I certainly didn’t.

To anyone who knows the thought of Russell Kirk as outlined in masterworks like The Conservative Mind and The Roots of American Order, it should come as no surprise that he studied at Duke. After all, it was Kirk who adored the particularism and anti-majoritarianism of Southern thinkers like Calhoun and Randolph; he not only wrote his master’s thesis on John Randolph, but dedicated an entire chapter of The Conservative Mind to their philosophies.

Be that as it may, there are far more reasons why a recent graduate like myself would be completely ignorant of the fact that Kirk studied at Duke. I spent a long four years traipsing the halls of Duke’s Gothic campus, yet I did not once encounter a mark of his legacy—something that was certainly not a result of a lack of trying on my part.

There is no Russell Kirk Scholarship program at Duke. No Kirk Center for the Study of Southern Thought. No Kirk building. No portrait in a dusty back corner of a library à la Nixon. No mention of him in the recent Centennial celebrations. Not even a name plastered to one of those high-tech meeting spaces that apparently cost tens of thousands to construct. Until recently, there was not even any discussion of Kirk’s legacy in Duke’s classrooms. In fact, it took an outside, conservative non-profit to fund a course on the intellectual development of American conservatism just to have the father of American conservatism even be mentioned at his alma mater (shout out to Dr. Coome)! [and Barnes & Noble wants to call The Handmaid’s Tale a “banned book.”]

The only modicum of recognition Kirk ever received from the university was an offer for the “Most Distinguished Alumnus award” in 1989—something Kirk declined on account of “previous engagements.”

Ironically, then, Kirk’s conservative mind has not been conserved, at least on the rainbow-lined streets of Durham. This man who exhorted a generation of Americans to honor the things of old has been, unceremoniously, written out of the very history of the place he once trod. And, as easy as it would be to merely lament this fact or highlight how a similar fate would never befall a liberal intellectual of equal stature, such efforts do little in the way of honoring Kirk’s legacy. What is needed is not a rebuttal of the revisionists but a recovery of Kirk himself.

The purpose of this essay is thus to rebuild Kirk’s Duke legacy by reconstructing his brief stopover in Durham—and, more importantly, to show how this otherwise unhappy year helped Kirk discover the intellectual tradition that would eventually become his conservatism.

I will first introduce Kirk as we know him today, briefly outlining his life and political thought, before diving into his year at Duke. This essay was pieced together from a series of Kirk’s private letters and writings, biographies, and other publicly available information. For those interested in reading more about Kirk or his time at Duke, I will include a “Further Reading” section at the bottom of this post. I hope y’all enjoy!

Who Was Kirk?

Before I can take you through Russell Kirk’s year at Duke, it’s worth explaining, however briefly, who he was in his day. Kirk was, to put it simply, the father of American conservatism. Born in Plymouth, Michigan, in October 1918, Kirk spent the vast majority of his life, from his stately home on Piety Hill, expositing a political philosophy defined by prudence, humility, respect for tradition, and, ultimately, trust in divine Providence.

Though Kirk published many impactful books, his most influential was an adaptation of his doctoral dissertation from the University of St. Andrews, The Conservative Mind, published in 1953. Over the course of about five hundred pages, Kirk walks readers through a scattershot history of the leading Anglo-American conservative thinkers from the last two or so centuries—beginning with Kirk’s muse, Edmund Burke, and ending with the man he called the “principal conservative thinker in the twentieth century,” T.S. Eliot. The Conservative Mind was, and still is today, the lodestar for the American conservative movement. Not only did it rocket conservatism into the mainstream of American politics, thanks to its generous media coverage upon publication, but it also proved to a generation of Americans that conservatism is not merely regressive. He showed, with aggressive precision, that conservatism has substance. The most accessible example of this is the six canons of conservatism Kirk included in the book’s first chapter:

“1) Belief in a transcendent order, or body of natural law, which rules society as well as conscience. Political problems, at bottom, are religious and moral problems. […] 2) Affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of human existence. […] 3) Conviction that civilized society requires orders and classes. […] 4) Persuasion that freedom and property are closely linked. […] 5) Faith in prescription and distrust of “sophisters, calculators, and economists” who would reconstruct society upon abstract designs. Custom, convention, and old prescription are checks both upon man’s anarchic impulse and upon the innovator’s lust for power. […] 6) Recognition that change may not be salutary reform: hasty innovation may be a devouring conflagration, rather than a torch of progress. […]

But, more than that, Kirk demonstrated that conservatism has a mind and an active one at that—evidenced by the political and literary careers of the men he drew into his canon in the book. For these reasons and more, The Conservative Mind has come to occupy the same place in the heart of intellectual conservatives as Das Kapital does for Marxists or Locke’s Second Treatise for classical liberals.

In light of Kirk’s monumental intellectual achievement, Alfred Regenery, the son of Henry Regenery, the man who originally published The Conservative Mind, described this work as “the catalyst that began the transformation of a band of disparate conservative critics into the political, cultural, and intellectual force that it is today.” And catalyze it did. Within two years of The Conservative Mind taking the nation’s intellectual elite by storm, Kirk had joined with other prominent conservatives like William F. Buckley to found National Review in 1955—where he would serve as a regular contributor for decades.

Throughout his lengthy career, Kirk not only wrote masterworks of conservative political philosophy, books like The Roots of American Order, but also helped establish an institutional infrastructure that would outlast his mortal life. By the time of his death in 1994, Kirk had founded magazines and prominent scholarly journals, mentored innumerable young conservatives at institutions such as the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, and sometimes even explicitly participated in right-wing politics—for example, when he served as the chair of Pat Buchanan’s 1992 Michigan primary campaign.

These accomplishments ultimately led President Ronald Reagan to name Kirk “the prophet of American conservatism, Russell Kirk has taught, nurtured, and inspired a generation.”

What About Duke?

The factors that led Russell Kirk to attend Duke are perhaps too numerous to list. The young Kirk apparently had no real interest in Southern history or politics. As his biographer Bradley Birzer explains, Kirk was essentially raised on whatever works his mother, Marjorie Rachel Pierce Kirk, could give him. This included everything from the romantic tales of the Brothers Grimm and Lewis Carroll to the more mature works of Victor Hugo, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, and Shakespeare. While a modern reader may find an upbringing that exposes a young man to these sorts of writers a bit aristocratic, the Kirk family was anything but. In fact, so poor were the Kirks’, that there was a point during the Great Depression when the total of the family’s worth was a $20 bill kept as a bookmark in his mother’s copy of Kipling’s The Light That Failed.

Poor though they were, Kirk was not raised solely by his parents. His maternal grandfather, along with his mother, most shaped the young man, always discussing esoteric topics like “the character of Richard III, and of Puritan domestic life, and the ferocity of the Assyrians” during their long walks around his property.

As surprising as it may sound, Kirk was quite fond of his public education. He was exposed to all manner of topics like history, literature, Latin, business law, arithmetic, and science. This, of course, was a bit of a holdover from earlier, late-nineteenth-century public education practices and did not reflect the leveling efforts of John Dewey. In light of his relative educational luck, Kirk said, “I crossed the drawbridge just before the portcullis fell.”

His formal and informal schooling ultimately led Russell Kirk to enroll at Michigan State College in the fall of 1936. While an entire essay could be written about his time in Lansing, there are only a few things worth noting here. The first is that Michigan State, through his literature professor, John Abbott Clark, introduced Kirk to the thought of eminent conservative writers Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More. Kirk’s biographer summarized their contribution to Kirk’s thought thusly: “In essence, Babbitt and More wanted to remind men and women what it meant to be human and a part of a continuity of the past, the present, and the future.” Secondly, his time in college demonstrated Kirk’s immense intellectual ability. Most notably, he published two scholarly articles while still an undergraduate—one of which was so deftly molded that editors of College English mistook him for an “instructor in history at Michigan State College!”

These four years at Michigan State gave Kirk many of the raw materials of his later conservatism, particularly his admiration for Babbitt and More. But the pieces had not yet formed a coherent political philosophy. That would begin to happen at Duke.

Yet, like every fresh graduate in America, Kirk still had yet to slay the great dragon before him—he was jobless. And, to make matters worse, the nation was still in the midst of the Great Depression. This really left the young man with few options. Either he returns home to Michigan and plies some trade that he would doubtlessly loathe or, if possible, enters academia. Now, as anyone who has attempted to “enter academia” can tell you, this is not always an easy feat.

“Graduate study was a possibility—not a very desirable prospect, just then, but a tolerable one,” Kirk wrote in his memoir The Sword of Imagination. Indeed, Kirk did not exactly want to become an academic or graduate student, but the Great Depression and perhaps his frenetic mind forced his hand. Kirk applied and was offered admission to just two master’s programs in History, one at Pennsylvania State and the other at Duke. Though he was still a bit uncertain what he thought of a career in academia, Kirk knew that “the degree snobbery of academia” would require of him more than a mere bachelor’s if he wanted to remain in what he called “the petrified forest of academe.”

Ultimately, Kirk would accept the offer from Duke, which included a tuition waiver, no real teaching duties, and “a modest sum” of two hundred dollars—what the ever-humble Kirk termed “wealth beyond the dreams of avarice.”

The Duke of 1940

A. Campus Culture

Duke, at the time of Kirk’s arrival, was not unlike the fledgling American Republic at the height of the Virginia dynasty (the first two decades of the nineteenth century). It had everything an upstart, bold institution needed. Duke had heaps of money due to the generous Duke endowment created by James Buchanan Duke in 1925; a pioneering titan of education in University President William Preston Few (who sadly died in October 1940); and the look of an old, Gothic campus thanks to the craftsmanship and foresight of Julian Abele and James B. Duke.

New buildings were going up everywhere on campus. In just the year of 1939, a new addition had been added to Duke Hospital, a section of the Few Quadrangle, and, most importantly, the home of the world’s most infamous college basketball fans, Cameron Indoor Stadium (then known as Duke Indoor Stadium).

It was this architecture that seemed to impress the young Russell Kirk most. Writing in his memoir, Kirk recalled (in the third person):

“the tall Gothic buildings of Duke emancipated Kirk from his Michigan provinciality. For austere study, he could not have made a better choice. Duke proper was for men only, the girls being at associated Trinity College, some distance away among the loblolly pines; the odorous tobacco town of Durham, which had few attractions, was yet more distant.”

If it is not evident from this glowing praise, Kirk felt what Julian Abele wanted him to feel—as if the campus were old, reverent, and fit for capacious young minds like his. He did not feel at home, of course. But one could certainly say that the physical setting of Duke lifted Kirk’s mind above the trees to gaze upon the affairs of men and possibly even encounter the guiding hand of Providence. It’s difficult to overstate how important this was to the young Kirk’s thought. He would later become the pre-eminent thinker in a tradition that holds that places, institutions, architecture, manners, and inherited customs shape the people who inhabit them. In that sense, Duke was already teaching Kirk something that he would later spend his career arguing: that the physical and cultural inheritance of a civilization can educate the mind before the mind has learned to articulate why it matters.

This Duke that enchanted Kirk was not the Duke of 2026. There are some obvious examples of this, with the campus being racially and sexually segregated. Yet there are subtler points worth touching on. The campus was patriotic and conservative. As Kirk noted in an October 25th, 1940, letter to a friend:

A Duke Chronicle poll around the time of Kirk’s letter confirmed the Republican bent of the student body, showing a 292-vote margin for Willkie. Students still organized Old South-style “Yankee-Reb” balls where young men vied for the hand of freshmen girls. And President Few, himself educated in the classics, often spoke about the duties of citizenship and the glories of the American cause. “Our inheritance of English civilization, of English institutions, of English ideals, and of participation in English life should have supreme significance for us,” Few remarked to a gathering at the Women’s college. Few continued, “We are under very fortunate circumstances in the greatest republic in history, under a government which leaves its citizens free to do their best for the general welfare, to rise to their full stature, and to live the fullest possible life.” One could only imagine the outrage these remarks would cause today if President Price delivered them!

Yet, like its architecture that so profoundly “emancipated” Kirk, many aspects of the Duke of 1940 were similar to today’s campus culture. About half of the students, on Kirk’s rendering, came from the North—although the Northerners of Kirk’s day possessed “Southern civility.” Greek life was thriving, with 168 freshmen pledging 18 fraternities in the spring of 1941. The Duke Chronicle was similarly active, publishing a semiweekly print edition on everything from local concerts to campus scandals. The university was also peculiarly tolerant of other Christian denominations for a Southern school. The best evidence of this is the formation of a large Catholic Club of about 200 students around 1939.

Most similar of all to today’s Duke was the campus’ lively sports culture. However, it was Duke football, not basketball, that led the way. The team, led by the modern stadium’s namesake Wallace Wade, won unofficial national championships in 1936 and 1941 and, in an ode to Manny Diaz, came out victorious in just about every Southern Conference championship from 1933-1943 (excepting ’34, ’37, ’40, and ‘42). Under Wade’s leadership—a future College Football Hall of Fame inductee—Duke’s football team would play in two Rose Bowls and has generally been recognized by sports writers as one of the greatest teams in college football history [do not ask me for a source on this ;)].

You can look at really any edition of the Duke Chronicle during this era to get a sense of this lively environment that Kirk would have experienced during his year at Duke. Perhaps my favorite example of this came during a fall 1940 football game vs V.M.I. In an October 1st, 1940, article titled “Patriotism Appears in Duke-V.M.I. Fray,” a student wrote:

“Everything was very patriotic last Saturday…from the playing of the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’ and ‘God Bless America’ to the uniforms on the field…V.M. wore red pants, the referees supplied the white, and the Devils were attired in their usual blue. After the first team tallied so rapidly via the air, someone in the stands was heard to remark that it looked like a ‘blueskrieg.’” Duke won 23-0. Maybe 1940 Duke wasn’t so similar to today’s, in more ways than one…

B. Duke During the War

A keen reader will note that all of this talk of patriotism and “blueskrieg” is coming during a time when the Nazi war machine was ravaging Europe. This was something that Americans, including Duke students, were incredibly aware of and opinionated about. In fact, Dr. Eduard Benes, the former president of Czechoslovakia, addressed Duke’s centennial celebrations in 1939. As any World War II buffs will know, Dr. Benes was in office during the time of the ill-fated Munich Agreement of 1938, which effectively forced Benes and the Czechs to cede the Sudetenland to the Third Reich. Following the collapse of his pro-Western foreign policy, Benes resigned on October 5th of that year and began lobbying for Czech abroad.

