In August 1990, George Bush announced that America was “drawing a line in the sand” of the Saudi Arabian desert. With those words, the President recalled a list of individuals reaching back to Christopher Columbus who have defined “America” by the act, whether physical or verbal, of inscribing the American land. Definition is, by common...

F. Scott Fitzgerald, Raymond Chandler wrote, “is a subject no one has a right to mess up. Nothing but the best will do for him”; and that is how I feel about Laura Ingalls Wilder, who deserves to be ranked with Fitzgerald and Hemingway, Twain and O’Connor and Dickinson as one of the geniuses of...

The one certain thing about population control is that we do not yet know how to achieve it. That needs a bit of explaining. If human beings do absolutely nothing about controlling their populations, nature will do it for us, simply because the world—our world—is limited. Sure, a few human beings might eventually be shipped...

” . . . Ahaz . . . did not that which was right in the sight of the Lord . . . he . . . made his son to pass through the fire . . . he sacrificed and burnt incense in the high places, and on the hills, and under every green...

I have just returned from a trip around the world; a trip where among other things I explored why certain nations succeed brilliantly and other nations stumble along in poverty with marginal economies. In previous travels to South America, I accepted the standard south-of-the-border excuse that its poverty and problems were caused by “Yankee Imperialism.”...

On the morning of July 13, 1985, as I noted in my journal, I woke with an exceptionally clear recollection of a dream. In it my wife, Elizabeth, and I were in a high-ceilinged Victorian room with brown walls fashioned of rotating metallic discs. From there, we moved outside onto New York City’s Park Avenue,...

There is a painting on my wall that fascinates me. That is partly because it is beautiful, partly because of the story it tells. It is a large Dutch oil of 1658 by Hendrik van Vliet, better known for his church interiors, and it shows two men solemnly seated at a dark table lit only...

Civilization hangs suspended, from generation to generation, by the gossamer strand of memory. If only one cohort of mothers and fathers fails to convey to its children what it has learned from its parents, then the great chain of learning and wisdom snaps. If the guardians of human knowledge stumble only one time, in their...

The Western novel has always been hedged about with more conventions than any other category, with the possible exception of women’s romances. I’ve often puzzled about why that is so, and even after years of thinking about it, I don’t have any good answers. I know that some of it has to do with the...

All in all, why did I come to this nightmarish New York? To fill my pockets with dollars, and then to go back and live as a money-changer? No. You know that the answer is no. Out of curiosity? Yes. . . . Somehow yes. But most of all out of anxiety. Does this legendary...

As American migrant workers took to the fields in the first harvest season after the passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (the sweeping new federal law to control illegal immigration), Herminio Muñoz, a sixty-five-year-old Mexican-American from Progreso, Texas, told the Dallas Times Herald: “We think there is going to be a...

When T.S. Eliot said that there are no lost causes because there are no won causes, he probably was not thinking of American conservatism. Nearly sixty years after the New Deal, the American right is no closer to challenging its fundamental premises and machinery than when Old Rubberlegs first started priming the pump and scheming...

With the deaths of Robert Penn Warren and Walker Percy the specter of the star system is loose again in the land. “Who will be their successors? Who will pick up their mantle?” It’s a plaintive cry, predictable but genuine, largely journalistic and academic—a spume from the wave of canon-making—thinned by its basis in literary...

American society is in trouble, and not only because our traditional values and institutions are under siege. The nuclear family is crumbling as a result of government policies that are ruthless when they are not mindless. Our once great cities have reverted to a state of nature, in which the innocent are terrorized by hordes...

Even as we, in our own time, go about revising, or refusing to revise, our fundamental law, so did our Fathers in the beginning vote to put such law in its place: that is, one state at a time, reflecting, after vigorous dispute, 13 different majorities, some of them very belated—and very reluctant. All of...

“The feeling between this city and the hayseeds . . . is every bit as bitter as the feelings between the North and South before the War. . . . Why, I know a lot of men in my district who would like nothin’ better than to go out gunnin’ for hayseeds.” —George Washington Plunkitt...

On December 3, 1989, the London Telegraph included a piece of academic news from the United States: “Researchers in his native Georgia must soon decide whether to reveal that the late Dr. Martin Luther King, murdered in 1968, was—in addition to his other human failings—a plagiarist. There is now much doubt as to whether his...

The great conflicts of the future will no longer pit left against right, or East against West, but the forces of nationalism and regionalism against the credo of universal democracy. The lofty ideal of the global village seems to be stumbling over the renewed rise of East European separatism, whose aftershocks may soon spill over...

Good News Blues What I started to say, my original impulse, was wrong. Not all wrong, but, anyway, riddled with error and inconsistency. I started to say this: that in many ways, speaking (as we one and all must) from my own limited angle, my assigned point of view, the times we seem to be...

My friend Dr. Bob grew up in a coal town called Packard in eastern Kentucky, a place that was abandoned years ago. All that is left these days is kudzu growing over old foundations. He’s a neurosurgeon in Louisville now, and an amateur Kentucky historian, and my favorite tale of his is about the blue...

