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Bringing back unity

These two works are incredibly important because they show what the American left is all about, intends on doing, and will do if given the opportunity. This is something we have now seen repeatedly with the various sorts of deranged freaks who have tried to assassinate President Trump.

This is something the Antifa crowd epitomizes as well. They’re all freaks. Life’s losers with nothing going for them. As Thomas Carlyle wrote of Philippe Egalité, a leader of the French Revolution, they have every deadly sin written upon their execrable faces. They burn with a savage hatred of the world because it dares to exist, and to do so in a better way than they. As true believers in equality, they wish to drag all down to their squalid level of an execrable existence little better than that of yeast, and with an added dose of bitterness, and will use whatever bomb, gun, or crowbar they can get their hands on to make that happen.

What is important to recognize is that this is nothing new, and that’s why those two books are incredibly eye-opening and helpful. There is a direct throughline between John Brown’s rise out of the blood-drenched rhetoric of the radical abolitionist movement, and the murderous, race communist left of today, which is trying to end America for good. That shows what’s in store if we don’t crush them.

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The John Brown Left’s Rise

As Fleming shows, the American Civil War didn’t begin because a collection of white linen-bedecked Southern oligarchs wanted to remain such. That might have been part of it, particularly in places like Mississippi, but it isn’t why states like Virginia and North Carolina gave their all for the Southern cause. No, they had been convinced by years of leftist behavior of the sort epitomized by John Brown that to allow the abolitionists in Massachusetts to have their way would be to allow their beloved homes to turn into Haiti.

This was no idle worry. Nat Turner’s rebellion lit the fire of it. Turner was a slave in Virginia who had been treated as well as could be hoped by the family that owned him,1 by all accounts. He nevertheless led a rebellion, and he began it by butchering the family that owned him in a horrifically bloody way. He then went on to lead a brandy-drinking body of slaves on a murder spree targeting women and children in his corner of Virginia. As Virginius Dabney tells it in his Virginia: The New Dominion:

Turner, a part-time preacher who thought he saw visions, had gathered up a group of about sixty other slaves and embarked on an orgy of indiscriminate slaughter, beginning with his master and mistress and their baby. A hatchet and an ax were used in dispatching this gentle couple as they lay in their bed, after which the child's brains were bashed out against the brick fireplace. Guns, daggers, swords and razors also were employed in killing some fifty-five others, mostly women and children.

It was put down, eventually, but horrified the South. Still, a slave rebellion can be understood. None would wish to be a slave. What can not and could not be understood is the way in which the abolitionists cheered the murder of women and children, savagely gloating over the corpses of infants with their brains bashed out and women who had been cut to pieces. Yet such is exactly what the abolitionists, led by the much-despised William Lloyd Garrison, did, as Fleming notes:

Did Garrison express even a hint of sympathy or pity for these stunned, grieving families and their terrified neighbors? Did he confess that his immediate emancipation slogan was wrong, or at least in need of amendment? The only emotion Garrison permitted himself was thinly disguised gloating— and a call for sympathy for the slaves.

This continued on to the point that even abolitionists in Virginia were savagely attacked by a rabid press that was baying for their blood, expressing what those at the time called a “morbid hatred of the southern white man” with the clear goal of provoking a race war that would turn the whole South, including Virginia, into Haiti.2 And Garrison was no outlier. Joining him were a panoply of other radical leftists who bayed for the blood of southerners and called for slaves to “at least try to cut your master’s throat.”3

It was out of such a milieu that John Brown came. A lifelong loser who was characterized by his lack of personal success and his religious fervor, he adopted the fierce hatred of the South and Southern civilization that was preached by such types as Garrison, and then used the conflict in Kansas to put it into action. Namely, he butchered the Doyle family by cleaving them to pieces with his broadsword. The Doyles were poor farmers who had nothing to do with slavery, but who also weren’t abolitionists, and he murdered them in cold blood.

And it wasn’t just that he murdered them. He was praised for it. Sorts like Garrison, men who were too scared to get their hands dirty but who hated the hierarchy of the South with a burning passion, funded Brown’s endeavors as he murdered civilians across Kansas in the name of abolition.

Those same sorts then funded Brown as he attempted to start a Haitian-style slave revolt in Virginia with his Harper’s Ferry raid, a debacle characterized primarily by his incompetence and thirst for blood. During the raid, Brown robbed George Washington’s grand-nephew of a ceremonial sword, murdered a free black man, and brought along thousands of pikes on which those who rallied to his banner were to spit women and children. And for that, he was praised by the spiritual heirs of Garrison, who framed the man who would delight in bloodily massacring women and children as a Christ-like figure.4

That did not go unrecognized in the South, where firebreathers asked, as Fleming notes, “Could the South stay in the same country with people who could complacently look forward to seeing these weapons thrust into the bodies of helpless women and children?”

They decided they could not, a decision made in part because the government refused to punish the “Secret Six” who had enabled Brown, or the media hacks who glorified his bloody deeds.

As Thomas Nelson Page notes in his The Old Dominion: Her Making and Her Manners, “the John Brown raid shocked [Virginia] from the Potomac to the North Carolina line. It was 'a fire-bell in the night.' Every man sprang to attention, and 'every mother clutched her babe closer to her bosom.’” The raid, and more importantly, the praise of it from the abolitionist press, had roused them to fury and fear.5 And so came war. Even those who had no wish for secession—as most of Virginia, including men like Robert E Lee, did not—could not stand by and watch their state be invaded by those legions who sang “John Brown’s Body”,6 revelled in the theft of southern property,7 and had shown such a decided intent to target women and children.

And though Union soldiers grew disgusted with the lies and antics of the abolitionists as the war wore on,8 what came with9 and followed it—particularly following the ill-considered assassination of Lincoln, a relative moderate—did nothing to allay Southern fears. Reconstruction, in particular, brought much of what they had desperately fought to stave off.

Civilization-Rending Reconstruction

For example, Reconstruction-era Virginia politician James Hunnicutt, who modelled his physical appearance after John Brown, rallied a crowd with positively Radio Rwanda-style rhetoric in which he called on freed blacks to burn the homes of their former masters, declaring: "The white race have houses and lands. Some of you are old and feeble and cannot carry the musket but can apply the torch to the dwellings of your enemies. There are none too young-the boy of ten and the girl of twelve can apply the torch."10

Such harangues and policies reflective of the attitude behind them destroyed Southern civilization;11 it was not for nothing that the Civil War-era US had finally recognized Haiti,12 which had long been the beau ideal of abolitionist radicals.

Eventually, Reconstruction ended, and states like Virginia could rebuild themselves somewhat. Such took many decades, with Virginia never regaining her former glory and much of the South muddling on through agricultural depression and the like until the post-World War II era.

The Days of Rage Destroy America

By then, the abolitionist sorts were back, with an even firmer intention to wage war on civilization.

These are the radicals about whom Burrough writes. The Weather Underground. The Black Liberation Army. The Black Panthers. They Symbionese Liberation Army.

These groups explicitly saw themselves as following in the traditions and footsteps of John Brown, as Burrough notes: “Every white revolutionary, [John Jacobs] argued, was duty-bound to become 1969's version of John Brown, the Civil War-era antislavery zealot. ‘John Brown! Live like him!’ became JJ's rallying cry.”

And they did so with an added dose of revolutionary fervor and violence that added to the unslakeable bloodthirst of their urban guerrilla campaign against normal America, all with the goal of a Haitian or Congolese Crisis-style13 remaking of America in mind.

Such came the chaos of the 60s and 70s. Black Panthers and Black Liberation Army guerrillas murdered cops. The Weather Underground and FALN blew up bankers, police stations, and skyscrapers. All robbed banks and armored cars. They rioted in the streets and smashed the cars, windows, and storefronts of productive people. It was a vast rising of the disenchanted losers against the normal, of the disaffected bottom against the content and industrious.

It raged for years, and only ended because America became so awful in the process that no one cared anymore about bombings or occassional shootouts; the guerrillas had effectively won, and America was a trainwreck.14

Eventually, Reagan’s tax cuts and deregulation pulled America somewhat out of that deep malaise, and mayors like Rudy Giuliani made the crime problem go away enough that people stopped caring as much.

But the radicals never faced their comeuppance. They weren’t even imprisoned, by and large, much less hanged. Instead, the cowards in charge over the course of the Revolutionary Terror—Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan—let them get away with it while punishing the FBI for investigating them.15 Most of the murderous leftist terrorists didn’t even get a slap on the wrist.

And so they have sat in the halls of power ever since. They have become professors, authors, media personalities, and NGO administrators.16 They have poisoned the minds of America’s youths yet further, demanding decolonization and dramatic change, while also serving as a reminder by their very existence that leftists are allowed to get away with terror in America.

They can cause mayhem, carry out terror campaigns, commit horrid crimes, and even murder people…and face no real consequences for it. Such is the legacy of the Days of Rage generation.

The Revolution Returns

And now the Revolution has returned.

Antifa is attempting to assassinate ICE agents. Gangs of leftist terrorists who call themselves John Brown Gun Clubs are armed and organized with the explicit goal of terrorizing and killing normal Americans so as to bring about some sort of Bioleninist, race communist revolution from the rubble when it’s all over. Crime rages out of control, and is not just allowed but encouraged by leftist judges, DAs, public defenders, and pro-crime NGOs.

Most of those involved in such operations are tied directly in with the radicals of the 1960s—the pro-crime Wren Collective has been pushed along by Chesa Boudin, son of Weather Underground terrorist Kathy Boudin, for example—or were influenced by what they taught, wrote, and said. And so now our cities are more violent than active war zones.

That constellation of leftist terror groups and their hangers-on is the modern incarnation of John Brown, much as the Weather Underground types were the John Browns of their day. It is a collection of life’s losers organized with the explicit goal of murdering whites to achieve some sort of egalitarian revolution, and it is being funded by the same collection of bleeding-heart leftist interests that put equality before everything else.

Take the latest would-be Trump assassin, for instance. He explicitly left Kash Patel off his list of targets, as he only wanted to kill white people.17 As my friend put it, “Kash Patel was deliberately excluded as not a target. He was also the only one that wasn’t White. That makes this a racially motivated attack and that should be obvious. What unifies the Left is nothing more than hatred of White civilization. The left-right divide is existential.”

And noted anti-white bigot Jimmy Kimmel has been joking about it, referring to Melania as an expectant widow. So too have been others. Like John Brown, they want us, our women, and our children dead, spitted on pikes. And they think it’s funny. So too did the freakish French Revolutionaries, and the Bolsheviks.

Indeed, this threat is existential.

Either this latest permutation of the John Brown spirit can be crushed, or it will kill us as it attempts to bring about the egalitarian revolution it so dearly wants. Haiti is its goal; it says as much, openly cheering the white genocide in Haiti. So too does it praise the Congo Crisis, Reconstruction, the worst atrocities of the Civil Rights Era, the Days of Rage era, and more. It wants to destroy us, and destroy our civilization. That is its explicit goal.

