William Terry Couch and the Politics of Academic Publishing: An Editor’s Career as Lightning Rod for Controversy by Orvin Lee Shiflett (review)

In his twenty years as head of the University of North Carolina (UNC) Press, William Terry Couch transformed academic publishing in the United States by issuing books about contemporary social issues written in clear and pointed prose for an educated, middle-class readership. By borrowing the techniques of the trade press in the service of academic scholars, university presses, Couch believed, could be the vanguard of social change. UNC Press became, as Daniel Joseph Singal has observed, “the single most influential institution in launching Modernist thought in the South” (The War Within: From Victorian to Modernist Thought in the South, 1919–1945 [Chapel Hill, 1982], 268). Orvin Lee Shiflett’s biography of Couch chronicles Couch’s “downward spiral from acclaim and national recognition to relative obscurity” after he left UNC Press in 1945, frustrated with challenges to his authority and the lack of financial support for the press (p. 215). Couch also shifted from liberalism to conservatism, and Shiflett argues that Couch, who emerges as a deeply principled but fundamentally irascible man, was a “central figure in the renaissance of American conservatism” (p. 5).

The strength of Shiflett’s book lies in his treatment of Couch’s career as a publisher. Couch had notable success at the University of Chicago Press for five years before he was fired for alleged managerial deficiencies. Yet Couch attributed his dismissal to ideological differences with university president Robert Maynard Hutchins. Couch spent much of the 1950s working for the Crowell-Collier Publishing Company overseeing Collier’s Encyclopedia and related yearbooks, which he attempted to remake into vehicles for conservative truth telling. Eventually fired from that position, he was briefly associated with a small publishing company in the 1960s and, disastrously, with the William Volker Fund’s Center for American Studies, which tainted him by association with extreme figures such as Christian Reconstructionist Rousas John Rushdoony and Nazi apologist David Hoggan. Shiflett uses Couch’s papers and other archival sources to provide blow-by-blow accounts of Couch’s professional conflicts, including his chronic disputes with university officials. Anyone interested in the history of publishing, encyclopedias, and libraries will especially benefit from this book.

The treatment of ideas is less surefooted. Shiflett scants Couch’s published writings. Though not uncritical of Couch, he tends to write from the viewpoint of Couch’s later conservative phase, sometimes adopting Couch’s voice as his own. Singal’s chapter on Couch in The War Within remains a better account of Couch’s early thought and provides a more vivid personal portrait. Nevertheless, Shiflett’s faithful account of Couch’s later conservatism is helpful in understanding the intellectual journey from Left to Right of figures like himself and Richard M. Weaver, whose Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago, 1948) Couch midwifed into print by University of Chicago Press. Both men began as critics of capitalist exploitation but gravitated to the Right. Couch incessantly attacked what he considered liberalism’s cultural relativism, a concept that seemed to evoke a fatal inability to make social or moral value judgments and that he believed represented a larger scientific ideology that liberals clothed in a sham objectivity. This displacement of economic with philosophical analysis, and not social traditionalism, emerges as the key to both men’s conservatism.