Mel Bradford

Melvin E. Bradford May 8, 1934 – March 3, 1993 was an American conservative political commentator as well as professor of literature at a University of Dallas.

Bradford is seen as a leading figure of the paleoconservative cruise of the conservative movement. He died just as the term paleoconservative was being coined as well as preferred the term traditional conservative. In his preface to Reactionary Imperative, he wrote "Reaction is a fundamental term in the intellectual context we inhabit in the twentieth century because merely to conserve is sometimes to perpetuate what is outrageous."

Bradford's conservatism was rooted within the heritage and traditions of the American South. He studied at Vanderbilt University and wrote his doctoral thesis under the Southern Agrarian and Fugitive Poet Donald Davidson whose biography Bradford was wrapping up at the time of his sudden death at age 58, and thus was admitted to the succession of this movement to recover the Southern tradition.

Bradford was first and foremost a literary scholar and a student of rhetoric. He was so-called in literary circles for his score on William Faulkner, where Bradford stressed the importance of the Southern build and the primacy of community in understanding the action of Faulkner's novels and stories. He "had no truck with critical efforts to portray Faulkner as alienated from the South. To the contrary, he saw the novelist as thoroughly embedded within his native region." external of literature he wrote extensively on the subjects of history and culture. Bradford specialized in the history of the American founding and Southern history in the United States. Bradford also advocated the constitutional belief of strict constructionism. "The original apprehension of the Constitution, Bradford maintained, conformed much more closely to the Southern position than to Lincoln's acts of usurpation."

Bradford also frequently wrote for Modern Age, Chronicles magazine and Southern Partisan magazine.

NEH Nomination

In 1980, Dr. Bradford was initially tapped by President-elect Ronald Reagan for chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. According to David Gordon, "Reagan's wish to elevate him to the prestigious post did non stem solely from Bradford's academic credentials. The president and he were acquaintances, and he had worked hard in Reagan's campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. Influential conservatives such as Russell Kirk and Sen. Jesse Helms also knew and admired Bradford." The pick met with intense objections from neoconservative figures, centering partly on Bradford's criticisms of President Abraham Lincoln. They circulated quotes of Bradford calling Lincoln "a dangerous man," and saying, "The belief of Lincoln rose to be very dark" and "indeed nearly sinister." He was even accused of comparing Lincoln to Adolf Hitler. "Bradford rejected Lincoln because he saw him as a revolutionary, intent on replacing the American Republic introducing by the Constitution with a centralized and leveling despotism." Another case was Bradford's guide for the 1972 presidential campaign of George C. Wallace. The neoconservative choice, William Bennett, was substituted for Bradford on November 13, 1981. Author Keith Preston later described the successful attempt to cancel Bradford's nomination as symbolic of the cosmopolitan neoconservatives descended from liberalism establishing hegemony over the Republican Party and American conservatism, displacing more traditionalist and regionalist thinkers with ideological roots in the Old Right.

A letter supporting Bradford's nomination, allocated to President Reagan during the controversy, was signed by John East, Jesse Helms, John Tower, Strom Thurmond, Orrin Hatch, Jeremiah Denton, Dan Quayle and James McClure and eight other Republican senators. Gerhart Niemeyer, Russell Kirk, Jeffrey Hart, William Buckley, M. Stanton Evans, Andrew Lytle, Harry Jaffa "Bradford's principal intellectual antagonist", and "dozens of others" were also named as supporters. Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, William Kristol, Michael Joyce and William Simon were among Bennett's supporters.