Arrayed against the Earps in Tombstone was a loose and constantly shifting set of alliances known as “The Cowboys.” Eastern journalists, looking for sensational material, followed the Cowboys’ enemies and rivals in describing them as an organized gang, but no one could quite figure out who the gang’s leader was—Ike Clanton, Bill Brocius, or...
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The Point of War
The U.S. government continues its slow but relentless buildup of military forces in the Middle East, preparing to unleash “Fourth-Generation” warfare against the eighth reincarnation of Adolf Hitler. Historians and pseudo-historians extol the liberating glories of past redemptive wars waged by God’s instrument on earth. The Bush administration, neocons, and theocons (and other cons in...
Getting It Right
Writing a history of recent American conservatism is not like writing a history of baseball or the Social Security system. There is fairly wide agreement about what constitutes baseball and Social Security; at issue are specific details. But there is little agreement about what American conservatism is. Not merely the rocks and bushes, but the...
Beyond Trash
In the middle part of this century one of the main staples of the Anglo- American reading public was the historical novel, or romance. Such “swashbucklers” were not great literature, but they had their virtues. In the hands of skilled writers like C.S. Forester or Kenneth Roberts, they introduced a great many people to some...
US Out of Dixie
Browsing at a local newsstand the other day, I spied a startling comic book, issue #11 of Captain Confederacy. Its $1.95 price was even more startling (the last comic book I bought, back about aught-56, cost something like 15 cents), but I had to take this one home, and did. Let me tell you about...
Abraham the Unready
(This column is based in part on an address delivered at a “Colloquium on Lincoln, Reagan, and National Greatness” sponsored by the Claremont Institute in Washington, D.C., on February 12, 1998.) L’affaire Lewinsky was the obsession of the headlines and conversations of Washington throughout February, obscuring even the jolliness promised by another airborne stomping of...
Annus Horribilis
The centennial of that enormous calamity later known as World War I saw the release of about a dozen books on the subject. Catastrophe 1914, by Sir Max Hastings, one of the foremost British military historians writing today, is an exhaustive, one-volume history of that annus horribilis and the events leading up to the fatal...
A View From the Top of the Ridge
On the Literature of the American West For the last several weeks, working at a leisurely pace, I have been reading through the new and extremely ambitious Columbia Literary History of the United States. This is a huge work, one which has many merits and aspires to be inclusive. Indeed, it is a conscious attempt...
The Loss of American Identity
I have never been able to get it through my thick skull that one’s identity, culture, and national sovereignty should not stand in the way of making money. For whatever reasons, I have always had a real attachment to my name, my family, my people, my place, my way of life. I have never felt particularly...
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...
The Sacralization of Black Lives Matter
Perhaps I’m going crazy, but I thought I just heard NBC News and other respected information sources report that the recent burning of two Black Lives Matter (BLM) signs is being investigated as “potential hate crimes” by the Washington, D.C. police. Apparently these alleged hate crimes occurred as BLM and its sister organization (or rather,...
Blood Will Tell
In Tom Wolfe’s America the Northern WASP elite is shallow and cowardly, the most sacrosanct minority groups seethe with ingratitude toward the majority and snarl at one another, culture is dominated by the conspicuous vulgarity of new and ill-gotten wealth, and manners and morals are in a catastrophic nosedive in which the relation of man...
Methodists and Sex
The United Methodist Church, having declined from 11 to 8 million members in the United States, spent millions on a television and newspaper ad campaign called “Open Hearts, Open Minds, Open Doors.” Those millions were probably wasted, however. The ad campaign has been overshadowed by unwanted publicity over increasingly routine battles about homosexuality. Last fall,...
Second Thoughts
These days everyone is having second thoughts—about Vietnam and the 60’s, about American history, about what it means to be a liberal and what it means to be a conservative. Rather than be left out of the rewrite, I too have been having second thoughts about what I did and did not do some 20...
Eurabian Nights: A Horror Travelogue
Thousands of young Muslims, armed with clubs and sticks and shouting, “Allahu akbar!” riot and force the police to retreat. Windows are smashed; stores are looted; cars are torched. Europeans unlucky or careless enough to be trapped by the mob are viciously attacked, and some are killed. The scene could be Mogadishu in the aftermath...
The Manufactured Border Crisis
In nearly 30 years of covering America’s corrupted immigration and entrance policies, I can tell you definitively that every “border crisis” is a manufactured crisis. Caravans of Latin American illegal immigrants don’t just form out of nowhere. Throngs of Middle Eastern refugees don’t just amass spontaneously. Boatloads of Haitians don’t just wash up on our...
Bad Georgie
The facts of George Garrett’s literary career are laid out in the bibliography here: his 24 books include novels, plays, and collections of poems and short stories. In addition he has served as editor of 17 other books—interviews with contemporary writers, literary criticism, books on film scripts. He has also written a biography of the...
The American Spectrum
There is no conflict, M.E. Bradford insists, “between preserving the language and securing a civil polity,” a credo which, embedded in “What We Can Know For Certain: Frank Owsley and the Recovery of Southern History,” provides the subtext for the work as a whole. Not only does a relationship between language and polity exist, it...
