 This is an historical or session that deals with the historical topic, which is an attempt to look at what there was of a conservative movement or an American right in the end of war years, who are its luminaries, who are its most important figures, and in what way did they influence the future course of the American right? Did they have any influence on the future course of the American right? And finally, I think all of us will have to answer the question in the end, are these people worth studying? Should they have any relevance for us at this point in time? I will be the third speaker. The first speaker I think is David, isn't it? David Gordon, who is going to speak basically on classical economics, the free market thinkers of the inter-war period. If I'm wrong, you can correct me after you rise to speak. And the second speaker will be Brian McLenahan of the Aviville Institute, who is also an academic, and he will be speaking on southern conservatism, focusing on the agrarians of the inter-war period. And my remarks afterwards will be a kind of potpourri in which I will go over a number of important, mostly literary figures of the inter-war period, and I suppose why they are still worth reading for their ideas as well as for their literary style. So without any further ado, I will present, we'll have our first speaker on this panel, David Gordon, who will make his eloquent presentation. Thank you, Paul. Paul said that I could correct what he said about me in the intro, what I was going to talk about after I rose to speak. Would it have been rather difficult for me to correct him before he spoke? Well, what I wanted to talk about briefly is a split, I'm going to be talking more about foreign policy than perhaps one might have thought from policy introductory remarks. But what I wanted to talk about was a movement away from the anti-war tendencies that had happened after World War I among the figures of the so-called old right, as Murray Rothbard called them, figures like H. L. Menken and Albert J. Nock and others, there was a tendency to a very strong tendency of revulsion against World War I. The view was prominent that America should never have gotten involved in the war. During the war, World War I had been presented as by Woodrow Wilson once the U.S. entered the war as a crusade against the Germans, in particular the nefarious policy of the Hohenzahl and Emperor Wilhelm II. This culminates in Article 231 of the Versailles Treaty ending the war where the Germans bore exclusive, said to bear exclusive responsibility for the war. After the war, there were a group of historians called revisionists. Harry Elmer Barnes was one of the most prominent of them, Sidney Fay was another one, who said that the view that the Germans had initiated the war, the Kaiser had plotted the war, wasn't true that the war had actually divided responsibility or, as in the case of Barnes, was more that the French and Russians bore primary responsibility. This movement became very prominent and it led to a opposition to U.S. entry into World War II. There was a great opposition to Roosevelt's foreign policy, remember in October 1937 in the famous Chicago bridge speech Roosevelt had called for quarantining the aggressors by which he meant just Italy and Nazi Germany, but he seemed to, the people were opposed to the war, said well what about the Soviet Union weren't they equally aggressive. So we had among the old right figures there was opposition to the war. Now the question I think is an interesting one, what happened after World War II? Here I think we have a split between the isolationists if one can call them the ones who are opposed to the war. John Lukacz whom I often don't agree with, I think it's right to call attention to this, but there were some isolationists who were consistently opposed to an interventionist foreign policy. They didn't like the new Cold War either. They said just as there been an exaggeration of the threat to the U.S. from the Axis powers there was no need for a Cold War either. Now there were other isolationists who shifted a bit and this was because to a certain extent their opposition to entry into World War II was primarily based on opposition to communism. They thought that if you had a choice between the Nazis and the communists it was really, it's the U.S. should avoid getting involved on either side, but it was better not to get involved on the communist side. The communists were worse. So from that point of view what they wanted to do was once the Cold War had started then they rather tended to shift and say maybe the Cold War isn't so bad. Now what aided this shift was that there was a new magazine national review founded by William Buckley who worked for the CIA and was according to some accounts that the CIA helped set up national review under William Casey was one of the big figures there. So what they did was to marginalize to the extent they could the figures from the old right who were opposed to the war. But I do think it worth notice that there was a considerable, at least some extent, I shouldn't say perhaps considerable, some extent, some of the figures on the, from the old revisionist historians were still writing for national review. For example, Harry Elmer Barnes wrote an article called Hiroshima Assault on a Beaten Foe which was quite a revisionist article on the end of World War II. And the revisionist historian Charles Callan Tansil who was one of the greatest revisionist writers, one of the absolute key figures, was extremely well thought of in national review circles. People would refer to him in very respectful terms which is not surprising because he was one of the top two or three figures in American diplomatic history at the time along with William Leonard Langer who was his one-time friend of his. I think there were still friends but Barnes and Langer had split up long before and Samuel Flag Bemis who was definitely not a revisionist writer. But if you look at national review in its years when it got started there was considerable, there was some openness to the, these ideas of the revisionist writers. And then the last point I would mention on how we had the shift from some of the old right opposition to war, to more support for the Cold War consensus was there was a tendency among some of the figures on the old right such as John T. Flynn and especially and to emphasize how the U.S. foreign policy toward China had lost China as they put it to the Chinese communists. You sort of the view there that was that there was internal subversion at the Amorasia Institute. There was a famous spy case. So to some extent the some of the old right figures tended to concentrate on internal communist subversion of the U.S. policy and that opened them to a certain extent could be argued how much to influence by ex-communists and who had suddenly converted to opposition to communism and now called for renewal of the Cold War and these would