Kirk’s memoirs and diaries offer little insight into his feelings about the war while at Duke. The closest thing to an opinion on the conflict comes from that October 25th letter Kirk wrote to his friend:

“The Willkie cause is strong here at Duke; however, I am happy to say. Remember to get out all your henchmen to vote next week—and not for the Country Squire (FDR). Willkie made a spirited defense of states’ rights yesterday, I see. Glad to be able to cast my first vote for him. I think we’ll win.”

For all of his talents, Kirk was not endowed, at least in the fall of 1940, with the gift of political foresight. Willkie was demolished in the 1940 election. Yet, Kirk’s vehement support for Willkie, especially when taken in the context of later writings, suggests he supported involvement in Europe and elsewhere. Willkie, like FDR, was a kind of liberal internationalist whose critiques of FDR’s handling of programs like the “destroyers for bases” program were typically procedural and not substantive.

Kirk’s Studies

“He being in the South, it behooved Kirk to acclimate himself by studying Southern history and Southern literature. In this, Providence seemed to lend Kirk a hand,” so wrote Russell Kirk in his memoir. That providential hand came in many forms.

Its first instance was that of two nationally acclaimed faculty who just so happened to share Kirk’s conservative way of thinking: Southern historian Charles Sydnor and Southern literary critic Jay Hubbell. Though Kirk “never had heard of them until he arrived at Duke,” he quickly acquainted himself with the two and their areas of expertise. Kirk described the two scholars in his memoir, The Sword of Imagination, as “Southern gentlemen and scholars of the old breed, courteous and friendly to those deserving of friendship.”

Whatever their ideological alignment, it seems, from Kirk’s personal letters and other writings, that Drs. Sydnor and Jay Hubbell did not exert a profound role in his intellectual journey and primarily served as career mentors and friends to the burgeoning scholar. That said, these men were unabashedly Southern conservatives tied to the old way of life of the South. Kirk especially enjoyed a course on Southern literature and culture from 1800-1870 that he took with Dr. Hubbell.

At this point and through these engagements with Drs. Hubbell and Sydnor, it would be fair to say that Kirk’s generally conservative leanings and suspicions of modernity acquired a place, a people, and a political tradition: the South.

Those familiar with the relatively niche intellectual conservative literary canon may recognize Dr. Sydnor’s name. His 1952 work, American Revolutionaries in the Making: Political Practices in Washington’s Virginia, has become a bit of a cult classic in those circles, owing to its staunchly conservative, dare I say localist appraisal of colonial Virginian politics. That sort of political environment—one where men were forced to debate face-to-face and engage in the practical art of statesmanship—produced precisely the kinds of prudent statesmen that the burgeoning republic would need. Moreover, Sydnor argued that this democratic politics, coupled with the uniquely aristocratic requirements on voting and officeholding, created a near-perfect mixture of astute intellect mediated by popular accountability. Kirk would pick up on many of these themes in his later works, particularly in his chapters on John Adams and the “Southern Conservatives” in The Conservative Mind.

Though Kirk enjoyed the company of Sydnor and Hubbell, as well as some classmates, such as his sometime travel companion, Ralph Purcell, he did not, on the whole, like the faculty and students at Duke. Birzer’s biography of Kirk is quite clear on this point, noting, “although he enjoyed a few professors’ lectures, he disliked his fellow graduate students, most of whom he considered little better than lemmings.” Kirk himself said as much in a letter to a friend:

“There simply are not enough real brains in this country to fill the graduate schools which are growing every day…And these ‘scholars’ expect to teach college! A century or more back in the old days of ignorance and unenlightenment, they wouldn’t have had a chance to teach little boys in a rural school; their pupils would have known more than they.”

The young scholar thought of his fellow graduate students as “automatons, if that.” They were without agency and utterly incapable of original thought…to Kirk. While some of this may have stemmed from a cocktail of narcissism and cynicism on Kirk’s part—more likely a general frustration with his lack of an intellectual peer—this criticism was not entirely without merit. Kirk was almost certainly the most learned and well-read student in his cohort. Moreover, he was probably the freest thinker. This is something Birzer actually describes rather vividly in American Conservative, detailing a moment when Kirk debated his roommate on the literary quality of William Dean Howells and Henry James. Kirk argued that Henry Adams was a much better fiction writer, to which his roommate asked, like an annoying sibling in an early 2000s comedy, “Says who?” Shocked, Kirk responded, “I do.” Birzer details the rest:

“Aghast, the roommate protested Kirk’s assertion of authority and argued only a scholar in the field could pronounce one writer better than another.”

The silver lining of this dissatisfaction with the intellectual community at Duke—the second stroke of Providence—was that it forced Kirk into the library. Paradoxically, then, the very thing Kirk hated about Duke became one of the things that made the university intellectually formative for him. The classroom disappointed him, so he educated himself. And in educating himself, he discovered the Southern tradition that would give political shape to instincts he had previously encountered mainly in literary and philosophical form.

He had already acquainted himself with the Southern literary and political canon beforehand, reading some Southern agrarians like Davidson’s The Attack on Leviathan while at Michigan State. Still, it was really at Duke, owing to the lack of classroom enrichment, that his interest in the South took off. While in Durham, Kirk read just about everything published by James Fenimore Cooper, Sir Walter Scott, and Irving Babbitt. Later in life, Kirk would praise these Southerners for their “Christian humanism, stern criticism of the industrial mass society, detestation of communism and other forms of collectivism.”

In Perkins Library, therefore, Kirk found a home away from home. This “splendid” institution housed “six hundred thousand manuscripts,” many of which contained the personal papers of men such as Calhoun, Robert E. Lee, and Beauregard. Kirk loved Duke’s library for its connection with Chapel Hill, which gave him even more access to the writers he desired. So great was his attachment to the library that Kirk was said to have spent most of his career at Duke, when not traveling across the South, in the building. The best portrait of this time in Kirk’s life is detailed in a letter he wrote to his mother in the spring of 1941:

“I must work hard if I am to get my degree in June, and am reading two or three books a day…Write me when you can; I’ll write again soon. Must leave for the library now.”

Yet, for all of its majesty, Duke’s library system was deficient in one respect. “The one book I need most, though, isn’t here—Proceedings of the Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1829-1830. It contains Randolph’s most important speeches in the field of constitutionalism,” wrote Kirk in an October 1940 letter to a friend.

During this time in the library, among his friends in the faculty, amid the soaring Gothic architecture, and on his travels across the region to locations like Charleston and Bennett Place, Kirk became increasingly enchanted with the South. The more he read, the more he came to see in the Southern past a distinctive political and cultural inheritance, one that stood in sharp contrast to the atomized, industrial society he had come to distrust in the nation at large.

Randolph of Roanoke

It was perhaps the third move of Providence, then, that Kirk’s growing fascination with the South should lead him to one of its most idiosyncratic political thinkers: John Randolph of Roanoke. In Randolph, the disparate strands of Kirk’s intellectual life at Duke—his suspicion of industrial modernity, admiration for tradition, affection for the South, and growing interest in decentralized political authority—began to converge. Randolph offered Kirk an ideal subject through whom to explore the constitutionalism, political individualism, and agrarian conservatism that so captivated him. By the time Kirk began work on his master’s thesis, his subject was thus almost inevitable: he would turn from reading the Southern canon to examining, in depth, the political thought of one of its most brilliant and eccentric sons.

Now, this chronicle of Kirk’s life at Duke is already too long to include a full explanation of John Randolph’s thought and Kirk’s finalized thesis. What’s important to know is that Kirk saw in Randolph a political imaginary: a man who was a friend to federalism but also understood that a strong national government could only exist in those voids which local institutions—the “little platoons”—were incapable of filling. It was Randolph’s Southern conservatism that ultimately led Kirk to call himself later a “Northern agrarian.” Kirk, in the opening pages of his published thesis, explains how he adored Randolph’s:

“alternating ferocity and compassion, his duels, his beautiful letters, his entrancing extemporaneous eloquence, his fits of madness, his sardonic wit, his outbursts of prophecy and his visions of devils, his brandy and his opium, his passionate Christianity, his lonely plantation life, his quixotic opposition to the great political and economic powers of the day.”

In a word, Randolph was everything that Kirk’s classmates were not. He was convicted of his beliefs. As a traditionalist, he loathed industrial society. He was a man of passion, and Christian passion at that. At bottom, Randolph was a real man who engaged in a real world. He had no time for the utopian ideologies or impractical philosophizing of men like Jefferson. He was a politician and a statesman, and as such, he had duties to attend to.

Birzer writes that Kirk’s thesis was, in essence, “an act of piety.” And this, ultimately, was what Kirk had begun learning at Duke. The conservatism Kirk discovered was not simply opposition ot loberalism but the recovery of an inherited tradition—replete with people, institutions, customs, and the ideas that modern America had forgotten.

Kirk thus sought to bring “Randolph up from among the shades,” rescuing his political thought from the past so that it might once again speak to the problems of American politics. In studying Randolph, Kirk was attempting to recover a forgotten political inheritance and place it back into the service of the present. Indeed, Randolph had not simply been forgotten but—owing to the success of Jeffersonian leveling in modern America—had, according to modern liberals, been proven wrong. Kirk sought to dispel this misnomer by situating Randolph as a truly “great man.”

More than that, Kirk believed his recovery of Randolph could help reorient American politics in some minuscule way. Anticipating much of his later work, particularly his writings in The Conservative Mind, Kirk saw in Randolph a prophet of what Alexis de Tocqueville called “soft despotism”: a slow descent of the American Republic into bureaucratic administration and dependence on the state. Looking around at the United States under the New Deal, Kirk thought of Randolph as precisely the voice the nation needed. Randolph not only rejected this soft despotism but fundamentally rejected the premise of egalitarianism—that men are not merely equal in the eyes of God, but possess equal potential and ought therefore to be treated as interchangeable political units. And, to put the cherry on top, Randolph saw tradition and the customs inherited from generations past, rather than positive law alone, as the ordering principles of a nation.

This was all music to the young Russell Kirk’s ears.

Kirk would later say that his study of Randolph “invigorate[d] his political imagination.” However, Randolph’s most lasting contribution to Kirk’s thought was perhaps his role as a midwife of sorts. After all, it was through Randolph that Kirk first encountered Edmund Burke at an intimate level. Kirk says as much in his memoir, writing again in the third person: “About the same time, and in part through his reading of Randolph, he began to apprehend a greater thinker and statesman, Edmund Burke. The power of Burke’s Reflections did for Kirk what it had done for Randolph and many others…it expounded the politics of prescription and convention.” For these reasons and more, Kirk described Randolph as “the American Burke.”

Edmund Burke rocked Kirk’s world. His Reflections on the Revolution in France showed Kirk, perhaps for the first time, what a politics of prudence, prescription, and humility could actually look like. Randolph had given Kirk the political imagination; Burke would give it a philosophy.

Thus, at Duke it could be said that Kirk discovered his political hero.

It is difficult to overstate how monumental this revelation was for Kirk—and, ultimately, for the modern conservative movement. In some sense, it was the modern conservative movement’s equivalent of Marx’s discovery of Hegel: a young intellectual encountering the thinker who would provide the substance for the instincts he had already begun to develop.

So enthralled was Kirk with the thought of Randolph and Burke (and ready to ditch his obtuse classmates) that he finished his master’s thesis in just one year. Birzer notes that, “by April, [Kirk] admitted to finishing each chapter, within a two-day time span.” But before Kirk could leave Duke, he had one last hurdle to conquer: his thesis defense. Kirk described this encounter in the spring of 1941 as a “fierce battle,” owing in no small part to a “scowling, burly, heavily-mustached creature who objected to everything from the title onward, most sincerely.” According to Kirk, the problem was that this man, Dr. William Gibson, was both a political scientist and a nationalist. These two ways of thinking, bent on quantifying and controlling everything, did not mix well with Kirk’s deliberative, organic thought.

Dr. Gibson not only loathed Randolph’s Southern particularism but took issue with Kirk’s usage of the term “political thought” in his title. Kirk’s retelling of the admittedly hilarious exchange, as detailed in a May 1941 letter, has been repurposed below:

[Dr. Gibson]: “Your title is deceptive and false. ‘Political thought’ has a special technical meaning. To be political thought, it has to be unique. What contribution did Randolph make that was unique?”

[Kirk]: “None…nothing has been unique since Aristotle.”

[Dr. Gibson]: “Well, in American political philosophy, I mean.”

[Kirk]: “None. Thought doesn’t have to be unique.”

[Dr. Gibson]: “It does. It’s a special technical term.”

[Kirk]: “I’m not in favor of special technical terms. We’re speaking different languages.”

[Dr. Gibson]: “Your thesis has nothing to do with political thought.”

[Kirk]: “What else could I call my thesis?”

[Dr. Gibson]: *ignoring Kirk’s question* “It’s a special technical term.”

[Kirk]: “Well, I’m no great philologist…”

[Dr. Gibson]: “It’s not a matter of philology. It’s a matter of definition and history and meaning.”

[Kirk]: “What is your special technical meaning of ‘philology?’”

Supposedly, their debate went on and on like this for a while. This episode, like Kirk’s other encounters with Duke’s faculty and students, is revealing. It illustrates precisely the sort of academic snobbery and intellectual conformity that Kirk loathed. He had little patience for such people.

