God’s Grandeur

A poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, written in 1918:

God’s Grandeur

THE WORLD is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

We’ve Lost More Than We’ll Ever Know….

When I was a teenager I yearned to leave my small Midwestern town. The place was just too small; there seemed to be nowhere to go and nothing to do. Classes at school were mainly dull, and not belonging to the small set of “popular” kids I saw little prospect of finding a nice girlfriend. Despite this, the adults in our town constantly proclaimed its all-around superiority and progressiveness. When it came time to leave, with no hesitation I chose a college in a city on the East Coast, where I was finally able to enjoy a satisfactory social and intellectual life. I was bitter enough about my high school life that when the editor of our local newspaper asked me to write a piece on how my town had influenced my college and later experiences, I told him I didn’t have anything to say. So whatever sentimentality I have about my hometown developed much later. (I now blame my own bad attitude for some of my youthful discontent, but that is another subject!)

What I did not realize was that wanting to leave my town was not merely the personal response of myself and a few friends to local conditions, but a generalized cultural phenomenon. People have been wanting to leave their small towns for much of the 20th century, but especially in the post-World War II era. Richard Davies describes the situation thus:

A destructive cycle…took hold. Camden provided a secure haven in which young people were reared and educated, but on reaching adulthood they left for greater opportunities than those available in their hometown. (p. 139)

I now appreciate the privilege of growing up in a “secure haven” much more than I did at the time. Then, I couldn’t leave fast enough.

It is, of course inevitable in a modern society that its talented members should tend to migrate to urban areas. Even regional cities suffer from this loss – the Beatles left Liverpool for London, never to return. But the loss we have experienced is much deeper than that – not, unfortunately, the mere urbanization of our society, but a widespread  disintegration. What Davies describes as happening in small towns happened at every level of society:

What went unrecognized at the time [the early 1950s] was that the social fabric, which had long provided a sense of community responsibility and unity, had begun to unravel…. Television tended to isolate families inside their homes during evening hours, reducing the amount of visiting between neighbors…. Over time, neighbors became more distant; newcomers sometimes remained strangers. Attendance at the three traditional churches became a subject of concern…. Store owners also knew that when farmers and townsfolk went shopping now, especially for major purchases, they got into their automobiles and headed out of town. (p. 155)

Reports of increased crime also began to filter onto the pages of the local newspaper. A series of break-ins of businesses and residences stunned local citizens, who began to lock their doors even during daytime hours. Few residents considered the relationship of juvenile behavior and rising crime rates to national trends because they naturally tended to view life from the perspective of their daily lives and their local community. Also, they tended to know their neighbors less, thus increasing the level of suspicion and lowering their sense of security. (p. 157)

No one could argue that the loss of community in America’s towns was compensated for by equivalent cultural gains in the cities. The suburbs people flocked to had even less community and character than the small towns. The cities kept their status as cultural centers, but have of course been devastated by crime and economic decay. Even culturally they are far from what they used to be, with symphonies and newspapers closing down constantly, and hope for good city schools expressed as a matter of form only. Urban crime, of course, has been inseparable from black, Hispanic, and other ethnic migration to the cities, a topic I won’t expand on here, but the decline of industry has been the result of economic dislocation analogous to those suffered by the small towns. As the national expansion of markets eroded the small town, the globalization of industry eroded the city, and indeed the nation itself. Or so it seems to me.

One thing is for sure: we are left a society yearning for the community and the moral order that once characterized our small towns, but at present without material or economic incentive to go back to living in such communities – if there even were a plausible way for large numbers of people to do so. Still less clear is how we could return to the social and sexual mores of a half-century ago. Can a people collectively and voluntarily give up social freedoms for the greater good? I have no idea how this can happen, though it will have to happen if our civilization is to survive.

A couple of years ago I learned of the song “Roots,” from the Show of Hands album Witness, on the Oz Conservative blog. The title track of that album is another one that can be well appreciated by traditionalists and conservatives. It describes a small village of people who have left the modern world to live in the countryside, farming and living a life of prayer looking forward to the coming Messiah. The song was apparently inspired by the artists’ visit to a religious commune.

