Seven years ago we celebrated a week of Charles — Charles Kesler, Dengler-Dykema Distinguished Professor of Government at Clarmeont McKenna College, editor of the Claremont Review of Books, long-time friend and tutor — for his receipt of one of 2018’s Bradley Prize awards along with Allen Guelzo and Jason Riley. Video of the event is posted here on Vimeo.
Charles is a gentleman, scholar, author, teacher, editor, advocate of America and the American propositions, and one of the wittiest men I know. He has helped turn the CRB into an irreplaceable magazine of ideas.
Charles’s leading qualities were on display in his brief remarks accepting the Bradley Prize. He recalled Solzhenitsyn’s 1978 Harvard Commencement Address in which “the great Russian novelist and historian warned the West that it was in danger of losing not only the world but also its own soul.” He continued: “In short, the fundamental crisis of the West was internal, spiritual, philosophical. ‘A decline in civic courage,’ [Solzhenitsyn] specified, ‘may be the most striking feature an outside observer notices in the West today.’ Civic courage means the courage of our convictions, which had declined because we had grown unsure of those convictions.” Charles ended his remarks with a call for the reawakening of our own civic courage. I posted the text of Charles’s remarks here on Power Line.
On October, 23, 2025, Encounter Books honored Charles with the Encounter Prize for Advancing American Ideals during its annual gala at the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium in Washington, DC. Senator Tom Cotton. As a former Publius Fellow of the Claremont Institue, Senator Cotton was one of Charles’s students. Around the time of our week of Charles in 2018, Senator Cotton put his own learning on display in his speech on statesmanship at Claremont’s 2018 Churchill dinner.
RealClearPolitics included video of Charles’s speech accepting the Encounter Books award in its lineup yesterday afternoon along with the text of his remarks.
Charles reminds us — in my case, teaches me — of Forefathers’ Day, just in time to celebrate the holiday next week. The holiday commemorates the Pilgrims’ landing at Plymouth Rock in 1620.
In his speech Charles presented “highlights from John Quincy Adams’s discerning 1802 Forefathers’ Day address, simply titled ‘Oration at Plymouth,’ one of his least well known but most helpful dissertations to our own age.” Listen or read and learn:
[Adams] pays tribute to the Pilgrims’ political and religious learning, based partly on their own experience in exile in Holland, and as distilled into the Mayflower Compact. “This is, perhaps, the only instance in human history of that positive, original, social compact, which speculative philosophers have imagined as the only legitimate source of government. Here was a unanimous and personal assent, by all the individuals of the community, to the association by which they became a nation.”
Adams anticipated the party platform of Zohran Mamdani, too. As you may know, the Pilgrims’ original political economy was communist or socialist: they experimented with the “community of goods and of labor, which fanciful politicians, from the days of Plato to those of Rousseau, have recommended as the fundamental law of a perfect republic.” “This theory results, it must be acknowledged, from principles of reasoning most flattering to the human character.” Yet here Adams parts company from the idealistic Mr. Mamdani. “A wiser and more useful philosophy, however, directs us to consider man according to the nature in which he was formed; subject to infirmities, which no wisdom can remedy; to weaknesses, which no institution can strengthen; to vices, which no legislation can correct. Hence, it becomes obvious that separate property is the natural and indisputable right of separate exertion; that community of goods without community of toil is oppressive and unjust; that it counteracts the laws of nature, which prescribe that only he who sows the seed shall reap the harvest; that it discourages all energy, by destroying its rewards; and makes the most virtuous and active members of society the slaves and drudges of the worst.”
Finally, Adams foresaw and dismissed the arguments for what these days we term ownership forgiveness, those phony ceremonies at the beginning of public meetings and so forth, apologizing to the Indians of the so-called “indigenous peoples” for appropriating their aboriginal lands. He dismissed such claims memorably. “What is the right of a huntsman to the forest of a thousand miles over which he has accidentally ranged in the quest of prey? Shall the liberal bounties of Providence to the race of man be monopolized by one of ten thousand for whom they were created? Shall the exuberant bosom of the common mother, amply adequate to the nourishment of millions, be claimed exclusively by a few hundreds of her offspring? Shall the lordly savage not only disdain the virtues and enjoyments of civilization himself, but shall he control the civilization of a world?”
Excellent questions, which deserve wise consideration as we and our elected representatives celebrate how and why to advance the ideals of American democracy.
I hope Charles’s own Encounter books were mentioned in the course of the evening. Encounter published Charles’s Crisis of the Two Constituions: The Rise, Decline, and Recovery of American Greatness in 2021. Last year Encounter also published the Festschrift Leisure With Dignity, edited by Michael Anton and Glenn Ellmers, a book full of essays written in Charles’s honor.