Though this quarrelsome professor was “no gentleman,” he ultimately assented and voted with his colleagues to approve Kirk’s thesis. This was largely the result of the “history men” like Dr. Sydnor who went to bat for Kirk during the defense. The final product of his year of study and masterful defense of his thesis would become Kirk’s first book, published by the University of Chicago Press in 1951: Randolph of Roanoke: A Study in Conservative Thought. Kirk was proud of this achievement. He wrote in The Sword of Imagination, “Perhaps no other master’s thesis in American history, written in the space of eight months, has enjoyed such long life in print, even unto this very day.” In a separate letter around the conclusion of his time in Durham, Kirk mentioned to a friend, “I hope to write a book of biographical sketches of the Old Republicans…”

Birzer appears to conclude that this letter of Kirk’s, revealing his ambitions to write a Plutarchesque set of sketches of conservatives, coupled with his newfound love affair with Edmund Burke, was the moment when Kirk first set his mind to writing something like The Conservative Mind. Whether that is true is, of course, debatable. What is clear beyond any doubt is that, by the end of his time at Duke, Kirk had found a friend in Burke and had a stated ambition to chronicle the intellectual histories of various conservative minds.

Kirk’s Meager Social Life

Before I finish this tale, it’s worth touching a bit on Kirk’s personal life while at Duke. As already noted above, Kirk did not like the people at Duke all that much. There were some professors and a friend or two, but, on the whole, the campus was not very welcoming to the young “Sage of Mecosta.”

Even during his attenuated travels across the South with classmates, Kirk spoke more in his letters and memoir about the places themselves than about his fellow travelers. Apart from his friend, Robert Purcell, everyone else was a sort of vague archetype, a “classmate,” a “roommate,” or a “professor.” They were not really people in the way that Randolph and Dr. Sydnor were. In truth, if you read Kirk’s recollections of his travels, he always speaks highly of the places themselves and their history but never fails to disparage the people. For example:

“At Chapel Hill, all the walks are of a sort of sand-and-gravel; one of the benefactors of the University specified that if they ever put in concrete walks, they would lose his bequest. The students and faculty who pride themselves on belonging to the most ‘liberal’ institution in the South, and think change means reform, are forever trying to have hot and hideous cement substituted, but as yet they’ve been able to find no loophole in the bequest.”

There’s no record of Kirk joining a fraternity or club on campus—believe me, I read through every extant edition of the Duke Chronicle from his time. The only thing he did, apart from reading about Randolph and the other Southern conservatives, was grade papers for a freshman European history course.

Kirk supposedly had a bit of a love affair while down in Durham, though the girl was someone he met during a visit to Florida. This anonymous liberal arts student was, according to Birzer, one of three girlfriends Kirk had before he met his future wife, Annette Kirk. It seems the only hint of an extracurricular social life we get comes from his memoir, where Kirk wrote:

“The only place (aside from fraternities) for socialization was a snack counter with a half-dozen stools. The graduate students had their own dining room, with waiters and plenty of peanut butter, and their own dormitory, two to a room.”

Perhaps Kirk’s distance and generally melancholic state of mind can be explained by his longing for home, specifically his mother. As I mentioned at the beginning of this piece, Kirk had a very close relationship with his mother. She was the person who introduced him to his lifelong love of literature. The two regularly shared books and letters by mail. Sadly, while Kirk was at Duke, his mother began to experience symptoms of intestinal cancer. Throughout the early 1940s, her health quickly declined before she ultimately succumbed in the early months of 1943.

The usually stoic Kirk was perhaps not broken but certainly disheartened by this dreadful news. He was losing his mother, and there was a chance he would not be there to say goodbye. One can only imagine the cloud this must have cast over his time in Durham. This is shown on full display in a February 3rd, 1941, letter he sent to his mother:

“Dear Mama,

Perhaps when you receive this you will have had your final operation and will no longer have to worry about that. If you recover from its effects as rapidly as you did from those of the first one, you’ll be feeling fine when I come home in March. Are you in the same room in the hospital as you were before? You will have to tell me all about your new roommates. When will you be going home again? Be sure not to move until you feel well enough. I wish I could have your operation for you; it probably would help me lose some of my fat (although I have reduced slightly, of late, I think).”

Kirk loved his mother in a truly admirable way. You can see it in his almost desperate questions to inquire about her health as well as his feeble attempt at the end to lift her spirits with a bit of self-deprecation.

Conclusion

Whether it was his mother’s declining health, the lack of intellectual rigor, or the intrusion of Yankees, it’s quite clear that Kirk did not enjoy his time at Duke. And yet, for all his complaints, Duke may have been the most intellectually consequential year of his young life.

Rather ironically, he treated Duke and the South at large much like the so-called carpetbaggers did in the sense that he swooped down from the North, pillaged its intellectual resources, and carried them off to his little getaway on Piety Hill.

As Birzer wrote in American Conservative, “nothing personal held Kirk in the South.” His roots were elsewhere—perhaps in a hospital bed somewhere in Michigan. Though his friends, Drs. Sydnor and Hubbell, attempted to keep Kirk at Duke to pursue his P.h.D., he was unaware of this until a few years later (contra Birzer’s suggestion that Kirk openly declined the offer). After a tenure in the Army, Kirk would ultimately wind up at St. Andrews University in Scotland, where he wrote a little-known dissertation titled The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot.

Kirk came to Duke looking for a job. In Durham, he discovered a lifelong intellectual vocation.

I think it’s best to end Kirk’s time at Duke and the South more generally with his own recollection:

“Kirk had found in the South a conservative society that had been struck a fearful blow eighty years before and still sometimes seemed dazed by that stroke; but he liked its life far better than the life of Detroit. In the South, then and later, he learned that some of the more oppressive ‘problems’ in life never are solved, unless by Time and Providence. He read deeply about the South ‘befo’ de wah’ and poked into its ashes. In Richmond and Charleston he found communities that had not surrendered unconditionally to the new order of American life.”

Further Reading (in no particular order)

1. Russell Kirk: American Conservative (Birzer)

2. Imaginative Conservatism: The Letters of Russell Kirk (ed. Person Jr.)

3. The Sword of Imagination: Memoirs of a Half-Century of Literary Conflict (Kirk)

4. Russell Kirk: A Critical Biography of a Conservative Mind (Person Jr.)

If my Instagram and X feeds are any indication, we are witnessing levels of Nixon appreciation not seen since, well, Pat and Dick’s honeymoon in the summer of 1940.

Young men are posting cinematic Nixon edits to their stories. Young women are unboxing cutesy, pastel-colored Nixon merchandise for all the world to see. Even our sitting vice president, before jet-setting off on his book tour, made a pilgrimage to the Nixon Library to praise the thirty-seventh president’s “deserved” renaissance. Even the Wall Street Journal has noticed, publishing an editorial last week on Nixon’s unlikely cultural revival.

Everyone seems to be warming up to good old Tricky Dick.

Well, everyone except for that prudish old bag, his and my alma mater.

For nearly ninety years, Duke University has been able to claim Richard Nixon among its law school graduates.

Yet one would hardly know it. Walk across campus and you’ll find little evidence that one of the most consequential presidents in American history ever studied here. There is no Nixon Program in American Ideals and Institutions or Nixon School of International Relations. No lecture series celebrates his contributions to American foreign policy. No archival center preserves his papers. Heck, there is not even a course on Nixon.

Duke scarcely mentions him at all.

In fact, it took me dragging my sister to a shadowy corner of the Duke Law Library just to find a portrait of the man!

Now the reason for all of this is obvious enough. Watergate has long been treated as the final word on Richard Nixon, even by many staunch conservatives. And, moreover, in today’s academic climate, would anyone really expect a university to stick out its neck for a disgraced president?

Of course not.

To many universities, Duke among them, there is no separating Nixon the president from Nixon of Watergate, no acknowledging his extraordinary influence without appearing to excuse his misconduct. Two things seemingly cannot be held true at once. Better, then, to quietly forget that Richard Nixon ever belonged to Duke at all.

The funny thing is, that wasn’t always Duke’s view.

As it turns out, Duke once heavily considered housing Nixon’s presidential library on campus.

The following pages will take you inside that drama, detailing its twists, turns, and the clawing hand of academic bureaucrats that ultimately denied an obvious win for the university.

In truth, this is more than a story of fear, near-sightedness, and buffoonery on the part of the library’s opponents—try as much as I will to highlight the deficiencies in their perspectives. No, it is to an equal degree a tale of raw, outrageous ambition. If not for the personal drive and persistence of Duke’s then president Terry Sanford, there would have been no consideration whatsoever of a Nixon library in Durham.

Enough editorializing from me—how did it all begin?

Sanford Begins Plotting

Any analysis of the Nixon Library Affair must start with the man who so heartily championed it, Terry Sanford.

As his biography’s title suggests, Terry Sanford was a man of outrageous ambition. Born in 1917 to a struggling middle-class family in the small town of Laurinburg, North Carolina, Sanford would, by April 1970, have risen to the highest highs of the state’s political and educational scene. At just over forty years old, Sanford was already a double Tar Heel (AB ‘39; L.L.B. ‘46), a highly successful Democratic campaign manager, a state senator (1953-1955), a nationally-recognized governor (1961-1965), and, as of late, the enterprising young president of Duke University.

His plans for Duke were, as historians Howard E. Covington Jr. and Marion A. Ellis wrote, “Restore stability to the Duke campus and rebuild student and faculty confidence in the administration, repair the deteriorating relations with alumni, and return the school to its North Carolina heritage, with a continuing ambition to raise Duke up as an institution whose name would appear on anyone’s top-ten list of great universities” (my italics).

Sanford, for his part, believed that he was primarily in the business of raising Duke’s reputation. As he later remarked in an interview, “I wasn’t here [at Duke] to fix anything, but I thought I could elevate Duke to national and international status and that was always it from the very beginning…Several people said, ‘Well, he’ll come in here as a great fund-raiser.’ I said, ‘I’m not coming as a fund-raiser. I’m coming as president of the university and as president of the faculty.’”

Ironically, raising money was one of the first things Sanford did upon assuming the presidency of Duke. The rationale for this was, of course, inextricably linked to his mission of raising Duke’s prestige. After all, a boat can only rise if it is itself seaworthy.

And so, in his early years, Sanford appointed a former boarding school fundraiser, Croom Beatty, as an admissions director. Beatty’s charge was simple enough: seek out wealthy students who could fund Sanford’s ambitions for the school. Before one begins asking why Sanford did not seek more promising revenue streams like federal and private research grants, it’s worth remembering that, at this time (the 1970s), Duke subsisted primarily on hefty tuition fees. This was all before the wave of federal grant money, largely tied to Duke’s Medical School and clinical work, that swept into the university in the period after the creation of Duke’s Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Sanford’s strategy, in hiring Beatty and giving him the mission that he did, was, at bottom, elitist, and, moreover, belied his ambitions for the university. Though the man himself was anything but a wine-and-cheese Southern gentlemen—in fact much of his political career was staked on opposing that very class—he recognized the usefulness of such people, or, rather, the utility of their money. Only through increased alumni donations and wealthier students could Duke rival the fruitful endowments of its soon-to-be peers to the Northeast.

Whatever the moral character of Sanford’s fundraising methodology, one thing was clear—it worked. After a meandering few years of restructuring finances, performing aggressive alumni contribution campaigns, and making spurious admissions decisions, Sanford finally got Duke out of its economic rut. By the end of his fifteen-year stint in Durham, Sanford had raised the alumni’s annual giving from $750,000 to nearly $6 million and rocketed the endowment from $80 to $200 million.

With the university’s financial troubles all but solved, Sanford was freed to pursue his real ambition: raising Duke’s international status.

But, as anyone who was forced to read The Great Gatsby in high school can attest, money can only get one so far. To put Duke in the same conversations as the centuries-old institutions in the Ivy League, Sanford needed to make Duke a prestigious place and fast. But how?

The Controversy Begins

After mulling various options for lifting Duke’s prestige, Sanford realized the answer had been staring him in the face all along: the university’s students. Or, more accurately, its former students, the Duke alumni. As Sanford saw it, the Ivy League had always marketed itself through the lives of its graduates. One knows which actors went to NYU and which presidents went to Princeton because it is the people who make those places what they are. Ask someone about a prestigious school, and they’ll conjure up its famous graduates long before they say a word about the rigor of its classes or the quality of its faculty (perhaps this is part of the reason why some of today’s most prestigious schools are the easiest to attain A’s).

All Sanford really needed to do, then, was find a famous alum—someone who was internationally revered and carried with them significant cachet—and name a program or school after them.

And so, on July 28th, the now-sixty-four-year-old Sanford rang the New York City office of former President Richard Nixon. Over the course of their brief call, Sanford laid out his proposal for a Nixon Presidential Library housed in Durham. The building would be located on a stretch of about 30 acres on Morreene Road, near the Law School.

Sanford’s biographers described his state of mind at the time like this: “He believed that within the school’s grasp was an opportunity to become the center of a study of the American presidency that would attract worldwide attention. Sanford believed scholars would come seeking the details and nuances of a failed presidency while others would focus on Nixon’s remarkable achievements in foreign affairs, including his opening of relations with China.”

In other words, Sanford saw a presidential library for the Duke Law alum—whatever his personal moral failings—as the university’s ticket to lasting scholarly intrigue and international acclaim. No amount of bad press could dissuade generations of historians, economists, political scientists, etc. from making the trip to Durham to study the papers of the nation’s disgraced former president. As a certain, current president of the United States once wrote, “Controversy, in short, sells.”

But there was more to Sanford’s Library plan than merely cultivating scholarly interest. He wanted to repair the university’s relationship with Nixon. Back in 1954, when he was just about a year into his first term as Eisenhower’s Vice President, Duke offered Nixon the opportunity to receive an honorary degree and deliver that year’s commencement address. Some time after the faculty sent their invitation, there was another faculty vote on the subject, most likely driven by a vocal minority of professors jaded by the earlier decision. This time around, the naysayers won out. The April 6th, 1954, edition of the New York Times records that the faculty voted 61 to 42 to rescind the honorary degree but still allow Nixon to deliver the commencement speech. A rather insulted Nixon decided that if the university didn’t find him honorable enough to receive a degree then it might as well look elsewhere for a commencement speaker. And so Nixon canceled his speech.