We’ve got land, we grow food
We bake bread, and fell wood
Spring lambs in the fields
Sweet water in our hills

And at sunrise each day
We connect, we pray
We’ve got faith to spare
We bond, we share

So, sit down, stop running
He’s near, he’s coming….

The song is a fantasy, of course – I might even call it a liberal fantasy, for a life of subsistence farming is a life of hard toil, and the community desired could only be achieved by giving up much personal freedom and choice and mobility. As for the faith – can it be regained in any way other than hardship and suffering? Yet I admit it is also my fantasy, or dream, not so much to live in the countryside but to live in a true Western civilization and in a nation where my family and I are part of a greater whole.

It is becoming increasingly evident, in any case, that apart from a few areas like medicine, technical progress and improved communication and information technology are no longer improving our quality of life. Getting back to my hometown: in the 1950s one had to drive about an hour to shop in the nearest city; when I was growing up there was a mall a half-hour away. Now there is one of those ubiquitous strip malls with all the shopping one could ever hope for (I’m partial to the Barnes and Noble), about 20 minutes away. Ugly as sin, but unquestionably convenient. Yet…I recently learned another such mall is going up in the same region. We don’t need it! For those already there it only means more crowding, less green. It is obviously for the anticipated growing population, fueled by mass immigration, that the managing class of this country has signed on to. The sprawl closes in – and there are signs that urban crime is reaching the area too.

Is there a silver lining to all this loss? I believe that there is, but it is found in the bittersweet truth that only great loss will teach us the true value of our civilization, so we can begin fighting for our families, our towns, our nations again. I pray that the realization comes sooner rather than later, with as little loss as possible.

References
Richard Davies, Main Street Blues: The Decline of Small-Town America, Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1998.

The Fate of Small Towns is the Fate of America

In discussing Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street in last week’s essay, I was mainly interested in Lewis’s condemnation of the moral and intellectual character of the American small town of his day. How fair was his picture of small-town life? Undoubtedly there was much truth in his portrayal of the shallow materialism, smug-mindedness, anti-intellectualism, enforced conformity, and physical drabness of his Gopher Prairie, Minnesota. On the other hand, most of these shortcomings were hardly unique to the small towns, while their work ethic, community spirit, safety, and other virtues that were once taken completely for granted now seem like rare treasures. What fools we have been – to allow ourselves to believe that greatest achievement of our civilization has been mere economic productivity!

However, it is also true that we cannot talk about morality and culture in isolation from socioeconomic factors. The rise and decline of the American small town is inseparable from the history of the larger society, a point that was driven home to me again and again while reading Richard Davies’s Main Street Blues: The Decline of Small-Town America (1998). “A century or more ago,” writes Davis, “[small towns] occupied a central place in the overall scheme of things, but modern America, with its dominant urban culture, has now passed them by, relegating them to the cruel obscurity that comes from being abandoned by a railroad or left off the federal interstate highway map.” (p. 1)

Davis’s book tells the story of Camden, Ohio, the town of his birth and birthplace of the author Sherwood Anderson. Its story parallels that of thousands of other American small towns. The first white settlers arrived in 1803, purchasing sections of the pristine forest at $2 an acre at the terms of the Land Act of 1800. Like David Crockett, Ohio settlers started by slaughtering the amazing profusion of wildlife that was available for the taking, as they took on the arduous task of clearing the forest for farming. Camden lay in the economic orbit of Cincinnati, and produced pork and grain for that market. By 1850 it was home to some 400 persons, with another 750 living in the surrounding farmland. Railroad service reached Camden in 1852; electric service in 1883.

