The true nature of the New Deal was revealed in one of those brilliant ironies that flash lightning-like in a midnight storm. It happened September 13, 1933, the Nativity of a new secular holiday: NRA Day. An interminable parade up New York’s Fifth Avenue celebrated the National Recovery Administration, which was to set prices, fix...
While violent criminals are given a pass to victimize and reoffend, the everyday American finds himself under the heel of an increasingly invasive and oppressive state.
Near the beginning of Federico Fellini’s Intervista (1988), a very large camera crane is about to rise, wreathed in smoke and artificial moonlight, high above the soundstages of Cinecitta. One of the camera operators calls down to his director (Fellini being played by Fellini), “Aren’t you coming up?” “No,” Fellini immediately replies, “I can imagine...
One of the most significant but little noted transitions from English to American society was in the Common Law of homicide and self-defense. As far back as the 13th century, English Common Law dealt harshly with the act of homicide. The “right to kill in self-defense was slowly established, and is a doctrine of modern...
Vanessa was the first American woman in my life. “You forced a superpower to her knees,” congratulated my friend Peter, when I told him what had happened the previous night. Things went considerably quicker in Paris in 1958; I had no reason to beat around the bush posing questions about bisexual lovers, blood transfusions, or...
The questions I ask myself from time to time are: What is the Ingersoll Milling Machine Company doing with its own philanthropic organization? What does Ingersoll have to do with philanthropy at all? We are engaged in a highly technical international machinery business, which is extremely demanding because of surging technology, because there are competitors...
One of the best things in life for a writer who sets out to be an artist is to be appreciated by people whose opinions are generally respected and valued. That is the happy condition in which I find myself this evening, and I thank the directors of the Ingersoll Foundation and the Rockford Institute....
This year the Ingersoll Foundation has decided to present the Richard M. Weaver Award for Scholarly Letters to a professor of classics. Amidst joy and gratitude, this will bring to the fore some of the uneasiness that has been associated with the word and concept of “classics” for a long time, an uneasiness that seems...
When we recall the great artists of the 19th century, perhaps the vibrant and theatrical images of Delacroix come to mind. Or do scenes of daring and struggle from Hugo flood our memory instead? Or the ebullient audacity of a Schumann song resonate in our ears? Perhaps all three, and more, for theirs was the...
Stereotypes to the right of them, stereotypes to the left of them, the politically correct volley and thunder at every image that might offend the sensitive soul of the approved victim. Dartmouth’s comic Indian mascot turned into an unsmiling noble savage, then was abolished altogether. First the Frito Bandito’s politically unacceptable gold tooth disappeared, then...
Lehi, Utah, is somewhat familiar to those who have seen the movie Footloose. The small Mormon community provided Hollywood with the perfect setting for a tale of adolescent rebellion against parental and religious authority. Yet shortly after the movie’s release Lehi’s pious image was ruptured by a child abuse scandal. One morning in the summer...
“In a state of civilization,” opined Thomas Jefferson, it is not possible to be both ignorant and free. In Query XIV of his Notes on the State of Virginia Jefferson laid out his plan for public education. Every free man would learn “the most useful facts” from ancient and modern history. The “best geniuses” would go...
UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA Edward Gibson tells us that, about 250 A.D., the Goths came down from the Ukraine and took the city of Marcianopolis. To save their lives and property, the people of the city gave the Gothic warriors “a large sum of money.” This bribe worked to restore order and peace in the city...
How are we-the campus conservatives-to think of ourselves in the sea of political correctness? Perhaps we adopt the attitude of the left, and view ourselves as the real but unacknowledged victims of oppression, casualties in the war for diversity and sensitivity. It is our turn to be denied tenure, refused job interviews, not invited to speak...
Robert Frost published 11 books of poetry, won four Pulitzer Prizes, established himself as the unofficial poet laureate of the United States, and acquired a national and international literary reputation. Despite his fame as a poet and public speaker, and because of his friendship with such liberal Democrats as Vice-President Henry Wallace and President John...
Visits in the space of ten days to Toronto, Ontario, and then Tifton, Georgia, demand reflective analysis for stronger reasons than the compelling force of alliteration. The city and the town are so different that the visitor to both is driven to look for the faintest similarities. Once that effort is made, however, sweeping conclusions...
When mild-mannered Bernhard Goetz shot four black youths who attempted to rob him in a New York subway in 1984, news reporters inevitably called him the “subway vigilante.” But Goetz was not a vigilante; he was not a member of a vigilant group of concerned citizens patrolling the subways as keepers of the peace. On...
