important for the ideology of their movement. Anticommunism, which called for a

strident defense against a potential Soviet subversion, galvanized the general public,

both liberals and conservatives alike. By 1960, traditionalists and libertarians had

allied with right-leaning anticommunists to support a cohesive conservative program

that had such a popular following that liberals and moderates in both parties could no

longer treat the movement as a wishful nostalgia or a reactionary impulse, as they had

for the past decade.3

 Conservatism is, as most -isms seem to be, a catch-all term encompassing a

number of distinct and often contradictory principles and political interpretations.

Codifying conservatism for this project has been an exceptional challenge. Taft and

Dewey existed in a time before the "conservative intellectual movement" that Nash

has so eloquently and thoroughly described. When the GOP was beginning to split in

the mid-1940s, William F. Buckley, now widely regarded the godfather of modern

conservatism, had just recently graduated from Yale. His first book would not be

published until 1951 and the first issue of National Review did not arrive on

newsstands until two years after Taft's death. The nascent right-wing press was

limited to the libertarian Human Events and the fledgling Commentary. Writers such

as John T. Flynn and Frederick Hayek appeared in some mainstream publications like

Reader 's Digest and completed their own monographs, but these sold a limited

number of copies. In the late 1940s, the conservative movement, if it can be called a

movement, lacked coherence. It did not yet embody an accepted set of principles that

could serve as a litmus test between conservatism and liberalism.




3 For an example of the "liberal" take on conservatism in the early 1950s, see Daniel Bell, The New
American Right (New York: Criterion Books, 1955); George Nash, The Conservative Intellectual
Movement in America since 1945 (Wilmington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1998)