include figures at national review like Frank Meyer who had been a longtime member of the U.S. Communist Party and the Wilhelm Schlam who had been in the German Communist Party and then the Trotsky, James Burnham. So it was the interest in communist subversion. I think that to some extent led to somewhat of a rapprochement between some of the old right figures and national review but in to the extent the old right figures came out against the Cold War they were marginalized and excluded by William Buckley's policy. So I can't think of an appropriate joke to finish up so I'll just stop. Well good morning and I'd like to thank Paul for inviting me out and of course it's great to be back at Mises. My talk is is going to be about the agrarians but also about the southern tradition in general because I don't think you can focus on the interwar south without talking about the tradition itself and so it's broader than that but I'm going to bring that back to that interwar period but I want to start with a little story. In 1966 Senator Jim Eastland in Mississippi who was the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee walked into that body and asked feel hot in here a staffer probably from the north replied well senator the thermostat has said it's 72 degrees but we can make it colder. Eastland looked puzzled by this so he doubled down he said I said feel hot in here well the staffer who I mean now he can't figure what's going on here I mean I'm going to get fired or something so he says look we're going to lower the temperature for you and now Eastland was really irritated he shot back damn it son I said is senator feel PHIL hot HRT in here so I begin with a story because it's emblematic of the regionalism of the United States or at least it used to be listening to congressional debates from the middle of the 20th century it was like hearing a symphony of dialect the Kennedy brothers so hailing from irish catholic bootleggers sounded like they were from an old brahman massachusetts family stennis rustle thermon urban and other southerners brought their instruments to the show now I attended school in Delaware but my eighth grade english teacher was from alabama yet because her husband was a minister and had to move around she dropped her accent and adopted a flat midwestern timber all while assigning the great southern writers are notably anti-yanky partisans like washington urban you see you can take a girl out of alabama but you can't take the alabama out of the girl with a few exceptions though it would be hard to detect any regionalism among the current crop of 535 members of congress as americans move and consume we become less independent and more and more plastic people dominated by midwestern yanky puritanism recent studies have shown that children who move frequently are less likely to excel in school or in a social environment they aren't from anywhere and have no real culture this is by design nationalism creates a crop of drones with an americanism that suggests saying the pledge of allegiance makes you an american and that abraham lincoln and hamilton state capitalist dream are the greatest parts of american history we've replaced billy's grocery harvey lumber company and danuel appliance with public's home depot and best buy buy your american flag at the home depot with your credit card during the president's day sale in every town usa let's do this the south always offered a counterweight to this type of americanism but today you can't sound southern and still be taken seriously just as you can't suggest that anything from the southern tradition is true and valuable without being slapped over the head with the book of bigotry i'm surprised the modern leftovers and walk around like the monks in the mighty python film the holy grail chanting pious mother planet earth save us from our privilege slap the only thing they haven't done is require a bonfire of the vanities and demand that every heretic throws some traditional vice whether it's the bible your guns precious metals certainly your confederate flags into the fire and a communal cultural cleansing it's probably coming now senator john stennis of mississippi said in 1974 that while people in the south lacked for money and lacked for worldly things they got plenty of things money can't buy like good neighbors good friends the community spirit of sharing with the other fellow sam ervin the last jeppersonian to serve in the senate shared a similar sentiment when he suggested defeat was good for the soul because it shook the glory out ervin was from burt north carolina and the spirit of that place and the people there ran through his blood and bones some interwar southerners knew that the world was changing just as their ancestors knew the united states was was destroyed by fire in 1865 and replaced with a unitary american empire beholden to hamiltonian political economy and yankee social engineering the very thing john taylor of caroline and other old republicans warned about in the late 18th and early 19th centuries nothing had changed after the war robert louis dabney decried the new south creed for its infatuation with progress in all forms industrialization was simply the mistress of social transformation and the destruction of tradition the fusion of big banks big business and unconstitutional big government along with government sponsored social engineering made for frankenstein that could not be tamed there was a reason popular senator tom wasen of georgia titled his newspaper the jeffersonian in the early 20th century the continuity between generations the traditions that shape the people shape the south and her people were the most important part of southern history and southern identity that identity has been remarkably consistent even when it seems otherwise take for example the efforts of progressive southerners to tame the eagles eagles of yankee finance capitalism and the pre-world war one congress the war saw the complete victory of hamilton's economic system in the postbellum period so protective tariffs and central banking and federally funded internal improvements and corruption of course single republican rule we can't forget that hamilton said the best part of the british constitution was corruption and that's what he wanted southerners had some success in pushing back against these measures in the 1880s and 90s but it wasn't until the wilson administration that they achieved any sort of legislative victory the glass steagle act the clayton antitrust act the underwood terror for all parts of a broad southern effort to place a jeffersonian stamp on the economy these were undoubtedly big government and constitutionally dubious ideas and policies but to these southerners using the apparatus the republican party created to undermine what they considered to be the backbone of anti-southern entity jeffersonian principles seem natural oscar underwood of alabama even classified the federal reserve