And as the recurrent attacks on Trump’s life show, as the recurrent Antifa attacks on ICE and conservatives show, as the murder of Charlie Kirk showed, it is not only armed but is actually willing to use violence to bring about what it wants. These cells of terrorists are serious threats. Their backers in the media, the courts, and the NGO complex are serious threats. They must all be treated as such, and crushed with the full force of the law.

Such is what wasn’t done to Brown until it was too late, and the result was the Civil War and the destruction of Southern civilization. Such is what was never done to the radicals of the 70s, and the result is that they largely won, and their spiritual heirs are now attempting a new revolution far more bloodly than which they attempted.

No compromise is possible. Either we will win, or they will have our heads. Such is what they have made clear in word and deed.

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It’s no secret that our cityscapes have become increasingly ugly in the wake of the Second World War. What few new statues are raised are ugly and discomfiting rather than heroic and inspiring. What non-criminal people there are wandering about are in a general state of slovenly undress, generally with their eyes fixed in front of them so they can see and avoid the zombie-like vagrants who choke most streetcorners. The advertisements put a panoply of vices on display, and aren’t even attractive.

And, of course, there’s the general collection of strip-mall-style parking lots and stores that add to the depressing nature of the environment. If one had to define the modern urban environment in a picture, this would be it:

But that is just the beginning of it, for all of those aggravating abnormalities are just the cherry on top of the true urban demoralization campaign waged against us: Brutalism.

Brutalism is that architectural style that consists of a horrid collection of geometric shapes built out of raw, unadorned concrete. The Boston City Hall is the pre-eminent American example of it.

The wretched style came out of Europe in the post-WWII era, and is closely related to modernism. It was meant to be both ideological and practical, as it was a simultaneous rejection of the sort of pre-war architecture that people find beautiful, and the unadorned nature of it makes it theoretically much less resource-intensive than traditional styles such as Neo-Classical, Victorian, and Art Deco.

It initially floundered, as everyone but a select group of socialists found it abhorrent, but “the movement got new wind in the 1950s when European cities sought to rehouse populations displaced by war and to remake the built environment”.1

This largely meant that the post-war socialist governments that ruled the “free” West and communist East relied upon it for the construction of public housing, for example, as part of their communal housing schemes. Not only were such buildings inexpensive and easy to build because they were unadorned and ugly, but they also sent a message about the new sort of world that existed after the war: one that was ugly, resource-strapped, and utterly egalitarian. Such was the point of the style.

Naturally, those with “reactionary”, which is to say normal, aesthetic senses have been repulsed by Brutalism ever since its inception. The story goes that Ian Fleming, the author of James Bond fame, was so horrified by Erno Goldfinger’s Brutalist/modernist designs around London, including one in Hampstead, that he named the Bond villain “Goldfinger” as a dig at the architect. This supposedly sparked legal squabbling between the two men, with Goldfinger claiming he was being defamed. Perhaps the story is apocraphyl, perhaps not. Either way, it does capture the emotions of the movement: those who have traditional tastes hate Brutalism, while those who hate tradition love Brutalism.

And while few have the opportunity to name a legendary character after a proponent of the despised style, it remains generally unpopular. Whether the Hoover Building or Boston City Hall, normal people find the style repulsive and off-putting. It exudes totalitarianism, is the opposite of beautiful, and reeks of the same ideology of spite and wretchedness that drives the Bioleninists. Yet it nevertheless remains popular in the architectural community, and a certain sort of client—the nouveau riche, NGOs, and leftist governments—remains willing to build in it.

Why?

Because the sense of revulsion and horror it produces within you when you see it is the point. Brutalism was designed to be ugly, designed to be a rejection of beautiful Classical architecture, and designed to make you feel uncomfortable rather than uplifted. Such is the point of it, and why it was effectively required by a slew of post-war construction laws.

The Brutalist Atrocity

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A recurrent problem on the right is that many insist on the general veracity of leftist tellings of history. This comes up quite frequently, with people of all age groups.

For example, many struggle to take their revisionist and rightist understanding of a specific issue, such as the tragedy of Rhodesia’s murder, and use that to re-examine a much broader subject, such as the post-Great War history of the 20th century generally, or even the Cold War. Instead, there is a general tendency to think “wow, that’s horrible” and then move on with a shrug, one’s general view of history left unimpaired by knowledge that proves it to be a lie.

This often comes up when specific figures are mentioned. Elon Musk, for example, has no issue commenting on the South African farm murders, black crime in America, or the Grooming Gangs in England. He knows the official story to be a lie, and is willing to boldly challenge that narrative. But when Mandela comes up, he nevertheless praises him,1 unable to understand that Mandela was a communist terrorist and is evil for the same reason that the present system of anarchotyranny is evil; the Global Favela in all its forms is rotten, as are its promoters, and must be rejected entirely.

The same is true of many people when Martin Luther King Jr. is brought up. They’re clear-eyed on crime in America, often understand generally what happened to cities like Detroit, and sometimes are even willing to condemn some Civil Rights figures, like the abominable Andy Young. But those same people often find it hard to criticize MLK even though the banner he waved was the same one that destroyed America’s cities by unleashing crime and riots on them, that he was plugged in with the Soviets, and that he supported the destruction of functional colonial states like Rhodesia just as much as did Andy Young.

Why?

Because they have drunk deeply of the poison that is Leftist History and have let its general precepts control their understanding of what has happened and is happening.

An offshoot of Whig history and its absurd belief in the gradual triumph of progress over the ages,2 Leftist History is the belief that “oppression”—defined vaguely and generally as the exercise of natural hierarchy in the world—is always wrong and that it is in the end good for it to be overthrown, whatever the tactics used, and bad for it to be defended.

Hence why class time is taken in every American history class to damn Robert E Lee and praise the Civil Rights movement despite the fact that Robert E Lee’s character was an unvarnished pillar of marble and most Civil Rights “leaders” were corrupt hacks whose personal lives were defined by their communist connections and a litany of rapes. But we are told that Eldridge Cleaver and MLK are heroes, and Lee the most evil thug to ever ride across America; his wife inherited some slaves freed within a few years, you see…

Many can reject this in specific scenarios. They’ll defend Lee and Washington, for instance…though making sure to try to align that defense with Leftist History to the extent they can by noting that both were relatively mild masters, all things considered. Or they’ll defend Rhodesia…but never the Belgian Congo! Leopold II was mean….or something (he did a relatively good job, in fact).

Again and again, this comes up: a specific scenario can be addressed with intellectual honesty, but never the overall assumption of Leftist History, which is that “oppression” is always bad and the fruits of it must always be overthrown.

I was reminded of this over the weekend when I made a throwaway comment3 about the leftist nature of the French Revolution—particularly the fact that its main leaders were deformed freaks driven by spite and envy, as Carlyle notes in detail in The French Revolution. Most who saw it agreed, but there was a distinct strain of horror at such a thought articulated by several self-professed rightists who read that post: who could dare compare Marie Antoinette favorably to Marat and Danton, the French monarchs were tyrants! “Tyrants compared to whom?” was the question left unstated by such detractors.

Never did it cross their minds that what was done to the heavily religious Vendee4 by the atheistic proto-Bolsheviks in the Jacobin heart of the Revolution was far worse than anything done by a Bourbon. Nor did they note that the Bourbons were perhaps worse rulers than the Founders or Hanoverians, but also less exacting sovereigns and stauncher defenders of Tradition than many European monarchs of their period. No, what mattered was that the Bourbons “oppressed” someone or other on behalf of Tradition, and so were evil no matter what under the strictures of Leftist History.

Louis XVI was not a good ruler. His regime was not conducive to human flourishing. Had he been overthrown by a regime that was, and that defended Tradition against godless egalitarians like the Jacobins, that would have been a good thing. But, in terms of what should matter to anyone on the right, the Bourbons were far better rulers than the Jacobins. Whatever their faults, they didn’t murder tens of thousands of people for the crime of being successful and normal, nor were they godless atheists. Further, those facts must inform one’s understanding and application of history.

However, that can be difficult to do. All these examples—Civil Rights, decolonization, kings and Revolution—tug on the heartstrings of most, and are things about which we have all imbibed much propaganda, directly or indirectly. There is thus an emotional component that is hard to get past.

So, in this article, I’m going to attack Leftist History from a different angle, one that hopefully gets past those emotional barriers because it is an issue about which few people know: that of the supposed “Norman Yoke” and whether it was a great evil or great benefit to the Anglo-Saxon people. I think this shows Leftist History and how it shapes our worldviews quite clearly, and why moving on from it is important.

The Norman Yoke

When William the Conqueror defeated Harold at Hastings in 1066 and then solidified his rule over the ensuing years, he brought with him not just a new aristocracy from which a few noble families—namely the Percys and Grosvenors—still claim descent, but a whole new method of rule, governance, and land ownership.

Gone would be the system of the Anglo-Saxons, under which common and noble held land in varying amounts but which they owned in fee simple and farmed themselves. Gone too would be the commons, the witan,5 the mead hall, and the other defining features of Anglo-Saxon life from the 7th century on, all of which were relatively egalitarian and communal rather than hierarchical, ritualized, and “oppressive”.

Replacing all of that would be the system of common law, the king as a hereditary sovereign, a titled nobility that held its lands in fee to the crown, and a tenant peasantry that would farm the land for often absent land lords who used the rent of the tenants to fund military campaigns against each other and abroad. The courts were in French, ritualised, and based on Norman common law rather than the customary laws of the Anglo-Saxon peasantry.

Such is the myth of the Norman Yoke, and its most potent physical manifestation was the manor, the form in which all land was held after William distributed every acre of English land to his followers and himself. Replacing the fee simple farms and open-field system of farming of old were “manors”—collections of farms ruled over by a sometimes-fortified manor home and held in fee tail to the king by an alien “peerage” of often absent warrior nobles. These were Norman innovations that set a “seignural” stamp on the landscape that was as alien as it was indelibly hierarchical,6 and much of it lasted until the socialist land reform of the post-World War I era.

Such is the tale of the Norman Yoke, the tale of an alien and tyrannical system cruelly foisted on a formerly free Anglo-Saxon people in what had been a land of liberty and egalitarianism before the Normans arrived with their warhorses, lances, and manors. It is a tale of the evils of hierarchy, the rapaciousness of an “oppressive” aristocracy, and the damnable origins of the great landed estates of England and the gentlemen who ruled over them from ancient manor homes.

Thomas Paine pushed this message seven centuries hence in a passage that quite well summarized the popular conception of the Norman yoke as unjust and oppressive hierarchy imposed on a formerly free people, saying, “A French bastard arriving with armed banditti and establishing himself the King of England against the consent of the natives is in plain terms a very paltry rascally original and certainly has no divinity in it.”7

The Norman Yoke As Leftist History

Never mind that this might not have been true,8 or that by the time of the Plantagenets, the Anglo-Saxons were generally happy enough with the militarized peerage and monarchy’s wars abroad, so long as they were won. It was powerful, captivating, and a way to shake one’s historical fist at the peerage that had remained socio-economically dominant for a millennium.

