Historians tend to make the same argument: The South lost the Civil War because its economy was agrarian rather than industrial, with too few munitions factories to supply Confederate troops with weapons and too few textile mills to clothe them. According to these same historians, the postbellum sharecropper system proved to be an economic disaster,...
The book Partisans is a product of contemporary political discourse—made up of cut-and-paste, second- and third-hand source-filled rants—that fails to pass for serious scholarship.
“I don’t want to be married any longer.” “What does that mean?” “What I said.” “You don’t love me.” “I don’t love anybody.” “You loved me. Or said you did.” “Nobody’s responsible for what they said twenty-five years ago.” “I love you.” “I wish you wouldn’t.” “Am I so tough to get along with?” “Not...
Last summer this expansive sagebrush basin at the lower end of the Wyoming Range made the annual encampment of the Rainbow Family of Living Light, spawn of a congestive civilization. Fifteen thousand strong, they organized according to their various pursuits: drinking, drugs, nudity, fornication, and—for all the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Department knows—cannibalism and human sacrifice....
Historians tend to make the same argument: The South lost the Civil War because its economy was agrarian rather than industrial, with too few munitions factories to supply Confederate troops with weapons and too few textile mills to clothe them. According to these same historians, the postbellum sharecropper system proved to be an economic disaster,...
Anti-Confederate liberals (of various races) can’t get over the fact that pro-common-sense liberals, moderates and conservatives (of various races) can’t go over the fact that rhetorical agitation over race has led us down a blind alley. The supposed “nationalist” rally in Washington, D.C., last weekend was more an embarrassment to its promoters than it was...
In the early 1960’s, I was introduced to a fellow motorcycle rider by the name of Steve Foss. Before I could say anything, he quickly offered, “No relation to Joe Foss.” He had anticipated my question and that of nearly everyone he had met for years back. For most Americans back then, the name Foss...
Detroiters have a deeply ironic way of looking at their beloved city. The irony is evident in a once-popular T-shirt that showed a muscular tough gripping a ferocious dog around the neck while holding a loaded gun to the animal’s head. “Say Nice Things About Detroit,” the T-shirt read. The T-shirt is a commentary on...
In the German name for Austria, Osterreich, Reich denotes more than “empire” in the sense of territorial extension; there is also a certain spiritual content. In the Middle Ages, empire meant the Eastern Roman Empire of Byzantium, and after Christmas Day 800, when Charlemagne was crowned by Pope Leo XIII, the Sacer Imperator Romanus was...
Tanks make good pictures—the idea of an invasion of Ukraine sends shivers down the spines of most of Europe—and keeping the tanks at bay is what the political class is expected, indeed offers, to do. The price, however, will be for nations to surrender just about everything else. And that price is now about to...
The opening scene of the folk opera Singin’ Billy, for which Donald Davidson wrote the book and lyrics, takes place in the yard of Callie Wilkins, “Miss Callie,” the matriarch of Oconee Town in Pickens County, South Carolina. Two young people have married, John and Jennie Alsop, and are in danger of a shivaree. They...
Paul Theroux laments that the world is aging badly, that the world he knew as a young man has nearly vanished, that the decline and decay of precious things is everywhere apparent. Theroux should know; he travels more than I do. Also my own ventures at home and abroad depressingly confirm his impressions. Except when...
Long after his death, William Pitt is remembered as one of England’s finest statesmen, a man who valued his country's mixed constitution and unique combination of high regard for the rights of man and a stable social order where king, nobles, and commoners all had their place.
White anxiety is the single greatest driver of right-wing politics in the United States, and it is as understandable as the fear one feels while trying to avoid death by drowning.
Whatever may be the outcome of the crisis in the Gulf, one thing is already certain: European intellectuals will no longer be polarized along ideological lines, but divided along geopolitical fault lines. For the first time the European right is marching hand-in-hand with the European left, in common protest against the U.S. involvement in the...
A unique exhibition was held from March 1 to April 15 in the Vatican’s Braccio di Carlo Magno (Charlemagne wing) next to St. Peter’s Basilica. Entitled Verbum Domini, it was dedicated to telling the story of the Bible amid a mounting wave of anti-Christian secularization. “This is the most valuable exhibition the Vatican has ever...
The controversy over the humanities curricula is a struggle over definition, and what is at issue is not so much the nature or purposes of the American university as the identity of the American people. There have been many such definitional combats in the past; the greatest of them led to the War Between the States....