as a jeffersonian-inspired central banking system henry dilamar clayton of alabama also secured federal loans for farmers in the 19 teens as a type of reparations for being punished by poverty after the war but in spite of or perhaps because of the crushing economic dislocation southerners clung to their history their relief their regionalism and their culture and use it as both a shield and a blanket when confronting modernity or in some cases adopting it for example fuller calloway a southern industrials in lagrange georgia just down the road from here told him told muck raker ida told muck raker ida tarble that he made american citizens and used cotton mills to pay the expenses his son case in calloway focuses energy on scientific agriculture and eventually made his blue springs farm a private nature reserve called calloway gardens he and his wife virginia cultivated the jeffersonian agrarian spirit and believed the independent farmer and localism again were essential for america the family farm dominated their lives and azaleas blue spring water woods and outdoor recreation were their southern legacy this is something every southerner took for granted in the 1920s and 30s jimmy carter's agrarian manifesto an hour before daylight portrays his father as a jeffersonian worried about new deal regulations on hogs and tomatoes like a good yankee franklin rosevelt drove through georgia and thought he could fix it it's no coincidence that the first industrial hog slaughterhouses appeared in the united states in the 1930s chicken houses followed in the 1950s and soon industrial farming was ripping the family farm apart which was the backbone of the southern tradition the 12 southerners who wrote i'll take my stand in 1930 could not have been more prophetic and most people even some southerners didn't want to listen to what mary cuff and a recent piece in the modern age of all places described as an untenable prescription she writes quote thus even for those who sympathize deeply with the agrarian diagnosis of modern society's ills the social alienation and dehumanization triggered by sprawling urbanism industrialization and the dominance of technology there is often the sense the agrarianism is unhelpful as a solution the 21st century these southerners have been labeled romantics who hectored about farming and never picked up a plow southerners even in the early 20th century seemed to agree an 11 year old named liliam natives of magnolia mississippi said in 1911 we like the mill work much better than farming five of our nine family members worked the mill but these criticisms missed the point did agrarianism make the man or did the man make agrarianism or directly was i'll take my stand an agrarian or a southern manifesto the authors have called themselves could have called themselves 12 farmers 12 poets or 12 writers but they chose 12 southerners and the title is certainly a southern choice david chandler in his book the natural superiority of southern politicians wrote that the south has produced the preeminent geniuses of american political history that genius was only made possible by southern culture the root of agrarianism a southern man could still be an agrarian and not live on a farm it certainly helped but at its core the southern agrarian tradition was based on an organic rhythm of life a christian sensibility of good friends and good communities faith property independence and a chivalric code that had honor as one of the highest traits of man in organized society to be southern meant you embrace the old order of western civilization as handed down by the anglo-american traditions and peppered with the cultural mosaic of the various peoples that settled south of the mason dixon and as southerners began to wrestle the implications of a yankee victory in 1865 they became consciously more southern but that did not change their traditions the historian drew gilpin foust vaulted into a college presidency at harvard by in part continually insisting that confederate nationalism was inorganic a creation of racism white supremacy but is this true the evidence points in another direction edwin alderman the first president of the university of virginia an editor of the comprehensive library of southern literature told a university of california audience in 1906 that quote when the age of moral welfare shall succeed to the age of passionate passionate gain-getting when blind social forces have wrought some tangle of inequality and of injustice of hatred and suspicion when calculation and combination can only weave the web more fiercely when the whole people in some hour of national peril shall seek for the man of heart and faith who will not falter or frail and the sweet justice of god hither shall they turn for a sucker at the once as they once turned to a simple virginia planter this southern tradition has nothing to do with race it was an expression of the jeffersonian mind a critique of the hamiltonian vision of america turning to the virginia planter the man of heart and faith not the industrialist or the shopkeeper had to be the solution and that planter brought up on the traditions of his people the story of the of his ancestor men of action when time called for it had to be a southerner this was a call to washington or jefferson not lincoln or grant and certainly not jp morgan or john d rockefeller but what america now in the throes of industrialization look to the sage of monicello for answers and if not how could a defeated people sell this tradition or even should they literature professor charles kent advised southerners to look inward to become better southerners not co-opted yankees it seems he wrote in 1907 much more desirable that we should endeavor to comprehend what our father stood for especially in all manners relating to self-government then study calmly our own situation and resolutely acknowledge and adapt the principles and policies that means that mean that seem excuse me most constant with our welfare so far as my studies allow me to judge no other people or a fraction of people has a more admirable body of publicists from whose writings inspiration and guidance may be derived and of course he's talking about southern literary figures the southerners who wrote i'll take my stand in 1930 and contributed to who owns america in 1936 took this challenge seriously who owns america is in some respects a more interesting book than i'll take my stand it is more prescriptive and less philosophical a practical application of the principles of 12 southerners sought to define just six years earlier and when i explicitly southern focused like i'll take my stand the southern tradition drips from its pages the great poet donald davison outlined a plan for regional government that incorporated frederick jackson turner's prophecy that the core of american government was naturally the relation of quote section in nation not state in nation davison called it a new