy), not all are listed but implied. May your reading be fruitful and your books multiply.

On Remembering Who We Are: A Political Credo

This essay was originally published in Modern Age (Spring 1982) and can be found here.

Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787, Reported by James Madison

• The Avalon Project

• National Park Service: The Constitutional Convention: A Day by Day Account for June 1787

“On the origins of the Icelandic Republic” Bradford recommends: 

• Magnus Magnusson, Vikings! (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1980)

• Stefan Einarsson, A History of Icelandic Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1957)

• G. Turville­ Petre, Origins of Icelandic Literature (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1953)

On Venetian history, he suggests (in his words, “a splendid book for the study of republican government”)

• Frederic C. Lane, Venice, A Maritime Republic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973)

On the origins of the Dutch Republic (in his words, “a splendid book for the study of republican government”)

• C. V. Wedgwood, William the Silent: William of Nassau, Prince of Orange, 1533-1584 (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1968)

“The earlier American view of [the origins of the Dutch Republic] is preserved in” 

• John Lothrop Motley, The Rise of the Dutch Republic: A History, 2 vols. (New York: A. L. Burt, n.d.). 

• Bradford notes, “This reading of Dutch history overemphasizes the religious significance of the struggle for independence.”

“Only equal persons in equal situations may enjoy equal opportunities. Professor Robert Nozick has written instructively of these distinctions in his:”

• Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1974)

“Professor Tonsor has recently reminded us that the spiritual equality and liberty of Christians do not readily translate into political terms in:”

• Stephen J. Tonsor, “Equality in the New Testament,” Modern Age, XXIV (Fall, 1980)

Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics (New York: Basic Books, 1962)

Michael Oakeshott, On Human Conduct (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1975)

Leo Strauss, Natural Rights and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953). Bradford is using Strauss as a negative example here.

Leo Strauss, Liberalism, Ancient and Modern (New York: Basic Books, Inc.)

F. A. Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, Vol. I, Rules and Order (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1973)

Robert Nisbet, Twilight of Authority (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975)

Robert Nisbet, The Social Philosophers: Community and Conflict in Western Thought (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1973)

Russell Kirk, “Imagination Against Ideology,” National Review, XXXII, No. 26 (December 31, 1980)

Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975)

M.E. Bradford, A Better Guide Than Reason: Studies in the American Revolution (La Salle, Illinois: Sherwood Sugden & Co., 1979

Thinking Within the Inheritance: A Dedication

This was an address given on August 24, 1982, in Nocona, Texas, for the opening of a new public library.

Stark Young, So Red the Rose (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953)
Jonathan Elliot, The Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution

Not So Democratic: The Caution of the Framers

An address originally given to the Tarshar Society of Shreveport, LA in 1980. It was published in The Freeman 31 (June, 1981) and can be read here.

Max Farrand, The Fathers of the Constitution: A Chronicle of the Establishment of the Union (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1912)
Max M. Mintz, Gouverneur Morris and the American Revolution (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1970)
Robert Ernst, Rufus King: American Federalist (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968)
M. E. Bradford, “The Heresy of Equality: A Reply to Harry Jaffa,” on pp. 29-57 of A Better Guide Than Reason (La Salle, Ill.: Sherwood Sugden & Co., 1979)

And God Defend the Right: The American Revolution and the Limits of Christian Obedience

First published in Christianity and Civilization: The Theology of Christian Resistance

Robert R. Palmer, The Age of Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760-1800, 2 vols. (Princeton University Press). Cited negatively by Bradford.

“With a slightly different, less egalitarian, and more libertarian emphasis [than Palmer]”:

• Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Harvard University Press, 1967)

“Even worse” than Palmer and Bailyn is:

• Henry Steele Commanger, The Empire of Reason: How Europe Imagined and America Realized the Enlightenment (Anchor, 1977)

“Useful examinations of American secular millenarianism in the old Puritan commonwealths are:”

• Nathan O. Hatch, The Sacred Cause of Liberty: Republican Thought and the Millennium in Revolutionary New England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977)

•  James West Davidson, The Logic of Millennial Thought: Eighteenth Century New England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977)
  

Pauline Maier, The Old Revolutionaries: Political Lives in the Age of Samuel Adams (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980)

C. V. Wedgwood, The King’s Peace, 1637-1641 (Glasgow: William Collins & Co., 1955).
Samuel Rutherford, Lex, Rex, or The Law and the Prince (1644)
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William E. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1972)
A.S.P. Woodhouse, Puritanism and Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), “puts Calvin’s remarks on tyranny in the context of the thought of his time.”
M. Stanton Evans, ‘Toward A New Intellectual History,” Modern Age, 25 (Fall, 1981)
John Drayton, Memoirs of the American Revolution (Charleston: A. E. Miller, 1821).

