“As long as virtue was dominant in the republic so long was the happiness of the people secure.” —Robert E. Lee John P. Diggins raises various, often profound, questions about the moral foundations of America as a political society. Diggins is fond of calling attention to what he considers the underlying cultural tensions in American...
284 search results for: Southern+Heritage
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A Reluctant Revolutionary
Wendell Berry is a Democrat, pacifist, and critic of organized religion. Add to this the fact that he is a writer whose work has proved compelling to many conservatives, and he becomes a bit mysterious. At times Berry himself has seemed somewhat bemused by the cultural conservatives who frequently promote his work. Once we consider...
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Remembering H. L. Mencken
Critics have long considered H. L. Mencken to be impossible, meaning stubborn, difficult, exasperating. But today the appellation takes on a different meaning: His career and ideas simply would be impossible today.
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Our Tribal Pasts
This readable and remarkable book is the first in David Hackett Fischer’s projected series regarding American cultural history. In it, Fischer has drawn upon many sources of important information: narratives, statistics, linguistics, literature, diaries, topography, architecture, and political science. The result is a brilliant and formidable achievement, a major American contribution to the international tradition...
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On Crime and Vigilantism
Like Roger McGrath (“Treat Them to a Good Dose of Lead,” January 1994), I “grew up in a Los Angeles that had very little crime.” We, too, “locked the door to our house with a skeleton key, when we remembered”—until we lost the key. Professor McGrath does not attempt to account for the absence of...
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A Strange Career
C. Vann Woodward, Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University and a contributing editor to The New Republic, is the leading liberal historian of the South. For three decades his encyclopedic knowledge and detailed historical investigations have produced works that have set the pattern for subsequent historians. Woodward accepts the title “liberal,” if somewhat...
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Tracts Against Capitalism
Peaceful Valley is a bucolic residential neighborhood in Clemson, South Carolina. The middle-class homeowners who live there are not land speculators hoping to turn a profit. Many are like Kathleen Dickel, a 50-year-old high-school German teacher, who owns a two-story contemporary house with a deck surrounded on two sides by deep woods. Kathleen stained the...
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Know Patria, Know Patriotism
With Independence Day festivities approaching, Chronicles readers may be interested in a public lecture about patriotism which I gave in Louisville this past year. It has always seemed to me that before we can begin to intelligently discuss border control, Southern heritage, kneeling NFL linebackers, or any other given controversy, there is an even more...
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Revolution on the Right: The End of Bourgeois Conservatism?
In the early months of 1985, national headlines recounted lurid tales of an impending right-wing bloodbath in the United States. In New York City Bernhard Goetz admitted to the shooting of four Blacks who he believed were about to assault him on a subway car, and he promptly became a national hero. In the Washington...
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Dead Weight
“A conservative government is an organized hypocrisy.” —Benjamin Disraeli It may speak volumes about American conservatives that David Frum’s critique of “big government conservatism” permitted William Buckley—or so Buckley claims on the dust jacket—to enjoy “the most refreshing ideological experience in a generation.” To a conservative movement led by advocates of national uplift allied with...
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Hardly an Accident
It is hardly an accident that the decomposition of the American nation and its culture is paralleled by the decomposition of the American middle class. In the 19th century, nationality and the middle classes were born together as Siamese twins, and their enemies understood their linkage and tried their best to strangle them in their...
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Melting Down Art and History
After the Civil War, former North Carolina governor Zeb Vance became a U.S. senator. His Northern colleagues enjoyed his affable nature and sense of humor, and some of them invited him to Massachusetts during a break in government business. While there, Vance attended a party, and eventually required a visit to the outhouse, where his...
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Nationalism, Old and New
In the course of American history, nationalism and republicanism have usually been enemies, not allies. From the days of Alexander Hamilton, nationalism has meant unification of the country under a centralized government, the supremacy of the executive over the legislative branch, the reduction of states’ rights and local and sectional parochialism, governmental regulation of the...
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A Story of the Days to Come
Early in December of last year, while President-elect Clinton was trying to come up with a Cabinet that would “look more like America,” the U.S. Census Bureau published a report that told us what America really looks like and what it will probably look like 60 years from now. Presumably, Mr. Clinton will have departed...
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Come Home, America
Greetings from New York, where a new hate crime is taking shape: It is called “place-ism,” and it will be defined in the criminal code as the belief that a particular place, be it a neighborhood, village, city, or state, is superior to any other place, and that the residents of this place have a...
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Searching for Foes in the Post-Cold War Era
Despite the President’s and Congress’s promises, the budget is unlikely to be balanced in the year 2002. The bulk of the promised spending cuts come after the year 2000, and future Congresses and Presidents are unlikely to be any more willing than present ones to make tough political decisions. Equally problematic is the fact that...
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Forty Years After
Americans have grown fond of celebrating anniversaries of one kind or another. I first noticed this new habit during the national thrombosis over the Statue of Liberty back in 1986, but more recently the habit has swollen into something like an epidemic. In the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, we have endured the anniversaries of...