In a landmark five-to-four decision last spring, in United States v. Lopez, the Supreme Court announced—for the first time in almost 50 years—that Congress had exceeded its interstate commerce powers. At issue was a federal statute—the Gun Free School Zones Act of 1990—which forbade the carrying of firearms within one thousand feet of a school....
Philip Jose Farmer of Peoria, Illinois, is one of the great masters of science fiction. The first of a new series, Dayworld, depicts events in seven distinctly different, wild Manhattan life-styles of the year 3414 A.D. By portraying a future world government rooted in modern ideas and dilemmas, Farmer continues the science fiction tradition of...
Those earnest “neoliberals” at the Washington Monthly have again gotten religion, which, every few years, seems to be their wont. The putative convert this time is Amy Waldman, who writes that the left (her term) has needlessly neglected to “draw on a religious tradition” when trying to persuade others to support its political program. The...
After serving for more than three decades on the U.S. Supreme Court, Chief Justice William Rehnquist died on Saturday, September 3, at the age of 80, having lost his battle with thyroid cancer. With Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s recent announcement of her retirement, there are now two vacant seats on the Court. Just over a...
“When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school . . . ,” Paul Simon mused in a popular song some years ago. Simon, of course, was in high school long before multiculturalism, Afrocentrism, Outcome-Based Education, bilingual education. Heather Has 17 Mommies, Holocaust Studies, and assorted therapeutic group gropes and mass...
Goethe taught us that true happiness comes from being engaged with others in productive projects, and we have known since Plato and Aristotle that man is a social animal, but we would be hard put to reach these conclusions if our only guide were the current state of American law. Far too often the American...
Questions of transhumanism have been the subject of many dystopian and futuristic movies, but our fascination with the subject says more about ourselves than the machines.
As the hysterical coronavirus overreaction crashes our economy, I can’t help but think of the Spanish flu, which took some 675,000 American lives in 1918 and 1919. Adjusting for the difference in the size of the American population then and now, that number would be equivalent to two million deaths today. I’ll be surprised—I’m writing...
In classical times, the city was a sacred place, bounded by a wall, in which civilization occurred, and to live outside the city was to be uncivilized. To be the founder of a city was to be god-like, so that there are at least six Alexandrias, the work of Alexander the Great; several Antiochs, named...
Leon Redbone left the scene in 2015—I don’t mean that he expired, but simply that he retired. There was mention at the time of health concerns, but he was through with television appearances and concerts and touring, and with recording as well. There has been almost nothing about him on the national scene since then,...
Somewhere deep in their bones, Americans recognize that property is the paramount civil right—perhaps the paramount human right. Anyone who seriously studies American history, particularly that of the late 18th century, will discover that property, along with virtue, provided the foundation for American government. Indeed, the preservation of properly is arguably the chief reason we...
What was meant to grow separately cannot last long as an artificial whole. This prehistoric wisdom seems to be forgotten by advocates of multiculturalism—which is just a misleading euphemism for polyethnism and multiracialism. The unpredictable side of multiracial conviviality seems to be deliberately overlooked by political elites in multiethnic and multiracial Belgium, a miniscule country...
Signals of Strength Charlie A. Beckwith and Donald Knox: Delta Force; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; San Diego. This warrior’s account will leave its mark above all as hero saga in a land by no means lacking in heroes but oblivious and often antagonistic to their deeds. Nor will it be forgotten as testimony in a vituperative...
With the war in Ukraine dangerously close to Poland, the specter is raised of the forgotten Polish-Soviet War of 1920. American pilots came to Poland's aid in that war, most importantly World War I veteran and King Kong director Merian C. Cooper.
Midway through Billie Holiday’s plaintive 1941 recording of “Jim,” there is a short piano solo barely 25 seconds in length—not even a full 32-bar chorus—by Teddy Wilson. “Jim” is largely forgotten today, but Wilson’s lightly swinging interpretation of the melody is typical of his elegant, rhythmic playing, exemplary for its Swing Era sensibility, and neatly...
A wise man once observed that the existence of a nation requires that many things be forgotten—in particular, those things that divide its people. Maybe that’s why the South never made it. Black and white Southerners have had their little disagreements in the past, of course, and so have flatlanders and hillbillies, rednecks and gentry....
“All we want are the facts, ma’am.” —Sgt. Joe Friday Not long ago I was sorting through old papers for disposal. I came across a clipping saved for some forgotten reason. On the reverse was this headline: “NAACP Chief Says More Assistance Needed.” This headline might have appeared in my hometown paper today (though I...
