It’s easy to see prole drift in terms of dress, speech, and manners. All that is required to see how far things have degenerated is to look at an old video of life in an English town or an American railroad station. Things were imperfect in the past, of course, but at least they tried to inculcate some sense of dignity and decorum in public places while avoiding vulgarity.

Today, that is very much not the case, as I wrote about in my original article on prole drift.

Anyone can go to the airport and be utterly horrified by what they see, smell, and hear.

The decline is so immense and omnipresent as to be impossible to avoid knowing or thinking of, even if one does the “liberal” thing and swallows his disgust reflex while pretending that to be virtuous because of tolerance or some such synonym for civilization-wrecking apathy.

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Sources Referenced in this Episode:

I am an Amazon Affiliate. If you would like to support the show at no added cost to yourself, you can do so by using the links below to order and read the sources I used to create this episode. Thanks!

Armes, Ethel, Stratford Hall: The Great House of the Lees, https://amzn.to/4wxAAfl

Burt, Nathaniel, First Families: The Making of an American Aristocracy, https://amzn.to/4r0KLYG

Cole, Ryan, Light-Horse Harry Lee: The Rise and Fall of a Revolutionary Hero, https://amzn.to/4wiZOy3

Connelly, Thomas L., The Marble Man: Robert E. Lee and His Image in American Idea, https://amzn.to/4ywRf4j

Crocker, H. W., III, Robert E. Lee on Leadership: Executive Lessons in Management, https://amzn.to/4gvXpds

Dabney, Virginius, Virginia: The New Dominion, https://amzn.to/46gVW69

Dowdey, Clifford, Lee: A Biography, https://amzn.to/46lDf14

Fleming, Thomas, A Disease in the Public Mind: A New Understanding of Why We Fought the Civil War, https://amzn.to/4yzbiix

Flood, Charles Bracelen, Lee: The Last Years, https://amzn.to/4gDcA4I

Freeman, Douglas Southall, R. E. Lee: A Biography, https://amzn.to/4gkaqrx

Hendrick, Burton J., The Lees of Virginia, https://amzn.to/4xshjNe

Lee, Cazenove Gardner, Jr., Lee Chronicle: Studies of the Early Generations of the Lees, https://amzn.to/4q7GiTI

Longacre, Edward G., Fitz Lee: A Military Biography of Major General Fitzhugh Lee, https://amzn.to/4xkLNAu

Nagel, Paul C., The Lees of Virginia: Seven Generations of an American Family, https://amzn.to/4wUxkfi

Nichols, James L., General Fitzhugh Lee: A Biography, https://amzn.to/4qeURoz

Royster, Charles, Light-Horse Harry Lee and the Legacy of the American Revolution, https://amzn.to/3TKWspX

Sanborn, Margaret, Robert E. Lee: A Portrait, https://amzn.to/3SA6EkN

Thomas, Emory M., Robert E. Lee: A Biography, https://amzn.to/46qVL8c

Transcript:

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One was that the death of FDR ought not be an impediment to America’s rise as a Britain-like power, a social democracy that used massive social spending and egalitarian legislation at home and a mixture of hard power and economic leverage abroad to become something of an empire of liberalism. This was broadly in line with the desires of the Anglo side of the Anglo-American Establishment, which was paring back the empire as it liquidated the accumulated wealth of centuries to pay for a ruinously expensive welfare state and doubled down on maintaining the City of London’s status as a financial empire. While Churchill would have preferred the old empire remain intact, his nation lacked the will to do so, and he had been replaced in power by socialists who were happy to hand the empire off to the natives, the Americans, or even the communists, so long as they could leave.

Internationalists in America preferred this strategy, and chomped at the bit to pick up where Britain had left off. Generally, this was justified either by appealing to pro-democracy sentiments, or by pointing to the threat of world communism. The latter justification became more common as the Cold War began in the bitter ashes of postwar Europe.

The other strain of thought was the old American conception of our nation and its role in the world. To such men, America should be neither a social democracy nor an empire. It did not need welfare or the high taxes required to pay for it. It needed a strong military, but primarily to keep Fortress America strong, not to influence the politics of Equatorial Guinea or the social organization of Burma. Such is what the Europeans did; America’s business was business, and questing after dragons to slay would irrevocably reshape America for the worse.

Such is what Harry Byrd thought. He was always a strong proponent of national defense, but understood that America was, as Pat Buchanan would later put it, A Republic, Not An Empire. So, he thought, America would have to resist the siren song of empire in the early years after World War II. It needed to retrench, to shrug off the absurd regulations and tyrannies of FDR’s regime, and get back to the business of America while protecting it from attack.

This set up an important conflict, and helped shape Byrd’s opposition to the even more revolutionary social change that was to come with the Civil Rights Movement.

Before the resistance to Truman began, the Democrats hoped that they would be able to reunite in the wake of FDR’s death. It was Truman who was president, after all, rather than outright communist Henry Wallace. Perhaps the Southern Democrats like Byrd, embittered over FDR’s New Deal policies and attempts to transform America, could be brought back into the fold…

But it was not to be. Though he gave Truman a shot, Byrd found his reform-minded, internationalist approach to government unacceptable. And so Byrd mobilized the bipartisan conservative coalition he headed, firmly entrenching himself as its Congressional leader in a fight to bring back old America that pitted him against those who dreamed of a new America dominated by imperial ambitions and domestic equality.

Standing firmly athwart that tide, Byrd and his conservatives battled Truman at every level. Domestically, he fought not just for the traditions of the Old Dominion, but to dismantle wartime economic controls, check aggressive labor unions, and block the expansionist welfare measures of Truman’s “Fair Deal.” Internationally, Byrd resisted Truman’s open-ended, massive global spending—rejecting foreign economic aid programs like the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan, and warning that the permanent entanglements of NATO would bankrupt the republic. His opposition to Truman was grounded in a “Fortress America” philosophy of balanced budgets, national economic vigor, and national defense rather than imperial obligations.

Overall, this was a battle Byrd fought in a desperate attempt to shield the Old Dominion and the nation from a dangerous drift toward socialism and imperial overextension. This is important, for it presages the fight between Byrd and Truman over Civil Rights, the next step in the transformation of America, and shows what America’s path might have been had it not transformed itself for the ostensible purpose of fighting the Cold War.

The primary works used for this article are Harry Byrd of Virginia by Ronald L. Heinemann, Harry Byrd and the Changing Face of Virginia Politics, 1945-1966 by J. Harvie Wilkinson (III), The Byrds of Virginia by Alden Hatch, Virginia: Bourbonism to Byrd by Allen W. Moger, and The Byrd Machine in Virginia by Michael Lee Pope. Ronald Heinemann’s Depression and New Deal in Virginia: The Enduring Dominion was less instrumental in this article than Part II, on FDR, but was nevertheless a useful read as well.

Read Part I here: The Byrd Organization, The Bulwark of the Patrician Order

Read Part II here: The Man Who Stood Down FDR

Listen to the audio version of this article here:

Opposing Truman

The Domestic Battle

Byrd had the advantage, as his fight with Truman began, that the new president was of a decidedly poor political position compared to FDR, who, whatever else, had spent most of his presidency in a position of dominance and strength. As Wilkinson notes:

Lacking the stature of his predecessor, Truman seemed vulnerable to congressional leaders, many of whom were former colleagues... The country was no longer charged with the crisis of depression, recession, or world war, and congressional leaders after 1945 were freer to resume their bickering with the executive.

This meant that Byrd was on relatively solid political ground when he prepared the conservative coalition to resist Truman’s attempts to transform America, declaring in a speech that Trumanism was “a definite and precise trend toward socialism and away from the free enterprise system. [It] is contrary to the basic principles upon which America was founded and has grown great.”

But while the battle between Byrd and President was one for which the conservatives were prepared, it was not one that was pre-ordained. It could have been avoided, had Truman charted a more traditionally American path.

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Today, we are here to talk about never despairing. That is good, for despair is a sin.

But it must be admitted, at times, that things can look bleak. This is particularly true when one gazes out upon the bleak, disparate impact-ravaged economic situation for young white men in particular, and then examines the sort of craven and cupidity-driven reaction that the Established sorts, whether in private or public life, have had to that situation. Such is why things are so bitter, and economic populism is increasingly popular. The haute bourgeoisie is always detested for its tendency to act like Smaug in a recliner—just see what Thomas Carlyle said about the plutocrats of his day, and now seemingly the entirety of the Establishment embodies such a mode of living.

Where, it is asked, is the sense of duty? Where is the training in virtue? Why can he with millions to spare never seem to use it for anything worthwhile, politically, culturally, socially, or even personally? It’s that story of Warren Buffett refusing his daughter’s request for financial aid in renovating the kitchen to make life easier for his granddaughter,1 over and over again, played out across our politics, economy, and culture time and time again. There are many counter-examples of course, from incredibly kind and generous family members to a talented boss giving a young man a chance. But reality has a way of being bleaker than those nice stories for many, and this sends many off a cliff of despair, particularly when it interacts with yet more troublesome issues, from mass immigration to rampant crime. Those who refuse to contemplate reality in one slice of life have a way of doing the same time and time again, across every issue. This is particularly true when they are wealthy enough to avoid reality, and thus have no real incentive to re-examine their priors.

Such is disappointing, but it ought not be depressing: this is the cycle of things, and what matters far more than how he who made—or at least accumulated—the money acts is how his heirs act once they inherit it. Assuming it doesn’t all go to some horrid “charity,” which is to say a fund promoting some poisonous form of social subversion worldwide and providing cushy jobs to well-paid bureaucrats as it does so. Coming after multiple generations of expropriatory death taxes and what amounted to an economic revolution under FDR, Truman, and the rest of those pinko sorts, the current wealth Establishment and economic elite entered a world practically anew, with nothing to guide them in how to live as something more than accumulators.

All the folkways, traditions, mindsets, and duties once thought about regarding the intersection of wealth and duty were wiped away in the sea of bitterness that came with the Red tide of the mid-twentieth century. From this come many of the present neuroses and poor behavior for which that wealth elite is known: with rare exceptions, those who came into their fortunes recently tend not to use them well. The mercantile spirit is too strong, the lessons learned through a life of accumulation too different from those required for prudent stewardship of the sort that is honored and respected. But there is nothing new under the sun, and that, in particular, has been seen before.