A Fire Bell in the Night

An address given before the Organization of American Historians in 1972. Also, published in Modern Age, 17 (Winter, 1973). It can be read here.

Russell Kirk, John Randolph of Roanoke (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951)
C. Van Woodward, Reunion and Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction (Garden City N.Y.: Doubleday, 1956)
George M. Fred­rickson, The Inner Civil War: Northern Intel­lectuals and the Crisis of the Union (New York: Harper & Row, 1965)
Gottfried Dietze, America’s Political Dilemma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1968)
M.E. Bradford, “Lincoln’s New Frontier: A Rhetoric for Continuing Revolution,” Triumph, VI (May, 1971), 11-13 and 21; (June, 1971), 15-17

“The trouble with our literature from the revolution is, to be sure, the disproportionate representation of ultra sentiments in these documents. But we should not be surprised at this, considering the distribution of sentiment in our own day’s commentary on current politics: ultras are usually articulate and always out­ spoken. And commonplace, middling attitudes rarely drive their way into print.” As examples:

• Bernard Bailyn, The Ori­gins of American Politics (N.Y.: Allred A. Knopf, 1968)

• J.R. Pole, Foundations of Amer­ican Independence, 1763-1815 (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972)

• Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina, 1969)

Eric Voegelin, Order and History, 3 volumes (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1956 and 1957)
Gerhart Niemeyer, Between Nothingness and Paradise (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univer­sity, 1971)
Ernest Lee Tuveson, Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America’s Millennial Role (Chicago: Univer­sity of Chicago, 1968)
Eric Voegelin, Science, Politics and Gnos­ticism (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1968)
William Faulkner, The Unvanquished (N.Y.: Random House, 1938)
Joel Chandler Harris, Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings (Grosset & Dunlap, 1921)

The Lasting Lesson of Southern Politics

Bradford gave this address in Winston-Salem in 1974 to the North Carolina Conservative Society and a revised version was published in the National Review 27, no. 13 (April 29, 1975)

Frank L. Owsley, Plain Folk of the Old South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1949)
Richard Weaver, “Aspects of the Southern Philosophy,” in Southern Renascence, ed. Louis D. Rubin Jr., and Robert D. Jacobs (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1953)
M.E. Bradford, “Faulkner’s ‘Tall Men,'” South Atlantic Quarterly 61 (Winter 1962)
Cleanth Brooks, William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country (Yale University Press, 1963)
William Faulkner, “Barn Burning”
Robert A Smith, ed., Edmund Burke on Revolution (Harper and Row, 1968)

Some Southern Thoughts at Dartmouth

An address given at Dartmouth College in 1974 and published in the Occasional Review 7 (Winter 1977)

I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1930)
The Twelve Southerners:

1. Donald Davidson

2. John Gould Fletcher

3. Henry Blue Kline

4. Lyle H. Lanier

5. Stark Young

6. Allen Tate

7. Andrew Nelson Lytle

8. Herman Clarence Nixon

9. Frank Lawrence Owsley

10. John Crowe Ransom

11. John Donald Wade

12. Robert Penn Warren

Bradford also names several Southern authors connected to the Nashville Agrarians

1. Caroline Gordon

2. Flannery O’Connor

3. Cleanth Brooks

4. Madison Jones

5. Walter Sullivan

6. Marion Montgomery

7. Richard Weaver

8. Peter Taylor

9. Elizabeth Spencer

10. and numerous historians trained by Frank L. Owsley

The 16 Fugitive poets:

