Hoffman Nickerson and a coterie of essayists in the 1920s and 1930s comprised the “Old Right,” a loose confederation of thinkers and writers animated by anti-modernism, suspicion of democracy, and worries over the debasement of Western culture.
In 1934, the cartoonist David Low created the cartoon character of “Colonel Blimp,” an exaggerated caricature of older British officers preserved in Boer War amber, overweight, sporting droopy walrus moustaches, and pontificating in an over-the-top Tory reactionary manner that bemoaned the Empire’s decline since Queen Victoria. “Gad, sir, Lord Beaverbrook is right,” a towel-clad Blimp declares in a London club sauna. “We must refuse to take part in another world war unless arrangements are made to hold it in the British Empire.” In another, “Gad, sir, Lord Reverbeer is right. We should explain to the natives in India that British troops are there only to protect them from massacre, and if they don’t accept that then shoot ‘em all down.” Blimpish characters thereafter became a staple of British culture. One thinks of Lord Henry Ames in Michael Palin’s droll 1982 film The Missionary, where his Lordship declares, “I once had a chap before me who’d been caught stealing from the mess. I ordered every alternate fingernail to be removed, and you know, I still get a card from him every Christmas.” Or alternately, “You see, what I think is wrong with the country today is that there aren’t enough people chained up.” Or again, writing a complaining letter and asking Lady Ames, “Are there two ‘ls’ in “disembowelment?” Blimp’s character was meant as critical satire, of course, mocking pig-headed establishment elders blind to Hitler’s rise, but the rotund colonel soon became a sympathetic figure, since everyone recognized in him the aging veteran of every community due more respect than mockery. His fullest redemption came in the 1943 The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, where the now technicolor officer faces personal and political challenges and rallies behind the war effort.
The United States had its Blimps too. When Hoffman Nickerson died in 1965, the conservative columnist John Chamberlain recalled that he “looked a bit like the English cartoon character ‘Colonel Blimp’…. The old man was a fierce libertarian who thought modern civilization had started on its downward path when Napoleon tried to out the whole French nation in arms.” The description was perfectly apt, as the mustachioed Long Islander, buffeted by a Harvard degree and an inherited fortune, carved out a long career as writer and military commentator. Nickerson and a coterie of essayists in the 1920s and 1930s comprised the “Old Right,” a loose confederation of thinkers and writers animated by anti-modernism, suspicion of democracy, and worries over the debasement of Western culture. “It was ‘reactionary’ in the best and most genuine sense,” the economist Murray Rothbard remembered, “It was a horrified reaction against the Roosevelt Revolution, against the Great Leap Forward toward collectivism that enraptured socialist intellectuals and enraged those who were devoted to the institutions and the strict limitations on centralized government power that marked the Old Republic.” Headquartered largely on the East Coast, its ranks were populated by the diverse likes of Albert Jay Nock, Irving Babbitt, Paul Elmer More, H L. Mencken, and John T. Flynn. Among its forgotten luminaries was Hoffman Nickerson of Oyster Bay.[1]
To say Nickerson was born into fortunate circumstances undersells the case. Both his father and grandfather were respected Episcopal ministers from an old Cape Cod family: the latter left the sea captain’s life for the altar at age fifty-five and the former served in parishes in New Jersey and Massachusetts. A Phillips Andover and Harvard graduate (where he became chummy with Teddy Roosevelt), Nickerson’s father married Mary Louisa Hoffman in January 1888 (Hoffman was born the following December) and while the Nickersons were comfortable, the Hoffmans were rich. She was daughter of Eugene Augustus Hoffman, dean of the General Theological Seminary and fixture of Gilded Age New York City society, rumored to be “the richest clergyman in America.” The Hoffman fortune at the Dean’s death in 1902 was worth $10 million (a whopping $357 million in today’s dollars) based largely in Fifth Avenue real estate and was divided among his four children. When Mary Louisa died in 1911, young Hoffman Nickerson inherited her entire estate as her only child.
Nickerson could have lived as an idle gentleman but instead embraced the active life. A talented athlete, he became a nationally-ranked tennis player and at Harvard gained notoriety for penning anti-socialist verse entitled “The Harvard Radicalettes” attacking Samuel A. Eliot (whose father Charles W. Eliot had been college president) for supporting Emma Goldman:
We hang our heads in shame
To speak his grandson’s name
Unhonored, who by dint
Of yellow journal’s print
Has spread his name abroad
To win the worthless laud
Of those who go about
With clamor and with shout
In high unselfish guise
To flout the good and wise
And ravish for their spoil
The fruit of others’ toil
With social dynamite
More base than open fight.