In fact, this is a lesson told better by Old Virginia than anywhere else.

Who, after all, were the dynasts of the First Families of Virginia? A collection of used car salesmen along the frontier, essentially. William Byrd the First was a goldsmith by birth, and his uncle Stegge–the one who created the fortune–was a rascal so good at wheeling and dealing that he made a fortune trading with the Indians. King Carter made the famous Carter fortune–hundreds of thousands of acres and a thousand slaves–primarily through ripping off the Fairfax Proprietary when he was supposed to be working as its faithful agent. One of the FFV dynasts–I will forbear saying who–was supposed to receive 1000 acres in headright land for the indentured servants he brought over; involved in the government at the time, he added a zero to the end of that, and thus was a great fortune of 10,000 acres born out of stolen public lands.

Richard Lee the First liked to point to his supposed Norman heritage, but was the son of a clothier and brought that mind and background to all he did.

There is a fun story on this: Richard Lee I is famed as one of those true Cavaliers of the Old Dominion, the Fifth Crown, for he sailed off from Virginia to meet with the man later to be known as Charles II after Charles I had been deposed and disposed of by Cromwell’s crowd of Levellers. In the Low Countries, he pledged Virginia’s undying loyalty to the Royalist cause, and Charles bestowed upon the state the Old Dominion title as a reward for its loyalty, considering it the fifth crown alongside Wales, Scotland, Ireland, and England. A glorious moment for the Cavalier cause! Or so it is remembered. Perhaps it happened that way. What is for sure true is that Richard insisted upon being paid to take a cargo ship with him on his diplomatic mission, carrying his own tobacco in its hold, which he sold at a profit while meeting with the king, and with those proceeds he brought back a few dozen indentured servants, for which he insisted upon the headrights due him–50 acres a piece. This land was to be the basis of the Lee fortune, and Virginia’s mercantile ruling class soon surrendered to Cromwell’s Navy so as to not risk the tobacco trade. Craven wouldn’t be the right word, but only just.

But then something strange happened. Virginia changed. The planters always cared about their profits, of course, but suddenly they had more to them than that. They, well, cared about their colony and saw it as their duty to govern it well, not just to find ways to loot the treasury.

Virtue, honor, duty, cultivation…the sort of men whose culture and traditions built the Founding Generation were suddenly extant, and so the century after Bacon’s Rebellion was a century of social peace largely characterized by prosperity, and overwhelmingly characterized by gentry leadership of the military and political apparatus in the colony, and its social and cultural development. Their heirs were the ones trusted to lead the Revolution, and they did so quite well. More than anywhere else in the Anglo New World, Virginia became a state that was truly an aristocracy–a state governed by the best men, with those men being the best in every respect of the term. The Old Dominion flourished as a result, and was the leading colony when Revolution came, having successfully built itself to that point.

So, what happened? How was this achieved? Why were the inheritors so different from those from whom they inherited?

For one, the Cavaliers. Unwilling to live in a dour land of Puritanism and Presbyterianism, those dashing Cavaliers in their plumed hats and leather riding boots arrived with a dash in Virginia, and were much respected by the locals. After all, their manner of life was far more attractive than the hardscrabble nature of things in Virginia up to that point, and the intermixture of settler families with Cavalier refugees wrought a change in outlook in Virginia.

Contrary to myth, Virginia was not founded by Cavaliers, nor were there ever enough Cavaliers to really dominate the state. But there were enough to leaven it, and give it a different sort of culture from the “used car salesmen along the frontier” one it had been developing.

This was particularly true of outlook and education, through which the fledgling gentry culture began to form.

Once Cromwell was thrown out and peace of a sort returned to England, even with that Dutchman and his Whig friends coming across the Channel, Virginia and England could have stable relations again. Particularly, the planters could communicate a bit more with those Cavalier families into which they had married, and learn from them the importance of education of a certain sort: a liberal education, which at the time meant being trained in the art of being a flourishing man and steady ruler through the lens of the Classics.

And so the sons of the first families sailed to England to get such an education, typically at Eton, then “Oxbridge,” then the Inns of Court, particularly the Middle Temple. They learned their Plutarch, read their Livy, studied their law, and returned to Virginia with a very different conception of life and what it was all about. They might still have been acquisitive sorts–Thomas Lee and William Byrd II certainly were–but they cared about much more besides. They were well read, refined, and did care about governing well, not just in their immediate self-interest. They had seen what a real gentry was like, in practice, and wanted to act in such a manner. They wanted to be such men, and brought the culture and traditions surrounding wealth, stewardship, and duty that they learned abroad back to their state.

That wasn’t all. As a saying from the 19th century went, “In Kentucky, men are born, but in Virginia, they are foaled.”

That was a good way of putting it, for it adds the racehorse-like element to what they did, and how they were. This was not a class of men as might be imagined from what I just said. They were not overeducated, overpolished, overrefined. They were excellent. Cultivated, yes, but brimming with vitality and power too. The Classical training was the bridle that guided them in the right direction; the vital life force surging within them is what drove them forward.

And from where did this come? Their training on the plantation. They were raised with the goal of inculcating in them the habit of command: that swaggering mixture of imperiousness and true leadership that was to define the planter class in the Golden Age and the Revolutionary period. A sense that not only was leadership theirs by right, but that privilege imposed upon them an immense duty to wear it well, to do honor to their name.

There was much involved in this. Noblesse oblige was the most classically chivalric part, as was the understanding that “leadership” meant not just writing laws, but leading the militia. And so George Washington chomped at the bit to fight in the West, Light Horse Harry became one of the few great American cavalry commanders…as later did JEB Stuart, and even Richard Henry Lee–the man of laws and declarations–rallied the local militia to drive the British raiding parties off the Potomac when they dared attack his dear Stratford and Chantilly.

Further, they were trained from birth to understand that the excellence of a man can be seen in what quality leaf he grows, as that immediately visible mark of a man was a sign of how he exercised Dominion over his lands, from the soil to his dependents. Such required a driving will to put one’s beliefs into practice after ensuring they were the correct beliefs, creating that mixture of study and action for which they were known. It required imperiousness, hence why they had a reputation for being little devils as children rather than the sedate and well-behaved pupils of New England’s dour Puritan meetings. And they were raised with the understanding that violence is a necessary part of life; from hunting to Indian fighting, they were from birth “blooded” and made accustomed to the unpleasant side of Dominion, taught that authority only exists insofar as it can be imposed. Preferably, that need not be the case. But perhaps it must be, and only he who can impose it neither with squeamishness nor lust can properly understand this and apply the lesson of it to the government of a republic.

And led by such a class, what a republic Virginia was turning out to be! No egalitarian republic was this. No, like all great republics, it was a relatively aristocratic one. Voting power was vested in the hands of the responsible–like Rhodesia centuries on, this meant only those who had shown themselves to be successful stewards in their own lives, principally through the ownership of land, were entrusted to steward the future of the polity by voting.

Their choices came from amongst the gentry. Occasionally a new man like Patrick Henry might pop up and be taken in, but on the whole it was the same list of families that proffered candidates for election after election. The Lees, Carters, Corbins, Custises, and so ons. You know the names, for you have read them in every history of the early republic worth its salt. There were perhaps two dozen families that really mattered, and a couple hundred families at most who participated in the running of the government.

But–you might be thinking–Will, what you are describing is just an oligarchy. Brazil has an oligarchy. It is terrible. Why the devil ought we emulate that?

Because that is not all it was. I said earlier that they were an aristocratic republic. That they indeed were, for those at the top chiseled themselves into being the very best sort of men they could be. Thus was Virginia ruled by the best, and in being the best they could lead their colony so well.

It should not be surprising that those so obsessed with Rome they modelled a new nation on it should have followed the classic pattern that made the Roman aristocratic republic work, when it was followed closely, as a general thing. They, like the Romans, built a cursus honorum–a sequential ladder of public offices that builds the most promising men into steadily better leaders with steadily more responsibilities–to do so, to screen the wheat from the chaff in their own class, and preserve the public’s respect for it as a governing class.

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The first step on this ladder of office was the plantation. As I discussed earlier, the quality of the leaf a man grew was the first mark of his character–he who indulged in rotten theories and produced a poor crop, he who could not master his workforce, he who simply could not well manage his own affairs–was excluded from public office entirely. He would never be invited into the inner circle, for he had failed that first test of a man: using well the resources he had to establish his financial independence on sound footing, and showing he possessed that most prized of all things, a gift for effective leadership.

If such is what he had, then he was chosen by the older members of his class to lead. At first, the stakes were low, and entirely undemocratic: the Established Church was the only church in Virginia over this period. Anyone not on the fringes worshipped as an Anglican, and the Anglican vestries–a Norman institution brought over with the Conquest–were an undemocratic council governed by the gentlemen of the area. So, a young man who grew good leaf would, when a vacancy opened up, be asked to join the vestry; he was chosen on the basis of his demonstrated talents, not elected.

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This was the first test in a number of ways. For one, if he refused to do his duty and join, he would be forever ignored in polite society. A man who did not do his duty was not a man. Further, if he did a poor job, he would not be allowed to rise in the ranks and eventually join the real government of the colony. He had to demonstrate that he could manage the unpaid headache of managing and adjudicating local moral and administrative affairs–bastardy, minor theft, road maintenance, and the like–while still growing good leaf, mind you. This was the Virginia alternative to the town meeting of the Puritan states: it was comparatively undemocratic and inegalitarian, and is how the community was governed.

He who did well in this table stakes role was then given more opportunity to prove himself: the next step up the ladder was being a Justice of the Peace on the county court. These courts were community gathering places, and court day each month was a brilliant spectacle. Disputes over property were adjudicated. Criminals might be in need of punishment, disputes escalating into potential duels in need of settling before they became feuds, the metes and bounds of land decided on…all could come up, at any time, requiring a wide base of knowledge and experience informing capable judgement across a wide variety of subjects involving a similarly wide variety of people. You can see why competence was so highly prized: without it, things would have fallen apart.