Years later, in 1961, Duke faculty members again voted in favor of Nixon delivering the school’s commencement address. The man from Yorba Linda, fresh off of a devastating presidential defeat to the very avatar for his elitist antipathies, John F. Kennedy, declined. Tragically, this was not the end of Nixon’s woes. In 1969, the Duke Law painting of Nixon (yes, the same one from the intro), was reported missing. Fortunately for Nixon and unfortunately for fans of mischief and heists, the ex-president’s portrait was found, as the day’s papers explain “stuffed beneath loose ceiling tiles in a second-floor classroom.”

Like Pepperidge Farm, Sanford remembered. He wrote in a personal diary he kept in 1970, “I felt that Nixon had been an injustice by Duke in publicly turning him down for an honorary degree. It’s one thing to decide not to give somebody an honorary degree, but to have it so highly publicized is inexcusable.” The Library was thus equal parts academic resource and apology.

Ever-willing to clear his name, Nixon agreed to Sanford’s proposal. After getting everything in place, which is to say, gaining the approval of Nixon’s lawyers, Sanford picked up the phone yet again, this time fishing for the go-ahead from the Chair of the Board of Trustees. As then-Chairman J. Alexander McMahon recalled:

“Terry called me and said, ‘What could you think about have a Nixon library at Duke?’ I said, ‘I think it would be a great idea.’ My heavens, this is a university. He is one of the most significant political individuals of our time, [with] a significant presidency that ended up discredited, but my heavens, think of all the things to learn. I said absolutely, we take any store of scholarly materials.”

McMahon, like Sanford, saw the library as an ostensibly academic enterprise. Like all of the other libraries before it, even for those of controversial presidents like Nixon’s old foe and noted phallophile, LBJ, this library would be primarily archival with a Nixon museum as a bit of a sideshow. The 1955 law creating the federal support for the presidential library network said as much, defining the purpose of these institutions as the “preservation and administration…of papers and other historical materials of any President or former President of the United States.” Sure, there would be a museum and some memorabilia, but the university could always argue that these were simply the price one had to pay for hosting such a trove of primary sources.

Now that he and McMahon were in agreement, Sanford began working on a memo to the full Board of Trustees. On August 8th, 1981, Sanford finished the letter and sent the “confidential” document to the full Board:

“We have been in discussion with President Nixon about the placement of his Library at Duke. It would include all of his papers and tapes (as Representative, Senator, Vice President and President), and memorabilia similar to the LBJ Library at Austin and the Truman Library at Independence…

The proposal is that Duke would contribute the necessary land to the U.S. Government (GSA), subject to reversion if it were ever abandoned as the Nixon Library…

These are the most significant presidential papers, from an academic and research point of view. I think we should go through with this arrangement, and I consider the Nixon decision to be a real coup for Duke….”

Across his three-page memo, Sanford made it clear that the Library would be an archival site administered and funded by the federal government. He also made clear that Duke would not be obligated to raise any funds for the Library, though it “would provide technical advice on fund raising.” Most importantly, however, Sanford stressed the urgency of the whole thing. “Time is of the essence. They [Nixon’s team] had expected to announce on August 11 that the library would be placed at the University of Southern California. They reversed this decision after my conference with President Nixon on July 28,” he typed. Though on vacation at the time, Sanford had already secured the approval of two board members, Brown and McMahon, and had laid the groundwork for gaining a thumbs up from the faculty, scheduling a meeting with the Academic Council the following Monday.

Yet, as Nixon learned during the commencement scandal in 1954, Duke faculty are not always the most agreeable of people. Sanford certainly anticipated some pushback from the faculty, including in the August 8th memo, “the faculty reaction will be mixed, but I expect Dean Goodwin will overcome much of the negative attitudes. (“We are glorifying Nixon, Duke’s reputation will be sullied, etc.”).

The University Community Responds

To help ease some of these tensions with Duke faculty, Sanford called the acting chairman of Duke’s History department and former head of the Academic Council, Dr. Richard L. Watson. Unbeknownst to Sanford, Watson was one of the faculty members who, in 1954, voted to rescind Nixon’s honorary degree. Their phone call, which took place on August 8th shortly after Sanford sent the memo to the Board, was far more disagreeable than his previous two to Nixon and McMahon.

Like most academics, Watson had no time for the very real and obvious benefits of a presidential library (e.g., Rich archival material, prestige, event potential, etc.). Instead, Watson spent his time languishing over the prospect of Duke being associated with that wretched Nixon.

In a letter to Sanford around this time, Watson said, “As historians we would welcome the acquisition of collections of papers by Perkins Library whether they be those of poor or rich, of famous or infamous, of Woodrow Wilson or Richard Nixon, of Adolf Hitler or Winston Churchill, but we would draw the line at having a building named for some of these persons on this campus.” This line of reasoning is of course nothing new to modern readers. We all heard similar arguments throughout the 2010s and early 2020s as Americans grappled with the, let’s say, checkered legacy of some figures in our national pantheon, men like Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Robert E. Lee, and Andrew Jackson.

The principal historical and ethical difficulty with Watson’s argument—and what distinguishes it from modern cancel culture and associated renaming efforts—is that he made these claims from the campus of a slave owner. To be sure, the Dukes did not own as many slaves as other prominent North Carolinian families like the Camerons, but the head of the Duke family, Washington Duke, owned at least two people—a young woman, really a girl, named Caroline and an older man given the name “Jim.” If Watson wanted to reject Sanford’s proposal on the grounds that honoring Nixon crosses a line, then by his own logic he must have also advocated for renaming the university itself. Not only does Duke bear the name of its forebear, Washington Duke, it actively venerates him with a bronze, seated statue at the entrance to the school’s East Campus and a literal sarcophagus in the Duke Chapel. And, for what it’s worth, the History building itself, perhaps the location from which Watson penned his letter, was named for Julian Carr (since re-named), a nineteenth century tobacco baron who bankrolled North Carolina’s 1898 White Supremacy campaign.

While Watson undoubtedly believed in his heart of hearts that enslavement and the global proliferation of a carcinogenic, highly addictive substance were more reprehensible than Nixon’s conduct as president, it’s difficult to see, if he is not simply a spiteful academic, why he so vehemently opposed one and not the other. Sure, it would be a far more laborious task to move the university away from the Duke family name than to block a single new library, but if he was truly applying a consistent principle rather than a personal grudge, that difficulty should have counted for nothing. For a man willing to reject the Nixon library at such cost to the university—forfeiting its abundant archival material and near-guaranteed public interest for years to come—it is hard to see why he shouldn’t have demanded the same sacrifice of the university’s own name.

Well, as Sanford came to learn throughout August 1981, Watson and his colleagues were just that, spiteful. Their personal disdain for Nixon, however, was not always obvious. Most of the faculty opposition came in the form of memos stressing the bureaucratic strangeness of the proposal process. One letter to the Dean of the Graduate School, signed by various professors in the History department on August 21st, embodies this dynamic well. There, the professors speculated that Sanford had scheduled the plan for summertime specifically so the faculty could be caught off guard and left unable to organize a voting opposition. The History faculty were, in effect, accusing Sanford and other upper-level administrators of secretly engineering the entire process to circumvent faculty oversight. The faculty were, of course, correct in their estimation—but who could blame Sanford and his allies for doing this?

Sanford had little reason to believe the faculty were driven by a desire to preserve bureaucratic procedure. Time and again, they demonstrated a personal opposition to Nixon and his political career. One historian even told Sanford this directly to his face, “Well, I’ll be damned if I want to go to those scholarly meetings around the country and have people making fun of me for being at Nixon’s university. I didn’t want to put up with the gaff.” In a later conversation with our old friend, Professor Watson, Sanford recalled him saying, “As a historian I suppose I should be for this [the Library], but I can’t stand that son of a bitch.” Sanford continued, “He [Watson] was saying, ‘My professional standards are in conflict with my personal emotions.’”

Opposed as they were and ever-willing to unionize, Duke faculty formed the Committee Against the Nixon-Duke Library (CANDL) with at least fourteen professors and several students listed on the initial promotional material. Other students also joined the CANDL and began staging protests against the Library, although their opposition was not as formidable as the faculty given that the term was only just beginning and they really had no voting powers. Regardless, in the following months, open forums were held on the campus where administrators, students, faculty, alumni, and Durhamites debated the merits of the proposal.

Faculty also organized, as they so often do during moments of controversy, a “Teach-In” on September 14th. There, they repeated many of the same talking points—that Sanford had excluded them from the process and that the whole plan was being rammed through by an undemocratic administration.

Perhaps the most formidable argument against the Library came from Duke Political Science Professor James David Barber. On September 8th, the Duke Chronicle published an editorial by Barber titled “Duke Not Place for Nixon Library.” There, the nationally renowned researcher of presidential character argued that the Library would simply become an altar to Nixon. Describing presidential libraries on other campuses, Barber called them “showplaces where modern audiovisual technology exhibits a president in his most favorable light, with film and tape and photomontage. No genuine objectivity is allowed to intrude upon the atmosphere of enthusiastic boosterism.”

Doubling down, Barber contended in the same essay, “We have a profound responsibility to our students, not to mislead them, not to sponsor or endorse or condone the falsification of history, but to insist on teaching the truth. That is a struggle professors have been waging for centuries, staving off those who would exploit us for their own purposes.” Perhaps it was lost on Barber that it would be men like him and his colleagues at Duke who write the histories of Nixon, not Joe Public who pays a visit to the Library.

While much of the intelligentsia both in and outside of Duke criticized the Library, calling it a “public relations albatross,” several others took a more ambivalent or even positive tone to the proposal. Putting on his best Reddit moderator, fedora-tipping performance, History professor Sydney Nathans asked, “It is an archival ‘Treasure of Sierra Madre.’ We will possess it, but will it possess us?” English professor, Dr. Edwin H. Cady, for his part, essentially agreed with Sanford’s idea of the Library as a timeless archive, saying:

“What’s mistaken, as I see it, about wishing to spurn a documentary treasure of inestimable value is that the opposers operate in too narrow a time frame. They are far too now-minded. A great university lives in a time frame wholly other from the brief spans of the people who build at it through centuries as others erect cathedrals. If we get the Nixon Papers, he and we will be matters of history very shortly. The documents will be there for history, for our successors, very likely for centuries. To professors who do not grasp what access to a great documentary center means to a university, I am afraid it is not possible to explain.”

In the midst of the controversy, Professor Reynolds Price told a national outlet, “If you tore down every building in Europe that bears the name of a morally reprehensible person, it would be a bare scene.” Invoking Sanford’s own regret at Nixon’s past treatment by the university, Price ended with, “Nixon was one of ours. There’s a certain amount of owning up involved.” Price was among a group of seventy-four faculty members, along with Sanford’s good friend and recently deceased pioneer of Duke’s School of Public Policy, Joel Fleishman, who signed a statement of support for the library.

As the controversy heated up, national and local outlets began to take interest, largely as a response to Sanford’s decision to include a copy of Cady’s letter in his August 18th letter to over 65,000 Duke alumni. The New York Times ran a story, People Magazine flew a reporter down to Durham to interview Sanford, essayists in the Washington Post penned articles in support of the Library, and the Duke Chronicle seemed to publish a new letter of support or opposition every day.

The Procedural Battle

Fiery though the discourse was, Sanford still had a job to do. He needed to gain the approval of the faculty and the Board of Trustees. Following Sanford’s August 8th memo to the Board and overtures to the faculty, along with the subsequent uproar this caused on campus, the Academic Council rescheduled their September 17th meeting to the 3rd.

Before the meeting on the 3rd, there was another, more informal gathering of faculty on the Monday of that week. The Duke Chronicle reported that the response of the over 400 faculty members at the two-and-a-half-hour meeting was “overwhelmingly negative.” Many of the professors present, like psychologist Irving E. Alexander, argued that the Library would be a museum first and archive second, that the “glorification of a dishonored president whose tenure in office exemplified the antithesis of our central values would be a serious mistake.” Though largely unified, the faculty felt powerless in their opposition. One of the 29 speakers that evening, History professor William Chafe, said precisely this: “Today’s discussion bears little similarity to reality. I still have every reason to believe the Trustees will vote for the library. The only chance we have is to urge the Academic Council to respond as vociferously and vehemently as possible so no one misunderstands how we feel.”

And, at least in this respect, Professor Chafe and his colleagues were correct. The faculty, like the students, did not really have any “hard power” to oppose the Library. They could scream all they wanted, but ultimately the decision was the Board’s.

On September 3rd, the Academic Council again met, but this time they had a more concrete agenda. They planned to vote on a referendum that proposed to “urge the Board of Trustees to cut off negotiations” for the Library. Like the previous day’s meeting, arguments were heard from both sides, with Sanford himself making an appearance. As many expected, the tenor of the faculty throughout the meeting was one of opposition. By the evening, the faculty had voted 35-34 to “not proceed with proposals to build a Nixon library and Archive on or adjacent to the Duke campus.” Yet, as mentioned earlier, this was only a symbolic vote. The real test for the Library would come the next day, Friday, September 4th.

The hot seat now shifted from Sanford to McMahon, the Chairman of the Board and one of the first advocates for the Library. McMahon addressed the board members in his typical, managerial style, “This is the most controversial if not the most important decision that the executive committee and the board have been called on to make.”

Bucking the Academic Council, the Board voted 9-2 to “donate to the U.S. government an undetermined site for Richard Nixon’s presidential library and continue negotiations for the building.” As part of their vote, the Board placed certain limitations on the Library, stating that it must “emphasize the archival and scholarly function and purpose of the facility and shall provide strict limitations on the space to be set aside for museum purposes.” In other words, the Board agreed with Sanford and his allies among the faculty who believed that the university could maintain the Library without being forced into the role of rewriting the narrative of Nixon. Professor Anne Scott, chair of the History department, unsurprisingly disagreed with this perspective. Shortly before the vote she cautioned the trustees that approving the Library would “inextricably involve [Duke] with rehabilitating the career of Nixon.”

