Category: Polemics & Exchanges

I enjoyed Samuel Francis’s lucid analysis of the 1954 Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education (“Forty Years After,” May 1994), but I take exception to his argument that “the only feasible moral defense of the Brown decision today is not that it replaced force with freedom, but that it replaced one kind of...

Having briefly served on the staff of the Presidential Commission on the Assignment of Women in the Armed Forces, I read R. Cort Kirkwood’s “Life on the Front Lines” (Vital Signs, March 1994) with interest. His report on the commission is exactly correct. Particularly depressing is that so many of the Naval Academy and Military...

Chronicles does like to keep a good debate going. Samuel Francis’s bugle call (“A Banner With a Strange Device,” February 1994) for economic nationalism was another interesting alignment of Main Street conservatism with the dirigiste left. Come the Middle American political uprising, I’m still wondering, what sort of policymaking might we actually expect? Is your...

Like Roger McGrath (“Treat Them to a Good Dose of Lead,” January 1994), I “grew up in a Los Angeles that had very little crime.” We, too, “locked the door to our house with a skeleton key, when we remembered”—until we lost the key. Professor McGrath does not attempt to account for the absence of...

John Meroney’s article (“Maya Angelou’s Inaugural Poem,” December 1993) about my colleague here at Wake Forest University deserves serious attention. It reveals much about America’s poet inaugurate, but, even more importantly, it probes into the bizarre reasons for the poem’s popularity among the Clinton administration and its supporters in the world of education. Angelou’s poem...

I was sorely disappointed by the editing of my review of Paul Gottfried’s The Conservative Movement, Revised Edition (“Gloomy Conservatives,” August 1993). My attempt at irony and subtlety might have exceeded my ability to express myself and thus confused your editor; but this only validates the need for a review of the editing by the...

Samuel Francis (“A Perpetual Censor,” July 1993) carefully criticizes the dubious “substantive due process” doctrine. But he errs repeatedly in his facts and analysis, not least in counting me among the doctrine’s adherents. Francis correctly criticizes judicial activism of the sort that creates constitutional rights out of thin air. But he ignores the even more...

I am most concerned by the profile of “A Young Conservative” (Liberal Arts) featured in your June issue. While I realize the election is not yours but rather that of a conservative student newspaper at “one of America’s largest universities,” I am fearful that youthful conservatives, of which I am a part, are becoming less...

When I took my daughter Lauren to see Walt Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, like everyone else in the audience I was overwhelmed. Disney, producer of Snow White and other films that have long been part of our very heritage, was back. The animation is stupendous, as are the orchestration and lyrics to the songs....

Your March issue (“Art in the 90’s: Visions and Values“) was balm to a battered spirit. My sculptor husband (deceased) was punished professionally for his stubborn adherence to the belief that the best art serves truth and beauty. My own sculpture and, regrettably, that of our son is ignored with a vengeance. I am forwarding...

Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, brilliant laissez-faire economist of 18th-century France, said that interventions by the government to protect consumers “would be like wanting it to provide cushions for all the children who might fall.” If he were alive today, wouldn’t he be amused to learn that a sober (?) New Jersey legislature (Cultural Revolutions, March...

Professor Jenkins bears false witness against me in “Priests and Pedophiles” (December 1992) when he implies that somehow I am an opponent of clerical celibacy. The only thing I’ve ever written on the subject has been in support of celibacy. I have consistently argued that most pedophiles are married men and that the pedophilia syndrome...

Gary North in his “Pat Buchanan’s First Inaugural Address” (November 1992) cites a line employed by Franklin Roosevelt in his first inaugural address: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” This line was actually written by Montaigne, who died in 1592. Bacon, Wellington, and Thoreau also noted this poignant line in their...

I was disappointed to read Randy Salzman’s anti-lawyer diatribe (“Letter From Georgia: The Price of Justice,” May 1992) in your otherwise fine magazine. The sum of $6,000 is a very small amount to pay to insure that a man charged with a homicide receives a fair trial. I am sure that no non-indigent citizen, a...

Help! M’aidez! Salve! While perusing your excellent September 1992 issue, I was horrified to see two articles espousing inaccuracies about homeschooling. First, E. Christian Kopff. In his article “Ignorance and Freedom,” he repeatedly states (without any source) that “‘Bible-believing’ Christians are strongly opposed to learning [Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and German] and allowing their children to...

Jacob Neusner’s otherwise entertaining report on the Dead Sea Scrolls fiasco (Cultural Revolutions, April 1992) is marred by the aside that “Christianity, like every other great religion, rests not on historical facts but supernatural revelation. . . . “ This ugly little pronunciamento (made just in time for Lent) is about what one would expect...