Adapted to its function as a local economic hub in the national network of agriculture and industry, “by the end of the nineteenth century Camden was indistinguishable in appearance, form, and function from some ten thousand similar communities spread across the land.” (p. 44) Davis paints a detailed picture of the physical environment, dominated by the banks and the churches, and the moral ethos, likewise attuned to the mandates of economic productivity and moral propriety. The largely middle-class citizenry was divided into upper, middle, and lower sub-groups with invisible but universally recognized boundaries. The values of the town are familiar to all of us, if only in our imagination:

Certain behavioral characteristics were expected of those enjoying substantial social standing; sobriety, diligence, probity, reliability, and a responsible work ethic went a long way toward determining one’s standing in the community. Residents believed in the inevitability of Progress, a benevolent but demanding God, and the American Dream. They were unquestionably patriotic. (p. 46)

In a small town, everyone knew everyone else, and while that meant unacceptable or nontraditional behavior was quickly identified and powerful community sanctions imposed, it also meant that the protective cloak of the community was available in times of emergency or need. Criminal activity of any type was extremely rare. (p. 47)

By the mid-1920s telephones, automobiles, and radio connected Camden to the larger region and to the national culture. The future looked bright, but Camden’s very connectedness was undermining its former self-sufficiency. Local merchants lost business to the department stores of Dayton; movies replaced the Vaudeville-type entertainment of the “Opera House.” These phenomena were harbingers of the great changes in national life, propelled by technology and national social and economic trends, that would ultimately reduce towns like Camden to shells of their former selves. Davis describes these changes decade by decade. First came the Depression, with plummeting agricultural commodity prices leading to a wave of mortgage foreclosures. The Depression shook residents’ belief in efficacy of their work ethic, and, as they came to depend on government funds and to subordinate their activities to the mandates of centralized planning, it reduced their actual self-sufficiency. Davis describes the impact of the Depression as follows:

In confronting the cruel realities of the massive economic collapse, residents had to wrestle with the realization that many of the fundamental values upon which they based their lives were no longer viable. It was no longer possible to explain the existence of poverty as the result of laziness or personal failure. They now recognized that they did not have control over their own economic futures. (p. 89).

Subsequent events contributing to the surprisingly rapid decline of the small town included World War II, the suburban boom of the 1950s, the interstate highway system, the spread of television, and other familiar events in our history. By the early 1960s, the decline of America’s small towns was evident to all and seemed to be irreversible. As someone born in the mid-1960s who grew up in a small town and imagined it to be a stable, secure type of community, Davis’s book helped me to understand various physical and institutional features of my town as historical phenomena. I could also see how various events in my town over the years were symptoms of the general unraveling of small-town society that he describes. In the entry that follows this one I will try to articulate some of the issues and questions that the rise and fall of America’s small towns raise for those of us trying to recapture some aspects of our traditional culture.

References

Richard Davies, Main Street Blues: The Decline of Small-Town America, Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1998.

As We Begin a New Year….

New Year’s celebrations this year certainly took on a muted tone, at least in the mass media. In a piece I heard on NPR shortly after midnight of January 1, the commentator seemed unable to think of anything positive to say. Ostensibly, the reason for the gloom is our economic crisis. In reality, it comes from a growing sense that we have no control over how to face whatever crises the future brings. Even white liberals, whom one would expect to be thrilled at the election of Obama, do not seem genuinely excited. The sentiment I hear most often is that people “hope” things will get better under Obama. Hope. Funnily enough, people seem to be directing that hope, mainly, toward the possibility that racial tensions will be reduced once our non-white president is in office. With major threats to our economy and national security, with the systematic dysfunction of education and health care, we pin our hopes on black people finally coming to like us. And you know, I think maybe white Americans really want that more than anything.

Still, even if January 1 is no more than an arbitrary point on a calendar, I like the fresh feeling of starting a new year. In deepest winter, it is a time for looking ahead. As the John Wayne quote, apparently genuine,  reminds us, “Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. Comes into us at midnight very clean. It’s perfect when it arrives and it puts itself in our hands. It hopes we’ve learned something from yesterday.” I also value the opportunity to make New Year’s resolutions, and have made a couple of personal ones. As for this weblog, I intend to keep it working at its intended task: in however small a way, promoting love of country for Americans and love of Western civilization for Westerners. My regular readers will know exactly what I mean by this, something for which I am deeply thankful. But I hope this year will also see many new visitors and ultimately, new friends and allies.

