George H. Nash’s Reappraising the Right: The Past and Future of American Conservatism (Wilmington, Delaware, ISI Books.2009) is a collection of far-ranging essays, ending with “The Prospects for American Conservatism” an address presented October 24, 2008 at Belmont Abbey College (NC) when he received the Richard M. Weaver Prize for Scholarly Letters from the Ingersoll Foundation when Nash was president of The Philadelphia Society. In Part I Nash examines a number of writers: “The Quiet, Libertarian Odyssey of John Chamberlain,” Whittaker Chambers, Friedrich Hayek, Willmore Kendall, Russell Kirk, and Forrest McDonald.
Nash devotes four essays to Herbert Hoover about whose early life he had extensively written. Nash focuses on the relationship between President Calvin Coolidge and Secretary of Commerce Herbert C. Hoover. President Coolidge’s quiet and retiring style clashed with the hyper-active “Great Engineer” in his cabinet. Nash also examines the bad press which Hoover received during and since the Great Depression.
Nash presents five chapters on “William F. Buckley Jr. and the Advent of National Review.” He examines the impact of Buckley’s original blockbuster criticism of his college, God and Man at Yale (1951). In November, 1955 when Buckley’s mentor, Frank Chodorov, had stepped down as editor of The Freeman at the Foundation for Economic Education, Buckley felt free to launch National Review. Buckley had contributed his new fame to assisting Frank Chodorov (then associate editor of Human Events) to promote the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists. Buckley and his editors had broken with the CIA-sponsored Congress of Cultural Freedom for presenting a social democratic rather than a free market face in American outreach to foreign intellectuals. National Review editors were unhappy with the Eisenhower administration’s failure to come to grips with the impositions of the New Deal such as Social Security and the TVA, or its creation of the new Department of Health, Education and Welfare inspired by Nelson Rockefeller. Nash notes the strong role of Catholics in National Review at a time when Catholicism was associated with anti-collectivism and the free market.
To me, the most valuable contribution is Nash’s Part III: “Conservatism and the American Jewish Community.” “Forgotten Godfathers: Premature Jewish Conservatives and the Rise of National Review” deals with seven writers: William Schlamm, Morrie Ryskind, Eugene Lyons, Frank S. Meyer, Frank Chodorov, Ralph de Toledano and Marvin Liebman. Nash says that the side walks of New York were their formative influence. Nash mentions but does not discuss Will Herberg, National Review’s religion editor for a decade. Nash analysis is a valuable contribution.
However, the most engaging chapter is “Jews for Joe McCarthy: The Rise and Fall of the American Jewish League Against Communism” (pp. 169-201). Nash originally presented it at a conference on “McCarthyism in America” held at the National Archives in Washington, D. C., on February 9, 2000 – the fiftieth anniversary of McCarthy’s speech in Wheeling, West Virginia.
The American Jewish League Against Communism was founded in 1947 by Rabbi Benjamin Schultz who was a graduate of University of Rochester and of Rabbi Stephen S. Wise’s Jewish Institute of Religion. He had been rabbi of Temple Emanu-El in Yonkers, New York since 1935. The original backers were Eugene Lyons, author of The Red Decade: The Stalinist Penetration of America (1941) and a biography of Herbert Hoover, Isaac Don Levine, Ralph de Toledano, George Sokolsky, noted Hearst columnist, and Alfred Kohlberg, main funder and head of the “China Lobby.” After several years of clashes between Rabbi Schultz and some Jewish organizations, Nash notes: “between 1952 and 1954, one of the most conspicuous boosters of McCarthy and his “ism” in New York state and beyond was Rabbi Schultz.” Rabbi Schultz received commendations from Vice-President Richard Nixon, J. Edgar Hoover and Bernard Baruch. I knew Rabbi Schultz while I was a student at Georgetown University. The members of the 1952 Students for Taft continued their activities in part in association with Rabbi Schultz. There were few Jewish students supporting the American Jewish League Against Communism, so a mixture of gentile and Jewish students represented the League at meetings and functions. These culminated in the historic dinner at the Hotel Astor in July, 1954 to honor Senator McCarthy’s principal aide, Roy Cohen. With the fading of Senator McCarthy, so also did Rabbi Schultz fade. But his support from Bill Buckley and Alfred Kohlberg was a step to the launching of National Review.
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