Bradford, Mel

Biographical Sketch

Melvin E. "Mel" Bradford was a conservative political commentator and professor of literature at the University of Dallas. Bradford was well versed in the classics, constitutional law, and in southern literature. He emerged as an intellectual sage in the paleoconservative movement, and a contender for the 1980 National Endowment for the Humanities chair. Though, Bradford lost the chair to William Bennett—the neoconservatives' favored contender since Bradford's anti-Lincoln scholarship brought his nomination under even greater scrutiny by the politically-incorrect cabal within the Grand Old Party. Clyde Wilson writes of his colleague Bradford:

Bradford not only confronted directly the liberalism that was ascendant throughout most of his life; he also took on the older and still powerful orthodoxies of American nationalism. His essays on Lincoln were spread through several books. They are as brilliant as anything every written on the subject — and unavoidably unpopular because Bradford challenged the most unexamined and therefore the most fervently held part of American mythology and amour propre. ¹

Bradford researched and studied intensively on the American founding and constitutional history. Marshall L. DeRosa notes,

The Southernness of Bradford's scholarship was professionally problematic, as is evidenced by the academic ostracisim imposed on him due to his Southern, states'-rights brand of conservatism. For example, Gary Wills' reference to Bradford as a "suicidally frank" conservative is an accurate observation that reveals as much about the ideologically charged prevailing political climate as it does about Bradford. Such biases notwithstanding, M.E. Bradford's scholarship merits the attention of scholars and policy makers not merely as a curiosity but as a significant answer to nationalists—especially those on the U.S. Supreme Court—who rationalzie a model of national supremcacy not only inconsistent with an original intent model of American federalism, but the rule of law itself. ²

Like Edmund Burke and John C. Calhoun, Bradford refused to be "blindly enamored by abstractions such as natural rights" which was "attributable to this reliance on real life experiences and hsitorical events (manifested in biographies, literature, art, history, and politics) as the materials for his thereotical constructs."³ Bradford was always hopeful, in spite of the formidable odds, that a viable federal paradigm could be reestablished and states' sovereignty regarding the traditional police powers of health, safety, morals and welfare could be restored. Bradford's constitutional and political scholarship, such as A Better Guide Than Reason: Federalists and Anti-Federalists and Original Intentions: On the Making and Ratification of the United States Constitution should inculcate the student with a deeper appreciation of what was, is, and possibly will continue to be the nature of the American constitutional order.

Bibliography

A Defender of Southern Conservatism: M.E. Bradford and His Achievements, Clyde Wilson, ed., (Columbia, MO: Univ. of Miss. Press, 1999)

Works Cited