This summer’s border crisis—the near total collapse of any controls or security at our southern border, especially in South Texas—was manufactured by the Obama administration as a means of forcing through a mass amnesty, either via Congress or by executive fiat. Legalizing millions of illegal aliens now resident in these United States is the immediate...
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...
“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...
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...
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...
(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...
“Apologize for what? Cory should apologize. He knows better. There’s not a racist bone in my body.” Thus did a stung Joe Biden answer rival Cory Booker’s demand he apologize for telling contributors, in a southern drawl, “I was in a caucus with James O. Eastland, He never called me ‘boy.’ He always called me...
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. ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
“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...
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....
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”...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
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...
“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...
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...
“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...
“Can we all just get along?” That was the plea of Rodney King after a Simi Valley jury failed to convict any of the four cops who beat him into submission after a 100-mile-an-hour chase on an LA freeway. King’s plea came after the 1992 LA riots, the worst since the New York City draft...
The opportunity for a reconsideration, indeed a reconstruction, of literary history is, in the case of William Gilmore Simms’ poetry, both enticing and rewarding. In Matthew Brennan’s analytical volume, we find the basis, fully elaborated, for reengaging with a body of work, the worth of which has only recently been reevaluated. William Gilmore Simms (1806-70)...
When I first heard that V.S. Naipaul was writing a book about the South, it made me nervous. What would the author of Among the Believers make of Jim and Tammy? Could we look for Louisiana: A Wounded Civilization? Well, I’ve been reading A Turn in the South, just out last winter from Knopf. I’m...
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...
Back in February, a USA Today story on black historical sites mentioned a “Black Confederate Memorial” in Canton, Mississippi, a “20-foot obelisk . . . built in 1894 to honor Harvey’s Scouts, one of the black units that operated behind Union lines to harass supply shipments.” As it happened, I read that story while spending...
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...
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. ...
Scandalously, Thomas Jefferson once wrote to James Madison, “I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and is as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.” In the same year, 1787, in regard to what is known as Shays’ Rebellion, he wrote ...
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,...
Among the significant changes on the American intellectual right in the last 50 years is the growing emphasis on equality. From the speeches of Jack Kemp and the collected works of Professor Harry V. Jaffa to the arguments advanced for Proposition 209 in California, it seems that equality is not only a principle worthy of...
Scandalously, Thomas Jefferson once wrote to James Madison, “I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and is as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.” In the same year, 1787, in regard to what is known as Shays’ Rebellion, he wrote another friend, “God forbid...
“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...
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,...
Imagine America invaded by a foreign power, one that has quadruple the population and industrial base. Imagine that this enemy has free access to the world’s goods as well as an inexhaustible supply of cannon fodder from the proletariat of other countries, while America itself is tightly blockaded from the outside world. New York and...
In November 1972 I voted for the re-election of President Nixon. Granted, it was only an elementary-school straw poll, but I was still thrilled when he carried the student body by a three-to-one margin. On election night, the electoral map was covered in a sea of blue (in those days each party retained its appropriate...
The issue of Kosovo, which has been simmering since the United States waged a war of unprovoked and unjustifiable aggression against the former Yugoslavia, is boiling over. While Serbian “public opinion” is said to be more interested in economic questions, the resentment against the international community is real. As one senior advisor to Prime Minister...
Whenever you hear the New World Order crowd whining about the obligation of the “international community” to come to the rescue of a “multiethnic democracy” threatened by “nationalism,” get ready for Uncle Sam to be dragged off on a fool’s errand. This term, “multiethnic democracy,” the prime exemplar of which is supposedly the United States,...
Nearly sixty years ago John Peale Bishop published a remarkable essay in the Virginia Quarterly Review entitled “The South and Tradition.” In it he ruminated on the Old South—its glories and failings—and said that the South had a civilization because like civilizations elsewhere (in Rome, France, England) there was “a continuous succession of manners, which...
“The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion.” So reads Article IV, Section 4 of the Constitution. Historically, that constitutional duty—to protect America’s states against invasion—has been the province of the president of the United States, the chief executive,...
Writing in the mid-1980’s, Forrest McDonald observed that America’s founders would have recognized their handiwork as late as the early 1960’s, but not after. Despite technological changes, the Civil War, the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and two world wars, the governments most Americans dealt with were state and local. Except for the draft board...
“The United States shall guarantee to every state in this Union a republican form of government.” —Constitution of the United States, Article IV Until the triumph of the civil-rights movement at the end of the 1960’s, probably the most disruptive and recurrent conflict in American politics came from the struggle between...
Since I had emerged from the theater in Foley, Alabama, somewhat sickened after watching Sling Blade, imagine my surprise when I found Clyde Wilson endorsing the film in Chronicles (Cultural Revolutions, November 1997). Because I’ve met Dr. Wilson and respect him greatly, I figured I must have been a shallow rube the first time I...
In this book Harriet Owsley remembers the life, friendships, and scholarly career she shared with her husband, Frank Lawrence Owsley. The subtitle of her memoir calls attention to her husband’s field of study as teacher and scholar. His three books on the Old South are definitive, and they are still in print: State Rights in...
The recent passing of Mel Bradford has cast a chastening light upon this latest of his collections. Who had wished to be reminded of the author’s indispensability in this or indeed any other way? Yet reminded we are and must be. This book means much in itself as it stands, and means more as the...
Despite all that has passed since, the war of 1861-65 arguably remains the central event of American history. In proportion to population no other event equals it in mobilization, death, destruction, and revolutionary change. We are into the Sesquicentennial, and one would like to think that Americans will take the opportunity to contemplate where we...
“Poetry is the Devil’s wine.” —St. Augustine In his prophetic poem “The Silence of the Poets,” Dana Gioia imagines a time in the not too distant future when poetry will be a completely lost art. “A few observers voiced their mild regret / about another picturesque, unprofitable craft / that progress...