LONG AGO, THE NATION HAD a conservative editor. Paul Elmer More edited the already venerable magazine for five years just before the First World War. On joining The Nation, More was already an entrenched conservative; indeed, he preferred the term "reactionary." While at the magazine, he wrote 600 articles. At his departure, he was well along the path that would lead him at last to Christianity. Perhaps if Henry Adams had forgone France, he would have come up with a title such as "The Virgin and the Dynamo" for an essay on America's pre-eminent progressive magazine and its Paul Elmer More. More occupies a unique place in The Conservative Mind. He was as reflective as any figure in Kirk's volume, yet his life and literary biography were marked by a restlessness that seems characteristically American. The Americans in Kirk's book, in the main, were not the restless sort. Figures such as Santayana and T. S. Eliot stood out in their cultural milieux for their impassivity and stoicism, not to mention their Europhilia. Several of Kirk's minds were involved in the hurly-burly of public debate--More's forbear at The Nation, E. L. Godkin, and More's sometime colleague at Harvard, Irving Babbitt--but these, some critics contend, were never able to write a truly lasting book. More was described by Mencken as "our nearest approach to a genuine scholar"; More may well have exceeded Mencken as an editor, too. (1)