After the Board’s vote, Sanford’s life became a bit more enjoyable. While there were still protests and glares from the faculty who passed him in the halls of Duke’s Gothic campus, his main hurdle had been surmounted. It seemed as though the Library would survive after all.

Unfortunately for Sanford, the Board’s September 4th vote only served to continue the negotiations and guaranteed little else. This meant the now-old man from Laurinburg had to find a compromise. Hence, Sanford proposed that Nixon’s Library be constructed at Durham’s Research Triangle Park as a multi-campus effort between Duke, UNC-Chapel Hill, and NC State University. The site was a natural fit, with more than enough space for a presidential library along with a considerable research pedigree of its own, owed in no small part to the National Humanities Center which had been located at RTP since 1978.

Sanford ran his new idea by Nixon, who, up to this point in the negotiations, had been characteristically quiet on the controversy. The ex-president liked the idea of the multi-campus initiative, telling Sanford, “My brother received a degree from State College.” Nixon’s only hesitation was that Sanford be sure that this change of plans “does not look like the crazies ran us off.”

Contra the hopes of Sanford and any Nixon-loving Blue Devils, from this point onward, the Library plan began to crumble. Only a few days after the initial meetings with leaders of the UNC System, faculty in Raleigh and Chapel Hill joined with their peers at Duke in protest of the proposal. Following a few more weeks of protest and haranguing of Sanford, the plan was on life support, and, after a unanimous October vote of the Academic Council that entirely rejected the museum component and drastically downsized the facility, the Duke-Nixon Library was dead.

A disgruntled Terry Sanford later remarked that “the well had been poisoned and Mr. Nixon then became the reluctant one.”

And so goes the story of Terry Sanford’s doomed attempt to bring the Nixon Presidential Library to Duke. After years of debate over file access, a Nixon Library finally opened in his hometown of Yorba Linda, on July 19th, 1990.

Concluding Thoughts

If you’ve made it all the way to the end of our story, first off, thank you for reading! These pieces take a considerable amount of time and research to pull off, so any support, readership included, is much appreciated.

That said, there are still some loose ends that need tying up.

1. Why did Sanford choose Nixon and not some other famous alum to raise the university’s national profile?

Well, as Sanford came to learn during his search for famous alumni, Nixon was really all Duke had to offer the world in terms of A-list names. This is part of the reason why Sanford needed to improve Duke’s status in the first place—it lacked a promising pool of famous alums. This is not to say that Duke boasted no recognizable names, but, unless the school wanted to name a program for a young Judy Woodruff, the gruff, melancholic ex-president would have to do.

2. Why did Sanford care so much about rehabilitating Nixon’s legacy?

Keen readers will have noticed that Sanford envisioned the Library as both an academic venture and a means for reconciling Nixon to Duke. But why?

It seems to me that Sanford saw something of himself in Nixon. Both men were political animals who had clawed their way up from modest, unglamorous beginnings—Sanford from a struggling middle-class family in Laurinburg, Nixon from a Yorba Linda lemon grove—through sheer will and ambition. Both also had learned, the hard way, how easily a public reputation can be seized by others and rewritten into something smaller and uglier than the man himself. Nixon’s undoing was Watergate. Sanford’s own legacy has never fully escaped the shadow of his cautious, at times equivocating, record on civil rights as governor. In fact, one can still hear criticisms of Sanford’s tenure as governor today walking through the corridors of Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy.

Perhaps, then, Sanford recognized in Nixon’s plight a version of his own gnawing fear: that history is very often left to people who were never in the room. A president—or a university president—does not get to choose who tells his story after he’s gone. Sanford, ever the strategist, seems to have understood this earlier and more clearly than most politicians. In fighting for Nixon’s library, he may well have been fighting, in some small way, for the principle that a man’s legacy should not be left entirely to his enemies.

3. What made this Duke’s biggest mistake?

This is the big question, isn’t it?

The most obvious reason is that a Nixon Library would be a sure-fire academic success.

Look at what similar institutions have built around similarly contested men: Stanford’s Hoover Institution, built in part around the papers of a president many blamed for the Depression, is now one of the most influential policy think tanks in the country. Princeton’s Madison Program has spent decades trading on the name of a slaveholding founding father to attract scholars, funding, and attention from across the political spectrum. Had Duke followed through with Sanford’s ambitions, it isn’t hard to imagine a Nixon Institute doing the same: pulling in generations of Americanists, foreign policy scholars, and historians of the presidency, all making the pilgrimage to Durham instead of Yorba Linda. That said, these two institutions are both markedly conservative, which perhaps explains Duke’s continued reticence to establish any program named for Nixon.

Whatever the reasons for Duke’s hesitancy, what’s clear is the university has no real legacy in American studies. It’s not merely that the university lacks courses in American history and political philosophy—something that I’ve written about elsewhere. No, it’s that intellectuals struggle to tell you anything about Duke’s Americanist reputation. This is something I encountered time and again as an undergraduate at Duke. My professors always talked about award-winning faculty from their own undergraduate days but had nothing to say about the current crop. There was no: “Go check out so-and-so’s work down the hall, she’s great!”

Sure, Duke has the technocratic, neo-conservative American Grand Strategy (AGS) program that primarily specializes in foreign policy, but nothing that rivals the Hoover or Madison programs in their renown or approach to questions of domestic policy, political philosophy, and history.

As simple as it sounds, what Duke lacks is a name. If the AGS administrators simply renamed the program for Nixon and established a partnership with the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, it would instantly become a home base of sorts for world-renowned faculty across the humanities. This problem, of course, would have been entirely avoided had Duke gone along with Sanford’s proposal in the first place.

On a separate, though related note, killing the Library was also a mistake because its opponents among the faculty argued from a bad premise. It’s worth returning to the words of English professor Edwin Cady here:

“They are far too now-minded. A great university lives in a time frame wholly other from the brief spans of the people who build at it through centuries as others erect cathedrals. If we get the Nixon Papers, he and we will be matters of history very shortly. The documents will be there for history, for our successors, very likely for centuries.”

Cady’s point is really one about institutional humility. Watson and his colleagues were so consumed by how the Library would look in September 1981—so certain that their present-day discomfort was the correct and final verdict on Nixon—that they never seriously reckoned with how it might look in 2081, or in 2026, for that matter, with a vice president making pilgrimages to Yorba Linda and twenty-somethings posting cinematic Nixon edits to their Instagram stories. A university is supposed to be the one institution built to outlast the news cycle, to hold a man’s record open for study long after the public has made up its mind about him.

In 1981, Duke’s faculty forgot that. And they forgot, too, that it would be the professors themselves, not the proposed museum, that would write the histories of Nixon.

For more on the Nixon Library Controversy, check out these sources:

1. https://exhibits.library.duke.edu/exhibits/show/nixon-duke-library-controversy/editors-note

2. https://www.nixonfoundation.org/2011/04/duke-missed-a-prize-in-1981/

3. https://time.com/archive/6858750/education-those-bedeviled-blue-devils/

4. https://www.csmonitor.com/1981/0904/090442.html

5. https://www.nytimes.com/1981/08/27/us/duke-u-dispute-over-nixon-library-growing.html

6. Chapter 16, “Outrageous Ambitions,” in Terry Sanford: Politics, Progress, and Outrageous Ambitions (Covington Jr. and Ellis).

Seeing that most of the gathered executives already support President Reagan’s proposals, few of the reporters present expect anything particularly newsworthy from this meeting. Yet, some time into the conversation, they would get just that.

Amidst friendly discussions over price supports and protections for farmland, Agriculture Secretary John Block—himself a bit undecided on this legislation—slips out of the room.

A minute or so later, true to his name, Secretary Block returns to the room, but this time he’s holding a block.

Well, not just any old block, of course, but a massive, five-pound block of moldy cheese.

Speaking to the press inside, Secretary Block explains this curious gesture: “We’ve got 60 million of these that the government owns. It’s moldy, it’s deteriorating…we can’t find a market for it, we can’t sell it, and we’re looking to try to give some of it away. It is illustrative of what we are up against as we accumulate these dairy products.”

[Note: This is, strangely enough, not the first time a giant block of cheese has been wielded in the White House for political purposes.] We can thank “Old Hickory” for that one. More here]

Unfortunately for the secretary, the American people and the ever-agreeable American press did not take his message as intended. They heard “half a billion pounds of cheese in government storage” and began asking uncomfortable questions and running even more uncomfortable stories. The most common line of attack at this time went as follows: “Who is President Reagan to be hoarding all of this cheese when he had just run a campaign in 1980 on cutting government spending and wasteful programs like Food Stamps? Have you no heart?”

Critical though they were, these sorts of arguments resonated within the Reagan White House. In a public address, the Old Gipper announced his decision to release 30 million pounds of cheese from the government’s warehouses. Part of what he called the Temporary Emergency Food Assistance Program, Reagan hoped these handouts to the poor and elderly would kill two birds with one stone by getting the press off his back and reducing a source of waste.

Generally considered a successful, albeit outlandish, act of executive decisiveness, this provision of so-called “government cheese” would go on to occupy a place in the national consciousness. Whether it was the direct consumption of the over 300 million pounds of cheese distributed over the life of the program, the innumerable pop culture references, or the sheer absurdity of the whole situation, what’s clear is that Americans remember government cheese.

Yet, few know how the government got into the cheese business in the first place. Among the small portion who could tell you something about the Carter administration’s dairy policies or even FDR’s Commodity Credit Corporation, no one seems to remember the legislation that pre-dated and, in many ways, prefigured this whole government cheese debacle: North Carolina’s subtreasury plan, a Populist-era proposal to have the federal government store and lend against farmers’ surplus crops.

The goal of this essay is twofold. First, I hope to introduce a new generation to this fascinating, albeit failed piece of legislation—highlighting its promises and vicissitudes. Relatedly, this piece should, if done correctly, demonstrate how much of our present culture (or at least a culture in living memory) is a direct byproduct (ba dum ching) of past decisions made by our leaders in government.

Don’t hear what I am not saying. The sources of a given culture—or any single cultural development—are incalculable, and anyone who points to a single cause and says “Aha! I found the culprit” is simply overstating their claim. My supposition is nothing more than this: the things we often believe to be organic developments of our present minds are born of much deeper sociocultural contexts.

Applied to today’s story, this argument would submit that the leaders in the Reagan and Carter administrations, like their predecessors under FDR, did not devise their policies concerning the nation’s dairy industry from some a priori deduction. Rather, they drew—whether they knew it or not—on a set of ideas about government, surplus, and relief that had been circulating in the American political psyche since the Populists first proposed the subtreasury plan a century before.

Origins of the Plan

Like just about everything we associate with “modern America,” the origins of government cheese trace back to the close of the Civil War. Yet, unlike most intellectual histories of modern America, our story begins in the shriveled fields and tattered granaries of, you guessed it, postbellum North Carolina.

Before the opening of hostilities, the state’s farmers and enslaved laborers produced 145,000 bales of cotton, 33,000,000 pounds of tobacco, 30,500,000 bushels of corn, 4,700,000 bushels of wheat, and 4,700,000 bushels of wheat in 1860. A decade later, in 1870, these numbers had either stagnated or declined significantly, with the state now producing 145,000 bales of cotton, 11,000,000 pounds of tobacco, 18,450,000 bushels of corn, 2,860,000 bushels of wheat, and 3,220,000 bushels of oats. Four years of artillery fire, worker shortages, Confederate food requisitions, nitrogen shortages, harsh tilling by inexperienced hands, and general inattentiveness had, to the say least, set the state’s agricultural industry back.

Yet, all was not lost. Many of the output declines shown in the 1870 data were ultimately wiped out within a decade or two. In fact, the only sector of the state’s agricultural industry that did not experience a rebound in production at or above 1860 levels was wheat. However, this would not have unduly concerned the state’s farmers, seeing that cotton and tobacco were the state’s real money makers even during the Reconstruction period.

Contra the arguments of men like Fitzhugh (see below), these upticks in North Carolina’s agricultural output can be directly ascribed to the onset of free labor in the post-war period. The abolition of slavery made the state’s many large plantations simply untenable investments for North Carolina’s landed aristocracy. These families—many of which had held their lands since colonial times and had used the wealth derived from them to sustain familial domination of their locales—were forced to sell. This, of course, meant that many more North Carolinians now had access to plots of land upon which to farm. The data reflects this, showing the number and average size of farms going from 72,203 and 316 acres in 1860 to 157,609 and 142 acres twenty years later.

“But far the worst feature of modern civilization, which is the civilization of free society, remains to be exposed. Whilst labor-saving processes have probably lessened by one half, in the last century, the amount of work needed for comfortable support the free laborer is compelled by capital and competition to work more than he ever did before, and is less comfortable. The organization of society cheats him of his earnings, and those earnings go to swell the vulgar pomp and pageantry of the ignorant millionaires, who are the only great of the present day.” George Fitzhugh, Sociology for the South (1854).

Tenant farming exploded onto North Carolina’s agricultural scene during this period. As you may recall from your high school history courses, this system involved a landowner, who provided land, and a tenant who worked said land while taking tools, seed, and credit from the landowner. At harvest, the tenant farmer would typically receive about half of the crop while giving the rest to the landowner. Though there were variations in this basic arrangement, with some tenant farmers paying rent instead of shares of their crop (sharecropping), this was the state of affairs for about a third of the state’s farmers in the nineteenth century. In fact, so prominent was this economic relationship that, according to one historian, “the tenant farmer seemed to outside observers to represent the typical North Carolinian.”

