A Toast to The Philadelphia Society

Joseph A. Morris
A Toast to The Philadelphia Society

Gala 40th! Annual National Meeting
The Philadelphia Society
Chicago, Illinois, May 1, 2004

The annals of our body record that it was in early 1964 that Don Lipsett organized the first regional meetings of what would become The Philadelphia Society. Small groups of lovers of liberty gathered in Indianapolis, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. There they explored the establishment of a forum for the cultivation of ideas about freedom and the social order. That happened 40 years ago. This is the 40th anniversary of those meetings.

It was a year later, in 1965 in Chicago, that an annual national meeting of the Society was convened for the first time. That session, of course, followed the celebrated conference held in New York, in the immediate aftermath of Barry Goldwater's defeat in the Presidential election of 1964, where, in the presence of Don Lipsett, Frank Meyer, and Ed Feulner, Milton Friedman and William F. Buckley, Jr., were introduced. The Society took on its name, its mission, and its corporate form. That 1965 conference was the first annual meeting of the Society; the 40th anniversary of that milestone will occur next year, in 2005, when, God willing, the Society holds its 41st annual meeting; this is the 40th annual national meeting.

The traditionalist position is that nothing exists in a vacuum, and due account must be given to the conception of the idea and the gestation of the institution. This is the 40th anniversary.

The fusionist position is reflected on the printed covers of our conference packets: This is the"40th Gala! National Anniversary Meeting". You will note, by the way, the mysterious exclamation point which appears after the word "Gala". It was inserted by the Invisible Hand.

The roster of those who spoke at the Society's first annual meeting was stunning. One panel, for example, consisted of George Stigler of The University of Chicago, Eliseo Vivas of The University of Chicago, and Russell Kirk of the cosmos. That's the intellectual equivalent of a batting order consisting of Hank Aaron, Babe Ruth, and Willie Mays on steroids — that is to say, of Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, and Sammy Sosa.

Milton Friedman of The University of Chicago opened the conference, addressing "The Problem of Philosophy". He referred to himself as a "classical liberal", and he praised modern man's ability to break with authoritarian traditions of the past. The gist of his argument was that the central problem of social thought and practice is the achievement of individual liberty.

Fr. Stanley Parry of the University of Notre Dame followed. (There were moments, in those days at least, when it seemed that the Society ran on a University of Chicago / Notre Dame axis.) He spoke in defense of the traditions of the West, and he argued in favor of an organic vision of society rooted in morals and metaphysics. The gist of his argument was that the central problem of social thought is the careful cultivation and transmission of the gifts of Western Civilization.

The modern conservative movement had begun to take shape in America. It was to be an alliance of libertarians and traditionalists, of economists and philosophers, of orthos, neos, paleos, and Sandoz. It would embrace Friedrich von Hayek and Gerhart Niemeyer, Ben Rogge and Russell Kirk, Yale Brozen and Melvin E. Bradford. Importantly, however, it would be more than a coalition of personalities, parties, or interests. Its essence was ideas.

Because the conservative movement has been about ideas, and emphatically because those ideas involve freedom as a goal and reason as a method, it has been a noisy affair, and nowhere more so than at The Philadelphia Society's annual and regional meetings. But debate helps to crystalize and clarify, and ideas that are tested in debate grow in strength.

Ideas also have the ability to transcend party, section, nationality, race, ethnicity, language, time, and space. Although such leaders of this Society as Glenn Campbell, Henry Regnery, John Ryan, and Ernest van den Haag could not have been more different in character, background, profession, and interests, they recognized that it was through ideas that politics, economics, and ultimately history would be shaped. E. Victor Milione, of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, and Leonard Read, of the Foundation for Economic Education, were among the early voices urging the rest of us to see education as the single most important tool in the reformation and renewal of societies, cultures, and civilizations. Personality and party take on importance in proportion to the extent to which they embody, and give life, to ideas.

My wife, Kathy, our friend David Forte, and I were reminded of this phenomenon last night after dinner, when we spoke with Roman Joch from the Civic Institute of Prague in the Czech Republic, who is attending this meeting as the guest of Annette Kirk. Roman told us that he was 18 years old when communism fell. He spent his entire childhood in the maw of a totalitarian state and its educational system. Yet, he told us, from his earliest days he held a dream of freedom. The channels of his awakening, and of his hope, were Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. They were the heroes of his boyhood, because they spoke of ideas, and he listened, he understood, and he made those ideas his own.

As the historians of the conservative intellectual movement will attest, the ideas to which Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher gave voice were ideas revived, advanced, refined, and broadcast over these last four decades by members of The Philadelphia Society, their work often taking place in the very halls where the Society met and debated.

A venerable rule that conservatives often follow is to search out the practices of their forebears. The Founder of this Society, and for more than three decades the benign dictator of its domestic affairs, was Don Lipsett.

Don Lipsett was known as "The Commodore" for a number of reasons, but certainly among them was his lifelong interest in the life and times of Stephen Decatur, a great figure from the early days of America's naval history.

Born in Maryland and reared in Philadelphia, Decatur was commissioned a midshipman in 1798, and rose quickly through the ranks of the young United States Navy. At various times in the early years of the 19th century he had command of such storied vessels as the Constitution and the Congress. He would manage the Norfolk Navy Yard and command all American naval forces on the Southeast coast. He successfully defended New York harbor during the War of 1812.

In 1815 Decatur commanded a nine-ship squadron dispatched to the Mediterranean to settle conflicts, persisting since 1812, with the criminal regimes of the Barbary Coast. These were rogue Arab states whose major enterprises were one form or another of piracy, often in secret league with the French. Sound familiar?

In due course the fleet returned to American shores and Decatur returned to Norfolk where, on April 4, 1816, a great testimonial dinner was given in his honor. Among the entertainments of the evening was the singing by guests of a song, written for the occasion by a local worthy and set to the tune, "To Anacreon in Heaven," the melody known to us as the musical setting of "The Star Spangled Banner."

  Algiers' haughty Dey, in the height of his pride,
  From American freemen a tribute demanded;
  Columbia's brave freemen the tribute denied,
  And his Corsairs to seize our bold tars was commanded.
  Their streamers wave high,
  For Decatur draws nigh,
  His name strikes like lightning — in terror they fly —
  Thrice welcome our hero, returned from afar.
  Where the proud crescent falls to the American Star.

In fact, according to the two contemporary Norfolk newspaper accounts of the event that have survived, Decatur lifted his glass and said: "Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations, may she always be in the right, and always successful, right or wrong."

Conservatives will appreciate the nuances. The toast was decidedly patriotic, but far from jingoistic. Decatur had a well-deserved reputation as a champion of civilian control of the military and of the rule of law. His toast reflected those fundamental American precepts.

Our Father in heaven, we thank you for all the blessings that you have bestowed upon us: Family and friends; life and love; reason and grace; citizenship in free lands; and the bounty before us.

And finally, Lord, we are mindful of those men and women who, in places far and near, willingly put themselves between us and those who would destroy our lives and our liberties. With them especially in mind, we pray, in the words of the Fourth Verse of the American national anthem:

  Oh! thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand
  Between their loved home and the war's desolation!
  Blest with victory and peace, may the heav'n rescued land
  Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation.
  Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
  And this be our motto: "In God is our trust."
  And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
  O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!