November 24, 2019

Steele Creek Church and the Airport

                                                        By Boyd D. Cathey

Back during the summer of 2019 the historic Steele Creek Presbyterian Church, near the city of Charlotte, North Carolina, closed its doors for good. The church, the second oldest in Mecklenburg County, having been founded in 1760—nearly 259 years ago—by hardy Scots settlers to the region, merged with another Presbyterian Church in the area, Pleasant Hill. The classic 1889 Gothic-revival style brick structure was abandoned, purchased by nearby expanding Charlotte Douglas International Airport.

As late as the early 1970s Steele Creek counted 1,000 members, but the encroaching airport and the constant deafening roar of supersonic jets every moment of the day speeding off to Munich, London, Latin America and all points in between, plus the precipitous decline in the Presbyterian Church USA, which has gone the way of all mainstream Protestant denominations and embraced the liberal social gospel, had brought the membership down to around 350, many of them adults who held on to the memory of a Presbyterianism that once boasted of a Reverend Robert Lewis Dabney…but now could only grasp for scraps from a barren Progressivist table.

Next to the historic 1889 building is the Steele Creek Cemetery, one of the more historic burial grounds in Piedmont North Carolina, holding over 1,700 graves, the earliest from 1763, twelve years before the onset of the Revolutionary War [See: The History of Steele Creek Presbyterian Church, 1745-1978; Third Edition, Charlotte, 1978]

In that cemetery are laid veterans of every conflict and war that the American nation has engaged in: those who served during the Revolution when the then-tiny hamlet of Charlotte served as an unwelcoming “hornet’s nest” for General Lord Cornwallis; a few who went off later to fight in Mexico or against Britain again in the early Nineteenth Century; many more who joined Confederate ranks to defend the independence and rights of North Carolina in 1861-1865; then, others who fought in the great world wars and conflicts since then. But there are others, also: husbands and wives, and children, of those who had formed up until recently a close-knit, church-oriented farming community like many spread over the Tar Heel State and the South.

Since 1777 over sixty members of my father’s family have been buried in Steele Creek’s sacred ground. Six of them are direct ancestors, including my grandfather and grandmother Cathey, my War Between the States great-grandfather, Henry Cathey[13^th North Carolina Regiment], and my eight-greats grandmother, Jean, who was born in County Monaghan, Ulster, in 1692, a descendant of Scots who migrated there from Ayrshire in the early 1600s. As a young boy I recall vividly attending the funeral of my grandfather, Charlton Graham Cathey (1958), in the old sanctuary and the impressive minister John McAlpine who comforted my grandmother who would pass on four years later in 1962, aged almost 98.

Those events remain engraved in my memory, even to the point of recalling the hymns sung—“How Firm a Foundation” and “Blessed Assurance,” two of granddad’s favorites.

But most of all, I remember that remarkable church, its strong and impressive brick structure, that aura associated with and radiated by it,  which deeply connected it to the history of old Mecklenburg County, to North Carolina, and to the land and families who settled nearby, and for which it was the center of their lives for generations.

The cemetery remains in church hands, despite the shrinking congregation having departed. It is too historic, so despite some earlier efforts by the airport authority to have the graves moved, it will remain where it is for the foreseeable future. But the old 1889 structure, its brick walls and interior now silent, is deserted, owned by the airport, serving only as a disappearing memory for those who care to recall what it once meant to so many.

In 1904 essayist and polyglot Henry Adams, scion of the fastly extinguishing Adams family of Massachusetts, authored a marvelous little volume, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres. In it he contrasted the accomplishments of the modern age, its spirit and objectives, with those of the high Middle Ages, in particular the great works of sublime architecture created during that period. While for modernity its symbol was the dynamo, the unthinking, whirring and cold mechanical devices increasingly dominating the landscape, for the Middle Ages its endearing symbol was the Blessed Virgin, Holy Mary Immaculate, whose sublime tenderness and inexhaustible love for the Faithful inspired such miraculous structures as Chartres Cathedral. Adams expresses this with a certain irony, contrasting our modern fascination with and hypnotization by machines (and now with an inhuman, impersonal technology) with the Blessed Virgin as Heavenly Queen whose centrality, reality and endless bounty are manifested exuberantly in such cathedrals. Noting the devotion to Her as our champion before the Throne of God he writes: “True it was, although one should not say it jestingly, that the Virgin embarrassed the Trinity; and perhaps this was the reason, behind all the other excellent reasons, why men loved and adored her with a passion such as no other deity has ever known ...” And why she sparked such incredible creativity which mirrored that devotion and faith.

Steele Creek Church still stands as the supersonic machines speed off overhead from Douglas airport to Europe, Latin America, or maybe Cancun. In a way, like Chartres compared to the modern dynamo, there is no greater contrast than what has happened to the million-person city of Charlotte, and the remembrance of a heritage and inheritance that Steele Creek incarnated and reminds us of. Modern Charlotte and it airport make stark comparisons with the haunted walls and ancient graveyard of Steele Creek. For in the bustle of the metropolis and the incessant noise of the jets there is little memory of who we were as a people, little connection to our rich historic culture.