1. Walter Clyde Curry

2. Donald Davidson

3. William Yandell Elliott

4. James Marshall Frank

5. William Coleman Frierson

6. Sidney Mttron Hirsch

7. Stanley Johnson

8. Merrill Moore

9. John Crowe Ransom

10. Laura Riding

11. Alfred Starr

12. Alec Brock Stevenson

13. Allen Tate

14. Robert Penn Warren

15. Jesse Ely Wills

16. William Ridley Wills

Herbert Agar and Allen Tate contributed to and edited, Who Owns America? A New Declaration of Independence (New York: Houghton, Mifflin Co., I936)

Contributors:

1. David Cushman Coyle

2. Lyle H. Lanier

3. John C. Rawe

4. Frank Lawrence Owsley

5. Richard B. Ransom

6. Donald Davidson

7. James Muir Waller

8. George Marion O’Donnell

9. John Crowe Ransom

10. Douglas Jerrold

11. Willis Fisher

12. Andrew Lytle

13. John Donald Wade

14. Robert Penn Warren

15. T.J. Cauley

16. Henry Clay Evans, Jr.

17. Mary Shattuck Fisher

18. Cleanth Brooks

19. Hilaire Belloc

Louis D. Rubin Jr., The Writer in the South : Studies in Literary Community (University of Georgia Press, 1972)
Louis D. Rubin Jr., The Faraway Country (University of Washington Press, 1963)
Lewis P. Simpson, The Man of Letters in New England and the South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973)
Thomas Daniel Young, Waking Their Neighbors Up: The Nashville Agrarians Rediscovered (University of Georgia Press, 1982)
Thomas Daniel Young, Gentleman in a Dustcoat: A Biography of John Crowe Ransom (Louisiana State University Press, 1982)
Michael O’Brien, The Idea of the American South, 1920-1941 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979)
Donald Davidson, The Attack on Leviathan (University of North Carolina Press, 1938)
John Donald Wade and Donald Davidson, Selected Essays and Other Writings of John Donald Wade (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010)
Allen Tate, Collected Essays (Swallow, 1959)
Donald Davidson, Still Rebels, Still Yankees, and Other Essays (Louisiana State University Press, 1957)
Andrew Nelson Lytle, Bedford Forrest and His Critter Company (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1931)
Andrew N. Lytle and M.E. Bradford, From Eden to Babylon: The Social and Political Essays of Andrew Nelson Lytle (Regnery Gateway, 1990)
Andrew Nelson Lytle, The Hero with the Private Parts; Essays (Louisiana State University Press, 1966)
Andrew Nelson Lytle, A Wake for the Living: A Family Chronicle (New York: Crown Publishers, 1975)
Robert Morse Crunden, The Superfluous Men: Conservative Critics of American Culture, 1900-1945 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1976)
Richard M. Weaver, George Core, and M. E. Bradford, The Southern Tradition at Bay: A History of Postbellum Thought (Arlington House, 1968)
Richard M. Weaver, Visions of Order: The Cultural Crisis of Our Time (Louisiana State University Press, 1964)
William G. Harvard and Walter Sullivan, A Band of Prophets: The Vanderbilt Agrarians after Fifty Years (Louisiana State University Press, 1982))
The American Review literary journal published 1933-1937
The back issues of the Southern quarterlies (e.g. Georgia Review, Sewanee Review, Southern Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, etc)
The Collected Poems of Robert Penn Warren, edited by John Burt (Louisiana State University Press, 1996)
Robert Penn Warren, John Brown: The Making of a Martyr (Payson & Clarke, 1929)
John Donald Wade, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet: a Study of the Development of Culture in the South (The Macmillan Company, 1924)
Allen Tate, Stonewall Jackson: The Good Soldier. A Narrative (Minton, Balch & Co., 1928)
Allen Tate, Jefferson Davis, His Rise and Fall: A Biographical Narrative (Minton, Balch & Co., 1929)
Donald Davidson, The Tennessee Volume One: The Old River: Frontier to Secession (Rinehart, 1946)
Donald Davidson, The Tennessee Volume Two: The New River: Civil War to TVA (Rinehart, 1946)
John Gould Fletcher. Arkansas (University of North Carolina Press, 1947)
Edward S. Shapiro, “The Southern Agrarians, H.L. Mencken, and the Quest for Southern Identity,” American Studies, vol. 13, no. 2 (Summer 1972)
Edward S. Shapiro, “The Copperheads: Traitors or Democrats?” Southern Partisan, vol. 7 (Spring 1987)
Edward S. Shapiro, “Who Owns America? After 50 years…,” Southern Partisan, vol. 6 (Winter 1986)
Edward S. Shapiro, “Catholic Agrarian Thought and the New Deal,” Catholic Historical Review, vol. 65, no. 4 (October 1979)
Edward S. Shapiro, “Frank L. Owsley and the Defense of Southern Identity,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly, vol. 36, no. 1 (Spring 1977)
Edward S. Shapiro, “Donald Davidson and the Tennessee Valley Authority: The Response of a Southern Conservative,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly (Winter 1974)
Edward S. Shapiro, “The Southern Agrarians and the Tennessee Valley Authority,” American Quarterly, vol. 22, no. 4 (Winter 1970)
Virginia J. Rock, “Agrarianism: Agrarian Themes and Ideas in Southern Writing.” The Mississippi Quarterly, vol. 21, no. 2, (1968)
Virginia J. Rock, “They Took Their Stand: The Emergence of the Southern Agrarians,” Prospects
Virginia J. Rock, “The Making and Meaning of I’ll Take My Stand: A Study in Utopian-Conservatism, 1925-1939″ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Minnesota, 1961)
John Crowe Ransom, God Without Thunder: An Unorthodox Defense of Orthodoxy (Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1930)
Eudora Welty
Patrick Henry
John Taylor of Caroline