An interesting historical phenomenon associated with the New Year in America is the paper carrier’s address. When I delivered papers as a boy, the “Christmas tip” was always something to look forward to. But in earlier times, paper carriers would actually go to the homes of their customers on the new year and recite poems which combined some thoughts about the preceding year with exhortations for a new year’s “bonus.” Interestingly, the very first such poem I happened upon at in the linked collection has Uncle Sam, in 1852, bewailing the destruction being wrought by mass immigration – of Catholic Irish and Germans, no less. I quote the pertinent verse, not because it is great poetry or on the mark about those ethnic groups, but only because it shows a refreshing kind of popular resistance:

Turn we to home – to see what mighty strides
We here are making, over lands and tides;
Through the broad world our booming engines go,
Where dell and mountain sweep or billows flow.
Yet reap we not the fruits our labors win -
Scarce to secure our liberties begin -
While wandering Celts and squalit Swabians pour
Their whelming masses on our cumbered shore;
To curb our pride, to claim our dear-bought rights,
And filch the bread from hard-press’d laboring wights.
Hence Natives shake the slumbering lion’s mane,
And call upon their brethren – not in vain -
To quell the curse thus o’er the franchise spread,
And rob our toiling millions of their bread -

(The final line seems not to fit grammatically; if any reader is able to parse these lines to make sense of them, I would welcome hearing from him!)

While this weblog is not about me personally, it may be worth making a few comments about its intended meaning and how my own background relates to that meaning. Its focus is the promotion of historic American nationhood. The most immediate motivation for its creation comes from alarm over the destructive effects of mass immigration. But focusing on national identity is really one of an unlimited number of approaches one could take in response to this problem. Other writers focus specifically on the threat of Islam, or on racial differences, or on religious matters. I myself feel that the common cause we have with other Westerners trying to preserve their civilization may be more important, in a sense, than nation-based patriotism. Nevertheless, to be a Westerner is to be a Westerner of a particular nationality, and my own is not only indispensable to me, but something I want passed on to future generations.

Common to all traditionalist conservatives is the understanding that race is an essential part of one’s identity, and that the taboo in our society against acknowledging this is the single biggest obstacle to our ability to actively stand up and fight for our civilization. This weblog begins with the understanding that American civilization is essentially the creation of people of white, European descent. It acknowledges the important role, past and present, played by those of other races, and especially black Americans, and it holds no ill will toward any individual “minority” who respects the historic American civilization and supports its preservation. But its author is one who has understood clearly that you can’t have white civilization without white people, and that for a historically white nation to redefine itself as a space for all the other peoples of the world to colonize is not an act of generosity and broad-mindedness, but of national suicide. If this seems an odious notion to the new reader who may have casually stumbled upon this site, I only hope he will give a hearing to the arguments made here and elsewhere, and see if they don’t contain some truth.

Regarding the nature of that “white” identity, in the interests of full disclosure, I probably should admit that despite the very “Anglo-Saxon” theme of this site, I myself do not come from “founding” American stock, but am largely a mixture of post-1880 immigrants which includes quite a bit of Celtic as well as some Jewish background. I do not regard myself as at all Jewish and indeed do not know enough about Judaism to fake it if I wanted to, but obviously I include myself in the category of people I aim to reach in these writings, the “heritage Americans.” This is not to say that I aim to recklessly celebrate the “melting pot” and the indiscriminate mixing of peoples and races that is now the official ideal of our country. A certain amount of variety and new blood undoubtedly stimulates a nation, but even in the 1850s, and certainly in the Ellis Island years, mass immigration had severe costs. If anything, I agree with one of my online friends who remarked that if the population of America could come to resemble its founding population more, that would be a good thing and not a bad thing. But not being in any position to promote mass English immigration to this country, I have to content myself with paying tribute to my nation’s founders and promoting the creation of a civilization that they would recognize as a rightful descendent to theirs. That is, perhaps, my ongoing and final “assimilation” to America – and maybe yours too. What we make of our heritage is up to us.

Apologies

…for the unannounced absence. I will resume posting on Sunday evening.

Merry Christmas!