In the late 1950s “the Queen City” that I remember as a boy was where older families yet predominated, where my father’s people were neighbors to the families of Billy Graham and Randolph Scott, where folks could recall the area’s history. Charlotte and Mecklenburg County were still linked strongly to their traditions. Now Charlotte rivals Atlanta as a mega-metropolis, and a soul-less anthill of business, banking and international commerce, with little room for heritage, except as a veneer to attract an occasional tourist not going to a Carolina Panthers game or to some big event at the coliseum.

I forget who said it—perhaps Faulkner, maybe Louis Rubin, I cannot remember—but that if he had known what Atlanta would become today, then he would wish that Sherman had torched it more thoroughly. Given what Charlotte has become, perhaps the same sentiment might be uttered?

The last major portions of farmland out near the Catawba River that had belonged to my dad’s family since 1750 are now sold to developers and strip malls. The pre-Revolutionary War house that my father was born in back in 1908 (the last of his family to do so) is now, thankfully, preserved at the Historic Latta Plantation. But the whole region has changed radically, altered and almost unrecognizable and discordant to my memories of sixty-five years ago. Hundreds of thousands of transplants (many from up North) now make Charlotte and its suburbs home and live—if you wish to call it that—the frenzied life of our tawdry, commercialized age.

I am put in mind of the great Southern Regionalist writer, Donald Davidson, in his epic poem, “The Tall Men”:

This is Rupert of the House

Of Rupert, famed in history,

Pondering on his income tax,

Deducting genealogy.

Great-grandfather from a loophole

Potted Choctaws in the thicket;

Rupert, menaced by the Reds,

Scratches the Democratic ticket.

[….]

Rupert, mounting in his car

Zooms up to God in Rotary.

Grandma Rupert had ten children;

Rupert's father begot five.

All of Rupert's stocks and bonds

Are strained to keep one son alive.

Democracy, a fuddled wench,

Is bought from tousled bed to bed.

Bass voices in white vests defile

The echoes of great voices dead.

There are remnants of the old culture that survive, a few, but they are fast being overtaken by a triumphant “Yankee” culture which Robert Lewis Dabney warned about 140 years ago, the fear that we would, as he said, become like our conquerors of 1865. Dabney, the Old Light Presbyterian divine that he was, declared that his role was like that of Cassandra at Troy, to prophesy and speak truth, but not to be believed until too late.

My mentor Russell Kirk once told me while we were discussing the old South and the changes being inflicted on her from both without and within that “it is hard to love the gasoline station where the honeysuckle used to grow.”

Steele Creek Church and its cemetery remind us who we are and who we have been. Despite being passed by and deserted, those grave stones cry out to those who would listen and take heed.

Perhaps, then, for those who do, our watchword could be from Spanish philosopher, Miguel de Unamuno in his volume, The Tragic Sense of Life: “Our life is a hope which is continually converting itself into memory and memory in its turn begets hope.”

Is this not, then, our challenge, to keep both memory and hope alive?

November 22, 2019

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

THE VANISHING TRADITION: Perspectives on American Conservatism

A New Book You Will Want to Read

Friends,

Shortly after the turn of this year, in early 2020, a book will be published by Cornell University Press. Its title is: The Vanishing Tradition: Perspectives on American Conservatism, and it is edited by distinguished traditional conservative author Dr. Paul Gottfried. Intended to be a critical view of what has happened to the “conservative movement” over the past half century, it offers both detailed discussion and history that for many readers will not be found elsewhere.

Among the contributors to this volume are: Gottfried, Jack Kerwick, Jesse Russell, Marjorie Jeffreys, Keith Preston, Jesse Merriam, and others. I have been privileged and honored, as well, to have a chapter to appear in the book, “The Unwanted Southern Conservatives,” in which I recount what has happened to the Southern tradition, to Southern conservatives, once so celebrated and welcomed by “national” conservatives and by such journals as National Review, but now reviled and exiled by the “establishment” Neoconservatives who dominate and control the conservative narrative. 

Robert E. Lee, John C. Calhoun, and more recently, the late Mel Bradford, have been “ejected from the bus,” no longer honored by the likes of National Review editor Rich Lowry, or by Brian Kilmeade, Ben Shapiro, or by the Fox News “All Stars.”  Those Southerners were, you see, “racists” and “white supremacists,” and their places in the contemporary conservative pantheon are now taken by the likes of Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and “Saint” Martin Luther King.  What my chapter attempts to do with ample documentation is offer reasons why this has occurred.

But my contribution is just one of several to this volume.

*****

Here is a pre-publication review; I hope you will purchase The Vanishing Tradition when it comes out, soon:

Conservatism: A Vanishing Tradition

https://mises.org/wire/conservatism-vanishing-tradition

by David Gordon  November 20, 2019

[The Vanishing Tradition: Perspective on American Conservatism. Edited by Paul Gottfried. Cornell University Press, 2020. 223 + pages.]

Paul Gottfried’s excellent anthology of essays on American conservatives chronicles a key phenomenon of our times. Understanding it is important not only for those, like Gottfried and his contributors, who are traditionalist conservatives, but for anyone concerned with freedom. The phenomenon in question is the takeover of American conservatism by neoconservatives.

