“We have to get rid of a few old stereotypes we have lived by,” Richmond journalist James Kilpatrick surmised in 1961, “to begin some gradual adaptation to a genuinely new order of things … that will see the Negroes treated fairly as individuals, but will stop short of surrendering our institutions to a race of people unqualified to administer them” (143). This newsman's words proved prophetic in the years after the 1964 Civil Rights Act's passage when a more color-blind conservatism prevented federally mandated desegregation from yielding full social integration. Historians usually tell that story from the top or bottom, but not William Hustwit. His 2013 James J. Kilpatrick: Salesman for Segregation looks at an “intermediary figure” (3) whose reporting introduced frustrated white suburbanites to leading Republicans offering a pointed critique of liberal policies poised to transform schools, neighbourhoods, and workplaces.
Kilpatrick's four-decade career also answers an important question for scholars of the modern conservative and civil rights movements: why did some segregationist leaders survive the 1960s? This “underappreciated yet significant figure on the political right” (2), for example, went on to thrive as a syndicated columnist, conservative commentator, and television personality. Hustwit attributes this success to Kilpatrick's shrewd adaptation of a worldview forged during his Oklahoma boyhood. His father gave him a reverence for the free market, limited governance, and social custom, which, on the Plains, dictated that whites and blacks stay separate and unequal. Kilpatrick held firm to these values during the Depression, a period that reaffirmed Kilpatrick's faith in individual initiative, not public assistance. His work ethic also served him well at the University of Missouri, Columbia's journalism school and then the Richmond News Leader. Kilpatrick thrived in the Virginia capital, where he found himself immersed in Harry Byrd's political machine, welcomed into elite Southern circles, and skilled at reporting the ins and outs of Richmond court proceedings. Talent, diligence, and enthusiasm landed Kilpatrick the editorship when he was just shy of thirty. Yet he was still impressionable. His publisher introduced Kilpatrick to major thinkers, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Locke, Alexis de Tocqueville, Edmund Burke, and Russell Kirk, who further shaped the young journalist's writings on race relations, small government, and conservatism.
But Kilpatrick really established himself after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. This desegregation decree prompted him to resurrect Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and John Calhoun in defence of a state's right to “interpose” itself between the citizens and the federal government. Kilpatrick's arguments were rooted in a legal interpretation of the Constitution, not the sort of racial demagoguery usually associated with massive resistance. His arguments played well with readers in and outside Richmond. “After six weeks,” one moderate magazine noted, “the strange new word ‘interposition’ entered the vocabulary of most adult Virginians and of politicians all over the South” (52). Leading members of the conservative movement also lauded Kilpatrick's reasoning. National Review's William Buckley was the first to give him a national audience. Such invitations increased after Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential run, which impressed upon editors the need for conservative voices. Kilpatrick's rise to political prominence was meteoric: by 1966 almost a hundred newspapers carried his biweekly column. Yet his readership only grew because he turned his legal reasoning into a general appeal to the silent majority, not a pointed argument for de jure segregation. That evolution soon made him a Washington insider and a recognizable name once he established his place among the conservative talking heads who defined the combative television news programming starting to remake American journalism in its contemporary form.
Yet George Will, Pat Buchanan, and Robert Novak were better known than Kilpatrick, despite Hustwit's assertion that “his greatest victory in shaping the language of race … would come after the civil rights revolution occurred, at a time more amenable to his conservative beliefs” (142). Kilpatrick still seems to be just one voice among many navigating shifts in race relations, southern mores, and national politics. Kilpatrick's presentation of himself in word and print as a “country gentleman with simple southern roots” (207–8) may have made him stand out amongst his better-known contemporaries, but recent scholarship on this era's conservatism nonetheless makes clear that all of these pundits traded in what Hustwit wants to ascribe to Kilpatrick's later personal appearances and columns: “the language of the right and its adherence to private property rights, hostility toward central government, faith in disciplinary authority to defend order, adherence to free market capitalism, and indifference to racial advancement for blacks” (204).
Hustwit's attention to the suppleness and the adaptability of Kilpatrick's thought is still this book's strength. Scholarship on the right has often been reductive of the movement's complicated response to the civil rights movement. Through Kilpatrick, Hustwit shows the many ways that race was interwoven within the larger “constellation of political and economic ideas known as conservatism” (5), which sheds light on the “disturbing continuities between race and conservatism's popular causes” (4) before and after 1964. If Kilpatrick updated childhood values to confront new social realities, so too, surely, did his friends in office, fellow journalists, and loyal readers. Hence, though this biography is “limited to an account of Kilpatrick's racial beliefs” (6), Hustwit has nonetheless offered an intriguing explanation for how staunch segregationists, like Kilpatrick, lived to see the nation elect a black president, the right embrace the rhetoric of states’ rights, and the Republican Party dominate “the South and large sections of the nation” (222).
