A Defender of Southern Conservatism: M.E. Bradford and His Achievements is an informative overview of the life, legacy and scholarship of the late Mel Bradford who died in the early 1990s. The southern historian Clyde Wilson has assembled a powerful anthology of essays in tribute to the late Mel Bradford. It should be duly noted that no true-blue conservative can study the American founding, the Constitution, and southern history without eventually encountering the name Mel Bradford.
Bradford was an heir to Southern Agrarian movement centered at Vanderbilt University and left a legacy of constitutional scholarship and literary achievement. He served as professor of English at the University of Dallas and gained notoriety for his southern literary criticism.
He was 1980 nominee to chair the National Institute of the Humanities chair under the Reagan administration, but Bradford lost to the former Democrat and neoconservative Bill Bennett. Bradford caused quite a stir as his views over Abraham Lincoln became a source of controversy. The budding neoconservatives mounted a smear campaign, and the political activism and anti-Lincoln sentiments of Bradford may well have cost him the nomination. In the aftermath, the paleoconservative movement became more self-conscious as the fissure deepened. Their passionate and principled dissenting tradition served as a reminder to their neoconservative tormentors about what conservatism really embodied.
