Sling Blade, the recent hit film that rightly won Billy Bob Thornton an Academy Award, is now out on video. As viewers of the film know, it is a marvelous tragedy of classical simplicity. But what has not been mentioned is that it is also a tale told in the tradition of Southern literature. As...
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On Correctness and Collegiality
It all began in February, when one disgruntled Vermonter started a blog to attack the Second Vermont Republic, the four-year-old secessionist organization in our state. He was apparently prompted by hearing Rob Williams, then cochair of the SVR, attacking Abraham Lincoln on the radio for the illegal suppression of Southern secession, and his political-correctness genes...
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Allons, Enfants de la Patrie
It was years ago that I first read the collection of Donald Davidson’s essays called Still Rebels, Still Yankees. In one of them, “Some Day, in Old Charleston,” the doughty Last Agrarian addressed one of his perennial themes, the trashiness of modern civilization and the superiority of the Old Southern regime, by describing Charleston’s Army...
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Raising a Flag for Mr. Davidson
“An outlaw fumbling for the latch, a voice Commanding in a dream where no flag flies.” —Donald Davidson, “Lee in the Mountains” The University of Missouri’s publication of Where No Flag Flies: Donald Davidson and the Southern Resistance does much to redress a literary grievance. Donald Davidson, the late poet and professor of English at...
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L’Etranger Chez Lui
I suppose that after William Faulkner and Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy (1916-1990) has been for the last three decades the most widely read of Southern writers. He has been known as a social observer as well as a novelist, and as a philosopher as well as a Roman Catholic. And he has...
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The Last Round-up
Chronicles has a leisurely—almost Southern—production schedule, which means that you should be reading this just about the time the dogwoods blossom. I’m writing it, though, as 1989 draws to a close, ending a decade that, all things considered, could have been worse. But lest we wax too smug about the success of voodoo economics and...
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The Origins of the Jerk
(Inspired by Clyde Wilson) Every human society has had its share of offensive or annoying people: busybodies and bores, poseurs and bullies, cheapskates and check-grabbers, hypocrites and egomaniacs. You might even be able to define some societies by the offensive characters they tend to produce or by the qualities they find most offensive. Southerners used to regard...
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The Country Girl
The fall the Orioles won their first World Series, I was rooming off-campus with three other Towson State College freshmen in a three-story house on Evesham Avenue. The Baltimore of the mid-1960’s was not as much ashamed of its heritage as unschooled in it, most Baltimoreans not knowing—or caring—that, under the shade of the trees...
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Clip Clop, Bang Bang
The manipulative sensationalism regarding any display of the Confederate battle flag continues unabated. The New York Times gets hot and bothered, or sexually aroused—or whatever it is that the New York Times becomes—whenever that banner appears over the capitol of South Carolina or on a vanity tag in Maryland, indeed anywhere. The shibboleths of liberalism...
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Remembering the Right
The featured theme of this month’s magazine is focused on a particular task, namely retrieving conservativism and conservative thinkers from the past and explaining their continued relevance to the present. The current conservative movement, as a form of media entertainment and as a partisan PR machine, has undergone sweeping change in just about every respect...
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Remembering Andrew Nelson Lytle: Agrarian Prophet
In the early 1990s it was my good fortune to make a pilgrimage to meet Andrew Lytle on the occasion of the publication of his last book, Kristin (1992). A book-signing had been arranged by the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, where Lytle taught for many years and edited the illustrious Sewanee Review....
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“Better Than Balkan”: Blood Against the Levelers
“Exsilioque domos et dulcia limina mutant, Atque alio patriam quaerunt sub sole iacentem.” —Virgil, Georgics II.511-12 Honestly, why bother any more? If there is any unifying theme in the scribblings of genuine, bona-fide American conservatives, it is that our country is lost, whether to whoremongers or warmongers—or both. Drum sets in...
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Strategic Implications of China’s Burgeoning Sea Power
Last Wednesday China completed a major naval exercise in the disputed waters of the South China Sea. On July 3 it was reported that China was testing a new naval helicopter which “could fill a big gap” in its expanding fleet. Over the weekend, Australian media reported that the country’s navy was monitoring a Chinese...
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Portrait of Lincoln, With Warts
The publication of the last volume of William Marvel’s four-volume history of “Mr. Lincoln’s War” completes one of the more remarkable historical works of our time. Marvel is an “amateur,” nonacademic, historian. That is not a remarkable, but rather an old and honorable, thing. This is what is remarkable: I can think of no active...
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Gloomy Waters
Rivers exercise a strange pull on the human imagination; they work their way into every art form, from Bernini’s Renaissance sculptures of the great flows of Europe to Mikhail Sholokhov’s social-realist novels of Cossack life along the Don to Basho’s haiku celebrating the waterways of northern Japan. In this country no region has taken to...
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Destroy the Mexican Drug Cartels
It is past time to focus in earnest on extirpating America's massive problem south of the border.
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The Illinois Negro Code
Most people believe the history of race relations in the United States is neatly divided by geography. Those states north of the Mason-Dixon Line were paragons of equality and liberty, where race was not an issue and diversity flourished in all its glory. In the benighted states to their south, however, the entire social structure...