The Agrarianism of Richard Weaver

First published in Modern Age 14 (Summer-Fall, 1970) and can be read here.

Eugene Davidson, “Richard Malcolm Weaver—Conservative,” Modern Age, VII (Summer, 1963)
Eliseo Vivas’ Introduction in Richard M. Weaver, Life Without Prejudice and Other Essays (Henry Regnery, 1965)
James Powell,  “The Foundations of Weaver’s Traditionalism,” New Individualist Review, III, No. 3 (1964)
Willmoore Kendall, “How to Read Richard Weaver: Philosopher of ‘We the (Virtuous) People’,” Intercollegiate Review, II (Sept., 1965)
Russell Kirk’s “Foreword” to Richard M. Weaver, Visions of Order (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1964)
Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver, RIP,” National Review, XIV (April 23, 1963)
H.L. Weatherby, “A Southern Rebuttal,” Triumph, IV (April, 1969)
Marion Montgomery, “Richard Weaver Against the Establishment,” Georgia Review, XXIII (Winter, 1969)
Richard M. Weaver, “Agrarianism in Exile,” Sewanee Review, LVIII (Autumn, 1950)
Richard M. Weaver, “The Tennessee Agrarians,” Shenandoah, III (Summer, 1952)
Richard M. Weaver, ”The Southern Phoenix,” Georgia Review, XVII (Spring, 1963)
Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948)
Richard M. Weaver, The Ethics of Rhetoric (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1953)
Richard M. Weaver, Composition: A Course in Reading and Writing (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1957)
Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, Modern Rhetoric (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1949)
Donald Davidson, American Composition and Rhetoric (New York: Scribner, 1939)
John Crowe Ransom, A College Primer of Writing (New York: Holt, 1943)
Louis D. Rubin, Jr. and James Jackson Kilpatrick, eds., The Lasting South (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1957)
Richard M. Weaver, “Lee the Philosopher” in Georgia Review, II (Fall, 1948)
Richard M. Weaver, The Southern Essays of Richard M. Weaver (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2003)
Richard M. Weaver, “The Regime of the South” in National Review, VI (March 14, 1959)
Richard M. Weaver, “The Southern Tradition” in New Individualist Review, III (1964)
Donald Davidson, “The New South and the Conservative Tradition,” National Review, IX (Sept. 10, 1960)
Harriet Chappell Owsley, The South: Old and New Frontiers, Selected Essays of Frank Lawrence Owsley (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1969)
John Crowe Ransom, “Happy Farmers” American Review, I (Oct., 1933)
John Crowe Ransom, “What Does the South Want?” Virginia Quarterly Review, XII (April, 1936)
Andrew Nelson Lytle, “John Taylor and the Political Economy of Agriculture” American Review, III and IV (Sept., Oct., and Nov., 1934)
Allen Tate, “The Angelic Imagination: Poe and the Power of Words,” Kenyon Review, XIV (Summer, 1952)
Tom Landess, The Old South, the New South, and the Real South on the Conversations at Dallas: An Agrarian Reunion, April 1968
John Donald Wade, “The Life and Death of Cousin Lucius,” “The Dugonne Bust,” and “What the South Figured: 1865-1914”