Lo, now is come our joyful’st feast!
Let every man be jolly,
Each room with ivy leaves is dressed,
And every post with holly.
Now all our neighbors’ chimneys smoke,
And Christmas blocks are burning;
Their ovens they with baked meats choke
And all their spits are turning.
Without the door let sorrow lie,
And if, for cold, it hap to die,
We’ll bury it in a Christmas pie,
And evermore be merry.

- George Wither

A Laurel and Hardy Interlude

Last week I wrote on the theme of American innocence – a topic I hope to get back to next week. The loss of innocence – or the full-fledged emergence of modernity into the cultural mainstream – in the West is often dated to the end of World War I, as by Paul Johnson in his book Modern Times. Of course, the cultural changes that became evident at about that time had been developing for decades before that, especially in Europe.

Thinking about that era has got me listening to some songs from the Vaudeville era. This was truly the golden age of American music and entertainment. And whatever one may conclude about the health of society as a whole at that time, there certainly was a beautiful innocence to the popular culture.

From the Vaudeville culture emerged Laurel and Hardy, my favorite comic performers from the old days. Many of my readers are probably acquainted with clips like those below, where the duo bring their well-practiced song-and-dance routines to the screen. I never get tired of watching these.

The song performed below in the 1939 film Way Out West, was written in 1913. Incidentally, a glance at the Wikipedia entry for 1913 shows a year full of disturbing events at home and abroad, from the ratification of the 16th amendment authorizing the income tax, to bloody U.S. campaigns in the Philippines. Be that as it may, there was a joy to that time that I hope we will see again.

“At The Ball, That’s All” (John Leubrie Hill, 1913)

Commence advancin’, commence advancin’,
Just start a prancin’, right and left a-glancin’,
A moochee dancin’, slide and glide entrancin’.
You do the tango jiggle,
With a Texas Tommy wiggle.
Take your partner, and you hold her,
Lightly enfold her, a little bolder.
Just work your shoulder,
Snap your fingers one and all, in the hall,
At the ball, that’s all, some ball.

The Loss of American Innocence

After the 2001 Islamic terror attacks, Americans were told that many people in other parts of the world thought it was a good thing for us to be shown that America “isn’t invulnerable.” Like many of the wispy platitudes expressed in our culture today, this one takes the appearance of a reasonable idea in order to bypass our faculty of judgment and penetrate our unconscious. When given the slightest bit of scrutiny it proves absurd – at best. Is being mugged good for the victim because it “teaches” him that…he might be mugged? A bit more scrutiny exposes something more sinister. What friend would say such a thing about another friend? And what kind of person would be so lacking in self-regard as to accept such an ill-willed statement as if it were some kind of deserved, helpful admonishment?

Another phrase repeated after the 2001 attacks was that America had “lost its innocence.” What does this mean? The British writer Peregrine Worsthorne, apparently considered a “conservative” but in a column written shortly after 9/11 sounding indistinguishable from the raving leftwing America-haters at the Guardian, wrote in that same paper:

Compared to the mushroom cloud under the shadow of which the whole world had been living for the last half of the 20th century, this new 21st-century terrorist threat strikes me as relatively trivial. The idea that with the end of the cold war all was henceforth going to be sweetness and light was always too good to be true. And the only thing in the least genuinely surprising and even shocking about the latest outrage is that it has killed bankers and stockbrokers in American tower blocks toppled by maniacs rather than impoverished workers in crumbling third world tower blocks.

And:

For the end of American innocence must not be confused with the end of mankind, and just because the American homeland is scratched for the first time, this does not mean that the rest of the world – which has survived so many worse scratches, is going to bleed to death.

Such statements clearly unpack the hidden meaning of statements about America’s “sense of invulnerability” and “innocence.” The assumption is that throughout our history, from the wars against American Indians to the atom bombings to the present-day campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, America’s successes have been built on murder and exploitation. Despite this, the majority of American people have been unconscious of this fact and hence “innocent,” but also guilty. People who believe such things naturally took satisfaction in America’s being hit in 2001.