Despite the relative freedom of tenant farming, many farmers still struggled to make ends meet. This system effectively decentralized North Carolina’s agricultural industry and turned hundreds of thousands of former laborers, who had once been responsible only for tilling the fields, into agricultural entrepreneurs. If it is not already obvious, someone does not enter into a tenant-farming agreement unless they are struggling economically. Yet this very system was often incredibly costly for impoverished farmers, who were now forced to bear expenses that had once been the responsibility of plantation owners, including the purchase of fertilizer, state-of-the-art equipment, and livestock. The tenant system also tended to deplete the soil through overfarming and monocropping, reducing crop yields and forcing farmers to move from one farm to another in the hopes of improving their lot—literally. This, of course, only prolonged their squalid conditions, as constant movement prevented farmers from learning how to improve the land through longer-term investments in drainage, fencing, and other improvements. Couple this with other factors such as farmers being forced to buy most of their possessions on credit at exorbitant interest rates from local merchants, and one can begin to understand why contemporary newspapers characterized the state’s agriculture industry as “languishing.”

Well then, this all sounds mighty interesting, but what does any of it have to do with the subject of today’s story, government cheese?

The Farmers Respond

Like the industry representatives we began our story with, these poor nineteenth-century North Carolinian farmers began to organize. Their main gripes were, rather sensibly, their poor working conditions (even relative to mill and factory workers), lack of stable income, and the exploitative credit practices that turned potentially productive farmers into debt slaves.

The Moses figure for these farmers was Leonidas L. Polk (1837-92), a native of Anson County. While much has been written about Polk and his later escapades as the presumptive presidential nominee for the Populist Party in the late nineteenth century, his importance here is mainly limited to his early organizing work. Beginning as the state’s first agriculture commissioner in 1877, Polk would go on to start a respected publication in 1886, the Progressive Farmer. As its byline proudly read out, this paper was ostensibly founded on the belief that “the industrial and educational interests of our people [are] paramount to all other considerations of state policy.” However, after about a year of consistent publication on practical topics like “Tobacco, How to Manage It,” Polk shifted the paper, or perhaps it’s more accurate to say rural North Carolinians demanded, a heightened focus on the strife of the poor farmer.

Within about a year of publication, the Progressive Farmer was regularly promoting meetings of local farmers’ clubs alongside statements from more national advocacy organizations. For example, the December 8th, 1887, issue includes a subsection on North Carolinian “Alliances and Clubs” like the Farmers’ Alliance and Oak Ridge Alliance next to a more sweeping column on the “Demands of the National Farmers’ Alliance Upon Congress.”

Though there were many organizations, national and local, that advocated on behalf of the laboring poor, it was really the NC-based Farmers’ Alliance that brought these issues into the national consciousness. The group was first organized by Leonidas Polk in 1887. In its early days, the Alliance was a furtive, all-white group that allowed for the membership of male and female farmers, along with just about everyone involved in some kind of craft or industry save for those dastardly lawyers and merchants who were deemed untrustworthy due to their history of predatory lending and other spurious practices.

Now, it’s worth noting that the Alliance was, like most populist organizations even in American politics today, composed of more well-to-do farmers than one may expect. The greater share of the group were landowners, not tenants or laborers. Moreover, the highest-ranking members of the organization, the two presidents of the Farmers’ Alliance from the years 1887-1891, were wealthy planters like Sydenham Alexander and Elias Carr.

Whatever was lost in the purity of the group’s populism by the inclusion of these affluent landowners was more than made up by their social network and connections to the state’s political elite. Within five years of the Farmers’ Alliance’s launch, the organization had successfully lobbied for the creation of what is today NC State University, grown its membership to well over 100,000, and elected several of its members to state and national offices (by 1888, the speaker of the state house, Augustus Leazar, and eight of nine federal congressmen were registered Alliance members). In short, the once forgotten voice of the North Carolinian farmer had, by the last decade of the nineteenth century, become the defining political movement of the era.

Yet rising political tides do not necessarily lift all boats. Even with its exploding membership and steadily increasing control of the General Assembly, the Farmers’ Alliance and its affiliated organizations still struggled to meaningfully improve the condition of North Carolina’s farmers. Perhaps the starkest example of this came in 1889, when the Alliance failed to pass a railroad reform commission through the General Assembly. The proposed commission emerged from a widespread grievance. Across the state, lower-class citizens complained to their elected leaders about the high cost of rail travel and the open secret of railroads granting rebates to wealthy industrialists. Yet despite the Alliance’s growing political power, reforms such as the railroad commission still failed.

This failure was both a consequence of the sheer depth and brokenness of the tenant-farming system and, as Alliance members put it, the “maneuvering of the old political leaders.” These were the sly, older politicians tied at the hip to North Carolina’s railroad and manufacturing interests who, by virtue of their high status, were sometimes labeled “Bourbons”—an invective seemingly intended to evoke the near-regicidal sympathies of the Revolution. Thus, if the Alliance wanted to succeed, it would need to remove these Bourbons from elected office.

The Alliance got their chance at the next election. Following a heated campaign season, several Alliance members successfully unseated enough Bourbon senators to gain the requisite votes for pushing the railroad commission through the General Assembly. All seemed to be going well for the Alliance. And, in truth, it was. By the end of 1891, the state had approved a three-member commission empowered to eliminate rebates and, in its first year, approved a 40 percent rate reduction.

These railroad reforms, though remarkable, were but a mere rehearsal for the Alliance’s actual ambition: fundamentally improving the condition of the farmer. Even with a recovering agricultural industry and an ascendant populist movement, North Carolina’s farmers still struggled to earn a living. While the group’s leadership, figures like Leonidas Polk, found success in banquet halls in Raleigh and Washington, the laborers who made up the bulk of the organization’s membership still spent their days hopping from plot to plot. These men and women needed something more than symbolic political victories. They needed material change.

The Subtreasury Plan

Enter Harry Skinner. Without getting too bogged down in the minutiae of his life, Skinner was, in the early 1890s, a well-connected Populist politician and Greenville-based attorney. Like many men of his day, Skinner maintained connections with the Populists and the Farmers’ Alliance. Through these associations, Skinner steadily reached certain conclusions about the problems in the state’s agricultural production. To Skinner, the destitution of North Carolina’s tenant farmers was almost entirely a product of government inaction. After all, it was the South that produced 75% of the world’s cotton. Yet, these farmers received no protection from the federal government—unlike the cotton manufacturers who had, in 1889, been shielded by a series of tariffs. Cotton producers in North Carolina were thus completely at the mercy of international markets, like the Liverpool Cotton Exchange, which had a real knack for low-balling Southern producers. The problem before Skinner and the other friends of the South’s cotton industry was thus: How can we sustainably allow cotton producers to sell their product at fair market value?

After discussing with colleagues and meditating on this issue for some time, Skinner picked up his pen. Throughout 1888 and 1889, Skinner wrote a series of articles in which he proposed a solution to the problem of unfair trade. His most influential essay, titled “Views of a Leading North Carolina Democrat,” was published on November 30, 1889, in Frank Leslie’s Newspaper. There, he proposed, in considerable detail, his plan for revitalizing the South’s cotton industry.

To Skinner, the answer was simply that the government needed to extend the same helping hand to producers that it did to manufacturers. As he wrote for Leslie’s, the U.S. Government should “throw around cotton culture the same arm of protective care that it gives to the manufacturer, and thus assist the cotton planter in making the European manufacturer pay a reasonable price for his product.” But how would this protective arm be thrown? Skinner proposed that if European merchants would not pay fair market value for their cotton, the U.S. government would buy the cotton at that price (about 13 cents a pound) using treasury surpluses and store it in federal storehouses to be constructed throughout the South. The farmer could then deposit his crop in the warehouse until it could be sold at its graded value, while paying a fee of 1 cent per pound and receiving a loan of paper money in the meantime, with these deposits as collateral. It ought to be noted, however, that such a system as Skinner’s could only work with non-perishable goods like cotton, which could sit for long months in these storehouses.

The thrust of the idea was that both the farmer and the government would benefit from such a scheme. The farmer, of course, would be (finally!) fairly compensated for his production and the government’s treasury would benefit from the per-pound fee.

Skinner’s idea became the leading issue for the Farmers’ Alliance in the year 1890. Farmers across the country could not get enough of what came to be known as the “Subtreasury Plan,” and who could blame them? They would finally be guaranteed fair compensation for their hours spent in the field. Their ostensible representatives, men like Leonidas Polk, also supported the Subtreasury Plan, evidenced by Polk himself reading Skinner’s articles at meetings of the Farmers’ Alliance across the country.

Yet, like the railroad commission of 1889, the Subtreasury Plan was doomed to fail. To succeed, it required the support of Democratic Senator Zebulon B. Vance. Though he initially agreed to introduce it in the U.S. Senate, Senator Vance ultimately became a strong opponent of the measure. The senator’s argument was simply that Congress did not have constitutional authority to lend money directly to citizens. This argument was strongly rebuked by Polk in his Progressive Farmer and Populists throughout the South. As one citizen of Gates County wrote in September 1890, “Now we, the people, need something like the Sub-Treasury bill to help the farmer and the working class, and because Senator Vance thinks it too big to crowd into the Constitution of the United States, shall we stop there?”

Despite being endorsed by politicians across the state and becoming a defining political issue in the Southern consciousness, the Subtreasury Plan would ultimately falter toward the end of 1890 as Democrats refused to break with Senator Vance.

Though ultimately unsuccessful in bringing about more equitable conditions for North Carolina’s farmers, the Subtreasury Plan did succeed in one respect. It presented future American policymakers with a template. As historian William S. Powell wrote, “Neither of [Skinner’s] ideas was acceptable, but strategies very much like both of them became national policy under President Franklin D. Roosevelt half a century later.” Indeed, Skinner’s proposal was a first-of-its-kind plan that envisioned government warehouses stocked with privately produced goods, federal loans backed by those goods, and public officials stepping in when markets failed to provide producers with what they believed was a fair price. In truth, the warehouses themselves were never built, but the underlying logic would prove remarkably durable.

Over the next half-century, this logic behind Skinner’s proposal steadily migrated from relatively obscure Populist circles into the mainstream of national American public policy. The fundamental problem remained the same: farmers were often forced to sell their crops immediately, even when doing so meant accepting ruinously low prices. What changed was the federal government’s willingness—and eventually its perceived responsibility—to intervene directly in the market.

The first major step came during the agricultural crisis brought on by the Great Depression. As collapsing demand and technological advances produced enormous surpluses, the prices of major commodities fell to levels that threatened the survival of American farmers. Through the New Deal, FDR’s administration responded by transforming the federal government from a passive observer of agricultural markets into an active participant in them. Through the Commodity Credit Corporation, the government could provide loans to farmers, allowing them to use their crops as collateral and avoid selling immediately when prices were low. If prices later recovered, the farmer could repay the loan and reclaim the crop. If they did not, the government could take possession of the commodity.

This arrangement bore a striking resemblance to Skinner’s Subtreasury Plan, even if the institutional and political circumstances were entirely different. Both systems sought to solve the same problem by allowing farmers to wait. The crucial difference here was, of course, scale. Skinner had imagined a network of federal warehouses that would give individual farmers greater leverage over cotton merchants. The New Deal created a permanent national apparatus capable of supporting prices across entire agricultural industries, albeit one specifically designed for periods of emergency.

By the late twentieth century, this logic of government intervention in agricultural markets had produced a distinctly American twist. The Carter administration had substantially increased federal support for dairy prices, guaranteeing farmers a higher price for milk and dairy products than the market alone might have provided. The policy was intended to protect dairy farmers from volatile prices and declining incomes. But higher guaranteed prices also encouraged continued production, even as American consumers could not absorb everything that American dairies produced. The federal government thus became the buyer of last resort, purchasing enormous quantities of surplus dairy products and storing them in government warehouses.

When the Reagan administration came to town in 1981, it inherited both the policy and its consequences. The new administration was committed to reducing government spending and scaling back what it viewed as wasteful federal intervention. Yet dismantling the dairy support system could not eliminate the existing surplus. The government still owned hundreds of millions of pounds of cheese, much of it deteriorating in storage. Reagan’s solution was, in part, to distribute the surplus to low-income Americans through the Temporary Emergency Food Assistance Program. The result was one of the strangest episodes in the history of American agricultural policy: a conservative administration seeking to reduce government waste by distributing the government’s enormous stockpile of cheese.

In Sum

Ultimately, the road from Skinner’s proposed cotton warehouses to Reagan’s government cheese was not a direct line. But it was unmistakably a road that began with Skinner’s Subtreasury Plan and the Populist movement of nineteenth-century North Carolina. A farmer produces a commodity. The market offers too little. The government intervenes to prevent a collapse in prices. That intervention encourages production—or at least prevents production from falling far enough to eliminate the surplus. The government then removes the excess supply of the commodity from the market. And eventually, someone has to decide what to do with what has been stored.

This, perhaps, is the most enduring lesson of the story. Political ideas rarely disappear simply because legislation fails. More often, they linger—circulating through newspapers, campaign speeches, legislative proposals, and bureaucratic institutions—until they reappear decades later in forms their original architects could scarcely have imagined. Harry Skinner never saw his warehouses filled with cotton. But a century later, the federal government found itself filling warehouses with cheese.

Further Reading:

Hicks, John D. “The Sub-Treasury: A Forgotten Plan for the Relief of Agriculture.” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 15, no. 3 (1928): 355–73. https://doi.org/10.2307/1892435.

Or, at least political strategizing was the ostensible goal of the meeting. In reality, this meeting was about something far worse.

On the upper floors of the courthouse, it was business as usual. One can imagine the scene: Caswell County’s most ardent Democrats conversing back and forth with one another, a few gentlemen discussing strategies for voter intimidation in one corner, a group lamenting the state’s growing black political class in another. This was precisely the kind of show they intended. Plotting illegal activities? Sure. Sowing of racial divisions? Most certainly. But there would be nothing so untoward in this upstairs gathering as to arouse any suspicion or unwanted attention from passersby. After all, they had a murder to conceal.