After a brief stint in the New York Legislature and upon America’s entry into World War One, he joined the American Expeditionary Force and served as an ordinance officer in France. The experience was transformative and for the remainder of his life he meditated on the meaning and conduct of war to Western nations.[2]
Back in the United States, Nickerson settled down with his wife and family to begin a prolific literary career. After a larkish stab at a history of the Inquisition, which he used as a cudgel to throttle Prohibition (“a parasitic growth which has fastened itself upon the Constitution” and “sectarian Protestant religious persecution”), he turned toward more serious topics. Three lodestars guided his intellectual course: Irving Babbitt, Hilaire Belloc, and Charles Maurras.[3]
Babbitt had been one of Nickerson’s Harvard professors and the New Yorker imbibed the tenets of what became the philosophical movement of New Humanism. “No commander trained in Napoleon’s school ever sought victory over the principal mass of a hostile army with a more single mind than that with which Babbitt devoted himself to attacking the vast chaos of contemporary life and thought and to replacing that chaos with a truly human order,” Nickerson eulogized after Babbitt’s death. But the student pushed further than the mentor. Babbitt’s greatest shortcoming was his inability to move from theory to action, from the lecture hall to polemical journalism and the streets. “If on the positive side his doctrine omitted so much that doubtless … his Humanists will never be more than Auxiliaries skirmishing usefully on the flanks of the great legions of a returning Christendom; nevertheless when our civilization has succeeded in reintegrating itself he will prove not the least of the reconstructors of order.” Nickerson saw himself as finishing Babbitt’s project.[4]
Alas for Nickerson, appreciation was a one-way street. Babbitt himself (and his close friend and collaborator Paul Elmer More) mistrusted his understudy. When Nickerson published an article attacking Harvard president Abbott Lawrence Lowell over his humorless criticism of musical comedy – labeling Lowell’s moralistic flailing “the last struggles of an expiring Puritanism” – and called Babbitt and More to his side, the New Humanist sage called him “distinctly unbalanced.”[5]
Nickerson was closer to Belloc, whom he addressed as “Cher Maître” for his eloquent defenses of Europe’s heroic Christian past and visited him constantly throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Indeed, he entered Belloc’s inner circle in 1937 after divorcing his wife and marrying the Englishman’s private secretary Jane “Bonnie” Soames. Yet the independent-minded Nickerson was no Belloc clone and in American journals pointedly critiqued the latter’s economic philosophy of Distributism. While he sympathized with the concept of wide property ownership, Britain and America were very different places. British Distributists criticized capitalism and concentrated property ownership, but in the United States capitalism guaranteed property rights and land redistribution or retributive taxes on the rich assailed the “prescriptive rights” of landowners. “The cement of society is justice but for the sake of peace human justice must respect prescriptive, vested right,” Nickerson threatened. “If you suddenly and severely disturb custom, the result is disorder for which the only remedy is force.”[6]
Distributism struck the wealthy New Yorker as silly Jeffersonian idealism, that new landowners would spontaneously transform into responsible and frugal stewards by owning a few acres of soil. Government grants of money and land without recipients earning it created an ownership class without the virtues necessary for maintaining wealth. Nickerson voiced the traditional conservative lament:
They are far more likely to consume this gift from the gods in record time, trusting to another government hand-out when supplies run short. Instead of more respect for property they will have less. Man usually values and respects that for which he has laboured, he often respects that which has been left him by his ancestors, how can he respect that which is dumped into his lap by a government department? The root of the difficulty is the irresponsible proletarian mentality. Propertyless masses exist where people would rather spend than save, where they prefer immediate enjoyment to independence.
Even Belloc’s friend G.K. Chesterton came in for criticism. “We often see in him an anti-social and subversive mood,” Nickerson grumbled, winking and nodding at Robin Hood and the discomfitures of the rich.[7]
Nickerson’s greatest influence came from France. With little exaggeration, he was America’s premier Maurrassian. He worshipped the French reactionary, knew him personally from frequent Paris sojourns, and facilitated Belloc’s confabs with Maurras in the 1920s. Despite his Anglo-Catholicism, Nickerson hailed the agnostic Frenchman as defender of the Catholic Church and the European social order, even composing a pseudo-prayer in 1924:
Come, Maurras, Master and Captain of the Allies of the Church, be propitious with me. Forget, if only for a moment, the folly and sorrow of thine own dear country in order to inspire us here. Lend me something of thy clear spirit, thy rapier logic, and thy serene ardor, for thou hast enough and to spare. Lend me of thy love for the age-long sanctities wherein thou dost not believe. As for the Doric loveliness of thy style, I ask it not – for it is thine own and immortal, and it could grow under no other hand. If thou wilt inspire me then I will shrink from no task.