It is true that the American character has historically been marked by optimism, goodwill, and a certain innocent trust of outsiders; and it is also true that America has, in the past, wielded its great power with less introspection and seriousness than would seem warranted. For instance, I once saw a picture of American personnel riding in a military vehicle on their way to inspect the damage in Hiroshima or Nagasaki. All were smiling with joy and exuberance. And why not, one might say: the terrible war was over, and America victorious! Still, there was something incongruous in the lightheartedness shown on the faces of these men on their way to see hell on earth. A few hours later, these men would no longer be smiling, but the U.S. public mainly remembered the exuberance, when a more sober attitude would have been better.

Part of our “innocence” has come from the persistence of a belief in traditional morality, abandoned earlier and with more abandon by our European cousins. A moral man has a certain innocence, but is not necessarily weak or naive. If you believe in moral values that apply to all people and hold yourself accountable to those values, you should also be able to sense when other people aren’t following the same code. As the saying goes, “you can’t cheat an honest man.”

And yet clearly Americans are now being cheated and deceived on a vast scale. 9/11 was supposed to wake Americans up to their vulnerability, and there were certainly many signs of life and a will to self-preservation during the months that followed that atrocity, but we have returned to sleepwalking, and it will take much greater horrors to awaken us again. And I wonder – is our liberal attitude of tolerance really innocent?

Over the Thanksgiving holiday, while delighting in the comforts of home as I always do, I felt more distressed than in the past by the gulf that separates my thinking from that of most of my relatives. See, we all, liberal and conservative, know that America, and “the world,” are in bad shape. We’re all worried about the future and distressed by the horrors reported in the news. But only some of us have understood that without preserving Western civilization, which means preserving our white-majority, morally Christian societies as such, we have no defense against the horrors and no possibility of securing a better future. I suppose this has become so crystal-clear to me that I imagine even my liberal friends and relatives must be seeing it on some level. But such is not the case. And so, we have less and less to talk about. Conversation keeps returning to sports and pets and the usual family stories. No one would like more than I would to be able to separate politics from family ties and friendships. But the truth is that the conflict between “liberal” and “conservative” today involves deep differences in values, and harmony between people of opposing political persuasions can only be achieved by avoiding the deeper issues.

Anyway, who is more innocent? The “conservative” who sees the links between immigration and terror, race and crime, and sexual morality and the well-being of children, and wants to take measures that will be painful for some in order to preserve the larger society? Or the liberal who places his hopes in wealth redistribution, universal health care, and laws outlawing as “discrimination” the making of the very distinctions that make life and civilization possible?

Nietzsche said somewhere words to the effect that “I allow myself to be deceived, in order to not be on guard against being deceived.” He was expressing his vision of the greathearted man, one who can rise above the petty concerns of ordinary people in order to create his own, new values. There is a certain truth to the idea (when taken in its commonsense meaning), but I fear Americans are not entirely innocent in allowing themselves to be deceived. They are avoiding hard truths and arduous labor in favor of familiar, comfortable ideas of helping “humanity” and “the planet.” But when our society is ruined, we will no longer be able to help anyone else. Better to be “as wise as serpents and harmless (innocent) as doves.”

Happy Thanksgiving!

I am visiting with family this Thanksgiving, and hope most of my readers are as well.

Most Americans celebrate Thanksgiving as a family feast. Millions of people take on the expense and inconvenience of traveling to be with relatives they don’t normally see. It can be a tense as well as a joyful occasion, but we would never dream of calling it off.

I, for one, get a little tired of the endless discussion of turkeys – the Presidential pardon of the turkey and all that. It seems to be the only external symbol of Thanksgiving that we, most of us, are comfortable with. Well, my family has turkey too, but I wish we’d talk about the “thanks” part more.

Every year one encounters some article explaining that most of what we know about the history of Thanksgiving is myth. The Pilgrims didn’t dress as they are portrayed; they didn’t call themselves Pilgrims; they weren’t crusaders for democracy; Pocahontas didn’t really save Captain John Smith; etc., etc. It seems to me this is mostly beside the point, since I’m sure children have not been taught the Thanksgiving tales I grew up with for several decades.

In recent years, our arbiters of culture have taken to claiming that Thanksgiving symbolizes the ideal of “inclusiveness” and “tolerance” in our multicultural, immigrant society. Brenda Walker chronicles some extreme but not atypical examples in VDare today. Englishman Godfrey Hodgson succumbs to this vice in his recent account of the American Thanksgiving, A Great & Godly Adventure: The Pilgrims & the Myth of the First Thanksgiving.

