Bill Buckley’s book God and Man at Yale energized conservative attacks on liberal elites. In this view, the growing atheism and collectivism of America’s universities was to blame for the liberal consensus. Buckley believed that the average American had above average intelligence, but more wisdom and character than the liberals in power. Despite populist overtones, Bill’s vision was not democratic. He wanted to replace the governing liberal class with men of individualist and Christian backbone. As the author of several books, the host of the TV series “The Firing Line,” and his televised debate with Gore Vidal leading up to the 1968 election, William F. Buckley Jr. is considered one of the founders of the modern conservative movement.
Bill’s father, William F. Buckley Sr., was a Texas oil millionaire who defied the cowboy stereotypes of Texas oil tycoons. Raised Orthodox Catholic in Texas, Will brought moved his law practice to Mexico during an oil boom. Fluent in Spanish, he was the ideal middleman for big oil companies seeking to exploit lack of regulation and easily attainable oil contracts in Mexico. Following the murder of the Mexican president and the intensification of the Mexican Revolution in 1913, Will was kicked out of Mexico for funding plots against Mexiccan revolutionaries. As a result, his property was seized and confiscated. Both in Texas and Mexico, William F. Buckley Sr. viewed himself as an outsider - a reality that overtime became a virtue.
The Buckley children inherited most of their political beliefs from their father. Will Buckley was convinced that he had witnessed the first stage of the world Communist revolution. His devout Catholicism convinced him that Communism was more than a foreign threat: it was a satanic assault on Christianity. Nevertheless, he warned his children of the dangers of ‘materialism’ and profit seeking as an end in itself. After living in Mexico, the family moved to Sharon, Connecticut, where Buckley Sr. had his children homeschooled in English, Spanish, and the arts. While the children did not inherit their father’s openly anti-Semitic and racist views, his expectations for self-education and self-betterment carried on.
The nature of Will Buckley’s parenting had a different effect on his children. At a young age, the children wrote a family newspaper, ‘The Spectator,’ that criticized the New Deal and supported America First - an organization that advocated against American entry into World War II. The dinner table was a theater of intellectual performance for the children, as they regularly defended their beliefs from their father’s questioning. Later, young Bill and his siblings were sent to boarding school in Britain for a year to improve their speech habits (this is where Bill supposedly developed his high brow accent). Reid commented on his father’s decision that “he felt he could throw us to the wolves and our faith would not be shattered in any dimension” (Judis 1990, 40-41). The young Bill Buckley was driven by competition in almost every scenario and eventually he won the favor of his father.
Bill discovered Albert Jay Nock at the age of seventeen. A right wing anarchist, Nock had a profound influence on the libertarian strand of the conservative movement. In the early 20th century, Nock wrote for left-liberal publications such as The Nation. He founded his own publication, The Freeman, in 1920 as he came to oppose government intervention. Bill read Memoirs of a Superfluous Man before attending Yale. In it, Nock expressed little hope for the masses because he believed they could not be educated. Only a small number of exceptional men, which he called ‘the remnant,’ could lead society. The state had to be abolished so these exceptional men could lead the helpless masses. It was the duty of ‘the remnant’ to preach this elitist doctrine despite the hopelessness of the situation During the last years of his life, Nock’s social views became increasingly pessimistic and in turn elitist. He visited the William F. Buckley’s family from time to time. It was Albert Jay Nock’s disapproval of progressive education - learning through experience advocated by education reformer John Dewey - and libertarian traditionalism that instilled a sense of purpose in the young Bill Buckley.
William F. Buckley Jr.’s first book blended these two impressions: his father’s defense of Christian values and Nock’s duty of ‘The Remnant.’ Published in 1951, God and Man at Yale drew on Bill’s experience as an undergraduate at Yale. During his senior year, Bucklery was chosen to be the chair of Yale Daily News, a position that allowed him to write editorials in the school’s newspaper. As the editor, Bill openly criticized faculty, such as professor of anthropology William Kennedy. Bill claimed that Kennedy treated religion as if it were a joke. At a dinner honoring a retiring Yale President with the presence of many Ivy League presidents, Buckley was chosen to give an address. His speech attacked the university’s administration for employing professors who challenged religious orthodoxy and patriotism. Longing for education with a strictly defined curriculum and teachers with an explicit point of view, Buckley vilified the notion of a liberal education: “Yale is very, very allergic to criticism from the liberal, who is the absolute dictator in the United States today” (Buckley 1951, 210). The speech was ultimately withdrawn due to concerns that it was too controversial.
