Fifty years after its appearance in 1970, The Basic Symbols of the American Political Tradition by Willmoore Kendall and George Carey remains a leading interpretation of our tradition for the opponents of not just one, but two schools of thought. It was a pioneering effort to counter what these dissenting political scientists called “the official literature” on the American Founding: the view of Progressive Era interpreters (following Abraham Lincoln’s similar understanding) that it was dedicated foremost to individual rights and equality, and that the American political system, as ideally conceived, is likewise dedicated to these principles.
In the authors’ view, the progressives were responsible for a “derailment” of the American tradition because they so wrongly misinterpreted it, displacing majority rule or self-government and a virtuous political civility from their rightful pre-eminence therein. Although the late political philosopher Harry Jaffa and the associated “Claremont school” have deeply opposed the thinking of progressivist historians and social theorists, Basic Symbols is also used as an intellectual cudgel against them, for they too have followed Lincoln in insisting on the centrality of individual rights and equality to the American tradition.
Identifying the Derailment
The flamboyant Kendall (1909-1967), who was politically but not temperamentally a conservative, and his modest younger collaborator Carey (1933-2013), a conservative in both respects, were in some ways an odd couple. But in political philosophy, or at least on the American Founding, they saw eye-to-eye. Basic Symbols is not, therefore, a compromise negotiated by two divergent writers, but a truly co-authored work like the Federalist Papers. In the decades following Kendall’s untimely death of a heart attack a few years after he happily joined the faculty at the University of Dallas, Carey’s enduring career at Georgetown University allowed him to serve as teacher and intellectual mentor to a much longer stream of students and future scholars.
Kendall, a “wild Yale don” and “natural aginner” as two observers have called him, was among the founders of America’s 20th-century conservative intellectual movement and is still very much a name to conjure with. But Carey is himself a powerful presence among scholars of American political thought, especially those who are right-of-center. His quiet persistence in the vineyard of constitutionalism did much to maintain his old intellectual partner’s influence for two full generations, an influence that continues today and likely can be expected to in the future. Carey’s greatest contribution in this sense, perhaps, was to extend a small set of interesting lectures into an even more interesting book, Basic Symbols.
The first half of this short, concise volume consists of four lectures that Kendall gave at Vanderbilt University in 1964, lightly edited for publication. The next three chapters, on the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, were written by Carey, who describes them as a continuation of the first half, implying that they adhered fully to the view Kendall held of those later documents. The final chapter, with more on “the extent and causes” of the alleged derailment, originated as one of the Vanderbilt lectures, but unlike the others was “written on the spot under the pressures of time and circumstance.” For this reason, Carey made “fairly substantial” additions and changes. But in making these revisions, as in writing chapters five through seven, he closely consulted students’ notes on course lectures given by Kendall, as well as some of the latter’s writings and their private correspondence.
In his preface to the 1995 edition of Basic Symbols, Carey amplified, and answered objections to, his and Kendall’s comments on the American tradition’s alleged derailment. But the point can be stated quite simply: The “official literature” on the Founding which he and Kendall oppose, Carey writes later in Basic Symbols, “cannot place the Declaration in its proper context.” It reflects “a total ignorance of the tradition that both preceded and followed” it.
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