Further, it was an early form of Leftist History in that it was a way of damning social hierarchy by characterizing the English nobility and gentry as mere descendants of foreign invaders who used the oppressive lance to destroy an Anglo-Saxon golden age of liberty and a relatively level social hierarchy. That, of course, made it a powerful tale to tell the poorer classes in England as the Civil War began, and delegitimized the Cavaliers by painting hierarchy as it then existed as immoral, oppressive, and alien.

For that reason, it was a tale picked up and made popular by the Levellers.9 A sect of the Puritans “lodged within the New Model Army” of Cromwell, the Levellers focused on using the Civil War to achieve an egalitarian revolution in England. They aimed to “place all people on the same social and political level, essentially eliminating the political power of the aristocracy and gentry . . . Levellers at first demanded the extension of suffrage to all Englishmen, basing their claim for near-universal suffrage on ‘natural right’; they also attacked monopolies, the House of Lords, and the monarchy.”10

Similarly, it was a tale attractive to the Diggers.11 The Diggers, also called the “True Levellers”, were an even more radical sect of Puritans who “wanted all land to be held in common,” which is to say they were proto-communists. They were known for declaring that “honour, nobility, [gentility] … would disappear when the new Zion was established” by the overthrow of Charles. “Seeing the common people of England by joynt consent of person and purse have caste out Charles our Norman oppressor, wee have by this victory recovered ourselves from under his Norman yoake,” a prominent Digger declared upon Puritan victory over Charles.

They also claimed that the Norman peerage held the English people captive with the supposed yoke, comparing their plight to that of the Israelites in Babylonian captivity. “The last enslaving Conquest which the Enemy got over Israel, was the Norman over England,” went one popular tract, adding that the Normans “still in pursuit of that victory” are “Imprisoning, Robbing and killing the poor enslaved English Israelites.”12 Their radical belief in communal ownership of land was prompted and legitimized by that belief that the Norman Yoke had enslaved the English people.13

Thus, we see how this tale became Leftist History. There are merits to the Anglo-Saxon system and merits to the Norman system. But in popular memory, the Normans were ruthless oppressors who dragooned the Anglo-Saxons into paying them extortionate rents so that they could squander the money on high living, venality, and sinful wars.

Thus, the peerage and the hierarchy it represented were rotten because they were oppressive, and destroying them would be and was a good thing, regardless of what social ills replaced them.

Carlyle’s Response

This argument is best rebutted by Thomas Carlyle in Volume I of his History of Frederick II, in which he argued against such a Leveller or Digger interpretation of the Normans and understanding of their system as a yoke. Instead, he argued, the hierarchy and manorial system the Normans brought with them should be viewed as a positive because the order and hierarchy it imposed were the catalyst that made the British a great and world-spanning people. He argued:

England itself, in foolish quarters of England, still howls and execrates lamentably over its William Conqueror, and rigorous line of Normans and Plantagenets; but without them, if you will consider well, what had it ever been? A gluttonous race of Jutes and Angles, capable of no grand combinations; lumbering about in potbellied equanimity; not dreaming of heroic toil and silence and endurance, such as leads to the high places of this Universe, and the golden mountaintops where dwell the Spirits of the Dawn. Their very Ballotboxes and suffrages, what they call their 'Liberty,' if these mean 'Liberty,' and are such a road to Heaven, Anglo-Saxon highroad thither--could never have been possible for them on such terms. How could they? Nothing but collision, intolerable interpressure (as of men not perpendicular), and consequent battle often supervening, could have been appointed those undrilled Anglo-Saxons; their potbellied equanimity itself continuing liable to perpetual interruptions, as in the Heptarchy time. An enlightened Public does not reflect on these things, at present; but will again, by and by. Looking with human eyes over the England that now is, and over the America and the Australia, from pole to pole; and then listening to the Constitutional litanies of Dryasdust, and his lamentations on the old Norman and Plantagenet Kings, and his recognition of departed merit and causes of effects, --the mind of man is struck dumb!

Rebutting the Yoke, and Leftist History

Carlyle’s response to the Levellers and Diggers—many of whose views were being repeated by the Chartists of his day—is the perfect rightist rebuttal because it gets to the core of the argument, and the political question that needs to be answered: what is the ultimate good for which we should aim?

Is it equality? If so, then Norman yoke is indeed terrible, oppressive, and all the rest.

Or is it human flourishing and national greatness? If so, then that yoke is what got the Anglo-Saxons to stop belching in their long halls after many long years of decline and instead became the people who conquered and settled everywhere from Australia to Virginia, Alberta to Rhodesia.

Further, Carlyle’s counter-argument shows how complaints about the Normans are all leftist in tone and nature, for they are rooted in the belief that hierarchy is always bad because it must be oppressive, regardless of its fruits.

Without the Normans, the British would never have launched a Crusade like that of Richard the Lionheart. They wouldn’t have colonized India, created civilization out of the woods in Virginia, or done the same thing in Rhodesia. The human capacity was there, but the will was not. Nor, without the manorial system, could the resources have been mustered for them—it was the great lords who funded the East India Company, Virginia, and Rhodesia, for they had the spare capital to do so because of their manorial holdings.

Order and hierarchy matter. Without them, Morris Talapar never could have said, as he did in his The Sociology of Colonial Virginia, “Virginia is a landmark in the history of the Anglo-Saxon people. The Anglo-Saxon people developed towards their position of world domination during the last several hundred years, when they showed an unusual initiative in exploration, discovery, conquest and colonization. As England’s first colony Virginia is the genesis of the British Empire, and as the first Anglo-American colony she is the genesis of the United States of America.”

When he wrote it, that was true. The Anglo-Saxons had done those great things over the preceding centuries. But they had only done so because, as Carlyle noted, the Norman yoke had drilled them into being able to do so. Without that order, their “liberty” would have meant mere licentiousness.

But still complaints abound, most of which stem from the Leveller and Digger tendency—the annoyance that great lords ruled large swathes of land, whether in Virginia or England, rather than all being equals of a sort and different in degree. The mindset inculcated by Leftist History of the Normans and their descendants, men like the Grosvenors in England or Lees in Virginia,14 is that their existence represents unfair and unjust hierarchy.

That idea is deeply set and quite a problem because further leftist tendencies flow from it. Much as the Levellers and Diggers used it to push proto-communism and social egalitarianism in the days of Cromwell, those who think of the Normans in such terms tend to be hostile to hierarchy and its fruits as a result.

To believe the tale of the yoke as told by the Diggers or Thomas Paine belies a tendency to support the politics of envy, to support egalitarian social modes, and to otherwise support that which would hollow out our civilization from within.

It’s no coincidence, after all, that much of Britain’s decline came as a direct result of legislation designed to break the supposed Norman Yoke by breaking up aristocratic landed estates with egalitarian tax legislation and disempowering the Lords with the Parliament Bill. Which is to say, doing what the Levellers and Diggers originally wanted. Such is legacy of the Norman Yoke, and what flowed from a belief in it.

It’s one thing to make a point about inequality and the way in which it can be unjust through the lens of someone like Tiberius Gracchus. The oligarchs in that story were Romans who stole the land of the yeomen, their countrymen, through treachery and guile. They stole the land of brave citizen-soldiers of their own ilk so that it could be engrossed into vast latifundia. That is wrong. But it is wrong because of how it was done and to whom, rather than that engrossment happened—had their estates merely been in conquered Sicily, Gaul, or North Africa, no one would have cared. It was that they stole the land of fellow Romans that made their wealth and the inequality it shows rotten.

But that’s not what happened in England. The Normans won. They defeated the Anglo-Saxons, and the Anglo-Saxons tamely submitted to it, generally. The “exploitation” that occurred came because they were conquered and ruled as a conquered people. That didn’t last forever, nor did the yoke. By the High Middle Ages, they were one with their lords in many ways, and united behind kings like Henry V or Edward III. The yoke had transformed them into a more capable people, and empowered leaders who—like the Northumberlands—routinely led them in battle.15

Yet further, to read too much into the Leveller and Digger attempt to view the Normans and peerage through the lens of what amounts to Leftist History misses much of what worked about British society.

As noted by authors like JV Beckett, the middle class generally liked the traditional aristocracy and wanted much more to become part of it than to replace or destroy it.16 Similarly, as noted by Cannadine in Victorious Century, “the most pronounced social change of [the late 19th century] was the creation of a new sort of working-class culture, which was in many ways profoundly conservative, as would be evidenced by the number of pubs in working-class districts named 'The Earl of Beaconsfield' or 'The Lord Salisbury'.” Whatever their class, those who weren’t social malcontents were more than happy with the generally capable and pro-social aristocracy they had, and had no desire to tear down Chesterton’s fence and replace it in the name of vague ideological goals.

Those bonds between classes that made for a functional society were forged by the supposed yoke. Further, the supposed yoke had threaded the needle and created a people that, when part of a properly ordered traditional society, was not hostile or bitter about the upper classes holding the lion’s share of the land. It was the exactions of traditional society-replacing plutocrats that destroyed that delicate balance and made for a much more unstable and unpleasant order. But it must be remembered they were not the Normans, nor the heirs of the manorial system.

Why Rejecting Leftist History Matters

All of this matters in that it gets to the sorts of myths and systems that create and drive societies. Whatever their faults, the Normans did succeed in creating the sort of society Carlyle describes. By the time their spirit sank into the Anglo-Saxon people, Britain became a land not of myopic belchers, but of a people focused on outward exploration, glory, and achievement, a legacy that redounded to their credit everywhere from Virginia to Sarawak. Without the Normans, very little of that would have happened. The Anglo-Saxons just weren’t a people with broad horizons by 1066.

But there is a certain sort who hates it. This is the sort of person who, like the Levellers of yesteryear, is “on the right” when it comes to social issues and even some political issues, but hates anything that is unequal out of a belief that inequality is indicative of oppression and oppression is invariably bad. So they attack inequality or “oppression” where they see it, something that has become particularly prevalent from the right-wing Third Worldist contingent as of late, and end up pushing what is invariably just leftism arrived at via a circuitous route of muddled Leftist History.

What they argue is a leftist telling of history designed to harm the right by degrading the concept of hierarchy, a narrative that can only harm the right and help the left, as it was designed to do.

That should be rejected, and the myths surrounding the Norman Yoke show why. Inequality is not in itself a bad thing, but rather a natural one. The same is true of hierarchy. The same is true of the imposition of order—including order that is good but alien to a conquered people, like the common law system that was so anathema to the Anglo-Saxons.

Keeping that in mind makes for a more coherent study and understanding of history. Yes, deformed degenerates wreaking bloody havoc in the name of atheism and egalitarianism in both the French and Russian Revolutions was in itself a bad thing, regardless of whether the Bourbons and Tsars had their faults. Yes, Robert E Lee was a great man, and his executorship of the Custis estate—through which he was connected to slavery—is to his credit rather than his detriment because of the honest and capable way in which he handled it. No, Southern civilization doesn’t need to be apologized for, nor does colonialism. On and on it could go. Leftist History must be rejected, as must be the myths that flow from it.

