YU News
James McClellan, RIP
By
Jan 30, 2005, 10:55

James McClellan, RIP

Yorktown University’s family suffered a grievous loss on Friday, January 28, when Professor James McClellan died at his home in Meherrin, Virginia.

Professor McClellan, “Jim,” was a great inspiration to all of us concerned about the philosophy of limited government of the Founders of the Constitution of the United States, and we will miss him terribly.

Working with Russell Kirk, he published a biography of Senator Taft of Ohio that was an important milepost in our understanding of the recovery of the conservative persuasion in American politics.

The Great Depression challenged the foundations of the American republic at a time when it seemed the entire world was falling into the abyss.  That economic event, however, was just a capstone in a long decline of American political and cultural order that began with radical changes in American life brought about by Progressives who asserted the powers of the state over the forces of free markets and public choice.

The election of Woodrow Wilson, brought about by the challenge to the Republican Party by Bullmoose progressive Theodore Roosevelt, gave us a thoroughly modern president whose foreign policy created the power vacuum in Europe that led to the rise of the murderous Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin.

The Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, the Vietnam War, and the political consequences and social disruptions they brought, left the United States at the end of the 20^th century with a public sector that dominates all private life, a disrupted civil society, cultural divisions greater than those that threw the nation into Civil War in the 1860s, and seriously challenged institutions of church, academe, and family.

The first movement toward recovery of traditional order in the wake of half a century or more of disorder began with journalists such as Westbrook Pegler, and many others, who looked askance at the growth of the state, and personal power of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Senator Robert A. Taft rallied the business community against monopoly union power, and attracted a new generation of political activists to politics.  Jim McClellan and Russell Kirk wrote the history of that attempt at political recovery in The Political Principles of Robert A. Taft. His other publications include Joseph Story and the American Constitution, The Federalist: A Student Edition (co-editor with George Carey), Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787 (co-editor), Liberty, Order & Justice, and New Views on the Constitution.  

Jim also published a bevy of journal and law review articles that were--and are--often cited by leading scholars and jurists.  The text for his course at Yorktown University on the Origins of the Constitution of the United States was published by the Liberty Fund and is installed for free access by his students in his course.

Of Jim's major works, Joseph Story and the American Constitution remains the most prominent: it is a classic study of jurisprudence in Early Republic and Early National periods of American political life.  In reading this tome, which is still a central text for the study of American constitutionalism (and still in print from the University of Oklahoma Press), one can know and appreciate the advantages of a constitutional republic.

Dr. McClellan earned a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Virginia and a J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law.  He taught American Government and Constitutional Law at the University of Alabama, Emory University, Hampden-Sydney College, and Claremont McKenna College.  During the last years of his life he was James Bryce Visiting Fellow in American Studies at the Institute of United States Studies at the University of London.

That list of teaching positions reflects the itinerant character of conservative academics challenged by the domination of Academe by those for whom Bob Taft, Barry Goldwater, and Ronald Reagan were anathema.  Against them Jim McClellan sinned additionally by serving as Chief Counsel and Staff Director of the Subcommittee on the Separation of Powers of the U. S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary.  The chairman of that Committee was fellow political theorist, Dr. John East, Senator from North Carolina.  After leaving the staff of the U.S. Senate, Jim McClellan founded the Center for Judicial Studies. 

My first attempt at academic publishing as a greenhorn academic was a review of Jim’s fascinating study of Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story in The Intercollegiate Review.  Our paths crossed when I was working on an essay on Thomas Hill Green to be published in The Political Science Reviewer, a journal Jim co-founded.  Jim was an excellent, tough, editor and his criticism made that essay much better than it was originally. 

Jim was always available, responsive to questions, and full of good humor.  When Yorktown University was in need of senior Faculty, he responded immediately, and attended our first Faculty training session in Richmond, Virginia.  Later I visited him in Meherrin, Virginia, near his beloved Hampden-Sydney College, and we enjoyed an afternoon of good talk, and the type of cajoling that academics engage in when there is no reason to worry about classes, grading exams, office hours, and lawsuits. 

On this pleasant afternoon, I discovered that Jim had not heard of Heaven Hill bourbon!

“Not heard about Heaven Hill,” I teased him.  “And you’re a conservative?” For three quarters of a century, Heaven Hill was the drink of preference of southern conservative academics and writers, including William Faulkner, Donald Davidson and Allan Tate, who were, for most of their lives, genteel, but underpaid. The name of this affordable bourbon whiskey is one of those litmus tests, sort of like “What do you think of the French Revolution?” that enable us to put an asterisk alongside of the names of those who answer that question incorrectly.

Heaven Hill, now known as Evan Williams bourbon, is still quite powerful in its ability to make otherwise dour academics into wits, and raconteurs.

Despite his never having touched a drop of Heaven Hill, Jim McClellan was a wonderful man, a good friend, a good father, and a loving husband. Last year his son died from accidental drowning.  I didn’t have the heart to call him on the phone, so I wrote to him about how difficult it must be to lose a son.  His handwritten reply was a very human testament to the losses we mortals must endure because God’s creation allows for death, infirmity and, of course, freedom.  We do not choose our time of departure, but we prepare for that day by living lives that are commendable to God and to our fellow man.  James McClellan lived a commendable life.

Richard J. Bishirjian