Free Trade, Free Slaves The United States owes its origin to the trade wars of early modern Europe but its success to the Industrial Revolution, which filled America with productive, largely self-sufficient people. The history of the United States is testimony that economic growth has not occurred uniformly around the world. Some nations and empires...
In his book on declining social morality and the transformations of liberal ideology, Brad Stetson goes after deserving targets. He unmasks the liberalism that holds the media, universities, and the publishing industry in thrall and stresses the will to total domination that accompanies liberal concerns about racism, sexism, self-actualization, and the costs of low self-esteem....
One of two epigraphs with which Elizabeth Spencer introduces her memoir of growing up in northern Mississippi is taken from the closing sentence of her story, “A Southern Landscape.” The narrator, looking back on her hometown from a far remove in place and time, acknowledges her need “of a land, of a sure terrain, of...
The announcement in February 1997 that British scientists had cloned a sheep turned the medical world upside down, Ian Wilmut and his colleagues had taken cells from an adult sheep’s udder and removed the nucleus from each. They then implanted this genetic material into a specially prepared sheep ovum from which the nucleus had been...
The modern age has known many false prophets who have challenged the moral and spiritual beliefs of the Christian faith. Although churchmen have not always been vigilant in defense of traditional religion, one institution able to resist the secularizing trends of the 19th and 20th century has been the Catholic Church. But it has not...
“No nation ever made its bread either by its great arts, or its great wisdoms. By its minor arts or manufactures, by its practical knowledges, yes; but its noble scholarship, its noble philosophy, and its noble art are always to be bought as a treasure, not sold for a livelihood.” —John...
Late in October 1899, in the town of Deming, New Mexico Territory, the commander of Scarborough’s Rangers recognized a face familiar to him from the pages of Cosmopolitan magazine, one of many publications then devoting considerable media attention to the Bandit Queen, a youngish woman from Chicago. In the company of another small-time crook, she...
The most important thing to know about this volume is that its authors were the principal formulators of the infamous National History Standards of 1995. The United States Senate was so dismayed by the History Standards that it voted 99 to I to reject the efforts of this trio of historians from UCLA. History on...
In a recent PBS documentary about the exploration of Mars, a NASA scientist lectured, “We are, after all, one planet. . . . Once we get ofFour planet, especially once there’s a colony on another planet, national boundaries start to become really insignificant. . . . The New World Order isn’t going to be America...
The 12 Southerners who contributed to I’ll Take My Stand (1930) must have been a terrible failure, for the South as well as the rest of the nation ignored their warnings and injunctions. Yet, in their failure—caused in part by the frustration of the Depression and sealed by the global engagement of World War II—they...
“‘Tis time to fear when tyrants seem to kiss.” —William Shakespeare “Just the facts, ma’am.” Joe Friday’s prescription for getting at the truth has been followed by Seymour Hersh, whose investigation of the secret life of John F. Kennedy, America’s “prince of the people,” is peppered with facts as recalled by...
Thinking about unidentified flying objects can be a useful exercise, whatever we believe about extraterrestrial life and its presence among us. If nothing else, it forces us to deal seriously with those perennial questions that are as useful to scientists and philosophers as they are to lawyers and politicians on congressional investigating committees: What do...
“Will no one tell me what she sings? Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow / For old, unhappy far-off things. And Battles long ago.” Wordsworth, perhaps, was prompted by recollections of an age before warfare meant the mechanized destruction of all in its path. Yet war, to paraphrase an American precursor of Zhukov and Guderian, has...
“The thing is to squeeze the last drop out of the medium you have learned to use. The aim is not essentially different from the aim of Greek tragedy, but we are dealing with a public that is only semi-literate and we have to make an art out of a language...
This compendium on immigration by editors of the National Research Council (NRC) includes the work of 14 scholars, among them economists, demographers, and sociologists. At least one of the contributors is a strong advocate of high levels of immigration, while another has recently criticized current policy for ignoring the decline in skills and levels of...
The grand theme of P.D. James’s work is man and his overwhelming sense of rootlessness, anxiety, and guilt in the knowledge of a crime unknown and a punishment outwardly denied in the post-Christian era, though inwardly anticipated. Especially in the last decade or so, James has moved far beyond Dame Agatha Christie, delving deeply into...
“Friendship is like two clocks keeping time.” —Anonymous Walker Percy was born in Birmingham, Alabama, on May 7, 1916, the eldest son of a prosperous lawyer and a Georgia socialite. In addition to patrician lineage, Percy enjoyed a birthright of wealth and privilege. With these amenities, however, came a familial predisposition...
