McClellan’s War: The Failure of Moderation in the Struggle for the Union by Ethan S. Rafuse Bloomington: Indiana University Press; 525 pp., $35.00 Walt Whitman remarked after it was over that “the real war will never get in the books,” and, despite all the volumes that have been written since then, his prediction remains largely...
Everybody knows that “The Star-Spangled Banner” was written by Francis Scott Key as he watched the British attack on Fort McHenry in Baltimore harbor during the War of 1812. But in 1861 Francis Key Howard wrote about his grandfather, “The flag which he then so proudly hailed, I saw waving at the same place over...
There will be no Greek default—not for months to come at least, as we predicted here two weeks ago. The private banks that had splashed out on ostensibly lucrative Greek bonds will have to accept a “haircut” of fifty percent of their nominal value, according to an agreement reached early Thursday morning after days of...
Most of us objected to The New York Times’ notorious “1619 Project” because it trashes the great achievements of Americans (creating free institutions and conquering a continental wilderness), substituting a story of supposed victimization as the core of our history. Alas, Professor Hall, in his speculations in the March issue (“Slavery and the American Founding”)...
Skyfall Produced by Metro-Goldwyn Mayer and Eon Productions Directed by Sam Mendes Written by Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, and John Logan Distributed by Columbia Pictures Lincoln Produced by 20th Century Fox and Dreamworks Pictures Directed by Steven Spielberg Written by Tony Kushner Distributed by Touchstone Pictures No less an authority than Vatican City’s daily newspaper,...
California is a preposterously large state, with 38 million dwellers stretching toward 138 million. So it’s not surprising a new idea to split it into six states has gurgled up from Silicon Valley venture capitalist Tim Draper, who’s holding a press conference today, Feb. 24, at 6 pm EST. His divorce initiative just received the...
“Beware the people weeping / When they bare the iron hand” —Herman Melville, “The Martyr” It is one of the most famous photographs of the nineteenth century: Alexander Gardner’s picture of four hooded figures dangling from a gallows in the old federal penitentiary in Washington, D.C. on July 7, 1865. On that sweltering afternoon, about...
Anyone who met M. E. Bradford was unlikely to forget him. There was his imposing bulk and his Stetson cowboy hat, but that was just the trimming. This Oklahoman, long a fixture at the University of Dallas, radiated vast erudition, lightly worn and easily shared, often in colloquial language. He emitted goodwill and sparkling humor,...
The news descended with crushing force: I must be getting really old. Rising from the dinner table, I had pulled back my wife’s chair, and our waiter complimented me. He complimented me for the kind of civil and reflexive action to which my generation was bred in the post-World War II years? Ah, yes; he...
I’m sure some readers of these letters are tired of hearing what a special place the South is. So I’ll warn you: I’m going to say it again. And I’m going to quote all sorts of other people who say it, too. Come back next month if you can’t take it. The South is a...
Florence King, a/k/a “Fascist Flossie,” “Ku Klux King,” and “the thinking man’s redneck,” is the author of Southern Ladies and Gentlemen, Reflections in a Jaundiced Eye, Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady, and a number of other books under her own name and several others. She is infamous, in a South full of unreconstructed Confederate...
Of the making of Civil War books there shall be no end. There are so many, most of which cover the same bloody ground in much the same slogging way, without any new insight or contribution. To make matters worse, American historians have rewritten the war as a simplistic moral melodrama between the forces of...
No one can deny the decline of civility and manners, both a cause and effect of our decadent society. Digby Anderson and the British-based Social Affairs Unit have explored this trend, and the quickening downward spiral toward barbarism so evident in the Western world. Gentility Recalled is a defense of the old-fashioned concept of “manners”...
From the October 2000 issue of Chronicles. For seven years (1989-96), I was a full time faculty member at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV). I grew up in Las Vegas, earning a B.A. in philosophy from UNLV in 1983 before going to graduate school. In August 1996, my wife and I left Nevada...
E.U. enthusiasts have recently scored a hat trick of good news. First, there was the election of Rothschild banking protégé Emmanuel Macron to the presidency of France along with a parliamentary majority, followed by the much-improved pre-election poll ratings of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and now the Tories’ loss of their party’s once solid parliamentary...
When I first heard of the topic “Small Is Beautiful,” I thought of the wonderful motto of Chilton Williamson’s friend Edward Abbey: “Growth Is the Enemy of Progress.” Abbey went right to the heart of the matter. The false but pervasive premise of American life is that progress and growth are the same thing and...