Why should this development concern us? In brief, the neocons, interested in their own agenda, have joined with the left in enforcing a public orthodoxy that excludes certain views from discussion. As Gottfried explains: “We might note some of the offenses for which an older Right was read out of the movement by the 1990s. Such presumed enormities included opposing the First Gulf War, supporting Patrick Buchanan’s presidential bid in 1992, and complaining about the influence of the American Israeli lobby. Some of the same people had also been critical of the cultural effects of Third World immigration, the extensions of the Voting Rights Act that would increase the electoral strength of the Left and bring the electoral process almost totally under federal administrative control, and the elevation of Martin Luther King — a controversial figure of the Left in his own time — to iconic status with a national holiday.”

Obviously, those who favor the suppressed positions should be concerned, but others should be as well. The Left, joined by the neocons, not only insists on its agenda but will not allow dissent. If, for example, you don’t think that Martin Luther King was a “moral saint,” as more than one eminent philosopher has termed him, the Left will not try to show that your arguments for your view are mistaken. It will deny you a forum to express your arguments at all and then try to destroy you personally. Even if you admire King or accept other tenets of the public orthodoxy, you should be troubled by the suppression of free speech.

Two of the contributors, Keith Preston and Boyd D. Cathey, discuss in detail one such smear campaign against a dissenter from the Official Truth. This was directed at Mel Bradford, a literary scholar and historian, who criticized Abraham Lincoln. In 1981, Ronald Reagan intended to nominate Bradford to head the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Bradford’s opinions about Lincoln would on the surface seem irrelevant to his fitness for the post. But Lincoln’s role as the savior of the Union and scourge of slavery is a key part of our public orthodoxy. The Left joined forces with the neocons to strike at Bradford. Preston writes: “As a legal scholar, Bradford was an advocate of a ‘strict constructionist’ approach to interpreting the Constitution, his view of the American founding as a conservative revolution, and his defense of the South against what he considered to be the usurpations of state sovereignty by President Lincoln during the Civil War [aroused neocon ire].”

Because he had attacked Lincoln, Bradford had to be denied the nomination. “Among the prominent neoconservatives who expressed opposition to Bradford were Irving Kristol, a former Trotskyite and the coeditor of The Public Interest, who is credited with having coined the term ‘neoconservative.’ The neoconservative movement’s other leading intellectual, Norman Podhoretz, another former leftist and the publisher of Commentary magazine, also expressed opposition to Bradford’s nomination.”

Why are the neocons willing to join forces with the Left? Doing so permits them to advance more effectively their own goals, strong support for Israel and for an interventionist foreign policy. Marjorie Jeffrey gets at the heart of the matter: “In what may be considered one of the founding documents of what became Bush-era neoconservatism, [William] Kristol and [Robert] Kagan wrote in ‘Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy’ that instead of either Clinton’s ‘Wilsonian multilateralism’ or Buchanan’s ‘neo-isolationism’, America should seek a policy of ‘benevolent global hegemony.’” Those who opposed this policy were assailed: “Against these efforts [opposing war], David Frum penned his famous ‘Unpatriotic Conservatives’ essay in the pages of National Review, charging antiwar conservatives and libertarians with being anti- American: ‘They have made common cause with the left-wing and Islamist antiwar movements in this country and in Europe. They deny and excuse terror. They espouse a potentially self-fulfilling defeatism. They publicize wild conspiracy theories. And some of them explicitly yearn for the victory of their nation’s enemies.’” As Jeffrey accurately notes, Ron Paul has with characteristic insight brought into question whether an interventionist foreign policy is in America’s interests, and for this he has been vilified.

Preston in his excellent essay makes the same criticism of neocon foreign policy, but he wrongly traces interventionism to the Jacobins: “A former assistant secretary of the Treasury during the Reagan administration, Paul Craig Roberts, has described the foreign policy views of the neoconservatives as emanating from the fanaticism that emerged during the French Revolution, observing ‘there is nothing conservative about neoconservatives. Neocons hide behind ‘conservative’ but they are in fact Jacobins. Jacobins were the 18th century French revolutionaries whose intention to remake Europe in revolutionary France’s image launched the Napoleonic Wars. A similar critique of the neoconservatives has been offered by the conservative scholar Claes Ryn.” The Jacobins in fact were mainly concerned with internal reform: it was the Gironde that wished to spread the Revolution abroad.

But this minor error pales into insignificance when put beside Preston’s indispensable point, also drawn from Ryn: “The ongoing project of the neoconservatives has been to purge from the American Right any tendency that is suspected of opposing aggressive military interventionism, the revolutionary spread of ‘democratic capitalism’ on an international level, the geopolitical agenda of Israel’s Likud Party, or the cultural values of urban cosmopolitanism. Meanwhile, the neoconservatives will make common cause with anyone on the left they deem aggressively militarist enough.”