federalism not to be confused with richard nixon's bastardization of the term in the early 1970s which really wasn't federalism at all he wrote quote for the united states the ideal condition would be this that the region should be free to cultivate their own particular genius and define their happiness along with their sustenance and security in pursuits to which their people are best adapted the several regions supplementing and aiding each other in national comity under a well balanced economy this has not happened he lamented because the constitution could not allow it the result had been the clash of competing imperialisms with the northeast the ultimate victor the old outcry against wall street davison argued is an outcry against a regional foe symbolized by a single institution it means that the towers of new york are built upon southern and western backs andrew nelson leidl the philosopher as historian and writer he prays on franklin rosevelt for acknowledging the importance of the family farm what leidl called the livelihood farm he was given fdr too much credit of course for rosevelt's discovery that the southern agrarian tradition was vital to american prosperity was like telling a gust is like a gust is telling livy to write glowing histories of rome in the first century ad or josiah bailey of north carolina writing the conservative manifesto quote unquote in 1936 warning about the potential constitutional and legal hazards of the new deal in both cases the empire had already consumed its parents regardless leidl insisted that a united states with one quarter of the people engaged as livelihood farmers would boast the most stable economy in its history the tangible benefits would be seen in the welfare of the general population what he termed the more natural living conditions leidl continued this should be the most important end of polity for only when families are fixed in their habits sure of their property hopeful of for their security of their children jealous of liberties which they cherish can the state keep the middle course between impotence and tyranny this required the southern tradition though john crow ransom argued that the south may be a valuable accession to the scattering an unorganized party of all those who think it is time to turn away from the frenzy of big business towards something older more american and more profitable what ransom loath and feared most was the was a south beholden to quote foreign ideas and notice that he used the term american along with the descriptive older the southern agrarian tradition is older than the united states the straight line from the old republicans like john taylor of caroline to ransom davison and leidl should be easy to see but that tradition that older more american vision of america was swallowed up in the post-war war two nationalist orgy and cold war propaganda us against them had no room for regionalism and southern agrarianism the machine age and the nuclear age required a hamiltonian americanism we had to beat the commies but more importantly beating the commies required a civic religion it also took aim at tradition the very thing dabney said would take place immediately following the war which brings us to 2019 and tucker carlson is now infamous at least among neoconservatives monologue criticizing what he called market capitalism this was a clumsy though refreshing attempt to articulate the older more american vision of the 12 southerners the establishment pandit as anti-capitalist and foolish with media darling ben chapiro immediately going on the offensive in both print and video carlson mislabeled his enemy market capitalism he was really throwing barbs at hamilton state capitalist system in the over century long republican led attempt to remake america which they were more than open about saying in the 1860s that involved an economic social political and diplomatic transformation that replaced the older more american world of the southern agrarians with the lincolnian american empire regardless when carlson asked for a fair country a decent country a cohesive country a country whose leaders don't accelerate the forces of change purely for their own profit and amusement a country you might recognize when you're old a country that listens to young people who don't live in brooklyn that's a good idea a country where you can make a solid living outside of the big cities a country where lewiston main seems almost as important as the west side of los angeles a country where environmentalism means getting outside and picking up the trash a clean orderly stable country that respects itself and above all a country where normal people with an average education who grew up no place special can get married and have happy kids and repeat unto the generations a country that actually cares about families the building block of everything when he said that he was channeling the jeffersonian america that dominated politics and culture to the close of war in 1865 and that found a voice and fits and spurts in the postbellum period particularly from southerners who knew they told you so richard weaver offered the best explanation of for why the southern tradition still had currency in modern society and his excellent the southern tradition at bay he wrote the south possesses an inheritance which hasn't which it hasn't perfectly understood and little used it is in the curious position of having been right without realizing the grounds of its rightness the interwar southern critique of hamilton's america came closest to doing so and in the end we are left with weaver weaver's conclusion that the southern tradition offers not an example but a challenge the challenge he said is to save the human spirit by recreating the non-materialist society this is the very challenge carlson offered his viewers the 12 southerners scribbled about dabbney thunder from the pulpit and taylor of caroline the most jeffersonian of all jeffersonians insisted we remember when he when he faced hamilton or hamilton schemes weaver concluded by suggesting quote that the old south may may indeed be a hall hung with splendid tapestries in which no one would care to live but from them we can learn something of how to live you don't have to be a farmer to be an agrarian we could all use a little more of the southern tradition but it's up to us to take the challenge of saving the human spirit through an older more american world view seriously thank you for your time i would like to apologize to david for having misrepresented his talk it was not on austrian economics uh but on uh the position of the old right uh vis-a-vis uh europe and uh its position on military intervention and uh i agreed with what he said i let me also uh uh note that uh i was very impressed by brian's talk particularly his critique of american nationalism uh which i think is a toxic force um and it is something that has that is artificial in a way that french or german