Academia
Mr. Right
Dallas professor Mel Bradford thinks that Abe Lincoln was a scoundrel and that equality is nonsense. I had to find out why.
(Page 2 of 2)
“I inherited what Burke called a prescriptive identity, just as I inherited my middle name,” said Bradford, whose middle name, by the way, is Eustace. “We were a storytelling people. All my life I heard stories about the Civil War, particularly from my grandmother and great-uncle. I had three great-grand-fathers who fought for the Confederacy, and one lost his leg at Chickamauga and suffered terribly from the wound for the remainder of his life. Emerson says that everyone belongs to the ‘party of memory’ or the ‘party of hope,’ and I grew up within the party of memory. Reconstructing the past helped my family define who we were.”
Bradford’s political thinking was greatly influenced by his father, the manager of a wholesale paper company in Fort Worth. E. A. Bradford was so conservative that he opposed Jim Crow laws in the South because he believed the regulations that segregation imposed on businesses were contrary to Southern tradition. His father also believed that the University of Texas was too radical, so young Mel attended the University of Oklahoma on a Naval Reserve Officers’ Training Corps scholarship. Not until he went on active duty as a junior ensign aboard the U.S.S. Hornet had he been around a broad cross section of people. “That’s where I realized that the point of departure in my thinking was different than most other Americans’,” Bradford recalled. Later, he taught at the Naval Academy and at Vanderbilt University, where he received his doctorate in English. While at Vanderbilt, he began writing for Southern literary quarterlies and conservative journals, slowly developing and refining an ideology that, as far as I can make out, sets out to prove that the Old South was right all along.
I had traveled to Dallas to learn Bradford’s views, not to debate him, but some of his pronouncements on the Confederacy got my blood pressure dangerously high. I asked Bradford to explain how any decent person could live comfortably with the institution of slavery.
“The way to look at the institution of slavery,” he replied, “is not backward from 1991 but forward from the hundred years before 1860. Slavery was like the rising and setting of the sun, a fixture of life. In pre-Colonial times, everyone was racist, except a few Quakers. Jefferson thought that Negroes were not capable of taking care of themselves, that they were somewhere between helpless children and orangutans.”
“What I remember Jefferson saying,” I told him, “is that blacks had been so crushed by their experience with whites that an interracial society wasn’t feasible. Did Southerners look on blacks as human beings?”
“Oh, yes. That’s why they tried so hard to Christianize them,” he said patiently. It was a question that he had addressed many times. In one essay, he wrote: “There is no purpose in extending the Divine Grace made available to men through the death of God’s son to creatures less than human.”
I then phrased a loaded question: “I know that you have written that equality is a ‘pseudoreligion,’ ‘the opiate of the masses in today’s world,’ ‘part of a larger and older passion for uniformity.’ But on a purely human level, how can you argue that simply because a person is black, that person shouldn’t have the same opportunity as anyone else?”
Bradford took extra care in wording his reply (this was one of the few times he used the word “black” rather than “Negro”). “I can understand,” he said slowly, “the outrage of a black person equipped to manage full membership in a white society and being prevented from doing so. I would feel the same way if I were black. On the other hand, a white mother not wanting her child assigned to a school where there is an undercurrent of violence and tension, a real danger—her attitude is perfectly human and natural, and to attribute it simply to racism is abusive.”
“And you don’t see yourself as a racist?”
“I am not a scientific racist,” he replied. “I don’t believe that Negroes are genetically inferior. But history shows that blacks have had a hard time in this country, that they are a kind of fifth wheel. That’s just an observation of fact.”
Bradford’s bashing of Lincoln is only a small part of his literary outpouring, but it’s the part that has made him nationally known. His essays read like criminal indictments. For example, he charges that Lincoln was a tyrant who seized unprecedented power, instigated a system of income redistribution, arrested and imprisoned his political enemies without trial, closed newspapers that criticized him, allowed war profiteers to sell rotten beef and worthless guns, and put the priorities of his own political machine ahead of the lives and well-being of his soldiers. Bradford portrays Lincoln as a systematic racist, pointing out that as a lawyer before the war, Lincoln filed a case in Kentucky under the Fugitive Slave Act to recover money owed from the sale of some of his wife’s family’s slaves. Lincoln told racial jokes, urged friends to keep quiet about white-only clauses in Western state constitutions, and viewed emancipation as little more than technical release from slavery—for blacks, a onetime “root, hog, or die” opportunity.
“A lot of what Bradford says about Lincoln is simply sour grapes from a disappointed Confederate,” says Harry Jaffa, a professor emeritus of political philosophy at Claremont McKenna College and Claremont Graduate School in California. “Bradford would never come right out and defend slavery. You can’t do that these days. Instead of defending slavery, he attacks Lincoln.” The author of Crisis of a House Divided and other books, Jaffa has debated and written numerous responses to Bradford’s attacks on Lincoln. Though Jaffa is Bradford’s longtime nemesis, there is a grudging friendship in their relations. Jaffa supported Bradford in the NEH fight.
I asked Jaffa why he thought Bradford was so vehement about Lincoln. He laughed and said, “Lincoln stole Mel Bradford’s great-grandfather’s slaves.”
Bradford’s revelations about Lincoln are neither new nor startling. As far back as 1927, Charles Beard, one of the most distinguished American historians, wrote that Lincoln displayed “a lack of sensibilities, an uncouthness of manner, and a coarse jocularity that were shocking to persons of taste two or three generations removed from the soil.” But as Beard also wrote, “He was in very fact President of the United States in a tragic hour, measuring up in full length to his Augustan authority and responsibility.” Lincoln’s greatness, as Beard suggests, is that he preserved the Union. “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it,” Lincoln wrote in 1862. “And if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.”
Bradford gives Lincoln no credit for saving the Union, because the Union that Lincoln saved was not the same Union that existed before the war. It was an industrial nation, not an agrarian one, and its power belonged unquestionably to the central government instead of the states. To Bradford, the new Union is less worthy; he prefers antebellum America to postbellum America.
Bradford’s central belief is that Lincoln is to blame for all this. If only Lincoln’s war policy had been different and the South had been allowed to leave the Union or negotiate the terms of its return, all of subsequent American history would have been different. That’s what I was thinking as I walked out of Bradford’s office and headed home, and on reflecting, I realized something else: I was more grateful than ever that Lincoln had persevered.
Pages: 1 2
My Library
