“Does it Matter…?” Political Theory in the Archives of William F. Buckley, Jr.

When I began the research for what would become The Fire Is Upon Us: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley Jr., and the Debate over Race in America, my sense of the scope of the book was modest (Buccola 2019). I proposed to write a short book that focused on the evening in February 1965 when James Baldwin, who Malcolm X (1968) aptly called “the poet” of the civil rights revolution, went toe-to-toe with William F. Buckley, Jr., who might have been justly called “the poet” of the conservative counterrevolution. The setting for the clash was the Cambridge Union, the world’s oldest debating society, and the motion before the house that evening—“The American Dream Is at the Expense of the American Negro”—was the perfect one for Baldwin and Buckley to debate. Baldwin—son of Harlem turned revolutionary prophet—versus Buckley—son of privilege turned guardian of hierarchy—would face off to debate race and the American Dream in front of an international audience. The stage seemed to be set for a concise, dramatic book in which the debate would be the centerpiece of the action and the driving force of the narrative.

But then I entered the archives, and everything changed. The first archive I visited was the William F. Buckley, Jr., Papers at Yale University (Buckley Papers), a vast collection to which I would return many times. About midway through writing my first draft of the book, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture opened the James Baldwin Papers (Baldwin Papers) to researchers and off I went for the first of many trips to research that collection. Then there were the archives of the supporting characters in my story. It was in the archives that I got a true sense of the story I needed to tell, the heart of which was the backstory of each man—and I could not get to that heart without the archives.

To defend this claim here, I limit this article to a particular strand in the Buckley side of the story. Given the theme of the debate, one of my primary aims was to uncover, understand, and reconstruct how Buckley and the writers he surrounded himself with at his National Review magazine reacted to the Black liberation struggle of the 1950s and 1960s. As I did this research, the published record was rich with evidence. Buckley used the pages of National Review as a platform from which he and his colleagues sought in the area of “race relations,” as he put it in 1965, to be “extremely articulate, non-racist while not attempting a dogmatic racial egalitarianism either.” ¹ A good history of this aspect of the American Right could be written using only the published writings of these figures. We could, for example, use only the published writings of Buckley and his circle at National Review to provide a sound sense of how one group of right-wing intellectuals justified their resistance to Brown v. Board of Education, the sit-in protests, the Freedom Rides, the March on Washington, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. However, this would be an incomplete history. This history provides a sense of how these men justified their positions, but it would not provide a sense of what they did when out of the public eye to thwart Black liberation. To understand how conservative power adapts to forces rising to displace it, we must delve into these shadowy spaces. We need, among other things, to look in the archives.

This article focuses on a question that remains urgent in our politics: How does the self-proclaimed “respectable,” “non-racist” Right use the political energy of the “unrespectable,” “racist” Right while denying that it is doing so? ² The archives of Buckley and his circle offer many examples to ponder. Consider first the 1958 correspondence among Buckley, segregationist polemicist James Jackson Kilpatrick, and Citizens’ Council leader William J. Simmons. Recall that Buckley was seeking to fashion a “non-racist” justification for resistance to civil rights. According to Buckley’s understanding of “non-racism,” cozying up publicly with Kilpatrick was acceptable but cozying up publicly with Simmons was problematic. Kilpatrick was an ardent defender of segregation, but he could be counted on—most of the time—to dress his segregationist arguments in the garments of constitutional theory. Simmons was a leader of a group that was aptly called The Uptown, or Rotary Club, Ku Klux Klan. “Same values as the Klan,” I sometimes say, “different outfits.” The Council set out to destroy the lives of anyone they deemed to be too friendly to civil rights, but their preferred means usually differed from the Klan. ³

This article focuses on a question that remains urgent in our politics: How does the self-proclaimed “respectable,” “non-racist” Right use the political energy of the “unrespectable,” “racist” Right while denying that it is doing so?

