SOURCE: Cheney, Brainard. “The Conservative Course by Celestial Navigation.” Sewanee Review 62, no. 1 (winter 1954): 151-59.

In the following review, Cheney reviews The Conservative Mind and takes serious issue with arguments advanced by John Crowe Ransom in his own review of the work published a few months earlier in The Kenyon Review.

As our renowned ship, Materialism, nears the Rock of atomic explosion and the Suck of Russian sovietization, athwart the passage to Utopia, all aboard are appalled. In the choppy waters, her timbers creak with growing stress. There are noisy and frightened exclamations among the passengers. The men on the bridge look grim and belligerent in their effort to look confident. There is a hasty and confused search going on in the chart room.

Any one coming forward with a new course for evading the perils of our Scylla and Charybdis at this hour risks the charge of temerity...