“War is the trade of kings.” —John Dryden The single greatest force for consolidation of the national state is war. A truism, but one that American conservatives have been loath to admit. Ideologically committed to anticommunism, the conservative movement fell into lockstep with liberal troops in the Cold War, in the...
“No government power can he abused long. Mankind will not bear it.” —Samuel Johnson The stereotype of the British journalist—and stereotypes are usually true—has an arrogant Brit arriving in Washington, rewriting the Washington Post and the New York Times for his dispatches, and spending the rest of his time in fancy...
Not too long ago, the London Daily Telegraph resurrected a 1962 essay by Ian Fleming on “How to Write a Thriller,” in which the creator of James Bond said, “If you look back on the bestsellers you have read, you will find that they all have one quality: you simply have to turn the page.”...
The great political project of our time is the rebellion against giantism: against the state, corporate, and professional leviathans that strangle individuals and communities. Of all the ways to injure those monsters, the single least effective one may be to write a book about it. Or, at least, to write the book that Thomas Naylor...
The fall of the Wall; the assertion by former communist leaders that they were engaged in systematic espionage against the United States; revelations provided by the Venona tapes of communist activity in this country; the admission by Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and other leaders that communism did not work; General Volkogonov’s concession that President Reagan was justified...
“An historian is a prophet in retrospect.” —A.W. von Schlegel Wir sind mit Hitler noch lange nicht fertig (“We are nowhere near done with Hitler”): the warning by two contemporary German historians provides an apt opening line to John Lukacs’s delightful book. His “history of the evolution of our knowledge of...
In the alternative culture that has grown around modern American religion, music stars such as Amy Grant have commanded much attention. Disgusted by the filth that is popular music, teenagers are encouraged by well-meaning parents to listen to Grant instead of, say, Madonna. Likewise, Frank Peretti is seen as a Christian substitute for mega sellers...
America in Black and White is an ambitious project, at once a massively detailed review of race relations this century and a provocative manifesto for the future. As such, it demands comparison with Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma (1944), which did so much to place racial injustice at the center of American politics for decades...
“Folly is often more cruel in the consequences than malice can be in the intent.” —Halifax The correspondence of Edmund Burke, whose letters help to illuminate his published works, was not available in a complete edition until 1978. Today, however, it seems that every aspiring journalist begins saving his correspondence even...
During the early 1980’s, social scientists noticed that welfare mothers were spending three to six times their official income. According to Harvard sociologist Christopher Jencks in his foreword to Making Ends Meet, conservatives and liberals have been loath to admit this: conservatives because they refuse to admit that mothers cannot survive on welfare alone, and...
The interstate highways, John Steinbeck complained in his 1962 memoir Travels with Charley, “are wonderful for moving goods but not for inspection of a countryside. When we get these thruways across the country, as we will and must, it will be possible to drive from New York to California without seeing a single thing.” When...
Obedient Sons begins by reminding us how thoroughly the language of generations pervades our sense of modern American history, which is after all the story of the “Lost Generation, Beat Generation, generation gap. Generation X.” But the whole concept of generations is a relatively modern device which carries a vast range of social and political...
Unbelievers, Flannery O’Connor remarked, think that faith for be- Hevers is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the Cross. William Buckley, regretting at the outset of his book that he is unable to convey a sense of his own personal struggle with Catholic Christianity, pleads simply that “there is no sufficient story...
While Cold Mountain, the admittedly well-wrought novel about a Confederate deserter, has achieved bestseller status, a story of a quite different sort has gained a modest but devoted readership and demonstrated anew the gifts of one of America’s finest writers. Nashville 1864 is a mere 129 pages long. Still, it is best not read in...
A reasonable case can perhaps be made for some form of firearm regulation. However, few in the opinion- molding professions are able to make it with credibility, unacquainted as they are with up-to-date, scholarly work on the issue. Many journalists who cover the subject continue to recite a collective wisdom based on the studies and...
“Internationalism is a luxury which only the upper classes can afford; the common people are hopelessly bound to their native shores.” —Benito Mussolini Walter A. McDougall, a professor of international relations at the University of Pennsylvania, presents useful truths about the history of American foreign policy. The United States, he correctly...
“Poetry is the Devil’s wine.” —St. Augustine In his prophetic poem “The Silence of the Poets,” Dana Gioia imagines a time in the not too distant future when poetry will be a completely lost art. “A few observers voiced their mild regret / about another picturesque, unprofitable craft / that progress...