The Agrarian Tradition: An Affirmation

Bradford originally delivered this as an address in 1972 to the Gulf Coast History and Humanities Conference and published in the Conference’s Proceedings 4 (1973)

Donald Davidson, Poems: 1922-1961 (University of Minnesota Press, 1966)
Edward S. Shapiro, “The American Distributists and the New Deal” (doctoral dissertation, Harvard University,. 1968)
Tommy W. Rogers, “Dr. Frederick A. Ross and the. Presbyterian Defense of Slavery,” Journal of Presbyterian History 45 (1967)
M.E. Bradford, “Faulkner, James Baldwin, and the South” Georgia Review 20 (Winter 1966)
Edwin M. Yoder Jr, “The Greening of the South” Book World (July 4, 1971)
George Steiner, “Thought in a Green Shade” Reporter 31 (Dec 31, 1964)
Thomas Lawrence Connelly, “The Vanderbilt Agrarians: Time and Place in Southern Tradition,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly, XXII, 1, (March, 1963)
Rennard Strickland, “Puritan, Indian, and Agrarian: A Critical Essay on the History of Law, Environmental Values, and Rhetorical Strategy” St. Mary’s Law Journal 3 (Winter 1971)
Virginia Rock, “The Fugitive-Agrarians in Response to Social Change,” Southern Humanities Review, 1 (Summer, 1967)
John Shelton Reed, The Enduring South: Subculture Persistence in Mass Society (1972)
John Shelton Reed, One South: An Ethnic Approach to Reginal Culture (Louisiana State University Press, 1982)
Harvey Cox, The Secular City (Macmillan, 1966)
Alan L. Otten, “The New South-Still Conservative” Wall Street Journal, 1972
Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation: The Rise of Modern Paganism (Alfred A. Knopf, 1966)
Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (Oxford University Press, 1964)

Why the South Will Survive (University of Georgia Press, 1981). Contributors: 

• Don Anderson

• M. E. Bradford

• Cleanth Brooks

• Thomas Fleming

• Samuel T. Francis

• George Garrett

• William C. Havard

• Hamilton C. Horton Jr.

• Thomas H. Landess

• Andrew Lytle

• Marion Montgomery

• John Shelton Reed

• George C. Rogers Jr.

• David B. Sentelle

• Clyde N. Wilson

Bradford calls out several social scientists as ignorant enemies of the Agrarians. A few examples:

• John S. Ezell, The South since 1865 (Macmillan, 1963)

• Thomas D. Clark and Albert D. Kirwan, The South since Appomattox (Oxford University Press, 1967)

• Paul N. Gaston, The New South Creed (Alfred A. Knopf, 1970)

• William H. Nicholls, Southern Tradition and Reginal Progress (University of North Carolina Press, 1960)

• David Potter, The South and the Sectional Conflict (Louisiana State University Press, 1968)

• and Especially Ignorant, H. Brandt Ayers and Thomas H. Naylor, You Can’t Eat Magnolias (McGraw-Hill, 1972)

Bradford writes that it is a “mistake to ‘desectionalize’ I’ll Take My Stand, converting it into a pseudopoetic tract or an exercise in pastoral mythmaking. Those Guilty:

• Allen Guttmann, The Conservative Tradition in America (Oxford University Press, 1967)

• Eugene Genovese, The World the Slaveholder’s Made (Pantheon, 1969)

• Clinton Rossiter, Conservatism in America, 2d ed. (Alfred A. Knopf, 1962)

