Thomas H. Landess, R.I.P. At 80 Tom was still producing every day more than a day’s worth of versatile work. His sudden passing in January struck like an unexpected calamity that portends the end of an era. We lost not only the truest of friends, but a true gentleman, a true man of letters, and...
Scandalously, Thomas Jefferson once wrote to James Madison, “I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and is as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.” In the same year, 1787, in regard to what is known as Shays’ Rebellion, he wrote another friend, “God forbid...
Alas, Tea Partiers, you may as well fold your tents and quietly leave the field. Salon (a website that apparently caters to members and would-be members of the national elite) has given your movement the coup de grace. They have uncovered the cruel truth that your movement is a “Southern” movement. No more need be said. The...
This is strange to say, but observation bears it out: Almost all publishers and most booksellers and librarians neither know nor care anything about books. Publishers don’t have a clue as to what is a good book or even a good-selling book. Whenever you run across a book by a new author that is a...
Awhile back the folks out in Seattle got in a dudgeon when they learned that their county, King, was named after William R.D. King, who was elected Vice-President in 1852. They wanted the world to know that the county was ever after to be considered as named for The Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King,...
I have always been amazed at the sub-intellectual process by which liberals all know at almost the same time and in the same form what they are supposed to think. It is amazing. Of course, it has nothing to do with ideas or learning—it has to do entirely with attitude, fashion, and presenting oneself as...
Democracy: A sacred form of government invented by Abraham Lincoln in the Emancipation Proclamation and the Gettysburg Address. John F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. also helped greatly in the invention of democracy. Democratic Elections: When the rulers permit the voters to keep on voting until they get it right. Elder...
How much “diversity” can the West absorb before it is no longer the West and thus ceases to be a haven for people escaping their own non-Western “cultures”—which they bring with them? When and why did the critical shift occur in American mentality that caused “scholars” and journalists to stop reporting facts, events, and...
Does television corrupt American morals or do American morals corrupt television? If there had never been any racist, sexist, homophobes, would the United States exist to give affirmative action to minorities? Does anyone in a position of authority or influence care that the American middle class, and therefore the country, is being demoralised and...
John C. Calhoun was the last great American statesman. A statesman must be something of a prophet—one who has an historical perspective and says what he believes to be true and in the best long-range interest of the people, whether it is popular or not. A politician, which is all we have now, says and...
Did you enjoy your “peace dividend”? Did you enjoy your “stimulus” money? Do you think its wonderful that our Congresspersons and other federal officials constantly strive to make “our” lives better? Isn’t a great example of bipartisan statesmanship that all our leaders got together to save “our” economy by giving billions to the New York...
Do you look forward to living in a majority nonwhite country, which the U.S. is predicted to be in a few decades? Will you take a lie detector test about this? Do you look forward to your descendants living in such a country? Have you ever thought about your descendants at all? Did your...
Well, Old Man, 70 today. Who’d have thought? And still in pretty good condition, considering how little care I have taken of the old carcass. I understand now how the accumulation of minor miseries in aging is mercifully designed to let us down slow and easy till we are ready. The children are OK....
“The Northern onslaught upon slavery was no more than a piece of specious humbug designed to conceal its desire for economic control of the Southern States.” —Charles Dickens, 1862 “Slavery is no more the cause of this war than gold is the cause of robbery.” —Gov. Joel Parker of New Jersey, 1863 In 1931, sixteen...
Declining prosperity is now a settled fact of American life. Prosperity is not measured by the day’s average of stock speculation, or the profits of bankers, or the munificence of government subsidies and salaries, or the consumption of luxury goods, or even by the Gross Domestic Product. It is amazing how in a few short...
“A crocodile has been worshipped, and its priesthood have asserted, that morality required the people to suffer themselves to be eaten by a crocodile.” —John Taylor of Caroline “The Father of Waters now flows unvexed to the sea,” Lincoln famously announced in July 1863. He was, according to a reporter, uncharacteristically “wearing a smile...
There seemed to be little interest among audience members [at a scholarly meeting] in whether the ideas I had presented were true, only in whether their application would bring about results they liked. —Jason Jewell I used to have a running argument with a colleague, a great scholar now gathered to his fathers, during...
