M. E. Bradford

Melvin E. "Mel" Bradford was a conservative political commentator and professor of literature at the University of Dallas. Bradford is seen as a leading figure of the paleoconservative wing of the conservative movement. He died just as the term paleoconservative was being coined and preferred the term traditional conservative. In his preface to Reactionary Imperative, he wrote "Reaction is a necessary term in the intellectual context we inhabit in the twentieth century because merely to conserve is sometimes to perpetuate what is outrageous." Bradford's conservatism was rooted within the heritage and traditions of the American South. He studied at Vanderbilt and wrote his doctoral thesis under the Southern Agrarian and Fugitive Poet Donald Davidson, and thus was admitted to the succession of this movement to recover the Southern tradition. Bradford was first and foremost a literary scholar and a student of rhetoric. He was known in literary circles for his work on William Faulkner, where Bradford stressed the importance of the Southern setting and the primacy of community in understanding the action of Faulkner's novels and stories.