It is a festival that comes even closer than the Fourth of July to the deepest of all American national feelings: gratitude for God’s special providence for the United States as a nation of immigrants who have lived for the most part in peace and plenty under the rule of law as established with the consent of the governed. (p. viii)

Although Hodgson emphasizes repeatedly that the Pilgrims’ intentions had little to do with later American nationhood and democratic ideals, he seems to conclude that it is best that Thanksgiving be understood this way. I beg to differ. It has indeed developed as a holiday celebrated by the American people as a nation, but for this to have any meaning there has to be a nation, which by definition cannot be composed of immigrants.

Thanksgiving is certainly culturally specific. Many cultures have harvest celebrations, which are often rowdy, alcohol-soaked occasions, but America’s subdued celebration, which has never completely lost the idea of giving humble thanks, is distinct to our Anglo-Protestant heritage. Many families make a point of inviting someone from outside the family who is unable to be with relatives. The foods we eat at Thanksgiving remain those that are hardest to find outside of the country.

We do have much to be thankful for in these perilous times. I wish all my readers a very happy Thanksgiving. And I would also like to take this chance to express my own thanks to the readers and bloggers who have supported The Heritage American in the first few months of its existence. We have lots of work to do, so let’s use this weekend to recharge.

Update: Let us pray for the safety of our countrymen, and for all those affected by today’s jihad attack in India. No news yet on American victims.

Notes

(1) Godfrey Hodgson, A Great & Godly Adventure: The Pilgrims & the Myth of the First Thanksgiving, New York: Public Affairs, 2006.

A Peek Into a Girl’s Book: Little Women and Traditional Womanhood

“I want my daughters to be beautiful, accomplished, and good; to be admired, loved, and respected; to have a happy youth, to be well and wisely married, and to lead useful, pleasant lives, with as little care and sorrow as God sees fit to send….”
- Marmee in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (Chapter 9)

I am sure any boy who grew up reading books, and had sisters, occasionally borrowed one of his sister’s “girl’s books” to see what they were about, whether he would admit it or not. This was how I read the Little House books of Laura Ingalls Wilder. This week I decided to take a look at a “girl’s book” I had never gotten to, Little Women. To a boy the title of the book alone would probably be enough to put him off; but as a traditionalist American I thought it would be worth seeing what the book had to say about the American Woman.

Until a few decades ago, Americans lived and expressed themselves within a white and culturally Christian society with clearly defined gender roles. Now that immigration, multiculturalism, and feminism have destroyed this norm, it can be hard to imagine what life was like under it. Many younger people, I am sure, are convinced that America was a backwards and bigoted society. Older people, too, have mainly accepted the “progress” we have made since their youth (if not, they have at least decided not to say anything). Yet sometimes, when we encounter our past in history, film, or literature, a strange feeling nags at our hearts and tells us that it is not so.

I believe that though this feeling lies hidden in our society, unformed and inarticulate, it is real and part of all of us, even those too young to have direct memories of the traditional America. I have sensed it in my mother, who has spoken nostalgically of playing in her wooded neighborhood with other children, free of adult supervision but secure in the nearby presence of mothers and a community one knew well. I saw it in the response of an older woman to a musical about the life of the Andrews Sisters. Nothing explicit, just words like “They don’t make music like that anymore.” But the real meaning went so much farther. They don’t make society like that anymore. They don’t make women like that anymore. That’s why they don’t make songs like that anymore.

Of course, I don’t mean literally that today’s women are of lower quality than our grandmothers and great-grandmothers! But girlhood, womanhood, and femininity lack a cultural expression today, outside of rare occasions like weddings. In education and culture of the present day, the ideals held up for women are the same as those traditionally applied to men: leadership, independence, assertiveness, adventurousness, athleticism. And we have lost utterly a picture of an ideal woman – an image of feminine beauty, modesty, taste and sensitivity, nurturing care, and other qualities that could be expressed through language, dress, and behavior and embodied in the culture.