“One night,” said Uncle Remus—taking Miss Sally’s little boy on his knee, and stroking the child’s hair thoughtfully and caressingly—”one night Brer Possum call by fer Brer Coon, cordin ter greement, an atter gobblin up a dish er fried greens en smokin’ a seegyar, dey rambled fort fer ter see how de balance er de settlement...
“This used to be a hell of a good country. I can’t understand what’s gone wrong with it.” When people of a certain age and experience begin to think about when and how America went wrong, they almost inevitably hear echoes of George Hanson’s little sermon, delivered by Jack Nicholson in Easy Rider. An ACLU...
If the war with Iraq was largely the work of the Likudnik faction that has commandeered the Bush administration’s Middle East policies, the liberation of Liberia on which the President suddenly embarked the nation last summer seems to have originated at least in part with yet another lobby of questionable loyalties. On July 7, as...
Historians tend to make the same argument: The South lost the Civil War because its economy was agrarian rather than industrial, with too few munitions factories to supply Confederate troops with weapons and too few textile mills to clothe them. According to these same historians, the postbellum sharecropper system proved to be an economic disaster,...
Why are so many Western Christians either silent about, or actually complicit in, the Muslim hegira to the West? One would think Christians would be at the forefront of opposition. Some are, but most are not, and these latter include Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans, mainline “Protestants,” and evangelicals in America. These churches have made four...
Historians tend to make the same argument: The South lost the Civil War because its economy was agrarian rather than industrial, with too few munitions factories to supply Confederate troops with weapons and too few textile mills to clothe them. According to these same historians, the postbellum sharecropper system proved to be an economic disaster,...
The title “Dorothy Day and the American Right” promises a merciful brevity, along the lines of “Commandments We Have Kept” by the Kennedy Brothers. After all, the founder of the Catholic Worker movement and editor of its newspaper lived among the poor, refused to participate in air-raid drills, and preferred Cesar Chavez to Bebe Rebozo....
Post-Christian beliefs permeate the culture. A stroll across the majority of university campuses, five minutes of channel surfing, the U.S. Supreme Court’s First Amendment case law, popular behavior and that of the American elite—these are proof positive that Christianity in the 21st century bears little resemblance to the Christianity of America’s not too distant past. ...
After nearly a decade of working for the Washington Times, I was fired last September. Technically, I “resigned,” but Wes Pruden, the Times‘ editor-in-chief, asked me for a letter of resignation, and I had no real choice but to agree. Nor, by that time, had I any real desire to remain on the staff. The...
Editor-in-chief Paul Gottfried offers an examination of three major streams of conservative thought, based on aristocratic tradition, universal principles, and the pragmatic pursuit of power.
The Life of Saul Bellow: Love and Strife, 1965-2005, by Zachary Leader (New York: Alfred A. Knopf; 784 pp., $40.00). This is the second volume of the author’s biography of Saul Bellow, a massive and no doubt definitive work, minutely researched and very well written. Nevertheless, the patience required of the reader to pursue such...
Dr. Samuel Francis describes secession as an “infantile disorder” and casts The League of the South in the role of Margaret Mitchell’s impetuous Stuart Tarleton in contrast to the part he imagines he is playing—the cool, rational Rhett Butler. But if Dr. Francis had bothered to read the League’s literature, he would have learned that,...
The Rebel Flag and Ole Miss go hand-in-hand—or rather, they did, until recently. The University of Mississippi’s football team is named the Rebels, and students and alumni have had a long tradition of waving the Confederate Battle Flag at home football games. But the tides of time and political correctness have washed up on Ole...
This interview took place on September 18 and 19, 1985, at Garrett’s house in Charlottesville, not far from the University of Virginia. It is a sizable stone house, rented, with most of the available wall space covered with hastily erected brick-and-board bookcases. Not quite settled yet, Garrett and his wife, Susan, joked about how they...
A few months past there came to visit us for a weekend, at our house in the backwoods, Mr. Andrew Lytle, man of letters, aged 87 years. Although there are not many big houses farther north than ours, and although Mr. Lytle is very much a man of the South, he felt at home here....
Nineteen ninety-two was an opportunity for Americans to reflect on both their past and their future. In less than a month, we celebrated the birthday of Columbus and the transfer of power from the New Deal to the Big Chill, from the civics-class pieties of George Bush to the Penthouse improprieties of Bill Clinton. I...
Geronimo: An American Legend Produced by Walter Hill, Neil Canton, and Columbia Pictures Directed by Walter Hill Photography by Lloyd Ahem Screenplay by John Milius and Larry Gross If you are a lover of film but have never seen Geronimo: An American Legend (1993), you are missing not only one of the best Westerns ever...