As a former prosecutor and public defender, I found Thomas Fleming’s May Perspective, “Law and/or Order,” to be very wise. However, I noticed one oversight—no mention of the workfarm, or work camp, as a place of incarceration for some convicts. When I started practicing in 1969, St. Louis county had a workfarm operated by Mel...

I sure wouldn’t want to cross Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. In his semihysterical, mean-spirited diatribe (Cultural Revolutions, January 1992), he manages to charge Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas with perjury, perversion, and racial opportunism. And that’s just for openers. Although I probably lost count, there are some twenty-five negative references to Thomas’s character, ideology, or...

Jacob Neusner, in his “Letter From Germany” (December 1991), assesses the academic apathy of Germany, pointing out that “the National Socialists got rid of the talent as well as the entrenched mediocrity.” Which is to say that Nazism destroyed not just the “drags” of the old Germany, but also the society’s protected classes, and the...

Theodore Pappas (Cultural Revolutions, November 1991) says, “There is, of course, no long-term answer to homelessness,” but this begs the question. The focus should not be on solving the specific problem of homelessness, but on seeing homelessness as a symptom of modem decay. When the change of focus takes place, a “long-term answer to homelessness”...

Concerning Thomas Fleming’s December Perspective about the America First Committee, anti-interventionists might have taken heart from the statement attributed to Winston Churchill in August 1936 by William Griffen, editor of the New York Enquirer: “America should have minded her own business and stayed out of the World War. If you hadn’t entered the war the...

I enjoyed Jigs Gardner’s “Letter From Cape Breton Island” (January 1992) on the subject of “The New Utopians.” He correctly states that environmentalists are openly Utopian, and as such are full of “cocksure ignorance” in support of Utopian views. A true Utopian has boundless faith in his dream world, and any challenge to that dream...

J.O. Tate’s review of Mary Gordon’s “writings” (“Feminist Fatale,” September 1991) provided comic relief when sorely needed. I laughed out loud at his deft phrases, and giggles threaten to erupt when I recall it. I’ve never actually “read” Mary Gordon; I tried to once, I really did. I bought a battered paperback copy of one...

Professor Murray Rothbard’s “Letter From Academia,” (Correspondence, September 1991) begins on a Swiftian tone, but ends disastrously. We learn from the last paragraph that the trouble with our universities is the lack of a “reality check,” in other words, that they are not run on the private, profit-making enterprise model. I have always thought, naively...

Tomislav Sunic’s (“The Gulf Crisis in Europe,” May 1991) proposal of an Islamic conversion for neo-pagan Western Europe as some type of alternative cultural synthesis is an eyebrow raiser. But to state that the Moslem religion’s “record of zeal and intolerance is no worse than that of other monotheistic beliefs” is a denial of the...

While I recognize that Paul Gottfried and I clearly have philosophical differences on the nature and goals of education, I feel compelled to address one point in his review of my book in your May issue. Professor Gottfried correctly notes that I hold up the figure of Mark Van Doren of Columbia University as a...

While George W. Carey (Opinions, April 1991) reached the right conclusion (“the Constitution of which he [Russell Kirk] writes in this book is, in fact, dead”), referring to Kirk’s The Conservative Constitution, the headline writer could have done better than quoting only the first sentence—”Your Constitution is all sail and no anchor”—of the paragraph from...

Steven Goldberg’s “Sociology and Common Sense” (March 1991) contains some bits of wisdom, but its central premise is badly flawed. I first encountered the “Common-Sense Sociology Test” as a graduate student in the early 1960’s, and by then it was at least a decade or two old, so its ancestry is considerably older than Goldberg...

Jacob Neusner’s fierce attack upon the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton (Cultural Revolutions, December 1990) is not as well-informed nor as balanced as one would expect from a scholar of his eminence. Neusner claims that the permanent faculty of its schools of historical studies and social sciences “are not prominent, though they publish,” and...

Forrest McDonald’s “On the Study of History” (February 1991) was stimulating. His quick survey of our nation’s ills was pinpoint bombing. I had trouble, however, digesting McDonald’s “the reason we cannot solve our social problems is precisely the reason we can put a man on the moon,” and his allegation that the scientific method “cannot...

Thank you for Theodore Pappas’s article (Cultural Revolutions) on illegal immigration in the January 1991 issue. So little is written about the topic that we are grateful when anyone recognizes the problems. A little clarification. There are two kinds of deportation. Most frequent is what agents refer to as “VRs.” This translates into “voluntary returns,”...

The message of the thoughtful and beautifully written articles in Chronicles (December 1990) on “good news” seems to be this: things are very bad and bound to get worse, but if you resign yourself to the inevitable and concentrate on family and friends you may, with God’s help, get through it. If this is “good...

I don’t know who Mr. R. Cort Kirkwood is or what his credentials to write about “law” are. His knee-jerk reaction (Vital Signs, November 1990) to efficiently verifiable identification of applicants for special recognition in the United States today compels me to suppose that they are minimal. No one suggests that there be any compulsion...

