On America: How to Understand the Legacy of 1776
By Russell Kirk
Edited by Michael Lucchese
Foreword by Bradley J. Birzer
(Creed and Culture, 197 pp., $28.00)
It’s summertime in the village of Mecosta, Michigan, and the semiquincentennial celebrations are well underway. A few days ago, area churches and civic organizations such as the local Daughters and Sons of the Revolution chapters came together to put on a “Colonial Social Gathering.” The full program of demonstrations and activities that evening included a special guest appearance by Benjamin Franklin, colonial dances, and a reenactment of the drafting of the Declaration of Independence.
A mile away from the event, atop the hill above the village, is Franklin Street. At the end of that street, in a brick barn that served as his personal library for over half a century, Russell Kirk penned books, essays, speeches, articles, and letters that helped many Americans understand the unique character of this country that we call home.
Russell Kirk (1918-1994) was best known as the “father of the modern American conservative movement.” He articulated the intellectual and cultural inheritance of the United States in works such as The Conservative Mind: from Burke to Eliot, The Roots of American Order, The American Cause, and America’s British Culture. In 1976, the same year that the United States celebrated its bicentennial with much patriotic fanfare, Kirk’s Roots of American Order first appeared.
It is a hefty tome that argues that America is best understood as a continuation and new expression of Western heritage, rather than a break from it, as the French Revolution so disastrously aimed to be. 50 years later, it is an argument that sorely needs to be reintroduced, and is perhaps more relevant than ever today.
Russell Kirk on America: How to Understand the Legacy of 1776, released in June, arrives on the scene just in time to keep the conversation that Kirk began at the bicentennial alive. Edited by Michael Lucchese, the book is a collection of Kirk’s essays that capture his thought through three categories: “American Roots,” “American Statesmanship,” and “American Letters.” The book features two previously unpublished Kirk essays: one on Mark Twain in “Huckleberry Finn and the Joy of Life,” and another on “Abraham Lincoln and the Dignity of the Presidency.”
Invaluable to recognizing the common thread that runs through these diverse essays—that is, Kirk’s argument that the founding of the United States was a fundamentally conservative, not revolutionary act—is the foreword by Bradley J. Birzer. A Professor of History and the Russell Amos Kirk Chair in American Studies at Hillsdale College, Birzer summarizes Kirk’s view that “America served the world as a kind of anamnesis—a remembrance that returns us to right reason and the proper ordering of things.”
With The Roots of American Order, Kirk shows us that the ideas that made America were not new: “They were present in the Ten Commandments, Greek philosophy, Roman legal structures, the Magna Carta, British common law, and other sources. With astounding perspicacity, the Founders applied ideas taken from these models to their particular historical circumstances to create the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution.”
They were present in the Ten Commandments, Greek philosophy, Roman legal structures, the Magna Carta, British common law, and other sources.
The essays selected in this volume by Michael Lucchese give us a sense of the statesmen, writers, poets, and ideas that express what the American Founding was all about, as well as what shaped American identity and potential. “From Kirk’s analysis of the Founding moment, to his sketches of the great statesmen who embodied its principles, to the literature that best conveys our national spirit, the writings gathered in this volume convey what makes our country worth loving.”
In this year of the semiquincentennial, we could all probably use a dose of patriotic pride in what the Founders and other American culture-shapers accomplished, along with a reminder that we have inherited their struggle to realize this country’s promise and potential. “As the reader will see,” Lucchese explains, “Kirk did not believe that the American Republic was a perfect regime. The Founders did not solve every political problem for all time, nor did America bring about ‘the end of history.’ But the principles of American order, Kirk taught, were fundamentally sound. Our regime is a particular incarnation of certain universal principles that have inspired the best in Western civilization over the long course of centuries.”
Kirk frequently addressed the perennial comparison between the American and French Revolutions. Indeed, as Lucchese writes in his introduction, “[Kirk] argued that the Founders aimed at a ‘recovery of what was being lost,’ not a ‘Jacobin revolution [that] meant destruction of the fabric of society…in other words, revolution, for the Founding generation, meant a return to the traditions of self-government and the particular rights that had developed in the colonies, and among Englishmen more broadly, over centuries- rights that the imperial Parliament of the 1770s had violated.”
By bringing Kirk’s words to light at this moment in our nation’s history, Lucchese has made a valuable contribution to the often polarized conversation regarding its Founding, purpose, and direction.
From “Thoughts on the Fourth of July,” to “A Revolution Not Made but Prevented,” to “Will American Caesars Arise?,” the reader may be surprised at the contemporary relevance of Kirk’s insights and prescriptions as to what ails America. By bringing Kirk’s words to light at this moment in our nation’s history, Lucchese has made a valuable contribution to the often polarized conversation regarding its Founding, purpose, and direction.
While some circles view patriotism as passé or politically incorrect, other circles (unfortunately) express patriotism with a tribal intensity. Kirk rejected both tendencies. Throughout his corpus of work, Kirk demonstrated that American conservatism has a respectable intellectual heritage that the Founders would recognize, and illuminated that Americans have a wealth of reasons to understand, celebrate, and renew their patriotism.
Andrea Kirk Assaf is a writer, an instructor of the Art and Architecture of Rome, and the youngest daughter of Russell and Annette Kirk. She lives between Rome, Italy, and Mecosta, Michigan with her family. She writes daily at fourseasonschole.substack.com.