Ever since the late 1960’s, the cultural Marxists of academe have worked assiduously to destroy American heroes or simply to omit them from textbooks—and they have been largely successful. As we approach the 60th anniversary of VE Day and VJ Day and the youngest of the World War II veterans are entering their 80’s, it...
Author: Roger D. McGrath (Roger D. McGrath)
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Celtic Thunder
“The Celts fear neither earthquakes nor the waves.” —Aristotle Nearly six years ago, Chronicles published “Death Before Dishonor,” an article I wrote about the westward march of the American pioneer. Much of the time, I was writing about the Scotch-Irish—or Scots-Irish, if you prefer. These hard-edged folks were in the vanguard of the movement across...
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Red Over Black
For hundreds of years, perhaps thousands, the Indians of North America practiced slavery. Until the 18th century, those enslaved, for the most part, were other Indians. The tribes of the Pacific Northwest, for example, raided constantly, principally to secure slaves. The populations of some villages were one-third slave. There is even an instance of a...
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Remember the Texas Revolution
“Chicano Studies” departments at American universities portray the Battle of the Alamo as the triumph of the lawful rulers of Texas over a rowdy, drunken band of illegal aliens. Such a portrayal has a delicious irony to it, though it is mostly false. Almost always omitted from the Chicano version of events are several unsettling...
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The Star Chamber
In 1975, the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) launched a campaign for reparations for those Japanese who had been forced to evacuate the West Coast during World War II. A heavily financed lobbying effort came to fruition five years later when the House of Representatives passed a bill creating the Commission on Wartime Relocation and...
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Whose Atrocities?
The Last Samurai is the latest movie to treat us to the spectacle of the U.S. Army slaughtering American Indian women and children. Playing a disillusioned captain, Tom Cruise suffers from nightmares for his role in the dastardly deed. He finds honor and redemption as a Great White Samurai in Japan. Many movie reviewers have...
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Boys Will Be Boys
When my daughter, Katie, was in the fifth grade, her grammar school conducted a week-long series of tests inspired by the White House to promote physical fitness for schoolchildren. Children who completed the tests with passing marks—the standards for passing were not high—received a certificate from the President. The kids ran, jumped, and stretched, and...
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California’s Mythologized Bandido
On the wintry morning of February 20, 1853, more than a hundred Chinese miners were working their claims near Rich Gulch. Without warning, five mounted and gun-brandishing bandidos swept down upon the Chinese. Taken by surprise and without arms themselves, the Chinese could do little but comply when ordered to hand over their gold. An...
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Mexifornicating the Californicated
Victor Davis Hanson, a professor of classics at California State University, Fresno, writes often and writes well. I have two of his books on ancient Greece. He is the only author who has ever explained to me how difficult it was to wreak permanent agricultural devastation on a typical Greek city-state: Pulling out grape vines...
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A God-Given Natural Right
I do not believe in unilateral disarmament: not for the nation; not for our citizens. Neither did the Founding Fathers. They were students of history, especially of classical antiquity. They knew the history of the Greek city-states and Rome as well as they knew the history of the American colonies. This led them to conclude that...
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Unit 731
Every time I ask my college students if they are familiar with Nazi atrocities, the collective reply is “Of course.” Nearly all of them have also heard of Dr. Josef Mengele and his horrific medical experiments conducted at Auschwitz. The “Angel of Death” has been the subject of countless lectures, articles, books, movies, and documentaries. ...
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Fire-Breathing Cowards
In 1963, when I was a junior in high school, Saturday-night dances were held at an old beach club near the Santa Monica pier. The club had once been exclusive and elegant but had long fallen on hard times, and its ballroom was rented for various functions. At first, most of those going to the...
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Republic or Empire?
“Remember Pearl Harbor” was a phrase familiar to everyone I knew growing up. In a sneak attack, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor! This was a dastardly, despicable act. A sneak attack! The politically correct today like to say “surprise attack,” but that is something done in time of war. The Japanese attacked without a declaration...
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Bury the Facts at Wounded Knee
At Wounded Knee Creek, on December 29, 1890, the last fight of any size or significance between the U.S. Army and American Indians occurred. Although a terrible tragedy involving the loss of Indian women and children, the battle has been wildly mischaracterized, especially by those bent on making the Indian an innocent victim of the...
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“You Have To Commit!”
We were on the practice field preparing for a team that ran the option. Our scout team was running the upcoming opponent’s offense. To our surprise, the scouts executed the option perfectly, which left our outside linebacker frozen halfway between the quarterback, cutting off the block of a tight end, and a trailing halfback arcing...
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American Icons
“Thou shalt not portray a white male in an heroic light.” Thus reads the first commandment of the politically correct. Ever since the late 1960’s, the cultural Marxists have been engaged in a drive to destroy American heroes—if they are white males. This was not always a difficult task. Historians from an earlier generation had...
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The Myth of Red Brotherhood
Second only to the myth of Indian as ecologist is that of red brotherhood. Although physically similar, the Indian peoples of what is today the United States were a diverse lot. There was no common language, culture, or identity. A few groups of Indians evolved political organizations—the Iroquois League of the Five Nations was the...
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Fighting the Good Fight
“Save your fundraising mailing lists, for the San Fernando Valley shall rise again.” For now, secession has failed. In the November 2002 elections, a referendum to separate the Valley from the City of Los Angeles and to create the City of San Fernando Valley passed 51 to 49 percent in the Valley but lost 67...
