The following was given by James Panero at the Fourth Annual Gerald Russello Memorial Lecture on December 8, 2025, in New York City.
E.B. White famously declared that “No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.” Tonight, I feel such luck in delivering the Gerald Russello Memorial Lecture. Gerald was a friend as well as one of my writers at The New Criterion. Along with many of you in this room tonight, I was lucky to know him. If you take anything away from this presentation, I hope it will inspire you to look back on Gerald’s writings.
At The New Criterion alone, Gerald contributed some twenty articles. His topics ranged from the novels of Louis Auchincloss to the philosophy of Dietrich von Hildebrand. Robespierre to Lord Acton. Virgil and Ovid to John Jay Chapman.
The last time I saw Gerald was at a symposium we organized in 2018 on the centenary of Dr. Kirk’s birth. Here Gerald focused on a debate about law and custom. He focused on the bulwark of local authority against the consuming powers of the centralized state in a way that bears repeating:
Kirk in his writings on the law understood that if the customs of a people change, then the law changes as well, even if written texts remain the same. So it was important for citizens to be mindful of and preserve those traditions that supported local government and established practices and understandings.
Let’s keep in mind that word, local. Looking back at my own contribution to the 2018 symposium, I took up the ghost stories of Dr. Kirk—believing that his speculative fiction is not only engaging but also revealing of his worldview. As highway projects, abuses of eminent domain, and government redevelopments all seem to factor into his haunted tales, I suggested at the time that “fruitful inquests might still be made into Kirk’s dim views of post-war urban planning.” So, here we are.
I have titled my talk “The Urbanity of Russell Kirk.” My working subtitle has been, Kirk and the City. I imagine some might consider connecting the “Benevolent Sage of Mecosta,” as Willmoore Kendall called him, with any form of urban sentiment is something of a provocation. Dr. Kirk, who called himself a “northern agrarian,” might have agreed. After all, Dr. Kirk wrote his master’s thesis on Randolph of Roanoke, that aristocratic, antebellum, agrarian advocate for states’ rights. Kirk also wrote approvingly of “I’ll Take my Stand,” that famous rebel yell of the agrarian southern cause. Dr. Kirk lamented how “Jeffersonian democracy, designed for a simple agrarian people, was thrust upon an acquisitive, impatient, and often urbanized mass of men.”
In the history of twentieth century thought, we might note how Dr. Kirk kept himself apart, intellectually and geographically, from the power centers of Washington and New York. He lamented what he saw as “the Supreme Soviet of Libertarianism” among many of conservatism’s urban disciples. Instead, he moved the other way, from the Detroit suburb of Plymouth to his ancestral stump-country of central Michigan. Here he went to live in his great-grandfather’s house, in a town of some 200 souls. I am told that number is now up to 400. I am ever grateful for Dr. Kirk’s family members and the staff of the Russell Kirk Center for convening this gathering tonight some 700 miles from Main Street, Mecosta, to bring us together at Fordham University, Columbus Avenue, New York City.
Few places might seem farther apart from the megalopolis in which we now meet as Piety Hill, but the two are closer than we might think, as I believe Dr. Kirk understood. After all, we are here to honor Gerald Russello, a multi-generational New Yorker, who dedicated much of his intellectual life to Dr. Kirk. Just as Dr. Kirk addresses the agrarian, he also speaks to the metropolitan.
By way of illustration, much like Gerald, I am an American, New York born, to adapt the opening line of Saul Bellow’s Augie March. My family can trace some six generations in this town. My father, born nearly a century ago in Park Slope, Brooklyn, moved in with his grandmother, Concetta, during the Great Depression. As a boy he learned Italian from her while studying to become an architect for the city, where he worked on the designs of John F. Kennedy Airport and the World Trade Center. He raised me a few blocks from where we now meet, on 64th Street and Broadway. I now live up the street, in a building that is more than a century old. My wife is another New York born whose family still lives across the park. Our daughter attends the same school I did, where my wife now works as an English teacher. The New York we know is not some concrete jungle but one of co-op boards, tenant associations, school boards, garden groups, running clubs, religious schools, and social associations. It is family and friends over for Sunday supper. Midway upon the journey of life, I should also add that I recently became the owner of a dog named Virgil. My cucciolo now knows every handyman, doorman, dog, and dog walker in a ten block radius of home and makes sure we visit them all on our daily walks.
