The community of Southern scholars lost a very good friend. 

Dr. Thomas H. Landess passed away in his beloved South Carolina on Sunday, January 8.   

Dr. Landess was a person who made many friends, of which the community of scholars at Yorktown University is one, readers of Chronicles of Culture, and former associates at the University of South Carolina, Converse College, the University of Dallas and the U.S. Department of Education.

I met Dr. Landess when I joined the Faculty of the University of Dallas fresh from a year of dissertation research at the London School of Economics. I don’t think I had ever been in Texas, so I was surprised upon arriving at Love Field that everything was green. Even in winter when the rest of the country was huddled inside, February in Dallas began to turn warm.  On some days you could smell salt water from the Gulf of Mexico. 

In those days, the University of Dallas had just suffered a very serious loss.  The great political theorist, Willmoore Kendall, had died.  Though to many today Willmoore Kendall is unknown, a great many students escaping the liberalism of American higher education gravitated to the University of Dallas in search of Dr. Kendall.  Upon his passing, since there was no possible way to find a successor who was his equal, the University retained the services of a series of part time instructors.  Students and administrators tired of that arrangement and they decided to bite the bullet and hire someone—anyone they could afford.

I was so young and untested that they plucked me out of London—without an interview--and that began my introduction to the real South.  Ensconced on the second floor of the Braniff Graduate School building at UD were Tom Landess and Melvin E. Bradford, holding up the honor of the South in the Literature Department.  Just an office or two away was Dr. Frederick Wilhelmsen, professor of philosophy and founding editor of Triumph Magazine.  Like Lee’s forces at Appomattox, they were surrounded by “others.”

This is an account of the heroic life of Dr. Thomas Landess, so I will not recall by name those other people, some Southern, some not even Yankees, who felt that the Triad of Wilhelmsen, Landess and Bradford were, well, too conservative. 

The South if nothing else retains a patina of civility, thus nothing was ever said in public as it is said up North, that would disrupt civil discussions.  But, Dr. Landess and his colleagues Bradford and Wilhelmsen were in the fight of their lives. Had Willmoore Kendall lived they might have won that fight.

The South, let it be said, is a very unique culture and self conscious of itself as different from other parts of the country.  Though defeated in war and dominated for many years by fools, buffoons, corrupt politicians and later, bankers, Southern scholarship particularly in Literary Criticism and Literature was “world class.” 

Southern critics and writers were the equal of the best of their European counterparts and became a substitute for philosophical investigation and explication.

Southern literature explored the human condition, probed it, exposed it and experienced reality in light of experience of transcendence. William Faulkner, Caroline Gordon, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren and later Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy and James Dickey created a community of authors unrivalled in so many ways that Northern writers never understood. 

In their wake there developed a retinue of literary critics housed at Vanderbilt University and elsewhere.  Tom Landess, Bill Corrington, M. E. Bradford, Marion Montgomery and a handful of others fashioned a body of scholarship that illuminated the writings of these Southern writers and something very real, exciting and transcendent occurred. 

Largely because Christianity had not been destroyed in the South as it had been in the North, Flannery O’Connor, Tom Landess, Mel Bradford, Bill Corrington and Marion Montgomery discovered and came to admire the philosophical writings of Eric Voegelin. Tom Landess was responsible for bringing Voegelin to the University of Dallas when he was Dean of Students and thus gave Voegelin, who had taught many years at LSU, an opportunity to teach another generation of Southern critics an insight into philosophy that hitherto they had not known.

It was at the University of Dallas where all these forces came together in the late 1960s where Tom Landess, Mel Bradford and Louise Cowan fashioned a graduate program that drew conservative activists, students of literature, and intelligent undergraduates. Had Bradford and Landess been able to stay the course, Dallas would have rivaled the University of Chicago, the New School in New York, and Claremont Graduate School in California where the acolytes of Leo Strauss dominated the political philosophy curriculum. 

They were not able to control the course of Faculty appointments, however, and Tom Landess retired to become a professional writer residing on Edisto Island, South Carolina.  Fritz Wilhelmsen and Mel Bradford stayed at UD but became a minority of two with national reputations. 

Tom Landess was a member of the Founding Faculty of Yorktown University where he developed a course titled “Writing as a Small Business.”  The lectures in that course are now available to the public at www.edulectures.com. 

Thomas H. Landess leaves so many friends and family that it is impossible to list them here.  But, suffice it to say that he shall be remembered by thousands of admirers, fellow writers, scholarly colleagues, students and grateful politicians for whom he was their “ghost” when they desired to publish their autobiographies.

Rest in peace, my friend and may God bless your grieving family, especially your gracious wife, Mary Beth, and children and the friends who loved you.