Some of the contributors find an epistemological source that in their opinion accounts at least in part for the errors of the neocons. The neocons favor principles that are universally true, regardless of historical time and circumstance. This contention seems to me mistaken. Isn’t the problem rather that the neocons favor the wrong universal principles? If like Murray Rothbard we support self-ownership, property rights, and peace, we would not fall victim to neocon delusions.

Mention of Rothbard of course brings to mind that he too was the victim of smear campaigns by both Buckley’s National Review and the neocons. As Gottfried remarks: “In some cases, however, those thrown off the bus were subject to at least intermittent abuse intended to justify their fall. This happened in a particularly bizarre way to Murray Rothbard, in the form of an obituary that Buckley inserted into National Review shortly after Rothbard’s death. Here Buckley offered a comparison between Rothbard and cult leader David Koresh. Neither apparently had more than a handful of followers: Rothbard had ‘as many disciples as David Koresh had in his redoubt in Waco.’ ‘Yes, Rothbard believed in freedom; David Koresh believed in God.’ It had not been enough for National Review’s founder to scold Rothbard during his lifetime.”

Fortunately, neither Buckley nor the neocons succeeded in suppressing Rothbard. His teaching continues to guide and inspire us.

Author:

Contact David Gordon

David Gordon is Senior Fellow at the Mises Institute, and editor of The Mises Review.

November 17, 2019

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

The IMAGINATIVE CONSERVATIVE’s

Fascinating Review of THE LAND WE LOVE

Friends,

As often as not when I come downstairs to my computer in the morning I already have an idea of something I want to write in the MY CORNER series, something I wish to share with you. I archive daily dozens of files and news articles for future reference—I have them strewn all across my crowded Desktop for (mostly) easy reference when I might need them.

But then, after a cup of strong coffee and reading the usual 100 new messages that have come in overnight, something unsuspected may hit me across the face, something that causes me to rethink what I’ve intended to do.

That happened today. Once again my planned installment on “hate crimes” and who is really responsible for them will be postponed.

Distinguished author Jerry Salyer teaches in Kentucky and writes frequently for Chronicles magazine, where occasionally my byline will show up as well. He has been a staunch defender in print of those Covington Catholic boys who were so pilloried and attacked by the Mainstream media and, stunningly, by such Neoconservative publications as National Review—see its outrageous  coverage, January 20, 2019:  “The Covington Students Might as Well Have Just Spit on the Cross,” another confirmation of the precipitous and ugly slide of once “conservative” journals and journalists into a foul and fetid Leftist bog.

I just discovered that Salyer has written a probing review of my book, The Land We Love, at the Web site of the respected online journal, “The Imaginative Conservative.” Salyer’s approach is different in large part from that taken by other reviewers in that he examines the religious emphases and concentrates on some of the deeper theological connections and links which appear in the volume. Using that perspective he is able to draw both certain historical and philosophical insights which others might miss or overlook.

As I attempted to do in The Land We Love, Salyer recognizes that the “Confederate cause” became for European traditionalists a cause they could fully comprehend and, also, embrace. They understood, at least intuitively, that the cause of the Confederacy was in many ways the cause of traditional Western Christian civilization. And fighting for the Confederacy was to fight for that “outpost of Christendom,” to defend that two-Millennia inheritance, its richness and fullness, against the agents of a radical progressivism that aimed to undo and overthrow it. Liberalism, modern democracy, egalitarianism, statist centralization, the attack on traditional religion—these were common enemies, even for figures as diverse denominationally as staunch Presbyterian Robert Lewis Dabney or Catholics Father Abram Ryan and Admiral Raphael Semmes.

And thus the specter of the ultra-traditionalist Catholic Prince Camille de Polignac, Major General of the Confederate Armies, leading thousands of hardy Texas Protestants at Mansfield in 1864—They loved and respected him, and according to accounts, could not pronounce his name, so called him affectionately, “Gen’ral Polecat.” He earned and kept their affection.

I pass on Salyer’s review:

Boyd Cathey’s “The Land We Love” as an Admonition to My Co-Religionists

https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2019/08/boyd-cathey-land-we-love-jerry-salyer.html

By Jerry Salyer|August 2nd, 2019

Under advanced liberalism there is an expectation that anybody who so much as dares to speak civilly to or about any figure associated with the Confederacy is to be deemed persona non grata. For Catholics as Catholics, such sweeping and absolutist expectations are simply unacceptable.

Forth from its scabbard, high in the air
Beneath Virginia’s sky;
And they who saw it gleaming there,
And knew who bore it, knelt to swear
That where that sword led they would dare
To follow—and to die.

—“The Sword of Robert Lee”
by Father Abram Joseph Ryan
Chaplain, Army of Northern Virginia, CSA

That the revolutionary left seeks to purge the Southern legacy from America is obvious. Less obvious is why this ongoing purge should be a topic of interest to my fellow Catholics. No doubt some might ask me whether we do not have plenty of uphill battles already. Is it not enough to support the countercultural Latin mass, and declare the perennial albeit unpopular truths of Church teaching, without getting embroiled in rancorous debates about the real causes of the War Between the States or the personal virtues of General Lee? While I appreciate such reservations, the truth is that we all have a dog in the fight over the Southern legacy, whether we admit it or not. It is no coincidence, after all, that the bishop who cheers the loudest for the tearing down of Confederate memorials is the same one who recently issued an LGBT prayer card in honor of Gay Pride Month. For those leftists who most fervently hate the South also hate the Church—and largely for the same reasons. And let us be clear: They hate the South not so much for its failings, real or imagined, but because they (correctly) see its various cultures as embodying a deep-rooted resistance to the egalitarian-utopian project. Moreover, I would also point out to my fellow communicants that Southern heritage and Catholic identity are not only analogous, but connected—at some junctures, even inseparably intertwined.