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Goetzing Down in the Gunfire State
Last October 1, Florida’s new handgun law went into effect and the talking hairdos on the evening news had an arched-eyebrow contest. As you may have heard, law-abiding Floridians, tired of being an unarmed minority in the Sunshine State, rared back and passed a law that allows any Floridian with no police record, $145, and...
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Look Away, Dixieland!
Black migration from the rural South to the cities of the North is an important chapter in 20th-century American history. What began as a steady trickle developed into a flood as blacks left the land in response to the promises of the factory. The decade of the I920’s alone saw nearly 250,000 blacks make the...
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A Tempting Sport
Clinton-bashing is a tempting sport, as indicated by the phenomenal popularity of Rush Limbaugh. But like everything that is too easy, it has its pitfalls. It will be a fruitless enterprise if it merely succeeds in tearing down Clinton to make way for a lackluster Republican administration only marginally better on the critical issues. Clinton’s...
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Remembering
Tazwell is a town in Claiborne County, Tennessee, about 45 minutes northeast of Knoxville on Highway 33, just south of the Kentucky border. On the muggy Saturday morning of June 3, 2000—the 192nd anniversary of the birth of Jefferson Davis and Confederate Memorial Day in Tennessee — some 200 people gathered in Tazwell’s Irish Cemetery...
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The Patsy
In general I am not a fan of conspiracy theories. A good historian learns that, in regard to controversial events, the simplest explanation is the one most likely to be accurate. I long ago took to heart Napoleon’s maxim that you should not blame on hidden machinations what can be more readily explained by incompetence....
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Nationalism, Patriotism, and Internationalism I
Recent press reports inevitably describe Serbia's Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica as a
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White Sprinters
For several years now, professional baseball has been pouring millions of dollars into developing black players. Evidently, the number of black players, at least American blacks, has been in decline. NASCAR is funding programs to develop black drivers after fielding complaints that the sport is too white. Similarly, the NHL now has a “Diversity Program”...
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Ora Pro Nobis
Last summer, on the 10th anniversary of Elvis’ death, a reporter called to ask the usual question: What does it all mean? Ah, that took me back. To be precise, it took me back to August of 1977. We were living in England when Elvis died, and I noticed at the time that the BBC...
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Immigration, the Border, and the Fate of the Land
One hundred and seventy miles southwest of Tucson, hard by the Mexico line, stands a weathered mountain range called the Cabeza Prieta. It is a place of weird landforms and scarce but formidable vegetation, a graduate school for desert rats that only the best prepared dares enter. The geography of the place says, Stay away. ...
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Sweet Land of Liberty
I am deeply honored to receive the Richard Weaver Award, to stand in the ranks of the distinguished men who have received it, and to have an award in the name of a man who has always been one of my heroes. As a lifelong libertarian, I have been moved by the occasion to reflect...
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A Wilson for Our Times
John Lukacs has observed that our century’s two most significant revolutionaries were Lenin and Wilson. Of the two, according to Lukacs, the internationalist Lenin had less destructive influence in the long run than the democratic moralist but fervent nationalist Wilson; today it may be said that the Wilsonians have outlasted the Commies. Democracy and national...
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A Government We Deserve
“A democracy, when put to the strain, grows weak and is supplanted by oligarchy.” —Aristotle The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln by Sean Wilentz New York: W.W. Norton; 1,004 pp., $35.00 To write a book about democracy, a word that functions today as little more than an advertising slogan, an author should first...
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The Machines of Enslavement
The historically ignorant and leftist-driven “1619 Project” of The New York Times posits a grand design to enslave blacks in the American Colonies and to perpetuate the institution by revolting against British rule and establishing the American Republic. That slavery in the colonies was the result of the genetic constraints imposed by malaria rather than a grand design...
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In Praise of Sex and Violence
All the best authorities agree: there is too much sex and violence in America. Social critics say that pop culture is reinforcing a cult of violence, which they trace back to the savage days of the American frontier; preachers launch jeremiads at the explicit eroticism of MTV, and Planned Parenthood pretends to have the jumps...
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Slavery and the American Founding
The New York Times’ “1619 Project” is a series of articles published in 2019 to mark the 400th anniversary of the first enslaved Africans to arrive in America. In an introduction to the series, New York Times Magazine Editor-in-Chief Jake Silverstein claims that slavery “is the country’s very origin.” He writes: Out of slavery—and...
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The Vanishing Anglo-Saxon Minority
“The Anglo-Saxon carries self-government and self-development with him wherever he goes.” —Henry Ward Beecher For almost exactly 30 years, Kevin P. Phillips has been cranking out some of the most interesting and provocative works of political analysis written since World War II. In 1969, The Emerging Republican Majority argued that American politics runs through periodic...
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Too Greedy to Hate
Back in the spring there was a lot of hoo-rah in northern Virginia about a plan to build a shopping mall on part of the battlefield at Manassas (“Bull Run” to Yankees). At first, some of us down here suspected a federal plot to obliterate the reminders of two humiliating defeats, but it turned out...