In any case, this position was also unpaid, also tedious, and also important. For this was a man’s first experience with the county electorate–the roughly upper half of the male population–and was thus his opportunity to prove himself to them as someone who was fair, learned, competent, and possessed of that habit of command that marked him as a man truly of his class. Whimpering appeals to the mob generally did not go over well in those days, for only responsible men could vote. This was his opportunity to see how the law operated in practice–for he was enforcing that which Williamsburg declared–and was a further test on his time, resources, and competence: he still had to grow good leaf and manage his duties on the vestry, even as he did this.

If he did well, he would be invited to be one of the candidates running for elected office in the House of Burgesses. To win, a man almost always needed this nod from the established power players in the county, and to get it he had to have demonstrated his excellence in those three prior ways mentioned. To win, he generally needed to be reasonably well-liked by voters–some time spent fighting Indians in the militia helped quite a bit, as did having a reputation for being fair on the vestry and county court.

Those who were too haughty were typically rejected by voters, as were those who were too weak in spirit and eager to please. It took a man who could be certain in his convictions, and preferably of popular ones, to win. Being from the right family with lots of tenants and dependents helped as well, as voting was open, and it’s rare a man’s tenants–they qualified for the ballot if they rented a certain amount of land–would vote against him or his primary candidate of choice.

Thus was the wheat again cut from the chaff in this limited democratic process, and were the best chosen to lead their fellows in the Burgesses.

There, in Williamsburg, talent was refined yet further. Though their expenses were paid, it was not a profitable post, and was a major drain on time, though also a major boost to one’s honor and standing. In the role, one first saw the dreary drudgery that went into writing legislation and getting it passed, and those who understood the nature of the process and the importance of doing it well were picked by old-timers to have their talents further refined and developed. If good speakers, they were chosen and encouraged to do that more. If good writers, they were put on more of the committees drafting legislation. And so on.

It is for this reason that Jefferson was sent North with letters of introduction noting his remarkable knack for writing powerfully, though he was a poor speaker, for example; that talent had been noted, cultivated, and made exceptional. The same was true for Richard Henry Lee, for James Madison, for Francis Lightfoot Lee, and for many of the others who brought their particular talents to bear to make the Revolution a success and craft the early republic in their image.

The peak of the cursus honorum, for those of great wealth and standing in the state, was membership on the Governor’s Council. The highest position to which a colonial could aspire, it was essentially a combination of the state Senate and Supreme Court, a select body that stood as the court of last resort and the higher body of the legislature. It was, in many ways, a House of Lords for Virginia, with the newest addition to that circle of aristocrats chosen from amongst the leading families every time a member died, encouraging them to keep competing to accumulate land, honor, and reputation. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t achieve this topping honor!

One can see how this was different from Virginia’s origins: out of new cloth in the new world, a gentry had formed. It modelled itself on the gentry of England, but it was different in a few important ways.

Its economic concerns required much more exacting management, for one: rented land in Virginia was never as profitable as in England, and a man had to grow his own tobacco to build his reputation. Further, it developed organically, but was more regimented. A man had to do these things to be a man. They weren’t the additions to a life at the top, but the preconditions for being considered part of that top, rather than just rich. And it was government, much more than military service, that was deemed appropriate: the gentry of England might spend its youth first touring, then fighting on the Continent, or in the colonies. In Virginia, it spent it farming and governing, putting the classics it studied to life and only fighting Indians or rebels occasionally.

But though different, it did bring to America that which was most important about the Anglo-Norman landed elite: an understanding that the privilege of great wealth carried with it great duties and responsibilities, and that one’s training in life should be oriented towards those responsibilities. From the raising of little devils who were nevertheless sternly instructed in Classical virtue to the education of students taught to be gentlemen rather than mere merchants, their lives were ordered around this understanding even as they were also taught to be attentive to their financial affairs.

What was key was that it was no longer just wealth that ruled, but that mixture of steady and honorable government by the best for the purpose of ensuring that those who were able, whatever their level of inherited wealth, could flourish. That was quite a different thing from the early days of the colony, when it was much more oligarchic than aristocratic.

We hear much about meritocracy now, but this was really it: cross-domain excellence ensuring the perpetuation of a system that allowed the gentry to rule and those men of good character and hard effort to flourish, and perhaps eventually rise to the top…as Peter Jefferson did, much to the benefit of his son, Thomas. This was not the supposed meritocracy of spelling bees and Excel spreadsheets, but of the frontier baron and his yeomen retainers. It was a republic of excellence, an aristocratic republic in the highest and truest sense of the term.

Thus was Virginia able to lead the Revolution, and make the early Republic in its image. It could only do so because of how its men had ensured that they were the best, using the wealth of the first couple of generations to become a true gentry, rather than a mere collection of extractive oligarchs.

But that is all in the past. What about in modern times? We are no longer in a new world of primeval forests, Indian bands, and plantations.

The importance of this has not faded. Just look to Virginia in the middle of last century. It was a poorer state, relatively, than it once had been. No longer did it possess West Virginia; it was wracked by the legacy of a war that reduced its way of life to cinders. Perhaps half a billion dollars in capital was destroyed by the war; 25 million ounces of gold, at $20 per ounce par, as it was then. $105 billion in privately held capital erased, in modern terms, from a population of perhaps a million and a half people.

Some efforts at rebuilding had been tried, and some–namely those instituted by Governor Fitz Lee to bring capital to the state—succeeded. But still, it was a tired and poor state in the early 20th century. One that could have, if differently led, drifted into socialism. Into the web of FDR’s attempts to foist his version of toned-down communism upon America.

That it did not was thanks to Harry Byrd, who brought the Virginia gentry to life once again. Given the opportunity to run a struggling family newspaper by his father, a noted state politician who might have been a great man of his day were he not a drunk, this descendant of the William Byrds of Westover used that opportunity to build a great fortune. He was a newspaper man, an apple orchard baron, and a great holder of equity capital by the time he died…and in family tradition, he used that immense wealth not to live a life of ease but to lead his state and keep it on the path of tradition.

Taking over the state Democratic Party as a young man, he built what is remembered as the Byrd Organization. A state party machine like no other, it was loyal to him personally and existed for nearly half a century.

Using a web of bureaucrats, judges, lawyers, politicos, and men of prominence, it kept a close lid on the politics of the state, controlling almost every position and policy. Harry Byrd used it not to enrich himself, but to keep the state out of FDR’s grasp, successfully resisting much of the New Deal and Fair Deal at the state level while railing against them both from his seat in the Senate. Rejecting the politics of envy, he kept Virginia prosperous–relatively speaking, given the Depression–by making sure it was one in which doing business was easy. Raised by those who taught him how the best of his ancestors and their contemporaries acted, Harry did his duty as a gentleman rather than a grasping oligarch.

Most of all, he led the resistance to the Cultural Revolution. Using a poll tax to trim the electorate down to the successful, much as his ancestors had once done, he ensured that the average Virginia voter was a sober-minded man who generally understood business and the political issues at play, and would vote responsibly. Such men were liable to be hostile to unions, hostile to communism, hostile to FDR, and hostile to all of the rest of the change that targeted Old Virginia. These were men who wanted to keep Virginia the Old Dominion, and trusted him to lead them in doing so.

They trusted him because he was honest and competent, and followed through on his promises. Under his Organization, the state was well-managed. It stayed out of debt, taxes were low, and unions remained non-dominant. It controlled everything, yes, but governed well as it did so. Its competence could be seen along every roadway, in every statement of the state’s financial affairs, in every examination of its economic strength despite the nation’s economic weakness. Further, it did so while keeping things just how its voters liked them. So much as any place could remain a piece of Old America in the days of FDR, Virginia did, and Byrd’s leadership represented the alternative to what FDR represented: it did not take socialism to keep communism away, just wise paternalism, just government, and general competence at effecting steady and responsible development.

That Byrd could do this for decades was for two reasons. One was who he was: a scion of an ancient name, a man whose fortune was mostly his own creation, a competent businessman and honorable politician; he was excellent in all the ways that mattered to the voters of his day, who had their priorities right.

The poll tax is the other element of it: Harry Byrd did not have to be Huey Long because the voter base was different. In Long’s Louisiana, it was redistribution and reform that marked the government’s policies, and Long’s demagogic stump speeches were what led to this; such is to what mass voting, mass democracy, led. In Byrd’s Virginia, an innate conservatism ruled, and Virginia remained Virginia. Change was kept away not by giving in to a different form of it, but by showing those who ought be the ones deciding what was right and how to achieve it.

Eventually, he was defeated. His Organization did not bring in as many youth as it should have, making it gradually more unpopular. But that it could have muddled through, particularly if it looked to the Virginia of the Golden Age to understand the necessity of bringing up new, young leaders. The real problem was that poll taxes were eventually outlawed nationally, and so the Organization could no longer continue on, for the masses could vote and they—primarily the denizens of the DC-connected areas of Northern Virginia—wanted liberalization and change. Thus did the aristocratic republic finally fade, and the Virginia of now crop up.

But the point of this is to never despair, not to wallow in defeat. What can we learn from this tale?

First and foremost, that much can be accomplished when one is led by the best, which means pushing the inheritor generation toward duty and virtue rather than more mere accumulation. The great wealth transfer is happening. Death taxes are high, but not high enough to stop it. The Giving Pledge and like Die with Nothing initiatives are absurdities, but not enough to really blunt it in an appreciable way. For the first time since before FDR, we’ll have a real generation of inheritors.

It’s not too late to make that a trend in our favor. There is a hunger for that about which I speak. Just look to the success of Johann Kurtz’s book at garnering him a hearing amongst a wide swathe of people, from podcasters and tech guys to average Joes with more successful than average businesses.

Look to my friend and the success of his Classical Society, which aims to train men in this virtue. Look at the dunking that happens, and the millions of impressions, every time some celebrity with a nouveau fortune announces they’ll give it to some frivolous cause rather than their heirs. And if you want to see effectiveness, look to how George and Alex Soros are using the Soros fortune to continue pushing leftism. Dastardly, yes, but indubitably effective. Or look to how the Mellons have used theirs to aid conservatism: Tim Mellon’s support for Trump is well known, and another Mellon helped get Project Veritas going and made it a success, back before the recent unpleasantness. Imagine hundreds of families in every state acting in such a manner, and think of what could be achieved. Such is the very real opportunity.

And how to achieve it? There are a few lessons I think we ought to draw from all this.