That, at least, is the conclusion one might draw from select passages of The Land We Love: The South and Its Heritage, a recent collection of essays by Boyd Cathey. To be sure, this wide-ranging book deals with many compelling subjects, from the thought of Presbyterian theologian Robert Louis Dabney, to the rise of neoconservatism, to the formerly positive relationship between the South and Hollywood. It is safe to say, though, that the book’s most unusual feature is its emphasis upon Dixie’s relationship with Christendom. Dr. Cathey holds a doctorate from the University of Navarra in Spain, so his book contains a lot more references to Spanish traditionalists than we might normally expect from a work of this sort.

Indeed, the section entitled “Secession and Catalonia” deals in no small part with the troubled yet inspiring history of Catholic Spain, a history which the author sees as pertinent to his own North Carolina. Historically the Spanish king was “not actually the absolute king of a unitary, centralized royal state, but rather the monarch over a collection of fiercely regionalist states, each with its own traditions, history and parliaments,” explains Dr. Cathey. This loose patchwork of a kingdom was rocked by wars of succession during the early modern period, which pitted mechanistic liberal ideology against the old regime of fueros, or regional rights:

During those several civil wars in the 19^th century, Catalonia stood, by and large, with the traditionalist defenders of the ancient regime, the Carlists. It was the Carlists who defended the fueros and who advocated the return of a strong king who actually had power, but whose powers were also circumscribed by the historic regions and traditions of the country. It was the Carlists… who understood [that] 19th-century liberalism, despite its slogan of “liberty and equality,” would actually do away with and suppress those old regionalist statutes and protections, those intermediate institutions in society that secured more liberties for the citizens.

So far, so good, and nothing surprising to the historically-conscious Christian, Catholic or otherwise, who is well aware that the Spanish Carlists were among the most tenacious opponents of that modernism so stridently condemned by Pope Saint Pius IX (of whom more will be said shortly). But what does all this have to do with the American South?

Catholic intellectuals such as Marcelino Menendez y Pelayo and Juan Vazquez de Mella have much in common with the agrarian-minded, piety-oriented Southern patriot, argues Dr. Cathey, noting that one of the Spaniards he befriended as a doctoral student went so far as to characterize the Confederate soldiers of yesteryear as “paladins of Christian civilization.” (As a personal aside, I can attest to the curious affinity certain Spanish traditionalists have for Dixie, having had on some occasions the honor of sharing drinks and cigars with a gallant Cuban who served the Tridentine mass and was wont to profess his high regard for Stonewall Jackson.)

Given the common misconception of the South as monolithically low church evangelical, many will be inclined to scoff at romantic phrases about medieval paladins, but here the romance is backed up with at least a few cold hard facts, as Dr. Cathey relates:

In Spain I discovered as many as 1,000 Spanish Traditionalists, or Carlists, who rose up against Liberalism in their own country under the motto, “God, Country, our Regional Rights, and our King,” and then came to Texas to volunteer for the Confederacy. They came by way of Mexico and fought in Confederate ranks at Sabine Pass and at other battles. According to Spanish military historian, David Odalric de Caixal, some enlisted in the Louisiana Tigers. Others found their way as far afield as the 34^th and 41^st Tennessee regiments. A few even ended up in the Army of Northern Virginia, where General A.P. Hill called them his “rough tattered lions sent by Providence.”

Nor were Spanish Carlists the only Catholic Euro-Confederates. Following the destruction of the Neapolitan monarchy at the hands of masonic revolutionaries, several hundred former Bourbon guardsmen likewise crossed the Atlantic to fight on behalf of the Davis government, and to this very day Confederate banners fly in Naples to commemorate the South’s “Italian Brigade.”

As Dr. Cathey rightly points out, neither the Louisiana Tigers nor the Bourbonists in grey fit tidily into the common conception of the war as a noble Northern crusade against wicked slavedrivers—and whatever we may think of this Richard M. Weaver Fellow’s account, let him not be mistaken for some isolated crank. There have been many Catholic writers and thinkers who would more or less agree with the historiography of yet another Catholic, the poet-scholar Allen Tate, who wrote that “in the South the most conservative of the European orders had, with great power, come back to life,” even as the antebellum North, “opposing Southern feudalism, had grown to be a powerful industrial state which epitomized in spirit all those middle-class, urban impulses directed against the agrarian aristocracies of Europe after the Reformation.” Whether we ourselves concur, there is no denying that the 19^th century was indeed the era of liberal nationalism in Europe, as proponents of the consolidated, urbanized nation- state usually succeeded in imposing their vision upon champions of traditional agrarian order. There is also no denying that around the same time, the Know-Nothing movement enjoyed vastly more support in the urbanized and Puritan-rooted North than in the South. From there, it is not hard to see why many European Catholics identified with Dixie during the fratricidal American war.

