Few who knew John Randolph in his youth ever imagined him embracing the tenets of the Gospel or admitting the reality of Original Sin. He was raised in an orthodox Christian home. He lived in a conservative place, around people who identified as traditionalists. But as Christianity waned in his day, he embraced new vogues. [...]
Seashore towns once played the same conservative role as American farms did, but by the end of the twentieth century, man took to coercing nature in order to protect his ocean playground. The Atlantic and Pacific Coasts of the United States serve as a home to the Union’s great cities and to a majority of [...]
Methodist minister Joseph Cross, a South Carolina native, traveled in Europe in the late 1850s, emerging as a nationalist committed to democracy, material progress, and enthusiastic Evangelical Protestantism. With the publication of I’ll Take My Stand in 1930 the southern conservative intellectual tradition definitively entered into consciousness of the American academy and the American literati. [...]
Throughout his political career, Abraham Lincoln connected the maintenance of freedom with the preservation of the free West. If the American West fell, so would American liberty. Richard W. Etulain’s “Abraham Lincoln: A Western Legacy” seeks to show more explicitly Lincoln’s relationship with the West. Abraham Lincoln: A Western Legacy by Richard W. Etulain (198 [...]
Russia’s nineteenth-century literary luminaries all found themselves wrestling with a particularly Romantic archetype: the Superfluous Man. Bored, confused, dissolute, yet noble and aristocratic, the Superfluous Man experiences tragedy in his reckless pursuit of passion. And I can’t help but wonder whether there is any hope for these characters—both the Russians in the novels, and the [...]
Far from feeding disunion, John C. Calhoun understood that a more perfect Union listened to the representative voices of the states, rather than the despotic voice of the “nation” represented in the federal Congress. I recently read two essays: one bemoaning the electoral college, and another explaining that Yale University was considering renaming Calhoun College. [...]
After removing family and religion from his life, Abraham Lincoln’s chief object of devotion remained the American nation alone. Shoppers looking for presents at large American book stores have been greeted by a plethora of biographies on Abraham Lincoln recently. Three books have added to the already behemoth historiography of the sixteenth president: Richard Brookhiser’s [...]
James Kirke Paulding affirmed the preeminence of place, tradition, and orthodoxy in the antebellum North even as he forces of capitalism, Evangelicalism, and materialistic modernity eroded the gentrified and agrarian culture of the Hudson River Valley. Paulding never wavered from his belief in prescriptive truth and the transcendence of place. He derided American democracy, viewing [...]
Ernest Hemingway lived and breathed American religious nationalism. But the experience of war caused him to lose his faith in the American nation he inherited from the progressive Protestant establishment. When the United States entered World War I in 1917, President Woodrow Wilson breathed a sigh of relief. A passionate progressive and Presbyterian elder committed [...]
Russell Kirk gave southern conservatives a larger canvas by which to imagine the conservative tradition. One could be southern, conservative, and yet reject the ancient racial evils of the South. When Russell Kirk published The Conservative Mind in 1953, he included among the pantheon of conservatives in the United States John C. Calhoun and John [...]