Schneider – Tribute to Stephen Tonsor

Gregory L.
Schneider
Tribute to Stephen Tonsor

The Philadelphia
Society
Regional Meeting in Pittsburgh
October 14, 2006

A few years ago rummaging through the vast collection of conservative
manuscripts at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, I came across what struck me
then—and still strikes me today—as perhaps the most literate and
conservative correspondence I had ever had the pleasure to read. The
letters of Henry Regnery and Stephen Tonsor, both deserving of the distinguished
membership in this society which we bequeath on Stephen this evening, spoke of
weightier concerns than what was passing for conservatism in America in those
days.

The
correspondence between the two men—stretching almost forty years and involving
one (sometimes two or more) letters per week—was literate in the nature of
topics discussed and arguments broached: German literature, conservatism,
philosophy, Chicago culture, wine,
classical music, gardening, ideas—especially ideas—and family. These were
the concerns of the two men, expressed in beautifully written prose, Tonsor’s
always written in ink pen in a bold and self-assured script.

The correspondence was conservative in truest sense of the term,
concerned about the struggle of man to preserve tradition in the face of
modernity, of the continuities in what historians had once referred to as “the
great chain of being.” It was concerned with how change and progress could be
harnessed to conservative ends. It was not reactionary—even though Tonsor
identified himself by such a term–but it was counter-revolutionary, especially
since the counter-revolution the two men were waging was shaped by Edmund
Burke’s response to French philosophes, and Tonsor’s to the philosophes’
heirs on the post-modern and Marxist university campus.

Towards the end of his career Tonsor reflected on this lifelong battle
with such people, writing Regnery: “I have been depressed lately. The history
department at Michigan is simply disintegrating. The Marxists and Feminists. .
.have taken over. . . .I am very fearful of a collapse of the Humanities on a
national scale. It is as though there were some intellectual equivalent of the
AIDs virus which has got inside the minds of administrators and faculty under
age 50.” This was written in 1990; I can report that sixteen years later the
damage on campus is worse and there are fewer colleagues one can find to stem
the tide. It is indeed a depressing prospect to be on a college campus. Yet one
must not despair for despair is a sin. As Irving Babbitt once said, “fighting
against a whole generation is not always a happy task.”

“The essential function of the teacher is the transmission of
tradition,” Tonsor once wrote in honor of his mentor, the University of
Illinois historian Joseph Ward Swain. “The values he or she conveys to the
next generation are values of content and method. In the case of the historian,
the transmission of the knowledge of the past, those human experiences which are
the ground of present-day existence, is the content of the historian’s
science.”

Tonsor achieved this through his long teaching career at the University
of Michigan, inculcating in the minds of his students—those adept enough to
pay attention—some of the key principles and values of the western tradition.
He took his duties seriously and never wasted time. He treated his students as a
professor should, as a mentor, one who was concerned with their intellectual
development. He was friendly but professorially distant, inviting students to
his home for seminars and discussion yet never getting involved in their
day-to-day problems. He was consistently warm and kind-hearted beneath a gruff
exterior.

Tonsor—who
owed much to his mentor Swain—sought to develop in his own students an
appreciation for history and an appreciation for the political, cultural and
spiritual inheritance of the western world. Swain had introduced the young
Tonsor to conservatism, sending him a lengthy review of Russell Kirk’s The
Conservative Mind in 1953, “[having] no idea how revolutionary that book
would become nor any idea of its influence on me,” Tonsor wrote. “It is one
of the mysteries associated with the great teacher that he is usually unaware of
the movements of the Spirit he excites in his students.”

It may surprise you (and it may equally surprise Stephen) but I conclude
that Tonsor was a futurist. The term is not meant in the manner of the
technology-worship of Newt Gingrich, Al Gore, or Alvin Toffler. Rather, Tonsor
was a futurist in the manner that Edmund Burke was a futurist, and thus any
conservative is a futurist. John Henry Newman’s Essay
on the Development of Christian Doctrine argued “that the past in its
fullness can only be known in future time.” Future time was sacralized time;
the work of those of us in the present was to defend tradition, so as to
preserve its precious links between the “living, the dead and the yet to be
born.” Tonsor lived and worked in future time.

