Melvin Eustace Bradford (May 8, 1934 – March 3, 1993) was an American conservative author, political commentator and professor of literature at the University of Dallas.

Bradford is seen as a leading figure of the paleoconservative wing of the conservative movement. He died just as the term paleoconservative was being coined and preferred the term traditional conservative. In his preface to The Reactionary Imperative, he wrote "Reaction is a necessary term in the intellectual context we inhabit in the twentieth century because merely to conserve is sometimes to perpetuate what is outrageous."

Bradford's conservatism was rooted within the heritage and traditions of the American South. He studied at Vanderbilt University and wrote his doctoral thesis under the Southern Agrarian and Fugitive Poet Donald Davidson (whose biography Bradford was wrapping up at the time of his sudden death at age 58), and thus was admitted to the succession of this movement to recover the Southern tradition.

Bradford was first and foremost a literary scholar and a student of rhetoric. He was known in literary circles for his work on William Faulkner, where Bradford stressed the importance of the Southern setting and the primacy of community in understanding the action of Faulkner's novels and stories. He "had no truck with critical efforts to portray Faulkner as alienated from the South. To the contrary, he saw the novelist as thoroughly embedded within his native region."

In U.S. presidential elections Bradford campaigned for Barry Goldwater in 1964, George C. Wallace in 1972, Ronald Reagan in 1976 and 1980, and Pat Buchanan in 1992.

He died in 1993 after undergoing heart surgery.

NEH Nomination

In 1980, Bradford was initially tapped by President-elect Ronald Reagan for chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. According to David Gordon, "Reagan's wish to elevate him to the prestigious post did not stem solely from Bradford's academic credentials. The president and he were acquaintances, and he had worked hard in Reagan's campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. Influential conservatives such as Russell Kirk and Sen. Jesse Helms also knew and admired Bradford." He was even accused of comparing Lincoln to Adolf Hitler. The neoconservative choice, William Bennett, was substituted for Bradford on November 13, 1981. Author Keith Preston later described the successful effort to cancel Bradford's nomination as symbolic of the cosmopolitan neoconservatives descended from liberalism establishing hegemony over the Republican Party and American conservatism, displacing more traditionalist and regionalist thinkers with ideological roots in the Old Right.

A letter supporting Bradford's nomination, sent to President Reagan during the controversy, was signed by John East, Jesse Helms, John Tower, Strom Thurmond, Orrin Hatch, Jeremiah Denton, Dan Quayle and James McClure and eight other Republican senators. Gerhart Niemeyer, Russell Kirk, Jeffrey Hart, William Buckley, M. Stanton Evans, Andrew Lytle, Harry Jaffa ("Bradford's principal intellectual antagonist"), Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, William Kristol,

Bibliography

Books

  • A Better Guide than Reason: Studies in the American Revolution (1979)
  • Worthy Company: Brief Lives of the Framers of the Constitution (1982)
  • Generations of the Faithful Heart: On the Literature of the South (1983)
  • Remembering Who We Are: Observations of a Southern Conservative (1985)
  • The Reactionary Imperative: Essays Literary and Political (1989)
  • From Eden to Babylon: The Social and Political Essays of Andrew Nelson Lytle (1990)
  • Religion and the Framers: Biographical Evidence (1991)
  • Against the Barbarians, and Other Reflections on Familiar Themes (1992)
  • Original Intentions: On the Making and Ratification of the Constitution (1993)

Major articles

  • "A Fire Bell in the Night: The Southern Conservative View" (Modern Age, 1973)
  • "The Heresy of Equality" (Modern Age, 1976)
  • "Dividing The House: The Gnosticism of Lincoln's Political Rhetoric" (Modern Age, 1979)
  • "On Remembering Who We Are" (Modern Age, 1982)
  • "Rhetoric and Respectability" (Modern Age, 1988)

Sources

  • A Defender of Southern Conservatism: M.E. Bradford and his Achievements (1999) by Clyde N. Wilson ()
  • "Culture Clash on the Right" by David Frum, Wall Street Journal, June 2, 1989
  • "Southern Conservatism and its Discontents: Mel Bradford and the American Right" by John Langdale in Southern Character: Essays in Honor of Bertram Wyatt-Brown ()

References

  • Mel Bradford, Old Indian Fighters, and the NEH, by Thomas H. Landess. LewRockwell.com, April 25, 2003.
  • Southern Cross: The meaning of the Mel Bradford moment, by David Gordon. The American Conservative, April 1, 2010.