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Also, consider checking out my history of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, such as this video on their legacy:

15

Kings in the North by Rose is a good book on this

did a good review of it:

Charles Haywood

Kings in the North: The House of Percy in British History (Alexander Rose)

Cicero described Julius Caesar as a man “of supreme daring, hardened to every risk.” In our hyper-feminized age, such men seem nonexistent, though more likely they are quietly biding their time, and will emerge when the time is right. Such rarity, however, is anomalous in the West, as this book shows…

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2 months ago · 19 likes · 5 comments · Charles Haywood

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New data from 2025 has been released, and so the TFR (Total Fertility Rate) situation is back in the news. As could be expected, the sorts who focus heavily on “natalism” and TFR-connected issues are freaking out, as in many ways the data is quite bad. Or, at least, it’s worrisome if your main measurement for societal success is increasing the total amount of human biomass, with few concerns about who comprises said biomass or what its growth might mean.

Namely, the overall TFR—which needs to be 2.1 for a population group to hold steady—continues to decline from its already low level. Thus, we have a population vase instead of a population pyramid1…and the problem is getting worse by the year.

Adding to the problem is that young women (20-24) now have a lower TFR than middle-aged women in the 35-39 bracket, which is a first ever. Worse, the way the 20-24 demographic’s TFR has fallen off a cliff while the older brackets have not ticked up substantially indicates family formation is not being delayed, but rather just fading away entirely for swathes of the population.

And, of course, while I focus on America, this is a problem pretty much everywhere. Western Europe is particularly hard hit.

To put in perspective how much things have fallen off a cliff, particularly since the 2008-9 Recession, overall TFR is at its lowest ever. White Non-Hispanic TFR has ticked up ever so slightly and converged on the overall TFR for the first time since the War Between the States, but both are nevertheless quite bad.

To look at the birth rate declining in such a way is to see a civilization dying. Or so we are told.

Certainly, it won’t be good for a debt-backed, overly financialized economy premised on infinite growth. Who will need increasing numbers of 96 packs of Gogurt at Costco if our world consists of humanoid robots ambling around to help out the last 7 Americans, all of whom are in a nursing home? Scary stuff! The DJI could drop below 50,000, and Pam Bondi would grimace from behind layers of botox…

But the reality of the situation is somewhat different once the data is zoomed in upon.

Who, after all, is it that poses most of our problems? Who is it that has spent decades trying to destroy Western civilization, and largely succeeding in so doing—as is shown by the South Africanization of America?

The Bioleninist coalition. This is the composite collection of life’s losers who have been molded together into a wrecking ball driven by spite and envy. A good example of such a wrecking ball is the infamous “No Kings” protester pictured below.

And who is it that composes this Coalition? All white progressives and most minorities. Yes, there are some progressive winners—they still side with it out of fear of social ostracization, as Tom Wolfe noted in Radical Chic. Yes, there are some minorities who side against it. Generally, this group consists of white-identifying Hispanics, who are roughly a third (ish) of the Hispanic total, and then some success stories from the other racial groups. These are generally deeply religious, financially successful, and from culturally conservative backgrounds. Unfortunately, this group is quite small; however grossed out they are by transgenders, close to 100% of black women vote for the “trans the kids” party. And so on.

So, for purposes of looking at the data, the easiest rule of thumb is to assume that those who don’t identify as white and who identify as liberal/progressive/etc. are part of the Bioleninist block. That might be inaccurate at the fringes, and they might disagree with the harder-core Antifa types at times, but on the whole it’s accurate. That’s the collection of interests behind the South Africanization of America, for reasons of ideology, cupidity, or both. From the racial angle, this looks like what was inflicted upon Rhodesia by Zimbabwe. From the intra-white angle, this looks like what the post-WWII British government did to the landed elite.

With that in mind, let’s re-examine the data.

For one, the overall white TFR (this includes the white-identifying Hispanics, generally) has not just held steady but bounced upward recently. It’s still too low, but it isn’t really decreasing in the precipitous way other demographics have collapsed.

And, as Ryan Gidursky recently covered, this means white births are back to being a majority in America.2 The white TFR bump was small, but contrasted heavily with a collapse in TFR amongst non-white groups, particularly migrants. “Births from Chinese immigrants are -17.5 percent, Colombians are -10.5 percent, Ecuadorans are -22 percent, El Salvadorians are -15 percent, Guatemalans are -16 percent, Haitians are -16 percent, Hondurans are -15 percent, and Mexicans are -13 percent,” he noted.3

And within the white block, conservatives are having dramatically more children than progressives. For the 25-35 demographic, the difference is 1.43 to 0.51. That is a dramatic shift from, say, the 1980s, when white conservatives had a TFR of 1.35 compared to a white liberal TFR of 1.10.4

This becomes even more dramatic when the data is looked at more granularly. Not only are those who are willing to define themselves as conservative or strongly conservative the only groups with replacement TFR, but the most conservative are having roughly 4 times as many children as the ultra liberal, as shown by the chart below.5 Here, looking at the older age group is necessary because that is the demographic that’s generally done having kids, so it’s a final score of sorts.

A few conclusions, for now, at least, can be drawn from all that.

One is that there will almost certainly be fewer people in the medium-term future.

Second is that the traits that were selected for in the last generation and are being selected for now are very different than the general middle-of-the-road traits that naturally seemed to exist up until the recent past.

Third is that even if the “extremely conservative” are not increasing much in numbers—even their TFR is only replacement-level—there will be dramatically more of them on a relative basis than now, and conservatives as a whole will vastly outnumber progressives.

So, overall, the population of the future will look very different from that of today. The HR harridans will have essentially bred themselves out of existence.

Of course, there is a wrench in those conclusions: they assume that the border stays shut, and more migrants don’t get into the country. Immigrants almost always join the Bioleninist coaltion, so flooding America with 50 million Squatalajarans so strawberries and chicken breasts are somewhat cheaper will undo multiple generations’ worth of biological threshing. The left knows this, which is why it wants to import 50 million Squatelajarans—it can’t reproduce, and the propaganda effort in the schools is largely a failure—so it aims to replace.

But there are reasons to think that all is not lost at the border.

For one, legal immigration rates, refugee admissions, and naturalizations are still too high, but are trending in the correct direction (steeply down).6 Most refugee admissions now are Afrikaners, which is a huge positive.

Similarly, Africa aside (its statistics are probably made up because no one really knows what is happening in there), Third World TFR is falling off a cliff. Unlike white TFR in America, which is holding steadyish, South and Central American TFR is dropping like a rock and falling below replacement level. Soon, the endless Camp of the Saints hordes won’t really exist in the same way, nor will they have the same demographic pressures pushing them here.

Finally, as mentioned previously, immigrant TFRs are falling like a rock, and generally crashing to below white American TFRs. The “refugee” who arrives and has ten kids issue is a problem in Britain, but isn’t so much an issue in America at this point, on the whole.

So, if the border remains defended—the main thing Republicans can do and why it is so important to not give into despair and hand the country to the race communists—America has a chance of being populated primarily by the sorts of people who read this publication in just a few generations. How exciting!

It’s More Than Just an Advantage, It’s a Referendum

This is important beyond just the immediate political advantages.

Yes, changes to the population via this demographic transformation are going to give those of us whose bloodlines make it through this genetic bottleneck an opportunity to remake the world in our image. Purging the progressive attitude opens up a whole host of currently inconceivable opportunities. Much will be back on the table. Recolonizing Rhodesia, colonizing Mars, finally building the nuclear fleet we need, and even solving the crime problem are on the table.

As Europe found after it hanged the crime committing 1% of the population for centuries, much is possible once the demographics change even slightly. That is even more true when they change as substantially as they currently are changing.

And make no mistake, the population is changing. Already, we’re seeing data that young men are becoming more religious. There’s the general rightward drift of the white male youth. Right now, these changes are ripples, but they are growing into demographic waves. The way young women remain leftists in orientation shows propaganda such as that pushed by the schools matters too…but even that is increasingly blunted; ~80% of children of conservative parents remain conservatives, and it is they who are having kids and filling the school districts.

But the most important thing is why they are doing so: birthrates are a referendum on the environment in which those who would be having children live. Birthrates are a referendum on an environment rendered ugly by progressive views of art and architecture, rendered unsafe by progressive policies, and rendered disgusting by progressivism’s Bioleninist tendencies.

The question is who would want to have kids in the shredder of humanity that is the Global Favela, particularly the progressive zones within it, those wretched hells of anarchotyranny characterized by squalor and crime but also oppressive regulation and taxation? Very few, and increasingly fewer, as we’re seeing.

That should be understood as what it really is: a spiritual referendum on the progressive system that has sunk its claws into our world for over a century now.

Those who buy into it fully or who are attached to the project for the usual reasons of envy and spite—all the constituent components of the Bioleninist Coalition—are spiritually dead. They are rejecting existence itself, for they no longer want to exist. They no longer see the point.

They are not driven forward by any sense of duty or tradition—they despise duty and hate tradition. They are not driven by any biological impulse—they reject biology and are at war with nature itself, taking what pharmaceuticals they can to combat it. Life is not within them. Technology and ideology have rendered them men without chests, craven slaves of a wretched lord named comfort and equality.

Meanwhile, those who honor tradition and allow themselves to be driven by biology—which is to say conservatives, whatever that term means at this point—are basically fine. Their TFR isn’t great, but it’s civilization-preserving rather than civilization-ending. They still will exist in 100 years…which is more than can be said for progressives.

Naturally, the progressives who are cognizant of the problem rather than merely gazing into the abyss ever more deeply have no idea what to do about this.

Their solutions consist of doubling down on the same disasters that led to this point: more “girlbosses”7 and more kowtowing to progressive female voters,8 namely. Methinks that will prove ineffective, and just exacerbate the “go to brunch until you die childless” problem that currently exists. Or the more outright race communists want “reparations” and so on to improve minority birthrates; given that the growth of the Great Society has tracked the decline in black birthrates, that seems ineffective too. The more cynical want to flood the country with foreigners, but right now they’re losing that battle—and the political fight is unlikely to improve for them as the children they failed to have create a political deficit.

No, there is no solution. This is a referendum on progressivism itself—on the idea that tradition ought be thrown out in the name of equality and improvement. That has created nothing but an adult Disneyworld with shocking levels of crime, not heaven on Earth.

No, as John Adams said, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” We’re finding that to be true in more ways than one. Not only does republicanism fail when the population grows base and atheistic, but it then fails to propagate itself and disappears. An amoral and irreligious people is so ill-suited for the world that it simply stops existing, as we’re now seeing.

If you found value in this article, please consider liking it using the button below, and upgrading to become a paid subscriber. That subscriber revenue supports the project and aids my attempts to share these important stories, and what they mean for you.