A new series about the quintessential Hollywood heartthrob reveals the dangers we encounter when we hide our true identities so well, they become forgotten—even to us.
Practice free trade. Avoid government debt. Keep the government and the banking system separate from each other. These quaint and long-rejected policies were Condy Raguet’s prescription for American peace and prosperity. Now largely forgotten, Raguet (1784-1842) was one of our earliest and best political economists. Unlike some later advocates of a free economy, Raguet was...
Late in life, Harry Sinclair Lewis of Sauk Centre, Minnesota, figured something out: he would soon be forgotten. In a mock self-obituary, Lewis foresaw that he would leave “no literary descendants. . . . Whether this is a basic criticism of [Lewis’s] pretensions to power and originality, or whether, like another contemporary. Miss Willa Cather,...
January 4, 2014 The trip to Florence took a long and unpleasant day. It was cold the day we left, and there was so much snow it required a bit of nerve just to drive to my office to pick up a few things I had forgotten. We caught the bus to O’Hare an...
As a faithful reader of Chronicles, I was sorely disappointed to see Tom Piatak’s “Outsourcing Our Future” (American Proscenium, May). Mr. Piatak takes the ridiculous but all-too-oft-repeated stance that, when Americans “lose” jobs to overseas workers, America suffers. He appears to have forgotten one of the fundamental lessons of economics: the lesson of comparative advantage,...
Kathy Boudin, by the time she walked out of the New York state penitentiary on parole last summer after serving 22 years for murder and bank robbery, should have been a forgotten name, but, thanks to the New York Times and similar organs, she was probably better known when she left prison than when she...
The avant-garde, according to those who are supposed to know, has been entering the mainstream, but the commentators busy cataloging this development for future art historians seem to have forgotten that “avant-garde” and “mainstream” are mutually exclusive terms. Once our present has become past, it may become clearer that the greatest artists of this period...
“We have forgotten the origin of morality in fact and circumstance.” —Wendell Berry Alasdair MacIntyre is our most relentless tracker of the crisis of the liberal regime. In After Virtue, he recounted the history of the triumph of “emotivism” in ethics. In Whose Justice? Which Rationality? he has begun the process of pointing the way...
After several weeks of fulminating about John Kerry’s war record and the medals he presumably awarded himself, at least some veterans of the Stupid Party eventually got down to the real point about the man who wants to replace George W. Bush in the White House. Amazingly, it was none other than the forgotten Robert...
From the August 1992 issue of Chronicles. Late in life, Harry Sinclair Lewis of Sauk Centre, Minnesota, figured something out: he would soon be forgotten. In a mock self-obituary, Lewis foresaw that he would leave “no literary descendants. . . . Whether this is a basic criticism of [Lewis’s] pretensions to power and originality, or...
While the political spotlight has been on the government shutdown, the Democrats have not forgotten that America’s political future will be shaped by the immigration bill passed by the Senate but stalled in the House. In an effort to convince House Republicans to drop their opposition to the bill, congressional Democrats gave their support to a rally...
“Aye, those fair living forms swam heavenly / To tunes forgotten. . . . “ —John Keats One of life’s great joys is to come across a new work of literature that is likely to last far beyond any early assessment of its value. In the case of poetry, which chiefly concerns us here, it...
In the 1950’s, American conservatives, subscribing to what Clinton Rossiter called the “thankless persuasion,” were a hard-shelled, pig-eyed lot who took no prisoners and asked no quarter. National Review, in a once-famous but now largely forgotten editorial in its premier issue, vowed that its mission was to stand athwart history and cry stop. Admittedly, this...
Pearl Craigie, the long forgotten novelist and playwright “John Oliver Hobbes,” who died in 1906, is due for resurrection. She has haunted me for over 40 years. It was through my study of the Anglo-Irish novelist George Moore in the 1940’s (particularly through Joseph Hone’s biography of him), that Mrs. Craigie first came into my...
Last Sunday, many of our political leaders, feeling pressured by the anniversary of the Armistice that began at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month exactly one hundred years ago, publicly remembered the generally forgotten dead of the Great War. That war is something any genuine statesman would always keep in...
In 1973 Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., published The Imperial Presidency. He argued that the stretching of presidential power by Democrats Roosevelt and Truman had been necessary and benevolent, but that such behavior by Nixon was a dark threat to the commonwealth. Schlesinger’s childishly partisan and superficial tirade was soon forgotten. Time has moved on, and...