I came across Mitch Snyder’s name the other day. Remember Mitch? He made the news first about three years ago, when, as head of the Community for Creative Non-Violence (CCNV), a Washington-based “homeless rights” group, he spoke out against the indignities perpetrated against 61 -year-old Jesse Carpenter, who “froze to death in the shadow of...
1128 search results for: Forgotten%252BHistory
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Black Confederates
Black Confederates! Remember, you heard it here first. You will be hearing more if you have any interest at all in the Great Unpleasantness of the last century that is the focal point of American history. There are more things in heaven and earth, dear Horatio, than are dreamed of by Ken Burns. In the...
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Slender Threads of Liberty
Although Paul Craig Roberts, a nationally syndicated columnist and Hoover Institution fellow, and Lawrence M. Stratton, a fellow of the Institute for Political Economy, are trained in economic and legal analysis, they have written a book that seeks to appeal to civic virtue at the popular level. They do so mainly by weaving together dozens...
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Five Plays in Search of a Character
In recent years Actors Theatre of Louisville’s artistic director Jon Jory has come under fire for the relative weakness of his new play festival. He should be happy that this year’s season was stronger. Like any other genre, playwriting is a craft, and if nothing else was evident, it was clear from the eight plays...
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Without a Barrel
Thundering through the Falls of Niagara is the overflow of all the Great Lakes except Lake Ontario. The combined waterpower of Horseshoe Falls and American Falls has been estimated at some four million horsepower. Both Falls drop more than 150 feet; their combined width is nearly four-fifths of a mile. Even Oscar Wilde, like Sarah...
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Another Reason Why the Agrarians Lost
Andrew Lytle’s “The Hind Tit” is the best essay in I’ll Take My Stand (1930), not only because it focuses on the small, independent farmer, the class the Agrarians most admired, but also because Lytle nails the volume’s primary thesis to the church door, the dilemma his region and nation faced in 1930—the choice between...
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Stray Nuts & Bolts
Using the backdrop of a small Southern town slowly awakening to the cultural and social rumblings of the mid and late 20th century, Jayne Anne Phillips is attempting in this novel to weave the lives, dreams, and remembrances of the Hampson clan of Bellington, West Virginia, into a mythic mosaic of the sort found in...
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Remembering Grover Cleveland
Grover Cleveland, in all of his offices, from the first day to the last, steadfastly followed the principles of Jeffersonian conservatism.
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On Saving Private Ryan
Wayne Allensworth, in his poignant and beautifully written review of Saving Private Ryan (“The Face of Battle,” January), focuses on what is right with the film. However, I find much that is wrong, and, for me, the wrong outweighs the right. Nonetheless, Steven Spielberg makes an important contribution to the making of war movies by...
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At the Heart of Darkness
“The New Englandeis are a people of God, settled in those which were once the Devil’s territories.” —Cotton Mather S.T. Joshi begins his mammoth biographical study of Howard Phillips Lovecraft by quoting his subject’s reaction to a suggestion from a fan that he write his autobiography. With the almost pathological modesty...
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The Fruits of Fraud
The worst thing about the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 legalization of abortion in all 50 states and U.S. territories has not been the 55 million—and counting—dead babies, as horrible as that has been, but the damage it has caused to the rule of law, specifically the U.S. Constitution. In his dissent, Justice Byron White branded...
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Backstage: The Hidden Heroes of MAGA
In the end the task of making America great again will depend upon the backstage crew of ordinary Americans who are doing the hard work of making America good again.
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The Prism’s Prison
Sometimes it seems that I have become the master of a single plaintive note, sung by the disembodied voice of the patron saint of grasshoppers, Marie Antoinette, from somewhere beyond the tomb. And it is true that often, when I reread whatever I have written, I am reminded of Russian dictionaries of fenya, or for...
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Ted’s Timor Mortis
It was the second night of RCIA (Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults), and Ted, the amateur catechist in charge of the class, was on a roll. The students were an odd lot of fallen-away Catholics, disgruntled Protestants who wanted to become Catholics, and men and women engaged to Catholics who objected to mixed marriages. ...
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The Curtain Descends; Everything Ends
Phoenix Produced by Schramm Film Koerner & Weber and Bayerische Rundfunk Directed and written by Christian Petzold Distributed by Sundance Selects The Gift Produced by Blue-Tongue Films and Blumhouse Productions Directed and written by Joel Edgerton Distributed by STX Entertainment and Showtime Networks German director Christian Petzold’s new film, Phoenix, begins with a perfectly dark...
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Ritual, Tragedy, and Restoration
The Deer Hunter received the Academy Award for best picture at the Oscars ceremony in 1979. The film was much criticized by some for its Russian roulette sequences, especially the alleged “racism” on display in the film’s depiction of the Viet Cong. But The Deer Hunter is truly a mythic, poetic work of art. The...
