Henry Regnery

Henry Regnery died age 84 on June 18, 1996, in Chicago of complications of brain surgery.

In 1951, Regnery published God and Man at Yale, the first book written by William F. Buckley, Jr. At that time, Regnery had a close affiliation with the University of Chicago and published classics for the Great Books series at the University, but he lost the contract as a result of publishing Buckley's book. In 1953, Regnery published Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind, as well as books by Albert Jay Nock, James J. Kilpatrick, and James Burnham. He also published paperback editions of literary works by novelist Wyndham Lewis and poets T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. In 1954, Regnery published McCarthy and His Enemies by William F. Buckley and L. Brent Bozell Jr. "Although Mr. Buckley [...] had criticized the senator for 'gross exaggerations,' Mr. McCarthy said he would not dispute the merits of the book with the authors," according to a news article in The New York Times. While criticizing McCarthy, the book was sympathetic to him (and in fact was harsher on McCarthy's critics than it was on the senator for making false allegations), and McCarthy attended a reception for the authors.

In the early 1950s, Regnery published two books by Robert Welch, who went on to found the John Birch Society in 1958. In May God Forgive Us, Welch criticized influential foreign-policy analysts and policymakers and accused many of working to further Communism as part of a conspiracy. In 1954, Regnery published Welch's biography of John Birch, an American Baptist missionary in China who was killed by Chinese Communists after he became a U.S. intelligence officer in World War II.

In 1947, he founded the Henry Regnery Company, now Regnery Publishing. "[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 1944, Regnery financed the creation of the conservative newspaper Human Events.

In the latter 1930s, Regnery became a member of the America First Committee, of which his father was a co-founder. 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 and president of the Philadelphia Society.

Henry Regnery (1912–1996) was a conservative American publisher who founded the newspaper Human Events (1944) and the Henry Regnery Company (1947) and published Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind (1953).

Henry Regnery was born on January 5, 1912, in Hinsdale, Illinois, the second-youngest of five children of Frances Susan Thrasher and William Henry Regnery, a wealthy Catholic textile manufacturer who had emigrated from Ensch, Germany. He obtained a BS in mechanical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1934, and an MA from Harvard University, where he worked with Joseph Schumpeter. He also studied at Armour Institute of Technology, and from 1934 to 1936 at the University of Bonn.