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The Modern Myth of the Black Cowboy
“Nigger Charley” Tyler rode the range of the Owens Valley in the trans-Sierra country of California during the early 1860’s. He was one of the hired hands of the ranching McGee family, who grazed their beeves in the valley and then drove them north to market at the booming mining camp of Aurora. Paiute Indians,...
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American MAGIC and Japanese-American Spies
The competition for victim status is fierce in today’s America. Considering their disproportionate degree of success here in the United States, it is ironic that, for the last several decades, Japanese-Americans have been engaged in that competition. The relocation camps of World War II are now called “concentration camps,” relocation itself is referred to as...
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Tales From the Politically Correct Crypt
Our nation is clearly in the midst of a culture war. The most important battles are not being fought in Washington, D.C., but in our media, churches, schools, civic organizations, youth groups, and universities. Western civilization, as we have known it, and America, as we have known it, are losing. Much of the time, the...
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Mexican in Name Only
For several years, Charles Truxillo, a professor at the University of New Mexico, has been proclaiming that the American Southwest will—and should—be reconquered by Mexico through massive immigration. Most politicians and media have either ignored Truxillo or tried to characterize him as an isolated extremist, claiming that most Mexican immigrants have no political agenda and...
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Not Separate and Not Equal
Oh I’m packin’ my grip and I’m leavin’ today, ’cause I’m taking a trip California way I’m gonna settle down and never more roam, and make the San Fernando Valley my home. I’ll forget my sins, I’ll be makin’ new friends, where the West begins and the sunset ends. Cause I’ve decided where yours...
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In Remembrance of My Brothers
Three New York firefighters raise Old Glory over the rubble of the World Trade Center. The dramatic moment is captured from afar by a photographer. Within a day or two, the photo is featured in newspapers across the United States. It becomes as recognizable as the Marine flag-raising on Mt. Suribachi. T-shirts soon appear with...
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Indian as Ecologist
Most of us learned in grammar school, if not before, that the American Indian had a special reverence for nature. He was a kind of proto-ecologist who conserved natural resources, be they trees or beasts, with a religious devotion. I cannot recall the number of times I heard someone repeat, mantra-like, that “The Indian used...
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California, Here We Come
It has happened. Whites have been reduced to a minority in California. By whites, I mean, of course, “non-Hispanic whites,” because most of the illegal aliens who have poured across the border from Mexico during the last 30 years to change dramatically the composition of California’s population are mestizo, a mixture of Spanish and American...
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Slavery’s Inconvenient Facts
I learned firsthand how disturbing facts could be when teaching a U.S. history course at UCLA in 1987. One of my teaching assistants, a politically correct young woman, became terribly upset after listening to my lecture on slavery. “He shouldn’t be saying such things!” she exclaimed to another teaching assistant. When asked by the other...
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An Aristocracy of Warriors
In his seminal work, Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville noted that the nobility of medieval Europe reckoned martial valor to be the greatest of all the virtues. The feudal aristocracy, he said, “was born of war and for war; it won its power by force of arms and maintained it thereby. So nothing was...
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Real Diversity
“By Tre, Pol, or Pen ye may know most Cornishmen.” This simple rhyme was known to nearly everyone in the mining camps of the Old West and probably to much of the general population in America during the 19th century. Treloar, Trevelyan, and Tremaine were especially common names on the mining frontier, as were Penrose,...
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The Western Way of War From Plato to NATO
When I first began reading of the ancient world as a child, I was mystified by the collapse of the Greek city-states and the fall of Rome. How could such a thing come to pass? It seemed perfectly reasonable that Egypt, Sumer, and the Hittite kingdom should have come and gone, but not Periclean Athens...
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The Reconquista of California
On February 6, 1998, the Mexican consul general in California, Jose Angel Pescador Osuna, spoke at the Southwestern School of Law in Los Angeles as part of a symposium on the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which gave the Southwest to the United States. Osuna proclaimed, “And even though I am saying this part serious,...
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Death Before Dishonor
The 46-year-old veteran frontiersman lay in bed, desperately ill. He was suffering from the effects of a gunshot wound that he had received in a fight. But duty called. The state legislature asked him if he would lead an army of volunteers to engage the rampaging Red Stick Creeks. Though scarcely able to sit up...
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Hollywood Does History
At 0825 on 20 November 1943, the first of six waves of Marines left the line of departure and headed for the beach on Betio Island, the principal objective for the United States in the Tarawa Atoll. At 4,000 yards out, shells from Japanese artillery pieces started splashing around the amtracs carrying the Marines. At...
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Letter From Australia: America Down Under
Vietnamese gangs shake down proprietors of small businesses for protection money. Blacks have enormously high rates of drug addiction, alcoholism, crime, and out-of-wedlock births. Pakistanis, Lebanese, and Nigerians drive cabs. Japanese buy up downtown highrise and choice beachfront properties. Chinese and Koreans take control of sections of the intercity. East Indians and Arabs run small...
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Treat Them to a Good Dose of Lead
While working my way through traffic snarls on the freeways of Los Angeles I listened intently to a radio talk show, when a caller urged that all citizens should go about armed, the program host exclaimed, “My God, that would be like the Old West. We can’t go back to that.” The host obviously thought...