M.E. Bradford (1934–1993)
“Melvin E.” Bradford; University of Dallas literature professor; the most influential neo-Confederate intellectual of the postwar American right; passionate anti-Lincoln polemicist; his failed Reagan nomination to head the NEH marked the neoconservative defeat of paleoconservatism; chief Claremonter antagonist in the foundational Bradford-Jaffa debate
Who He Is
Melvin E. (“Mel”) Bradford was a Texas-born literature professor at the University of Dallas — a student of the Vanderbilt Agrarian tradition, scholar of Faulkner, and “an impenitent conservative Southerner.” He is the key neo-Confederate intellectual of the postwar conservative movement: proud of his Southern heritage, a defender of states’ rights, a strict constructionist, and above all a fierce critic of Abraham Lincoln.
Bradford’s significance for this wiki is dual: (1) he represents the neo-Confederate strand of conservatism that the Jaffaite Declarationism project explicitly displaced; and (2) his failed 1981 NEH nomination — blocked by neoconservatives over his Lincoln attacks — marks the moment the Old Right lost the institutional battle for the Reagan coalition.
Biography and Intellectual Formation
Born in Texas, Bradford was trained in literature at Vanderbilt University, where he came under the influence of the Agrarian circle (the group that produced I’ll Take My Stand, 1930). His mentor Donald Davidson had once called the Lincoln Memorial “a brazen affront to Southerners.” Bradford took a professorship at the University of Dallas. He was what his eulogists called “equally at home in philosophy, religion, classical studies, politics, and history” — and, crucially, in American political rhetoric. He took a special interest in the literature of the South and in American political thought.
Reagan supported Bradford to head the National Endowment for the Humanities. Neoconservatives within the coalition — Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, and others — objected strenuously to Bradford’s record of Lincoln attacks. Reagan was forced to withdraw the nomination and appointed William J. Bennett, the Brooklyn-born Catholic moralist, in Bradford’s place. The episode was a defining moment in the struggle between paleoconservatism and neoconservatism for control of the Reagan coalition.
Bradford on Lincoln
Bradford’s assault on Lincoln was systematic and politically motivated. Lincoln is history’s most contested figure within American conservatism, and Bradford represents the most extreme anti-Lincoln position.
Lincoln as radical: Bradford read Lincoln as a “maniacal, tax-and-spend Whig,” a “promising young centralist” who saw government as the engine for imposing his vision. Lincoln’s Declaration-based rhetoric was, in Bradford’s reading, “one serious flirtation with the millennial thing” — a dangerous utopianism disguised as constitutional fidelity.
Lincoln’s dangerous religiosity: Bradford warned that Lincoln cast himself as an Old Testament prophet, receiving “intimations of the Divine Will” and calling the nation to holy mission. This “chiliastic moral imperativism” made him frighteningly zealous — a man who would “lecture and dragoon all who might object.” Bradford drew on Eric Voegelin’s New Science of Politics to frame Lincoln as a “Gnostic” — a political actor who reduces transcendent truths to immanent political programs and thereby tends toward totalitarianism.
Lincoln as Jacobin: Bradford’s most explosive charge: that Lincoln “misunderstood” the Declaration as conferring a “deferred promise of equality” — a Jacobin reading that would unleash an endless series of egalitarian crusades. This was not Lincoln’s constitution but the “Old Liberalism hidden under a Union battle flag.”
The Bradford-Jaffa debate: Bradford’s most immediate intellectual target was not liberals but fellow conservative Harry V. Jaffa, who championed Lincoln as the philosopher-statesman who completed the Founding. Bradford called Jaffa’s equation of “all men are created equal” with the lodestar of constitutionalism “the Heresy of Equality” — the antonym of every legitimate conservative principle. This debate — Bradford’s South versus Jaffa’s Lincoln — is one of the foundational disputes of postwar American conservative thought. Jaffa won institutionally; Bradford won culturally among paleoconservatives.
Bradford’s Constitutionalism
Bradford was a strict constructionist and a states’ rights conservative who held that the Reconstruction Amendments made no fundamental constitutional change — or if they did, the change was illegitimate. The Civil War settled secession as a legal fact, but it did not make a new constitutional order; it remained a federal republic of sovereign states. The Civil Rights Revolution was, in Bradford’s framework, a “Trojan Horse of our homegrown Jacobinism” — using the language of equality to impose a unitary, centralized, administrative state.
He regarded “equality” (capital E) as the driving abstraction of the modern liberal state, an endless engine for new crusades. “Should slavery be gone, some new infamy was bound to be discovered by the stern examiners whose power depends upon a regularity in such ‘crusades.’” This insight — that anti-racism would become the master framework for progressive expansion — anticipates the Longmarcherism arguments of the contemporary New Right.
Legacy
Bradford represents the road not taken by the Reaganite conservative movement — the explicitly neo-Confederate, anti-Lincoln, states’-rights strand that was defeated institutionally in 1981 but lived on in Paleoconservatism. Buchanan’s candidacies, Sam Francis’s theorizing, and ultimately the MAGA movement’s cultural nationalism all carry Bradford’s DNA.
The irony noted by historian Ken Kersch: Bradford’s neo-Confederatism was discredited precisely because it was too honestly Southern. His opponents defeated him not by refuting his arguments but by pointing to his cultural politics. The Jaffaite Declarationism project — invoking Lincoln, MLK, and Jefferson — accomplished much of what Bradford wanted (resistance to progressive constitutional revision) while coating it in the more palatable language of universal natural rights.
Cross-References
- Harry V. Jaffa — his chief conservative antagonist; the Bradford-Jaffa debate is foundational
- Declarationism — the Jaffaite project that displaced Bradford’s neo-Confederate framework
- Paleoconservatism — the movement Bradford helped define
- Russell Kirk — Bradford’s Agrarian-traditionalist forebear
- Counterrevolution — Bradford exemplifies the shift from conservative to counterrevolutionary
- Longmarcherism — Bradford’s “endless crusades” argument anticipates this New Right concept