The Last Confederate Produced by Strongbow Pictures Directed by A. Blaine Miller and Julian Adams Written by Julian Adams and Weston Adams Firetrail Produced by Forbesfilm Written and directed by Christopher Forbes Like it or not, movies are the main art form of our time, the storytelling medium that reaches the largest audience and...
This film has won a major prize and is being given the big hype by all the trendy thinkers as a profound look at the
Thomas Carlyle wrote that “History is the essence of innumerable Biographies.” While that description does not cover all the duties of historianship, it is true in an important sense. History that becomes too abstract loses its vital connection with the lives of real human beings. The people of the past were human, and we are...
Ask any trendy student of history today and he will tell you that, without question, the cause of the great American bloodletting of 1861–65 was slavery. Slavery and nothing but slavery. The unstated and usually unconscious assumption is that only people warped by a vicious institution could possibly fight against being part of “the greatest...
The American president began as Cincinnatus, a patriot called to the temporary service of his country (a republican confederation). The president ends as Caesar, a despot of almost unlimited power, presiding over a global empire. Like the Caesars, in some quarters the president is even worshiped as a god. Cincinnatus was called because of his...
All things at Rome are for sale. —Juvenal Thomas Jefferson has left us an account of a supper-table conversation in the very earliest days of the U.S. government. Vice President John Adams (who was intended by nature for a preacher) declaimed at length about the virtues of the British government, which, he said, if purged...
Some good folks in my hometown are planning a reunion of my high-school class, which, come June, will have graduated 50 years ago. It was a class of about 500. Three hundred are known, of which 53 are already deceased. (Our average age is 67.) It is a strange and unsettling experience to contemplate the...
“O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us To see oursels as others see us!” —Robert Burns A few years ago, a well-known conservative historian lamented that the American public was not morally engaged to undergo sacrifice after the September 11 attacks, unlike it was in its heroic response to Fort Sumter and Pearl Harbor....
Chronicles, as the premier journal of real American culture, takes notice, though belatedly, of the loss of two great scholars of American literature. They were both admirers and faithful readers of this magazine, to which I had the pleasure of introducing them. I knew and learned from both and like to think that I was...
. . . the human mind, as allotted by the Creator to certain of his creatures, is capable of receiving any impression it chooses, and holding it as a fixed conviction. Other minds may gather a different and more rational conclusion. . . . —Dr. John A. Wyeth The dismaying sense of it, perhaps the...
Satan knew what he was doing when he aided and abetted the fall in the Garden. —Robert M. Peters As we consider the world’s rulers, one question overshadows all others: are they fools or charlatans? . . . I lean toward the view that they are both. —Robert Higgs It must be noted to that...
The Pearl Harbor anniversary passed a few days ago. I remembered my father’s account of his walking downtown that Sunday morning in 1941 with the six-months-old Yours Truly in a stroller, when people began yelling and running. Grandmother always pointed out that I and my cousins were not “war babies.” We were born before Pearl...
The foreign adulation of Obama proves only one thing—they like him because they see him as not very American. I’m sorry, President-elect Obama, but I don’t feel very healed by this election. Opposed to a black President? I am not reconciled yet to John Quincy Adams. I hear that local gun sales are up 49...
These theories are interesting and valuable, although it is possible to stray too far along the road of geographical determinism. —John Davies A socialist firebrand could rapidly become a jingoistic warmonger. . . . —John Davies [T]he sole problem of our ruling class is whether to coerce or bribe the powerless majority. —Gore Vidal We...
This book would have been better entitled “A Time to Think.” It contains some good thinking but not much fight. Doubtless the author and publisher knew that Fighting is a better sell than Thinking. Barack Obama will have chosen his running mate by the time this review reaches readers. At the time of writing there...
Any fool can write history, and many do. Please do not assume that I mean by this statement to vaunt the “expert” and slight the amateur. In writing history the amateur is sometimes gifted, and there is no more pestiferous fool than the smug, pretentious “expert” who thinks of his own mind as the repository...
The field of Gettysburg is perhaps the closest thing to a sacred place, a Mount Olympus, to be found in our secular-minded land. The battle itself contains enough epic material for the admiration, contemplation, and inspiration of a hundred generations of Americans, if there should be so many. This is all lost on the U.S....
