Willmoore Kendall
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Willmoore Kendall (1909-1968) was an American conservative writer and Professor of political philosophy.
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[edit] Biography
Kendall was born in 1909 to a blind minister in Oklahoma. He learned to read at age two, graduated from high school at 13, from the University of Oklahoma at 18, and published his first book at 20. In 1932, he became a Rhodes scholar and studied at the University of Oxford.
Kendall became a Trotskyist socialist and went to Spain during the Spanish Civil War, where exposure to the harsh reality of the Spanish Republic shocked him out of his communist convictions.
In 1940, Kendall obtained a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois writing his dissertation upon John Locke on Majority Rule under Francis Wilson.
Kendall served in the OSS during World War II, and stayed on when it became the CIA in 1947.
He joined the Yale University faculty in 1947, where he taught for fourteen quarrelsome years until Yale paid him a handsome sum to resign. Among his students was William F. Buckley, Jr., with whom he participated in the founding of National Review; as a Senior Editor he constantly fought with the other editors (they say he was never on speaking terms with more than one person at a time). A friend of Kendall's, Professor Revilo P. Oliver, gives him credit with convincing him to enter political activism by writing for NR. [1]
He later converted to Roman Catholicism and taught at the University of Dallas, where he stayed until he died of a heart attack in 1967.
[edit] Works
Kendall authored many books, including:
- Baseball: How to Play It and How to Watch It
- Democracy and the American Party System (co-authored with Austin Ranney; Harcourt, Brace, 1956)
- John Locke and the Doctrine of Majority Rule (The University of Illinois Press, 1959)
- Willmoore Kendall Contra Mundum (edited by Nellie Kendall; Arlington House, 1971; republished by University Press of America, 1994, ISBN 0-8191-9067-5)
- The Conservative Affirmation in America (Regnery Books, 1985)
- The Basic Symbols of the American Political Tradition (with George W. Carey; LSU Press, 1970; Catholic University of America Press, 1995, ISBN 0-8132-0826-2)
- Oxford Years: Letters of Willmore Kendall to His Father (edited by Yvonna Kendall Mason; ISI Books, 1995, ISBN 1-882926-02-1)
[edit] About Kendall
- Willmoore Kendall: Maverick of American Conservatives edited by John Alvis and John Murley (Lexington Books). Reviewed here.
[edit] External links
- The Willmoore Kendall Site
- The “deliberate sense” of Willimoore Kendall by Jeffrey Hart
- Review of The Conservative Affirmation by Dr. Enrico Peppe (17 March 2004).
- The Pied Pipers of Neoconservatism by John F. McManus in The New American (Vol. 17, No. 17, August 13, 2001) discusses Kendall.