Afghanistan South
Heeding the advice of Gen. David Petraeus, Barack Obama has committed 17,000 more troops to Afghanistan and will keep 50,000 in Iraq after U.S. combat operations end in August 2010. But are U.S. vital interests more threatened by what happens in Anbar or Helmand than in the war raging along our southern border? Prediction: After...
Singing Our Song
In the summer of 2014, a “surge” was on at the southern border, particularly in my home state of Texas, stimulated by the Obama administration’s signals that it was planning a mass amnesty and had no intention of enforcing immigration laws. It became painfully obvious that the border crisis—the near total collapse of any controls...
Middle American Mellow?
Since the 1960’s, American politics at the national level has primarily consisted of an endless search for a new majority. The Democratic Party’s embrace of the civil-rights movement kicked off the quest by undermining the New Deal coalition that combined white Southerners with white, ethnic, Northern union members, allowing the Republican Party to invade the...
Lincoln’s Other War of Aggression
Lincoln’s war against Southern independence is just one component of the American Civil War. Like a Matryoshka doll, the Civil War opens up to reveal a set of nested wars, one inside another. There is Lincoln’s war against international law; his war against the Congress; his war against the judiciary; his war against the Bill...
Bush’s New “Axis of Evil”
George W. Bush must have been the despair of the history department of every school his daddy managed to get him into. Consider his latest excursion into the history of the republic, at Southern Methodist, where the Great Man's papers are to be housed. What's interesting about our country, if you ...
SPLC Spreads More Hate, This Time With A Twist
You wonder what took so long. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which labels any group or person even a smidgen to the right of Al Sharpton a “racist,” “hater” or “right-wing extremist,” is now terrorizing those who indirectly fund “hate groups.” Last week, World Net Daily reported that SPLC is moving against websites through which...
Before You Bet Against the Market . . .
“They’re wiping out our industries,” said my southern California friend, staring moodily out across the Pacific ocean beyond which They—the Japanese—presumably lurking even as he spoke. “They’re buying up all our land,” confirmed his wife. “Of course, we’re so stupid, we just let them.” “They need another earthquake over there,” her brother-in-law joked darkly. “That...
Making It Close
Following the publication of Wise Blood in 1952, whispered speculation commenced among the novelist’s relatives, who wondered how an innocent Catholic girl from a genteel Southern background could have acquired the worldly experience to write the early scene in which Hazel Motes enters a stall in the men’s room at the local train station, reads...
Community Revisited
Congratulations to Ray Olson for his review of Kings Row (“Kings Row Revisited,” Vital Signs, June), book and film, and his insight into how the movie slights the book’s theme of community. There is a big subject here. Community has been central to Southern literature. The community—Yoknapatawpha—is the true central character of Faulkner’s fiction, as...
Tame Monster
Randall Jarrell was born in Nashville in 1914 and grew up in Tennessee and Southern California. He studied under poet and critic John Crowe Ransom at Vanderbilt University and followed him to Kenyon College, where he lived in Ransom’s attic with the young Robert Lowell and wrote his thesis on A.E. Housman. Encouraged by Allen...
Bashing the Baptists
“Who are these people?” someone asks about evangelicals in the early pages of Redemptorama, a book billed as an exploration of Christ and contemporary culture. Despite years of research and her own Southern Baptist upbringing, the author, Carol Flake, offers only caricatures in response to the question. The book is supposed to help sophisticates bewildered...
Exercising Our Rights
The murder of Michael Westerman, age 19, of Elkton, Kentucky, allegedly by four young black males, should alarm anyone who publicly displays pride in his Southern heritage. Westerman, the father of infant twins, was gunned down as he drove with his wife between Guthrie, Kentucky, and Springfield, Tennessee, on January 14. According to Robertson County...
Of the Baptists and the Modern World
I live in amity with the Southern Baptists, whose general tolerance for my fellow “Whiskeypalians” I take kindly. I wouldn’t dream of joining the media whoop-de-do over who among the Baptist faithful did what to whom, and when, and what to do now. You have read it all; I will not recount the imputations of...
A Classic Smear Tactic
Last week, the Southern Poverty Law Center retailed another smear using its classic tactic: attach the “hate group” label to a conservative Christian group, then claim others tolerate “hate” if they refuse to to disassociate themselves from the “hate group.” This one came from Heidi Beirich, chief propagandist of the group’s smear publishing arm. Here...
The Populist Rainbow
It is June 1994, and Anthony Hilder is attending a Southern California gathering called “The New World Order.” Two overhead projectors beam book-covers alleging Masonic conspiracies onto the walls. Hilder, white and middle-aged, is the host of two syndicated talk-radio shows, Radio Free America and Radio Free World. He has brought tapes to sell to...
I’ll Take My Sit
Because it’s reasonable to assume that Gerald Russello (“The Agrarian Burden,” Reviews, October) is highly knowledgeable of his chosen subject, the Southern Agrarians, I must conclude that his avoidance of their intellectual hypocrisy (or worse) is by choice and not by accident. I’ll Take My Stand was written by a dozen academics, most comfortably ensconced...