nationalism is not uh and is is it very much of a construct used to impose centralized government and to involve the united states in perpetual war for perpetual peace um i did vote for pat bucane and for president but i got sick to my stomach every time he used the word american nationalism uh it it immediately evoked in my mind uh speeches given by neoconservatives at a ai and uh i i thought the defense brian's offensive regionalism uh against nationalism at least in my case was very well received what i would like to talk about are our uh figures of the interwar right who meet my demanding criteria of what exactly constitutes the right or who belongs to the right um and there are certain criteria that i applied in coming up with these names and the in the list by the way is not um a comprehensive or doesn't include everybody but it does uh i do try to touch on people or mention people who seem to fit the definition of what a right is um at least in this interwar period in the united states one of the criteria i think the opposition to technical society um which is society in which people have sort of lost their their roots in nature uh the uh revulsion for what is seen as massification or uh mass society and of course nostalgia for an older america they're always sort of looking back to an earlier time um there's also an opposition to what robertson robertson uh jeffers who i think is a quintessential representative of this of this interwar right american right described in his poem on pearl harbor as the hope to impose on the whole planetary world in american peace and by the way in in some anyways this this this poem is prescient that he wrote uh right right right after pearl harbor warning against an american empire which i think was was obviously not a discreet act at the time that it was performed uh but you know he says that uh uh as for me what can i do now but fly the national flag from the top of the tower america has neither race nor religion nor its own language it has uh either it is to be a nation or nothing uh and he's saying this sarcastically uh that that america is not based any longer on those things in which national identities have been rooted it is something that uh manifests itself or we were told manifests itself when america fights uh a military crusade and uh he goes on to say that this is um these are the men who conspired in labor to embroil this republic in the wreck of europe uh he was also complaining about intervention going back to world war one uh which he had which he had also opposed um to read these uh i think what is perhaps the uh the key lines in this uh poetic effort uh which i will now do the the war that we have carefully worked for years provoked catches us unprepared amazed and indignant our warships are shocked like sitting ducks in our planes like nest birds both our coast ridiculously panicked our leaders make orations this is the people that hopes to impose on the whole planetary world and american peace this was written in december of 1941 i should point out a week after i was born uh have some idea of how all that is uh but but it seems to be describing uh the uh the american vision of fox news that you can turn on every night in here right um so uh when i said there's a protest against military involvement uh but it also i think in this case expresses almost a kind of rightist impulse um because he is concerned jeffers with the politically and culturally destructive effects of this perpetual war for perpetual peace uh on the fabric of what then remained of a traditional american society uh i'm not including the objections of selective communist or pro-communist opponents to cert ideologically unpalatable wars for example george mcgovern's protest against the vietnam war while justifying the dropping of bombs unhelpful civilians on and what he took to be a politically correct war in which the united states was happily alive to the soviet union um i do not consider mcgovern to be uh somebody who opposes war on principle or opposes war because he sees it as having uh disruptive effects on civilization but someone who probably took the position which he did uh for um blatantly ideological reasons i would also say that people who know sort of fit my definition of the right um see a spiritual dimension together with uh with animating political positions um in the case of uh walla stevens uh who also i think is not only a great poet he's definitely a figure of the right uh in some ways he's poetry as a replacement for traditional religion though toward the end of his life he returns to christianity um and jeffers is somebody who uh uh expresses what is a philosophical position called anti-humanism uh which uh i do not consider to be some kind of coherent or systematic approach to the subject of philosophy but it uh it seems to be based on a kind of reverence for nature living living in the natural world uh he was not by the way uh a supporter he would not have been a supporter of the green revolution uh and he was very distrustful uh of of our centralized government um there also obviously is a criticism of the idea of democratic equality and particularly expressed in the efforts of the modern administrative state to further this goal uh and i noticed that as i'm listening with these people there's a predominance of men of letters um uh and uh i'm not really i i do not look down upon radically individualist authors like isabel paterson but i don't think she really qualifies as a figure of the right in the same way that some of the other people like walla stevens robertson jeffers uh george santiana who by the way was uh uh was walla stevens teacher at harvard in his longtime correspondent robert lee frost and if you notice his first name is robert lee robert lee although he was born in oregon his family was strongly pro confederate in the civil war and of course uh the man the the namesake of the organization that i had achal mangan um all belong on this list when i see this there's there's a very select list uh of uh of thinkers uh of the right um and i'm not mentioning the people whom brian discussed who definitely i think are figures of the right the southern agrarians nor am i mentioning the pro fascist literati like lovecraft and ezra pound who are generally assigned on the right although uh we might quibble with that uh with that positioning many of these rightest authors consider themselves to be modern as stevens pound jeffers uh but as has been frequently observed modernist writers were often political reactionaries they were usually political reactionaries who combined literary innovation and decidedly rightist opinions about politics significantly not only mangan but stevens admired nicha although in stevens case the admiration was motivated by aesthetic affinity rather than assumed political agreement this occasions the inevitable question of why so many generation defining writers particularly poets in the inter war