Mel Bradford

Mel Bradford

Melvin E. "Mel" Bradford (1934 – March 3, 1993) 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. Although some have argued that he was actually from the Southwest, Bradford would take issue with such a delineation of Texas—one of the original "Pre-Sumter 7" members of the Old Confederacy—from "the South". Regardless, he always saw both his beloved Texas and himself as part of the greater Southern cultural milieu. He studied at Vanderbilt and wrote his doctoral thesis under the Southern Agrarian and Fugitive Poet Donald Davidson (whose biography Bradford was wrapping up at the time of his sudden death at age 58), 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. He "had no truck with critical efforts to portray Faulkner as alienated from the South. To the contrary, he saw the novelist as thoroughly embedded within his native region." Outside of literature he wrote extensively on the subjects of history and culture. Bradford specialized in the history of the American founding and Southern history in the United States. Bradford also advocated the constitutional theory of strict constructionism. "The original understanding of the Constitution, Bradford maintained, conformed much more closely to the Southern position than to Lincoln’s acts of usurpation."

Bradford also frequently wrote for Modern Age, Chronicles magazine and Southern Partisan magazine.