Nickerson recommended Maurras to readers as “the chief intellectual force of the world-wide counter-revolution” and grouped him with Babbitt, More, Chesterton, and Belloc as sources of cultural resurrection. Maurras believed in “fixed political laws” (that man “can no more achieve perfect wisdom or virtue than he can grow wings or six legs”), that democracy in large states devolves into unstable plutocracies with periodic spasms of populist revolt, and that monarchies promised greater stability than any elected government. Nickerson heartily agreed, calling modern democracies “a mere façade of fine words.”[8]
Fortified by these influences, Nickerson published numerous articles particularly in Seward Collins’ controversial American Review, where he and the neo-Gothic Jacobite architect Ralph Adams Cram represented the Tory aristocratic faction alongside the New Humanists, Southern Agrarians, English Distributists, and Catholic Neo-Thomists. “Its writers often surveyed the wreckage of a once cohesive Christian culture, an organic society that provided individuals a sense of place, and a political arrangement based on privileged but benevolent elite leadership,” historian J. David Hoeveler, Jr. declared of the Review. “But the Western world had now become a mass society of uprooted souls, bereft of any sense of belonging, alienated, and directionless.” Anti-socialist, anti-modern, anti-democratic, and enthused over Catholicism’s defense of traditional social order, the Review became a depository of conservative and reactionary writing. In his articles and books, including The American Rich (1930), Can We Limit War? (1933), The Armed Horde (1940, which he dedicated to Cram) and The New Slavery (1947), Nickerson commented widely on historical and contemporary issues. Three themes dominated his writing: defense of the “leisure class,” a love of monarchy, and the destructiveness of democratic wars.[9]
While no Italian “Iron Law of Oligarchy” thinker, Hoffman Nickerson defended the presence and necessity of inequality. In the wake of the French Revolution, political equality failed to deliver fraternity and most often devolved into “class hatreds,” but economic inequality signaled a healthy society and a well-functioning market. “Economic inequality is inseparable from civilization,” he proclaimed in The American Rich. “The appetite for equality is sharpened by the baser side of human nature quite as much as is the appetite for distinction.” Indeed, most men labored with the internal dissonance of decrying inequality and yet craved distinction and the social esteem of others. Drives for equality were “violent and catastrophic” and sudden, while the wish for distinction was natural and steady, and when violent waves of egalitarianism finally waned, distinction returned.[10]
The primary reason agitators attacked the wealthy as undeserving and rallied for equality was a division that opened up in Colonial America between a landowning leisure class (descendants of medieval “nobles”) and mere businessmen (latter-day “merchants”), civic-minded squires serving the community and work-obsessed millionaires (half of whom were alcoholics, Nickerson scoffed) just making money. Several forces worked to crush this American leisure class. Low church Protestant “bible-christians” with a “consistent, thought-out, and finished scheme of theology and therefore of morals” obsessed over man’s sinfulness and the leisure class’s “undeserved grace.” In addition, the western frontier sustained the “bible-christian” contempt of leisure, since clearing land and planting settlements was hard work: “From the Atlantic to the prairies the pioneer American had to hack and burn every step of the way.” Finally, Nickerson mourned the decline of primogeniture and the decreasing quality of elites. The training needed for managing vast fortunes created higher quality leaders than what resulted from egalitarian divisions of property between siblings. All three left Americans with a deep hostility toward “leisure” because they confused it with laziness, or in Nickerson’s droll formulation, “that the man who withholds his energies from the task of making money for his wife to spend is a futile and probably vicious fellow.”[11]
But public service was wide open for the leisure class to do good, he insisted. “American politics cries out for relief from the second-rate lawyers and pathetic little clerks whose responsibilities are greater than their narrow shoulders can bear.” Arts and letters too depended upon independent wealth both for creators and patrons, Edith Wharton for example. Here, Nickerson sounded a note played by both Babbitt and his Harvard classmate T.S. Eliot: “Even without reference to creative talent, the mere intelligent patronage of a leisure class would mean much to letters and the arts. In both, it would help rid us of the cult of originality through eccentric ugliness; it would be hard to imagine such a class so stupid as to hope for artistic progress not rooted in tradition.” One also hears in Nickerson’s critique the distant notes of James Fitzjames Stephen’s assault on eccentricity for its own sake, the immature longing to be noticed rather than making genuine contributions to the advance of knowledge.