• Louis D. Rubin Jr., The Writer in the South : Studies in Literary Community (University of Georgia Press, 1972)

• George B. Tindall, The Emergence of the New South, 1913-1945 (Louisiana State University Press, 1967)

The “Malicious Mythographers” according to Bradford:

• F. Garvin Davenport Jr., The Myth of Southern History: Historical Consciousness in Twentieth-Century Southern Literature (Vanderbilt, 1970)

• M. Morton Auerbach, The Conservative Illusion (Columbia University Press, 1970)

• Alexander Karanikas, Tillers of a Myth: Southern Agrarians as Social and Literary Critics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966)
  

• John Lincoln Stewart, The Burden of Time: The Fugitives and Agrarians (Princeton University Press, 1965)
  

• Wallace W. Douglas, “Deliberate Exiles: The Social Sources of Agrarian Poetics,” Aspects of American Literature (Ohio State University Press, 1962)
  

• C. A. Ward, “The Good Myth,” and “Myths: Further Agrarian Views,” University of Kansas City Review 25 (June and October 1958)
  

• J. M. Bradbury, The Fugitives: A Critical Account (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1958)
  

The “Merely Malicious” according to Bradford:

• Idus A. Newby, “The Southern Agrarians: A View After Thirty Years,” Agricultural History 37 (July 1963)

• Anne W. Amacher, “Myths and Consequences: Calhoun and Some Nashville Agrarians,” South Atlantic Quarterly 59 (Spring 1968)

• James L. McDonald, “Reactionary Rebels: Agrarians in Defense of the South” Midwest Quarterly 10 (January 1969)

Culture and Anarchy: Federal Support for the Arts and Humanities

Originally an address Bradford gave at Hillsdale College in 1981 and can be read here.

Michael Mooney, The Ministry of Culture: Connections Among Art, Money and Politics (Wyndham Books, 1980)
Russell Kirk,  The Roots of American Order (Open Court, 1974)
Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 1869

Subsidizing the Muses

Prepared for a conference of the Heritage Trust of the Foundation Endowment and read in 1983 at the Metropolitan Club.

Federalist 49
Stephen Miller, Excellence & Equity: The National Endowment for the Humanities (University of Kentucky Press, 1984)
C.P. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, 1959
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 1916

Sentiment or Survival: The Case Against Amnesty

Originally published in American Spectator 17 (April 1984)

Homer Odyssey and Iliad
Beowulf
Virgil Aeneid
Chinese Exclusion Act of May 6, 1882
Quota Act of 1921
The McCarran-Walter Act 1952
Displaced Persons Act of 1948
Refugee Relief Act of August 7, 1953
Refugee Act of 1980
Plyler v. Doe

Faulkner’s Last Words and the American Dilemma

Printed in Modern Age 16 (Winter 1972) and can be read here.

William Faulkner, “Address to the American Academy of Arts and Letters upon Acceptance of the Gold Medal for Fiction.” 1962 
James Meriwether, William Faulkner: Essays, Speeches and Public Letters (Random House, 1965)
Ernest Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Mid­dle Ages (Pantheon Books, 1953)
Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales
Paul Fussell, The Rhetorical World of Augustan Humanism (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1965)

Bradford writes, “There are many methods for formulating a diagnosis of what has brought the Republic to this hard pass. But among the better professors of political philosophy and intellectual history, a pre­liminary consensus appears to be emerging.” He notes, “I refer especially to:”

• Harry Jaffa’s “disagreeable” Equality and Liberty (New York: Oxford, 1965)

• Harry Jaffa, Crisis of the House Divided ( New York: Doubleday, 1960)

• Willmoore Kendall, “Equality: Commitment or Ideal,” Phalanx, I (Fall, 1967)

• Willmoore Kendall, “Equality in the American Tradition,” Politea, II (Winter, 1964-65)

• Willmoore Kendall, “Equality and the American Po­litical Tradition,” (Arlington House, 1971)

• Willmoore Kendall, The Basic Symbols of the American Political Tradition (Louisiana State University Press, 1970)

“More conventional (but useful as indications of the fashion) are:”

• Robert J. Harris, The Quest for Equality: The Constitution, Congress, and the Supreme Court (Louisiana State University Press, 1960)

• Russell B. Nye, The Al­most Chosen People (Michigan State University Press, 1966)

• Sanford A. Lakoff, Equality in Political Philosophy (Harvard University, 1964)

More Freedom Than We Want: Corporate Life and the Literature of the American West

Originally a lecture prepared for the ISI Eastern Summer School in 1979 and published in Intercollegiate Review 16 (Fall-Winter 1980). It can be read here.

