Southern Conservatives at Bay

These days, it seems all but impossible to turn on a television without encountering a conservative talking head. Fox News has daily shows hosted by Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, and all the major networks and cable channels regularly feature conservative commentators: old hands like George Will, Charles Krauthammer, and David Brooks; former politicians such as Newt Gingrich, Mike Huckabee, and Sarah Palin; or fiery authors like Anne Coulter, Dinesh D’Souza, and Michelle Malkin.

One need not believe in liberal media bias to admit that this has not always been the case. Time was when only a small handful of conservatives could be seen on television. William F. Buckley, Jr., was one of the first, with his theatrical performances as host of Firing Line. Much less known, yet important as a predecessor to today’s pugnacious pundits, was James J. Kilpatrick (1920–2010), the subject of a new biography by William P. Hustwit. Kilpatrick was a heroic forerunner for the modern Right, at least according to Richard Viguerie, the direct mail innovator and longtime conservative activist: “In the dark ages of conservatism—before direct mail, before Rush, before the Fox News Channel, and way before the Internet, there was Kilpatrick with his columns and national television appearances. He gave encouragement to millions of conservatives as he expressed their beliefs” (p. 219).

Kilpatrick spent most of his career in print journalism, beginning with the Richmond News Leader in 1941. A native of Oklahoma City, he graduated from the University of Missouri School of Journalism in the midst of the Depression, a few years after his father had run off with his secretary and abandoned the family. His father’s caddishness left Kilpatrick with “a deep concern for financial stability,” according to Hustwit. It also seems to have played a role in Kilpatrick’s penchant for seeking out father figures. The first was the arch-conservative publisher of the News Leader, John Dana Wise, who chastised his young reporter anytime a liberal sentiment slipped into one of Kilpatrick’s columns. Wise also put him through a reading course of conservative classics. Soon enough Kilpatrick’s columns would be sprinkled with quotes from Edmund Burke, John Randolph, and, his new favorite, Russell Kirk.

Another mentor to Kilpatrick was Virginia’s powerful senator, Harry Byrd, the man who coined the term “massive resistance” to describe the white South’s response to Brown v. Board of Education. Hustwit shows the central role that Kilpatrick played in galvanizing white resistance to the Brown ruling. A talented writer, his impassioned editorials were reprinted widely across the South. More than anyone else, he was responsible for the short-lived interposition fad of the mid-1950s, when Southern legislatures dusted off the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions as justifications for ignoring the Court’s order to desegregate. He was a skillful speaker too. He got the better of Martin Luther King in 1960 during a nationally televised debate on NBC; even Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee activists watching the debate in Atlanta reportedly declared King “no match” for the Virginia editor (p. 112).

In his eagerness to please his powerful mentors, Kilpatrick was not afraid to get rough. Some of his segregationist writings from the 1960s are shocking, particularly given how easily he insinuated himself into the Washington establishment just a decade later. Hustwit maintains an admirable tone in covering this material, allowing Kilpatrick to indict himself with his own quotations. “In terms of values that last, and mean something, and excite universal admiration and respect, what has man gained from the history of the Negro race?” Kilpatrick asked in his 1962 book The Southern Case For School Segregation. “The answer, alas, is ‘virtually nothing’” (p. 145). In the aftermath of the March on Washington, Kilpatrick wrote a scathing article for the Saturday...