The first is the importance of embodying that for which we are pushing. We must embody excellence, particularly in our personal affairs. The forces of Tradition are built atop success, and like the Virginians judging one another by the quality of their leaf or Harry Byrd rising to the top once an apple baron because the successful men of Virginia voted for him, successful conservative counter-revolution does and will require that. So, we must make ourselves represent it. The growing interest in creating a business ecosystem amongst our sphere is helpful here, and should be encouraged, as should be general success.

And this applies aesthetically as well as monetarily. Our enemies have adopted the aesthetic of spiritual despair–slovenliness, androgynous freakishness, the deadly sins in personal form. We can and must do the opposite. Good manners, attractive dress, pleasant conversativeness…those sorts of things that make even radical ideas welcome and appealing are a field that has been left wholly open by the left, and ought be one we embrace and dominate. It is what our ancestors did, after all. Look to the attention of Washington and Lee both in being perfectly correct in matters of manners, speech, and dress, not because they were fops but because they understood how it makes one appear trustworthy at first glance. An impression that must be built upon by good character after, but an important first step nonetheless.

Harry Byrd did this as well. He had a reputation for being the most conservative man in the Senate, and his state the most conservative in the Union. Yet he was taken seriously, rather than being derided as a radical, because he was a charming man to whom others were drawn. He had a reputation for being competent and serious, he was personally charismatic, and even most of those who disagreed with him found he was no lightweight to be tossed aside.

Think what might be achieved with this in mind. Think what supposedly radical policies, what dramatic efforts at counterrevolution might be achieved with this. Perhaps more states could do what Tennessee has done, and use felony disenfranchisement to significantly shape the electorate. Perhaps capital punishment could be dramatically expanded. Perhaps taxes could be cut significantly, and the Dewanye Geld ended. Maybe not. But much is possible when those preaching for even dramatic change are normal-seeming people known for being highly competent, and how have a knack for making such ideas seem attractive through the attractiveness of their own spirits.

Second, I use the term conservative intentionally. With Ragnarok comes chaos, and that is not to our benefit. Gradually cutting out the cancerous rot that is the bad and building in its stead that which is good, however, is. The men about whom I have spoken recognized that. Yes, including those behind the Revolution. Why did the Virginia of 1700 remain, in its basic form, in 1960? How did the age of sail turn to the age of the atom with little change in social relations, government type, or what sort of men ruled? Because by 1700, the inheritors had built a system that was worth preserving, and those who inherited from them maintained it over the ages, adapting where necessary without deviating from its basic principles. Thus, in Harry Byrd’s Virginia, gentility mattered much as it had mattered when William Byrd II declared himself an Ornament of Virginia. A great deal changed in the interim, but not all that much in the Old Dominion.

Much must be reformed. But entropy must not be unleashed, for entropy is a fundamentally left-wing force. Instead, those bastions of tradition–the true church, a virtuous upper class, living in the Classical mold–ought be renewed, reformed, and strengthened. The sort of prudence to which this attitude leads tends to be what attracts those who formed the Byrd coalition–the prosperous, the successful, the able, and those who aspire to be such and eventually will in a world built to cultivate and allow human flourishing, as a conservative society should. This conservatism is what separated Virginia from the fire breathers of the antebellum and demagogues of the Depression, and is why it stayed the same as they heaped ruin and change upon themselves.

Finally, the goal of this is not just to win once. It is to keep winning for generations by creating a true upper class, as the Virginians did when they turned themselves into a gentry, one strike of the chisel at a time. If only worked upon for a singular presidential term, for a single gubernatorial term, for a single cycle of the school board, even the best changes can fade away near immediately. Real change is only brought about through the continual effectuation of it for generations, which is why I argue so frequently for the importance of dynasties.

Look to the Jeffersonians. Look to the Jacksonians. Look, if you can bear it, to FDR and Truman’s two decades in power. Look to Harry Byrd’s four decades in power. Look back to the nearly century-long Golden Age of Virginia. In each case, what was possible was only possible because power was maintained for decades, long enough for ideas to be fully implemented and given time to work. We need that too, particularly if the accumulated detritus of a century of bad policy is to be swept away.

The only way we can do this is by creating a gentry like the Virginians did. In modernity, that means building a political machine that is well integrated with an economic machine. We must look to men like Byrd or his ancestors and get involved at every level, building power at the competence-showing economic level that was once represented by the plantation, social level as represented by the church and vestry, local administration level as represented by the courts, and government level as represented by the Burgesses. Or, in Harry Byrd’s Virginia, all of it was represented by the Organization, which worked at all those levels.

What that means in each man’s case will be unique. Perhaps it’ll mean getting involved in a school board. Perhaps in your local GOP. Maybe even running for office. But one thing is certainly true: unless those efforts are interconnected, unless they are together part of an attempt to build a base of power lasting for decades that can be used, over time, to push back and rebuild that which has been lost, it will all be for naught. That is what “organize” must mean, and what “build” must mean. It does not mean just another group chat, it means recovering the old folkways surrounding duty, honor, and virtue that have been lost, and using them to bring into the fold the generation of inheritors who will have something approaching the resources the gentry of old once did. Think of what could be achieved with such a base of men, and support! Things not achieved by those of a conservative mind in generations!

Through that, I think, we can push back in sustained fashion. It can be done. It has been done before. But we must be the ones to do it. No one else is coming to help or save us, the old paths that have led to it happening naturally have been erased. It is up to us. Now we must go and do it.

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It was an interesting talk, though much of the theology went over my head. Thiel was an engaging speaker, and I enjoyed getting to meet a number of like-minded gentlemen after the event. If you are reading this, it was wonderful meeting you.

There was one aspect of the argument Thiel made in this lecture—Part III, covering “the Velocity of the Antichrist”—that I found particularly interesting: according to 2 Thessalonians 2, the Katechon is the “restrainer”—the power holding back the manifestation of the Antichrist—and Thiel indicated he thought the “great fortunes” have a role to play in being that Katechon. He also framed the force that must be fought as globalism. The ICC, USAID, the SWIFT banking system, and so on. I think he is right, though it is “great houses” of the sort my friends , , and describe that could fill that role, not rich “tech bros” in Silicon Valley. I’ll explain why here, after briefly explaining Thiel’s general argument.

NOTE: Yes, this is not an installment of the Harry Byrd series. I thought y’all might want a break, and I am giving a speech at a men’s group event this weekend (more on that soon), so writing another ~10,000-word essay with 20 or so lengthy footnotes was a bit beyond my capacity. More importantly, I think this is more a bridge rather than an interruption: the next two articles in the Harry Byrd series will cover his fight with Truman’s attempts to make America a globalist power, and then his standing athwart history in a decade-long attempt to reject the Civil Rights Act and trend towards levelling egalitarianism. He could only do so because he built a “Great House” in the truest sense of the term. Further, we need such men today if we are to fight what Thiel describes, whether it be “just” globalist tyranny or the Antichrist. So, I think this essay will help show why the next installments in the Byrd series are so important. Read Part I: The Organization and Part II: War with FDR if you have not already.

Thiel’s Antichrist

Basing his talk on a host of theologians and professors—including René Girard (under whom he studied at Stanford), Cardinal John Henry Newman, Pope Benedict, Carl Schmitt, and a host of European authors with names I couldn’t pronounce and can’t remember—Thiel argued that the biblical Antichrist could, and perhaps will, present itself in our age through globalism, technocracy, and bureaucracy. He thinks that one last great man of history could master a system built not just to constrain such men, but in the belief that they no longer exist, and use it to establish the sort of one world government prophesied in Revelation.

In his view, the Antichrist will appear not as a cartoonishly evil tyrant, but as the sort of person that people generally want in charge: a man who is highly competent, well credentialed, and frames himself as being a benevolent technocrat of sorts. Though such a man will be dangerous, few will recognize him as such, for his obvious characteristics will be managerial competence rather than deep and abiding evil.

Because people expect evil to look horrifying, they will fail to recognize an evil disguised as consummate managerial competence. Further, Thiel argues that such a man will appropriate the sort of empathy that Christians are taught is good, and use such arguments as calling for peace, asking for humanitarian relief, championing victims, and so on to justify the creation of a global government and surveillance state that enforces it.

This is the crux of Thiel’s argument about the Antichrist. "Peace and safety" will be the slogan of the Antichrist, and it will be brought about by a totalitarian state where mankind surrenders everything that made the West great— sovereignty, dynamism, and liberty—in exchange for “peace and safety”. North Korea, with French or Yookay welfare state characteristics. His view on this is supported by 1 Thessalonians 5:3, which provides, “While people are saying, ‘Peace and safety,’ destruction will come on them suddenly.”

Thiel thinks the Antichrist will use fear of Armageddon to create a monolithic, centralized, one-world government that is established to ensure Armageddon never happens. As he frames it, we in our decline are so fearful of sleepwalking into Armageddon that we will accept a unified, borderless, totalizing bureaucracy established and enforced by the last great man of history if doing so seems like the way to avoid catastrophe and achieve “peace and safety”.

In the talk I attended, Thiel, after briefly reviewing that, then noted that late modernity is a particularly fertile ground for such a situation not only because we deride and deny belief in great men of the sort Carlyle described in On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History, but because our achievement of real technological advancement has slowed considerably. Further, what advancement has occurred has occurred largely in the realm of bits rather than atoms. Because of this, he argues, we have increasingly become an even more fearful civilization that lost its frontier spirit and encourages living lives of inward-focused, risk-averse frivolity.

I thought it was particularly poignant that he marked the point at which this change occurred as being in 1969, when Woodstock followed just months after Apollo: America soon gave up on Apollo, and fully embraced the spirit of the do-nothing hippies.

In any case, he went on to argue that this decrease in advancement has not just suppressed our spirit of greatness, but has allowed the tyrannical bureaucratic regime to catch up and build the sort of NGO-bureaucracy-supranational institution state that makes doing anything impossible. Supranational bodies, global regulatory agreements, international safety treaties, and centralized digital financial networks provide the architecture for a universal state, and need only be harnessed.

