From the August 2013 issue of Chronicles. One of the greatest Olympians of all time, Bob Mathias, is all but forgotten today. He was born in 1930 in Tulare, in the heart of California’s San Joaquin Valley. Robert Bruce Mathias was his name, but everyone called him Bob. Bob had extraordinary coordination from infancy onward. ...
Whatever the wisdom of Pamela Geller’s Mohammed cartoon event in Garland, Texas — and there’s much not to like about it, as Chronicles executive editor, Scott Richert, wrote of Charlie Hebdo’s repulsive fare after the massacre at the magazine’s office — one thing ought not be forgotten: No matter what kind of event Geller had...
Kristine Thatcher’s play Niedecker, produced earlier this year by the Women’s Project at the Apple Corps Theatre in New York, is about paradoxes. It is the story of the reclusive poet Lorine Niedecker (1903-1970). She has been dead almost twenty years and is largely forgotten, but when she was alive Ezra Pound championed her. Basil...
Though too many years have gone by since I last crossed paths with Robert K. Wallace, that doesn’t mean I have forgotten that gifted and accomplished man. I remember him well from sites and scenes in graduate school at Columbia University; from his environment in northern Kentucky and at the old Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati,...
Frank Borzage may well be the best film director born in the United States, and I haven’t forgotten John Ford, who was also a master. Borzage, the son of Italian-Swiss immigrants, achieved much in his films that can only be understood as Catholic art, which is why his movies are now mostly unwatched or,...
“The United States is a nation of immigrants” is a meaningless statement, but that is not to say that it has no meaning. It is one of the lead lines for the Democratic/liberal/progressive agenda, and has been ever since Israel Zangwill used the mythic term “melting pot” as the title of his thankfully forgotten play...
So you thought writing hard-core pornography was an easy way to earn a living? You remembered your adolescence and those turgid paperbacks in which the vocabulary was strictly four-letter, the plot rambling and forgotten halfway through the book, and the characters’ names changed periodically as though some of the chapters were lifted bodily from other...
Richard John Neuhaus: The Naked Piblic Square: Religion and Democracy; William B. Eerdmans; Grand Rapids, MI. The worst thing about the wonderful but secondary and nonsalvific blessings of Christianity is that once those who enjoy the divine bestowals have forgotten their source, these blessings are set up as objects of new and destructive forms of...
A New Birth of Freedom: Lincoln at Gettysburg by Philip B. Kunhardt, Jr.; Little, Brown; Boston. On November 19, 1863, after Edward Everett had completed a now-forgotten oration of almost two hours at the dedication of a national cemetery on one of the Civil War’s bloodiest battlefields, Abraham Lincoln rose to deliver “a few remarks.”...
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...
After so many years living in exile up north, Héctor had forgotten how pleasant fall in the Chihuahuan Desert can be, the summer heat banished for good and the first snows not yet upon the desert mountains that enclose the city on three sides. From his office on the top floor of the Museo de...
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....
Who says that conservative historians have to be old, hoary-headed men unable to produce anything innovative? A young Italian scholar named Massimo Viglione is proving the contrary with his two latest books, Rivolte dimenticate (Forgotten Revolts) and Le Insorgenze—Rivoluzione e controrivoluzione in Italia, 1792-1815 (Uprisings-Revolution and Counterrevolution in Italy). Viglione is a Catholic researcher in...
Ever since Machiavelli, and probably long before that, successful statesmen have known that a plentiful stock of mendacity, as well as guile, are essential for anyone wishing to get ahead in politics. But what many of them may have forgotten during their arduous climb to the summit is that the often bitter accusations they level...
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...
“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...
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...
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.
I’d forgotten that a Barnes and Noble bookstore had opened in the old department store building. As I walked back to my car in the Baltimore suburb of Towson, I remembered what I’d seen in the other bookstore closer to home, so I changed my path a little, pushed open the heavy door, and headed...
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...
“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...
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...
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...
When I accepted President Reagan’s appointment to be chairman of the National Council on Educational Research, I did so because I welcomed the opportunity to learn firsthand how professional bureaucrats approached America’s many and increasingly serious educational problems. After some time spent at my appointed task, I realized that bureaucrats were not capable of solving...
America, in case you haven’t noticed, is lost in the throes of celebrating the writing of its Constitution, which is now two centuries old. The somewhat labored efforts to fix public attention on the historic document are largely the work of former Chief Justice Warren Burger and his own private bureaucracy in the Commission on...
The Decadent Society: How We Became Victims of Our Own Success by Ross Douthat; Avid Reader Press; 272 pp., $27.00 The ancient latin aphorism per aspera ad astra (“through rough things, to the stars”) might well be a fitting epigraph for New York Times columnist Ross Douthat’s latest book. Its cover features a 19th century French illustration of Rabelais’ Gargantua et Pantagruel being fed...
This renowned and deeply flawed historian’s misguided FDR worship should be rejected as propaganda.
“Party for a book? I’d love to,” I mutter to my host as we land in Sodom. Five days of vacation lie before me, and as we drive to the place—”Where the old McAlpin used to be, downtown,” the limousine driver reminisces—it is pleasant to think that people here still publish books. After a ride...
Even more than Vachel Lindsay, who liked to say that the Mason-Dixon line ran straight through his heart, Booth Tarkington embodied the regional conflict that defined the Midwest. Born in Indianapolis only five years after the end of the war between the regions, Newton Booth Tarkington was descended on his father’s side from Southern Democrats...