years took political and cultural positions that were diametrically opposed to those of our current literary and cultural elites allowing to provide one obvious answer that would causing me to be dismissed from an academic post if i was still unlucky enough to hold one some of the names i've been listening belong to the families of long settled or or the science of long settled wasp elite frost stevens jeffers and at least on one side san tiana the other side of his family was spanish one side were new england puritans uh and these figures cherished memories of an older american society that they considered in crisis jeffers was the son of a presbyterian minister from pittsburgh uh who was a well-known classical scholar by the time that jeffers was 12 this future poet in precocious linguist new german and french well uh and later followed the example of his minister fathered by studying classics in europe as well as in the us other figures of the literary right despised egalitarianism which was a defining attitude of the self-identified nichin menkin the sage of baltom were typified what the italian marxist dominica lo sordo describes as aristocratic individualism and which lo sordo and menkin identified with nicha this anti egalitarian individualism was also present in such figures as the jeffersonian libertarian uh albergine knock it may be nox memoirs of a superfluous man with its laments against modern leveling tendencies and nox earlier work our enemy the state which came out in 1935 which incorporated most persuasively for me the concept of aristocratic individualism perhaps more more so than in the case of menkin uh who is basically a journalist who when he writes on deeper questions is often you know uh obviously out of his element um knock opposed the modern state not principally because he disapproved of its economic policies although he may not have liked them as well but because he viewed it as an instrument of destroying valid human distinctions his revisionist work myth of a guilty nation which i'm about to reread has not lost its power since nox attack on world war one allied propaganda was first published in 1922 even more than menkin whose anti warfare over 1914 may have reflected his strongly pro-german bias knock opposed american involvement in world war one for the proper moral reasons namely that the western world was devouring itself in a totally needless conflagration curiously the self-described burkean russell kerr depicts his discovery of menkin of nox memoirs of a superfluous man um on an isolated army base in utah during world war two as a spiritual awakening robert nisbert recounts the same experience in the same way in very similar circumstances these interwar writers of various stripes took advantage of rich academic educational as well as literary milieu that was still dominated by predominantly wasp attrition class before its descendants sank into jade bushes and were even worse they were still they were still living in a society featuring classes gender roles predominantly family-owned factories and farms small town manners and bourgeois decencies even those who like jeffers knock and menkin view themselves as iconoclast uh even today would seem even to our fake conservatives to be thoroughly reactionary the world has changed many times in many ways since these iconoclasts walk the earth i still recall attending a seminar of literary scholars as a graduate student in yale in 1965 ten years after the death of walla stevens in hartford connecticut and being informed that although stevens was a distinguished poet it was rumored that he was a republican someone else then chimed in that stevens was supposed to have opposed the new deal something that caused consternation among those who were attending at the time i had reservations about the same political development but kept my views to myself i was still very young and had no professional standing of any kind so i thought i would not express my uh loathing for the new deal and progressivism and so forth i just listened to my elders and then went back to my dorm room one could only imagine what the acceptance price for a poet in a comparable academic circle at yale would be right now perhaps the advocacy of state-required trans transgendered restrooms space 20 feet apart uh or having a transgendered moderator leading the discussion i shudder to think but arguably the signs of what was to come were already present back in the mid-1960s what was fading was the academic society that still existed when stevens attended harvard frost art myth only for a semester or knock the still recognizably traditional episcopal art college our elite universities were not likely to produce even in the 1960s pleads of right-wing iconoclast as they had in the interwar years and even before the first world war and not incidentally the form of american conservatism that came out of yale in the post-war years quickly degenerated into something far less appealing than what what it replaced it became a movement in which members were taught to march in lockstep and the glue for which was advocacy of a perpetual military crusade the step had already been taken that led from the interwar right to what is today conservatism somehow the interwar tradition looks better and better with the passage of time thank you i'll stay up here i think we have time for some questions don't we i have a question for paul and for david um i know manken was uh basically a literate and a journalist but can we consider him a consistent libertarian i i would tend to view manken perhaps a bit more favorably as an intellectual when paul did he kept he kept up with a lot of uh literary developments he was uh although he was i think he was one of the discoveries of theodora drier as a writer whether that's good or bad i'll leave to other people to say but he had very strong taste in literature he was he didn't care for some of the newer trends so i think he he's but he is i think significant mainly as a for his literary writer in a wit more than as a major intellectual but he was certainly an important figure um thank you very much uh covering it as far as going back to the very first question um i recently have started it pushed for uh someone to write a book on the international uh the history of the international financing of war and meddling with this another aspect is meddling with culture and the centralization effect of that i'm kind of wondering uh brian as far as the hamiltonians were saying that they were looking at doing this and they were saying that that this was their agenda is there any book that surveys the regulations and laws that were designed to and had that would have the effect of destroying uh southern culture and is there any book that you know that covers this also through history as culture as a weapon because you hear many many politicians say that culture precedes politics so if you can destroy culture it's waging war