Willmoore Kendall Contra Mundum. By Willmoore Kendall. New Rochelle, New York: Arlington House, 1971. 640

When writing about Willmoore Kendall a strong temptation exists to deal with the man, not his teachings or theory. This I have always felt to be a shame, and, at times, a deliberate dodge because the reviewer or commentator sought to avoid coming to grips with the substance of his thought. I content myself with noting, as does Jeffrey Hart in his introduction to this volume, that Willmoore was a character of the first order who could on occasion be extremely perverse.

This perversity, manifested in his personal life, is not evident in his writings. To be sure, many will complain about his style. They will talk about “involuted sentences” that seem to run on indefinitely with dashes, colons, semicolons, and parentheses. Criticisms of Willmoore on these grounds are not well taken. His mind was a far-ranging one and he used the English language (he was, believe me, a craftsman) as best he could to set forth the nuances of his theory and arguments, as well as the depth of his emotional conviction. Students and teachers alike would do well to “pick” at those so-called involuted sentences. They will find them to be not only sentences that conform with the Queen’s English but, more importantly, stuffed with intellectually rewarding and provocative thoughts. Illustrative of this is one of the few pieces in this collection that I had never read before, entitled “Who Should Control Our Public Schools”? Read also in this connection “American Conservatism and the ‘Prayer’ Decision.” I know of no writings (and we have been flooded with them over the years) that simultaneously bring us to the issues at stake, state the conservative alternatives on these questions, and reflect the depths of conservative outrage concerning the course of events, a course dictated, no less, by the imperious masters of the American liberal establishment.

What was Kendall trying to tell us? What were his central teachings? I will list some that are highly interrelated.

(1) He told us to trust the American people. He always loved America and in his later years he came to love its political institutions and procedures. That is one theme that permeates most of his works dealing with the American system and his critiques of the proposals for reform offered by the modern American liberal. The three articles that best reflect this are “Dialogues on Americanism,” “Deadlock,” and “How to Read Richard Weaver: Philosopher of ‘We the (Virtuous) People.’”