This new biography of one of the great “fixers” in American political life, James F. Byrnes, creates the impression of an American Ozymandias, proclaiming by example the ephemerality of human greatness. Byrnes and his political colleagues did mold the world in which we live long after the last of them died; yet the scene of...
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...
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,...
Dick McIlhenny awoke with a cold foot in the blackness that could be an hour after he fell asleep or ten minutes before the alarm clock went off. He attended to the foot inside the sleeping bag and checked the luminous dial on the clock beside his pillow. The clock said 30 minutes past one....
(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...
Wendell Berry’s latest harvest of essays contains characteristically wise observations on mobility, industrial agriculture, and other maladies of our age, but it also displays a Berry seldom glimpsed—that is, Wendell Berry as a rural Kentucky Democrat reluctant to quit a party that long ago quit rural America. He even titles one short piece “Some Notes...
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...
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...
On March 3, 1994, ABC-TV’s Nightline devoted its half hour to the question of deteriorating relations between blacks and Jews. As background, the program showed clips of newsreels from the civil rights era, the “halcyon days”—and years—of unity between Jews and blacks in the 1950’s and early 60’s. The narration then jumped to the 1980’s...
Bolling Hall has squatted on its plot since the 14th century, hunched against the wind and rain of the West Riding—a North Country architectural essay in dark yellow sandstone looking warily down a steep hillside onto Bradford’s Vale. Old though the building is, the estate’s foundations go deeper than Domesday, when Conqueror companion-in-arms Ilbert de...
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,...
As the 20th century drew to a close lists of the century’s greatest figures in various fields of endeavor appeared regularly in newspapers and magazines. Revealing that memories were short, the lists tended to be dominated by figures of recent vintage, especially in the sports world. This is probably a consequence of the ephemeral nature...
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every hook has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless...
Americans are understandably concerned about the grave security situation in Iraq. The United States has suffered more than 2,500 fatalities in that conflict and has yet to defeat the insurgency. Indeed, the level of violence in Iraq is increasing, and much of that violence now consists of sectarian bloodshed between Sunnis and Shiites. The American...
One of the dumber remarks of the 1984 Presidential campaign—a campaign notable for its dumb remarks—came from Joe Frank Harris, governor of Georgia. Asked if he approved of Geraldine Ferraro, he replied: “Yes. I asked her if she had eaten grits and liked them, and she said, ‘Yes’—and she passed the test.” He should have...
I foolishly used an early version of my article. Rather than repost everything, I am putting in a few omitted extracts: Introduction“Poor Mexico,” sighed Porfirio Diaz, “so far from God, so close to the United States.” Though a hero in the Battle of Puebla (May 5, 1862) in which the Mexicans defeated French troops supporting...
That the republic has degenerated from a Protestant-inflected localized republic to a centralized bureaucratic imperial state is something most conservatives take for granted. The reason for such a transformation, however, sometimes becomes more assumed than proved. This compounds the difficulty of convincing liberals, and even some “conservatives,” that such a transformation has occurred. The secular...
California was imagined and named before it was discovered. In 1510 in Seville there appeared a novel that would have Fabio on the cover today. Written by Garcia Ordóñez de Montalvo, Las sergas de Esplandián is a romance of chivalry that vividly describes the adventures of a fictitious Christian knight, Esplandián. In defending Constantinople against...
The war on the West is not going badly—from a Westerner’s point of view. As of mid-February, salient victories included the successful filibuster, by Western senators, of Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt’s range reform bill; the routing of the obnoxious Representative Mike Synar (Democrat-OK), the congressional instigator of “reform”; the firing of the arrogant Jim Baca...
January 10 Last night we had a good seafood dinner at La Buca. This was our second seafood dinner, since the night before we had gone to my old favorite, Il Nuraghe, and dined well on fish–in defiance of the Trip Advisor food mavens, who are forever complaining about how stodgy and 1970’s the...
Some thoughtful soul, not I, would perhaps have some positive words about the present volume, and not without some justification. There is much to be said in praise of the Library of America and the quality of its volumes in various categories of presentation, and in the past I not only have acknowledged such manifest...
In his last novel, In the Tennessee Country, published the summer before Peter Taylor’s death on November 2, 1994, a man, the narrator’s cousin, “chucks” his family, his home, and his identity, and disappears. What is important about Cousin Aubrey, however, is not so much his mysterious absence from the narrator’s life as his lingering...
Marshall McLuhan argued that human beings simply cannot cope with the technological expansion of their senses through new media. He kept a close, critical eye on these emerging technologies all his life.
The standard opinion has it that, ever since they set foot on the new continent, the English settlers felt they were one people, Englishmen united by their common language, common origins, common enemies, so that it was only natural that their independence, once achieved, should lead them to the framing of one new national body,...
It is not impossible, merely difficult, for the author of a highly praised first novel to produce a second worthy of its predecessor. Perhaps paucity of imagination is responsible for the failure of many second novels; the writer emptied his quiver the first time or got lucky with a flash-in-the-pan and should not have tried...
The last couple of years have been busy ones, here in the South. Mississippi finally ratified the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, giving women the vote. At Billy Bob’s, in Fort Worth, Merle Haggard stood all 5,095 customers to drinks. And in Hardwick, Georgia, Daniel Sargent, 27, a one-legged and legally blind diabetic armed...
In his autobiography, A Season For Justice, Morris Dees describes his 1967 epiphany in snowbound Cincinnati. Dees was, at the time, a millionaire 31-year-old lawyer, salesman, and publisher. While he had “sympathized with the Civil Rights Movement,” he “had not become actively involved.” By the time he arrived in Chicago, however, he was determined to...