Right now, after all, they’re already dangerous enough. American leaders like Pete Hegseth and Marco Rubio live in fear of the ICC, worried that they like Netanyahu might face an arrest warrant and face being sent off to one of its show trials if the right loses its grip on power. The SWIFT system can be used to stamp out dissent. Hiding money is nearly impossible, and assets can simply be taken in the name of “the people,” as Russia’s were. Europe is planning to confiscate “excess” savings to fight Russia, and might well do the same to fund the entitlement state even one hour longer. Such is what Britain did to create the NHS, after all. Doubtless, enforcing this is what those Chinese crowd control robots are for.

We saw this during Covid: the powers that be decided, whether out of fear of the flu or reasons related to the debt, to lock everyone in their homes and apartments for months and to shut down the economy. Those who didn’t comply were ruthlessly punished with fines, arrests, investigations, and the like. This happened all over the world, as if by agreement, in the blink of an eye. What enabled that was the network of institutions Thiel identified as being the root of globalist power and control.

Right now, that system is mostly fragmented and has been cobbled together over the years. Most of the pieces necessary for a world government and the tyranny it could bring are already in place—and, he noted, so is the ideology of safetyism enforced by tyranny that Europe in particular represents—but no single man wields it for any particular end as of yet. Perhaps it is just an egregore guiding them, but the pieces are all there for someone—the Antichrist, Thiel seems to think—to pick them up and use them to establish the dismal world tyranny he thinks “peace and safety” will justify.

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever,” has become, “if you want a glimpse of the future, imagine Judge LaFonda—put through law school by MacKenzie Bezos’s ‘I Hate White Men 501(c)(3)’—enforcing Emmanuel Macron’s law forbidding hate speech and ordering the arrest of anyone in West Virginia who argued they ought not have to surrender 100% of their salary to fund braces for Gambian cannibals, forever,” and government AIs taking their paychecks anyway as drones strike them from the heavens if they try to resist.

A few pieces are still needed for it to be complete. For one, there is the Mark of the Beast—“no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark” (Revelation 13:17)—which Thiel seems to think will come about through even more totalizing financial surveillance, centralized digital currencies, and uniform regulatory oversight enforced around the globe. More importantly, someone must come about who can wield all of it at once to suffocate us forever.

In Thiel’s view, the only way to stave this off is through the Katechon—a real form of resistance to this globalist menace and he who might use it as a rainbow-covered sledgehammer. He seemed at a loss for what this might be, other than arguing that the Giving Pledge—billionaires promising to give most of their money to leftist NGOs—is ushering the Antichrist along rather than stopping him, and that were those fortunes made hereditary they might help be the Katechon that resists it.

I think he’s almost right, but less specific than he needs to be. Resistance to the spirit of the age, its institutions, and the man who might bridle it to dominate the world for the worse will not be accomplished through ethereal tech fortunes being passed from one generation to the next; that runs into the same problem of global surveillance and regulatory tyranny that it is impossible to resist that everything else does. But “Great Houses”—families that use wealth to build real power in the real world for generations—do present the Katechon opportunity.

The Great House Katechon

The Grizzled Earl and the War with Tyranny

In 1278, King Edward I was strapped for cash. Longshanks was a competent king, but also something of a tyrant. The very sort of man who would have conquered the world if he could, though he couldn’t. In any case, he needed money and decided that his nobles offered a sufficiently rich and tempting source from which to get it. So, he initiated “Quo Warranto”—“By what warrant?”—proceedings. Land holdings were, after all, tracked and regulated, and so he had his list of who owned what and was checking it twice as he sent his “justices” across England to demand nobles pay hefty fees to renew their charters. All for the good of the kingdom, you see.

Most decided the fight wasn’t worth it, and just gave into his rapacious demands for more gold with which to fight this or that war. Not a fellow named John de Warenne. As recounted by the medieval chronicler Walter of Guisborough, when the royal justices called upon John de Warenne to present his charter and pay a fee, he declined. Instead, the grizzled old earl, a veteran of many a campaign, drew his ancient sword, its blade notched from the countless fights he had won, and slammed that blade on the table.

As he did so, he declared, “My ancestors came with William the Bastard, and conquered their lands with the sword, and I will defend them with the sword against anyone wishing to seize them. The King did not conquer and subject the land by himself, but our forebears were sharers and partners with him.”

Stunningly, the domineering King Edward I backed down. Faced with this resistance from true nobles of Warenne’s mold, he let the old families live in peace and stopped trying to fleece them. The tyranny ended, for they were both able and willing to fight for their rights.

Such is, in large part, what limited the tyranny of medieval times. Yes, some kings were terrible tyrants. But only to a point, for the grizzled earl and his sort were unwilling to tolerate a centralized state that would attempt to expropriate their property, however much doing so might theoretically help the kingdom.

It’s Always the Great Houses

This sort of pattern has held true throughout history, in victory and defeat alike. It was Tiberius Gracchus—heir to a noble name—who stood as the last real bulwark against Rome becoming a land of cosmopolitan tyranny and plutocratic rapacity.

It was Bendor Grosvenor, descendant of a Norman knight, and Baron Willoughby de Broke, 19th of his name, who put together the Diehards, a collection of old lords who fought against the bureaucratic tyranny of Winston Churchill and Lloyd George. It was the Duke of Beaufort who led what postwar resistance there was to the Labour regime’s outright confiscation of assets in the name of the “good of the people”, and he thought Sir Winston should have been fed to the foxhounds for the tyranny and tax regime he heaped upon England.

In America, it was Harry Byrd who led the resistance to FDR’s attempts to fundamentally transform America. Rhodesia was the last holdout of excellence, the last outpost to which men who wanted something more than totalizing and stultifying equality fled; it was supported by Byrd as it, led not just by Rhodesian planter Ian Smith but African aristocrat PK van der Byl and British aristocrat the Duke of Montrose, stood alone in resisting egalitarian tyranny.

Some of these men were more successful than others. Sometimes the aristocratic counterrevolutions succeeded, as in Harry Byrd’s Virginia, Franco’s Spain, Mannerheim’s Finland, or the Holy Alliance1 crushing the French Revolution. Other times it failed, as with the Diehards, Tiberius Gracchus, and the French gentry and faithful Catholics leading a rebellion against the French Revolution in the Vendée.

But what is certain is that it was only one sort of man who fought against the all-enveloping bureaucratic tyranny without attempting to just impose a supranational tyranny of his own: the true aristocrat, the patriarch or scion of a Great House who cared and fought for his people. The plutocrat never did, and instead alternated between cowering in the face of tyranny and attempting to profit from it. The “fascist” generally attempted to establish a more bureaucratic and totalizing form of “Tory Democracy”, and the results were as dismal as could be expected. Liberal democracy encouraged communism around the world in the name of equality. Communism was, well, communism. Social democracy was just communism by other means. Decolonization was communism by other means.

Why Great Houses

So, the Great Houses (and those who supported them, from retainers to voters) alone stood against the origins of the system that Thiel described, that cobbled-together collection of NGOs, supranational organizations, stultifying social democracy, and all the rest. Sometimes they succeeded, sometimes they failed. But they alone stood as leaders in the face of “peace and safety” bureaucracy and technocracy, whatever its exact form. Why?

This goes back to the old earl. He was defined by confidence. He knew his capabilities, knew he could fight, and had tested himself before. More than that, as the old lord of an old estate, he knew that he had men on whom he could rely if he chose to fight. Men who were loyal to him, who knew him to be honorable, and who would thus answer the call and lay down their lives in defense of his rights and prerogatives as he would for theirs.

That was the benefit of the non-abstracted form of wealth that such men held, and it came up repeatedly. Because they were fixtures in a particular place for generation after generation, those who handled the role well were men who were trusted by those who relied on them to do the right and honorable thing. Because they were trusted to such an extent, they knew that their dependents would follow them, even into battle. That bred a confidence that often meant they could avoid battle. When they could not, as in the baron’s wars, they actually fought, and through that showed that they meant business.

These were not mercenary, purchased relationships built atop a pile of abstracted wealth. After all, as Thiel noted in his speech, a brokerage account can always just go to zero while the powers that be decide what to do with you. “Sorry about your Chevron stock, but you were racist. Now go to jail; you’ll have to use a public defender, as we will not unfreeze your money for you.” Such is the point of the opaque regulatory state composed of NGOs and bureaucracies that has been created: there is no one obvious to fight, no one at all to appeal to, and no real way to ensure compliance in a way that ensures it won’t be taken.

It is only real assets that are personally held, preferably for a very long time, and used as bases for resistance that avoid that problem. I have written about this before in the context of the Fitzwilliams, so I will not do so again here, nor will I repeat my Harry Byrd stories (though you should read my articles on the Fitzwilliams and Byrd, as they are relevant here). Instead, I’ll show this through the lens of the Grosvenor family, as they are one of the few aristocratic families in England that seem to have fully grasped this lesson in modernity.

The Grosvenors: Second Duke of Westminster

Take the Duke of Westminster that I mentioned earlier. He was hated by the British regulatory apparatus by the time he died in the 1950s. He was an old reactionary who detested the City of London and its denizens, had fought for and loved the old Empire, helped settle Rhodesia, had fought with Churchill over the Parliament Bill, and had helped lead the Tory resistance to getting involved in World War II. Uncoincidentally, he argued that the Gracchi were “true patriots” in the fight against the Roman plutocracy.2 He was also generally well-liked by the public and his tenants (if not his ex-wives), and immensely wealthy.

This made him and his estate a plum target for the socialist government, and the Inland Revenue Service stood up an entire new division to strip his family’s ancient lands, urban real estate, business interests, and other holdings from his estate upon his death. In confiscating his assets in the name of the people and world peace, it would prove a point about the nature of power in modern Britain: the days of the dukes were past, and the days of bureaucrats were upon Albion.

But then a strange thing happened: the state couldn’t get its claws on the estate. Every avenue to do so was blocked, for someone had read the rules and figured out how to beat them. You see, Bendor, though a rake, was also quite bright and generally realistic about things, and he and his retainers did not eschew the subject of his death but rather had planned on it for a long time. So, when it finally came in his old age, they were ready to do battle with the tax regime. Describing the preparation for battle in his Aristocrats, and how the nature of who Bendor was meant he had family retainers on whom he could rely, author Robert Lacey writes:

But family retainers, whatever their other shortcomings, are loyal. They derive something of their masters’ satisfaction from serving a cause greater than the here and now. They see themselves as part of the family, setting their endeavours in the same time-defeating family context which stretches back into the past and forward into the future. They defend the family interests as if they were their own, and it was in this spirit that George Ridley prepared to do battle to save the Grosvenor inheritance from the hands of the Inland Revenue in 1947.

