Conservatives and Al Gore's Nobel

For conservatives, everything is political war. Al Gore wins the Nobel Peace Prize, reflecting the entire world's consensus that man-made climate change is a crisis? For conservatives, that means: time to discredit the Nobel Peace Prize itself as a pathetic racket—or, as National Review [1]'s Steven F. Hayward puts it, "a once-prestigious award," now suffering its "final debasement."

It raises an interesting question. When did conservatives first begin questioning the prestige of the Nobel Peace Prize? Steve Benen [2] and James Fallows [3] point out that would be 1964, when the Prize was won by Dr. Martin Luther King.

Fallows reaches back to his youthful recollection of how his hometown, which went for Goldwater over Johnson, considered the notion of Dr. King as Nobel-worthy as something merely to sneer at. Looking in on my favorite research tool, Proquest Historical Newspapers, I found documentation for Fallows' recollection—like this letter to the editor of the Chicago Tribune (whose flagship right-wing editorial page's reaction to the honor of an American winning the Peace Prize that year was to simply ignore it):

Chicago, Oct. 19—For the Rev. Martin L. King to win the Nobel peace prize for 1964 is, in my opinion, a major fraud foisted on real peace-loving people throughout the world. —Thomas Biety.

The Los Angeles Times's editorial page was rather conservative, but nonetheless editorialized respectfully about Dr. King, praising his conviction that "nonviolent protest is the most effective weapon." But their piece concluded with an implication that all their conservative readership might not all prove so magnanimous: "Those who would deface his splendid work by mob action," they wrote, "or by any other unlawful means, would do well to ponder his wise words."

William F. Buckley columnized on King's prize with a nastily condescending open letter to the winner (from, apparently, white America itself), headlined, "Dr. King's Position Is Now So High It Includes Responsibility":

We don't expect that,in return for the Establishment's favor, you will become an Uncle Tom. But we do expect that for so long as we agree that you will be the reliquary for the world's inter-racial conscience, you will say something relevant tnow and then about the persecution of people even if they aren't Negroes. Is it a deal, Reverend?

If so, maybe we can go a long way together to make a better world. If not, kindly remember that the Nobel Committee is not a court of canonization, that it is merely one of those riches of the world which in your sermons you have so rightly disdained as of ephemeral importance.

As I wrote in an essay last January [4] (subscription only; email me at rperlstein@ourfuture.org [5] and I'll email you a copy), conservatives "hated King's doctrines. Hating them was one of the litmus tests of conservatism." Prominent conservatives even went so far as to blame him for his own death—for didn't the doctrine of "civil disobedience" mean you got to choose the laws you followed? Strom Thurmond: "[W]e are now witnessing the whirlwind sowed years ago when some preachers and teachers began telling people that each man could be his own judge in his own case." Ronald Reagan: this was just the sort of "great tragedy that began when we began compromising with law and order, and people started choosing which laws they'd break." Civil rights? That was just a front. A have here in front of me a slim 1965 pamphlet c0-authored by Lee Edwards, a present-day fellow at the Heritage Foundation, entitled Behind the Civil Rights Mask, whose cover features King's face as a mask, hiding their true goal: "revolution."

Once, the conservative litmus test was despising Martin Luther King. Now, it's despising Al Gore. History, once more, will indict them.