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American Conservatism
Edited by Andrew J. Bacevich
Library of America,
642 pages, $29.95
BYBARTONSWAIM
T
HE TERM“conservative,”
like its correlative “lib-
eral,” is an easy way to
locate oneself along the
spectrum of American
political opinion, but it can confuse
as much as clarify. Are you a conserv-
ative? It depends on what you want
to conserve.
A certain kind of conservative has
concluded that the tenets of unbridled
markets, or “capitalism,” tend to
destroy the things he wishes to con-
serve—religious faith, traditional habits,
refined aesthetic sensibilities. Another
kind of conservative notes that markets
are basic to the human condition and
encourage the virtues of frugality, in-
dustriousness and honesty. Yet another
kind of conservative prefers things
as they are and warns, rightly, of the
unforeseen consequences of well-inten-
tioned fiddling. Still another points out,
also rightly, that you need big ideas
—call it fiddling—to win elections.
Their liberal opponents are fond of
defining conservatism in one of these
ways and accusing conservatives of fail-
ing to live up to their own ideals. Often
these liberals will point to Edmund
Burke, as if something so conceptually
capacious as the urge to conserve and
perpetuate rather than forget or trans-
form must be defined in terms set down
by an 18th-century Irishman.
Modern American conservatism, in
all its dizzying diversity, dates from
about the middle of the 20th century.
That was the moment at which a con-
solidated American culture began to
fragment and a triumphant liberalism,
with most of its goals achieved, began
finding new problems to solve with
governmental solutions. Post-World
War II conservatism in the United
States necessarily took a very different
shape from the conservatism, if that’s
the right word for it, of, say, Grover
Cleveland or William Randolph Hearst.
That is the first and most apparent
problem with the Library of America’s
“American Conservatism: Reclaiming
an Intellectual Tradition,” a collection
of essays edited by Andrew J. Bacevich,
a former military officer and a emer-
itus professor of international relations
at Boston University. “The modern
American conservative tradition—
roughly dating from the dawn of the
twentieth century—emerged in reac-
tion to modernity itself,” writes Mr.
Bacevich in the book’s introduction.
“Modernity meant machines, speed,
and radical change—taboos lifted,
bonds loosened, and, according to Max
Weber, ‘the disenchantment of the
world.’ ”
That is certainly one way to define
modernity, but speedy machines and
lifted taboos and disenchantment long
predate 1900. In fact, there is no ob-
vious reason to trace this “tradition”
back to the turn of the 20th century
rather than to either John Adams,
the nation’s first great conservative, or
to the founding of National Review
magazine in 1955 or, perhaps, to the
publication of Whittaker Chambers’s
great memoir, “Witness,” in 1952.
This is not, alas, a trivial point. Mr.
Bacevich, evidently in need of some
“conservatives” from the earlier part
of the century, makes some bizarre
choices. Including works by Henry
Adams and George Santayana makes a
certain kind of sense, but Walter Lipp-
mann, midcentury America’s mostfamous liberal? The piece the editor has
chosen—a tirade against sensationalist
and sloppy journalism called “Journal-
ism and the Higher Law” from 1920—
would be unremarkable if written by
anybody else. After the disillusionment
of the Great War, Mr. Bacevich writes,
“Lippmann came to take more skeptical
views of America’s role in the world, of
democratic politics, and of journalism
itself.” Conservatism is here implicitly
defined as a “skeptical” attitude toward
things in general.
Elsewhere in the volume is a piece
by Randolph Bourne. You may be won-
dering, if you know that name, how he
came to be thought of as in any sense
a conservative. Mr. Bacevich calls hima “journalist of progressive inclina-
tions.” He was in fact a Nietzschean
aesthete who spent his short journalis-
tic career (he died of the Spanish flu in
1918, age 32) denouncing American
society for its philistinism. The work
reprinted here, an unfinished, posthu-
mously published work called “The
State,” includes the remarkable line,
“War is the health of the State,” and
indeed Bourne is remembered for his
antiwar stance. But as Fred Siegel co-
gently argued in “The Revolt Against
the Masses” (2013), Bourne was not
antiwar on principle but opposed war
with Germany because he believed in
the superiority of Germanic civiliza-
tion. In this Library of America volume,he makes his debut as an adherent of
the “conservative tradition.”
The use of Bourne and several other
entries in Mr. Bacevich’s collection has
much to do, it would appear, with Mr.
Bacevich’s own detestation of American
global hegemony or, as he might put it,
military adventurism. In a section of the
book called “The Exceptional Nation:
America and the World,” he includes a
chapter from Ohio Sen. Robert Taft’s
1951 anti-interventionist book “A For-
eign Policy for Americans.” Taft was a
tireless opponent of New Deal excesses,
not a great mind on international rela-
tions, which is perhaps why his contri-
bution here isthoroughly forgettable.
