From Lee Cheek [via The Imaginative Conservative] comes this remembrance of a great American you've never heard of...
Remembering W. Wesley McDonald:
On
September 9th, with the passing of Dr. William Wesley McDonald, the
American academy lost a talented teacher and defender of humane
learning. The American conservative movement, or what remains of
authentic conservatism, has also lost a strong advocate for restraint in
social and political life. From a very early age, Wes came to the
realization that politics, properly understood, was the pursuit of the
good the true and beautiful; and, at this early juncture, Wes also
appreciated the imperfectability of humankind, and the necessary limits
of politics. As a great lover and sophisticated student of the limits of
politics, Wes feared the inappropriate and increasingly commonplace
aggrandizement of liberty by the modern state. He spent his life
fighting the usurpation of fundamental liberties.
Wes loved his native Maryland, and
within our federal arrangement, he considered Maryland to be a southern
state in many regards, often referring to the “old Maryland” as a model
of political moderation and civility. Of course, as a realist, Wes
derided the political class in power in Maryland during most of his
lifetime, composed of career politicos and apparatchiks, whose guiding
principles were antithetical to the inherited tradition Wes cherished.
With some regularity, Wes would recollect the role of Maryland in the
Founding and in the evolution of the regime, and pray that all was not
lost if a recovery of principle could take place.
Graduating from
Baltimore’s Towson State University in 1968 with a degree in political
science, Wes pursued graduate study in political science, earning a
Masters of Arts in political science from Bowling Green State University
in Bowling Green, Ohio, in 1969. He considered several options for
graduate school before selecting The Catholic University of America in
Washington, D.C. At Catholic, Wes studied with and wrote a dissertation
under tutelage of the eminent conservative scholar, Dr. Claes G. Ryn. He
successfully defended his dissertation, entitled “The Conservative Mind
of Russell Kirk: ‘The Permanent Things’ in an Age of Ideology,” in
1982. The dissertation would eventually be revised into a book, and the
tome would serve as his most important contribution to scholarship.
No tribute to Wes would be appropriate
without some stress upon his importance as a friend and mentor. I first
encountered a mention of Wes on the last page of Kirk’s The Portable Conservative Reader
(Viking Penguin, 1982), in a section entitled “A Note of
Acknowledgment.” At the end of what is still the best single-volume
collection of conservative thought available today, Kirk made the
following comment: “Mr. Wesley McDonald spent months in close
collaboration with me, choosing selections and finding accurate texts,
and editing them.” This rather obscure reference introduced me to Wes,
his work with Kirk, and Kirk’s willingness to take on research
assistants who could benefit from studying with the Duke of Mecosta.
Having spent the final years of my undergraduate years engrossed in
Kirk’s writings, and reading the corpus of the Intercollegiate Review,
I came to view Kirk as a beacon of light amidst my academic darkness.
In 1983, I began my graduate studies at The Divinity School of Duke
University. I was totally unprepared for what was to follow, and instead
of reading the assigned texts, I turned to Kirk and Voegelin. During
the semester, I also attended an Intercollegiate Studies Institute
conference, and in the middle of a banquet event, I recognized Wes at an
adjacent table from his picture in an I.S.I. speakers bureau booklet. I
approached Wes, and he immediately encouraged me to write to Kirk,
telling him of my plight, and Wes also urged me to ask Kirk if he could
use a wayward research assistant. Thanks to the encouragement I received
from Wes, my life was never the same. In fact, I am now one of the more
aged individuals who were blessed with the opportunity to work and
study with Kirk in Mecosta.
The next year my old friend from my undergraduate years, Dr. Al Gilman, a mathematician qua
political theorist, and an acquaintance of Kirk’s, created an academic
entity at Western Carolina University entitled the Center for the Study
of Cultural Decadence, following the insights of Joad and Kirk. Three
decades later the center’s title and organizational focus appears a
little quaint, as we now take such a high level of societal decadence
for granted, and in some quarters we even celebrate decadence as the
“new enlightenment.” Nevertheless, the center was a noble, yet
short-lived pursuit, but not before Gilman held a national conference on
the topic of decadence. Both Wes and I presented papers at the
conference, and Wes’s contribution on Kirk was eventually published in
the Hillsdale Review. Before the conference ended, Wes advised
me to dedicate my year in Mecosta to spending as much time with Kirk and
to read constantly! This was some of the best advice one could receive!
After Mecosta, I returned to graduate
school, and Wes quickly invited me to present a paper at the annual
meeting of the Pennsylvania Political Science Association. In 1987,
under the kind auspices of Wes, I presented my first professional paper,
and this effort would become my first published article. For the remainder of his life, Wes and I remained friends and regular correspondents.