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Diversity Where It Counts
A work of genuine scholarship tells us what we did not know before and does so felicitously—it is a contribution to the world’s body of knowledge. Discouragingly, a majority of academic books that have bounced across my desk in recent years either regurgitate what was told better long ago, or are the distorted remnants of...
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That Demon Weed
When I hear all the talk about tobacco, I think of my Uncle Rollins, a green-visored straw hat on his salt-and-pepper head and a two-day stubble on his seasoned farmer face. He is standing in a field or by an unpainted barn as he crumbles a yellow-brown leaf and sticks a wad of ‘bacca in...
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Middle American Gothic
The bad weather of 1993 eliminated my usual fishing trips to northern Wisconsin, but the other day in Madison, where I go to use the library and relive the 60’s, I saw a sign for an instant oil change and lube: “Faster than an Illinois tourist.” Most people in Wisconsin are happy for the dollars...
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THE OLD REPUBLIC
Artur Schnabel . . . once said of Beethoven’s sonatas that “this music is greater than it can ever be played.” . . . The stories of American history are better than they can ever be told. —from David Hackett Fischer, “Telling Stories in the New Age,” March 1997 In my...
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Lament for a Lost Love
Oh, England! How have I loved thee, even though most of my forebears came from the doubtful Scots and Welsh borders, and not a few were 17th-century refugees from the turmoil of the German states. I am old enough to remember when many, many of us regarded you as our Mother Country, despite all the...
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The Donald & The La Raza Judge
Before the lynching of The Donald proceeds, what exactly was it he said about that Hispanic judge? Stated succinctly, Donald Trump said U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who is presiding over a class-action suit against Trump University, is sticking it to him. And the judge’s bias is likely rooted in the fact that he is...
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Melting Down Art and History
After the Civil War, former North Carolina governor Zeb Vance became a U.S. senator. His Northern colleagues enjoyed his affable nature and sense of humor, and some of them invited him to Massachusetts during a break in government business. While there, Vance attended a party, and eventually required a visit to the outhouse, where his...
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The New Meaning of “Racism”
The tedium that descended upon the nation’s politics last winter when Bush II ascended the presidential throne was relieved briefly in the waning days of the Clinton era by the bitter breezes that wafted around some of the new President’s Cabinet appointments. After repeatedly muttering his meaningless campaign slogan, “I’m a uniter, not a divider,”...
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J. Evetts Haley, American Cato
According to family records, ten of Great-Grandma’s twelve sons died in the Civil War. Thus it was that Allie Johnson Puett, the girl who became my Grandma Evetts, learned the lessons of self reliance, the duty of the defiance of illegitimate authority, the comforts of firearms, and the necessity of knowing how to shoot—wherein...
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If God Ran the State Department
“In the Name of the most Holy & undivided Trinity.” A Thus begins the Treaty of Paris (1783) by which Great Britain formally conceded the existence of the independent United States of America. This matter-of-fact invocation of the Triune God of Christianity stands in sharp contrast to the stirring tributes to human authority in the...
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America’s Second Civil War
“They had found a leader, Robert E. Lee—and what a leader! . . . No military leader since Napoleon has aroused such enthusiastic devotion among troops as did Lee when he reviewed them on his horse Traveller.” So wrote Samuel Eliot Morison in his magisterial The Oxford History of the American People in 1965. First...
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Apocalypse Now
“If a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand.” American evangelicals, according to former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, “are the Israelis’ best friend in the whole world.” In return, they dubbed him “the Ronald Reagan of Israel.” That so many are still surprised by those statements indicates that, by and large, those...
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Epitaph for Tombstone
Edward Lawrence Schieffelin’s story seems like something made up by a Hollywood writer long on cliche and short on imagination, for his silver strike epitomized the hopes and dreams of every sourdough prospector who ever wandered the lonely mountains, valleys, and streams of the American West. For years he searched in vain, living on the...
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After the Deluge
“Who would call in a / foreigner—unless / an artisan with skill to / serve the realm, / a healer, or a prophet, or / a builder, / or one whose harp and song / might give us joy. / . . . but when have beggars come by / invitation?” —Homer It should be...
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Up From Objectivism
It was sort of like being caught in a raging stream, and swimming hard against the current, inch by inch, to reach safety. The time was many years ago, when, as a college freshman, I fell into the currents of liberalism. And they were powerful. Just go with the flow, and you could get approval,...
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Picking Up the Conservative Pieces
Conservatives, with and without an upper case “c,” have still not recovered from last year’s electoral disaster. Even the drama of the Conservative Party leadership election, and the surprisingly comfortable Conservative victory at the subsequent Uxbridge by-election, have not removed a general feeling on the right of shock and bemusement. Even now we cannot believe...