All this goes to say that life in the big city, at its best, is like that of a small town, one with ever lengthening shadows. With its many strong local affinities, social ties, and healthy civic life, its Burkean “little platoons,” the city of today can even approximate the villages of yesteryear better than many of America’s lamentably hollowed out and burned over traditional town centers. In many ways this is their attraction and an explanation for why so many Americans move away from their heartland hometowns to these coastal enclaves.
Dr. Kirk defended the lengthened shadows—institutional, physical, ancestral—in ways that set him apart from the majority of thinkers on both the modern left and modern right. Atomized individualism, mass consumerism, supply-siderism: the abstract *-isms of the right would be as anathema to him as the progressivism and collectivism on the left. So too an abstract universalism that erases geographic and local authority and distinction. As Gerald reminded us in that 2018 presentation,
The unwritten constitution, in Kirk’s usage, has both a spatial and temporal aspect. Geographically, state and nation overlap, but each territory has its own historical imagination and narrative of itself, which is necessary for self-government and a stable social order….
[Burke’s constitutional vision] is “attuned to the space that the Constitution preserves for local communities to defend the vulnerable and to protect traditional values.” Abstraction of either the Left or the Right will ultimately disempower citizens and eliminate the space for free self-government.
I came to Dr. Kirk as much through his fiction as his political histories. I had the honor of writing a new introduction to his bestselling novel Old House of Fear, which we republished through Criterion Books. I might argue that Dr. Kirk is best approached through literary analysis than through the social sciences, a term I am sure he would consider one of abuse. As George Nash wrote of Dr. Kirk, “In an age of the growing hegemony of the social sciences, he defiantly quoted poetry and wrote ghostly fiction with a moral twist. Indeed, I can think of no conservative in the past half century who resorted as frequently as did Kirk to works of literature to buttress his social and political commentary.” After all, while Dr. Kirk made little mention of his many honors, he prominently proclaimed the Ann Radcliffe Award he received from the Count Dracula Society. As David Frum wrote some years ago in The New Criterion, even The Conservative Mind “isn’t history; it is a work of literature meant to achieve political ends.”
In his fiction, census takers, tax collectors, and city planners are the primary villains. The ghosts of these haunted tales are the ancestral shadows taking spectral form. They are the spirits of the past taking revenge on the ignorant and arrogant of the eternal present. And very often, it is the old city and the old town these spirits are defending against those capital E experts of capital P progress. Such avenging angels are ultimately the agents of Kirk’s own beliefs. They are the true products of his “moral imagination,” that Burkean phrase from Reflections on the Revolution in France much beloved by Dr. Kirk.
Take, for example, “The Surly Sullen Bell,” Dr. Kirk’s short story of 1950, first published in London Mystery Magazine. The tale lends its title to Kirk’s first story collection, published by Fleet in 1962. It opens in the rubble of St. Louis, where “they have pounded the Old Town into dust.” Against this backdrop of so-called urban renewal, we read that “To the modern politician and planner, men are the flies of a summer, oblivious of their past, reckless of their future.”
Then there’s Kirk’s 1957 story “Ex Tenebris,” first published in Queen’s Quarterly, which takes on slum clearance front and center. The setting is now relocated to the fading English farm village of Low Wentford, which is slated to be replaced by the new council-housing scheme of Gorst. Mrs. Oliver is a hold-out in the old town. Even though her windows “were too small” and her ceilings “lower than regulations,” she simply wants to “train rosebushes against the old walls” and to “spade her own little garden.” She also has little interest in Gorst, which boasts “six cinemas” but no churches, and was a “jerry-built desolation of concrete roadways” designed to “make it difficult for people to get about on foot.” Here her antagonist is S. G. W. Barner, “Planning Officer,” who knows better. He believes Low Wentford serves as an “obsolete fragment of a repudiated social order.” Therefore, it must be effaced: “Ruins are reminiscent of the past; and the Past is a dead hand impeding progressive planning.” As for Mrs. Oliver: “She would be served a compulsory purchase order before long . . . and would be moved to Gorst where she belonged.”