Beneath all of this chicanery and the creaking of hardwood boards, sits a group of eight to twelve members of the white supremacist organization, the Ku Klux Klan. They have been waiting here for several hours, daggers-in-hand, for the arrival of one man in particular—Mr. John Walter Stephens. Though himself a white man and Republican state senator, Stephens plans to attend the Democratic gathering on the off chance that he can persuade a local Democrat, Frank Wiley, to run for county sheriff on the Republican ticket.

He would never get the opportunity.

Within a few minutes of arriving, Stephens was dead. After being greeted by Wiley and led down a dark flight of stairs into a dingy basement holding area, the gang of Klansmen violently seized the senator, tied him up, and proceeded to stab him to death. In cowardly fashion, the assailants left Stephens’ corpse on a wood heap in the courthouse basement for his family to later discover as the killers bestrode their horses, galloping off into the safety of the night.

This murder of John Walter Stephens, alongside the equally heinous, albeit more public killing of black Alamance County Commissioner Wyatt Outlaw, triggered what would become known as the Kirk-Holden War. Over the course of several months in late 1870, the state underwent a period of protracted political intrigue, heated exchanges between state and federal officials, killings, mass arrests, the raising of a militia, the suspension of habeas corpus and—when it was all said and done—the first successful impeachment of a governor in the nation’s history.

While the Wilmington Coup of 1898—often called the “only successful insurrection in U.S. history”—receives all of the publicity thanks to David Zucchino’s Pulitzer-winning Wilmington’s Lie, it is the goal of this series to demonstrate that the Kirk-Holden War should be viewed as just as much of an insurrection. Though ultimately less successful at seizing lasting political control compared to their counterparts nearly thirty years later, the Democrats of 1870 did achieve their immediate goal of regaining political power—grabbing a majority in the General Assembly in 1872 and so tarnishing the reputation of Republican governors so as to prevent a single one from entering the executive mansion for twenty years (1876-1896).

But how did all of this come to be? For that answer, we must return to the man we started with.

Who was John Walter Stephens?

John Walter Stephens was a North Carolinian through and through. Born to Absalom and Letitia Stephens in 1834, Stephens spent the majority of his life in and around the Piedmont region of the state, initially plying his trade as a tailor for the family business before bouncing between jobs as an agent for the American Bible and Tract Society and a tobacco merchant in York, South Carolina. By 1857, Stephens was only 23 years old and had his entire life ahead of him. As was typical for the time, he married young, to a Ms. Nannie Walters who bore him one daughter before sadly passing away only two years into their new life together. Within a year of Nannie’s passing in 1859, Stephens was remarried, this time to Martha Frances Groom, with whom he shared one child, a little girl named Ella. This marriage, like Stephens’ a few years earlier, was destined for despair.

Shortly after Martha and John Walter tied the knot in 1860, the state of South Carolina seceded from the Union. Not only did this trigger a wave of secessions throughout the Lower South during the early months of 1861 and send the nation into its greatest crisis and mass-casualty event to date, but it also radically changed the fortunes of the Stephens family.

John Walter quickly joined up with the Confederate Army in December 1860 and immediately set to work conscripting soldiers as an impressment agent for the Army of the Confederate States of America (C.S.A.). Though Stephens never saw combat, serving instead as an impressment agent pursuing draft evaders in the Carolinas, those who knew him regarded him as an ordinary Southern Confederate. One could maybe even go further to say that Stephens was publicly recognized during this time for his support for the Confederate cause, evidenced by his headstone which describes him with three words “SOLDIER–C.S.A.–PATRIOT.”

As, at least nominal, hostilities drew to a halt in the late spring to early summer of 1865, the now 32-year-old Stephens moved back to Wentworth in Central North Carolina, again picking up the tobacco trade. Apart from acquiring the unfortunate moniker of “Chicken Stephens” after shooting several chickens who made the fatal error of strutting onto his property—an act which so tarnished his reputation in Wentworth that Stephens fled to Yanceyville—his first months after the war were remarkably uneventful. He reintegrated himself back into the life of a Southern tradesman. Stephens quickly re-joined his home church, spent time with his young family of four, and, by all accounts, got along quite well re-establishing himself in the state’s fractured but peaceful enough post-war social order.

Such was the life of John Walter Stephens until he made the fateful decision to throw his support behind North Carolina’s newly-founded Republican Party in 1867.

At the time of its inception in 1867, the Republican Party was recognized by many of the state’s whites as a usurper organization, primarily interested in the political futures of the so-called carpetbaggers (Northern Republicans operating in the South) and newly freed blacks. As the Daily Sentinel—the preeminent Conservative paper in the state—made clear in a summer 1867 editorial, “the States, however, which will thus be gained to the republican side will be in truth black republican States, inasmuch as this dominant mixed party therein will be controlled by the black vote.” It was not simply that North Carolina’s Conservatives saw the Republican Party as a naive, radical political instrument entertaining its utopian fantasies in the South. No, to these disaffected whites—many of whom had only a few years earlier witnessed 30,000 of their brothers and neighbors killed by the Army commanded by these very Republicans—the GOP-led Reconstruction program, with its soldiers standing at every street corner, was nothing more than, as one former-Confederate put it, “a daily reminder of southern defeat and humiliation.”

It’s worth remembering here that the state of North Carolina was, staying true to its antebellum roots, still very much a “two-party” system during the latter half of the 1860s. For it was the Conservatives who, in 1866, elected Jonathan Worth to the executive mansion with 75.9% of the popular vote on a promise to pursue a Reconstruction program effectively identical to that of Andrew Johnson’s Southern-friendly “reunion and nothing more” strategy. It was also the Conservatives who nuked the state’s early attempts at a Reconstruction constitution from 1865-66, leading to its eventual rejection, by a popular vote of 19,880 to 21,770. It would thus be fair to say that the Conservatives, at least by 1867, were on somewhat equal footing in the “little-c” civil war for public opinion, despite the Republicans’ obvious advantages in the realm of federal military and political support.

Then Congress passed the Military Reconstruction Act in March 1867. This law, vehemently opposed by the Conservatives and their newfound friend in Washington, President Johnson, dissolved North Carolina’s government, formally placed North Carolina under military control, granted blacks the right to vote, and conditioned the state’s readmission to the Union on its adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment and a state constitution “in conformity with the Constitution of the United States in all respects.” Overnight, the federal government erased all of the Conservative Party’s political gains—quite literally eliminating their offices—and sowed the seeds for their future electoral defeat by enabling the over 73,000 black, male North Carolinians over the age of 21, effectively rubber stamps for the Republicans, to vote on the constitutional referendum in the fall of 1867.

Whatever one may say about the just cause of this measure, this was quite literally a stuffing of the ballot box in favor of the Republican Party.

Thus, when John Walter Stephens joined the Republicans in 1867, he was joining a party which was exercising outsized control over the state and waging political warfare against a sizable portion of the population. Though his decision to join the party is interesting in itself—a combination of his rejection by Conservatives following the whole “Chicken Stephens” affair and subsequent move into black-majority Caswell—it’s really the time and place of his decision that matter.

To be a Republican in North Carolina, in the eyes of many white Conservatives, was to betray your neighbor and be complicit in a radical experiment performed by distant political scientists. To be a Republican was to support the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment and continued federal meddling in the mores and social customs of a centuries-old tradition.

As much as history has made the project of Reconstruction about race and who gets to do what politically and for what reasons, it was just as much about this factor, self-determination, as it was about any of these other considerations. The Conservatives who opposed Reconstruction, almost entirely composed of former Confederates, did not oppose reunion and the freeing of slaves so much as they rejected this idea that Northerners would dictate precisely how North Carolina would settle these difficult questions of black political and social equality. The Conservatives, of course, had no intention of conferring such rights onto the state’s black population—evidenced by the legislature’s adoption of a set of regressive Black Codes in 1866. But they nevertheless were willing to abolish slavery and rejoin the Union (as they did in 1865) if that meant they could write the terms of black freedom—a prospect that was altogether denied by the Military Reconstruction Act.

This is precisely what made John Walter Stephens such a problem to his white neighbors in the moderate climate of the Piedmont. He was not a Northern carpetbagger or Union officer employed to impose Republican ideals upon the people of Caswell County. He was one of their own. He was a former Confederate soldier, a native North Carolinian, and a man who, in the eyes of many of the state’s whites, sought to hand the scepter of government over to the blacks and Northern whites.

By that fateful day in the Caswell County Courthouse—May 21, 1870—Mr. Stephens had become, as a March 1868 edition of the North Carolinian declared, an “odoriferous scalawag.” The people of North Carolina, or at least those who shared the opinions of the North Carolinian’s editor, John W. Dunham, had no time for a man like Stephens.

Statewide Klan Violence

Stephens’ murder was, like the far more deadly and centralized campaign in 1898, part of a trend of political violence. Former Confederates, disgusted by the course of Military Reconstruction, began to seek extra-legal means, that is, intimidation and sometimes murder, to change the course of a state which they very rightfully believed to be slipping from their grasp. Groups of white men, mainly in the eastern and central regions of the state, thus formed into roving bands of thugs which sought to take the matter of opposing Reconstruction into their own hands. And it was in the very hands of these men, which more often than not clinched a dagger or the foreend of a rifle, that the seeds of the Ku Klux Klan were laid.

Despite beginning as a small fraternity of young ex-Confederates indulging in elaborate costumes and rituals, by 1870, the Klan had become a real paramilitary force in the state of North Carolina and much of the South. According to an Alamance County Klan member’s sworn testimony before Congress, there were “no fewer than three hundred men in the Alamance Klan by the spring of 1869,” a number that increased to around six to seven hundred by the time of Stephens’ murder in May 1870. (Note: the population of Alamance County was recorded at 11,874 by the 1870 federal census, which means that, when Stephens was slain, approximately six percent of Alamance County were active members of the KKK).

Whether it was its size, social acceptance, or the sheer determination of its members, the simple fact is that the Klan began to quickly assert its will upon North Carolina’s political scene. Much of this was a direct result of the utter boldness and brutality of its actions during 1869 and 1870. Jim D. Brisson’s magnificent article on the Kirk-Holden War offers a harrowing account of this period. There he describes the slaughter of the black Blue family:

“At approximately eleven o’clock on a cold night, at least thirteen disguised members of the Moore Klan burst into the home of Daniel Blue, a black man, and indiscriminately started shooting. When they were finished, Blue lay upon the floor, shot but not mortally wounded; his family, however, was not so lucky. The Klansmen shot and killed Blue’s pregnant wife and four of his five children. When they discovered that Blue’s fifth child was still alive and cowering on the floor, one of the Klansmen killed the child ‘by kicking its brains out with the heel of his boot.’”

Killings like those of the Blue family were just a small part of a whole campaign of intimidation tactics used by the Klan in the lead-up to the election of 1870. This was an important election for the Conservatives for two reasons: 1) the Republicans, eighteen of whom were black, currently held a supermajority in both houses, and 2) said supermajority was created through the dissolution of the duly-elected (at least according to the state’s laws at the time) Conservative Congress of 1866 by 1867’s Military Reconstruction Act. For the men of the Klan, everything up to and including murder was justified if it meant that at least one less vote would go to those usurper Republicans in the fall. Unfortunately for the Klan, their intimidation program would not go without resistance.

The Republicans Respond

The Republican government in Raleigh, a mixed-race and geographically diverse coalition spearheaded by Gov. Holden, saw these killings as a genuine threat to the state’s hard-fought postbellum peace. Though the murder of sitting politicians and racial honor killings would offend any decent, God-fearing man, it was really the fact that the Klan orchestrated these events in 1869 and 1870 that set the Republican leadership on a path of confrontation.

By this time in the state’s Reconstruction, most North Carolinians were exhausted by the prospect of continued fighting, whether by word or gunpowder. The state had already given 30,000 of its sons in battle, spent years debating how to write a more egalitarian state constitution, torn itself apart over the ratification of the 14th Amendment, and—despite all of these disagreements—ultimately secured re-entry into the Union on July 4th, 1868. Even with many unsettled political questions and social equality among the races anything but realized, many people either believed they had gotten “over the hump” or simply had grown tired of the incessant bickering. Sure, the state was not fully reconstructed, but progress had been made.

In the eyes of the state’s sitting Republican governor, William Woods Holden, this Klan violence posed an existential threat to that progress. Writing later in his memoir, Holden recalled:

“Combinations were formed in various parts of the States, of a secret character, the object of which was to render practically null and void the Reconstruction Acts, and to set at naught those provisions of the Federal and State Constitutions which secure political and civil equality to the whole body of our people.”

It was precisely the Klan’s “secret character” which made Holden so fearful of its insurrectionary potential. Not only did the Klan wear disguises and ride at night, it often made up such large portions of rural areas that it could effectively intimidate whole communities into withholding the identities of its individual Klansmen. If unmasked and unpunished by the state, this organization could spend years, perhaps even decades, hopping from county to county, killing Republican politicians and spooking the state into reneging on its Reconstruction commitments.

This sort of future was simply unconscionable to Holden. Again discussing the Klan in his memoir:

“My attention was first called to these combinations in October 1868, and I then deemed it my duty to issue a proclamation setting forth the nature of our government, the manner in which it had been established, vindicating its authority as a government…and giving warning of the consequences that must follow, if any attempt should be made to subvert the government.” [my italics]

Holden continued on in this passage by reaffirming the rights of “the poor and the humble” alongside those of the “colored citizen.”

In April 1869, the General Assembly, acting congruently with Holden, made its first real move against the Klan. After the passage of “An Act making the act of going masked, disguised or painted, a felony,” Gov. Holden issued a proclamation which, on his reading, gave notice that “bands of men who go masked and armed at night, causing alarm and terror in neighborhoods, and committing acts of violence on the inoffensive and defenceless…would be followed and made to feel the penalty due to their crimes.” Though he did not mention them by name at the time, the target of this law and proclamation was, of course, the Klan.