Another concrete historical episode to which Dr. Cathey alludes deals with the arch-Confederate himself, Jefferson Davis, who was educated at a Dominican priory in Kentucky, maintained throughout his life close and warm relations with a number of individual Catholics and Catholic religious communities, and eventually embraced a number of Catholic practices, such as the scapular. In contrast to Lincoln, whose interest in God remained mostly confined to speeches, Davis took with him after the war into his prison cell a Bible, a prayer-book, and a copy of Thomas a Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ. Were Davis’s personal spirituality the whole story, perhaps it would not be worth mentioning, but what must also be fished out of the memory-hole of inconvenient truths is his correspondence with the pope.

Writing to Blessed Pius IX, Davis lamented “the ruin and devastation caused by the war which is now being waged by the United States against the States and people which have selected me as their President,” and thanked the pontiff for his efforts to broker a truce, or at least mitigate the ferocity of the conflict. “I pray your Holiness to accept on the part of myself and the people of the Confederate States, our sincere thanks for your efforts in favor of peace.”

“We attach you to us by a perfect friendship,” Blessed Pius IX replied warmly:

It is particularly agreeable to us to see that you, illustrious and honorable President, and your people, are animated with the same desires of peace and tranquility which we have in our letters inculcated upon our venerable brothers. May it please God at the same time to make the other peoples of America, and their rulers, reflecting seriously how terrible is civil war, and what calamities it engenders, listen to the inspiration of a calmer spirit, and adopt resolutely the part of peace.

Let us admit that the pope’s express wish for peace does not quite constitute the full-throated endorsement for which Davis might have hoped. At the same time, what is also quite clear is that neither Pius IX’s clearly expressed desire for a negotiated settlement, nor his acknowledgement of a plurality of disparate American peoples, nor honorifics such as “illustrious and honorable President” can be reconciled with the 21^st-century politically-correct sensibilities. So should we be embarrassed on behalf of Blessed Pius IX for his not having denounced the vile rebellion, for his not having seized the chance to align himself with “the right side of history”? Shall we perform the hallowed ritual dance of white liberal guilt because in 1863 pro-Southern articles authored by Bishop Martin J. Spalding appeared in the papal newspaper Osservatore Romano?

Although I myself find Dr. Cathey’s position persuasive in many respects, for Catholics how we assess his argument is almost irrelevant. It makes little difference how much weight we give to the factors various thoughtful, rival historians have presented as the true cause or causes for the American “Civil War”—slavery, states’ rights, tariffs, the industrial-agrarian cultural divide, and so on. So far as I am concerned Yankees—Catholic or otherwise—are quite welcome to keep busts of President Lincoln on their desks and roll their eyes whenever they hear someone whistling “Dixie.”

There is one point I must insist upon, however. As I mentioned at the beginning, no honest person can deny that The New York Times, National Public Radio, and other organs of globalist liberal orthodoxy despise the South and characterize it as the land of racist hillbilly rednecks. The journalists and bureaucrats who run such organs take for granted that all decent people distance themselves as far as possible from anyone who ever fought for the CSA. For that matter, under advanced liberalism there is an expectation that anybody who so much as dares to speak civilly to or about any figure associated with the Confederacy is to be deemed persona non grata. For Catholics as Catholics, such sweeping and absolutist expectations are simply unacceptable.

They are unacceptable not because the antebellum South was necessarily a quasi-Catholic ideal, but because no serious member of a serious body allows outsiders to dictate to him where the pale is, or who is to be within or without it. When the Catholic totally condemns Confederates, he is not merely guilty of uncharitably condemning men who sought to do their duty to their respective home states. Rather, he is in many cases condemning men who were his co-religionists to boot; Euro-Confederates aside, during the war the overwhelming majority of Catholic sons of the South remained loyal to their native region, such that a notably high percentage of Confederate leadership came from Catholic ranks.

These Catholic Confederates may not have been saints, true, and just for the sake of argument we will grant for the moment the Unionist assumption that they were politically misguided. Even then, the fact would remain that such Catholic Confederates seem to have been at least as devoted and earnest parishioners as are many of us today. Were we to disavow such bygone brethren of ours simply because the shrill voice of political-correctness tells us to, for their having worn the gray, I am not sure how different we would be from those quislings who obediently scurried to disavow the Covington Catholic students for having worn MAGA caps.

The Imaginative Conservative applies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politics—we approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility. Will you help us remain a refreshing oasis in the increasingly contentious arena of modern discourse? Please consider donating now.

