19 Facts About Willmoore Kendall

Willmoore Kendall's father, who was blind, was a Southern Methodist minister who preached in Konawa and other local towns.

At age two, Kendall learned to read by playing with a typewriter.

In 1927, Willmoore Kendall graduated from the University of Oklahoma at age 18.

In 1927, under the pseudonym Alan Monk, Willmoore Kendall wrote his first book, Baseball: How to Play It and How to Watch It.

At Oxford, Willmoore Kendall completed a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1935 and Master of Arts degree in 1938.

In 1935, Willmoore Kendall left Oxford to become a reporter for the United Press in Madrid.

Willmoore Kendall's dissertation was titled John Locke and the Doctrine of Majority-Rule.

Around 1939, Willmoore Kendall began his academic career as an assistant professor of political science, teaching at Louisiana State University, Hobart College, and the University of Richmond.

Willmoore Kendall left academia in 1942 to work for the federal government in World War II.

Primarily working in government operations, Willmoore Kendall worked for the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs in Washington, DC and Bogota.

Willmoore Kendall joined the Yale University faculty in 1947, where he taught for 14 years until being paid a severance package of over $10,000.

Willmoore Kendall influenced Buckley's ideas in the National Review because he explained that liberals were a small minority group in the community.

In 1963, Willmoore Kendall joined the University of Dallas, founding and chairing the Department of Politics and Economics at the University of Dallas.

Willmoore Kendall stayed at that institution until he died of a heart attack, at home on June 30,1967.

Willmoore Kendall saw him more as a proto-democrat who would approve of societies governed by majority rule, rather than an individualist who wished for an aloof government as was the more common consensus view.

Kendall voted for Republican challenger Wendell Willkie against Democrat and incumbent President Franklin D Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election; in a letter to a friend shortly after the 1946 midterm elections where Republicans made gains in Congress, Kendall expressed hope of "a Congress really asserting its prerogatives" against the executive branch.

Willmoore Kendall felt that majoritarianism should come before liberalism and that the government should not undercut the social consensus by attempting to enforce abstract rights.

Additionally, in his 1963 book The Conservative Affirmation and various articles, Willmoore Kendall opposed open society and moral relativism, particularly the philosophy of John Stuart Mill.

Willmoore Kendall is often forgotten as a founder of the conservative movement because he never wrote a "big book," rather he put together a collection of reviews and essays.