PleaseturntopageC9BOOKS
MalcolmX&Dr.King
The yin and yang
of the civil-rights
movementC9Doing the ‘Right’ Thing
Istherean‘Americantradition’ofconservatism?Anddoesitneedtobe‘reclaimed’fromtoday’sso-calledconservatives?
ATHWART HISTORYWilliam F. Buckley Jr., founding editor of National Review, on Park Avenue in 1967.
PHILIPPE HALSMAN/MAGNUM PHOTOSHidden Valley Road
By Robert Kolker
Doubleday, 377 pages, $29.95
BYRICHARDJ.MCNALLY
D
ON AND MIMI GALVIN
embodied the optimism
of the postwar Ameri-
can dream. Attractive,
charming, intelligent
and ambitious, they had come of age
during the Great Depression, met in
high school in Queens, N.Y., and
married shortly before Don left college
and enlisted in the Marines. After
transferring to the Navy, Don arrived in
the Pacific in time for the Battle of
Okinawa; he was a landing craft oper-
ator, shuttling troops from the USS
Granville to shore. He nearly perished
when kamikazes demolished the boats
on either side of him, and spent the
next several hours retrieving his dead
comrades from the sea.
Two weeks before Hiroshima, Rob-
ert Kolker recounts in his remarkable
new book about the Galvin family, Don
received a Western Union telegram an-
nouncing: IT’S A BOY. His son Donald
would be the first of 12 children—
Young Men
Touched
By Madness
10 boys followed by two girls—that he
and Mimi had over the next 20 years.
After the war, Don remained in the
Navy, hoping it would pay his way
through a Ph.D. program as a prelude
to a career as a Foreign Service officer;
instead, he switched service branches
again, and became an officer at the
new Air Force Academy near Colorado
Springs. The two settled into what
would turn out to be their lifelong
home on Hidden Valley Road.
The Galvins were to all appearances
the prototypical flourishing 1950s fam-
ily. Don eventually became head of the
Rocky Mountain Arts and HumanitiesFoundation. Mimi, who Mr. Kolker tells
us experienced culture shock when she
moved out West, grew to love Colo-
rado. Energetic, organized and consci-
entious to the point of perfectionism,
she seems to have been a caring
mother, eager to share her love of art,
music and nature with her children.
The Galvins had great expectations
for those children—and they were, in-
deed, a promising group. Donald and
his siblings excelled in diverse fields,The Galvins rejected the
idea that their parenting
was the problem, and
helped researchers
probing the genetic
roots of mental illness.including music, art,
chess, hockey and foot-
ball. Yet beginning in
the mid-1960s, six of
the Galvin boys became
psychotic—and all six
would be diagnosed with
schizophrenia (although
one was later rediag-
nosed as having bipolar
disorder). Mr. Kolker’s
riveting, compassionate
“Hidden Valley Road”
tells the story of a family
besieged by devastating
mental illness.
The author is a
tireless journalist whose
last book, “Lost Girls,”
took readers into the
lives of five murdered
Long Island sex workers.
For this account, he
spent three years getting
to know the Galvins,
interviewing all the surviving members
(including the six children who never
became psychotic) as well as doctors
and experts with firsthand knowledge
of their tragedy. With the skill of a
great novelist, Mr. Kolker brings every
member of the family to life.
Although all the ill boys experienced
the bizarre behavior, hallucinations,
delusions and social impairment
characteristic of schizophrenia, each
boy did so in his own way. Donald, the
oldest and first to succumb, began
acting strangely at Colorado State
University in 1964. He showed up atthe university health center worried
that he might have contracted syphilis
via a nonsexual route, and arrived
another time after having burned
himself when he jumped into a bonfire
at a pep rally.
A few years later, Donald married,
but his wife soon fled to Oregon and
filed for divorce after he developed
full-blown psychosis. Donald moved
back home with his parents, shaved his
head and would walk for miles
throughout the neighborhood around
Hidden Valley Road, wrapped in a
bedsheet. Donald believed that his littlesister, Mary, was the
mother of Jesus, and
he claimed to be the
offspring of an octopus.
His sister Margaret
would occasionally dis-
cover him sitting nude in
the living room, having
moved the household
furniture outside.
Donald’s brother Joe,
by contrast, was quiet,
withdrawn and pre-
occupied by Chinese
history. He claimed that
he had lived in China
during one of his past
lives, and that he
communicated with a
Chinese emperor he saw
in the clouds. Matt, a
talented potter, paid a
visit to family friends
one day to show them a
vase he had made. Upon
arriving, he suddenly ripped all his
clothes off and destroyed the vase,
terrifying everyone present. Matt
became convinced that he controlled
the traffic lights in Colorado Springs
and also claimed that he was Paul
McCartney.
The boys often fought, especially
Donald and Jim, the violent, second-
born son who was plagued by paranoid
delusions and auditory hallucinations.
Brian, a gifted musician in a rock band,
developed delusions culminating in
unimaginable violence.
PleaseturntopageC8CA. 1970Clockwise from top: Peter, Mark, Joe and Matt Galvin.
GALVIN FAMILY