Political and creative talent, however, needed to be educated in its ways; geniuses never popped up as Romantic fantasies suggested. America needed to train its gentlemen in the practical skills of leadership and responsibility, both achieved through classical studies in Latin and Greek rather than sciences that “analyze neither human nature nor society … They deal not with man but with things.” But anti-civilizational subversives and “radical-democrats,” many of them envious idealistic college professors living off tax dollars and university endowments and hiding behind credentials, thwart education. Just look at his own Harvard, Nickerson complained, where a great university surrendered to democratic chaos. They exalt science and technology, condemn differential training for an American elite, and antagonize class divisions: “Tell the poor man that he is naturally virtuous, and in particular that his ignorance is itself a virtue, tell him further that the rich men who seem to be having a better time than himself are naturally wicked (Roosevelt’s ‘malefactors of great wealth’), and he may be pardoned for seeing organized society as a vast mysterious conspiracy of which he is the victim.” All this leads to a down-sloped politics of candidates bragging of their lack of education and racing to prove who is most average. A debased education leads to a debased politics.[12]
Nickerson’s defense of a landed leisure class pointed to his preference for monarchy over democracy. Parliaments and congresses sank under the weight of incompetence and members like US congressmen were “an unrecognizable dust of mediocrities” and “perfect cowards” chiefly concerned with reelection and the orders of cash-in-hand lobbyists. Trusting in the electorate to elect better men to office was more Jeffersonian fantasy: “The idea is attractive and simple. All we have to do is to replace our present representative with saints and sages. Unfortunately, there do not seem enough to go around; moreover, the holiness and wisdom of those we have is disputed.” Instead, the answer lay with the rejuvenation of monarchy and thankfully, he noted, the United States was already blessed with an elected monarchy in the presidency, for which he dearly thanked Alexander Hamilton. Expand presidential powers even further and allow executives to propose legislation, control national budgets, and exercise absolute veto powers.[13]
Nickerson believed monarchy encompassed four desirable qualities: Flexibility, Unity, Decisiveness, and Conformity with Human Nature. Kingship worked in small or large states, those motivated by equality (or not), and those with democratic impulses (or not) since monarchs were “the nation incarnate.” It tended towards political unity and mediated social differences: “In this no democracy can equal it,” he wrote in 1930. “Not even a revered aristocracy can so well play the part of a mediator set above sharp racial and religious divisions.” In times of crisis, monarchs acted with decision as opposed to the endless chatter and delays of parliamentary democracy, witness Andrew Jackson’s decisiveness in the Nullification Crisis against congressional dithering. Finally, of all governmental forms, monarchy best reflected human nature:
More than any other form of government it adapts itself to the enormous and universal human fact of imperfection, which theologians have more vigorously termed original sin.… Everybody’s business is nobody’s business, but monarchy identifies the public interest with the private interest of the most powerful man in the community. This is preeminently true in regard to corruption; the monarch has more to lose by it than any other citizen, and the nature of his power makes him a fearful weapon against evil-doers.
History shows bad kings in power, he admitted, but sinister democratic majorities were deadlier. “At the very worst an exceptionally wicked monarch can sometimes be killed. But who can assassinate a tyrannous majority?”[14]
Nickerson’s model president was not some medieval divine right monarch but a corporate CEO and his model congress a stockholders’ meeting. Indeed, the entire state apparatus should be remodeled along corporate lines:
It exists for the single purpose of making money for its stockholders. Its range of activities, however great, is therefore unified by the impossibility of divisions arising except as to the means of attaining its one obvious goal. It is thus far better suited than a modern state for assembly government. It has its large assembly, the stockholders’ meeting, and it has its smaller assembly of elected representatives, the directors.
