Peter Viereck, a noted historian, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and a founder of the mid-20th Century American conservative movement who later denounced what he saw as its late-20th Century excesses, died May 13 at his home in South Hadley, Mass. He was 89.
A specialist in Russian history, Mr. Viereck was an emeritus professor at Mt. Holyoke College, where he had taught since 1948. He received the Pulitzer in 1949 for his first collection of poems, “Terror and Decorum.”
He also is widely credited with helping bring conservatism into the mainstream as an intellectual movement. In books, including “The Unadjusted Man” (1956), and articles throughout the 1940s and ’50s, he condemned what he saw as the hidebound utopianism of Marxist thinking.
Mr. Viereck’s brand of conservatism shunned extremism of either stripe. He was an admirer of the New Deal, a supporter of Adlai Stevenson and an anti-communist who made it clear that he had little use for Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy.
In a profile in The New Yorker last year, Mr. Viereck said he thought his 1949 book “Conservatism Revisited: The Revolt Against Revolt, 1815-1949,” “opened people’s minds to the idea that to be conservative is not to be satanic.” He added, referring to William F. Buckley Jr., “Once their minds were opened, Buckley came in.”
Mr. Viereck was born in Manhattan in 1916. He earned a bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees in history from Harvard.
In World War II he was an Army intelligence analyst, studying Nazi propaganda. At the time, his father, George Sylvester Viereck, a Nazi propagandist, was in federal prison.
A German-born newspaperman and poet, the elder Viereck had remained loyal to his homeland through the two World Wars. In early 1942 he was convicted of withholding material facts from the State Department when he registered as a foreign agent; he served 4 years.