Of much greater importance than my
personal narrative, Wes’s “mission” as a popular faculty member and
student mentor at Elizabethtown College defined his professional life.
The devotion to teaching and mentoring students was Wes’s greatest
gift–and his enduring legacy–and it is this academic witness that
separated Wes from most of his colleagues. In some respects, members of
the professoriate are the last nomads to be found in American today.
Professors often make career moves to enhance their status or salary
with reckless abandonment (and this writer is among the ranks of those
who have followed such paths), and with the shrinking number of
full-time academic positions, not to the mention the influence of the
proprietary, on-line programs, the growth of institutional academic
bureaucracies, and other threats to academic life, a professor with a
lifelong commitment to an institution is hard to find. Wes was a most
honorable exception. Wes taught at Elizabethtown College for nearly
three and a half decades. He was beloved by students and his resiliency
of purpose is a model for us all. He mentored countless students who
would pursue graduate studies, legal studies, and become political
practitioners of one variety or another. When Wes was a candidate for
full professor a decade ago, he asked me to write a letter of
recommendation on his behalf. He thought my status as an academic vice
president, and my strong letter of support, would make his promotion a
certainly. In my letter I simply asked the President and the Trustees of
they could name a more loyal and devoted professor at their college?
Wes was quickly promoted.
Finally, any celebration of Wes’s life should praise the importance of his great study, Russell Kirk and the Age of Ideology,
published by the University of Missouri Press in 2004. In essence, the
book is a valuable survey of a leading (nay, seminal) thinker of the
20th century, although Kirk’s contribution has for the most part been
neglected for ideological reasons and assessed by less perceptive
scholars than Wes (There are exceptions, however; see Russello’s The Postmodern Imagination of Russell Kirk [Missouri, 2004], and Brad Birzer’s forthcoming study from the University of Kentucky Press.).
Wes argued that Kirk was a political
thinker, historian, historian of political ideas, journalist, and one
who served in many other capacities. Kirk’s significance was not limited
to the conservative movement. Wes was correct, and he teaches us a
lesson that we should not easily forget.
In the first chapter of his work,
entitled “Kirk and the Rebirth of American Conservatism,” Wes provided
an excellent survey of Kirk’s plea for the return to traditional
concepts of political order and power. The description of Kirk’s
education experiences was alluring, and at my insistence, he included
Kirk’s private reading as an undergraduate at Michigan State, where he
was engrossed in Donald Davidson’s Attack on Leviathan; and the
influence of his two mentors at Duke, Jay Hubbell (English) and Charles
Sydnor (History). Additionally, Wes’s inclusion of Kirk’s own
commentary as contained in his Sword of Imagination made this an exemplary introduction to Kirk’s early intellectual life.
The next two chapters are central to his
book. Wes thoughtfully conveys Kirk’s defense of the moral basis of
social and political life, and the appropriate role of rights and
natural law. Wes depended heavily on Irving Babbitt to explain Kirk, and
the effort to distinguish Kirk explicitly from the Christian tradition
of natural law thinking evoked some criticism. While Wes may have
overemphasized Babbitt’s influence and the insights of the New Humanists
(and their contemporary disciples), he was still prescient in his
understanding of Kirk’s worldview. He was also correct to suggest the
important role of literature and humane letters upon Kirk. For example,
Wes’s analysis of Kirk’s Enemies volume is wonderful and this contribution alone will encourage a new generation of readers to encounter this tome.
Wes’s chapters (four and five) on Kirk’s
contributions to political theory scholarship are the best assessment
of Kirk’s political thought every written. Chapter six delineates the
centrality of community to Kirk’s thought, and is presented with great
accuracy and clarity. Wes’s stress on the role assumed by self-restraint
makes the chapter an important contribution to Kirk scholarship. Kirk
believed that humankind’s primary obligation lies in his or her
community. Self-discipline and love of neighbor begin with the
individual, and spread to the community, and then to society as a whole.
In other words, Kirk’s concept of community serves to define the
limitations of society and politics on hand, while on the other it
presupposes and defends the necessity of a properly constituted
community for securing the moral and ethical results concomitant to
society’s perpetuation.
There remain among us many who knew and
loved Russell Kirk, but very few of us who have devoted our lives to the
exegesis of his boundless wisdom for the rising generation. With the
departing of Wes for the Heavenly Banquet, we defenders of the
“permanent things” should remember one of the finest comrades and
gentlemen to have come our way.
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