One can see why Buckley may have been reticent to appear too close to someone like Simmons in public. What happens in private, however, is another matter. Buckley’s magazine was desperate for subscribers, and Kilpatrick—who was a frequent contributor and a friend of both men—was eager to help. When he had dinner with his friend Simmons in 1958, the two men hatched a plan. What if Simmons were to share his 65,000-name mailing list with Buckley, who then could use it to recruit subscribers? Buckley consented to the plan. ⁴ The Kilpatrick Papers at the University of Virginia and the Buckley Papers contain the back-and-forth among the three men executing the plan, revealing how the “respectable” Right could tap into the energy of the “unrespectable” Right while pretending they had space between them. The archive allows us to better understand the ways in which men like Simmons, Kilpatrick, and Buckley were collaborating behind the scenes. Moreover, it allows us to see the spaces between them and ponder an important question: Do those spaces really matter? In other words, were Simmons and Buckley truly all that different and, if not, what does that teach us about performativity in politics?

Fast-forward a few years to mid-1963. In the wake of the success of the sit-in protests, the Freedom Rides, the Albany and Birmingham campaigns, and the first serious traction on meaningful federal civil rights legislation since Reconstruction, what was a “respectable” conservative to do? The public record makes it entirely clear that Buckley found association with racist demagogues such as Ross Barnett and George Wallace to be unsavory, but he recognized that they were tapping into an energy that the conservative movement desperately needed. The archive provides glimpses into how Buckley thought through this conundrum. In April 1961, he had signed a contract with Putnam to write a “big book” on conservatism. By 1963, he had assembled hundreds of pages of notes for the project with a working title: The Revolt Against the Masses. ⁵ Buckley’s aim in Revolt would be to champion “the restoration of natural and compassionate hierarchy” in the face of what he took to be the excesses of democracy. ⁶ In his archive, Buckley kept a massive file for the never-to-be-written book, including articles by others that seemed relevant to the topic, letters to and from his editor at Putnam, and—most revealing of all—notes that Buckley took on the project. I recognize that we must be careful with unpublished notes. Our claims about such evidence should be relatively modest and it should be placed alongside other evidence that we discover in the research process.

With these caveats in mind, I cannot adequately express the feeling of scholarly elation that I felt when I sat in the archive and held in my hands a document titled, “Notes Re Revolt Against the Masses (Discussion with JB).” The “JB” in this case was James Burnham, a senior editor at National Review and a Buckley confidante. It is a brief but wide-ranging document. In it, Buckley reflects on “the Negro question” in a way that is very revealing. “The Negro question,” he wrote, “may cause a revolt against the masses for the wrong reasons…do whites oppose them because Negroes in fact represent lower standards?….[D]oes it matter whether the Negro problem was the proximate cause for a revolt against the masses?” ⁷ This is the “Does It Matter…” in my title for this article. Considered in context, this fragment is intriguing. Buckley was worrying about something that was at the forefront of his mind in this period: Should conservatives attempt to use the energy of anti-Black racism to accomplish their political goals? For Buckley, those goals were unapologetically elitist; he wanted nothing less than to be an intellectual leader in a revolt against the masses. But he worried about associating himself with those who seemed motivated by racial animus. He believed his defense of racial hierarchy was—to borrow language from his “Notes”—“compassionate.” However, the bottom line is this: the archival evidence, alongside Buckley’s published writings and public actions, help us to see that his answer to the “Does it matter…” question was an emphatic “No!” He and other “respectable” conservatives were happy to accept the energy of the racist Right because they recognized that their own movement would likely die without it.

We might still wonder what the archive has given us that had not already been provided by the public record. It is not as if Buckley was shy about his racially reactionary politics. That is true enough, but the archive helps us to respond to a question that has arisen numerous times since I began working on this project: Shouldn’t he have known better? Questioner after questioner has asked this or phrased it as a declaration: “He was such an intelligent man,” many have said to me, “and he claimed to be so devout, and yet he treated Black people with such inhumanity.” This glimpse into the archive helps us to see that Buckley was grappling with that question and that he was cognizant of the devil’s bargain before him. He asked himself if making a deal with the devil of white supremacy was a price worth paying for power, and he answered in the affirmative.

My hope is that this brief tour through only a few of the striking archival moments I had when doing the research for The Fire Is Upon Us will contribute to the case that many treasures are to be found in the archives of the people and organizations that we study as political theorists. Nevertheless, I want to conclude on a note of caution. Long after I finished the book, I was having dinner with a historian friend, and we were discussing the wonders of archival research. At some point in that conversation he said, rather casually, “But, of course, we have to remember that the archive is a lie.” There is truth in that too.