Peter Viereck

Peter Robert Edwin Viereck (August 5, 1916 – May 13, 2006) was an American poet, political thinker, and long-time professor of history at Mount Holyoke College.

Viereck was born in New York City, the son of George Sylvester Viereck. He received his B.A. summa cum laude in history from Harvard University in 1937. He then specialized in European history, receiving his M.A. in 1939 and his Ph.D. in 1942, again from Harvard.

Viereck was prolific in his writing from 1938. He was a respected poet, with numerous published collections of poems and some poems first published in Poetry Magazine. He won the annual Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1949 for the collection Terror and Decorum. In 1955 he was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Florence.

Viereck was an early leader in the conservative movement but by 1951 felt that it had strayed from true conservatism (see his review of William F. Buckley's God and Man at Yale, The New York Times, November 4, 1951). In April 1940, Viereck wrote an article in the Atlantic Monthly ("But—I'm a Conservative!"), partly in reaction against the ideologies of his father, George Sylvester Viereck, a Nazi sympathizer.

Peter Viereck's article ... argued for a "new conservatism" to counter the "storm of authoritarianism" in Europe and Moral relativism in the USA. He claimed communism and nazism were utopian and would sanction the murder of oppositions (as in anti-semitism) and that liberalism shared a naive belief in progress and humanity's essential goodness.

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