Texas Here too. Here, as on the other unfurling Frontier of the continent, the great Prairie where a solitary cry fades out; Here too the lariat, the Indian, the yearling. Here too the secretive and unseen bird That over the clamorous strains of history Sings for one evening and its memory; Here too the mystic...
I am so deathly afraid of those women. Strawberry pie again, Eleanor, how nice. Pity it didn’t set. Every Fourth of July I vow not to, but sooner or later I sit down and cry. I used to cry the minute Philo came in the kitchen with the strawberries; he would start to hull them,...
It was April and beginning to warm up in the mountains. Snow melted from the deep basins, especially from the exposures facing south and, in shrinking, formed pictures on the slopes—a snow hawk, a pack of running coyotes, an antelope. Alejandra Ruiz knew these animals would disappear as the sun slid into its higher arc,...
Last September, in a speech about Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, President Bush used for the first time a phrase that has come to signify his foreign policy objectives and his vision of the post-Cold War age: “New World Order.” Here and in subsequent speeches the President would hint that, with the liberation of Eastern Europe,...
Adventure fiction is vigorously alive. Although virtually ignored by critics outside specialist newsletters, the genre has long been a dominant force both in bookstores and in Hollywood. Such adventure films as Die Hard, Jaws, and the Indiana Jones epics draw millions of viewers. Tom Clancy’s technological thrillers and Robert Ludlum’s volumes of struggle and terror...
The modern temper shows a fatal tendency to break large moral and historical questions into smaller technocratic ones and to tinker with each of these as a separated “policy problem.” Unfortunately for advocates of this approach, the immigration debate presents us with what is essentially a moral problem, requiring the use of the moral—even of...
WICK ALLISON When one is asked about the future in the context Chronicles has set, the obvious response is to talk in political terms. But conservatism is not a political phenomenon. I have always been uncomfortable with references to the “conservative movement” when I read the political press or some of my favorite columnists. It...
Perhaps since the War Between the States itself, and certainly since the literary Southern Renascence became conscious of itself in the 30’s and 40’s, educated Southerners, and Southern writers especially, have taken their sense of history as a point of pride. Now, as the end of the century approaches, one may be tempted to wonder...
Jessie and Kirk Dawson were in their late 20’s when they I moved into Grove Glen, and Fred Glover’s wife Eva saw at once that they needed work. This was a tight community, not the kind two kids could walk into cold, so Eva took it as her responsibility. She was, after all, the boss’s...
The U.S. Forest Service has custody over 192 million acres of national forest and rangeland—an area nearly equal to Texas and Louisiana combined. Like the National Park Service, the Forest Service is commonly viewed as a stellar example of Progressive Era legislation. However, the Forest Service clearly and recurrently violates the spirit of its stewardship...
Not long ago I participated in a delightful and in some ways unusual nature outing at a place called Poplar Creek, one of the forest preserves that make up an extensive system of green spaces in Chicago and its suburbs. For three or four hours some fifty of us cut and piled brush, planted seeds,...
Fanning out over the globe to the far-flung backwaters of Azerbaijan and the jungles of Zimbabwe, a modern-day group of missionaries has been spreading the gospel of democracy. Inflamed with the zeal of Jesuits preaching the Good Book to wild Indians, these latter-day saints worship at the altar of pluralism, free elections, and human rights,...
The Common Problems of Assimilating Immigrants in Israel and the United States Parts of the United States are currently undergoing a radical cultural transformation. Demographers have documented that as a result of large-scale immigration, California—the country’s most populous state—will be composed of a majority of minorities by the first decade of the next century. Moreover,...
As a general rule, democracy does not grow with time. It usually comes into being as the result of some general uprising, and it is supported by the broader and more general popular will. But, with time, and because the larger population docs not usually continually watch for the encroachment of smaller groups, the course...
Transnationalism isn’t a term that is familiar to the American people. According to Peter Drucker, a leading advocate of transnationalism, a transnational company is one that operates in the global marketplace; that does its research wherever there are scientists and technicians, and manufactures where economics dictate (in many countries, that is); and that has a...
“It behoveth thee to be a fool for Christ.” —Thomas à Kempis Hawkins was doing his version of an Iranian student who had missed eight weeks of class, yet wanted an “A” in the calculus course. “I know you are wondering why I have not to come to class since school start. I am good...