“All the evidence shows that differentiation which is not fragmentation is a source of strength. But such differentiation is possible only if there is a center toward which the parts look for their meaning and validation.” —Richard M. Weaver One of the most interesting of many superb memoirs of the American Civil War is that...

This essay grew out of a request that I conduct a reprise of “The Bull’s Eye of Disaster,” my wrap-up conclusions on the Vietnam War that appeared in the August 1989 Chronicles, in light of what’s happened in the post-Cold War world since that essay appeared. I was thus thrust onto the stage of modern...

Mark Twain once confided that he received public schooling as a child but never let it interfere with his education. Millions today are not so fortunate; for their education is being interfered with. The full extent of the problem came to light in 1983 in four major national studies. (The four reports were as follows:...

F.A. Hayek, in The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism, offers us one insight into the nature of freedom and morality. Hayek argues that the major world religions have succeeded and endured because they reinforce the weak and imperfect points of human nature. Hayek believes that civilization is based on the family and on private...

Just after receiving an invitation from the editor of Chronicles to write about the college humanities curriculum, I received a letter from a friend and ally in education reform. It expressed alarm that “I had gone over to the other side”—an opinion that started, according to his letter, when I declined to label myself a...

For several years now a heated debate has been going on over Western civilization and humanities requirements at some distinguished universities, most notably Stanford. The debate has brought up the question of a justification—or lack thereof—for forcing students into a sequence of courses devoted exclusively to Western thought. It has been argued, correctly, that thinkers...

“Humanities” is Western society’s name for the academic expression of its fundamental values. There are other branches of learning—medicine, law, engineering, and business, all of which benefit from the humanities—but only the “liberal arts” reflect a society’s soul, central beliefs, highest aspirations, and ultimately its culture. Yet during the last half-century America has witnessed the...

More change has occurred in the environmental movement during the past ten years than in its entire previous history. Its thrust has become less ideological and more pragmatic, less New Age and more scientific. It is increasingly grounded in the databases of atmospheric science and the genetic models of conservation biology. The practice of conservation...

If asked to state the goal of the environmental movement, a participant in it would probably say something like: “to promote a sustainable relationship between human beings and nature.” How could one possibly object to such a formulation? Yet hidden in it is a set of assumptions that may paradoxically lie at the root of...

Today the United States takes in annually more than twice as many immigrants as all other countries in the world put together. Many Asian countries permit no immigration at all, and openly despise foreigners. The top U.S.immigrant exporter last year, Mexico (with 95,039), is also a vigorous deporter, sending back an average of 150 Central...

Jacob Neusner, Graduate Research Professor of Humanities and Religious Studies, University of South Florida Martin Buber Professor of Judaic Studies, University of Frankfurt Immigration nourishes America, affirming the power of its national ideal: a society capable of remaking the entire world in the image of humanity in democracy. No country in the world other than...

Since the days when Tom Paine set himself up as chief propagandist for the emerging American colonies the United States has been subject to invasion by British journalists. They come for a variety of reasons. Tired of tax collecting in England, Tom Paine came to start anew, and if doing so involved the common sense...

The recent successes of the American right depend, in part, on its ability to deflect lower-middle-class resentment from the rich to a parasitic “new class” of professional problem-solvers and moral relativists. In 1975, William Rusher of the National Review referred to the emergence of a “verbalist” elite, “neither businessmen nor manufacturers, blue-collar workers or farmers,”...

“In the background of the entire tedious debate over the NEA, the First Amendment has loomed, misunderstood and abused as usual, claimed by some as justification for their right to express a preference for causing pain to others during the sex act and asserted by others as the basis for a constitutional right to receive...

By now it should be obvious that “education reform” is a fraud. Its primary goal has not been to rescue children from public school malpractice, but to rescue the schools from angry parents and taxpayers. The 1980’s saw per-pupil spending climb by about one-third beyond inflation, almost entirely for doing more of the same rather...

Washington apparatchiks have spent the last two decades in a frustrating search for a theme that could carry the sagging American welfare state. There are signs now that they have finally identified a, two-headed creature slouching toward Bethlehem-on-the-Potomac to be born: “families” and “children.” Jimmy Carter had a vague sense of the political power behind...

After eight years in power, conservatives are down in the mouth. The right feels as out in the cold as it was during the wilderness period, fifteen years ago; and this time it does not even have much of a communist menace to fall back upon. Establishment Republicanism, as personified by George Bush, is in...

Nineteen eighty-nine was a year of great joy for lovers of freedom everywhere. For it was the “revolutionary” year in which totalitarian communism, throughout Eastern Europe and perhaps even in the Soviet Union itself, suddenly collapsed like a house of cards. Many of our pundits, equating complexity and permanent quasi-gloom with profundity, sternly warned us...

As I read the announcement and noted with admiration those receiving The Ingersoll Prizes, I can say in all humility that it never entered my head during the past several years that I might someday be so honored, and for that I thank you. I thank you also for the opportunity to make the following...

Certain moments in a good story possess a quality that is logically very strange indeed, and that renders them often haunting and unforgettable. Consider Dorothea’s choice of Ladislaw as her lover in Middlemarch: the logic of fiction would dictate that Dorothea should pair up with Lydgate, who is a heavyweight like her, and if after...