Caroline Gordon, Green Centuries (C. Scribner’s Sons, 1941)
Robert Penn Warren, World Enough and Time (Random House, 1950)
Robert Penn Warren,  Brother to Dragons (Random House, 1953)
Madison Jones, Forest of the Night (Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1960)
Walter Van Tilburg Clark, The Ox-Bow Inci­dent (Random House, 1940)
Walter Van Tilburg Clark, The Track of the Cat (Random House, 1949)
Edward Ab­bey, The Brave Cowboy (Dodd, Mead and Company, 1956)
Stephen Crane, “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky,” McClure’s Magazine, 1898
Sacvan Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self (Yale University Press, 1975)
James West Davidson, The Logic of Millennial Thought: Eighteenth-Century New England (Yale University Press, 1977)
Cushing Strout, The New Heavens and New Earth: Political Religion in America (Harper and Row, 1974)
M.E. Bradford, “A Writ of Fire and Sword: The Politics of Oliver Cromwell,” The Occasional Review, III (Sumner, 1975)
Richard Beale Davis, Intellectual Life In the Col­onial South. 1585-1763, 3 Volumes (University of Tennessee Press, 1978)
New Mexico novelist Frank Waters
Sir Robert Filmer, Patriarcha and Other Political Works (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1949)
M.E. Bradford, “That Other Republic: Romanitas in Southern Literature,” Southern Humanities Review (The Classical Tradition in the South: A Special Issue, 1977)
Borden Chase, Blazing Guns on the Chisholm Trail (Random Home, 1948)
Jack Schaefer, Shane (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1949)
The Literature of the American West (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1971). ed. by J. Golden Taylor
Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, revised and enlarged edition (The Macmillan Company, 1961), ed. by John A. Lomax and Alan Lomax

“On the dream of Eden in American literature, see:”

• R.W.B. Lewis, The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy and Tradition In the Nineteenth Century (University of Chicago Press, 1955)

• David W. Noble, The Eternal Adam and the New World Garden ( George Braziller, 1968)

• Hugh Honor, The New Golden Land: European Im­ages of America from the Discoveries to the Present Time (Pantheon Books, 1975)

• Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Sym­bol and Myth (Vintage Books, 1957)

The Lincoln Legacy: A Long View

An address given to the Philadelphia Society in 1979 and published in the Modern Age 24 (Fall 1980) and can be read on Abbeville Institute’s site.

M.E. Bradford, “The Heresy of Equality: Bradford Replies to Jaffa” Modern Age 20 (Winter 1976)
M.E. Bradford, “Dividing the House: The Gnosticism of Lincoln’s Political Rhetoric” Modern Age 23 (Winter 1979)
Roy Basler, The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (Rutgers University Press, 1953)
Alexander H. Stephens, A Constitutional View of the War Between the States (National Publishing Co, 1870)
George M. Frederickson, “A Man but Not a Brother: Abraham Lincoln and Racial Equality” Journal of Southern History 41 (Feb 1957)
Robert Penn Warren, The Legacy of the Civil War: Meditations on the Centennial (Random House, 1961)
Ludwell H Johnson, Divisions and Reunion: America, 1848-1877 (John Wiley and Sons, 1978)
G.S. Boritt, Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream (Memphis State University Press, 1978)
Clinton Rossiter, Constitutional Dictatorship (Princeton University Press, 1948)
Stephen B. Oates, With Malice Towards None (Harper Row, 1977)
Harriet Chappell Owsley, “Peace and the Presidential Election of 1864” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 18 (March 1959)
Charles W. Ramsdell, “Lincoln and Fort Sumter” Journal of Southern History 3 (August 1937)
George B. Forgie, Patricide in the House Divided: A Psychological Interpretation of Lincoln and His Age (W.W. Norton and Co, 1979)

Extra Sources of Interest

I’ve collected relevant sources from across the internet to supplement Bradford’s.