by another means a la claus witz you know politics is uh wars of conducting of politics by other means i think one of the best uh you just want to talk about the reconstruction period speaking in my opinion on the reconstruction period um now he's you don't want to be caught reading this book uh and if you're in graduate school uh but it's e merton culture is the south during reconstruction because he gets into the cultural imperialism of the north i mean and things like sport right so we in the south here we we take for granted saturday we're right across the street from the football stadium over here and we're going to go see the tigers play whoever and that's the biggest day in the south saturday uh but that's a that's a yankee it's yankee imperialism all of our ball games were brought from the north so when you look at southern sport it was blood sports um it was you know horse racing these kind of things and so that was certainly part of it and southerners were aware of these things and not everyone rejected it of course when we've got mcdonald's all over the place you've got southerners like these so i brought up the quote from the little girl in mississippi who said you know we like working in the factory because it's better than the farm um but i think that particular book gets into that idea now as far as others moving forward i mean you can if you read you know i'll take my stand if you read who owns america they talk about this quite a bit uh the agrarians do because they were fully aware by that point now 70 years later um what had actually happened dabney is very good because he's not only criticizing the hamiltonian economic system that's being foisted on the south he's also talking about things like uh the social transformations and not just race but in other areas uh that are going on the south that he thought were were uh you opened a pandores box um and if you look at the reformist movements after the war uh it was it was broader and of course more comprehensive than just uh the republican party pushing um you know for the 13th amendment or 14th amendment it was it was bigger than that so um certainly southerners are looking at the world and saying i i'm not certain that uh what we're doing here if we're just in a reconciliationist position where we're going to say abraham lincoln was good for america uh we're we're going to accept that um and then move on i mean there were other things happening behind the scenes and southerners were aware of it but and they were warning people about it you know you've said this okay we'll agree with with doing this but then what comes after that uh was the big question so um yeah i mean i think that you should read dabney read read culture read uh read the agrarians that's very good one point on when you're talking about the uh culture how how the government support for various culture movement is interesting after world war two there's i think some evidence the cia cia uh sponsored modernist art for example in the paintings of jackson pollock you remember pollock was the one who would drive a motorcycle across the canvas you might say well why would why would they have any interest in doing that uh one i think the argument was something like what they were trying to combat was the aesthetics of what was called socialist realism which was kind of a monumental style of art and architecture so the thought was well by having this kind of art were were undermining socialist realism and just uh to skip to something else which i often do in uh what brian was mentioning on on uh this during uh immersed in culture it's interesting some of the attacks on the southern historians started on reconstruction elsewhere started off explicitly but by the communist party for example uh herbert aptheker had a one of his works had a big attack on culture says oh you've never this is really an awful person you never want to read him because he was so anti-black he criticized the reconstruction governments he never is a really terrible person so a lot a good deal i wouldn't say entirely but good deal of the movement against the more traditional interpretation of the reconstruction period the black reconstruction governments has been especially corrupt uh came about through the communist party like if we look for example at a earlier work the book by the left-leaning claude bowers called the tragic era on reconstruction and bowers was certainly not a reactionary he was ambassador to the republic in spain he was very sympathetic to the republican sign the spanish civil war but he was very much very critical of the reconstruction governments but now that view is out it's regarded as forbidden to say that well i mean that's a very good question uh because you're talking essentially about the populist movement and um brian actually his family is from georgia so uh there's a there's a little place down the road here at lumpkin georgia now it's moved to columbus but westville and it's a living little 1850s living history like winsburg but for the 1850s and they have the brian house there and that was his family um he's from georgia and of course there was a there were a lot of similarities between the midwestern populace and the southern populace and i think one point the agrarians make is that and i brought up in the quote about the west and the south new york built on the backs of the west and the south westerners in the pre-war period sided with the republican party because they were anti-slavery and um so that was a way for them okay we don't want slaves in our states we don't even want blacks in our states and we're going to grab laws against that uh so we we want to keep that out of the west and we'll cut a deal with these new englanders who want big banks and tariffs and all these kind of things because that's going to be an alliance that will work for us at the time but then after the war is over and you have the mckinley tariff and you have uh you have uh the the promotion of a central banking system you get these things the hamiltonian system really being pushed they realized oops we've we've cut a deal here that we don't want to be part of anymore so then you started seeing these midwestern populists uh break off and you know james james weaver who is the the populist uh people's party presidential candidate uh in 1892 wrote a really interesting little book it's very jeffersonian and i think that um there was a lot of similarities i i think the one thing that the that the western populist and this filtered into the south eventually and this is this use of the general government to push legislation that was the same apparatus they would just use that to work against the big bankers and southerners just finally said yeah we'll do that too we'll go with it we're going to drop our long-standing opposition to a big central government because i mean why why why why not use it to get them i mean these people have been punching us for years so