Corporations do not constantly take the temperature of stockholders and quasi-monarchical company presidents are retained so long as profits continue. They seek advice and counsel all the time but at their own volition. On this model, American government would become a public sector version of the General Electric Corporation. At times Nickerson sounded like a cross between Thomas Hobbes and a Depression-era Curtis Yarvin.[15]
Over the past two-hundred years, as opposed to monarchies, democracies made wars cataclysmically bloody affairs. Emanating from the imperfections of the human condition, war and conflict were inevitable and no amount of pacifism, idealistic hopes, and peace conventions could alter that fact. The Reformation and the crackup of Christendom made European wars more likely and exponentially bloodier and revolutions quickly followed civilizational division leading to the eighteenth-century contagion of mass suffrage, majority-rule, nationalistic patriotism, and the specter of mass conscripted warfare. Regimes based on democratic equality post-1789 only brought “equality in suffering” and a new “democratic era of mass massacre,” the final fruits of which lay in the mud of Flanders:
Thus in 1914 after a century of unparalleled material development, during which democratic ideas had steadily gained ground, few in Europe imagined what a general and prolonged universal-service war would be like. By the end of 1918 all were wiser.… Without democracy, although a certain amount of war is and presumably always will be inevitable, nevertheless its ferocity and destruction might be kept within bounds by setting up governments independent of election and therefore not compelled alternately to rouse public opinion and to cringe before it.
The next war will be worse, one reviewer of Nickerson’s Can We Limit War? commented, “unless we can break the vicious circle of democratic passions, chaos leading to universal service, vehement nationalism deliberately organizing the military technique which has been the natural expression of social upheaval, then an increased dose of universal service, leading back to social chaos again.” Democratic revolutions spawn conscript armies and mass society, creating devastating wars which in turn create new revolutions, new rounds of chaos, and “battlefields hundreds of miles long.”[16]
Hoffman Nickerson’s writings are both illuminating and entertaining, a mix of Old Right inspiration and laughable Blimpish bluntness, but his blind spots are also worthy of note. He harshly opposed any attempts to break down Southern segregation, calling them “an idle dream.” Following his muse Maurras, Nickerson too often descended into cringy anti-Semitism, stubbornly insisted on the guilt of Alfred Dreyfus, and devoted an entire chapter of The American Rich (which New York rabbis condemned in the New York Times) to critiquing Jewish links to socialism and communism. In the 1940s, critics resurrected his anti-Jewish comments and charged him with sympathy for the Axis powers, which he stoutly denied and counter-charged such tactics would “make more difficult the desirable goal of inter-racial and inter-religious peace.” On his hostility toward democracy, he answered, “I am unaware of any material difference between my opinion of it and the opinion of the Founding Fathers.”[17]
In the pages of the American Review, Nickerson also frequently admired Benito Mussolini. In an era of decadence, disorder, and political corruption after World War One, Italy was “equal to the emergency” and Fascism restored order and Italy’s international prestige. “Warned by the Russian example, the intelligence and virility of Italy produced Fascism, which beat down the local Reds in a long series of street fights,” he proclaimed in 1936. “The Fascist is not perfect. But at least he has applied his violence to the enemies of society. At least he has set up states ruled neither by business men nor revolutionaries.” The appeal came not from deep philosophical affinity – although it is worth noting that Bonnie Nickerson translated the first English edition of Mussolini’s Doctrine of Fascism in 1933 (four years before they were married) with Leonard and Virginia Wolff’s left-wing Hogarth Press – but from practical worries over social chaos and Nickerson’s belief in Fascism’s transitional role in returning to monarchy. Monarchs were always superior to dictators, Fascist or otherwise. “We cannot tell how far the monarchies of the future will be elective, hereditary, or self-appointed. The hereditary plan – given a true monarchy and not a sham or puppet labeled a constitutional King – is preferable to a self-appointed dictatorship because it peaceably regulates the succession when a monarch dies, instead of throwing matters open to a free-for-all competition among ambitious candidates.” Leaders like Mussolini, even if lacking the legitimacy of monarchs, restored stability and allowed for “the reconstruction of our disordered society.”[18]
After World War Two, Nickerson slowly faded from public view. In the 1952 presidential campaign, he loudly backed Robert Taft for the Republican nomination (calling Eisenhower’s allies “Me-tooers, international spenders, Trumanites and Wallaceites, [and] big bankers”) and gained national notice as one of Taft’s biggest New York boosters. In 1955, when William F. Buckley founded National Review, Nickerson helped fund the magazine and lunched with its conservative luminaries in Manhattan. A Buckley biographer reported on these gatherings:
There might be one or more guests – writers with whom the magazine wanted to make contact (future contributors Arnold Beichman and Ernest van den Haag turn up on early lists), European visitors (Otto von Habsburg, Erik von Kuehnelt-Liddihn), or local supporters of the magazine (the military historian Hoffman Nickerson, whose second wife, Bonnie, had been Hilaire Belloc’s research assistant).