The same can be said, of course, about men and the masculine virtues. However, while it is not so hard to imagine making changes in our society along traditionalist lines to improve the quality of our men, it is more difficult to envision the form in which feminine virtues might be restored. Few women would want to return to the cumbersome outfits of the past or be limited to the roles played by women in 19th century farming families or 1950s nuclear families. For this reason, my view of women’s role in a revived traditionalist society is minimalist and fair. Namely, that a woman’s life course should involve a traditional, lifetime marriage and children. (This notion is by its nature reciprocal, since it would have to apply equally to men.) I believe that to implement this in practical terms would mean the restoration of certain gender differences and inequalities. I do not believe it would lead to the loss of most of the career opportunities that exist for women today, although we might well return to male (and female) dominance of certain professions and leadership roles.

While it is impossible to go back to the past, the art and literature of the past can help us to understand what is possible. Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868) portrays a group of sisters representing idealized types of girl, each with her own type of beauty and particular virtue, and also with her particular weakness which she battles throughout her life. Thus Meg is nurturing and beautiful but vain; Jo enterprising and creative but quick to anger; Beth musical and self-sacrificing but shy; and Amy sweet and artistic but spoiled. The book is composed of various episodes, each of which typically involves one of the girls learning a life-lesson on the need to control one’s temper, avoid envy and pride, work hard, be charitable, and so forth. (Little Women actually uses Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress as a reference for the girls’ journey through life.) Alcott herself was a kind of feminist and “literary spinster” who identified with the “tomboy” character Jo and expressed dissatisfaction with churning out “moral pap” for girls. Despite this, the book conjures up a sweet and beautiful world, where expectations for future lives as wives and mothers give a meaning, shape, and kind of sacred quality to the girls’ work, play, and education.

A critic could, of course, call the book false, a romantic fantasy. Even if this is so, the type of fantasy a society creates says something real about its soul. And in Little Women one sees a deep love between sisters and between mother and daughters that is utterly free of feminist distortion and resentment towards males. So, too, it was innovative as an early form of the American “domestic novel.” In the words of Madeline Stern:

Little Women is great because it is a book on the American home, and hence universal in its appeal. As long as human beings delight in “the blessings that alone can make life happy,” as long as they believe, with Jo March, that “families are the most beautiful things in all the world,” the book will be treasured. (1)

The values held by the March family amount to a uniquely American conglomeration of stern Calvinism and English bourgeois values: a strong work ethic and a dislike of the pursuit of money, ostentation, and habits like drinking and gambling; but a very worldly enjoyment of art, music, games, nature, and conversation. Here we find the moral values at the core of America’s greatness, but also the seeds of America’s future sacrifice of everything it has and is to non-Western “humanity.” When the March girls sacrifice their Christmas breakfast to a poor German woman with six children, we see the native American sense of charity in all its sweetness, but we may also note how easily such an impulse could morph into suicidal liberalism.

Most delightful in reading this book is to experience the drama of life, love, and family as it plays out in a world lacking the distortion of multiculturalism. The girls can be themselves and can sort out their friends and suitors on their own merits; there is no discussion of the need for “tolerance” or “diversity,” themes which doubtless would feature prominently in any novel written for the same age group today. The same could be said of most pre-1960s art and literature of the West. There are no racial tensions whatsoever in the book because there are no racial minorities present in the society of the Marches – even though they are the sort of family that would probably invite a poor “colored” man to dinner; even though the father is away from home serving as a chaplain in the Civil War! And though modern critics would attack the book for “suppressing” the black, American Indian, homosexual, and other “marginal” viewpoints, the truth is that the March girls are just being themselves. They live their own lives in their own society, and it is because their society is relatively homogeneous that they are able to live with a sense of higher meaning, struggling to do good and develop as women, within the common understandings of that society. Such, at least, is the thought that strikes me in reading Little Women, a story set in a world that is so far away from and yet so close to our own.

Notes

(1) Madeline B. Stern, “Louisa May Alcott: An Appraisal,” The New England Quarterly, Vol. 22, No. 4 (Dec., 1949), p. 476.