Criticism of Abraham Lincoln
Prof. M.E. Bradford’s Nomination Congressional Record September 24-October 5, 1981: Vol 127 
Donald W. Livingston, “Lincoln’s Inversion of the American Union” 
Thomas Hubert, “Arguing With Lincoln: The Views of M.E. Bradford & Richard Weaver” 
Ralph Ancil, “M.E. Bradford: Nuancing American Whiggism”
David Gordon, Southern Cross
H. Lee Cheek Jr. and Sean Busick, “Mel Bradford and the Founding”
H. Lee Cheek Jr. and Sean Busick, “How Jaffa’s Critics Remember Him”
H. Lee Cheek Jr. and Sean Busick, “Mel Bradford’s Scholarly Legacy at 20” Modern Age (Winter 2015)
M.E. Bradford, “The Language of Lincoln”
M.E. Bradford, “The Myth of Abraham Lincoln”
M.E. Bradford, “Abraham Lincoln Reconsidered”
M.E. Bradford, “How Equality Is Misleading” 
M.E. Bradford, “A Proper Patrimony: Russell Kirk and America’s Moral Genealogy”
M.E. Bradford, “The Household Gods of Freedom”
M.E. Bradford, “The Agrarian Tradition: Review Of I’ll Take My Stand” 1962
Marshal DeRosa, “M.E. Bradford’s Constitutional Theory: A Southern Conservative’s Affirmation of The Rule of Law” 
Dr. Troy L. Kickler, Anti-Federalism
David B. Broyles is not a fan of Bradford, due to his attacks on Straussian idols, “Southern, and American Conservatism” Claremont Review of Books, 2014
Clyde Wilson, “M.E. Bradford’s Revolutionary ‘A Better Guide Than Reason’ “
Clyde Wilson, “M.E. Bradford: The Agrarian Aquinas”
Marion Montgomery, “M.E. Bradford & the Intoxicated Air of the Modernist Moment”
Marion Montgomery, “M.E. Bradford: Traditionalist as Rememberer” 
Mark Malvasi, “Freedom & Tradition: M.E. Bradford’s Southern Patrimony” 
George Carey, In Defense of the Constitution (Liberty Fund, 1989)
Awakening Freedom: Protestant Revivalism’s Effect on the American Revolution by Defense Technical Information Center
William Anthony Hay, “John Randolph: Aristocrat for Liberty”
Russell Kirk, “Randolph of Roanoke”
Russell Kirk, “Donald Davidson and the South’s Conservatism”
The Appropriation of Abraham Lincoln by Ronald Reagan and Conservative Notions of Lincoln’s Legacy, 1980-1989
McClanahan Academy Course
Abbeville Institute Recommended Reading
Lucinda H. Mackethan, “I’ll Take My Stand: The Relevance of the Agrarian Vision” Virginia Quarterly Review (Autumn 1980)
“Political And Economic Recommendations Of I’ll Take My Stand”
Thomas Daniel Young, Donald Davidson (1971)
“I’ll Take My Stand: As Epic”
Randall Ivey, “I’ll Take My Stand”
Thomas H. Landess, “Fugitive Agrarians”
Thomas H. Landess, “Harry Jaffa and the Historical Imagination”
Donald Davidson, “I’ll Take My Stand” American Review
Ralph Nader, “Who Owns America?”
Jack Trotter, “What the Editors Are Reading: Who Owns America?”
Who Owns America on Abbeville Institute
Alan Harrelson, “Native to the Soil: Twentieth-Century Agrarian Thought in the Upland South” (2019). Theses and Dissertations. 3266.
“Alternative Land Reform Proposals In The 1930s – The Nashville Agrarians And The Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union”
Richard Beale Davis, Intellectual Life In Jefferson’s Virginia 1790-1830
Reid Hardeman Mitchell, “Images of Virginia: Allen Tate, the Agrarians, and the Old South”
Ronda Cabot Tentarelli, “The “Southern Review”: an Episode in Southern Intellectual History, 1935-1942.” (1980). LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses. 3576

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