Anamnesis Journal

An earlier version of this essay was produced for and presented at the Abbeville Institute's 2010 Scholars Conference.

January of 2011 marked the fiftieth anniversary of Dwight Eisenhower’s sobering farewell address which counseled vigilance against the “military industrial complex.”  In his criticism of science and the industrialization of war, Eisenhower, who upon leaving office retired to a working farm near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, spoke as an Agrarian in his final speech.  During the address, Eisenhower reminded the nation that, prior to the Second World War, the country had no defense industry, but instead had relied upon “American makers of plowshares” to make “swords” as well.  At the same time, Eisenhower, in his insistence that American foreign policy ought to “foster progress in human achievement,” spoke as a Wilsonian idealist.1  In the end, Eisenhower’s sober-minded realism was chastened by a faith in progress and American exceptionalism.  Nevertheless, Ike’s warning serves as a reminder that, during the decades following World War II, there was, to reprise Clinton Rossiter, what might be described as a second “great train robbery of American intellectual history.”  Whereas the first, as Rossiter noted, concerned the ascendance of unfettered acquisitiveness as a conservative tenet in America during the late nineteenth century, the second, it might be said, witnessed the nefarious merging of American conservatism with unfettered warfare during the second half of the twentieth century.2  In the aftermath of the First World War, the Nashville Agrarians had striven to elaborate a traditionalist conservative response to the first of these intellectual heists while, as this essay will argue, their lineal intellectual descendant Richard Weaver, in the aftermath of World War II, endeavored to respond in kind to the second.

William Gilmore Simms’s forgotten classic, The Cassique of Kiawah, is an exceptionally good novel, based upon accurate history, and a meditation on the historical development of South Carolina.  One can also draw some telling parallels between it and the work of Nathanial Hawthorne.  Simms scholar Masahiro Nakamura has noted that there are several similarities between the two authors’ lives and circumstances.  Most notably, both suffered the emotional disruption of losing a parent early in life.  As a result, “both placed a high value on order and home” that can be observed in their writing (Nakamura 190).  An examination of their work reveals that both men were highly skeptical of utopian projects and doubted the inevitability of progress.