Mrs. Oliver seeks refuge with Abner Hargreaves, the vicar of Low Wentford’s old church. Problem is, this church has been long abandoned. When Barner goes to investigate, he tells the spectral vicar that “Individual preferences often must be subordinated to communal efficiency.” The vicar responds: “I speak not simply of whim and inclination, but of the memories of childhood and girlhood, the pieties that cling to our hearth, however desolated.” Just then, as Barner feels the vicar’s hand on his neck, the “roof of the north porch . . . fell upon him.” A new planning officer abandons the Gorst scheme and recommends a “plan of deconcentration.” Mrs. Oliver can stay in her cottage, where she “weeds her garden, and bakes her scones, and often sweeps the gravestones clean.”
“The primary error of the Enlightenment,” wrote Dr. Kirk in an often quoted remark, “was the notion that dissolving old faiths, creeds, and loyalties would lead to a universal sweet rationalism. But deprive man of St. Salvator, and he will seek, at best, St. Science.” Or to put it another way, a blinding faith in progress turns us from the god of Moses to the god of Robert Moses, New York’s mid-century urban planner.
Kirk understood the importance of the traditional city just as he understood the traditional values of civilization. City, civilization, civis, the Latin root is the same. It is the place of the citizen. After all, in his introduction to The Conservative Mind, Kirk tells us that he wrote the book not only “in my great-grandfather’s house in the stump-country of Michigan [and] among the bogs of Sligo in the west of Ireland [but also] upon the steps of Ara Coeli, in Rome”—in other words, that most sacred site of ancient Rome, atop the Capitoline Hill.
We should remember that Kirk’s 1974 book The Roots of American Order, which serves as a pendant to his Conservative Mind of 1953, centers its history of civilization not around great thinkers but around great cities: Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, London, and Philadelphia. The book has rightly been dubbed a tale of five cities.
A champion of great cities, Kirk also took a dim view of the many mid-century schemes hollowing them out. This wasn’t just an American phenomenon. Addressing the annual dinner of the Corporation of London’s Planning and Communications Committee, Prince Charles once commented: “You have to give this much to the Luftwaffe. When it knocked down our buildings, it didn’t replace them with anything more offensive than rubble. We did that.”
In Great Britain, they are called council flats. In France, Habitations à loyer modéré, or HLM. In The United States, we call them public housing projects. In New York, they are dubbed Nychaland, for the land of the New York City Housing Authority, a landscape set apart where half a million New Yorkers continue to live in notoriously substandard conditions. Easy federal funding and wholesale condemnations were the fuel and flame that spread such developments like wildfire across vast urban areas at mid-century. How different these areas became from the bustling streets often just beyond them. I think of Dr. Kirk whenever I walk through these desolate areas—how in their total planning, they planned the life out of town.
I wondered what Dr. Kirk would have made of the neighborhood where we meet tonight. Along with the development of Lincoln Center next door, the Manhattan campus of Fordham University is the product of the same mid-century slum clearance. The Lincoln Square Renewal Project of 1955, a project led by Robert Moses, cleared seventeen blocks between Sixtieth and Seventieth Streets. Under the Federal Housing Act of 1949, cities could draw on federal funds to purchase deteriorating neighborhoods through eminent domain and then sell the land for redevelopment at a discount. The difference between the purchase price and the sale price was known as the “land write-down,” for which the federal government financed two-thirds of the difference and, in the case of New York, the city and state split the remaining costs. Such federal funding made these deals easy and often irresistible to grand urban schemers such as Moses, who parted not the Red Sea but the far West Side, the South Bronx, the Brooklyn waterfront, and countless other areas of town.
An interesting fact of his Lincoln Square project was that its great controversy at the time was not the clearing of tenement housing for the creation of an arts campus, but that a section of this parcel would be given over to a Jesuit school. The question of the separation of church and state around the creation of this campus by eminent domain made it all the way up to the Supreme Court. The court finally dismissed the challenge in 1958, giving the final green light to the project.