November 14, 2019

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

WHAT the HISTORIC SOUTH has to TEACH 

AMERICA – New Abbeville Institute Essay

Friends,

On November 3, 2019, I offered a commentary titled, “What the Historic South has to Teach America: Readings from Conservative Scholar Russell Kirk,” as an installment in the MY CORNER series. Originally, I had included at the end of my comments a long section of an essay that Dr. Kirk wrote in the fall of 1958 as a preface to a complete issue of the scholarly quarterly, Modern Age, dedicated to the South. I have since gone back and rewritten my commentary, integrating portions of the article which the late Dr. Kirk penned back sixty-one years ago into what is now essentially a new piece. And today it has been published by The Abbeville Institute.

I offer it to you now:

ABBEVILLE INSTITUTE

What the Historic South has to Teach America

https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/blog/what-the-historic-south-has-to-teach-america/

By Boyd Cathey on Nov 14, 2019

Many present-day Southerners—indeed, many of those Americans who call themselves “conservatives”—find it difficult to envisage a time when Southern and Confederate traditions (not to mention noble Confederate veterans like “Stonewall” Jackson and Robert E. Lee) were acknowledged with honor and great respect. Today it would seem so-called “conservative media” (in particular Fox News and the radio talksters) and Republican politicians would rather praise “Father” Abraham Lincoln or the radical black Abolitionist, Frederick Douglass (whose extra-marital liaison with German-born socialist and feminist Ottilie Assing certainly influenced him and should raise eyebrows among contemporary conservatives, but seldom does). These and other revolutionary zealots have been incorporated into the pantheon of “great conservative minds,” dislodging such figures as Jefferson Davis, John C. Calhoun and John Randolph of Roanoke, all of whom possessed towering intellects and an acute understanding of the history and nature of the American republic which Lincoln, Douglass, and those like them lacked.

It is far too common in 2019 to witness the historical ignorance of a Dinesh D’Souza or the meandering narration of a Brian Kilmeade in the godawful Fox series, “Legends & Lies: The Civil War,” in which he accuses the South of “attempting to rewrite history by denying slavery was the root cause of the Civil War,” and parrots the far Left template on racism.

And what of distinguished Southern writers who defend the South like historians Drs. Clyde Wilson or Brion McClanahan? Or literary luminaries such as James E. Kibler? Or Emory University scholar Don Livingston? When was the last time you saw their byline in the current, Neoconservative-edited National Review, once the “conservative magazine of record” in the land? They are, to use a Stalinist metaphor, “non-persons” among establishment conservatives and the contemporary “conservative movement.” One must not, under any circumstance, mention their names among Neocon intelligentsia circles, lest suspicions of “racism” or “Neo-Confederate tendencies” be exposed.

Perhaps the worst event symbolizing this exile was the unceremonious expulsion—the political defenestration—of arguably the South’s greatest essayist and author of the last quarter of the Twentieth Century, the late Mel Bradford. Tapped originally in 1981 to be President Ronald’s chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Bradford was a staunch defender of the original American Constitution, an acerbic and powerful critic of Lincoln and his legacy—and a defender of the South. According to chronicler David Gordon: “Bradford rejected Lincoln because he saw him as a revolutionary, intent on replacing the American Republic established by the Constitution with a centralized and leveling despotism.”

Although supported by such notable figures as Russell Kirk, Jeffrey Hart, Peter Stanlis, and Jesse Helms, Bradford was forced to experience an ugly, defamatory and underhanded campaign by the Neocons George Will, the Kristols pere et fils, and others to halt his nomination, in favor of Democrat Neocon, William Bennett. And, tasting blood, the new rulers of the conservative movement were successful.

Yet, it was not always so. A half-century ago Southern writers of distinction, defenders of our traditions and heritage, including of our revered historical figures and champions of the Confederacy, were welcomed in national conservative publications like National Review. And in Russell Kirk’s scholarly quarterly Modern Age, that acknowledged “father of the conservative revival” of the earlier 1950s, dedicated an entire issue to the South and a defense of its traditions, including its Confederate history. Kirk had authored what became in a sense the “Bible” of that revival, The Conservative Mind (1953), and his words carried tremendous weight.  That he would publish a whole issue celebrating the history and essential role of the South in America [Modern Age, Fall 1958], right on the cusp of the radical “civil rights” movement of the 1960s, almost in defiance of it, was a measure of the importance older conservatives attached to the Southland and their embrace of Southern traditionalists.

In the prefatory essay to that issue, “Norms, Conventions and the South,” Kirk authored, as only he could, a stirring and profound defense of the traditional South, its virtues, and its critical significance in the survival of the American confederation. In it he declares that the South represents “Permanence”—the “permanent things,” the norms and conventions handed down for generations which moor and have stabilized the American Republic, and without which the country would be adrift and subject to demagoguery, decay and dissolution.

But Kirk also—sixty-one years ago—had a warning and an admonition for Southerners:

How much longer the South will fulfill this function, I do not venture to predict here. I am aware of all those powerful influences, material and intellectual, which are changing the South today. It may be that the South, in the end, will be made homogeneous with all the rest of the nation, and that its peculiar role as conservator of norm and convention will be terminated. But if this comes to pass, the South will have ceased to exist: it will have lost its genius.

