“Rochester had sprung up like a mush- room, but no presage of decay could be drawn from its hasty growth.” —Nathaniel Hawthorne The day after his 101st birthday, novelist Henry W. Clune escorted my wife and me to a fine local restaurant, where we dined in the Henry Clune Room. “It’s a sin to live...
1128 search results for: Forgotten%252BHistory
Post
A Future for Europe
Political scientists are now grumpy. Instead of waxing enthusiastic about the 40 days that shook the world—let us say from the crumbling of the Berlin Wall to Ceausescu’s execution—they resent the brutal intrusion of reality on their slumber. It used to be so comfortable to think in terms of superpower pseudo-polarity, and global democratization is...
Post
Nixon and Trump, Then and Now
For two years, this writer has been consumed by two subjects. First, the presidency of Richard Nixon, in whose White House I served from its first day to its last, covered in my new book, Nixon’s White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever. The second has been...
Post
Tradition, Old and New
“Why do ye also transgress the commandment of God by your tradition?” (Matthew 15:3). Jesus had many negative things to say about the dangers of placing excessive emphasis on tradition; in the passage quoted above, he goes on to cite the prophet Isaiah, “In vain do they worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of...
Post
A Weekend With O’Keefe
Investigative journalism of the kind that James O'Keefe practices is not for normal people. But it is necessary nonetheless.
Post
Comment
The recipients of the 1984 Ingersoll Prizes are Anthony Powell and Russell Kirk The T. S. Eliot prize goes to Mr. Powell and the Richard Weaver prize goes to Dr. Kirk. Anthony Powell The serious novel has undergone a radical transformation in the 20th century. The old narrative forms that had given...
Post
Return of the Fairy Tale
The mass media have been particularly arid territory for children lately, treating our young as little more than vessels for advertising pitches. In fact, even theatrical films have become advertisement vehicles, as many of the recent releases aimed at children have been little more than blatant 90minute commercials hawking toy lines such as the Smurfs,...
Post
The Quest for Bijou O’Conor
In 1975 an eccentric old lady who lived near Brighton, England, with a Pekinese gave a taped interview about her affair in 1930 with Scott Fitzgerald. Recent Fitzgerald biographers have mentioned the evocatively named Bijou O’Conor and quoted bits from the tape, but no one has discovered anything significant about her background, appearance, or character....
Post
Crime Could Be the Election’s Decisive Issue
Trump’s campaign should take a page from the successful 1988 campaign of George H.W. Bush and make the facts on crime stick to Harris and Walz.
Post
Egon Tausch, R.I.P.
Chronicles has lost a longtime writer and friend, Egon Richard Tausch, who passed away on July 27. In Egon was found both brilliance and humility, a rare combination reflecting his Christian faith. He was also a man of fierce loyalty, unmoved by the patricidal demands of the politically correct and faithful to his inheritance as...
Post
In Praise of Tyranny
“I’m always sorry when any language is lost,” Samuel Johnson told Boswell during their tour of the Hebrides in September 1773, “because languages are the pedigree of nations.” Linguistic pride is not a dead artifact of Romantic nationalism. It is alive and well today, among the Quebecois and among the supporters of a constitutional amendment...
Post
Whose Voice Counts?
“I am teaching you to use a tool more deadly than a pistol.” This is the message beginning journalism students hear from an instructor who spoke last year at a conference on “Our Enemies’ Use of the Media,” sponsored by Accuracy in Media. In a world of Goliaths, count Accuracy in Media as one of...
Post
The Poet and the Plowman
Surprisingly often we talked about Vergil, usually about the Aeneid, but sometimes about the Georgics, and then with the wry sentimental fondness of old students who had been made, not quite willingly, to go to school to the poem. And during the plentiful longueurs of the Redskin games of the mid-1960’s, we would regret that...
Post
The New Liberal Establishment
For many decades people—conservatives, especially—have understood the phrase the liberal establishment to mean the social, educational, and economic elite that sits atop the broader community of people who think, act, and vote liberal: the “limousine liberals,” in other words. “The liberal establishment” meant the liberals at the top of the social hierarchy who dominated their...
Post
Trends to Come
The American Academy of Religion should change its name to the American Unacademy of Ethno-Religio-Secular Fashions, if its call for papers for its annual meeting in Washington this autumn is any indication of trends to come. None of the classics, at least of Judaism, is going to find a place on the program. The section...
Post
After Iowa, It’s Time for Republicans to Rally to Trump
There is no honor in denying the undeniable. Donald Trump is going to be the GOP presidential nominee. The other candidates should go home.
Post
Vol. 2 No. 12 December 2000
As Slobodan Milosevic fought for his political life in Belgrade, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright condemned him and expressed support for his opposition—while at the same time acting as if the State Department would do everything in its power to help Milosevic survive. “Kostunica not Clinton administration’s man,” reported UPI’s Martin Sieff on September 25,...
Post
A Major Threat to American Identity
Economic globalism, beloved of many on the contemporary right, may be the major threat to the national and cultural identity of American civilization in the coming decades, but its logical counterpart is the political globalism, long beloved of the left, that marches under the banner of “one world.” As the economic dependence of the United...
