M. E. Bradford Archives ~ The Imaginative Conservative

The Baleful Comet of Boston: Samuel Adams & the Puritan Republic

By M.E. Bradford|2025-09-26T13:46:05-05:00September 26th, 2025|Categories: American Founding, American Republic, American Revolution, M. E. Bradford, Samuel Adams, Timeless Essays|Tags: 1IR|

Samuel Adams believed that men are ruled more by fear or other emotions than by reason. And Sam Adams knew how to generate anger and fear. Thus he kept up the flow of propaganda that followed from the town's versions of what had happened in the Boston Massacre. Samuel Adams (September 27, 1722-October 2, 1803), [...]

The Last Great Englishman: Arthur Wellesley

By M.E. Bradford|2024-10-24T17:51:18-05:00October 24th, 2024|Categories: Books, Europe, Featured, History, M. E. Bradford, The Imaginative Conservative, Timeless Essays, War|

The Duke of Wellington was an exemplar of an older England—an England bound by blood, not interest. He affirmed the very English equality of manhood, which comes with honorable service in the line, the rule that he who is with the king on St. Crispin’s Day shall be by him called “brother.” The Great Duke, [...]

How to Read the Declaration of Independence

By M.E. Bradford|2024-07-07T16:00:22-05:00July 7th, 2024|Categories: American Founding, American Republic, Constitution, Declaration of Independence, Featured, M. E. Bradford, Timeless Essays, Willmoore Kendall|Tags: 1IR|

Our collective confusion about the American experience begins at the beginning. Most Americans who think about such questions imagine that they understand the Declaration of Independence, though many of them may be puzzled that it did not (and does not) produce the results one might expect from the commitments which they believe it makes. After [...]

William Faulkner’s Last Words & the American Dilemma

By M.E. Bradford|2023-09-24T14:40:44-05:00September 24th, 2023|Categories: Equality, Liberty, M. E. Bradford, Rhetoric, Timeless Essays|

The lesson of William Faulkner’s “Gold Medal” speech is both in the teaching it offers and in the method we must employ to grasp that meaning. It is a work of political imagination, drawing its rhetoric from the same fountainhead as poetry. The Summer of 1971, we Americans were removed by only half a decade from [...]

The Absurdity of Modern American Theater: A Call for Rebirth

By M.E. Bradford|2023-06-01T16:33:47-05:00June 1st, 2023|Categories: Culture, Featured, Great Books, M. E. Bradford, The Imaginative Conservative, Theater, Timeless Essays|

The theater of modern America loves to shock but has overdone the trick so often that our nerves are jaded and immune to further outrage. The New York stage must be allowed to dry up and blow away, creating space for a rebirth. To act out, in concert, before an audience, an interpretation of how [...]

M.E. Bradford and the Founding

By Sean Busick|2023-05-07T23:55:59-05:00May 7th, 2023|Categories: American Founding, Lee Cheek, Leo Strauss, M. E. Bradford, Sean Busick, Timeless Essays|Tags: Harry Jaffa|

M.E. (“Mel”) Bradford’s interest in the Founding follows naturally from his Agrarianism. He believed that, unlike the French and Russian Revolutions, America’s was a conservative revolution. Both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were conservative documents. According to Bradford, the American colonies revolted to preserve self-government, not to embark upon a progressive path toward [...]

M.E. Bradford’s Revolutionary “A Better Guide Than Reason”

By Clyde Wilson|2023-03-22T18:33:40-05:00March 22nd, 2023|Categories: Agrarianism, American Founding, American Republic, Books, John Dickinson, M. E. Bradford, Patrick Henry, South, Southern Agrarians, Thomas Jefferson, Timeless Essays|

No one who reads and digests “A Better Guide Than Reason” can fail to be revolutionized. We had thought that the great Southern political tradition—that of Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, John C. Calhoun, and the agrarians—was dead. Not so. A Better Guide Than Reason: Studies in the American Revolution by M.E. Bradford (241 pages, Sherwood Sugden [...]

M.E. Bradford: Nuancing American Whiggism

By Ralph Ancil|2021-08-07T20:26:06-05:00August 8th, 2021|Categories: American Republic, Books, M. E. Bradford, Politics, Ralph Ancil|

The late historian M.E. Bradford’s examination of early American history provides us with a framework for understanding the American experience and so gives a standard to clarify our present darkness. His Old Whiggism is a rhetoric of the heart, an appeal to stand in the old ways, to keep alive the spirit of the original [...]

“The Reactionary Imperative” Revisited

By John Devanny|2020-10-18T16:54:10-05:00October 21st, 2020|Categories: American Republic, Conservatism, Constitution, Government, M. E. Bradford, Politics|

In “The Reactionary Imperative,” Mel Bradford calls for a return to the roots of American order. Sadly, a return to a revised form of the Articles of Confederation is all but impossible. Hope, however, lies in a revivification of the principles of the Old Republicans of Thomas Jefferson’s day. Mel Bradford published a collection of [...]

Arguing With Lincoln: The Views of M.E. Bradford & Richard Weaver

By Thomas Hubert|2020-09-21T16:43:27-05:00September 21st, 2020|Categories: Abraham Lincoln, Civil War, M. E. Bradford, Richard Weaver|

If for M.E. Bradford, Abraham Lincoln was a gnostic renegade and heretic beyond the pale, he was for Richard Weaver a political and rhetorical father figure with whom one might argue but never condemn. These Southerners’ differing critiques of Lincoln’s person, views, and actions cast some light on this complex figure, one who continues to [...]

The Americanization of James Iredell

By M.E. Bradford|2021-04-23T14:42:35-05:00August 3rd, 2018|Categories: American Founding, American Republic, Constitution, M. E. Bradford, Politics|

James Iredell’s careful apologia for the American cause—a teaching which he developed in a series of essays and public letters written from 1773-1778—clearly contains a foreshadowing of what he thought should be in a constitution for the United States. James Iredell was born at Lewes, Sussex County, England. He was the eldest of the five [...]

M.E. Bradford: The Agrarian Aquinas

By Clyde Wilson|2018-07-04T13:30:07-05:00July 3rd, 2018|Categories: American Republic, Clyde Wilson, M. E. Bradford, South, Southern Agrarians|

M.E. Bradford did not write a lot about the agrarian life per se. His interest was in defending the South in which the agrarian way was taken for granted… M.E. Bradford I have called M.E. Bradford the Agrarian Aquinas. He did not write a Summa, but his work as a whole enriched and carried [...]

The Agrarianism of Richard Weaver: Beginnings & Completions

By M.E. Bradford|2019-06-17T15:43:45-05:00December 9th, 2017|Categories: Civil Society, Community, Conservatism, Featured, History, M. E. Bradford, Richard Weaver, Southern Agrarians, The Imaginative Conservative|

Richard Weaver claimed his homeland was the “last nonmaterialistic civilization in the western world.” Modernity to him meant at bottom institutionalizing most of the Seven Deadly Sins… Though his worth and stature were early established among them, while yet living Richard M. Weaver was something of a puzzle for his friends within the American “conservative [...]

The Americanization of Conservatism

By Barry Shain|2021-05-27T13:09:30-05:00October 25th, 2017|Categories: Constitution, Culture, Declaration of Independence, Featured, Federalist, History, M. E. Bradford, Russell Kirk, Willmoore Kendall|

We need to develop a fully American variant of conservatism; to advance our understanding of the conservative nature of the political traditions we have inherited; and to do so with a dignity that will permit us to stand before God, the American public, and our conservative forebears. In the next century, because of both need [...]