7

Throughline by Jill Filipovic

Want More Babies? Make More Girlbosses.

Last week, new data came out showing that the US birthrate has hit an all-time low. Most of this decline comes from far fewer teenage pregnancies; some of it also comes from declines in births among 20-somethings. Birthrates among women in their 30s and 40s are actually up, although not by enough to totally make up for the historically higher rates among teenagers and young adults. These older mothers are more likely to be college-educated than mothers of past generations. They are much more likely to be married than mothers without a high school degree…

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15 days ago · 44 likes · 8 comments · Jill Filipovic

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What We Discuss:

• The Cold War Background: How the Bay of Pigs Disaster led to President Kennedy deciding to set the Moon as a benchmark of Space Race victory, and why he chose it, along with whether the Soviet space program was really that far ahead of America’s. They cover Von Braun and the Germans at the Marshall Space Flight Center, the incredible story of the NASA Langley Research Center, and much more.

• The Engineering Talent Pool: How the mid-century U.S. produced an unprecedented concentration of technical brilliance, and how many of Apollo’s engineers came from educational backgrounds other than what one might expect.

• The Saturn V & The Lunar Module: Examining the “otherworldly” engineering and the sheer scale of the incredibly advanced spacecraft and rockets.

• Saving the Mission: How a handful of personnel in Mission Control made split-second decisions that saved the program from disaster, and how courageous decisions made by NASA leaders over the decade ensured Kennedy’s pledge was fulfilled.

• The SpaceX Connection: Why Elon Musk is the true heir to the Apollo legacy and how SpaceX mirrors the NASA of the 1960s.

• The Future of Human Achievement: What missions today could inspire the same civilizational impact as the moon landings.

About the Guest:

Charles Murray is a Hayek Emeritus Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. While widely known for his sociological work, his history of the Apollo program is considered a definitive look at the technical and organizational triumphs of the Space Race.

Get Charles Murray’s book about Apollo here: ⁠Apollo: The Race to the Moon⁠

See his other books here: ⁠Charles Murray’s books⁠

Find his other work here: ⁠Charles Murray AEI⁠

Note: I am an Amazon affiliate. Using the above Amazon links to Mr. Murray’s books is a way of supporting my work at no cost to yourself.

This weekend, I had the pleasure of visiting James Monroe’s former estate near Charlottesville, called Highland (it used to be called Ash Lawn, but that name has faded from use). While there, I learned a few interesting things, most of which are fun and inconsequential, but one of which is of supreme importance to those interested in history. I’ll discuss it after getting the fun bits out of the way.

One is that the quite attractive country house that sits on the property was mostly built in the 1870s. A fire broke out a few years after Monroe sold the house to pay off debts incurred in a lifetime of public service,1 and destroyed the original Highland house—the one he built in 1799 and that Jefferson, whose Monticello estate is just a few miles away, visited frequently. All that remains of the original Monroe estate is an unassuming guest house (now a wing of the 1870 home), with a beautiful interior.

Secondly, I learned that Virginia, despite its rotten governor, is doing a really cool program this year called the Virginia 250 Passport. These little passport books are available at pretty much all of the Revolutionary War-connected sites, and getting it stamped at one gets you discounts at all the others. The books contain dozens of sites of interest, are attractively produced, and seem like a good way of trying to encourage people to learn about the state’s history. If you live in the state, I’d recommend checking them out.

As a side note, the coolest thing at Highland is a massive white oak tree that dates to before the settlers arrived. It towers above the estate and is incredible to look at. It’s impossible to do it justice in pictures, but here are a few:

Also, there are a number of fun trails on the property that, altogether, add up to 6 or 7 miles. These are free to access, gorgeous, and much less crowded than those at Monticello. There’s also an inexpensive vineyard about a mile down the road if you need refreshments after a walk.

So, those are the fun parts. All in all, it’s a fun trip if you’re not too far away, and the lady at the front desk was super pleasant and informative. They also had a shockingly good book selection, and most of the furniture in the house was once owned by the Monroe family, which adds some great insight into the furnishings of a plantation home in the early Republic.

The downside is that the site is controlled by William & Mary University, and as such is utterly and completely controlled by rabid leftist ideologues who both make the overwhelming majority of the tour about the “enslaved population” of Highland, and even use that slavery connection to justify an almost murderous slave rebellion not unlike the Nat Turner debacle that helped eventually precipitate the War Between the States.

The way the property is laid out, this comes as a shock. The gift shop/entryway is relatively normal, and mainly has books about Monroe’s military service and the Monroe Doctrine. Then there is a garden, with a stunning view of the magnificent white oak. Nearby is the small house in which the overseer lived, and it is largely devoid of moralizing, instead focusing on the hard work necessary to ensure production of wheat and tobacco on such an estate. That comes as a breath of fresh air to those of us who visit such sites, and holds out the tantalizing hope that the whole thing won’t be about the “enslaved population” (it being considered demeaning to say “slaves” now, they always used the ridiculous “enslaved population” term).

Then one enters the slave quarters (though it’s not immediately clear that’s what they were, unless you study the map closely). The building is well built, seemingly healthful, multiple stories, and—even with multiple families in it—little more cramped than that of the overseer. Naturally, such positive observations go unobserved. Instead, the entire building is full of little placards that are not even tangentially about slavery on the estate, and are instead diatribes against slavery and race relations in the United States. Little pamphlets about gender relations are bizarrely included in here as well.

Also, everything is half in Spanish, as if it is critical that non-English speakers (none of whom have any idea what Highland is) desperately need to read the placards about slave revolts and George Floyd that are bizarrely included in what should be an exhibit about the operations of a Virginia Piedmont estate in the early 19th century.

So, what could have been an interesting history lesson on how slavery functioned in that time and place is instead a diatribe about how terrible white people are and always have been. The site could have discussed how slavery worked on the estate, how it compared to the slave islands or Deep South, what Monroe thought about slavery, or anything even remotely relevant.

Instead, there’s a placard about the removal of Robert E Lee statues because George Floyd overdosed, and why “mass incarceration” of violent felons is basically slavery…or something. As with the rest of the exhibit, the half-English/half-Spanish exhibits are just screeds against a functioning society that have absolutely nothing to do with James Monroe, or even the “enslaved population” of Highland, other than that those who wrote them would banish Monroe to the depths of Tartarus if they could.

Unfortunately, it gets yet more absurd from there. One then proceeds around the house and to the interior, and can do so either with a tour guide or alone. We did both. The experience is the same either way: about half or more of the tour and information presented via placards is not about James Monroe, how he ran the estate, what life was like on it, or anything else, but rather “the enslaved population”.

Particularly, there are two slaves, one named George and the other named Peter, that the placards inside the house and the tour guides themselves do not stop talking about. Presumably, they’re the only two whose names are known or who did anything of note, for they are mentioned endlessly and pretty much exclusively as the named members of “the enslaved population”. Both were carpenters whom Monroe either bought or taught to do the carpentry work on the guest house, for reasons of cost of the sort I have written about in a past article.

By all appearances, they did a good job; the woodwork in there now is the same as when it was built, and isn’t ornate or decorous but is attractive in a frontier sort of way. And it is brought up again, and again, and again. Every other sentence from the guides, both outside and inside the house, is about George or Peter. Nearly all of the signs and placards inside the guest house have some reference (also in Spanish, of course) about whatever George and Peter are believed to have been up to at X or Y time in Highland history. Practically every mention Monroe makes of the estate, in the information presented, includes reference to the work…giving a reason to bring George and Peter back into it and explain what they might have done at that time. It’s endless.

Fortunately, that’s just in the guest house; the 1870s house has much more information on Monroe and his times, despite being mostly irrelevant to them. But most of the guest house exhibits are not about President James Monroe and the handling of his estate, or time as a Virginia delegate, member of Congress, officer in the Revolutionary War, multi-term Governor of Virginia, Secretary of State, Secretary of War, or President. Instead, it’s about two carpenters who did a good enough job in their role, just because they were slaves, and thus present an opportunity to chastise the great man of history for owning slaves.

This gets to a much more fundamental problem than just the tour of James Monroe’s Highland being an aggravating bore in some respects: it shows why we can’t get anything done as a civilization, and indeed are declining in most metrics that matter.

The remainder of this article is paywalled. If you can afford a few dollars a month (if you can’t, let me know), I’d really appreciate you supporting my work by becoming a paid subscriber. That subscription gets you access not just to the paywalled articles—about a third of the content, and much of my best work—but also audio versions of each episode. Thank you for your time and support!

The Question of Civilization

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Particularly, Syndor notes that Virginia developed a unique method of raising and cultivating political leaders through a cursus honorum of sorts, and it worked incredibly well…but also would be damned if it existed today because of who it included—and more importantly excluded. Yet it produced the greatest leaders America has seen.

I think that gets to a central political question, so that question and the unique system the Virginians devised to answer it is what today’s article is on. Enjoy!

As always, remember that becoming a paid subscriber not only supports my reading habit and keeps this project alive, but gets you access to paywalled articles and audio versions I record of every articles, as can be listened to below. Also, if you could share this article with just one person who might be interested, I’d really appreciate it. That is how we grow and build, and it’s all thanks to you. -Will

The Only Political Question, As Shown in Rhodesia and Virginia

As I have written about before, much of what draws me to the story of Rhodesia is that it presents the perfect political litmus test: is government that discriminates on the basis of human capability to find and promote excellence good and right because it leads to human and national flourishing, or is it “morally wrong” because it discriminates in favor of excellence rather than enforcing the doctrine of equality?

The Rhodesians resolutely argued that their system was the right and proper one because it was what made them such a fabulously successful country. In under a century, they had turned a land that had been forever stuck in the nasty and brutish Stone Age—a land where cattle were treated better than the accursed humans who scraped life from its soil—into the nation with the highest standard of living for black and white alike on the continent. They had a thriving agricultural sector, a budding industrial sector, a terrific and genteel culture that brought the best aspects of British country life to a frontier environment, and good governance that ensured the flourishing state of things that they had cultivated was protected.

That last bit is critical, for it is what the whole Bush War and UDI imbroglio was about: Rhodesia insisted that everything it had built and cultivated would be brutally murdered if decolonization were inflicted upon it, as had happened everywhere else, most pertinently the Congo and Zambia. To protect the existing, functional state of things, they needed to keep their Responsible Government, as the restrictions and limitations upon mass democracy imposed by it were what made Rhodesia work. If every bushman with a pulse were allowed to vote for the politicians who promised him the most handouts…well, then, from the Stone Age Rhodesia had come and to the Stone Age it would return. Such is, of course, what ended up happening.

But such was not how the world saw it. Kissinger and his ilk saw the “moral” thing as being the destruction of Rhodesia and handing off of it to outright communist terrorists because those terrorists vowed to bring about equality. That such equality would consist of everyone being equally miserable, starvation-wracked, and under the thumb of a kleptocratic tyrant didn’t concern Kissinger, Carter, or any of the rest.

