There’s an old saying: the pen is mightier than the sword. Whether that’s true or not, the written word can be powerful. It’s a theme American Spectator publisher Al Regnery highlighted during a presentation at the 2009 Civitas Conservative Leadership Conference in Raleigh. After noting some highlights from the speech, you’ll read Regnery’s conversation with Mitch Kokai for Carolina Journal Radio. (Click here to find a station near you or to learn about the weekly CJ Radio podcast.)
Regnery’s father founded one of the most famous publishing houses associated with the conservative movement; Regnery later led that publishing house himself. During his speech, he recalled the impact of a book from the 1950s: Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind.
Regnery: Kirk was still in his late 20s. [He] was an instructor at Michigan State University. In 1953 he wrote this book, which turned out to be a brilliant account of the history of American — really, international, intellectual conservatism. Kirk was completely unknown, of course, as an instructor. He sent the book to one of the publishers in New York, and they sent it back and said, “Well, if you cut it down to 25 percent of the size that it is, we’ll consider publishing it.”
Kirk, of course, wasn’t going to do that. He sent it to my father, who had recently started his business, and he published the book. And it was an immediate sensation. The book probably never really sold more than, I suppose, 100,000 copies, but the people that mattered read it. What the book did was to lay out the intellectual side of what conservatism was. It defined American conservatism, for example, for the first time. Until then, nobody really used the word very much; they didn’t really know what it meant. He provided a road map of the conservative thought from 1789 to the present. In terms of leftist ideology, he demolished it one by one. He went through, and each of the things that the leftists believed in, Kirk explained how they were wrong. In the process, he made conservatism intellectually respectable. Until then, it was really laughed at. I mean, people literally thought that if you were conservative, you had some sort of a disease.
Less than a decade later, another conservative masterpiece arrived on the scene — Barry Goldwater’s book Conscience of a Conservative.
Regnery: It was a little 100-page book that laid out all of the tenets of American conservatism in very clear, plain language. It was the first time that people had something that actually spelled out what the issues were, which they could relate to and they could understand. And that book was published in 1960. By 1964, when Goldwater was nominated, I think there were something like 10 million copies in print. People carried it around in their pockets. It probably had more impact than any other political book in the 20th century. And as I say, it laid out for the first time exactly what conservatives believed, and it became the campaign theme of the Goldwater campaign. As a result of that book, millions of people came into the conservative movement — people that realized that things were going contrary to the way they wanted them to go. They got involved in politics. … One interesting point is that in 1960, when Nixon ran as a Republican candidate, he had 12,000 donors. When Goldwater ran four years later, he had over 1 million donors. And that completely transformed American politics. The way campaigns were financed was no longer by a few bankers in New York who gave their $10,000 and then said, “OK, this is the person we want nominated.” Instead, millions of people were writing $10 checks, and, with the old saw that he who pays the piper calls the tune, we began to call the tune of the Republican Party, and it transformed it.
Regnery also discussed a book he published in 1987. Red Horizons described the horrors of the Romanian Communist regime.
Regnery: The book was actually smuggled into Romania. The Romanian government said if anybody was caught with a copy, they would be shot. And I suspect they probably did shoot a couple. Well, then we made a deal with Radio Free Europe where they agreed to read the book in Romanian into Romania. And that was done in October of 1989, and you remember in December of 1989, Ceausescu was overthrown, and he and his wife were assassinated. They had a 15-minute trial and assassinated them, and that was the end of Romania. The next day, the counter-revolutionaries seized the newspaper, which of course had been controlled by the government, and what did they do on the front page? They started republishing Red Horizons. And they said this book was the one that had resulted in people knowing enough that they were willing to overthrow the government. And as I always thought, book publishing is a tough business to make any money in, but if you can bring down a government every now and then, it makes it worthwhile.
Kokai: [Carolina Journal Radio caught up with Regnery after his speech to discuss his own book on the history of the conservative movement. It’s called Upstream.] What does your study of the conservative movement tell you about how conservatives can respond to the challenges they face today?
Regnery: Well, there’s a lot, actually, because conservatives have been fighting these battles for a long time. The title of my book is Upstream, and that is it’s an uphill, upstream fight. I mean, you’re always swimming upstream because the consensus of the people that run this country is that they don’t like what we do. And so they’re going to try to stop us. I guess it’s just sticking to what you’re doing. It’s knowing your facts. It’s being better than they are. If you’re going to be a journalist, write better than they do. If you’re going to write a book, write it better than they do. Whatever it is, you have to be really good in order to prevail. You know, we’ve come a long way in 60 years since the end of World War II … and it’s because you’ve had people that persevered. For example, I have a chapter in my book on the donors. There are conservatives — wealthier people who have stepped up to the plate and people that aren’t wealthy as well — [who] have given their money. [It is] extremely important to keep these things going. None of these groups that we run are going to make it without the donors. And it’s the selfless kind of people who are willing, if they can give $10 or $100 or $1,000 or $100,000, whatever it is. That’s an important part of it. … It’s all the things — going out and working in campaigns, if that’s what you like to do. And you stick with it.
We still have a lot going on in this country. Things are pretty grim within the Obama Nation. But he’s not having an easy time, either. People are beginning to figure out where this guy is coming from, and they don’t like it. And the country is still center-right, so we have, I think, with what our beliefs are, we have a lot of goodwill on the part of the public. And if we explain what we’re about rationally, and in a way that they can understand, I think we’ll get a lot of people with us.
Kokai: Does history tell us anything about a rebound for conservatives?
Regnery: There’s always a rebound. I mean, nothing is static. Politics and policies and things like that always go up and down. You go back and, say, look at Lyndon Johnson. Here he beat Goldwater with all but five states — absolutely smashed him. Four years later, he was gone. He wouldn’t run for re-election; he was defeated. Nixon — he was beaten in 1960, and then he came back. In ’68 he was elected overwhelmingly; [he was] re-elected in ’72. Then … he resigns. He wasn’t impeached, but almost. He resigns, he’s gone, and people said the Republican Party is dead; it’s never coming back. [In] 1980, here’s Ronald Reagan. [He] wins overwhelmingly. Then in 1984 — with the biggest majority ever. So it always goes in cycles.