Editor's Note: It is with great sadness that ISI marks the passing of William F. Buckley Jr. Before going on to found National Review and so to emerge as the leading public figure in America's conservative revival, Buckley had served briefly in 1953–54, at the behest of his friend Frank Chodorov, as ISI's first president. Buckley had then already risen to public notice as the author of God and Man at Yale (1951), a book which illuminated the pressing need for an organization like ISI. Buckley remained a close friend of the Institute his whole life. His wit, intelligence, energy, and tremendous capacity for friendship will be sorely missed.

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This year marks the golden anniversary of the publication of one of the seminal books in modern American conservatism, William F. Buckley Jr.’s God and Man at Yale. Without it, one could fairly say, the conservative movement would not exist today. Soon after winning national attention with this controversial polemic, Buckley deployed his youth, charm, and intellect to unite a motley crew of cantankerous intellectuals into a viable conservative movement. Less than a generation after Lionel Tilling famously opined that “in the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition,” Buckley had in large part caused the liberal consensus to unravel.

For all of its fame, however, God and Man at Yale is as noteworthy as a failure as it is as a success. Buckley’s call for Yale alumni to withhold financial support until Yale ceased to undermine her students’ faith in Christianity and the free market went almost entirely unheeded; today Yale is more secular and left-wing than ever. Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to view the book as a mere historical artifact, for Buckley’s tocsin rings as loudly today as it did then, and the controversy over the book’s argument is well worth revisiting.

So decisive has been the rout of Christianity at Yale that anyone under the age of fifty now can hardly imagine how Buckley’s book could have caused as much controversy as it did, much less why Buckley should have become at the time the object of such intense vituperation. McGeorge Bundy called Buckley a “violent, twisted, and ignorant young man,” and questioned both the “honesty of his method” and the “measure of his intelligence.” Frank Ashburn, founder of the Brooks School, called him “Torquemada, reincarnated in his early twenties” and insinuated that he should be wearing not academic robes but those of the Ku Klux Klan. Henry Sloane Coffin, the former president of Union Theological Seminary who chaired a blue-ribbon committee to respond to Buckley’s charges, wrote snidely that Buckley, a Roman Catholic, “should have attended Fordham or some similar [Catholic] institution.”

If these attacks seem personal, that is because they were. All of the major players in the effort to discredit Buckley hailed from old-line Yale families. Many of them, including Coffin, McBundy, and Ashburn, belonged (like Buckley himself) to Skull and Bones. Charles Seymour, the President of Yale while Buckley was an undergraduate, was himself a Bonesman, while A. Whitney Griswold, the Yale President when the book was published, came from a Bones family. Buckley’s attackers thus saw themselves as custodians of a great tradition; their religion was liberal Protestant, their outlook modern, and their sensibility elitist.To them, Roman Catholicism, like Evangelical Protestantism, was the religion of the lower classes—publicly tolerated but privately derided. Buckley in consequence was not so much a Torquemada as a latterday Alaric who, upon being invited into the very citadel of Northeastern WASP prestige, had the gaucherie to question its continued legitimacy.

Part of the difficulty in understanding the controversy over God and Man at Yale is that the class distinctions that made Buckley such an unwelcome guest have become blurred since the 1960s. Students today associate religious conservatism with Establishment stuffiness, whereas in truth the leaders of the American Establishment at mid-century contemned both religious enthusiasm and religious orthodoxy. To be sure, the social prestige of men such as Bundy and Coffin could only exist within a Christian society whose mainline churches dominated the universities, and in turn, the government and the culture. Ironically, had the old Yale scions only followed Buckley’s prescriptions, they might not have seen their regime crumble around them in the 1960s. Perhaps an even greater irony is that Buckley’s urbanity and charm have made him perhaps the last living icon of the traditional high-WASP temperament.

In 1951, however, he was but a barbarian who had somehow found his way into the inner temple. His arguments in God and Man at Yale were straightforward: first, Yale was undermining students’ faith in Christianity; second, Yale was promoting economic collectivism; and third, alumni should exert their influence to reverse the course of pedagogy at Yale. His critics refused, however, to take these points at face value, but rather insisted that the book was not what it seemed. Fulminated Ashburn, “[God and Man at Yale] stands as one of the most forthright, implacable, typical, and unscrupulously sincere examples of a return to authoritarianism that has appeared. Under the guise of liberty it attacks freedom; under the guise of knowledge it denies the privilege of free investigation and dissent; under the guise of defending capitalism and religion it uses the technique of Dr. Goebbels; under the guise of academic freedom it hides the somber robes of theocracy.”

How did a book about pedagogy at Yale inspire a philippic against totalitarianism? Ashburn was not alone in leveling such charges at Buckley; every one of his critics construed the book as an attack not only on Yale, but also, despite Buckley’s professed belief in democracy and freedom, as a veiled attack on the very nature of a free society. Certainly they could not have inferred this insidious purpose from the substance of Buckley’s arguments. In reaching the book’s first two conclusions, Buckley was scrupulous almost to a fault in examining Yale department by department, professor by professor, in order to asses the effect each was having on students’ spiritual lives and political convictions. Indeed, much of the debate over the book focused not so much on questions of fact but on questions of interpretation. Buckley found that the drift of Keynesian economics was collectivist; his critics insisted that Lord Keynes merely defended the free market from itself. Buckley presupposed that Christianity entailed adherence to the orthodox tenets of the faith; his critics thought that mere interest in Christian spirituality sufficed to demonstrate the strength of religion on campus. Although in each case Buckley upheld the more rigorous view, the differences were surely not so great as to put him in the camp of Dr. Goebbels.