Post
To Hell With Culture
“The corruption of man,” Emerson wrote, “is followed by X the corruption of language.” The reverse is true, and a century later Georges Bernanos had it right: “The worst, the most corrupting lies are problems wrongly stated.” How pertinent this is about so many matters present, including the use of the word culture. My conservative...
Post
The Mystery of Things
Near the end of Shakespeare’s King Lear, when all seems lost, Lear comforts his daughter Cordelia—like him, soon to die—by telling her that in prison they will contemplate “the mystery of things.” Both in this sense, and in another sense, the word mystery leads the reader into the heart of Dana Gioia’s poetry. In the...
Post
The Other Pasternak
Sir Ernst Gombrich, for one, is glad to hear the news. The eminent art historian stands in the modestly furnished drawing room of his Hampstead house, leafing through his copy of Leonid Pasternak’s memoirs, recently published in England. The book’s publication had attracted the attention of the Smithsonian Institution, and the first retrospective of the...
Post
Eating With Sinners
And he took bread, and gave thanks, and brake it, and gave unto them, saying, This is my body which is given for you: this do in remembrance of me. Likewise also the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new testament in my blood, which is shed for you. —Luke 22:19-20 These familiar...
Post
The Return of the Grand Inquisitor
“Without the spiritual rebirth no political changes will make people free. But the spiritual rebirth, a Christian rebirth, is the ascent of a free man, and not of Russian nationalism, the cult of homeland, fatherland, and one’s country.” -Mihajlo Mihajlov in “Some Timely Thoughts” (written in 1974 in response to Letter to the Soviet...
Post
Live Right, Think Left
“Anglo-Saxon hypocrisy” is a famous phrase, and in January 1996, Harriet Harman, Labour spokesman for health in the British House of Commons, became an object of scorn on both sides of the House by sending her 11-year-old son to a school outside the public sector, chosen by entrance examination. She was later, after 1997, a...
Post
Remembering Tender Mercies
In the years just before America’s entry into World War II, thousands of people, shaken and scattered by the Great Depression, made their way to Houston, where the shipyards were booming. My people wound up there, too. The place they lived was called West End, rows of little white houses set up on cinder blocks,...
Post
Copperhead Road
I grew up in Alden, New York, a small town about 20 miles east of Buffalo. My parents still live there, and they (especially my mother) are very active in the town historical society and its museum. In that museum is a worn old wooden desk, unremarkable except for the sign that explains that it...
Post
The Big Bore of Arkansas
“‘Jour printer, by trade; do a little in patent medicines; theatre-actor—tragedy, you know; take a turn at mesmerism and phrenology when there’s a chance; teach singing—geography school for a change; sling a lecture, sometimes—oh, I do lots of things—most anything that comes in handy, so it ain’t work. What’s your lay?’” —The Duke, Huckleberry Finn...
Post
The Message of Tokyo’s Kowtow
Hubris will do it ever time. The Chinese have just made a serious strategic blunder. They dropped the mask and showed their scowling face to Asia, exposing how the Middle Kingdom intends to deal with smaller powers, now that she is the largest military and economic force in Asia and second largest ...
Post
A False Flag, or Fog of War over Ukraine?
A Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777 bound for Kuala Lumpur from Amsterdam was shot down in eastern Ukraine Thursday afternoon, killing all 298 passengers and crew. It was hit as it cruised at 33,000 feet above the war-ravaged Donetsk Oblast, 35 miles west from the Russian border. The airliner’s demise has the potential to escalate the...
Post
Restore the Constitution!
In recent years, American politics has been preoccupied with moral questions, or what are now called “social issues”: sexual immorality, sodomy, abortion, pornography, and recreational drugs. Some conservatives want the federal government to play a role in opposing these evils. Many libertarians, on the other hand, want the government, state and federal alike, to treat...
Post
A Difficult Road
Over the course of a one-month (April) trip through five European countries, Eastern and Western, I collected notes of many conversations, particularly with young people, about their view of what is called over there “the situation.” A more concrete term should not be used since not even the leading quattuor, Gorbachev, Thatcher, Mitterrand, and Kohl,...
Post
Russia Baiters and Putin Haters
“Is Russia an enemy of the United States?” NBC’s Kasie Hunt demanded of Ted Cruz. Replied the runner-up for the GOP nomination, “Russia is a significant adversary. Putin is a KGB thug.” To Hillary Clinton running mate Tim Kaine, the revelation that Donald Trump Jr., entertained an offer from the Russians for dirt on Clinton...
Post
Come, Sweet Death
In the spring of 1975, C. Everett Koop, M.D., addressed a conference of Christian laymen in New Orleans on the topic of abortion—more specifically, on the implications of Roe V. Wade. Among the changes he foresaw were a growing acceptance of infanticide as the “treatment of choice” for defective newborns and an increasing resort to...
Post
Remembering Herbert Butterfield
Herbert Butterfield formulated a political theory of limited liberalism around his Augustinian Christianity, which tempered personal liberty with the recognition of man's fallen nature.