What would Kirk, “the Sage of Mecosta,” that superb word-smith and Olympian man-of-letters say today he if were to return to our Southland? What verdict would he cast on those guardians of our heritage and our inheritance…and the actions we and our fathers have taken, or not taken, during the past six decades? How would Kirk—who saw before he passed away in 1994 the poisonous infection of the Neoconservatives—evaluate the willingness of far too many Southern “conservatives” to forego serious investigation into and defense of their history and accept the “mess of stale porridge” offered up by a Brian Kilmeade, or a Dinesh D’Souza, or a Senator Lindsey Graham?

In his essay Kirk employs the great Virginian John Randolph of Roanoke to bring home his message:

…John Randolph is the most interesting man in American political history, his wisdom and eloquence curiously intertwined with vituperation, duels, brandy, agriculture, solitude, and tragedy. Through Calhoun, [Langdon] Cheves, and many others, Randolph’s opinions were stamped indelibly upon the South…. A fervent Christian, a champion of tradition, the principal American expounder of Burke’s conservative politics, Randolph of Roanoke abided by enduring standards in defiance of power, popularity, and the intellectual climate of opinion of his era.

In his oratory in the U.S. Congress and his eloquent speeches to his constituents in Southside Virginia, Kirk continues, Randolph explained that,

There are certain great principles…which we ignore only at our extreme peril; and if those principles are flouted long enough, private character and the social order sink beyond restoration. In this, as in much else, Randolph was the exemplar of the Southern society. For the South has long been the Permanence of the American nation. Strongly attached to Christian belief, bound up with the land and the agricultural interest, skeptical of the visions of Progress and human perfectibility, imbued with the tragic sense of life, the South has not been ashamed to defend convention and continuity in this great, swelling, confusing Republic: to abide by ancient norms of private and public life. The problem of the races informed Southerners that society’s tribulations are not susceptible of simple abstract remedy; the rural life kept the South aware of the vanity of human wishes, the existence of Providential purpose, and the immortal contract of eternal society; the political and literary traditions of the Southern states endured little altered by the nineteenth- and twentieth-century passion for innovation. Military valor, courtesy toward women, and the pieties of community, home, and family persisted in the South despite defeat and poverty and the intellectual ascendancy of the North. So it is that in our time of troubles the South has something to teach the modern world.

And this recognition extended throughout Southern culture, and most especially in the richness and profundity of Southern literature:

…Southern writers still recognize those enduring elements of human nature, including the splendor and tragedy of human existence that are the stuff of which great poetry and prose are made. Belief in normality, and defense of convention, have not lain like lead upon Southern thought and life; on the contrary, these have been the foundations of Southern achievement….In its taste for imaginative literature, similarly, the South has chosen for its favorite authors the champions of norm and convention…. [and] a spirit of courage, of chivalry, of loyalty, an expression of ancient truths, that was congenial to their instincts. 

For those on the Left, for those Dr. Kirk calls “doctrinaire liberals, the zealots for Progress and Uniformity,” the South continues to represent all of the worst and most hated aspects in American history: racism, slavery, misogyny, white supremacy, religious fundamentalism and bigotry. But, as Kirk explains, that hostility is rooted in a deeper prejudice that “the South still stands resolute in defense of norms and conventions. To the ritualistic liberal, the South is what [George] Santayana called ‘the voice of a forlorn and dispossessed orthodoxy,’ rudely breaking in upon the equalitarian dreams and terrestrial-paradise schemes.” It is the Left’s own form of poorly concealed bigotry.

For the contemporary post-Marxist revolutionary Millennial, the fanatical indoctrinated student brandishing a “Black Lives Matter” placard, the loony feminist demanding an end to masculine oppression, and the LGBT zealot pushing transgenderism, the South and its traditions are major impediments to the realization of a dreamed of Utopia that is in reality a dystopian nightmare far worse than any vision ever entertained by Comrade Stalin or Chairman Mao.

The convictions and customs of the South perpetually irritate the radical reformer, who is impatient to sweep away every obstacle to the coming of his standardized, regulated, mechanized, unified world, purged of faith, variety, and ancient longings. Permanence he cannot abide; and the South is Permanence. He hungers after a state like a tapioca-pudding, composed of so many identical globules of other-directed men….he flail[s] against the champions of norm and convention, endeavoring in the heat of his assault to forget the disquieting voice of a forlorn and dispossessed orthodoxy that prophesies disaster for men who would be as gods.

And in one of those memorable passages for which Russell Kirk is remembered and celebrated, he closes his essay in striking form—a remarkable tribute to the traditional South, its heritage, and its pivotal role in the creation and sustaining of an America which seems to be passing away now before our eyes:

My argument is this. Without an apprehension of norms, there is no living in society or out of it. Without sound conventions, the civil social order dissolves. Without the South to act as its Permanence, the American Republic would be perilously out of joint. And the South need feel no shame for its defense of beliefs that were not concocted yesterday. 

So, I repeat my question: What would that Northern champion of the South and its role of Permanence in our confederation say today?  Can that South that Russell Kirk so lauded and defended survive, even in our dark times? And what is our obligation, our solemn obligation to our native land, to our ancestors, and to those who follow us?

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 year by the Scuppernong Press.