Ridley did so by eschewing financialized, abstracted forms of wealth. These are excellent targets for tax regimes, for they have an obvious value and are easy to seize. There’s no haggling, no real way of fighting for them. $4 million of stock is $4 million of stock, and 90% death taxes mean it’s really $400,000 of stock. That’s unideal.

But what is a (temporarily) unprofitable port in a forgotten city worth? Anything? Nothing? What about a forest full of oak trees that might not be harvest-ready for 75 years? A farm that requires much investment and produces little income? A collection of silver spoons stamped with the family crest?

All of that can be haggled over, for the price varies from unclear to indiscernible. Further, haggling over it creates an entirely different situation for the owner. “Owner of local port providing 500 jobs to otherwise impoverished residents holds Christmas party despite government attempting to take the port from him” reads significantly better, and creates much more sympathy, than “Family With $50 Million Stock Market Fortune Flees to Virgin Islands, Fights to Not Fund NHS”.

Ridley understood this, as did Bendor. Further, much as Lee had studied McClellan and used his dim impression of the man’s aggressiveness to plan a sweeping counterattack that drove him from Richmond, they studied the tax bureaucracy and how slow it would move if weighed down with details…details that would also show “good faith” on the part of the family. In an inflationary environment, such time was a godsend.

All of this combined to help the Grosvenors and their loyal retainer defeat the tax service. Here’s how Lacey describes them doing so:

The first and obvious decision was to sell all Bend Or’s stocks and shares and to transfer that capital into land, for stocks and shares have a defined price on the day that a man dies. There can be no arguing about their value. But the real worth of a piece of land can be haggled over endlessly: short-term cash losses could be created by investing in sluggish farms and developments that would, on paper, be of relatively low value on the day of death - and, most important of all, there were the considerably reduced rates of death duty levied on agricultural land and on land given over to forestry.

So suddenly, in the late 1940s, obscure corners of the Grosvenors’ estates found themselves benefiting from the cash released by the sale of Bend Or’s stocks and shares. The Duke of Westminster appeared overcome with a tree-planting urge, putting down thousands of acres to spruce, larch and pine with a mystifying disregard for the advice of government forestry experts, whose approval meant qualifications for government grants: whether he got the grants or not, the Duke went on planting out his forests.

In 1950 he bought nearly 6000 acres in Shropshire belonging to the Bridgewater family, and in 1951 he diversified into rural industry. The little port of Kinlochbervie, standing on Grosvenor land in the northwest corner of Scotland (acquired through the family’s nineteenth-century connection with the Dukes of Sutherland) found itself the focus of an ambitious development plan.

Grosvenor money was poured into this obscure village and its surrounding area to reopen the harbour, build a cold store and create a transport system whereby fish that were landed one evening could be marketed next morning in Aberdeen and Glasgow.

It was, on the face of it, a quixotic gesture, for on the day Bend Or died in July 1953 there was no way his estate could immediately recoup the millions of pounds he had invested in agricultural land, forests and developments like Kinlochbervie. The money sunk into the silted-up harbour there could even have been presented to the valuers of the Inland Revenue as a loss.

But by the mid-1960s the little port had become a thriving and very profitable concern which it was possible to sell off to a local syndicate. So the Grosvenor estate did not just minimize death duties and make a long-term investment which proved most remunerative. They also got the credit for reviving a rundown rural community and for handing it back as a going concern to the locals.

So, while other families were utterly ruined by death taxes, the Grosvenors survived the highest tax period Britain has ever seen with their financial position more or less intact. They could only do so because they were willing to fight the system in a clever way, and had retainers on whom they could rely. They could put up the sort of challenge that stops the frictionless globalist system from destroying everything in its path.

Was this enough to save Britain? No. It was them fighting for their fortune. But they preserved it so that it could be used to continue fighting for Britain and against onerous tax and regulatory policies, as happened a few dukes later.

The Sixth Duke: Averting Financial Armageddon for Everyone

The sixth Duke of Westminster must have been thinking about family tradition and leadership when he inherited the title at the young age of thirty, for he did not spend his time frivolously in high society or with the jet set crowd, but rather set about using his financial inheritance—namely the ancestral lands near Chester—to develop a loyal following of retainers. This he did by staying involved in local charities, clubs, functions, and the like. Here’s how Lacey described it:

Gerald Grosvenor, 6th Duke of Westminster . . . has to find ways to steer his inherited wealth through it and round [the law], and he also has to earn the respect that is accorded more and more grudgingly these days to inherited status that is not royal.

Gerald Grosvenor has done that by reviving the traditional role played by the squires of Eaton - he is Chester’s own lord of the manor. Bend Or had no time for the locals. But his youthful cousin-once-removed has thrown himself into provincial life with all the vigour of a keen new prefect trying to rouse the house spirit. His diary is filled months ahead with the 200 or more local functions he attends every year, and the evening of Tuesday, 7 September 1982 finds him in a dusty church hall with the members of the local junior five-a-side soccer team.

The hall belongs to the Eaton estate and is leased to the youth club for £1 a year. Five little boys are standing nervously to attention in the middle of the room as their parents peek proudly from behind a door, and, with his hands behind his back, the thirty-year-old Duke strolls down the line in a dark chalk stripe suit trying to make them feel at ease. He presents them with new soccer jerseys provided by a local sports firm, delivers himself of a short speech and poses for the benefit of a cameraman from the local paper. Then the ceremony is over, and the little boys scamper off relieved, anxious to get their new jerseys dirty.

Not quite a private equity firm buying up youth sports leagues and charging obscene rates to participate in them!3

Indeed, Gerald seems to have actually cared about those around him, or at least was very good at pretending to for the good of the family. As he put it, describing his life and role and whether he resented the impositions upon his time, “Not at all. I believe in playing a positive role in my local community, and this is the role people seem to want me to play.” He added, “I could never join the jet set. I find that way of life brittle and superficial, quite lacking in satisfaction. This is what I enjoy.” True or not, it is what he spent his time doing. As Lacey noted, the Duke’s official “List of Commitments” consisted of “six sheets of tightly typed paper listing his patronage, chairmanship or membership of 186 organizations”.

And they were not just youth soccer leagues. He was also an officer in the militia, and so had a body of men in his community who were used to trusting him to give martial commands, much as his ancestors did. Lacey writes:

Gerald Grosvenor does dedicate a substantial portion of even his free time to worthy local activities. He spends at least one weekend a month with the Territorial Army, when he goes on map reading exercises, sleeping rough, for the best part of thirty-six hours as Captain Westminster in the Cheshire Squadron of the Queen’s Own Yeomanry, and straight after his month’s holiday shooting grouse at Abbeystead every year, he goes off for two weeks’ full-time manoeuvres with the ΤΑ.

In preparing the local militia for battle, Gerald Grosvenor is, of course, going right back to the origins of aristocracy. In 1983 he is carrying out precisely the same function in Cheshire as the Norman Hugh Lupus and the founding fathers of the Gros Veneurs…

As with Bendor’s pre-death reorganization, this mattered.

It mattered because, under the Leasehold Reform Act of 1967 (and subsequent Housing Acts), long-term tenants were given statutory powers to compulsorily purchase the freehold of their homes—a process known as leasehold enfranchisement. This was a particular problem for the Grosvenors, for the Grosvenor Estate owned over 300 acres of prime central London real estate across Mayfair and Belgravia. The legislation would strip that keystone of their wealth from them, and turn neighborhoods that they had kept nice and beautiful for generations into potentially blighted areas.

The estate set about fighting this legislation, doing so widely and prudently. First, they pretended to be mainly concerned with the public and the beauty of the area, fighting for an amendment that would maintain their aesthetic control over the neighborhood, preventing Erno Goldfinger types from ruining it. As Brian Masters records in The Dukes:

The Estate did not accept the inevitability of such a prospect. After protracted negotiations, they succeeded in having incorporated into the Act a Section (19) which allows for the landlord to retain the right to continue a management policy for the whole estate, while in no way interfering with the leaseholder’s right to buy the property... In the case of Belgravia, the High Court approved the granting of such a certificate in 1973.

That wasn’t the end of it. After setting about ensuring that the estate could maintain strict control over such matters as painting, architectural alterations, and usage even if a tenant bought the freehold—a move that limited the desirability of buying the real estate and made the public more accustomed to the idea of them remaining in charge of it, the estate set about fighting the legislation more broadly, something that was to the benefit of every property owner in the country, for it was a fight for property rights.

After all, the estate lost 100 properties over the course of the 1970s to the law, so it was an important subject to them, and to every other property owner who found himself disenfranchised by outright expropriation via legislation. Like the old Earl, they’d resist the centralized government’s demands and see what they could do about ensuring property rights. This the estate—ever conscious of optics—did through the language of the regime, namely “human rights”. As Lacey notes:

In 1982 the Grosvenor Estate took the British government to the European Court of Human Rights to dispute the Leasehold Reform Act which gives tenants the power, in certain circumstances, compulsorily to purchase their own homes, for the Duke believes that the rich have as much human right to their property as the poor...

That wasn’t all. At the same time as the duke used the human rights apparatus to try to shield property owners generally, he threw the sword on the table, so to speak. The man who was beloved by thousands upon thousands who relied upon his support for their leagues and charities, the man who commanded a local military unit composed largely of those whose families loved him, the man whose family had restored the fortunes of many a forgotten area…suggested he might have to leave the country due to the attack on his rights, and take his money with him. Indeed, he let it be known that "...plans exist to shift him and his fortune offshore 'at the flick of a switch' if ever its preservation in Britain were to appear impossible."

