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. ...
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...
(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...
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...
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...
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
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,...
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 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 crocodile has been worshipped, and its priesthood have asserted, that morality required the people to suffer themselves to be eaten by a crocodile.” —John Taylor of Caroline “The Father of Waters now flows unvexed to the sea,” Lincoln famously announced in July 1863. He was, according to a reporter, uncharacteristically “wearing a smile...
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.
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...
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...
“This was a recognition of American terrorists.” That is CNN’s Roland Martin’s summary judgment of the 258,000 men and boys who fell fighting for the Confederacy in a war that cost as many American lives as World Wars I and II, Korea, Vietnam and Iraq combined. Martin reflects the hysteria that seized Obamaville on hearing...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
“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...
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...
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...
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 ...
“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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
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...
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 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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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;...
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,...
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...
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...
“Niuno è solo l’april!” Mimì tells Rodolfo in Act Three of La Bohème. Mimì didn’t survive until April, and if she had she might have felt alone without Rodolfo anyway. Still, spring, like sex, is exuberant, irrational—rather, it’s suprarational. And unignorable, like a 70-mile-an-hour wind, which is what spring amounts to in most of the...