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Lawless Roads
It is 10:00 P.M. as you step off the Greyhound bus in Laredo, Texas. By all rights you should feel exhausted after your 36-hour ride from Minneapolis. But the truth is, you feel pretty good. The air is cool but muggy on this late-August night. You are told that the Rio Grande is just a...
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Trump Is Right: The Left Wants a Bloodbath
No one has yet explained how Trump would end “democracy,” but as usual for the left, it seems to be a case of projection.
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The Forgotten Secret War
This past December, the United States commemorated the 75th anniversary of Japan’s 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. Most commentators rightly played down any conspiratorial suggestion that Franklin Roosevelt had deliberately provoked that particular attack, although they agreed that the U.S. had been putting heavy diplomatic pressure on Japan in the months leading up to it. ...
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The American Stasi
The following are excerpts translated from my latest interview with Sputnik News, which was broadcast live on July 19. Q:… What is happening to the freedom of speech in America? Are the current powers-that-be using secret services against journalists deemed troublesome, such as Tucker Carlson? … ST: Tucker Carlson’s evening show is the only mainstream media program...
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Strictest US Lockdown Can’t Stem California COVID Cases
COVID-19 vaccine may have arrived, but government lockdowns are far from over. On Monday, Prime Minister Boris Johnson reinstated a strict lockdown in the United Kingdom, citing a surge in infections and hospitalizations fueled by what officials say is a more transmissible variant of the coronavirus. “It is clear that we need to do more...
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Conservative Commons
American conservatism in the late 18th century was unlike the European species, where popular “peasant” and articulate “aristocratic” conservatism were able to develop together and to maintain a common front against the ascendant bourgeoisie. With the exile of loyalists and the waning of the old Federalists, American conservatism was effectively decapitated; nevertheless, a popular conservatism...
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New World Disorder
The Berlin wall may not be the only casualty of the Soviet Union’s disintegration. Recent elections in several European states have given evidence that nationalism is reemerging as the dominant political force in the West. Of course, “nationalism,” which in the broadest sense includes any assertion of tribal or national identity, is already the spark...
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The Sword in the Stone
“The call for free trade is as unavailing as the cry of a spoiled child for the moon. It never has existed; it never will exist.” —Henry Clay During the closing days of the 1993 congressional debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 300 of the nation’s leading economists, including two Nobel Laureates,...
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Trucker Economics
Talk about the economy is hotter than the coffee served at the truck stop in West Memphis, the third countertop we’ve visited in the last 12 hours. It’s the graveyard shift, and the waitresses are filling the half-gallon thermoses as fast as truckers can place them on the counter. The Java Cows in the kitchen...
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Remembering Warren G. Harding
Harding was a consummate conservative governed by humility, kindness, and charity for all: principles that guided him in both his personal life and his political career.
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The Doctor and the State
While cooling my preadolescent heels in the family doctor’s office forty-odd years ago, I was given to studying a Victorian Era print that hung on the waiting room wall. The Doctor was its title. A young woman, bare arm flung helplessly toward the viewer, lay stretched on chairs in, apparently, the family parlor. The tailcoated...
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From a Front Box
Only the most devoted students of Henry Adams are likely to have bought and read the six-volume Complete Letters that Harvard University Press produced between 1982 and 1988. More’s the pity, since it was an excellent work of scholarship disclosing an American epistolary artist of the highest order. But the editor and biographer, Ernest Samuels,...
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Visions of Disorder
Richard Weaver once wrote that it was difficult to perceive the decline of civilization because one of the characteristics of decline was a dulling of the perception of value, and thus of the capacity to judge the comparative worth of times. Weaver, I think, did not have us common folk in mind, for whom it...
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True Grit
A remark one often hears from the current crop of film critics is that John Wayne might indeed merit the iconographic status conferred on him by tens of millions of ordinary cinemagoers around the world, were it not for the troubling matter of his alleged evasion of military service during World War II—an issue, it...
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Different Women
In 1920, when Rose Wilder Lane met Dorothy Thompson, Lane was 33 and working in Paris, writing publicity stories for the American Red Cross. She had started out in California at the San Francisco Bulletin; written biographies of Herbert Hoover, Henry Ford, and Jack London; and she would go on to be one of the...
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Letter From Minneapolis Criminal Chic
The gap between Middle Americans and our cultural elite is nowhere wider than on questions of crime and punishment. While activists on the bench and in academia have crafted ever more rights and privileges for those accused and even convicted of crimes, they have given short shrift to the rights and welfare of current and...
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Alive and Well
The Tenth Amendment is alive and well in Ohio. On June 28, right before the state legislature recessed, Representative Michael Wise and Senator Grace Drake introduced into the Ohio General Assembly “House Concurrent Resolution No. 44” with 27 house cosponsors and 3 senate cosponsors. The resolution was referred to the House Committee on Economic Affairs...
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A Global Village or the Rights of the Peoples?