A fortune worth hundreds of millions of pounds was no small thing in those days, particularly given the continual financial problems of the British government. It was struggling along, looking weak, and Thatcher was trying to show she was a friend of freedom so that America would help her in the Falklands War. She couldn’t be seen as acting like a communist with expropriation-enabling legislation at home just years after handing Rhodesia to Mugabe, particularly with Reagan in the White House and treating some of her initial requests for help with scorn…

Add in the financial upheaval and general misery in the country, her crackdown on the coal miners, and the idea of perhaps tens of thousands thrown out of work or losing their charities because she had chased a beloved man out of the country for no reason other than his family’s ancient connection to the land, and the fact that there was a military unit loyal to him was a very real thing. Mountbatten’s coup attempt might have succeeded a few years earlier, after all, and Gerald was better liked than Mountbatten…

The totality of his threats, and nature of his influence, was not good for Thatcher. Though she eventually defeated the human rights challenge after much embarrassment, she found herself on losing ground with the lords and had to end the Capital Transfer Tax, the real threat to the estate.4 This was of tremendous benefit to every property owner in the country, as it made it possible to somewhat survive death taxes again, and the Leasehold Act remained full of loopholes. Meanwhile, the Grosvenors, having bought themselves time, converted the Mayfair and Belgravia “houses” into networks of apartments that looked like houses, making the law inapplicable, for it only applied to houses.

A total victory it was not, but nor had the earl’s victory against Edward I been total. It was, rather, a limited victory that showed the government could not do anything it wanted, as there would be resistance to its tyrannical usurpations. If nothing else, there would be immense friction. More realistically, the regime would suffer defeats as the friction turned into it facing impossible choices and difficult battles.

Back to Modernity

All that is well and good, but why does it remain relevant?

Because this is the path to resisting what Thiel warned of. At worst, that is the Antichrist. Less catastrophically, perhaps, it is a global nanny state that smothers its victims in the name of peace and safety.

No one is loyal to the tech founders. Bill Gates, the Indian in charge of Google, the Russian-named guy that left Google and now is whining about taxes in California imposed by Democrats he has long supported, and all the others could be thrown off the Tarpeian Rock tomorrow, and it is unlikely anyone would shed a single tear. They are weird and unlikeable people whose behavior has been poor, whose time horizons are short, and whose characters are obviously lacking. Courage they have not, nor do they have retainers who are anything but opportunistic mercenaries. This has real consequences.

Could Bill Gates get his current legal team to work for him for more than a moment if the government froze his assets, and victory in the case looked very unlikely? Probably not. Could Mark Zuckerberg? Probably not. There are many who want something from them, but few to none who much like them and are loyal to them. As plutocratic elites rather than aristocrats, they haven’t invested in the sort of relationships that matter when on the wrong side of the state apparatus.

But one can imagine George Ridley sticking by the Grosvenors even if the estate faced dark days. One can imagine the earl’s knights following him to London to confront Edward I against all odds. Erik Prince has men all over the world on whom he can rely even in dismal situations, as became clear when Hillary Clinton’s State Department mugged him and destroyed Blackwater out of pique.

Elon Musk could use SpaceX to put Rods from God in the sky and drop them anywhere on Earth. He probably doesn’t want to do that, but he always could. Such is what his close personal control over SpaceX, rather than just being a 10% holder of SpaceX stock, grants him. He is a man who can do things. More than Grok, Tesla, or anything else, that unspoken threat gives him a certain ability to negotiate that even his peers don’t have. Raising his son to be the man who can control such an organization and use it for similar purposes would make it even more effective, as would his being part of an entire class of men who can pose such threats and challenges to the apparatus. Their doing so requires more than just money. It requires power, which is dependent on real ownership rather than abstracted ownership, and it requires a sense of duty, the attitude expressed by the duke that he ought be part of his community and help better it.

Elon is different many of the others because he still controls real companies that do real things that matter. Facebook is controlled by Zuckerberg, but utterly reliant on networks of state permission slips to be anything other than a blocked website. Over the long term, SpaceX needs permission theoretically, but who really could stop Elon from putting tungsten rods in space? Who could stop him from wreaking havoc by shutting down Teslas with a remote update? Hopefully he does not do those things, but he could fight back effectively if attacked because he exercises personal control over entities that can shape the world in a tangible way.

That’s only so useful when it is just one man, but is incredibly useful when part of a class. Were it just the one earl, Edward could have crushed him. Fighting all the old Norman barons was a decidedly less appetizing prospect, so he chose not to.

Such is why men of Elon and the earl’s mold, when part of a class, can throw up challenges to globalist tyranny that plutocrats cannot. They have less fear of assets being frozen than stock owners—things are different when wealth is measured in acres, relationships, and personally held and personally managed companies, even if there are regulatory assaults upon them—and have the knowledge that there are men on whom they can rely to help them fight. As the old earl did.

That is what creates the friction points that slow this down. Thiel expressed his worry of an all-enveloping, frictionless global surveillance state run by AI-enabled bureaucracies, institutions, foundations, and the like, headed by the sort of man who could master such a beast and use it to leave his dismal mark. That is a real threat to Western man’s flourishing and liberty, whether or not the Antichrist comes. The way to fight it is to provide the little, castle-like redoubts that serve as friction points, bastions of resistance to that centralized tyranny. This is what Great Houses once were. It is what they could be again.

Read my thoughts on building the sort of class that matters here:

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Sources Referenced in this Episode:

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Cole, Ryan, Light-Horse Harry Lee: The Rise and Fall of a Revolutionary Hero, https://amzn.to/4wiZOy3

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The Script

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The Depression fundamentally reordered politics across America, and the policies enacted to address it lasted for generations. New programs and regulations accompanied new taxes and views of the government’s role in the economy, and the result was vast upheaval.

But some stood athwart the tide of FDR’s tyranny and demanded it stop. In some cases, they even succeeded as they did so. The most successful of these leaders was Harry Byrd, who was able to moderate FDR’s influence upon the Old Dominion so that, at the end of it all, Virginia was still recognizably Old Virginia.1 There was a bit more aid for farmers, a bit more welfare for the worst off of the urban poor, but little other change. What had elsewhere proved an unstoppable force smashed against the rock of Byrd’s word in Winchester, and there stopped.

He could achieve this because of the Byrd Organization. A unique animal in American politics, it was the Democratic Party political machine in Virginia, built by Harry Byrd out of the crumbling edifice of the Martin Organization that preceded it.

What made it unique is that it 1) lasted for generations, and 2) was personally loyal to Harry Byrd and his brand of arch-conservative, patrician politics.2 So, whereas other state political machines—such as that of Huey Long in Louisiana—had to generally go along with party dogma and embrace the New Age of socialism and regimentation, Byrd did not. Instead, he could use it to fight for traditional Old Virginia against the newfangled, tyrannical bureaucracy in DC that had set out to wholly destroy the America that would have been at all recognizable to the founders.

Aiding Byrd in this was that Virginia only allowed those who paid a poll tax to vote, which substantially limited the electorate, cutting it down to just the successful elements of society—landowners, professionals, large and small business owners, competent farmers, and the like. He did not have to play the part of a boisterous buffoon, clapping like a seal for the approval and votes of an underclass.

What made Byrd different from other conservatives in similar ideological positions, men who generally failed to conserve much, is that he was guided by a sense of duty. Immensely wealthy and heir to a noble name, he knew his family tradition was one of service to the state. He sought to emulate that in its best form to resist the tyrannical usurpations of first the FDR regime, then Truman’s “Fair Deal,” and then the Civil Rights Cultural Revolution.

That war against FDR is what we will cover today, picking up from the last article on how he built the Byrd Organization and why it gave him such an immense advantage in his attempts—many of which were successful—to resist the spirit of the times.

A note on sources: The primary works used for this article are Harry Byrd of Virginia by Ronald L. Heinemann, Harry Byrd and the Changing Face of Virginia Politics, 1945-1966 by J. Harvie Wilkinson (III), The Byrds of Virginia by Alden Hatch, Virginia: Bourbonism to Byrd by Allen W. Moger, and The Byrd Machine in Virginia by Michael Lee Pope. Additionally, I read Ronald Heinemann’s Depression and New Deal in Virginia: The Enduring Dominion to prepare for this article specifically. It is reasonably good, and pairs well with Heinemann’s biography of Byrd and Wilkinson’s book on Byrd’s fight against Truman and the Civil Rights Act. It is, however, about more than just Byrd, covering as it does the Depression in Virginia as a whole, not just Byrd’s reaction to FDR’s New Deal.

Listen to the audio version of this episode here:

The Patrician’s War with FDR

The Foundations of Harry Byrd’s (Mostly Successful) War with the President

It was no real surprise that Harry Byrd found it impossible to work with FDR. Byrd was a gentleman, a man guided by honor. FDR, on the other hand, was not just a socialist but a liar. He misled voters while on the campaign trail by pretending to plan major spending cuts, while in reality he was planning the creation of a vast, bureaucratic welfare state. Further, he aimed to regiment society to entrench his own power.

Byrd was implacably hostile to this. He was, after all, a member of the proud Virginia political tradition. His family was one of the very few in America with a tradition and record of service over centuries,3 and the Organization he built was reflective of the class that composed it. It was “oligarchic,”4 perhaps, but also honest, focused on fiscal thrift, and entirely opposed to un-American welfare schemes. Yet further, the very idea of a “campaign promise”—a lie told to deceive voters—was abhorrent to such men; as gentlemen, their word was their bond, and their power was directly related to their reputation for honesty. As Clifford Dowdey writes in The Great Plantation:

It never occurred to the oligarchy to give the machinery of government over to professional politicians who would be front men of powerful interests. They had been trained in an aristocratic republic to believe that the class in power should do its own ruling, and very forthrightly without lurid appeals and empty promises.

After all, elected at a county level in a parochial society, the candidates were talking to men they had grown up with and who would be around personally to see that each promise was kept. There was no such thing as a “campaign promise.” A man gave his word on his honor, and if he broke his word he became a man of dishonor.

Such was true in colonial days, true in the antebellum period, and true in Harry Byrd’s day as well. To tell bald-faced lies to voters about their intentions, as FDR had done, was to them a monstrous and abominable thing.