As someone who grew up in a highrise apartment complex that would have never existed without such slum clearance, I always have mixed feelings towards the Lincoln Center complex. Windswept and set apart from the street, desolate in corners, it has only recently become more inviting. What saves it, just as what saves Fordham’s campus, is that these parcels were swiftly given over from the government to a multitude of non-for-profit concerns—Lincoln Center alone is a federation of over a dozen arts organizations. Just compare the dynamism of Lincoln Center with the Amsterdam housing projects to its west. The product of a slightly earlier wave of slum clearance, this example of Nychaland presents government dysfunction as preserved in amber, with dead plantings, cracked pavement, and street boilers brought in to keep its buildings functioning at minimum standards.
When it came to the city, as Dr. Kirk rightly understood, even worse than the housing schemes was the development of the automobile highway. Take a picture of almost any downtown a century ago and map it onto a city of today. The American highway atomized the American metropolis much more thoroughly than any Soviet bomb.
One of Dr. Kirk’s most unexpected and controversial positions did not concern the Gulf War or Ayn Rand but rather the development of the automobile. Perhaps we should not be surprised. Unlike those theorists who live their lives in ivory towers, Dr. Kirk spent the early 1940s working for Henry Ford at his River Rouge plant in Detroit. Here he became an early skeptic of “assembly-line civilization.” He saw first hand the vast consequences of Mr. Ford’s mechanical creations and later the “disintegrated liberal” foundation that took his money and name. In a famous column from 1962, Kirk labeled the automobile “a mechanical Jacobin—that is, a revolutionary the more powerful for being insensate. From courting customs to public architecture, the automobile tears the old order apart.” As the cult of the car spread from the US, he lamented how “the popular automobile may destroy the beautiful cities of Europe and the pattern of centuries of civilization.”
The very same thing was happening, he noted, back home. Here is how he described the destruction wrought by the Long Island Expressway:
During the late ’fifties and the early ’sixties, I watched in Long Island the devastation of what had been a charming countryside, as dismaying as what was being done to our cities. To make room for a spreading population was necessary: but to do it hideously and stupidly was not ineluctable. Much of the mischief was accomplished by the highways of Robert Moses, generally supposed to be one of the abler of American planners. Speed was everything, speed by automobile from Manhattan to Montauk.
The New York City subway, that product of an earlier era, goes in for much opprobrium these days and some of it rightfully so, but the system remains a wonder. I ride it everyday. It is my eleven-year-old son’s passion to visit every station and line. For all that many conservatives defend Big Car, I would argue that the typical straphanger is far more courteous than the average car driver and often under far more uncomfortable and trying circumstances. For however much we need it, and I am a grateful car owner, the automobile has proven to be Kirk’s mechanical jacobin for our atomized society, spreading disorder and death with near impunity. Euphemistically, we label the 40,000 deaths caused by the automobile each year in America “accidents.” If you want to know what drivers think of your neighborhood, look at their speeding, screeching vehicles, the scratched off plates, and the mountains of trash that gets tossed from car windows along our medians and exits. And just as an aside, if you think our highways are bad, look at all the virtual trash now accumulating along our so-called information superhighways. Progress continues apace.
I have long suspected, as Dr. Kirk well knew, that the success of the contemporary city is despite and not because of its “enlightened” leadership. Our leaders are rapacious because the city makes such a tempting victim, with a spirit that is all too inviting for big government and big business to denude and rape. It seems that the two simply take turns in such defilement. Just look at the deal Chicago recently made selling off the public rights to its parking meters for pennies on the dollar. Meanwhile, that city gives away public parkland to a temple to the Deified Obama in the form of a brutalist presidential center, staffed with cronies.
As the pendulum swings, New York is once again being returned to a man of high theory who would make New York more affordable for some by making it more unlivable for all. As our mayor elect proclaimed on victory night: “we will prove that there is no problem too large for government to solve and no concern too small for it to care about.”
I began this talk by suggesting a working title of “Kirk and the City.” Perhaps I should end it with an appeal to Kirk FOR the city. There are many conservative answers to our urban questions, but the solution may not only be found in datasets, tax rates, and consumer spending. The urban fabric must also be mended and darned through continuous upkeep. The city is not yours to experiment. From Russell to Russello, our ancestral spirits cast their shadows whether or not we choose to observe the city of god in the cities of men.
James Panero is the Executive Editor of The New Criterion.
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