Henry Regnery
Henry Regnery (5 January 1912 – 18 June 1996) was an American conservative publisher.
He was the next to youngest of five children of Frances Susan Thrasher and William Henry Regnery, a wealthy textile manufacturer. He obtained a degree in mechanical engineering from MIT in 1934, and an M.A. from Harvard University, where he worked with the influential economist Joseph Schumpeter. He also studied at Armour Institute of Technology, and from 1934 to 1936 at the University of Bonn. Shortly after, he became a member of the America First Committee.
Regnery financed the creation of the conservative newspaper Human Events in 1944.
His publishing company, the Henry Regnery Company, is now known as Regnery Publishing, but is no longer owned by Regenery family since 1993.
The Henry Regnery Company published some of the first and most important books of the postwar American conservative movement. "[I]t was a measure of the grip that liberal-minded editors had on American publishing at the time that Regnery, which was founded in 1947, was one of only two houses known to be sympathetic to conservative authors," according to Henry Regnery's 1996 obituary in The New York Times. Examples include two conservative classics, William F. Buckley's God and Man at Yale (1951) and Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind (1953).
In the early 1950s, Regnery published two books by Robert Welch, who went on to found the John Birch Society in 1958.
Some of the first writings Regnery published, including a reprint of a speech by University of Chicago president Robert M. Hutchins, criticized the harsh treatment of Germans and Japanese, The first book published by the Henry Regnery Company was by the socialist Victor Gollancz, who ran the Left Book Club in Britain. A man of Jewish heritage, Gollancz was appalled at the bombing of German civilians late in the war and by the treatment of the country afterward. Gollancz published In Darkest Germany in Britain but was unable to find an American publisher for his unpopular ideas. He approached Regnery, who agreed to publish it. Regnery subsequently published the U.S. edition of Our Threatened Values by Gollancz.
Regnery's third book was The Hitler in Our Selves, by Max Picard. Other early books included The German Opposition to Hitler by the German nationalist Hans Rothfels and The High Cost of Vengeance (1949) by Freda Utley, which was critical of the Allies' air campaign and post-war occupation.
Regnery was a member of the American Conservatory of Music and the Chicago Literary Club. He was a trustee of Shimer College in the early 1960s. Regnery was the president of the Philadelphia Society.