Though John Shelton Reed’s December column was engaging and enjoyable, he made a very common error in misstating the old saw about Yanks and Rebs together being invincible. As Mr. Reed put it, “one observer remarked that if he had Confederate cavalry and Union infantry he could whip any army on earth.” The observer in...

The crux of Jacob Neusner’s (Cultural Revolutions, September 1990) frustration lies in the fact that he is desperately trying to find a “middle position” solution to the NEA funding crisis. There is no middle position to take with NEA, simply because the very nature of its being violates free market principles. Art is a business...

In “Revolution and Tradition in the Humanities Curriculum” (September 1990), Thomas Fleming repeats the false story that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. plagiarized his Boston University doctoral dissertation. The charge has been made several times in the last year and appears to be spreading like whooping cough among the unvaccinated. Allow me to introduce some...

I have read Theodore Pappas’s review essay (November 1990) in which he advocates compulsory national service and find his proposal quite unconvincing for the following reasons. First, despite the inclusion of military “boot camp,” it is not likely that the courts would uphold the constitutionality of the law because of the “window dressing” nature of...

The first half of Elizabeth Fox-Genovese’s article “Whose Women’s Studies?” (September 1990) seems to be a fair and balanced account of the struggle between passionate feminists, scholars in the field of women’s studies, and those of us who question or oppose feminist efforts to “transform the curriculum.” She admits the central role of radical feminists...

Congratulations on your unique and insightful August environment issue. My only concern is with the article by Frederick Turner. I found his “God is a fetus” natural techno-theology every bit as disturbing as some of your writers have found George Gilder’s microchip messianism. I was warned by a good friend once that if intellectual conservatism...

Murray N. Rothbard’s “Foreign Policy for the Post-Cold War World” (May 1990) covers much territory in a fine fashion. However, his assessment of the Soviet situation does not rest on solid ground. John T. Flynn prophesied the coming of fascism in the United States without realizing that fascism is merely communism in uniform with white...

Allan Carlson (May 1990) observes the self-serving inclination of certain parts of modern society to free families from the anxieties that modern society itself places on the family. “What,” he asks, “have been the results?” As part of the answer, he posits the rather preposterous notion that Cold War military families are part of an...

Thank you for presenting George Garrett’s piece (“Art Is Always Political When the Government Starts Giving Grants,” June 1990) dealing with the National Endowment for the Arts, an extremely complex issue that has been trashed by less informed writers. While my ideological inclination is to demand the abolition of all government funding, I also live...

C.S. Lewis is a major figure for at least three reasons. He was a great, historian of European literature; he was an important creative writer in the realm of Northern mythology; he was the most influential Christian lay teacher in the English-speaking world in our century. These things are not easily reconciled and present great...

I have been to Washington exactly twice in my life, and unless you count an airport layover, I remain innocent of the sinful pleasures of New York. On the face of it, it would seem hard to mark me down as a member of “Peggy Noonan’s Beltway claque.” But I get the impression from Jeffrey...

I was shocked at Llewellyn Rockwell’s complete misinterpretation (Cultural Revolutions, March 1990) of what William Raspberry wrote. Until your March issue, I had always assumed that what people wrote in your magazine was reasonably accurate. As closely as I can recall, Rockwell quoted Raspberry accurately, but he took the columnist’s words in an extremely narrow...

I am writing to avert any possible confusion between a book recently reviewed in your magazine (January 1990) and a work of my own. To be sure, no one who actually read my book, The Other God That Failed: Hans Freyer and the Deradicalization of German Conservatism, would be likely to confuse it with the...

Charlotte Low Allen’s review of George Gilder’s Microcosm (January 1990) seems to miss the book’s most obvious point. Perhaps that is because it is Allen’s purpose to attack Gilder’s message. She is a member of the revolt against the microcosm, a revolt widespread across the political spectrum. Microcosm dives into an esoteric technology to uncover...

William Hawkins (January 1990) is right on target when he states, “American society is far more interested in present consumption than future growth.” I am not sure, however, that “intervention to curtail imports” (whatever that means) is necessarily the answer. Surely dollar devaluation was a political, not a market, “solution”—and that didn’t work out very...

It is not, as Thomas Fleming says in his February Perspective, a “temptation” to “construct the Kingdom of God in the here and now.” This is, for Christians, a command by our Lord who taught us, in His prayer, that His Kingdom come will be done, on earth, as it is in Heaven.    ...

Professor Arthur Eckstein’s fine review of Pete Collier and David Horowitz’s Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the Sixties (August 1989) calls attention to the fact that the revolutionaries of the 60’s turned themselves into the professors of the 70’s and the deans of the 80’s. Why? Because the universities in the 1960’s were expanding. So...