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Creation Story.("Right Face: Organizing the American Conservative Movement 1945-65")(Book Review)-

Article Excerpt
Right Face: Organizing the American Conservative Movement 1945-65, by Niels Bjerre-Poulsen (Museum Tusculanum Press, University of Copenhagen, 333 pp., $29.95)

In the ever-quickening tumult of current political debate, it is easy to forget that American conservatism has become middle-aged. Fifty years ago this spring Russell Kirk published The Conservative Mind. Forty-three years ago next September, Young Americans for Freedom was born. Later this year the Intercollegiate Studies Institute will celebrate its fiftieth anniversary. In two years National Review will do the same.

What happens when a political movement reaches maturity? For those within its ranks, the impulse grows to proclaim success and salute its intrepid founders. For those outside its ranks, passion yields to curiosity: How, they wonder, did such a phenomenon come into prominence and power? In short, present-mindedness gives way slowly to self- consciousness and to the historian's quest for deeper understanding.

So it is with contemporary American conservatism. Long neglected by most serious scholars, conservatism in the last half-decade has suddenly become a historiographical frontier.

Among the new generation of historians who have discovered conservatism from the outside is Niels Bjerre-Poulsen, an associate professor of American studies at Copenhagen Business School. Like most of his confreres, Bjerre-Poulsen is less interested in conservatism's intellectual history than in its "political mobilization." Conservative ideology, that is, is less fascinating to him than the vehicles by which this ideology was carried into the political arena. In Right Face, he tells the story of how, in the first two decades after World War II, a "would-be political elite" of conservatives...