The man who loves other countries as much as his own stands on a level with the man who loves other women as much as he loves his own wife.” —Theodore Roosevelt Hailed by the New York Times for showing that Colonel Robert McCormick, the legendary publisher of the Chicago Tribune, was “anti- just about...
By any assessment, W.B. Yeats was an extraordinary man who led a more active and varied life than most poets. As R.F. Foster says, he was “a poetic genius who was also, both serially and simultaneously, a playwright, journalist, occultist, apprentice politician, revolutionary, stage-manager, diner-out, dedicated friend, confidant and lover of some of the most...
“Now in history,” wrote Chesterton, “there is no Revolution that is not a Restoration.” A collective memory, a vague but compelling collection of shadows that bind us to the past, seems to whisper a perennial, bittersweet hymn to the numbed ear of man, particularly modern man. Every nation, tribe, or clan has passed on tales...
The recent death of Robert Mitchum reminds us not only of his appearance in one of the best film noirs. Out of the Past, but of his impersonation of the detective Philip Marlowe in the remake of Farewell, My Lovely and The Big Sleep. Mitchum once claimed that, in his early days, he tended bar...
The theory that “big emerging markets” (BEMs) m the Third Worid will be the driving force of the world economy, and thus of worid politics, has been at the core of the Clinton administration’s foreign policy. As Undersecretary of Commerce for International Trade during President Clinton’s first term, Jeffrey E. Garten was the principal author...
“A perfect democracy is the most shameless thing in the world.” —Edmund Burke For some time now it has been the opinion of European political theorists that right and left have become antiquated points of reference. Allegedly, these terms, archaic by the time of the Cold War, were kept in use...
“Nature I loved, and next to nature, art.” —W.S. Landor In October 1986, I heard Robert Penn Warren read a selection of his poems at an LSU conference marking the 50th anniversary of the Southern Review. He was 81 years old, exceeding frail, and suffering from cancer. About halfway through the...
In the Victorian era, High Churchmen castigated Darwin as a materialist who would reduce men to mere monkeys, and earnest materialists enunciated a vision of scientific progress that, as it were, only incidentally drained the universe of purpose. Darwinian propaganda has been with us for 100 years, a mechanical explanation not only of the origins...
Charles Hamilton Houston, dean of the Howard Law School, taught his students to view law as an instrument of social engineering, and Thurgood Marshall, one of Houston’s top students in the early 1950’s, never forgot this basic lesson. As a leading advocate in the nation, Marshall served as a catalyst for social change as he...
“Democracy is more cruel than wars or tyrants.” —Seneca The correspondence on the origins of the Cold War between John Lukacs and George Kennan, who have been friends for more than four decades, is not entirely unknown to fans of either. Much of it was printed last year in American Heritage,...
Naomi Wolf is nice. She is attractive, she has a daughter, she is even married. To a man. A far cry from the rabid man-haters associated with modern-day feminism. Her voice has been hailed as one of moderation; she celebrates “power feminism,” professing that women are not helpless. She goes out of her way to...
We live in an age when biography flourishes, contrary to earlier expectations. The reason for this is the decline of the novel and the rise of popular interest in all kinds of history, and biography belongs within history. The problem is “all kinds”: for appetite may be fed by a wide variety of junk food....
“A people still, whose common ties are gone; who, mixed with every race, are lost in none.” —George Crabbe That Americans of different ethnic or religious origins intermarry surprises no one—half of Japanese-Americans, more than half of all Catholics, nearly three-quarters of Italian-Americans, 84 percent of Polish-Americans, and so on. But...
Maybe in another decade or so we will be ready to assess the full political and psychological impact of the 1995 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City, but already we can observe some of the major effects. The partisan impact became clear last year, when Bill Clinton’s reelection owed so much to the...
“Glorious things are spoken of thee, O city of God.” —Psalms LXXXVII This rich and complex book is on one level the summing up of a controversy over a properly Christian, specifically Catholic, view of politics which has pitted the author, a theologian, against certain “neoconservative” thinkers, notably Richard Neuhaus, Michael...
“Every honest man is a prophet.” —Blake Whittaker What is now known as the Hiss case exploded across the front pages of the nation’s newspapers on August 4,1948. The day before, Whittaker Chambers—a short, stocky man in a rumpled grey suit—had taken the stand before the House Un-American Activities Committee to...