They knew Rhodesia’s enemies were communists. They knew that ending the just, competent, and honest Smith government would bring about only a legacy of tears and ashes. They didn’t care. Such were the diktats of equity, and so what they inflicted upon the last holdout of the Old World. As Peter Baxter notes in his history of Rhodesia:

as Smith was apt to remark, there was more freedom in Rhodesia than anywhere in Black Africa. This was undoubtedly true, and indeed, Wilson was forced to appease some of the most brutal and disreputable men of his times. Rhodesia existed under the rule of law, without a whiff of corruption, and independence had been achieved without a single burning barricade, shot fired or drop of blood shed. With very few exceptions, this was not the case anywhere north of the Zambezi, but it did not matter. Under current democratic norms, it was the right of the majority to rule, and if that resulted inevitably in the looting and destruction of the nation, then so be it.

Such is why a country was destroyed, and why it presents such an interesting area of thought and study: was that worth it? Was destroying a flourishing country in the name of equality really the “moral” thing to do?

Obviously not. Equality is a false god, and the wages of worshipping that evil idol are national death.

However, that can be hard to explain, particularly in the context of American history and America’s political culture.

Was America not built on the principle that “all men are created equal”? Is it not a mass democracy under which we live, and a mass democracy that has brought us so far? Do we really have to choose between flourishing and equality…can’t we have good government and equal voting rights?

The answer is presented by Syndor in American Revolutionaries in the Making: the political system and culture that built the men who built America was not organized around equality, but rather on a complex interplay between aristocracy and democracy. The unique system Virginia devised blended those elements and allowed the best men to rise to prominence and lead first their community, then their state, then their nation.

“Statesmen come to the helm of government only if society has ways of discovering men of extraordinary talent, character, and training and of elevating them, rather than their inferiors, to office,” as Syndor notes. This is the central problem. Any political system must “do two things and do them well: it must develop men who are fit to govern, and it must select for office these men rather than their less worthy contemporaries.”

This is the quality in which Rhodesia and Virginia both excelled: both could produce great numbers of men who both had the “habit of authority” and were able and willing to exercise it well. Hence Virginians dominated the politics of the Founding and Early Republic, and Rhodesians served as officers in a hugely outsized way during the world wars.

Virginia’s Cursus Honorum

The way the Virginians achieved this was particularly interesting. Family ties of course mattered,1 as did wealth. It always helps to have friends in high places, and to be able to treat potential voters to a bit of liquor before they vote, hopefully for you. But that only matters to a point. Nepotism might indeed be a good thing, as my friend has argued well,2 but the promoted heir must still be competent.

It was to ensure the requisite level of candidate quality to maintain the public’s faith in the system that the Virginians developed what was, in effect, a cursus honorum3 applicable to life in Virginia. Each step in a man’s life, from the time he finished getting a classical education to when he grew senile and died, was a step along a path informed by duty, social obligation, and the understanding that he was to prove himself fit for successively higher roles.

The first step was succeeding in the management of a great plantation, as every man who was anybody had to do.4 This was no easy task, given the immense complexities involved in growing tobacco and running a primarily enslaved work force, along with handling tenant farmers and keeping an eye on one’s merchants abroad, soil exhaustion, and the like. Easy or not, it was critical to the formation of the gentleman politician of the sort that made Virginia the heart of the Revolution and early Republic. Through learning how to manage a farm, the planter gained the wisdom necessary for his first steps into public life.5 Hence why success in the business of being a planter was treated as a general precondition for running for office.6 He who lacked the drive or wisdom to steward a plantation would undoubtedly lack the wisdom to decide matters of political importance.

The next step along the path was service in the unelected parish vestry.7 Here, the competent planter could begin to mingle with his more experienced peers in a relatively low-stakes political capacity and start to exercise some political control at the local level.8 This was his first chance at government outside the bounds of his plantation, and was an opportunity to impress both his fellow great planters and the more common locals—future voters—with wise stewardship of the very limited domain of the vestry.9 Such is why membership on a vestry board, though unpaid and often tedious, was a prized position for the local gentry.10 It was the first political step along the cursus honorum, a chance to test and prove oneself in a governing capacity. In the words of Carl Bridenbaugh, “the parish vestry became the great nursery for Virginia’s statesmen.”

The next step along the cursus honorum of Virginia was to win enough respect on the vestry council to be appointed by one’s powerful peers and become a justice of the peace.11 This consisted of being a local judicial officer who handles minor disputes, generally involving property, in the community. It was a tiresome, thankless job as grating as it was time-consuming.12 It was also entirely unpaid. But it taught valuable lessons, particularly regarding the challenges that ordinary Virginians faced, and so was treated as utterly indispensable. He who wanted to advance higher had to serve in the role,13 and so, as Syndor notes, “perhaps half of the wealthiest men of eighteenth-century Virginia served as justices of the peace.”

The next step along the path to glory was to do tolerably well in the justice of the peace role, so that one would become recognized as a promising young political figure and be tutored by the higher-ranking, generally older men who ran the county courts.14 Through this, a young justice of the peace learned the ins and outs of the judicial process one rung higher up the ladder.15 Virginians were a tediously litigious group, so such legal and judicial training was good in itself, but it also served a larger purpose. It showed them how the political decisions made by legislators affected normal people, and thus why it was so important to take that duty seriously:

The work of the county court kept the justices in close touch with life. They saw the effect of general policies, set by the court and by Williamsburg, on the lives of individual men and women. Before them came the rich man seeking to evade listing his carriage for taxation, the tavern keeper charged with abusing an apprenticed orphan, the slave indicted with poisoning his fellow slave, the farmer complaining about poor roads. Nearly all of the Virginians who helped establish the rules under which the Commonwealth of Virginia should operate and who had a large share in setting the Federal system upon its course had seen the faces of men and women, children and old people, freeholders and slaves, when the power of government was applied to their individual lives. In eighteenth-century Virginia men learned to administer law and observed the effects of law before they were entrusted with its making.

Yet further, the county courts were social institutions as much as judicial ones when they met. Drink, socializing, horsetrading, and the like dominated the arcades of Virginia’s magnficient county courthouses. In such settings, the young political aspirant could make himself known to future voters by being a competent, honest, and notable justice of the peace. If he did well, he could commend himself to voters. “Sooner or later virtually every freeholder came to know who the judges were and to have a pretty good idea whom he desired among the gentry to represent him as a burgess at Williamsburg,” Bridenbaugh notes.

Those who succeeded in this role, proving themselves to both freeholders (voters) and the local gentry, were then primed for their first big political role: running for the House of Burgesses. This involved not only a good deal of expense16, as candidates were expected to provide the crowd with intoxicating drinks of varying sorts, but was also indispensable for public-minded men who wanted to go on to do greater things. First working one’s way into the Burgess and then up its ranks was a sine qua non of political power and glory.17

To be elected in this role, they had to be appealing not only to their fellow members of the gentry who had more political experience, but the common men who met the land threshold for voting18: the overly haughty and severe would never win enough votes to be elected19, only those who could appeal to the commons and what established powers there were.20 This kept both oligarchs and demagogues generally out of office.

Once they managed that step up the chain and became Burgesses, they had to submit to the rigors of such a role. Getting to Williamsburg to do their duty to the state was an expensive headache. Much of the work was routine, droll, and aggravating.21 But to do it well was important, for they were always being watched by those above them, and the new members who had special talents were quickly recognized and promoted so that their talents could shine.22

It was only then that men began being promoted to the truly high ranks of power, whether in leadership positions in the legislature, or to national office—once it was established. Only those who had proven their special talents, their understanding of the heavy burden of rule,23 and their understanding of how to be elected by common folks who relied on them to take the job seriously were even considered for such roles.24

That system was why the quality of the Virginia politicians was so high in this period.25 They had to prove themselves each step along the way of a long and winding, often tedious, path to glory.

This Is Now Impossible

Of course, this system was built on conditions very different than our own. There were 400 or so families that mattered politically, and perhaps 40,000 electors who mattered—as each elector represented a household, and about the bottom half of free society was screened out of voting. Both the great families and the average voters had a role to play in the process,26 and the combination was that unique mix of democracy and aristocracy that makes Virginia so fascinating.27

Such is what produced the great men of the period. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, John Randolph of Roanoake, George Mason, and even Patrick Henry followed more or less the same route to power and glory. They each completed the steps along the way to make themselves amenable to the competent part of the population as a whole and the grandees of their flourishing state. That screened for men of immense quality and ensured they were a cut above those of both more demagogic and oligarchic systems.

The problem, of course, is that the system they used to produce great men who still echo through history for their immense talent and competence is that it would be utterly unacceptable today. It presupposed that the state should be ruled by the able, rather than that “equality” was what mattered. Now, most would be horrified by the idea that restrictions should be so limiting as they were, or even exist at all. Syndor notes:

Judged by the quality of the men it brought to power the eighteenth-century Virginia way of selecting political leadership was extremely good; but judged by modern standards of political excellence, it was defective at nearly every point. As for voting qualifications, there was discrimination against women, poor men, and Negroes. There was no secrecy in voting, and polling places--only one in each county--were spaced too far apart.

…

Nearly every detail of the political processes of eighteenth-century Virginia has been repudiated; but, at the same time, the men elevated by those processes have come to be regarded as very great men. Here is a dilemma in an area of fundamental importance, and its resolution is no simple matter. Was eighteenth-century Virginia so full of great men that a random selection would have provided government with a goodly supply of great statesmen? If not, must it not follow that the selective system played an important part in bringing to the top the particular men who managed the public affairs of that day?

…

Such vestiges of aristocracy in eighteenth-century Virginia as property qualifications for voting, oral voting, the power of the gentry in elections, and the arrogation of virtually all offices, local and state-wide, by the gentry, are contrary to twentieth-century principles and ideals of democracy. It is nevertheless certain that the high quality of Virginia's political leadership in the years when the United States was being established was due in large measure to these very things which are now detested. Washington and Jefferson, Madison and Monroe, Mason, Marshall, and Peyton Randolph were products of the system which sought out and raised to high office men of superior family and social status, of good education, of personal force, of experience in management; they were placed in power by a semi-aristocratic political system.

Such is the only political question that matters, and is a slight variation of the same one presented by Rhodesia: toward what ought society be geared?

Is it competent governance that leads to human flourishing that matters? If so, then we need to seriously reconsider mass democracy, egalitarianism, and the like. If we want to flourish again, then essentially all that rot must be chopped away.

Or is it lip-service to the idea of equality, a professed belief that all men are equal and ought be treated as such, that is the highest ideal and thus should be allowed to snuff out whatever in society flourishes so that all is equally rotten? Well, if that’s the case, then we’re succeeding wildly.

But the decrepit nature of our cities, the plummeting birth rate, the slovenly and demoralized nature of our citizenry, the lack of national purpose, the comical corruption and ineptitude of our politicians…all of that hints that perhaps we took a wrong turn and ought return to our political roots in the name of having a functional society. If so, then Virginia shows what that is, and Rhodesia shows how it can be recreated in modern times.

