April 22, 2020
MY CORNER by Boyd
Cathey
Latest Published
Article at the Abbeville Institute: “Every Southerner Needs This Magazine”
Friends,
Back on March 26 in the MY CORNER series I offered an essay,
an appreciation of Chronicles magazine,
which I consider the finest journal of its kind in the United States. Founded
forty-four years ago, it has been since then the exemplary voice for American
and Western Christian tradition, never bending to the passing whims and fancies
of the day, refusing all political correctness, and consistently offering some
of the finest and most intelligent and trenchant writing anywhere in the
Anglosphere.
Always favorable to the South and its hallowed traditions,
recently under editor Paul Gottfried it has become even more cognizant of and
unafraid to enter the fray—the cultural battles—which deeply affect the
heritage of the South (as well as the United States), with major articles and commentary not found in print
anywhere else.
That March 26 installment of MY CORNER I slightly refashioned
and it now appears at The Abbeville Institute today, April 22. I offer it to
you....
Every Southerner Needs This
Magazine
Boyd Cathey on Apr
22, 2020
On various occasions I’ve made references
to Chronicles Magazine and cited articles printed in it.
Remarkably, Chronicles is the only print
magazine of stature (it is also online) in America which has represented and
aired traditionalist conservative viewpoints, in depth and intelligently, now
for forty-four years.
Edited by Dr. Paul Gottfried
(Raffensperger Professor of Humanities, Emeritus, Elizabethtown College), the
magazine includes some of the finest writers of the Old or Traditionalist
conservative persuasion in the Anglosphere. And recently, Chronicles,
which has been consistently favorable to the heritage and traditions of the
South, has published even more quality essays by and on Southerners. Early this
year the magazine inaugurated a series –“Remembering….”—which undertakes to
recover the thinking and wisdom of various writers, many of them from the
South, who contributed mightily to American history and culture, but who,
largely due to the dominance nationally of the anti-Southern Neoconservatives,
have been neglected or exiled from the public square.
In the December 2019 issue, for
example, Chronicles featured fascinating appreciations of
Mel Bradford (by Clyde Wilson), Robert Lewis Dabney (by Zachary Garris), and an
introductory essay by Gottfried titled, “Remembering the Right.” Subsequent
issues have featured an appreciation of the late historian Eugene Genovese (by
Robert Paquette, a Genovese amanuensis, in the January 2020 issue) and Tar Heel
writer Richard Weaver (by Jay Langdale, in the February 2020 issue).
Chronicles has never been afraid to address
controversial issues from a traditionalist point of view, and thus go against
the grain of our consumerist and authoritarian gate keepers who now control the
establishment Conservative Movement and who accept far too many precepts and
agenda points of the looney Left. An excellent example of this intelligent and
thoughtful non-conformity—this “emperor-has-no-clothes” approach to the
intellectual bankruptcy of “Conservatism Inc.”—is the February 2020 issue,
which not only has the Weaver appreciation but several other significant
contributions that every thinking Southerner would do well to search out.
A major contribution is Dr. Brion
McClanahan’s superb critique of the latest initiative of the fanatically “woke”
Leftwing historical establishment, “The 1619 Project,” which attempts to frame
all of American history in the terms of race as the pivotal benchmark in the
development of this continent since the first African slave stepped off the
boat. McClanahan’s essay is a masterful response that demolishes the very basis
of “the project.” Another essay by him in the same issue, “The Reinvention of
Reconstruction,” demonstrates how Reconstruction and it policies were renewed
as an ideological platform for both historians and politicians in the 1960s,
and how this ideology has come to dominate all discussion about the War Between
the States, about civil rights (expanding beyond simple laws on accommodation
or voting, to such extremes as same sex marriage and a race-consciousness in nearly
aspect of American life), and the virtual excommunication of anyone who would
question that narrative.
Another fascinating February
contribution, “The Great Debate: Lincoln’s Legacy,” by H. A. Scott Trask is a
thorough examination of the famous and long-running discussions between Drs.
Harry Jaffa and Mel Bradford over the (nefarious) role of Abraham Lincoln, not
just during the 1861-1865 War, but even more significantly since then on the
decay and destruction of American institutions and the Constitution. Trask goes
into some detail regarding the profound and significant debate between Jaffa,
who seized upon the Declaration of Independence—in particular, its
propagandistic exclamation that “all men are created equal”—to assert that
equality was the fundamental basis of the American nation, and Bradford, who
firmly rejected that proposition: America was based on communities and families
who came to these shores for land and liberty; NOT to establish some
egalitarian “world state,” as Jaffa implied (see for example, Bradford’s
deeply-reasoned, “The Heresy of Equality,” Modern Age, Winter
1976). Editor Gottfried adds additional and critical commentary.
As both Trask and Gottfried show it was
Southerner Bradford’s rather complete take-down and devastating assault of the
“Lincoln Myth” that got him into serious trouble with the Neoconservatives.
Supported in 1981 by Senators Jesse Helms and John East of North Carolina, and
Howell Heflin of Alabama, to be President Reagan’s head of the National
Endowment for the Humanities, Bradford was immediately attacked by columnist
George Will and other establishment (Neocon) conservatives for his writings on
Lincoln and the Confederacy. Such views, once welcomed by the older
Conservative movement in the 1950s and 1960s, were now verboten and
most likely “racist.” And after a barrage of negative attacks, the appointment
went to Democrat, Neocon-favorite William Bennett.
For full disclosure I admit that I have
had a few items published by the magazine over the past couple of years, and a
review of my book, The Land We Love: The South and Its Heritage (Scuppernong
Press, 2018), by Dr. Donald Livingston of The Abbeville Institute, was
published in the May 2019 issue. Let me add that I have been a subscriber for
nearly thirty of the magazine’s forty-four years, and I look forward to its
arrival in my mailbox each month.
The annual subscription price for the
print edition is $48.00 a year, twelve monthly issues—well worth the cost
(which would be about the same for a husband and wife at middling steak house).
Chronicles subscriptions and a view of some
of the recent articles are available at its Web site: https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/. There is also an “800” number for
those who prefer the old-fashioned method of using the telephone. And while you
are there on the Web site, take a look at the Archive of articles and essays, a
veritable cornucopia of excellent traditionalist writing.
Every Southerner who really cares about
our heritage and traditions, who is concerned about the present parlous state
of the American nation, and who is worried about what kind of country we have
become and what we will leave to our children and grandchildren, should
receive Chronicles.
In a sense, it is one of the best
“weapons,” certainly intellectually and historically, we can have in our meager
arsenal. In these dark days, as our monuments come down and, to quote poet
William Butler Yeats, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are
full of passionate intensity,” Chronicles is a ray of light
and a hope for our future.
About
Boyd Cathey
Boyd D. Cathey holds a doctorate in European history from the Catholic
University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain, where he was a Richard Weaver Fellow,
and an MA in intellectual history from the University of Virginia (as a
Jefferson Fellow). He was assistant to conservative author and philosopher the
late Russell Kirk. In more recent years he served as State Registrar of the
North Carolina Division of Archives and History. He has published in French,
Spanish, and English, on historical subjects as well as classical music and
opera. He is active in the Sons of Confederate Veterans and various historical,
archival, and genealogical organizations. His book, The Land We Love: The South and Its Heritage, was published in
November 2018 (Scuppernong Press).
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