Such was Gordon Lloyd’s contagious energy that his presence at an academic program guaranteed its success. Even now I can see him, with his irrepressible enthusiasm, almost hopping across the stage in excitement, brushing back the bangs of his wavy white hair as they fly about, and boyishly declaiming in the Caribbean accent of his youth, as he drives home a point to his listeners.
I met Gordon Lloyd in the summer of 1997, when the non-profit organization Liberty Fund hosted a month-long colloquium on the Constitutional Convention in Pasadena, California. I was a graduate student, having just earned my Master’s degree in American history, and was a late addition to the invitation-only small gathering of about fifteen people. Despite focusing my studies on the American Founding, I was about to learn how much I didn’t know. At the beginning of each week of the program a distinguished scholar visited for a day or two to participate in, and help kick off, the discussion.
They were all intellectual heavyweights, but all were overshadowed in at least some respects by the constant presence of the man helming the seminar: a scholar from nearby Pepperdine University, a man whose heavily-lined face and shock of wavy white hair made him at first appear older than he was; yet whose twinkling eyes, impish smile, and energetic manner soon belied his years: Dr. Gordon Lloyd. Gordon did a superb job running the colloquium and guiding the conversation without dominating it. Readers who are familiar with Liberty Fund will know that the goal of the organization, founded by American businessman Pierre F. Goodrich in 1960, is to promote conversations about liberty in such small-group formats, without reaching any conclusions or producing any written outcomes.
And Gordon was the perfect scholar for Liberty Fund—he participated in scores of their colloquia over the years—for his byword was “conversation.” He loved the means, not the ends, of scholarship. His published books were ones he edited or co-edited; despite lecturing on and discussing the Founding for his entire adult life and possessing a seemingly limitless knowledge of the minutiae of the personalities and events of the period, he never produced what one would have expected: a magnum opus on the Constitutional Convention. He certainly had the handwritten notes to do so; he would often show up to his lectures with a stack of notecards, the product of years of intensive research, to which he would only occasionally refer to remind himself of a topic he wanted to address. Fittingly, it was a website that Gordon chose as the main vehicle to share his research, as it could be constantly updated, changed, and refined, as the “conversation” within himself and with others progressed and brought new thoughts.
Indeed, Gordon could converse amicably with academics of all stripes. A man of many scholarly colors, it is impossible to pigeonhole him as a thinker—a trait I believe to be found most commonly in those who truly immerse themselves in the sources and personalities of the period they love, eschewing, if not ignoring, the colorings of the interpretive lenses that other academics impose on their work. Such are scholars who love their subject more than themselves. Though at Pepperdine Gordon operated within the largely Straussian intellectual world of conservative academia, and though he earned his advanced degrees at that bastion of Straussianism, the Claremont Graduate School, Gordon was a student of Willmoore Kendall, whose ideas differed from those of Strauss in several respects. Gordon was also a champion of the Antifederalists—whose importance is often minimized by Straussians—often arguing for them to be remembered as much more than losers in the American political tradition. And Gordon had written his dissertation on the early Southern political thinker, John Taylor of Caroline, hardly a popular subject among Straussians.
I had no idea during that month in 1997 that Gordon and I would develop a twenty-year working friendship. A working one, I say, not a close one, in that we only saw each other at such conferences over the years, perhaps 15 or 20, some organized by me, as Gordon readily accepted my eager invitations for him to lead programs that I designed for various non-profits, including Liberty Fund. Many of these programs provided “professional development” for teachers, and even now I can see Gordon, with his irrepressible enthusiasm, almost hopping across the stage in excitement, brushing back the bangs of that wavy white hair as they fly about, and boyishly declaiming in a Caribbean accent—he was raised in the British West Indies for a time—as he drives home a point about, say James Madison, to his listeners. Gordon’s presence at a program guaranteed that it would be exciting and a success. Such was his contagious energy that I coined the term “Gordemus,” a play on the Latin word “gaudemus,” to describe the sense of pleasure we all took in watching Gordon as he effused about the subject at hand.
That energy was fueled both by his enthusiasm for his subject and, it must be said, the red wine which he loved and which was a constant companion. Though he didn’t drink “on duty” during our academic programs, when the end of the day came, and participants were invited to imbibe, Gordon did so liberally and became even more animated in conversation. He took a bottle of red to bed every night, he told me, and drank it as he fell asleep, praying for all the friends whose names he could recall at the time. Raised a Roman Catholic, Gordon did not much practice the faith, telling me that he in fact considered himself an “American Catholic”: i.e., an American first, a Catholic second. Such was his love for his adopted country and hits history. Divorced soon after I met him, and childless, he remained close to his “mum,” whom he would visit every summer back in England. Yet his “immediate family” seemed to be those friends he prayed for nightly, and perhaps more so, those Americans of the 18th and 19th centuries to whom he dedicated his professional life.
When I met Gordon Lloyd, I knew hardly anything compared to what he knew about the American Founding, and yet he treated me as an equal in the conversation about American liberty. And though I know much more some 25 years later—in large part thanks to Gordon himself—I am yet wise enough to recognize that I will never rival his erudition in his field. With the news of his passing, I feel sorry to have lost contact with him over the last half-decade, and not to have known him better. But I am also grateful that I knew him at all, and that I was graced with the opportunity to work with him. And so I am reminded of a line from the film, The Man Who Knew Infinity, in which Jeremy Irons’ character, a math professor at the University of Cambridge, addresses the department’s faculty upon the passing of a brilliant colleague:
“But now I say to myself when I’m depressed, and I find myself forced to listen to tiresome and pompous people, well, I’ve done something you could never have done: I have collaborated with both Littlewood and Ramanujan on something like equal terms.”
Rest in peace, Gordon.
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The featured image is taken from C-SPAN.