Stephen J. Tonsor
“A Few Paleo-reflections in Time's Mirror”

40^th Gala! Anniversary Meeting
The Philadelphia Society
Chicago, Illinois
May 1, 2004

First let me say what a pleasure it is to be with all of you even at something of a distance. I have known a few of you for a total of fifty years. A few of you were still in the fever-swamps of Left-liberalism when those first brave pages of National Review were published. Is there something to be learned from the experience of fifty years? Has that Paleolithic age nothing to say to us or to the generation of heirs who now come to the fore? 

As one grows older, one becomes more and more the self given by time and history. One becomes, in short, increasingly paleo. At twenty we are still in rebellion against our heritage. At eighty we often ask ourselves whether or not we have been true to that heritage. 

To be "Neo" is to live in danger. Mutant types in culture and in biology are, as any sophomore student of biology knows, nearly always fatally flawed and prone to an early and ugly demise. Benign mutations are rare and the type out of the past has a persistence of the color of Mendell's peas -and this for the very good reason that the type has enabled survival. 

I would like to place these observations in the context of the life and generous spirit of one of Conservatism's founders, my friend, Henry Regnery. Few men have been as charitable, even when, as I reminded him, someone was attempting to do him in. I would like to discuss his gifts to the present in terms of those important areas of paleo life: community, culture, and politics. 

Let us begin with community. Henry loved Chicago. It was his kind of city-or at least he tried to make it his kind of City. Those of you who have read his autobiography "Memoirs of a Dissident Publisher" or "Creative Chicago" or "A Few Reasonable Words" know that Henry's life and thought were bound up with this city. It was no accident that his politics reflected His commitment to Chicago; the University of Chicago, the Chicago Symphony, on whose board of directors he served for many years, the Newberry Library, The Chicago Conservatory of Music, and that important club, the Cliffdwellers. These were institutions in which the Chicago community was reflected in a distinctive culture. 

His cultural identity was not that of an observer only but that of an active participant. Henry was a gifted amateur musician. He wrote well but not always easily and above all Ole enjoyed the company of the culturally creative. He hoped, for some years, to write a biography of Robert Maynard Hutchins. He had participated with Hutchins in the "Great Books" movement and he had published that great landmark of Chicago culture in the early '50s, Measure. Leafing through the pages of Measure one realizes what a special place Chicago was in those days. Henry thought for some years of writing a biography of Theodore Dreiser. This was an enthusiasm I could never quite understand though, to be sure, Dreiser was a mid-Westem German. 

For Henry, community always had an institutional and a personal location. That explains his enthusiasm for the Cliffdwellers, and the Club's founder, Hamlin Garland. This explains why community was for him personal rather than simply abstractly institutional. This also tells us something of the quality of his political commitment. 

Politics are always derivative from community and culture. Henry's background and education were German. His years of study at MIT, Harvard and Bonn put him in contact with the best of pre-Nazi and anti-Nazi Germany. The community around the journal Measure included Otto von Simson, Hans Rothfels, and Arnold Bergstraeser. These men were the most evident members of a larger post World War II group of German intellectuals who played a key role in the cultural and political rehabilitation of Germany. Henry published all of them in the early books and pamphlets of the Henry Regnery publishing company. He published, moreover, the best of German spirituality in the works of Romano Guardini and Josef Pieper. 

American Conservatism was, in the early 1950's, still only a scattered band of cultural and political malcontents. Henry's publication in 1953 of Russell Kirk's, The Conservative Mind provided these disparate elements with what Henry called a "unifying concept. " He had previously published William F. Buckley's God and Man at Yale and Buckley was, in the years following to give leadership through National Review to the Conservative movement. You will note that the key to this Conservatism was communal and cultural rather than abstractly political or economic. Randian Libertarianism and Liberal economic determinism were never a serious part of the Conservative movement. 

Moreover, the participants in this movement were a band of friends. Henry and Eleanor Regnery entertained all of them in Chicago and at their country place in Three Oaks, Michigan with wonderful food, German white wine and endless, improving conversation. Economics and political theory were important but derivative. Henry had studied with Joseph Schumpeter but his personal friendships were with people such as Gerhart Niemeyer, Richard Weaver, Wyndham Lewis, and Roy Campbell. Willmoore Kendall was an errant comet who strayed in and out of the sun's orbit. 

Henry's long and generous life should remind Conservatives of who they are and where they have been. It should return them to their common roots, their paleo-selves and to the unassailable achievements of community and culture which characterized this movement. We owe Henry a great debt which I fear may be lost in the klaxon-din of those who call themselves Neo-Conservatives.