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Shall We Gather by the River?
When I was invited last spring to be a judge at the Memphis in May World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest some envious backbiters put it about that it wasn’t because I’m well known as a discriminating ami de swine, but because my sister knows the woman who picks the judges. I have just one thing...
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That Royal Wedding, Reverend Michael Curry, and the End of England
Like many Southern boys growing up in the 1950s, I recall fondly my father reading stories to me of “Stonewall” Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley, of the “Gray Ghost,” Colonel John Mosby, and of Marse Robert Lee who led Confederate armies during the War for Southern Independence. But I also reveled in the exploits of...
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The American Revolution Was a Culture War
Two hundred and forty-seven years ago this month, a group of American opponents of the Crown’s tax policy donned disguises and set about methodically destroying a shipment of tea imported into Boston by the East India Company. The vandals trespassed on privately owned ships in Boston Harbor and threw the tea into the ocean. These...
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White Sprinters
For several years now, professional baseball has been pouring millions of dollars into developing black players. Evidently, the number of black players, at least American blacks, has been in decline. NASCAR is funding programs to develop black drivers after fielding complaints that the sport is too white. Similarly, the NHL now has a “Diversity Program”...
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Attack of the Jacobins
Trent Lott—to the guillotine! The cry has gone up, the mob is implacable, and the once-powerful and seemingly unassailable Senate majority leader has gotten the message loud and clear: Confess your sins, bare your neck, and prepare to lose your head! And for what? What sin did this former muckamuck of the GOP commit that...
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Witchfinder: The Strange Career of Morris Dees
The trial, conviction, and death sentence of Timothy McVeigh for the Oklahoma City bombing of April 19, 1995, passed quietly this year, far more quietly than most reporters and some political leaders wanted. The main reason for the calmness of the McVeigh proceedings was probably the utterly uninteresting mind, character, and personality of the defendant....
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The Court Historians
One sometimes feels obliged to contextualize a disagreement, because the point in dispute has still not been clearly stated. I have written critically more than once about the works of C. Bradley Thompson, first about his study of neoconservatism, Neoconservatism: An Obituary for an Idea (2010), and more recently, about a book he completed on America’s Founders, America’s Revolutionary...
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Come Home, America
Unanesthetized amputation cannot be more painful than enduring—no, “endurin'”—a Bruce Springsteen monologue about “growin’ up.” Stopping a concert dead in its tracks, he’ll mumble and stammer and “uh, like” his way through a tortured and tortuous tale peopled with Wild Billy and Sloppy Sue and, best of all, “there was this guy.” He shoots for...
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Martin Luther King, Jr., as Conservative Hero
In Campus, a newsletter of the conservative Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a letter last spring from a student subscriber questioned comments about Martin Luther King found in the preceding issue’s feature essay, “A Rage for Merit.” This article portrayed King as a passionate critic of affirmative action, and this, according to the student, does not square...
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Remembering John C. Calhoun
Though John C. Calhoun was a distinguished American statesman and thinker, he is little appreciated in his own country. Calhoun rose to prominence on the eve of the War of 1812 as a “war hawk” in the House of Representatives and was the Hercules who labored untiringly in the war effort. While still a congressman,...
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Caliban in the Classroom
What do black Americans think of whites? What do they want from them? The questions are almost as baffling as “What do women want?”—the question we raised a few months ago. After years of living with the men and women we used to call colored people, working with them and calling some of them friends,...
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A Clever Diversion
Amistad Produced by Steven Spielberg, Debbie Allen, and Colin Wilson Directed by Steven Spielberg Screenplay by David Franzoni Released by Dreamworks If Amistad is not yet a household word like E.T. or Jurassic Park, it may soon be with the power of Steven Spielberg behind it. Amistad is really two movies. One, about the 19th-century...
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Polonophobia, Cont.
“Polonophobia,” my essay in the January issue of Chronicles, engendered moving and informed responses for which I am most grateful. Professors Ewa Thompson and Alex Kurczaba and Dr. Wojciech Wierzewski have all praised me generously in letters to the editor [Eds. note: See the Polemics and Exchanges section of the April issue], but, according to...
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Answering Islam
Americans find it difficult to understand the Islamic threat. It is not just that they have made the mistake of listening to presidential speeches on the “religion of peace” or dulled their wits reading the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. The fault does not lie exclusively or even primarily with American schools,...
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Decency Through Strength
“Ideas rule the world and its events. A revolution is a passage of an idea from theory to practice. Whatever men say, material interests never have caused and never will cause a revolution.” —Mazzini My grandmother, the daughter of a Confederate “high private,” always said that if someone had done something particularly good, you could...
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Our Inner Mason-Dixon
About a hundred years before the Civil War, two British surveyors, Jeremiah Mason and Charles Dixon, with a crew of ax-men, marked out 270 miles of wilderness. They set a stone at every mile, and another grander one embossed with the arms of the Penn and Calvert clans every five miles. The resulting map pacified...