Book Review: On America: How to Understand the Legacy of 1776

It’s summertime in the village of Mecosta, Michigan, and the semiquincentennial celebrations are well underway. A few days ago, area churches and civic organizations such as the local Daughters and Sons of the Revolution chapters came together to put on a “Colonial Social Gathering.” The full program of demonstrations and activities that evening included a special guest appearance by Benjamin Franklin, colonial dances, and a reenactment of the drafting of the Declaration of Independence. 

A mile away from the event, atop the hill above the village, is Franklin Street. At the end of that street, in a brick barn that served as his personal library for over half a century, Russell Kirk penned books, essays, speeches, articles, and letters that helped many Americans understand the unique character of this country that we call home. 

Russell Kirk (1918-1994) was best known as the “father of the modern American conservative movement.” He articulated the intellectual and cultural inheritance of the United States in works such as The Conservative Mind: from Burke to Eliot, The Roots of American Order, The American Cause, and America’s British Culture. In 1976, the same year that the United States celebrated its bicentennial with much patriotic fanfare, Kirk’s Roots of American Order first appeared. 

It is a hefty tome that argues that America is best understood as a continuation and new expression of Western heritage, rather than a break from it, as the French Revolution so disastrously aimed to be. 50 years later, it is an argument that sorely needs to be reintroduced, and is perhaps more relevant than ever today.

Read more from Andrea Kirk Assaf in From the Academy, A Journal of Academic Renewal from the Martin Center.