By the time Nickerson died in March 1965, his son Eugene eclipsed his father’s celebrity as Nassau County Executive, an unsuccessful Democratic candidate for New York governor, and a federal judge.[19]
American Old Rightists were a quirky, temperamental, disorganized bunch covering a spectrum from Albert Jay Nock’s individualism to H. L. Mencken’s Nietzschean-inflected libertarianism to Ralph Adams Cram’s medievalism to Babbitt and More’s austere New Humanism. As historian Gregory L. Schneider describes it:
The Old Right lacked the institutions necessary to confront the New Deal political revolution… Old Rightists lacked the popular touch and were willing to castigate ‘the people’ as willing dupes of Roosevelt and other Left-wing influences in America such as labor union leaders and the communist party. Mass democracy particularly alarmed conservatives; combined with the development of a managerial state, they increasingly interpreted the historical situation as a revolutionary one, in which the old Republic and constitutional government would be undermined.
Hoffman Nickerson fits into this like a jigsaw puzzle piece, joining Cram and the American Review crew on the Tory aristocratic end of the scale. The American Colonel Blimp was the Squire of Oyster Bay.[20]
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Notes:
[1] Oneonta Star, 8 August 1965; Murray Rothbard, “Life in the Old Right,” Chronicles, 1 August 1994.
[2] Granville Hicks, John Reed: The Making of a Revolutionary (New York, 1936) 74.
[3] Hoffman Nickerson, The Inquisition: A Political and Military Study of its Establishment (London, 1923) 220-21. Hilaire Belloc wrote the book’s preface.
[4] Hoffman Nickerson, “Babbitt,” American Review, February 1934, 386, 404.
[5] Hoffman Nickerson, “In Defense of Musical Comedy,” Forum, September 1912; Humanistic Letters: The Irving Babbitt-Paul Elmer More Correspondence, ed. Eric Alder (Columbia, MO, 2023) 189-90.
[6] Michael Jay Tucker, And Then They Loved Him: Seward Collins and the Chimera of an American Fascism (New York, 2006) 105; Hoffman Nickerson, “Property and Tactics,” American Review, October 1935, 557-58.
[7] Nickerson, “Property and Tactics,” 559-60.
[8] Hoffman Nickerson, “On Alliance with Rome,” Commonweal, 12 November 1924, 6-7; Hoffman Nickerson, “Maurras,” American Review, December 1934, 158, 163-65.
[9] J. David Hoeveler, Jr., “American Review, 1933-1937” in The Conservative Press in Twentieth-Century America, eds. Ronald Lora and William Henry Longton (Westport, CT, 1999) 236.
[10] Hoffman Nickerson, The American Rich (New York, 1930) 5-7.
[11] Ibid, 9-24, 71-86.
[12] Ibid, 96-118. Following Babbitt, Nickerson takes particular care in skewering Rousseau: “Modern democracy has come to smell so strongly of Rousseau that the thing itself may have to go in order to rid the world of the stench, like a man who has persisted too long in the intimacy of a skunk … No one excelled his followers in exalting the tramp and bum.”
[13] Hoffman Nickerson, “The Collapse of Parliaments,” American Review, June 1933, 205; Hoffman Nickerson, Twilight of Legislatures,” American Mercury, February 1930, 131, 133.
[14] Hoffman Nickerson, “Elective Monarchy in America,” American Mercury, June 1930, 129-132.
[15] Nickerson, “Twilight of Legislatures,” 133-34.
[16] John Chamberlain, Review of Can We Limit War?, New York Times, 23 February 1954; Hoffman Nickerson, “Democracy and Mass Massacre,” American Mercury, April 1932, 398-99; Frank H. Simmons, Review of Can We Limit War?, Saturday Review of Books, 3 March 1934, 522-23; Nickerson, “Elective Monarchy in America,” 132.
[17] Hoffman Nickerson, “The South and the One-Party System,” Georgia Review, Fall 1948, 282; New York Times, 16 February 1931; Hoffman Nickerson letter to the editor, New York History, July 1942, 341-5.
[18] Nickerson, “The Collapse of Parliaments,” 206, 209-10; Hoffman Nickerson, “Gentlemen Wanted,” American Review, September 1936, 440-41; Nickerson, “Property and Tactics,” 569.
[19] Florence Times, 2 July 1952; Linda Bridges and John R. Coyne, Jr., Strictly Right: William F. Buckley, Jr. and the American Conservative Movement (Hoboken, NJ, 2007) 44.
[20] Gregory L. Schneider, The Conservative Century: From Reaction to Revolution (New York, 2009) 2-3.
The featured image is “A Fishing Party Off Long Island” (1860), by Junius Brutus Stearns, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