The life of Lee having been “done,” redone, and perhaps even undone by revisionist treatment, the present weighty phenomenon requires some contextual examination. We might first and simply ask the question, What is the purpose of this book? I mean to say that the revisionist treatment of the so-called Civil War has been gathering force...
I’ll take my stand. There are a lot of topics around—collapsing savings and loans, collapsing universes, donkey basketball—on which I have skillfully walked the rail or else mumbled “no comment” while hiding my face behind a raised lapel. There is one subject, though, that I’m willing to stand up and be counted on. I like...
Every day we hear references to North, South, East, and West, to Midwest and Southwest, to Pacific Northwest and, lo, even to Ozarkia, Cascadia, and Siskiyou. All of us speak or write of these geographical areas as if they had narrowly prescribed boundaries readily meaningful to everyone. Yet in reality these designations, as Humpty Dumpty...
“Things and actions are what they are, and the consequences of them will he what they will he: why then should we desire to be deceived?” —Joseph Butler, Fifteen Sermons No doubt many of us could think of an answer or two to His Grace’s rhetorical question, but the case for social science—any science, for...
Abraham Lincoln remains the central historical figure in modern America; the only others who can compete with him in their influence on the present and the degree of adulation accorded them are Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Rev. “Dr.” Martin Luther King, Jr. Lincoln is praised for having accomplished two things: preserving the Union and...
What an Austrian news magazine terms the “March on Vienna,” Jörg Haider’s “Freedom Party” took 23 percent of the November 1991 vole. Remarkably, this had followed a dismal showing four years earlier when his party garnered only 8 percent of the total vole and appeared on the verge of deterioration. Handsome and energetic, the 42-year-old...
America's crowning achievement was the moon landing. But, since 1972, our nation's priorities have shifted from moon missions to diversity, equity, and inclusion. It doesn't have to be this way.
It is commonly assumed that the word “Nazi” is the contraction of Adolf Hitler’s political party, the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP), or the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. But if that were true, then why did the Nazis hate being called “Nazi?” When the Nazis came to power, William Shirer notes in his Berlin Diary,...
Poetry, short story, novel, drama, screenplay, criticism, the teaching of writing: George Garrett has excelled across the entire spectrum of literary art. I can call to mind no other contemporary American writer who approaches this feat, though perhaps Garrett’s friend Fred Chappell comes closest. But, what is even rarer for a first-rank artist, Garrett also...
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...
California is at the forefront of the plan to grant reparations to blacks for slavery and discrimination. The state's published plan to pay up to $800 billion makes no sense, especially since California entered the Union as a free state.
Broad swaths of conservative opinion today would have it that the enemy of the right is some variant of Marxism. But this does not accurately describe people like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, or CNN’s Jeff Zucker. All the tech and media executives who are censoring and deplatforming voices on the right can hardly...
In 1833 James Fenimore Cooper returned from a European tour to Coopers town—founded by his father, one of the first pioneers into the dangerous frontier of New York beyond the Hudson Valley. Cooper property included a pretty peninsula on Lake Otsego that the family had allowed the community to use for fishing, picnics, and boating. ...
In 2008, Sheriff Paul Babeu became the first Republican elected to that office in the 136-year history of Pinal County, Arizona. At age 42, he is a 20-year veteran of the Army National Guard, retiring with the rank of major, having served in Iraq and as commander in the Yuma Sector of the U.S.-Mexican border. ...
Several years after he was forced into retirement, Otto von Bismarck was asked what could start the next major war. “Europe today is a powder keg,” he replied, “and the leaders are like men smoking in an arsenal . . . I cannot tell you when that explosion will occur, but I can tell you...
My establishment conservative acquaintances are still swooning over an anti-Biden tirade that Mark Levin delivered on his TV program last week, when we learned that our current president is the most racist person who has ever occupied the Oval Office, a charge that was then qualified with the phrase “since Woodrow Wilson.” Only two points in...
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...
You can read Letter from Germany, Part I here. This past week has been unseasonably lovely in southern Germany, with crystal blue skies and the temperature in the fifties. I was enjoying the view of the Alps from the southern wing of Neuschwannstein, the famous fairytale castle built by Wagner’s mad friend King Ludwig, when...
Louisiana being the jazz capital of the United States (and the world, for that matter), one easily forgets the other contributions she has made to American culture. Then one remembers Louisiana is Walker Percy’s adopted home and the setting of his most famous novel, The Moviegoer. Perhaps the writers Ernest J. Gaines and Shirley Ann...
The war in Ukraine reflects an ongoing revolution in military affairs that started two decades ago but which needed a major conflict to become fully apparent. To put it in a nutshell, the battlefield pendulum has swung in favor of defense
A sign above the cafe adjacent to the motel across the highway from the railroad tracks in Lordsburg, New Mexico, proclaimed the good news in faded red letters on a flaking white background. “Whiskey and water,” I told the waitress when she came with her pencil and pad. “No bar,” she explained. “But there’s a...
The Neocons, with the political left, now comprise a uniparty elite that confuses the interests of the state with the interests of the American people.
Spain is a country with strong regional identities. The central government recognizes four official languages: Spanish, Galician, Basque, and Catalan. The people in the “periphery” of Spain may refer to Spanish as Castilian, to distinguish it from their own language. In the Basque country, Catalonia, and Galicia, signs in the regional language are omnipresent. At...