Returning from the Abbeville Institute’s conference on Confederate symbols, I began thinking of all the things I failed to say in my talk on the campaign of cultural genocide waged against the South. I had addressed my argument to people who already respected the Southern tradition and quite properly resented the program of demonization and...
According to a host of news reports, the porous, virtually unprotected southern border of the United States has attracted the attention of Islamic terrorists, as many of us warned it would at the outset of the “War on Terror.” In March, Time, citing U.S. intelligence officials, reported that Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi, a ring leader of...
Chauvinistic Southerners like me are hard to please. We don’t like it when visitors pop in and out and say that the South has changed so much that it looks like everywhere else; but we don’t like it when folks come calling and say that nothing important has changed, either. In a recent article in...
It’s difficult to explain today that, from the 1920’s through the mid-1960’s, track and field was a major sport in Southern California. There were several reasons for this. There was no Major League Baseball anywhere on the West Coast—Chicago and St. Louis were the westernmost cities to field teams. We had only a minor-league circuit,...
A friend who sells high-end real estate tells the story of a well-heeled Northern couple who were enchanted by the idea of owning an antebellum Southern mansion. He met them at the airport and took them to one of our charming old South Carolina towns—one that, having failed to be liberated by the U.S. Army in...
The 12 Southerners who contributed to I’ll Take My Stand (1930) must have been a terrible failure, for the South as well as the rest of the nation ignored their warnings and injunctions. Yet, in their failure—caused in part by the frustration of the Depression and sealed by the global engagement of World War II—they...
Schoolchildren all across America are taught they live in the Land of the Free and that freedom of speech is a bedrock right. This is patently untrue, especially if one falls into any of these unfortunate demographic categories: Christian, white, Southern, or male. God help you if, like me, you fall into all four. Aside...
The 75th anniversary of the publication of I’ll Take My Stand ought to cause traditionalist Southerners and other Americans to look closely not only at the current state of our society but at their own personal spheres of community, family, and church. The authors warned that the South was in danger of being snatched from...
A noted Southern literary historian once took me to task for wasting time on polemics. The scholar’s task, he said, is to search out the facts and make coherent sense of them. In the long run, the truth of history would inevitably correct the fictions of ideology. At the time I was skeptical, and in...
Yes, I know I promised to write about the Georgia state flag controversy, but that prospect was too depressing. Let me address instead a couple of more entertaining topics, namely the 43rd annual Mountain Dew Southern 500 NASCAR Winston Cup Series Race and the recent presidential election. By the time you read this you’ll know...
I was recently gifted The South Was Right, by James Ronald and Walter Donald Kennedy, an updated version of a work originally produced in 1994. Seeking an antidote to the PC historiography in which our universities are now awash, I happily plunged into this printed gift. The present “leftist ideologues,” more than their predecessors, hate...
When Bill C. Malone’s Country Music, U.S.A. first appeared in 1968, it was obviously the most careful, well-researched, judicious, and accessible book on any kind of American popular music, including jazz, that had been published up to that time. Three revisions later, and a passing of the torch by Malone to a successor charged with...
To begin with, an anniversary: September 20th of this year marked a decade since the death of Alabama Representative Ray Burgess. The Honarable Ray, described at the time of his death by the New York Times as “a volatile segregationist and sometimes [sic] lay preacher,” had a habit of bringing his pistol onto the floor...
Richard Brookhiser’s biographical study of four generations of the Adams family illustrates once again that the rich and complex history of our country remains a closed book to the ruling class and their literary apologists. Brookhiser reveals in his introduction that his purpose is to create a usable past: “The United States is formally an...
The events of recent months present the eurozone as a dysfunctional bourgeois family, the latter-day Buddenbrooks morphing into Karamazovs. At the plot’s core is the loveless marriage of two incompatible, increasingly embittered partners. Teutonius is a rich yet parsimonious workaholic who abhors mortgages and long holidays. His much younger spouse, Meridiana, has inherited all the...
Just two hours from where I sit writing this lies a battlefield where 50,000 American men and boys were wounded, killed, captured, or went missing over the course of three days roughly 160 years ago. Several months later, that field became a cemetery dedicated by President Abraham Lincoln in his famous Gettysburg Address, and a federally...
“Fame is like a river, that beareth up things light and swoln, and drowns things weighty and solid.” —Francis Bacon At the height of his career, William Gilmore Simms was ranked with the best writers produced by the United States. In the Northeast, his novels were considered inferior only to Cooper’s, and there were many...