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What the Editors Are Reading: January 2021
First the crazies tore down statues they deemed offensive. Next they vandalized churches. Then they demanded trigger warnings on classic movies like Gone with the Wind and Blazing Saddles. If these monsters ever discover libraries, books will be next. Let me suggest you hoard copies of William McNeill’s The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community (1963) before...
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Imperialism From the Cradle to the Grave
In the first year of Cyrus the king the same Cyrus the king made a decree concerning the house of God at Jerusalem, Let the house be builded, the place they offered sacrifices, and let the foundations thereof be strongly laid. Mesopotamia was the cradle of empires, but it was also their grave, as the...
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The House of David
Descent from a Founding Father is a matter for celebration to thousands of sons and daughters of the American Revolution and members of the Cincinnati Society, Colonial Wars, First Families, and other sufficiently remote or proud groups. Americans are eager to claim, when they can, ancestry made noble by history if not by “blood.” The...
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Death of a Propositional Nation
The mythical nation dedicated to a proposition is dying, and rioters, looters, and social justice warriors are playing Dr. Kevorkian. Because the United States has not reached their construct of the purest Platonic form of equality, it must be euthanized to make room for a new empire to rise in its place. It’s fitting that activists,...
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American Icons
“Thou shalt not portray a white male in an heroic light.” Thus reads the first commandment of the politically correct. Ever since the late 1960’s, the cultural Marxists have been engaged in a drive to destroy American heroes—if they are white males. This was not always a difficult task. Historians from an earlier generation had...
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Dulce et Decorum
One of the most moving war memorials I know is on a wall outside the reading room of the British Museum. It is a simple plaque with the names of a hundred or so librarians killed in the Great War. Librarians. Think about it. That plaque makes a point, doesn’t it, if not perhaps the...
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Empire Strikes Back
” . . . To sit in darkness here hatching vain empires.” —Milton During his discussion of the overthrow of feudalism by the bourgeoisie in his classic Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, Joseph Schumpeter asked whether “in the end such complete emancipation was good for the bourgeois and his world.” He concluded that it had not...
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A Perversion of History
If you think the removal of the Confederate Battle Flag from the grounds of the South Carolina capitol was the end of flag controversy, you may be surprised to learn that an op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times declared, “It’s time California dump” the Bear Flag, “a symbol of blatant illegality and racial prejudice. ...
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The British Invasion of the Ozarks
Chronicles readers may recall my “Old Route 66” (September 2013) and “Keep the Water on Your Right” (February 2015) motorcycle travelogues, in which I rode through small towns and rural areas to reconnect with the land and people of America. A road trip can do this like no other kind of journey, and doing one...
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Edward Abbey: R.I.P.
“By retaining one’s love of such things as trees, fishes, butterflies and toads, one makes a peaceful and decent future a little more probable.” —George Orwell With the death of Edward Abbey, aged 62, in March of last year, the Western portion of what once was really the United States lost her greatest defender of...
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Looking Backwards
Gil Santana had it all: He was the model conservative for the new millennium. Gil was born and reared in Southern California, naturally, and his given name evoked the rich diversity of the state that had once symbolized the American dream: Kim Kwame Kaplan Santana, each part representing one fourth of his Korean, African, Jewish,...
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The Supreme Court, Globalization, and the Teaching of Religion
Public figures talk about globalization as if it were the Rapture. We are told that, unlike Marco Polo and Christopher Columbus, we live in an era of international trade; so these days, we must worry more about what the world thinks and does. As Justice Sandra Day O’Connor told the Southern Center for International Studies,...
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What Beto Revealed
For Texas conservatives, a surprisingly strong showing by Democrats in their deep-red state in November’s midterm election was an unexpected wake-up call. The results also set me to thinking about my own personal history with the Lone Star State. And how, in the absence of vigilance, the long, proud heritage of a particular place can...
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Give Us Your Huddled Masses
“Send these, the homeless, tempest tossed to me.” —Emma Lazarus The publication of a Julian Simon book is a cause for rejoicing among advocates of laissez-faire and open-border immigration. According to Dr. Simon, who teaches business administration at the University of Maryland and is an adjunct scholar at the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute,...
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We’re All Sikhs Now
The shooting of Sikhs at a temple in Milwaukee is generating the usual blather about senseless violence, the paranoid racialist right, and the patriotism of Sikh immigrants. I finally heard, this morning, the inevitable, “Today, we are all Sikhs.” Excuse me, but no, I am not now and shall never be a Sikh. Sikhs,...
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The Season of Rain and Death
A blood-red sun is setting on the horizon, distant but familiar, dull but glowing, like the bloodshot eye of a wounded Titan. Layers of pasty-blue, thin, translucent clouds drape the blood-eye image, as if they themselves were the misty, cloudlike shimmerings of heat rising from the sunbaked pavement, cooled by a late-summer rain. I stand...
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Putting Policies Before Personalities
A candidate’s character matters, of course, but what matters most at this moment in history is which candidate proposes policies that will build a better America.