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Becoming Noble

Nepotism is good

Nepotism is natural and good - when it’s done right. It’s time it made a comeback…

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a year ago · 123 likes · 9 comments · Johann Kurtz

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Note: the Apollo 16 CapCom whose name Richard could not remember is Charlie Duke

Listen on Spotify here:

Get Richard’s Book here: GPS Declassified: From Smart Bombs to Smartphones

Get Michael Collins’s Book here: Carrying the Fire

Get Charles Murray’s book about Apollo here: Apollo: The Race to the Moon

Most of these books are research works I consulted for my The Old World Show, namely the upcoming series on the history of Virginia and the First Families of Virginia, which will begin this week with a discussion of the reality and myths of the Old Dominion’s Cavalier roots.

For those who want to skip to the highlights, my favorites this month were numbers 11, 16, and 17, in that order, and the book that was by far the worst—and thus has my funniest description of what should happen to the author—is #10. Further, as a reminder, paid subscribers can listen to audio versions I record for every article. You can do so for this one here:

1. Virginia 1705-1786: Aristocracy or Democracy? by Robert E. and B. Katherine Brown

Virginia 1705-1786: Aristocracy or Democracy? is an interesting book in that it runs contrary to the general message pushed by authors whose work on Virginia I have covered before—namely Carl Bridenbaugh, Clifford Dowdey, Louis Wright, and Morris Talapar—and generally leans toward framing Virginia as being culturally a democracy rather than an aristocracy, despite the influence of the grandees. To support that argument, the authors bring a bevy of interesting land ownership data showing that most land was held by essentially yeoman farmers in small parcels of a few hundred acres at most, that being a tenant was not looked down upon, and that grandee-favored candidates often lost Burgess elections.

However, the overall thesis is mostly unconvincing. For one, the land ownership data is interesting but far from determinative, as most of the large owners owned a great many small tracts that they rented out to tenants, which diminishes the importance of evidence that landholdings were generally small. Further, the matter of elections is interesting, but matters little because Virginia’s history is a story of great men who worked through the House of Burgesses and the Council to achieve great things. With the exception of Patrick Henry, much of Virginia’s history is the story of men like Robert “King” Carter, George Washington, the Lees, and John Randolph of Roanoke—which is to say, large landowners who were generally seen as aristocrats, even if they functioned in a semi-democratic environment.

So this book is somewhat interesting and presents a contrary perspective well enough, which is useful. However, its arguments are made imperfectly, and the overall thesis is unconvincing. It’s also a real bore of a book, as it is very academic, somewhat leftist in spirit, and lacking in the sort of narrative elements that make the history of this period so interesting. The authors needn’t be tossed in a volcano, but their book can be safely ignored.

2. Social Life of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century by Phillip Alexander Bruce

Social Life of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century by Bruce is a fantastically interesting work that covers, as the title suggests, the formative years of Virginia’s history through the lens of how Virginia’s society developed. From horse racing and drinking to country house life and church, this is a fabulous resource for those who want a glimpse into what life was like for some of the earliest and most civilized Americans. Though it covers all the classes in Virginia over this period, by far the most interesting parts of the work come when Bruce shows how a colonial gentry developed out of the colony’s hard-scrabble origins, and how the foundations of the families that dominated the eighteenth century were laid in the seventeenth century.

Yet further, this is an older work, so Bruce speaks freely about the unique spirit of the Anglo-Saxons that led to Virginia being the way it was, English culture of the time and how it influenced the colony, slavery’s relation to social life in Virginia, and so on. There is no dancing around those issues that modern historians find “discredited” or distasteful, and the result is a fabulously interesting work of immense utility in examining the essentially aristocratic culture of Virginia.

This one is a bit dense, and the semi-archaic language can make it hard to read, at times, but it is well worth ordering and reading if the subject interests you. It was one of my favorites, and is fabulously interesting and well-written.

3. The Old Dominion: Her Making and Her Manners by Thomas Nelson Page

Thomas Nelson Page is a somewhat infamous character amongst modern historians of the antebellum period because of how his delightful ability to paint a picture of a romantic and idyllic antebellum life in the Old South, particularly the Old Dominion, did so much to color post-war perceptions of what life had been like in the land destroyed by Grant and Sheridan. What he describes in The Old Dominion: Her Making and Her Manners is essentially the world presented by Gone with the Wind, but in Virginia and with far more noble protagonists…along with the framing of the matter as fact rather than fiction.

That very rose-tinted view of Old Virginia makes Nelson’s work hard to trust implicitly, particularly when he waxes poetic about the tender treatment most slaves received. Still, much of what he argues is well supported, and his stark descriptions of how Reconstruction, more than war itself, destroyed the state are particularly powerful. Further, his charming portrait of what Virginia had been and how such a noble culture of cavaliers was built presents something of an idyll for those interested in hierarchical societies, and makes for a fun basis for further research.

Overall, this one was an enjoyable read. It is imperfect because of how partisan it is, but that’s not something Page tries to hide and most of his overly positive generalizations can be quickly glimpsed and ignored, while his facts and figures that are much more supported are easy enough to glean. Further, the romantic picture he paints makes the history enjoyable to read, and the emotional impact of that, I found, makes its details and anecdotes easier to remember than those of perhaps more factual but certainly much drier works.

4. A Bold Return to Giving a Damn: One Farm, Six Generations, and the Future of Food by Will Harris

A Bold Return to Giving a Damn is a book I have been meaning to read for a while, as it is about a subject I find fascinating—regenerative ranching—and is written by one of the men who has done more than nearly any other to popularize such a concept. In it, Harris discusses how industrial agriculture (particularly synthetic fertilizers and pesticides) destroys the topsoil, how regenerative-style agriculture fixes that problem, and what the economic challenges to shifting toward regenerative agriculture are. He also weaves in his family history, which makes the book somewhat more entertaining to read, and adds color to his commentary on what challenges and opportunities ranchers face.

My main takeaway was that American agriculture needs what English agriculture long had—wealthy agricultural landlords with decades-long time horizons who are interested in improving agriculture, care relatively little about short-term financial returns compared to stewarding the estates, and who have the resources to invest in improved agricultural methods. Harris would probably disagree, though his plowing all the earnings of his operation into expanding his domain and reinvigorating his small town is effectively making him that guy, but the “Coke of Norfolk” model is probably the only way to achieve what he sees as necessary at any degree of scale. Achieving as much would require a shift toward Great Houses (as I spoke with about recently), reattaching social prestige to being a successful agricultural landlord, and much more, which is why I write about it. More on that soon, perhaps.

All in all, this book is worth reading if you’re interested in the subject. It’s not a fabulous read. Harris’s performative libertarianism (“we have workers of all sexual preferences/races/etc. who listen to loud rap music, and that’s great!”) is grating at times, and a fuller discussion of the financial challenges to regenerative agriculture would have been interesting. Still, it’s good enough for what it is, and Harris is a generally sympathetic character. That makes this book a good one to pass around to people who might be interested in the general concept of regenerative ranching and why supporting non-corporate ranchers is important.

5. Behold Virginia! The Fifth Crown by George F. Willison

There isn’t anything obviously wrong with Behold Virginia! The Fifth Crown, but I didn’t particularly enjoy reading it. That might have just been because I was tired of reading histories of Virginia when I read it. However, I think the bigger problem is that Willison’s general hostility to and negativity regarding most aspects of Virginia’s formation, particularly Captain John Smith, the early Jamestown settlers, and the later grandees, is grating. That is particularly so because this is a general history of Virginia from Jamestown to the Revolution, and so his grating negativity and cynicism pervades most of the book.

However, Willison is the only author other than Talapar whom I have so far read who directly confronts the matter of Puritan involvement in early Virginia and its later extirpation at the hands of Gov. Berkeley, which makes it an important read because it is a relatively unique resource in that respect. His discussion of slavery and indentured servitude is also interesting, though it’s less fleshed out than that of Wertenbaker, whose work I reviewed last month.

Overall, this isn’t one I would recommend. There are far better general histories of Virginia that are far less grating. But if the Puritan influence on Virginia Company-ruled Virginia interests you, this one does have some information on that subject that most other works leave out.

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6. Old Virginia: The Pursuit of a Pastoral Ideal by William Rasmussen

Old Virginia by Rasmussen is absolutely fabulous. It is a wonderfully told story of how Virginia’s gentry developed, from the earliest days of settlement into the mid-twentieth century period in which Paul Mellon and a few others did much to revive it. Further, it covers how the concept of the pastoral ideal, as renewed and cultivated in Britain over that time period, did much to shape it. Adding to that is that a plethora of pictures of country houses, portraits of great men, and stunning landscapes are included throughout, which adds tremendously to the work and helps Rasmussen paint a vivid picture of “Old Virginia” over the ages.

The big issue is that Rasmussen is something of a leftist, despite his love of Virginia history, and so the book is full of lengthy tirades regarding the great evil of slavery. I find such moral preening quite tiresome and unnecessary: no one who doesn’t already think slavery was bad will read this book and walk away from it with their mind opened to the modern, progressive view regarding slavery. However, those sections are generally segmented off and can be skipped over.

This is one I would recommend if you are interested in the general subject of the Virginia gentry. Much of it is quite in-depth, the research is excellent, it’s fabulously interesting, many of the pictures and paintings included are ones I had not seen before, and the overall historical discussion of how the Virginia gentry developed is well told. The liberal attitude toward slavery is annoying, but it is at least thoughtful enough and segmented off enough to not be grating.

7. Sir William Berkeley And The Forging Of Colonial Virginia by Warren Billings

The characterization of Gov. Sir William Berkeley presented in most of the older works on Virginia is that he did a terrific job as a young man, before being deposed during the English Civil War, and that he was too old and crochety for the job when returned to duty under the Stuarts, which resulted in the string of avoidable mistakes that led to Bacon’s Rebellion. That general understanding of him was perverted over time, primarily by leftist historians upset with how he turned Virginia into a Cavalier colony (Talapar covers this well), into being that he had always been a ruthless tyrant without redeeming characteristics.

Billings then wrote Sir William Berkeley And The Forging Of Colonial Virginia to present what he frames as an original thesis—that Gov. Berkeley did a great job as a younger man and poor job as an older one. Despite that thesis being far less original than he presents it as being, the biography is nevertheless quite interesting. Billings does a wonderful job of showing how Berkeley’s origins and relationships led him to rule as he did, how his prescience regarding the problems with tobacco led him to push well-meaning but ultimately fruitless diversification schemes on the colony, and what went wrong that turned him into a crochety tyrant. It also shows, somewhat indirectly, how royal rule over Virginia worked in the 17th century and how Virginia’s unique identity and political self-conception flowed from that. Further, it provides an excellent discussion of why Colonial Virginia never really moved past its fixation and reliance on tobacco, despite the flaws of a one-crop economy.