We saw them at dawn: a dozen men in ragged camouflage, lugging dull black weapons glinting like poised snakes. Their faces rugged like Arizona bluffs, dark brown or brick red, they moved without a sound, like the mist rolling out of the forest. Large and beefy, they stood around our campfire and smiled at us....
There is a story told about the late Roland Barthes. Once, in his Paris seminar on critical theory, a British visitor bravely remarked that something he had just said sounded rather like a point made by Coleridge in the Biographia Literaria. An embarrassed silence followed. Then Barthes, in his ponderous voice, spoke: “One can never...
Somewhere between Muddy Gap and the old uranium town of Jeffrey City I became aware of my lungs, painfully expanding and contracting inside my denim shirt. Beyond Jeffrey City the smoke cloud was visible to the northwest, a pinkish-grey mass hanging on the mountainous horizon and planed along its upper edge by atmospheric winds: large...
The mystery novel, to borrow a line from Original Sin, has all the virtues of its defects. “The mystery,” Baroness James explained in a recent Washington Post interview, “deals with the planned murder” and is thus confined to a certain formulaic structure in which a detective protagonist confronts an often unsavory lot of suspects, all...
Bias crimes will no longer be tolerated in New York City, say the proponents of the city’s new “bias crimes” statute. Its sponsors call it one of the toughest such laws in the nation, and it will for the first time allow judges to award unlimited punitive damages to victims of bias attacks, as well...
“All you need to make a film is a girl and a gun.” —Jean-Luc Godard In 1947, an executive director of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals deplored the “sizable doses of communist propaganda” in many films of the day. Leaving aside the question of whether “American ideals” could be identified—much...
“O Fame, O Fame! Many a man ere this Of no account hast thou set up on high.” —Boethius “It is a kind of baby talk, a puerile and wind-blown gibberish. . . . In content it is a vacuum.” —H.L. Mencken on Warren G. Harding’s speeches Americans are a practical people. They don’t want...
Does the public stock market actually serve a purpose? To some free-market zealots, the answer is obvious: The public markets increase liquidity, and this enables fledgling businesses to get off the ground by allowing them access to capital. Moreover, we can all reap the benefits of capitalism’s “creative destruction” and become a nation of investors...
The Obama Administration’s Middle Eastern policy is irrational and detrimental to American interests in the region. The decision to support the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria and Egypt is the strategic equivalent of Emperor Nicholas I Romanov’s support for the Habsburgs in suppressing the Hungarian revolution in 1849. The cost of that geopolitical blunder was...
I am writing this very close to March 20, the 15th anniversary of the start of the Iraq war, and I’m wondering: Have we learned anything from that experience? One has only to look at the headlines to understand that no, we haven’t learned anything from the experience of being lied into war by a...
Many Americans today are baffled by the Third Amendment to the Constitution, the one in which the quartering of troops in private homes is prohibited in times of peace, except by the consent of the owner. Quartering troops in time of war was allowed, but only as regulated by law. Some of the amendments in...
I have just escaped from 15 months in a hell that I once knew as Sarajevo. Ours is the fourth generation of my family to claim this ancient, cosmopolitan, multiethnic city as our home. My family is classified as Eastern Orthodox Christian. In the context of the present war, that makes us Serbs. I have...
The amazing thing about the nuclear debate and the Catholic bishops’ participation in it is that the accumulated wisdom and experience of mankind, as well as the Church’s pronouncements on peace and war, are so completely ignored. This is quite a natural phenomenon on the part of so many lay debaters: it belongs also to...
Among the reasons Donald Trump is president is that he read the nation and the world better than his rivals. He saw the surging power of American nationalism at home, and of ethnonationalism in Europe. And he embraced Brexit. While our bipartisan establishment worships diversity, Trump saw Middle America recoiling from the demographic change brought...
The phrase “America’s Christian Heritage” might irritate any hearers who do not want to be classed as members of the tribe that first received its name in Antioch (Acts 11:26). But wait: we recognize that one does not have to be a member of the family to be remembered in a will, nor be of...
Paul Lewis, a professor of English at Boston College, is one of America’s most eminent scholars of humor. With this book, he has written another very thoroughly researched study of contemporary American humor, ranging from the “positive humor” and “laughter club” movements that use humor to promote health and efficiency, peace and uplift, to the...
Down and Out in Beverly Hills has a lot going for it. The film was directed and co-written by Paul Mazursky (Moscow on the Hudson). It has Richard Dreyfuss, Nick Nolte, and Bette Midler in the lead roles, as well as Tracy Nelson and “Little Richard” Penniman in supporting roles. The film was photographed in...
1959: I was eight years old. Had someone told me I would one day own and operate a bed-and-breakfast, homeschool my kids, and possess a laptop that allowed me to write instant letters to far-away friends or read newspapers from England, such predictions would have boggled my mind. “Homeschool,” “laptop,” and so on were words...
“What’s past is prologue.” —Shakespeare, The Tempest Situated between Austria and Rumania, Hungary has a rich history worthy of many books. And though this country of less than ten million people is the size of the state of Maine, her role on the world stage is only increasing. She has declared war on billionaire deconstructionist...
The world will little remember what Barack Obama said during his disappointing presidency, despite his messianic promise and his reputation as rhetor par excellence. His words were not memorable to begin with. (Try to recall a quotation, apart from his famous campaign slogan.) More significantly, his words were not intended to be remembered. They served...