He began the book when he was twenty-four years old, while teaching Spanish at Yale and after a short stint with the CIA in Mexico. To Buckley, the liberal notion of “academic freedom” was a farce. While many universities preferred a diverse faculty, expected to teach a range of viewpoints with equal respect, Bill thought this was unacceptable. He argued that teachers had to take a particular stance on issues that were threatening the values of western civilization. He called this approach to academic freedom ‘laissez faire education,’ remarking that “... because so long as Yale professes this uncurbed, all-encompassing, fantastical allegiance to laissez faire education she will lead her students nowhere” (Buckley 1951, 210). He wanted Yale to have a defined sense of purpose that could be instilled in its students. Furthermore, he believed that this vision should come from the university’s alumni and administration.
Buckley defined religion in the Christian sense, as the belief in a “supreme being” (Buckley 1951, 7). As a Christian, he believed that the spiritual convictions of Yale’s Department of Religion were inadequate. He explained that “Academically, in other words, it is everything one could wish. But to the student who seeks intellectual and inspirational support for his faith, it is necessarily a keen disappointment” (Buckley 1951, 9) In addition, he believed they should openly profess not just their faith, but the superiority of Christianity. Buckley stated “such a utilitarian conception of Christianity, coupled with this brand of self-effacement and steadfast refusal to proclaim Christianity as the true religion... is a sample of the adulteration of religion to the point that it becomes nothing more than the basis for “my most favorite way of living”” (Buckley, 1951, 25-26). Christianity as a lifestyle was to be rejected. He went further to argue that every student at Yale should be required to take a course in religion, because religion studies played a vital role in the defense of civilization. Bill thought that the majority of the Yale faculty were not only hostile or indifferent to religion, but also individualism.
God and Man at Yale lamented the abandonment of free market capitalism by the American elite. Keynesianism - an economic theory that advocated increasing government spending and developed by John Maynard Keynes - was the chief culprit. He used the term “collectivist” to describe those who supported Keynesianism, which Bill thought was on the road to socialism. In his view, the economics department was dominated by Keynesians. In a study of economics textbooks at Yale, he was appalled by the fact that out of the four textbooks he studied, only one mentioned individualism - and this was in a 19th century context - and none mentioned criticisms of Keynes (Buckley 1951, 73). Buckley concluded that should fire not just Marxists, but also supporters of Keynes and the New Deal.
Responses to God and Man at Yale varied. The ‘New Conservatives’ - the right wing of the Republican Party - criticized Buckley for failing to see that the New Deal and the welfare state saved capitalism. The Saturday Review, a popular literary magazine, published two different views on the book. Selden Rodman’s response championed its author’s “spirit and courage” for attacking a liberalism that “by making all values relative, honors none” (Regnery 2009, 51). Frank Ashburn’s Saturday Review article commented on what he believed to be the book’s “authoritarianism,” writing that “the book is one which has the glow and appeal of a fiery cross on a hillside at night. There will undoubtedly be robed figures who gather to it, but the hoods will not be academic. They will cover the face” (Regnery 2009, 51). Additionally, other reviewers commented on the book’s tyrannical tendencies.
One of the most popular criticisms of God and Man at Yale came from The Atlantic magazine. Writing in November 1951, George McBundy dismissed Bill Buckley’s attacks on Yale. McBundy claimed that not one minister or chaplain at Yale agreed with Buckley and that Yale was more religious than it was a generation ago. To him, Buckley could not define his version of a “true” Christian religion. He questioned the reliability of Buckley’s sources - some of which came directly from lectures, but could not be verified. McBundy attacked the book’s use of the term “collectivism,” a “menace” that was never clearly defined. Buckley’s assertion that Yale’s textbooks glorified Keynes, McBundy said, ignored the fact that each textbook took a different position on this economic theory. McGeorge Bundy concluded that God and Man at Yale was an attack on the freedom of one of America’s “greatest and most conservative universities,” and that its attacks were a “sign of the times” (Bundy 1951).
God and Man at Yale represented a battle over morality in the United States. William F. Buckley Jr. would never again write a book that was so popular. Its contents provoked a debate over how truth and knowledge would be taught at the University level. This conversation came at a time in postwar America when college educations were on the rise due to the GI Bill, the expansion of the suburbs, and overall general prosperity. Buckley believed that Christianity ought to define American life and that the “...duel between Christianity and atheism is the most important in the world.” In this battle students could not be left on their own to decide important issues because it was too dangerous. Values had to be imposed top down by the alumni and faculty. What he understood was that many Americans’ distrust of people in power overlapped with his own vision for the rise of a new elite - a conservative one that valued his notions of religion and individualism. His success was his ability to divorce this elitism from the anti-Semitism and overt racism of the older Right. Buckley’s populism was superficial: he wanted to be governed by conservative elites, but preferred being governed by anyone rather than liberal elites.
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