there's a lot of similarities you know um tom watson uh the popular suitor of georgia would have similarities with someone you know james weaver and you had the texas uh group uh the texas alliance and the farmers alliance and these kind of groups which were uh very very similar so i don't think by the time you get to the 1890s there was a whole lot of difference um i would say that maybe the the midwestern populist were a little bit more left leaning than the southern populist but um that was that's i think if you if you read brian uh there was actually a piece i found brian wrote and is in his newspaper because he controlled a newspaper there in nebraska uh that was uh it was very complimentary of the south and it took this position that the reconciliation reconciliation position okay well i mean it's good to work but we need to recognize the south was had this there there were good people too we just had we just had a difference and now it's over and now we're going to unify against the the real enemy which is big banks and big business so i think that's the best way i can answer your question and uh also with um if there'll be if there will be a panel like this in 2050 in the same very place we're sitting today um whom do you think we would talk about let me i i agree with what you say uh i take the the microphone um but one and one of the curious things that i've been noticing is that people who i haven't discussed this with brian before people who discuss what were left of center views 30 or 40 years ago are now featured as conservative historians um victor davis hanson has uh traditional leftist views on foreign policy uh i i heard him talk once he praised the republican side in the span of civil war it was a war against fascism um uh in fact most of his historical views would fit very easily with those of my leftist professors when i went to yale in the mid 1960s uh now he's considered to be you know a true conservative historian he's a he's a friend of donald trump or something and right now there there is a war between him and some other people on this uh the sudo right uh in which you know they were against him because they seem as being too far to the right you know so um uh historians someone seemed like cvn woodward who i actually i i studied with at one time was one of my teachers would today be considered a fascist if you were teaching although he was definitely a leftist at the time i i think he balked at the idea of voting from a govern though he may have swallowed hard and then then vote then he did vote for him i think um but the uh uh the the political spectrum has been has definitely moved to the left uh and historical studies have been definitely influenced by political correctness historians have been in the vanguard of political correctness uh so if you're looking for you know impartial historians writing on reconstruction of this you're not going to find them one of the projects that i i mentioned this to brian i've been thinking when i finish all the other books i'm working on if i survive that long i'd like to write a book on penitential history that this is one of my because what historians do today you know is help us expiate all of our sins uh and you know the start with with germans being entirely responsible for world war one which is utter nonsense we don't have to say anything else in that country though they'll send you to a rehabilitation camp if you do um and uh eric funer you know that dominates reconstruction history and he's writing he's pushing his political agenda into not writing very good history um but this seems to be very characteristic of the age in which we're living and people do not get criticized for writing dubious accounts they're praised in the new york times and if you criticize them you're a racist you're a sexist or something this is the way historical studies are now pursued um and i really have no hope of seeing it get better in my lifetime uh uh so you know i i think i think this this is something that should be addressed you know why have historical studies degenerated to the point that they have did you want to add anything well i mean i think that i'm a little more optimistic in that because mesis exists because you have all the fellows and the students because you know i work with the abbey val Institute and we have students with that too i i think there could be now we're not going to work through the through the traditional institutions you're going to have to publish outside of that but the internet is the great leveler as long as we can keep that free and open to dialogue and and ideas um there is i think hope that there will be a future crop of students now i always advise students uh go through go through graduate school and and not don't make any waves and then get out and get a job and then get tenor and then you can do what you want uh but at that point before you get there uh you can you can be who you are i think you know paul did that in graduate school he seems like he didn't he said he didn't make any waves so he got through nobody knew that he was who he was yet that took time uh so uh i i did the exact opposite thing i wouldn't work with clive wilson everybody knew i was so i was doomed from the beginning but uh i think that uh i still have hope that this could change me the pendulum swings back and forth and and uh you know right now it's uh we're we're at low tide uh for for uh real scholarship and discourse and maybe people will get tired of of just being beat over the head you know pious mother earth save us from our privilege maybe maybe they'll get tired of that uh and there's going to be some real thought and people actually engaging in real discourse in the future i don't know well i think in uh considering how history has become more politically correct it's quite amazing how far this has spread for example uh one of the uh the great authorities on on the on the air the so-called arian period or it was george dume zeal he wrote on kind of a structure a structure of society in certain in uh ancient history and he was criticized by another historian carlo ginsburg for having pro fascist views just because he was talking about sort of trying to trace kind of a proto arian taking this kind of a linguistic notion so even in a field uh you would think is uh immune to political correctness is as uh philology you find the same idea where people are are supposed to be politically correct and uh it's uh i guess now many people have sort of also a kind of very moralistic attitude toward history where the historian is kind of viewed as a a judge who's condemning people in in the past they have the attitude it's like the uh the line from james joy's history is a nightmare from which i'm trying to awake and i think that tends to be an attitude prevalent yes i uh i think we have reached the end of this stimulating session and i thank you all for coming and you are now dismissed it can go to lunch