She knew she did it well, had done this well almost all her married life; she would spend days at it if she had to, just to make it right. Still, every time the members of the Garden Club came to Alicia’s house, her mouth dried and her belly trembled. Employed as she was now,...
To enter the job market in the middle of World War II was a heady experience. In the year or two following Pearl Harbor nearly ten million young men had donned uniforms, and employers were crying for help. The only large reservoir left to be tapped was women. Rosie the Riveter was born. For college...
A nation lives by its myths and heroes. Many societies have survived defeat and invasion, even political and economic collapse. None has survived the corruption of the picture it has of itself. High art and popular art are not in competition here. Both may and do help citizens decide what they are and admire. In...
As 1969 rolled around and the decade was ending, I was six years old and living in a temperate Southern city a thousand miles from New York. Conflict came from wanting to stretch my feet into my brother’s half of the backest-back of our fake wood-sided turquoise station wagon; Vietnam had no meaning for me....
There is a revolution underway in Israel—an upheaval that has nothing to do with rioting Palestinians, a burgeoning Arab birthrate, or Islamic fundamentalism. Like the movement that gave birth to the United States, this is a revolution in the name of tradition. Perhaps counterrevolution would be a more precise term. Its leaders are orthodox rabbis...
I can’t remember the last time I was in an airport waiting for luggage along with a flight from Managua. Welcome to Sheremetyevo Airport, Moscow. The passport control soldier was in a glass-enclosed booth with a large shoulder high shelf that hid his checklists. He could look at the calibrations painted on his window to...
For Albert Camus, the French Revolution initiated the modern age, killing God in the person of His representative on earth, the monarch. After which “Utopia replaces God by the future,” as Camus nicely phrases it in L’Homme Revoke. God’s anointed could no longer justify arbitrary action in this world by divine transcendence, and man (read...
Everybody knows somewhere inside him that South Africa, since 1984, and really for a generation, has been a set piece in the bloody farce we call “revolution.” The one-sidedness of the farce betrays our unacknowledged unease: except for a classic article in Commentary by Paul Johnson and a few other pieces, not a word has...
Are political pilgrimages a matter of history, or has the phenomenon survived? If so, in what form? Some reference to these questions has been made in the preface to the (1983) paperback edition of my book Political Pilgrims, but the years that have passed since then call for further reflections on this matter. History has...
“Are you acquainted with Christopher Marlowe?” “The poet?” “The same.” “I am surprised you do not speak of him in the past tense. He has been dead for some while.” “Since May of ’93, as it happens.” “Well, then,” Hunnyman tells the young man. “At that same time our company was performing in the North.”...
I confess—I know Russian. This ability has been causing me a lot of irritation lately. I have been bombarded with questions from people who don’t know the language, about what is really going on in Moscow now. In my answers, in order to be absolutely unbiased, I always rely on “Pravda.” I mean not just...
When an influential group of American intellectuals, liberals and neoconservatives alike, unites against one man, a Russian scribbler at refuge in a New England town, there ought to be something big at stake. Their own explanation is that Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn is a reactionary, a social conservative, an anti-democrat, a 19th-century romantic or paternalist, a...
Andrew Lytle lives in a log house on the Assembly Grounds in Monteagle, Tennessee. It is a busy area in summer, but in the wintertime most of the other houses are closed, and he has few immediate neighbors. The house is built on a cross plan and has somewhat unusually high ceilings. Most often Mr....
This interview took place on September 18 and 19, 1985, at Garrett’s house in Charlottesville, not far from the University of Virginia. It is a sizable stone house, rented, with most of the available wall space covered with hastily erected brick-and-board bookcases. Not quite settled yet, Garrett and his wife, Susan, joked about how they...
When I say that I thank you for asking me here to speak to you, that I thank you I am here, I have to confess that I am flying in the face of the latest status ritual practiced by many of my colleagues in the scribbling professions. The latest thing, as you may already...
As a literary form, the essay was once thought to be doomed as the novel is said to be in its perennially announced demise. The familiar essay, in particular, brought to its classic perfection by Charles (“Elia”) Lamb in the early 19th century, still finds some continuity today in our many personalized newspaper columns and...
If I could tell every first-year graduate student in America one thing, it is this: The campus is not a calling, it is just another career. If university teaching serves your purposes, come and join us. If not, follow your star in a different firmament. In graduate school, learn in order to sell your knowledge...