This biography is quite good, and should be interesting to the layman and scholar alike. The narrative flows well, the level of detail presented is neither skimpy nor overbearing, and the thesis is well-supported. Billings being a bit self-inflated about the novelty of his thesis is humorous, but it also helps his obvious interest in and respect for his subject shine through quite well. I would recommend it to anyone remotely interested in Colonial Virginia or the British Empire.

8. The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790 by Rhys Isaac

I ordered The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790 thinking it would be a study of agricultural issue-driven decline in Virginia similar to Dominion of Memories: Jefferson, Madison, and the Decline of Virginia by Susan Dunn, which I didn’t want to reread because I remembered quite detesting Dunn’s work. As that alleged decline is a prominent feature of discussions of 18th and 19th-century Virginia (mistakenly, I think), that would have been a helpful resource.

But Isaac’s work is not that. Instead, it is a lengthy dissertation on political and religious conflicts in mid-18th century Virginia, primarily the religious feuding between Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Baptists. That subject is mind-numbingly dull, and Isaac does it no favors by generally refusing any opportunities to make it interesting, other than one fun line about Virginians preferring ministers who were gentlemen and could hold their religion like their liquor.1

This book is terrible. It is a boring subject written as boringly as possible and adds nothing to far briefer and better-written discussions of the same issues in most other works that cover this period. Unless you want to bore your brain to death, toss any copy of this book you see in the fire, or at least the trash.

9. Babylon Revisited and Other Stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald

I needed a break from Virginia, so I turned to a collection of Fitzgerald’s short stories that I hadn’t read before: Babylon Revisited. Short stories were Fitzgerald’s strong suit, though he found them distasteful compared to novels. That shines through here: all of these stories are delightful to read, but Fitzgerald lacked the passion for them that would have tied them together well, or led to their continuing to be published after about the mid-point of his short career.

So, these are fun, and require little brain power to read through. However, most of the stories in this collection are not as good as his Tales from the Jazz Age collection of short stories. They’re not quite as interesting, fun, or energetic. Instead, they suffer from his general tendency toward melancholy and wistfulness.

Still, they are enjoyable enough to read, and if you like Fitzgerald’s work, then you’ll probably like this collection.

10. George Washington, Entrepreneur: How Our Founding Father’s Private Business Pursuits Changed America and the World by John Berlau

I was quite excited to read George Washington, Entrepreneur when it arrived. Washington’s varied business enterprises are fascinating, and make him much closer in spirit and orientation to the early Virginia greats and grandees than their heirs, most of whom generally shied away from trade and mercantile activities other than selling tobacco as their wealth grew older. Washington, however, tried a great many different sorts of business tied to his estate, from commercial fishing to selling branded flour.

Unfortunately, however, this book is absolutely terrible. Berlau does not do a good job of including anything more than the most anecdotal of details, the narrative is as jumbled and confused as could be possible, there is no overarching theme of note, and many of Washington’s business activities are utterly ignored other than in the broadest of terms. It is, in short, a vapid collection of pointless words that point toward no conclusion and adds absolutely nothing to one’s understanding of the greatest of Americans.

I cannot recommend this book any more than I’d recommend dropping a cinderblock on your foot before jogging to Long John Silvers for a terrible meal. I would suggest tossing it in a volcano, as with Graeber’s disaster of a book on debt, but that would be to grace it with far more attention and notoriety than it deserves. Right now it languishes in the quiet depths of the forever unknown, which is where it deserves to be and ought remain.

11. Lewis and Clark: Pioneering Naturalists by Paul Russell Cutright

When working on my Lewis and Clark series for The Old World Show, I realized that reading an abridged version of the journals and Undaunted Courage, along with a great many articles, was enough for constructing a good narrative of the mission, but not enough for the video I really wanted to do—the story of their legacy as scientific adventurers, and why it was blunted.

So, to correct that, I read Lewis and Clark: Pioneering Naturalists. This is a dense book, but an absolutely fascinating and fabulous one. In it, Cutright tells the narrative of the expedition while pausing along the way to discuss what they discovered at each step of the journey, how they carried out the scientific aspects of their mission, how much they contributed to our understanding of this continent, and how a few disasters—namely Lewis’s suicide and the destruction of an important cache of preserved specimens—unduly limited their influence on American science. It includes everything from chapter-by-chapter lists of what they discovered along their journey to in-depth discussions of the importance of those discoveries woven into the narrative of the journey.

This book is really fabulous. Of all those I read this month, this one is probably my favorite, and the one I would most recommend that everyone read.

12. Economic History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century, Vols I and II by Philip Alexander Bruce

If you want to understand how Virginia came to be the social, political, and economic powerhouse it was during the eighteenth century, then this two-volume work on its economic development and growth during the seventeenth century—Economic History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century, Vols I and II—is a set of books you’ll need to read. The books are dense and hard to read through, but are very much worth it, as they present a detailed picture of how the colony’s economy functioned and what led to it functioning the way it did.

Particularly, Bruce discusses the development of the plantation system, the shift from yeomanry to grandees, attempts at diversification, the political implications of the economy developing as it did, how the First Families of Virginia were involved in and benefited from that development, and much more. As a scholarly work that was written to be referenced, it is excellent and without par, at least from what I have read so far.

That said, this is no beach read. I was fortunate to have a few days to devote nearly entirely to reading these two books and taking copious notes on them so that I could use them as the basis for future podcast episodes and articles. Had I not had that spare time imposed by catching a cold that stuck me on the couch, these two alone would have taken me most of the month to get through. So, I recommend them, but know what you’re getting into.

13. Colonial Virginia: Its People And Customs by Mary Newton Stanard

Colonial Virginia: Its People And Customs is another book that is great as a reference work, but terribly boring to actually read. In it, Stanard tracks the cultural and social development over time in Virginia by using copious numbers of probate documents, scholarly journals, bills of trade, and so forth to show what sorts of goods the Virginians were ordering from England and using in Virginia, and thus what the material prosperity of the colony was over time and how it developed across key periods. She uses that data, along with related history regarding marriage practices, religious practices, architectural practices, and so on, to show how Virginia developed culturally and socially over those same key periods in its colonial history.

On one hand, this makes it tedious and boring in the extreme. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to read a list of which Virginia planters had grandfather clocks or grand mirrors in the late 1600s. However, that level of extreme detail, all of which is well supported by her sources, also makes it a tremendous reference work to support more anecdotal claims about the colony’s economic development and what flowed from it with hard data.

If you are embarking upon some sort of scholarly or historical project related to colonial Virginia’s development over time, this is a reference book that probably ought be on your list. Otherwise, it can be safely ignored.

14. Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Tender Is the Night is probably the best of Fitzgerald’s novels. It is by far the most coherent, fleshed out, and tied together of any of his works. Unlike Gatsby, it is a full-length novel that doesn’t rely on insinuations. Unlike This Side of Paradise or The Beautiful and Damned, it isn’t jumbled and left feeling somewhat unfinished. Further, as it is essentially about the life that F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald lived as dissipated expats along the Riviera, it’s full of a great degree of vivid details that couldn’t be known without real-life experience, which makes it really come alive as a story.

However, it probably isn’t the best to read, as it is incredibly depressing. All of his novels are depressing like that, in contrast to his short stories, but this one is the most depressing. Particularly, I found it creates a general sense of unease and disappointment while reading it.

Still, it is quite good and worth reading if you like Fitzgerald’s work. Parts of it are fun, the story is well told, and it is full of terrific and memorable characters.

15. Virginia: The New Dominion, A History from 1607 to the Present by Virginius Dabney

Virginia: The New Dominion is a book I ordered because it came much recommended. Written in the early 1970s, it’s the tale of Virginia written by a man who obviously loves the state. It covers the full sweep of Virginia history, from the first settlement to the period of racial strife during which Dabney was writing, and does so with a great amount of detail, fun anecdotes woven through it appropriately, and a wonderful narrative pace. It also doesn’t end with the Revolution, as most general histories of the state do, or War Between the States and Reconstruction, as most of the remainder do, but instead continues through into the modern day. That makes it a great resource in many respects, and Dabney does an admirable job of connecting its then-present state with its ancient history.

That said, it is imperfect. For one, Dabney obviously wanted to avoid being labelled as a wrongthinker, so it is full of copious throwaway passages about black contributions to the state that feel quite forced; who wants a passage on Robert E Lee interrupted by a paragraph on the black servants of Confederate officers in the early war? Most of these passages are fine, and some are even interesting. But they do all feel forced, popping off the page as incongruous with the rest of the content, and ridiculous at times. Additionally, Dabney’s generally positive attitude about the modern development of the state was proven wrong by history: economic growth has killed Virginia by filling it with leftists and foreigners.

I would probably recommend this one, but I was confused, at times, as to why it had been recommended to me. The liberalism of someone who should know better is always grating, and that is certainly the case here. Still, it’s a generally fun to read and well done history of the state.

16. The Landed Gentry: Passions and Personalities Inside America’s Propertied Class by Sophy Burnham

The Landed Gentry is a book I had read before, but which I read again because I thought it would pick up where Dabney leaves off and tell the tale of the Chesapeake since the late 1960s. To some extent it does, though it is much broader than that, covering the landed across America. Still, about a third of the book is about what remained of traditional Virginian landed society into the 1970s, from the perspective of someone who grew up in that milieu, and that makes it interesting.

This is not a scholarly work. It is a collection of anecdotes with a bit of data tossed in semi-randomly. But it is a wonderful, fun, and delightful to read collection of anecdotes, one that I can’t recommend highly enough. So, I would certainly recommend you read it if the subject at all interests you, as it is a real pleasure to read, and is quite easy to read.

17. The British Gentry, the Southern Planter, and the Northern Family Farmer: Agriculture and Sectional Antagonism in North America by James Huston

As I discussed the findings of this book—The British Gentry, the Southern Planter, and the Northern Family Farmer—in depth in my article on the yeomanry of America, I won’t reiterate all that here. You can read that article if interested. What I would say is that this is one of my favorite books on American agriculture, as it cuts through a multitude of myths, from the claim that slavery was economically inefficient to the tale that Virginia was dying because of soil exhaustion in the 1840s, from the myth of the yeoman to the claim that the South was poorer than the North. Huston brilliantly shows from where all of those myths came, why they are false, connects them to the Cavalier-Puritan split, and shows how they led to the US Civil War. It is a fascinating read, supported by an abundance of data, and it is written in a way that makes it delightful to read despite how dense the subject matter is. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Read the article in which this book features prominently here:

In Conclusion

I hope you enjoyed those book reviews. They are always fun to write, and most of the books are fun to read. If you have made it this far, and are not yet a paid subscriber, I would really appreciate you upgrading your subscription. These books are quite expensive, and your subscriptions on here enable me to continue reading and reviewing works like these, all while producing new content that you find interesting. Thank you!

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Featured image credit: Stephen Lea, CC BY-SA 3.0 <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/>, via Wikimedia Commons

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