- Click here for the article.
Henry Regnery flipped through his notes a final time as he waited for the rest of the group to arrive. In a few minutes Room 2233 in New York City’s Lincoln Building would be packed with some of the brightest lights of the conservative movement, gathered together at his request. Writers, publishers, and editors made up most of the guest list, including William F. Buckley Jr., the enfant terrible of the right; Frank Hanighen, cofounder of Human Events; Raymond Moley, Newsweek columnist and author of the anti–New Deal book After Seven Years (1939); and John Chamberlain, former editor of the Freeman and an editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal.
When everyone was settled, Regnery explained why he had called the meeting. As 1953 came to a close, he observed the men in Room 2233 were unquestionably on the losing side of politics. And that puzzled him. “The side we represent controls most of the wealth in this country,” he told those gathered. “The ideas and traditions we believe in are those which most Americans instinctively believe in also.” Why then was liberalism ascendant and conservatism relegated to the fringes? Because, Regnery argued, the left controlled institutions: the media, the universities, the foreign policy establishment. Until the right had a “counterintelligence unit” that could fight back, conservatives would remain a group of elites raging against a system that by all rights they should control.
- Click here for the magazine they produced: Human Events.