What the Editors Are Reading: Lanterns on the Levee
Once upon a time I mentioned William Alexander Percy’s Lanterns on the Levee (1941) in a history seminar. The professor rolled his eyes: not that damned moonlight and magnolia again! A fellow student leaped to Percy’s rescue: Lanterns was a serious, thoughtful memoir for serious, thoughtful people. It is. And it is a portrait of a certain kind of Southerner...
The Wall: Moral and Good
President Donald Trump’s predecessors have circumvented Congress before on issues the legislative branch had tried to stop. They have redirected resources appropriated by lawmakers. They have resorted to the same National Emergencies Act that Trump is invoking in order to build the Wall along the country’s southern border. None of their actions triggered a reaction...
Reconstructing the Bostonians
The Bostonians: Directed by James Ivory; Screenplay by Ruth Prawer Ghabvala; Merchant-Ivory Production. A popular film that is more than chewing gum for the mind is a rare treat, and a novel of power and poignancy, translated into a well-created film, is sheer bliss. The Bostonians is a love story about an archaic Southern man...
A Jug of Wine, A New Zealand Trout
With Missouri frozen solid for two February weeks in a row, naturally one’s thoughts turn to the Southern Hemisphere. There were some hot spots in our beloved country even this winter—Miz Hillary was testifying before a federal grand jury, the Rose Law Firm was smoking, and Mr. Starr was building a few fires of his...
Books in Brief
Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center by Tyler O’Neil (Bombardier Books; 240 pp., $16.99). Journalist Tyler O’Neil of PJ Media has been busy. From roughly around the time of the Charlottesville racial conflagration in 2017 to the filling of the inkwells that were used to print this book, O’Neil has...
Reconstructing the Bostonians
Reconstructing the Bostonians A popular film that is more than chewing gum for the mind is a rare treat, and a novel of power and poignancy, translated into a well-created film, is sheer bliss. The Bostonians is a love story about an archaic Southern man who falls in love with a beautiful feminist preacher who...
The Saga of Esteban Solarz
Not long ago, during the glory days of the Gulf War, Stephen J. Solarz, ferret-faced little Democratic congressman from southern Brooklyn, was riding almost as high in the saddle as our Commander-in-Chief. For it was Solarz who played the major role in dragging his often- reluctant liberal colleagues away from their traditional dovish stance into...
What Matters Most to Nations and Peoples?
Speaking in Conroe, Texas, last weekend, former President Donald Trump accused his successor of allowing millions of migrants to enter the country illegally across our Southern border. “The most important border … for us is not Ukraine’s border but America’s border,” thundered Trump. “Before Joe Biden sends any troops to defend a border in Europe,...
Bush’s New “Axis of Evil”
George W. Bush must have been the despair of the history department of every school his daddy managed to get him into. Consider his latest excursion into the history of the republic, at Southern Methodist, where the Great Man’s papers are to be housed. What’s interesting about our country, if you study history, is...
Influx of Illegal Aliens
The European Union will set up rapid-reaction teams to deal with an increasing flood of illegal African immigrants on Europe’s southern flank. The decision was made by the European Commission at a July 19 meeting spurred on by complaints from Spain, Italy, and Malta. Illegal immigration to Spain via the Canary Islands has increased sharply...
The Trojan Chicken
Albany, Kentucky, has a stay of execution for at least a little longer. But more than a few townspeople are preparing to mourn her passing—and leave before the funeral. Albany is a town of 2,000 in the rolling limestone hills of southern Kentucky, just north of the Tennessee line. Founded in the early 1820’s, it...
The Union as It Was
A minority on the left is possibly willing to admit that a few “good Southerners” during the War Between the States opposed slavery, secession, and the Confederacy. Probably a much smaller minority would concede that a considerable number of Northerners opposed the war either to preserve the Union or to free the slaves. That, in...
The Lincoln Worshippers Strike Again
The “resignation” of Rand Paul’s aide Jack “Southern Avenger” Hunter was another broadside cannon shot fired in the war between us paleos and the liberals and neocons over Abraham Lincoln, a war that started with the attack on the late M.E. Bradford. The mainstream howled in outrage over Hunter’s 2004 column “John Wilkes Booth Was Right”. Now,...
Mondo Quasimodo
Last June, the 19,000 delegates to the Southern Baptist Convention voted to boycott the Walt Disney Company for its “promotion of homosexuality” and the other “anti-family” values. The convention pointed to Gay and Lesbian Days sponsored by Disney theme parks; to such twisted fare as Priest, Powder, and Kids, all films produced by Disney’s Miramax;...
Home Movies
In a recent letter I mentioned the circuitous route my wife and I drove last summer on our way from California back home to North Carolina. The first day it took us past Bakersfield, where I’m told the children and grandchildren of Okies have imposed something resembling Southern culture on a part of California. (I’m...
Bible-Belt Baroque
For some time, my friends Jeff and Rebecca Calcutt (a pair of Southern patriots sans pareil), had urged me to pay a visit to Bob Jones University in Greenville. I have no interest in driving to Greenville, I told them. I don’t like mountains, not even little ones. I don’t like Clemson fans, with those...