Peter Viereck

This article is about the American writer. For the German city, see Viereck.
Peter Viereck.

Peter Robert Edwin Viereck (August 5, 1916 – May 13, 2006) was an American poet, political thinker, and long-time professor of history at Mount Holyoke College.

Background

Viereck was born in New York City, the son of George Sylvester Viereck. He received his B.A. summa cum laude in history from Harvard University in 1937. He then specialized in European history, receiving his M.A. in 1939 and his Ph.D. in 1942, again from Harvard.

Career

Poetry and scholarship

Viereck was prolific in his writing from 1938. He was a respected poet, with numerous published collections of poems and some poems first published in Poetry Magazine. He won the annual Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1949 for the collection Terror and Decorum.[1][2] In 1955 he was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Florence.

Politics

Viereck was an early leader in the conservative movement but by 1951 felt that it had strayed from true conservatism (see his review of William F. Buckley's God and Man at Yale, The New York Times, November 4, 1951). In April 1940, Viereck wrote an article in the Atlantic Monthly ("But—I'm a Conservative!"[3]), partly in reaction against the ideologies of his father, George Sylvester Viereck, a Nazi sympathizer.

Peter Viereck's article ... argued for a "new conservatism" to counter the "storm of authoritarianism" in Europe and Moral relativism in the USA. He claimed communism and nazism were utopian and would sanction the murder of oppositions (as in anti-semitism) and that liberalism shared a naive belief in progress and humanity's essential goodness.[4]
Viereck's essay was deliberately provocative – "I have watched the convention of revolt harden into dogmatic ritual", he wrote of the Marxists who he said presided over campus life – but it also contained a sincere entreaty. Published as the Nazi armies were invading Denmark and Norway, it called for a "new conservatism" to combat the "storm of totalitarianism" abroad as well as moral relativism and soulless materialism at home. —Tom Reiss[5]

His beliefs are difficult to categorize as they raise questions about what "conservative" really means:

Mr. Viereck's brand of conservatism shunned extremism of either stripe. He was an admirer of the New Deal, a supporter of Adlai Stevenson and an anti-communist who made it clear that he had little use for Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy ... —Chicago Tribune[6]

According to Tom Reiss again, Viereck was right, as he wrote in Conservatism Revisited (1949), that he "had 'opened people's minds to the idea that to be conservative is not to be satanic.' But, he said, 'once their minds were opened, Buckley came in'."[5] In review of Buckley's 1950 book God and Man at Yale, Viereck wrote:

Yet what is [Buckley's] alternative? Nothing more inspiring than the most sterile Old Guard brand of Republicanism, far to the right of Howard Taft. Is there no "selfish materialism" at all among the National Association of Manufacturers as well as among the "New Deal collectivists" here denounced? Is it not humorless, or else blasphemous, for this eloquent advocate of Christianity, an unworldly and anti-economic religion, to enshrine jointly as equally sacrosanct: "Adam Smith and Ricardo, Jesus and St. Paul?" And why is this veritable Eagle Scout of moral sternness silent on the moral implications of McCarthyism in his own camp?[7]

In 1962 he elaborated upon the differences he saw between real conservatives and those he called pseudo-conservatives. He wrote of

... that whole inconsistent spectrum of Goldwater intellectuals and right-radical magazines. Most of them are so muddled they don't even know when they are being 19th-century liberal individualists (in economics) and when they are being 20th-century semi-fascist thought-controllers (in politics). Logically, these two qualities are contradictory. Psychologically, they unite to make America's typical pseudo-conservative rightist ... [ Russell Kirk ] and perhaps half of the new conservatives are bankrupt ... How can one attribute bankruptcy to a growing concern? Indeed, this new American right seems a very successful concern. On every TV station, on every mass-circulation editorial page, the word "conservatism" in the 1960s has acquired a fame, or at least notoriety, that it never possessed before ... Which is it, triumph or bankruptcy, when the empty shell of a name gets acclaim while serving as a chrysalis for its opposite? The historic content of conservatism stands, above all, for two things: organic unity and rooted liberty. Today the shell of the "conservative" label has become a chrysalis for the opposite of these two things: at best for atomistic Manchester liberalism, opposite of organic unity; at worst for thought-controlling nationalism, uprooting the traditional liberties (including the 5th Amendment) planted by America's founders.[8]

In January 2006, Viereck offered this analysis:

I think McCarthy was a menace ... because he corrupted the ethics of American conservatives, and that corruption leads to the situation we have now. It gave the conservatives the habit of appeasing the forces of the hysterical right ... and appeasing them knowingly, expediently. I think that was the original sin of the conservative movement, and we are all suffering from it.[5]

Teaching

Viereck first taught during 1946–1947 at Smith College. In 1948 he joined the faculty at Mount Holyoke, another women's college in Massachusetts, and taught there for nearly fifty years, eventually as a Professor of History. (He "retired" in 1987 but continued to teach his Russian history survey course there until 1997.) Upon grading the final exams of his students, he would write on the test, "An A- is good, an A+ means you aren't smelling enough flowers." He and the poet Joseph Brodsky would often joke about teaching a course together, "Rhyme and Punishment".

Death

Viereck died on May 13, 2006 in South Hadley, Massachusetts after a prolonged illness.

Awards

Works

Poetry

In Poetry Magazine

Poetry collections

Each year links to a corresponding "[year] in poetry" article:

Non-fiction

Select articles

References

  1. 1 2 "Poetry". The Pulitzer Prizes Retrieved 2013-11-12.
  2. ↑ "Modern Timeline of Poetry", University of Toronto
  3. ↑ found at theatlantic.com
  4. ↑ American History Timeline. Middlesex University London (evidently collegiate study materials). Archived May 17, 2006, at the Wayback Machine.
  5. 1 2 3 Reiss, Tom (October 24, 2005). "The First Conservative". The New Yorker.
  6. ↑ Chicago Tribune obituary
  7. ↑ Viereck, New York Times, November 4, 1951
  8. ↑ Viereck, Conservatism Revisited (Collier Books, 2nd edition), pp. 149-51.
  9. ↑ Brinton, Crane. "Metapolitics: From the Romantics to Hitler," The Saturday Review, October 4, 1941.
  10. ↑ Bundy, McGeorge. "Return to Metternich," The Reporter, October 11, 1949.
  11. ↑ Bruun, Geoffrey. "A Defense of Metternich," The Saturday Review, October 15, 1949.
  12. ↑ MacDonald, Dwight. "Conservatism Revisited," New Republic, November 13, 1949.
  13. ↑ Federici, Michael. "Revisiting Viereck," The University Bookman, Volume 44, Number 3, Summer 2006.

Further reading

Obituaries

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