The great conflicts of the future will no longer pit left against right, or East against West, but the forces of nationalism and regionalism against the credo of universal democracy. The lofty ideal of the global village seems to be stumbling over the renewed rise of East European separatism, whose aftershocks may soon spill over...
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Real Reform
Communist poet Bertolt Brecht, after the 1953 risings in East Germany, suggested that the Communist government should just dissolve the people and elect a new one. That is essentially what is happening in the United States. The American government is dissolving the people and electing a new one—in the name of shoring up and “growing”...
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The Secretary of Education Doesn’t
Monsignor Ronald Knox, when asked to conduct a baptismal service in the English language, replied that the Devil knew Latin, thus supplying a title for this lively, informative, and intelligent book. Many of its chapters have already appeared in periodicals, particularly Chronicles and Academic Questions. But five of them have been made by the addition...
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The Faustian Bargain of Dorian Gray
Albert Lewin’s 1945 film, The Picture of Dorian Gray, is the perfect selection for this season of reflection about our mortality and the virtues we need to cultivate to make life worth living.
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On Pleading Insanity
Janet Scott Barlow missed the point completely in her article about the Houston woman who drowned her six children in June (“Hearing More, Feeling Less,” Vital Signs, September). She interpreted the woman’s husband’s matter-of-fact, emotionless demeanor in front of the press the day after the killing as a byproduct of “an explosion of coverage.” Thus,...
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Revolution in the Air
Is it idle, or at least premature, to talk about “revolution from the right”? Whether it is or is not, that is exactly what leaders of the right have been talking about for some years, from Pat Buchanan’s “Middle American Revolution” and his imagery of the “Buchanan Brigades” and peasants with pitchforks rebelling against “King...
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What Really Happened
“You can observe a lot just by watching.” —Yogi Berra I call 2016 the Chronicles Election. The issues discussed in this magazine, often a lonely voice in the wilderness, for more than 30 years finally caught up with the national political discourse and got a president elected. They are bum trade deals, an eroding industrial...
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Does God Believe in Gun Control?
“You are doing God’s work,” Brady Bill sponsor Charles Schumer remarked to Sarah Brady at a congressional hearing. And perhaps one could argue that if it took God seven days to make the world, people should not be able to buy a handgun in any less time. But did God really support the Brady Bill?...
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Unpalatable Values: Culture as Gastronomy
To American readers the name A.A. Gill may mean nothing, but in England the restaurant and television critic of the Sunday Times is a cultural force to be reckoned with. A witty autodidact, with plenty of disdain for the pieties of the moment, to easily deafened ears he is a Jeremiah of the petit-four and...
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Counting People and People Who Count
My curriculum vitae still includes a paragraph describing my activities as an “educational consultant,” though it has been some years since I went to Washington to read grants or evaluate schools for the Department of Education. It was all time wasted, less profitable than time wasted on politics. Politicians, to their credit, know that it...
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Policing and Profiling
A growing nationwide disdain for police officers has resulted from several highly publicized shootings of “unarmed” minority men who have resisted arrest or attacked officers. The media’s rhetoric has inflamed passions, resulting in the murders of two New York policemen seated in their cars, and the assassination of four Lakewood, Washington, officers eating in a...
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The Hail With It
Hail, Caesar Produced by Mike Zoss Productions and Working Title Films Written and directed by Ethan and Joel Coen Distributed by Universal Pictures In Ethan and Joel Coen’s latest film, Hail, Caesar!, we’re taken back to the Hollywood of the early 1950’s, lovingly recreated but set darkly askew. That was when the dream factories were...
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The Goodness of King George
In The Last King of America, Andrew Roberts shows George III to be a much better man and king than the caricature presented by propagandists on both sides of the Atlantic.
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An Easter Reflection: The Mystery of Goodness
The sun broke through the thin, whispery clouds, and its reflection in a pool of water collected from the previous night’s rain caught my eye. Suddenly the day was bright and the morning as clear and joyful as hope itself. Resurrection Day. It was Easter morning in a year that will surely be marked down...
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The Vocal Scene
photo of Rosa Ponselle as Reiza in Oberon Of course my account of “the vocal scene” is not by the late George Jellinek—that cultured gentleman of Hungarian background. He had an extensive, even encyclopedic knowledge of the history of singing. His presentations of The Vocal Scene were the best things of their kind I have...
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Remembering T. S. Eliot
T. S. Eliot was a traditionalist, but he was also an aesthete, one who defended the independence of art and lauded the highly individualistic work of various modern poets. The caricatures never do him justice.
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The Forgotten White Ethnics
I recently returned to Toronto from a long visit to Poland, a trip on a Polish LOT Airlines jet that took only nine-and-a-half hours but would have taken months in an earlier age. In general, Toronto represents one extreme of modern development, to which Poland is a happy opposite. Nevertheless, there is a considerable Polish...