He knew to do
otherwise was to have a flawed understanding of the nature of humanity. Tonsor
wrote often on the Romantics and the futility of humanitarianism. He distrusted
their claims of liberation and distrusted their worship of technology. He had
first hand experience on campus during the 1960s with the new Romanticism of the
Left and the counterculture and was familiar with its
sturm und drang. When he told me of his inclination to invite
students to his home, he mentioned that Tom Hayden had once visited while an
undergraduate student. He made certain to tell me he didn’t think much of him
even then.

He once
referred to the Sixties culture as a “tidal wave of filth” which challenged
the traditional onus of the university. The path taken by many of the Romantics
and the technology-worshippers of that decade led to decadence. For many in that
generation it led to the decadence of secularization which always focused on
“newness.” As Tonsor wrote, “the secularization of time’s regeneration
usually takes the form of the institution of a new political order, the
inauguration of a new era in human history, and the renovation and rejuvenation
of mankind.” Wasn’t the Nazi quest for a “thousand year” Reich and the
Soviet “new man” products of such beliefs? So were the liberationist “year
zeros” propagated by many Sixties radicals, including the aforementioned
Hayden who spent some of his time living in a Kim Il-sung collective in
California.

One need not
have met Tonsor to have been inspired by his clear understanding of the nature
of history and of the condition of humanity within that history. I was one so
inspired, reading his sharp arguments and pointed polemics as an undergraduate
and then later growing to appreciate him even more as I embarked on my own
career chronicling conservative history. I have met him only once and was never
a Tonsor student. We have developed our own correspondence over the years and I
am fortunate to count him as a friend. The great teachers of modern conservatism
have passed—Kirk, Regnery, Meyer. I am fortunate to have a relationship with
Stephen, his mind and thought still more active and lively at eighty-three years
of age than mine at forty-one. He still teaches and still inspires.

Where I became
most familiar with Stephen was at the annual meetings of this society where I
saw him speak on numerous occasions. He loves the Philadelphia Society and it is
my belief that he always saved his best essays and most controversial pieces for
the edification and entertainment of its members. I was always entertained when
he spoke and always inspired by something he said, his wit and fearless
diatribes always striking like laser beams at some perceived problem in the
conservative force. We all are
familiar with his allusion to neoconservatives as “town whores,” a label for
which he suffered at the hands of equally caustic neoconservative critics who
labeled his remarks as anti-Semitic. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Its is sad when arguments devolve into name-calling. Tonsor’s views hardened
as he aged and he later replied, in probably one of his last speeches before
this society, that he was increasingly “paleo” and that old conservatives
like Regnery (and himself) were getting “lost in the klaxon-din of those who
call themselves neoconservatives.” It is fitting that by recognizing him this
evening we prove that he is not yet lost in the klaxon-din.

Regardless of
how his speeches were interpreted, Tonsor always had something to say. If he may
have delivered his talks in, as Jeffrey Hart once described it, “a pit bull
fury” (it would have been preferable for Hart to have described Stephen as a
Doberman or rottweiler rather than a pit bull) the listener would always profit
from what he had to say.

Part of what
makes Stephen the conservative he is, insistent on order, defensive of community
and protective of the tradition of the past is reflected in his upbringing in
the soil of the Midwest, in a German Catholic Illinois community from which he
inherited his own sense of place, his
weltanschauung and his love for church and country. His wife
Caroline, who many of you know, helped him develop this as a good spouse does;
she indeed is the bedrock upon which Stephen still stands. Those who have been
fortunate enough to be welcomed by Tonsor hospitality—thousands over the fifty
years they have lived in their modest Ann Arbor home—know this intimately.

Few men in the
history of the Philadelphia Society have moved so many and have embroiled so
much controversy as Stephen has with remarkable insights delivered at these
meetings. As I have written elsewhere, Stephen deserves wider recognition as a
conservative intellectual of the first order and it is fitting that in bestowing
this honor upon him tonight he is gaining such recognition alongside
conservatives he admired and worked with over the years. He is, I am certain, as
humbled by that recognition as I am to be the one to introduce him tonight.