Seeing that the 20th anniversary of the passing of Samuel T. Francis transpired on February 15, this may be the proper time to recall this gifted thinker of the American right. Francis wrote provocative books, but unfortunately, they didn’t attract prestigious presses, the one exception being University of Missouri Press, which brought out Francis’s acidic collection of essays Beautiful Losers in 1993. Most of his other books were published by obscure or vanity presses, and his posthumously printed anthology of sociological studies, Leviathan and its Enemies, only saw light in 2016 thanks to a far-right publishing house. No leading conservative press, to my knowledge, offered to publish these learned studies in book form. (Although I too as a writer suffered excommunication by so-called conservative publishers, leading academic presses have always taken my work.)
Francis was a brilliant, witty columnist appearing in both The Washington Times and Chronicles magazine. As is well known, he lost his post as a prize-winning commentator at the Times in 1995 because of a long-remembered professional faux pas. Francis chastised the Southern Baptist Convention for having offered a collective apology for its members’ onetime practice of slavery. By then, however, Francis had taken many other bold positions against what he interpreted as the leftward course of American politics and culture. His remarks about slavery and the Southern Baptist Convention were seen as further proof of his unwillingness to take polite stands on delicate issues.
Although a Southerner from Chattanooga, Tennessee, this longtime acquaintance never expressed sympathy for the Lost Cause, which he saw as a failed uprising led by an overly confident planter class (to which his own family belonged). His focus was on his own age—the danger he saw in the politics of misplaced guilt and the inability of socially rooted Americans to throw off the rule of the managerial class and the ideology by which it manipulated its subjects.
Francis’s favorite conservative thinker was James Burnham, on whom he wrote a monograph and whose study of the managerial revolution was his constant reference work.
Francis never held it against Burnham that he wrote his classic while still under Marxist influence, because for Francis such an identity may have helped Burnham understand the aspect of class struggle inherent in what the right was now required to do. A true right, as opposed to a bought conservative movement, according to Francis, would unite with the social group which he, in the manner of sociologist Donald Warren, called “middle Americans.”