The Fire Is Upon Us: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley Jr., and the Debate over Race in America by Nicholas Buccola (review)

In the 1950s and '60s, the American conservative movement was fractured into ideologically incompatible groups: libertarians, traditionalists, and anticommunists. Those divisions should have torn the movement apart, destroying it in its infancy. That movement, however, was held together by a powerful solvent, which became key to its popular appeal: its opposition to civil rights.

Nicholas Buccola's The Fire Is Upon Us is a superb exploration of that opposition. The book makes a case for the importance of a sometimes-overlooked media event: a televised 1965 debate that took place at the University of Cambridge between James Baldwin, the civil rights movement's most famous literary spokesperson, and William F. Buckley, Jr., America's leading conservative intellectual and the founding editor of National Review. The book traces the career of these two writers up to this event, showing how a confrontation between them became inevitable as they fashioned their ideas and intellectual personas in response to the demands and strategies of the civil rights movement. It culminates in a detailed analysis of the debate, rooted in interviews with students who attended it and a newly discovered reel-toreel recording that includes portions of Buckley's speech edited out of the original BBC broadcast. The transcript is reprinted in the book, and readers can listen to the audio recording on Princeton University Press's website.

The debate addressed the motion that "the American dream is at the expense of the American Negro," which Baldwin affirmed through a rhetorically masterful recapitulation of his recently published The Fire Next Time (1963). Baldwin won the debate by a vote of 544 to 164 among the audience's mostly white, male students. However, in Buccola's account, Buckley won a strategic victory that would have momentous implications for the future of American race relations. Rehearsing a critique of The Fire Next Time first developed by National Review contributor Garry Wills, Buckley argued that the praise that the American literary establishment lavished on Baldwin was ironic proof that a new kind of reverse racism had emerged in the United States. By lauding Baldwin's "flagellations of our civilization," by neglecting to take his "charges against America" seriously, that establishment was refusing to treat Baldwin "other than as a Negro" (457-58). Baldwin, in other words, was the first beneficiary of affirmative action, an undeserving writer too readily excused for his intellectual failings because of his race. By voting for Baldwin by an overwhelming margin, the Cambridge audience, in Buckley's view, proved his point.

The debate marked an important shift in conservative arguments about race. Buccola meticulously documents the magazine's position on segregation, which remained consistent up until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This position was an elitist one, marked by Buckley's antidemocratic belief that mass suffrage was responsible for many of America's problems, and that whites were culturally, if not genetically, superior to blacks. Buckley deplored some of the violent excesses of white segregationists; at the same time, he excused those excesses as the predictable reaction of a people who felt their communities to be under assault by Northern radicals. "Let us try, at least, to understand" white Southerners, Buckley wrote in a 1960 essay about mob violence against the Freedom Riders; "[t]hey feel that their life is for them to structure" (qtd. in 153; emphasis in original). For Buckley, the best of the South was represented by the Southern intellectuals whom he encouraged to write for the journal, figures like Richard Weaver and James Jackson Kilpatrick, and by middle-class white supremacist organizations like the Citizens' Councils. These writers and organizations embodied the civilization of the South, which had to be defended against "Negro backwardness" (115). Searching for a constitutionally defensible way to ensure black disenfranchisement, Buckley called for the institution of color-blind educational tests for all Southern voters...