4,103 words
Stephan Lesher
George Wallace: American Populist
Addison-Wesley, 1994
Claude Andrew Clegg III
An Original Man: The Life and Times of Elijah Muhammad
St. Martin’s Press, 1997
Like many members of the Montana Militia, Elijah Muhammad believed that a Social Security number represented the Mark of the Beast. (more…)
4,790 words
Henry Blue Kline, et al.
I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition
Harper Torchbook, 1962
One of the major themes of federal politics throughout the first seven decades (1789-1859) of the American Republic was the struggle to maintain the balance of power between the Northern and Southern states. (more…)
2,329 words
Edgy satires often achieve greatness proportional to the power of the thing they satirize. For example, a novel satirizing Communist Russia in the 1920s, such as Mikhail Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog, would have lost much of its edge had it been written in, say, 1987, during the final years of Communism. But since it was written in 1925, when Communism was quite vigorous, Bulgakov got cancelled, and the book had to wait until 1987 to see the light of day. (more…)
Phil Eiger Newmann, Flannery O’Connor, 2021
1,836 words
Phil Eiger Newmann, Flannery O’Connor, 2021
Like her near-contemporary Gore Vidal (both were born in 1925), the fiction writer Mary Flannery O’Connor had her first brush with fame via a Pathé movie newsreel. She had a pet chicken whom she’d taught to walk backward. Gore’s fame came a few years later when he piloted an airplane, age ten. (more…)
2,816 words
Padraig Martin, ed.
The Honorable Cause: A Free South –12 Southern Essays
Self-published, 2023
In concluding his great work The Southern Tradition at Bay, which was published five years after the author’s death in 1968, Richard Weaver leaves us with some truly haunting words: “The South which entered the twentieth century had largely ceased to be a fighting South.”
Although this statement was false in a literal sense, since throughout the twentieth century the American South had provided the United States military some of its best fighting men, it was true in that these men had largely ceased fighting as Southerners. (more…)
Nehemiah Adams
Nehemiah Adams
2,933 words
One of the most neurotic things about white people is the desperation so many of them have to be perceived as moral. Most will virtue-signal in a variety of cheap and easy ways. Those who take it seriously will often descend into activism. But there is one way to virtue signal — indeed, it is the best way — that will sanctify one’s morality for all to see: care more for outgroup members than for ingroup members.
After all, what motivation could there be — other than pure angelic virtue — for doing something so utterly self-defeating? (more…)
2,373 words
Southern writing may be the last American literature in that it has retained a true Anglo-Saxon base in terms of its authors, themes, and relation to history — specifically, white history.
Donna Tartt’s The Little Friend, published in 2015 and winning a justly-earned Pulitzer Prize for best novel, has a real command of writing, and her prose is a roller coaster dipping and rising from sad to exuberant that keeps you reading. (more…)
1,935 words
Brian Fairbanks
Wizards: David Duke, America’s Wildest Election, and the Rise of the Far Right
Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 2022
Brian Fairbanks is a Louisiana-based journalist who seems to be an ordinary liberal, looking for a Great Society-style social safety net. He has recently published a book about Louisiana’s 1991 gubernatorial election in which David Duke, a white advocate, nearly became Governor. (more…)
1,995 words
Edward H. Miller
Nut Country: Right-Wing Dallas and the Birth of the Southern Strategy
Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 2015
Edward H. Miller’s book Nut Country, about the rising Republican Party in Dallas in the late 1950s and early 1960s, is another academic book pointing to a certain place and point in time where the American far Right and mainstream Right first launched. Other books point to the Right’s rise in Saint Louis or Detroit at roughly the same time. (more…)
4,304 words
“A splendid little war” was how Secretary of State John Hay described the Spanish-American War of 1898. Since Hay had served in Abraham Lincoln’s administration, he had had a lot of experience with more jaundiced wars like the one in the 1860s. The Spanish-American War was little, and its splendor depended upon where you were when it occurred. In DC’s clubrooms and in Congress, it was quite alluring, and was to most of the country. But if you were on the front line taking rounds from Spanish Mausers or suffering agony from malaria or dysentery — which a good part of the army was — it was not so splendid. (more…)
Thomas Nelson Page
Thomas Nelson Page
4,261 words
What was life like in the antebellum South? Obviously it’s going to be a matter of perspective. Thomas Nelson Page provided one such viewpoint, the type we seldom hear about lately. He was a lawyer in his early career and a diplomat later, but is best known as a writer.
Aside from several novels, he published a non-fiction account of the Old South as he remembered it during his boyhood. This was Social Life in Old Virginia Before the War (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1897). It’s a quick read, providing a glimpse into a bygone time. (more…)