Post
Outside the Law
“This is a wonderful country, my boy, but our legal system doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to.” —Harold Smith, in Remo Williams, The Adventure Begins America’s “major” film critics have been very busy—and very worried— lately. They have a lot to worry about; the movies just aren’t going their way anymore, which ought to...
Post
Kissing the Toad
John Richardson, the brilliant biographer of Picasso, resembles (by his own account) those charming and attractive young men of limited means and boundless ambition—right out of the novels of Stendhal and Balzac—who use any means to make their way in the world. The son of an English soldier, educated at Stowe school and the Slade...
Post
In Hoc Signo Vinces
Tactical strengths and strategic weaknesses mark John D. McKenzie’s reassessment of Robert E. Lee’s generalship. The strengths of this book are many. The weaknesses, however, undercut the very point that the author attempts to make; namely, that Lee was at best an average military leader, and that Lee’s apologists have given us a biased view...
Post
Egon Richard Tausch, R.I.P.
Chronicles has lost a longtime writer and friend, Egon Richard Tausch, who passed away on July 27. In Egon was found both brilliance and humility, a rare combination reflecting his Christian faith. He was also a man of fierce loyalty, unmoved by the patricidal demands of the politically correct and faithful to his inheritance as...
Post
Quintessentially American
ABC News recently broadcast contradictory stories about the Balkans War. The first story highlighted a press conference where NATO personnel denied that Americans were engaged in warfare and that any Serb civilians had been killed during the thousands of round-the-clock sorties conducted by NATO forces. Reporting this “news” without a hint of skepticism, Peter Jennings...
Post
Education in an Age of Haste
Not much more than 24 hours ago, one of many of you who could get away with it asked me to speak to you on Class Day. It hit me that for a tutor who insists on students meeting deadlines, the situation has the best of comic myth: you got yours back, and at the...
Post
Ancestors
With the deaths of Robert Penn Warren and Walker Percy the specter of the star system is loose again in the land. “Who will be their successors? Who will pick up their mantle?” It’s a plaintive cry, predictable but genuine, largely journalistic and academic—a spume from the wave of canon-making—thinned by its basis in literary...
Post
Stanley Donen, RIP
This weekend brought the sad news of the death of Hollywood director Stanley Donen, at the age of 94. Donen directed many fine films, including the wonderfully Hitchcockian Charade, but the focus of the tributes is rightly on an undoubted American masterpiece, Singin’ in the Rain, a film that epitomizes Hollywood’s Golden Age. The entire...
Post
Peace With Zulus
Like most literate Brits of my generation, I grew up immersed in the book 1066 and All That, the brilliant parody of historical writing published in 1930 by W.C. Sellar and R.J. Yeatman. Among the large chunks of the book I can still recite verbatim is the catalogue of Victorian colonial wars, which mimics with...
Post
Death on a March Afternoon
Today, the remarkable life of Capt. Francis Warrington Dawson is little more than a footnote in the history of an era that brought an end in the South to Reconstruction and saw the advent of the “Redeemers” and their Conservative Regime. But in the 1870’s and 80’s, Dawson, founder of the Charleston News and Courier,...
Post
Commendables
Original Thought & Triplicate Forms George Roche: America by the Throat: the Stranglehold of Federal Bureaucracy; Devin-Adair; Old Grennwich, CT. Edwin J. Feulner, Jr: Conservatives Stalk the House: the Republican Study Committee 1970-1982; Green Hill; Ottawa, IL. Conservatives come in at least two types: those who wish to conserve principles and those who wish to...
Post
Desperate Pretense
After two years of desperate pretense that the Bush administration is but the long afternoon of the Reagan era, many of Mr. Bush’s conservative supporters now begin to suspect that morning in America is fast lurching toward chaos and old night. The President’s apparent willingness to consider tax increases, despite his best-known campaign promise, and...
Post
Dwight Macdonald
A Rebel in Defense of Tradition is the title of Michael Wreszin’s 1994 biography of Dwight Macdonald (1906- 1982). It is a very good title, by which I mean something more than a “handle”; it is a precise phrase, a summary properly affixed to the memory of an extraordinary man. The emphasis of Wreszin’s biography...
Post
Why Americans Shouldn’t Vote
Everyone is sure the American political system is broken, but no one wants to blame the people in charge. James Fallows has his nifty little book blaming the press; Howard Kurtz blames our talk show culture; Frontline and The Center for Public Integrity point to our corrupt campaign finance system; conservatives tout their all-purpose reform,...
Post
It Was the Worst of Times
The French Revolution was a cancer that metastasized and spread through Western societies, weakening them to the point of collapse. Even the European and American right did not escape being contaminated by the forces they struggled against, and, certainly, by the end of the 19th century, it was increasingly difficult to frame a conservative argument...
Post
Some Church Lives Matter More Than Others
Here is a textbook illustration of how the corporate media’s sins of omission can be far more damning than the corrupted industry’s sins of commission. Over the weekend, thousands of patriotic citizens descended on Washington, D.C., to protest election fraud and defend President Donald Trump. Left-wing “black bloc” mobs threw water bottles,...