Mark Winchell, literary scholar, biographer, essayist, and occasional contributor to Chronicles, passed from this realm in May after a brave two-year battle with cancer. With four books out in just the last two years and at barely 60 years of age, Mark was just coming into the prime of his productive career. His official title,...
Any doubts you may have had about the absurdity and falseness of American electoral politics would have been removed if you had lived through the barrage of advertising that preceded our South Carolina presidential primary. Every single one of the Republican candidates pretended to have become Horatio at the Bridge, single-handedly holding back the onslaught...
There is a popular superstition that defines America as a “Proposition Nation,” created and proclaimed by the obiter dicta about “all men” in the second sentence of the 1776 Declaration that the 13 colonies “are and of right ought to be free and independent States.” Is America a Proposition Nation? No, for the very simple...
Some acute scholar of future times, should there ever be such, will perhaps ponder over the very strange career of the United States Constitution—how it came, without changing a word, to be understood almost universally to mean things it did not mean and to be used for purposes other than, and sometimes the opposite of,...
In 1988, I wrote in a review in these pages, “If there is any young historian out there who wants to know where the cutting edge is in American historical understanding, it is . . . the new and coming field of Northern history.” Complicity is one of a half-dozen or more books published in...
George Garrett, Chronicles’ most distinguished contributing editor, can be relied upon, always, to tell it like it is. He is doing just that when he writes in a blurb to Reinventing the South: “[T]hese essays are splendidly written—mercifully free of contemporary critical jargon and easily accessible to the good and serious reader.” And he amplifies...
Memory’s Keep by James Everett Kibler Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing Co.; 221 pp., $22.00 A first-rate scholar is as rare as, or rarer than, a first-rate creative writer. Believe me, having hung out with professors for 45 years, I know whereof I speak. When a first-rate scholar is also a creative artist of merit, you have...
I thought that Sen. Byron Dorgan of North Dakota might be a cut above the general run of politicians when I noticed that he was one of four Democratic senators who voted against the Bush administration’s recent “immigration reform” bill, designed to replace the American population with Third World coolie labor. That prompted me to get...
“Transcend yourself and join in the universal struggle to bring about the self-transcendence of all men!” —Karl Marx Culture, as the term is used in America in our times, covers a vast territory with ill-defined frontiers. There is primitive culture (flint spearheads, animal and human sacrifice). There is high culture (Shakespeare, Michelangelo). There is, or...
“ . . . a republican government, which many great writers assert to be incapable of subsisting long, except by the preservation of virtuous principles.” —John Taylor of Caroline On a summer morning in 1842, near the end of its session, the U.S. Senate was busy receiving committee reports. The Committee on the Judiciary reported...
A friend who sells high-end real estate tells the story of a well-heeled Northern couple who were enchanted by the idea of owning an antebellum Southern mansion. He met them at the airport and took them to one of our charming old South Carolina towns—one that, having failed to be liberated by the U.S. Army in...
When I first heard of the topic “Small Is Beautiful,” I thought of the wonderful motto of Chilton Williamson’s friend Edward Abbey: “Growth Is the Enemy of Progress.” Abbey went right to the heart of the matter. The false but pervasive premise of American life is that progress and growth are the same thing and...
Since they first appeared in the late 19th century, professional academic historians in the United States have been pretty much Establishment men (though, in other days, they did observe some canons of evidence and reasoned argument, and an occasional maverick appeared to remind that historical understanding should be an evolving debate and not a party...
Shelby Foote, one of the giants of Southern literature, passed away on June 27 at his home in Memphis at the age of 88. An unapologetic Mississippian, Foote never finished college but had much more valuable experiences—he grew up with another world-class Southern writer, Walker Percy, and, as a young man, played tennis on William...
This article is drawn from the author’s speech on accepting The Rockford Institute’s first John Randolph Award at the historic Menger Hotel in San Antonio, a short distance from the Alamo. For this occasion, I have been asked to reflect on “the historian’s task” and “the American republican tradition.” To do so could be a...
“Sic Semper Tyrannis.” —from the Great Seal of the Commonwealth of Virginia “I want everybody to hear loud and clear that I’m going to be the president of everybody.” —George W. Bush “I hope we get to the bottom of the answer. It’s what I’m interested to know.” —George W. Bush A bit of folklore, often...