By October 1869, the situation in certain Piedmont counties had become so dire that the governor issued yet another proclamation decrying the “feeling of insubordination and insurrection” there and, as he later recalled, “gave notice in this proclamation that violations of law and outrages in the aforesaid Counties must cease; otherwise I would ‘proclaim those Counties in a state of insurrection,’ and would ‘exert the whole power of the State to enforce the law, to protect those who are assailed or injured, and to bring criminals to justice.’” In response, Conservatives complained, like the editor of Goldsboro’s Daily Messenger, “he [Gov. Holden] does not state the truth that this shooting was done while the negroes were actually engaged in robberies, thefts and rapes; not he; he criminally evades it, deigning that a false impression may be entertained by the public, thus making himself guilty of a grave falsehood in a public paper emanating from the Executive Mansion of the State. Monstrous!”

These sorts of arguments regarding black violence, like their sister claims advanced to justify countless acts of racial terror throughout the Jim Crow era, were utterly unfounded.

However, what the evidence did show—or at least what it showed to Holden—was that Klan violence was not stopping. His Excellency thus published yet another decree, this time in the form of a formal message to the state legislature on December 16th asking the good men of the state legislature to strengthen the state’s militia law. As Holden noted in his letter at the time:

“Since my last annual message, dated Nov. 16th, 1869, numerous outrages of the most flagrant character have been committed upon peaceable and law-abiding citizens, by persons masked and armed, who rode at night, and who have thus far escaped the civil law. I have adopted such measures as were in my power to ferret out and bring to justice all breakers of the law, without reference to their color or to the political party or parties to which they belong, and I am satisfied that Judge and solicitors in the various circuits have been prompt, energetic and impartial in the discharge of their duties. Notwithstanding this, Gentlemen, the outrages referred to seem to be rather on the increase in certain localities in so much that many good citizens are in a constant state of terror and society in said localities is in a deplorable condition. It is for your honorable body to apply the remedy by so strengthening the arm of the executive as to enable him to repress these outrages and restore peace and order. I have confidence in your wisdom, in your regard for law, and in the disposition which I feel sure exists in every member of your honorable body to adopt such measures as will speedily put an end to the evils complained of.”

At Holden’s behest, State Senator T. M. Shoffner, of Alamance County, a hotbed of Klan activity, introduced a December 16th bill labeled “An Act to Secure the Better Protection of Life and Property.” The draft legislation empowered the governor to suspend habeas corpus, authorized him to declare a state of insurrection “wherenever in his judgment the civil authorities in any county are unable to protect its citizens in the enjoyment of life and property,” and included some language concerning the raising of the state militia and federal troops should the situation call for them. Though Conservatives objected to almost everything in the bill, the Republicans ultimately rammed the so-called Shoffner Act through both Houses after dropping the habeas corpus provision, and it became law in January 1870.

In true fashion, Conservative newspapers across the state greeted the bill’s passage with scathing criticism. The January 21st, 1870, edition of the Wilmington Journal, perhaps the loudest, most verbose critic of the Holden administration, stated as much:

“By this bill the Governor hopes to concentrate the colored vote, and, by various stratagems, hold together the white Radical element, and make a straight-out Radical fight next summer. He will have no objection to the provisions of the bill producing a little blood-shed in some sections, as that would strengthen him with the negroes.”

A gathering of whites in Alexander, in the western portion of the state, likewise characterized the Shoffner Act in a formal resolution as “a direct attempt to subvert the liberties of our people by placing the sword and purse in the hands of one man.”

These objections were, of course, exaggerations that sought to portray Holden as a dictator intent on crushing opposition with an iron fist. In reality, Holden was not a radical. In fact, he had been a moderate Democrat who worked alongside many of his now-opponents for most of his life before founding the state’s Republican outfit. Furthermore, Holden’s request for the powers outlined in the Shoffner Act was justified insofar as it was a response to unresolved instances of Klan violence. There was no prosecuting the Klan when the prosecutors and, perhaps even the judge, were themselves Klansmen. Holden was therefore acting within the bounds and upholding the oath of his office, only executing “such measures as were in [his] power” and directly asking the legislature to empower him with the requisite force, not ruling by executive fiat.

The Murder of Wyatt Outlaw

The passage of the Shoffner Act incited more than a war of words, however.

On February 26, 1870, in Graham, the county seat of Alamance, a group of roughly 100 Klansmen set off for the home of Wyatt Outlaw, a black Republican town commissioner and organizer for the Union League. By the end of their ride, these men had seized Outlaw from his home, dragged him into the town square, and hanged him before the Graham Courthouse for all to see. As the sun rose over the grizzly scene, horrified passersby would have seen Outlaw’s bloodied body attached with a note warning Alamance County’s Republicans to “Beware, you guilty, both white and black.” Outlaw’s crime, like John Walter Stephens, whose death would come only a few months later, was simply supporting the Republican Party.

On the evening of Outlaw’s murder, the same band of Klansmen rode to the home of Henry Holt, another prominent black politician in Alamance. Fortunately for the Holt family, Henry was not present that evening. Unable to find their intended target, the Klansmen departed after terrorizing his wife.

The people of Alamance County were, as one could imagine, unsettled by these acts of domestic terror. Two days later, H. A. Badham, a Graham-area Republican, penned a letter on February 28th to Governor Holden expressing the town’s deteriorating condition. As Badham wrote, “Every republican in the County who has stood up for his own rights and that of the freedmen, is in danger. The civil authorities are powerless to bring these offenders against law and humanity, to Justice.”

Badham’s assessment captured one of the central problems confronting the governor. The Klan’s strength lay not merely in its weapons but in its social capital. Many of the Klansmen held high-ranking positions in local political offices or maintained well-paying jobs that provided ample funding for their murderous escapades, which thus allowed them to carry out their raids with relative impunity. In fact, the Klan was so powerful at this time, according to Holden’s recollection of events, it “existed…in a majority of the counties, and, as some of the members of it swore before the courts, the number was not less than forty thousand in the State.”

In truth, Holden may well have exaggerated the Klan’s size. Whether it numbered forty thousand members or far fewer, however, was beside the point. By early 1870, he had concluded that ordinary civil authority had broken down in parts of North Carolina.

On March 7th, Holden finally acted. After nearly two years of proclamations, warnings, and appeals to public opinion, he declared Alamance County to be in a state of insurrection.

Holden characterized his reasoning thusly:

“I have issued proclamation after proclamation to the people of the State, warning offenders and wicked or misguided violators of the law to cease their evil deeds, and, by leading better lives, propitiate those who duty it is to enforce the law. I have invoked public opinion to aid me in repressing these outrages and in preserving peace and order. I have waited to see if the people of Alamance would assemble in public meeting and express their condemnation of such conduct by a portion of the citizens of the County, but I have waited in vain. No meeting of the kind has been held. No expression of disapproval even of such conduct by the great body of citizens has yet reached this Department; but, on the contrary, it is believed that the lives of citizens who have reported these crimes to the Executive has been thereby endangered, and it is further believed that many of the citizens of the County are so terrified that they dare not complain, or attempt the arrest of criminals in their midst. The civil officers of the County are silent and powerless.”

Holden followed up his proclamation by requesting federal assistance. Approximately forty United States soldiers stationed in Raleigh were dispatched to Alamance County while Holden prepared to organize the state militia.

Across the state, Conservative politicians and newspaper editors began contorting this proportional response to Klan violence into an unjustified, even desperate attempt by Holden to cling to whatever political power he retained in the state. More commonly, pundits portrayed Holden as a traitor to his state. This sort of behavior could be expected of a carpetbagger or one of the black Republicans serving in the General Assembly, but certainly not of a white North Carolinian man such as himself. The Charlotte-area Southern Home said as much in their March 24th paper: “We could expect nothing better of Scott, Reed, Bullock, Warmoth and Powell (Republican governors in other ex-Confederate states). They are Yankees, and hate with the malignity of fiends the people whom they oppress. But there is a depth of infamy in this slander by a native born Governor, which Holden alone could reach.”

Yet, somehow these claims of betraying his homeland were the worst that Holden would hear. Some, like the Wilmington Journal, suggested, perhaps even themselves hoped, that Holden’s actions would lead to an armed conflict:

“Can Governor Holden read over these false and slanderous statements and not shudder at the consequences likely to spring from the cowardly and contemptible course into which party necessities and personal ambition have led him? He knows, as do the people of North Carolina know, that there is no insurrection in Alamance.”

Holden, of course, believed the opposite. Convinced that local government had collapsed in Alamance County and that organized violence threatened Reconstruction itself, he appealed to President Grant for federal assistance. North Carolina’s experiment in peaceful Reconstruction had reached its breaking point. The next chapter would be decided, as it was only five years earlier, by force.

Conclusion to Part One

The causes of the Kirk-Holden War were never simply a struggle between Governor Holden and the Klan. It reflected a more fundamental democratic problem that haunted the entire national Reconstruction effort, namely representation.

Congress and North Carolina’s Republican government had attempted to remake the state’s political order through legislation and military authority, but laws alone could not secure public acceptance. These laws required men to execute them. Unfortunately for the Republicans in Washington, there were no unifying figures like Grant lying around.

In North Carolina, the only men who were willing to step up to the plate were political opportunists, Northerners, black men, and people like Holden and John Walter Stephens who were seen as sectional traitors.

This created a kind of Catch-22 for Congressional Republicans. They could either permit ex-Confederates to retake the state as they did in the 1865 election, or prop up an unpopular government ad aeternum through military force. Neither path promised a stable or lasting peace.

The reality was that too many North Carolinians viewed Reconstruction for what it was: an externally imposed settlement maintained, in large part, by federal troops. The Klan, for its part, sought to overturn that settlement through organized violence and intimidation.

Between these two forces stood Holden, attempting to preserve a constitutional government in a society where large portions of the public fundamentally rejected its legitimacy. The result was a conflict that tested both the limits of executive power and the capacity for a democracy to survive in the face of a popular insurgency.

Onto the layman’s philosophy…

If you were to ask, say, the average American (if such a thing exists in our post-modern society), “Why study history?

”—what might they tell you? In my experience as a heretofore amateur historian, there are a few common answers.

Perhaps the most repeated one that I have heard is that history is merely interesting—that this discipline is helpful insofar as it busies our minds with colorful, long ago realities but does little in the way of moving our culture further along economically, socially, or politically. This view, what I like to call “mere history,” is the sort of thing you see in an AP history course at most American high schools. There, we teach about the Mongols, the Safavids, the Silk Road, simply because they are fascinating data points from our human past, not because they tell us anything ourselves or gesture towards some meta-narrative or grand narrator.

On this account of history, there is no room for meaning. History is a science, a field defined by empirics. These specialist historians, Ortega would call them learned ignorami, are thus concerned solely with the task of refining their methodologies so as to remove all need for a real, human perspective. There is, of course, room for meaning here, but it is strictly procedural. It is the meaning one derives at their desk, huddled over crusty, obscure documents late into the wee hours of the morning. The job of the historian becomes specialized beyond recognition.

Another answer one will hear to this question—Why study history?—is that history is useful. We study history not exactly because it taps into something beyond ourselves, not even because its “stuff” is really interesting whatsoever. No, history, like one of those online cyber security certificates, is worth pursuing because it’s a value add to our resumes. Generally-speaking, the historical vocation teaches us (or at least ought to) how to read, analyze documents, and critically think. Sure, one might pick up some cool facts about the past here and there, but really history is all about preparation for another career in a related discipline like law, policy, or business, etc.. Such is the view of the modern academy.

Note: If you’re curious what I mean by this, go look at the “What Do You Do with a History Degree?” page on my alma mater’s website. You will not find the wistful answer that my professors would have given you when they were undergrads.

Try as I might to discard these perspectives (and some others I did not care to mention), there is, like all things, some truth to them. As Sertillanges wrote in his magnificent work, The Intellectual Life, “You who seek truth and are ready to recognize its countenance everywhere, do not set its servants up one against the other, though they should be among those ‘incomplete angels,’ men of partial genius.”

Indeed, we have much to celebrate in the aforementioned perspectives, incomplete as they are. One would be obtuse to dispute that history is interesting or useful or that it can help you get a job. And, as ethically vacuous as it may be, the academic study of history can be meaningful in its own respect, even if that meaning is not necessarily derived from the study itself.

But there’s a problem here.

History is not just interesting, useful, or beneficial to your career aspirations.

It is so much more.

History is everything that we were, are, and will become. It is our grand narrative. As my favorite plump wisecracker, G. K. Chesterton, once wrote, “History is simply humanity.”

Here, and only here, do we learn strictly through the experience of others. Though their individual successes and failures are not necessarily our own, their humanity is. And it is because of this that we cannot treat the study of the past as a means to some end or merely interesting.

In fact, the historical imagination pulls us out of our very selves to see the contours of reality, the meta-narratives, and perhaps even the meta-narrator. It focuses our gaze in such a way that only time can achieve.

History also asks us why we care to remember certain things and discard others. And, in what I believe to be its most important function, history humbles us. It looks at modern men and says, “I thought the other ones were the moderns?”

But, for all that history does to check our egos and shatter our contrived moralities, it also gives us one of the richest—perhaps the most human—things of all: gratitude.

Gratitude, appreciation, thankfulness—whatever synonym you like—is why I am launching the 1775 Project. As someone who discovered a real appreciation for history during my undergrad years, I can attest to the way in which the historical vocation inspires gratitude.

Walking down the road, I see people everywhere. I see the work of stone masons and the long hours spent wiring miles of telephone poles. I see churches built by one generation and passed on to the next. I see stories in every brick and door jam.

There are systems of rights, supply lines, medical innovations, religious doctrines, military treaties, cuisines, schools of art, technologies, industries, and a city itself—all of which I had no part in making. Yet, I enjoy their fruits every single day.

The 1775 Project is an outgrowth of this realization. Through historical essays and original research, I hope to inspire gratitude for North Carolina’s past. More importantly, I hope that gratitude will help others, whoever comes across this page, to see the society around them as a partnership “not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.”

North Carolina is a place with a fascinating history, and I will make every effort to reiterate that point on the pages herein.