This was to become a point of contention on which Harry always harped. Referencing Roosevelt’s 1932 campaign pledge to reduce federal expenditures by 25% and preserve fiscal solvency, Byrd long called himself “the last of the New Dealers.” He argued that he and his allies alone stood on their word and fought for what voters had elected them to do, which was to cut ruinously expensive government spending and restore business confidence in the country. As Wilkinson puts it:

"'I'm one of the last of the old New Dealers,' the Virginian once mused with only the tiniest twinkle of humor. 'I campaigned for the New Deal platform in 1932—and I'm still standing on it.' The 'New Deal platform' for which Byrd campaigned was Roosevelt's 1932 pledge of federal frugality—including a cut of 25 per cent in the cost of federal government. When the President pursued quite a different course, Byrd reacted accordingly."

But Harry’s hatred of FDR was more than a matter of prickly gentlemanly honor. He also saw in FDR a direct challenge to Virginia’s traditional order. It was a state ruled by a governing gentry that based its understanding of good government on staying out of debt, developing steadily and prudently by wise expenditure of the proceeds of limited taxation, and encouraging prudent development by being a state in which doing business was easy and profitable.

The Organization was hostile to debt, hostile to taxes, hostile to unions,5 and hostile to egalitarian prattle. FDR represented all of that, and much else besides. His New Deal came to be a force of federal intervention in the economy, deficit spending to fund a welfare state, a vast centralizing of power, and regulatory collectivism that came across as tyranny to those who, like Byrd, believed in the Constitution and individual self-reliance.

This is what set up the battle, particularly after the first year of FDR, between his administration and the Byrd Organization: on one side was the most conservative political force in America, a force led by gentlemen and that intended to ensure the able found flourishing possible, and on the other stood the side of communism-lite, with its intensive focus on subsidizing life at the bottom. Their views of “the good” were wholly incompatible.

In response, Byrd deployed all of his political pull and power to lead the charge of legislative resistance in Washington. Meanwhile, his Organization in Virginia continued to manage unyielding political control of the state, and ensured that the Old Dominion remained an island of fiscal solvency, low taxes, and conservative governance in the midst of a rising Red tide.

Byrd was largely supported by Virginians in this war with FDR. This was for a number of reasons.

For one, Virginia’s economy was relatively balanced between different sectors,6 and the Organization had kept debt levels quite low. Those prudent development policies meant that the impact of the Depression was significantly muted in Virginia.7 The state might not have been entirely Depression-proof, but it was certainly Depression-resistant compared to most other states.8 Times were still bad for almost everyone, but far from despair-inducing or catastrophic for all but the most unlucky or incompetent. Virginians thus had much to complain about generally, while still being positive about the Byrd Organization: their fate was better than that of almost everyone else in America, largely as a result of his leadership, and they knew it.9

Further, the “political consensus and social stability” brought by Virginia’s long-term state of rule by men like Byrd was one with which Virginians of all classes generally agreed, or at least was one they found acceptable, as a general thing.10 The men empowered by it had governed well and honestly, which is all one can really hope of government, and few wanted to change the general sort of rule by competent gentlemen to which Virginians had grown accustomed.11 As Heinemann notes in Depression and New Deal:

By reason of blood, education, and social standing, the heirs of this tradition of noblesse oblige have determined what is best for the Commonwealth. They have been the caretakers of the status quo and the public treasury, and although frequently conservative to a fault, theirs has been an honest, frugal government. Above all else, civility has epitomized the reign of this long dynasty. The standards set by Washington and revitalized by Lee have been adhered to.

Perhaps most importantly, the state and its voters remained generally hostile to the idea of a welfare state. They might have treated some of FDR’s debt-enabled policies with less scorn than Byrd, but they were resolutely opposed to the sort of ambition-shredding, indolence-encouraging welfare state that FDR came to represent as the years wore on. Heinemann, describing this attitude towards welfare in Depression and New Deal, writes:

The Assembly’s failure to enact any relief legislation for the unemployed was not contrary to popular sentiment. Even if state leaders had been of a mind to raise taxes to finance reforms and relief, they would have encountered strong opposition from the citizenry. Although among the least taxed people in the country, Virginians were demanding tax reductions from their local governments because the depression was squeezing them so hard. Farmers claimed that the earnings from their crops were hardly enough to pay the taxes on the land. Said a Halifax planter: “Do you know what I got from a plantation a few miles from here? A dollar and twenty cents in cash, a bushel of peas, and four barrels of corn, and I let my tenant keep the bushel of peas because it appeared he needed the food.” Farmers formed taxpayers’ associations to pressure officials into economies in government.

Indeed, as one Richmond attorney put it, "Times were bad but not to the point of desperation even in the worst-hit communities. We tightened belts, hitched up trousers, economized, and resolved to beat the depression. In those days people did not want to be on relief.” This remained true throughout the Depression, with Virginia remaining far more hostile than most states to the idea of handing out welfare to all but the most needy.12

Altogether, this meant that Virginians were generally hostile to FDR’s schemes—though some particular programs involving conservation and agricultural price supports were received well—and supportive of the Organization’s efforts to resist the Cultural Revolution. As Heinemann writes in Depression and New Deal:

Self-help, stoicism, political indifference, and a feeling that Virginians were better off than others all combined to minimize protest in the Old Dominion. There was next to no support for the left; the Communist party polled eighty-six votes in the 1932 election, and although Norman Thomas’s Socialists enjoyed a brief “resurgence,” they received less than 1 percent of the vote (2,382 votes) . . . The absence of an active union movement in the state limited what little class consciousness existed among workers, and the extent of subsistence or general farming as opposed to market-oriented one-crop agriculture kept rural discontent low. Having insulated the state against the worst of depression, this traditional social order would prove almost impervious to the “revolution” soon to take place in Washington.

Now, it’s time to discuss what that war against DC and FDR entailed.

How Byrd Fought His War

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Such is, typically, the message that is pushed by right and left alike: the choice was between the Reds, FDR, populist socialism of the sort exemplified by Huey Long, and the rightist bureaucracies of Continental Europe. After man had been mobilized, there was no longer a place for a different pattern of life, one more in keeping with Western tradition.

This is what we are told about America in particular: the social changes wrought by industrialization and hardships wrought by the Great Depression brought such extreme displacement and suffering that the only realistic options we had were to let the Reds win, or accept some sort of compromise with them of the sort offered by FDR and Huey Long. Either way, redistribution, an expansive government, and the “common good” (to be defined by the have-nots rather than the haves) were the golden calves of the day. Life, liberty, and property were to be left by the wayside because their exemplars—the Harding-style “conservatives” who were characterized as worshipping Mammon and nothing else—had so failed to conserve anything worthwhile.

But that isn’t quite true. Even if it was the predominant sentiment of the day, there were counter-examples. They show what path could have been taken in the face of national upheaval to restore sanity and prosperity while preserving the American way of life. The best of these is Harry Flood Byrd. A self-made apple orchard baron and newspaperman who became first governor, then Senator for Virginia, he ran the so-called Byrd Organization—the Democratic Party machine that dominated the Old Dominion for about half a century—with the aim of preserving not just his political power, but historic Virginia.

An heir of the great Byrd name, a direct descendant of the famed William Byrds of Westover and their tradition of public service, he was an authentic Virginia patrician who mustered all of the power of his state to resist first the New Deal, then the Fair Deal, then the Civil Rights Act. Throughout it all, he remained ever the patrician, and never a rabble-rouser of the Long type. There was no one with a concomitant level of power at the state level across the nation, and no one who wielded what power they had more wisely than Harry Byrd.

His story has been mostly forgotten. That is a great shame, as he is the man who stood athwart the tide of communism, socialism, regimentation, and bureaucratization in the mid-20th century and did not just command the tide to stop, but ensured it broke around his beloved Old Dominion. He is the man who discovered the path to resisting leftism in a way that was genuinely conservative, rather than a revolution of spite and envy cloaked in the skin-suited garb of the right.

In all that, Harry Byrd provides an incomparable lesson to us, and shows the path to resisting the left’s grasping attempts at tyranny without ourselves adopting that very same tyrannical impulse, and all the rotten wages it carries with it.

So, in the next series articles, I will show how Harry Byrd built an organization that enabled him to stand up to DC on behalf of Virginia and its unique way of life (that’s what this one is on), how he fought FDR over the fate of his state, how he fought the equality-obsessed Civil Rights regime that followed the Second World War, and what factors led to his ultimate defeat in the war against Civil Rights, and for a conservative America. In each article, I’ll do a deep dive into the history, and then articulate some lessons I think we should take away from it. There is much we all can, and should, learn from this, so I hope you find these as interesting to read as I found researching them.

A note on sources: The primary works used for this article are Harry Byrd of Virginia by Ronald L. Heinemann, Harry Byrd and the Changing Face of Virginia Politics, 1945-1966 by J. Harvie Wilkinson (III), The Byrds of Virginia by Alden Hatch, and Virginia: Bourbonism to Byrd by Allen W. Moger. All four are reasonably good. Hatch’s is the most fun to read. Wilkinson’s describes the Byrd Organization the best. I also read, in preparation for this article specifically, The Byrd Machine in Virginia by Michael Lee Pope. It is quite a tiresome read—Pope is an inveterate leftist who has an obvious disdain for Byrd and his Organization—and is generally superficial rather than detailed. I would recommend reading any of the other books instead. Listen to the audio version of this lengthy article here:

Harry Byrd: The Last Virginia Gentleman, the Patrician of the Atomic Age

Despite being quintessentially Southern—he was of centuries-old blood, fond of linen suits, lived in a manor home with oversized white-painted pillars, and an inveterate opponent of the Civil Rights regime—Harry Byrd was in many ways the exception that proved the rule, as he remained a true patrician in an era that had largely seen the erasure of such men. After all, Russell Kirk felt fully justified declaring, when writing The Conservative Mind in 1953:

Only vague cautionary impulses guided the South after 1865, combining with popular distrust of the negro, and lack of material resources, to slacken the rate of social alteration. The modern South cannot be said to obey any consciously conservative ideas--only conservative instincts, exposed to all the corruption that instinct unlit by principle encounters in a literate age. The affection for state sovereignty, the duties of a gentleman, and the traditions of society which Randolph and Calhoun extolled found their finest embodiment in General Lee; and, with Lee, these ideas yielded to superior force at Appomattox.

In much of the country this was true. No great leader shines forth from Georgia, South Carolina, or any of the other Southern states in the aftermath of the War Between the States. Their world had been wiped away, and the sort of men who exemplified it went with it.

But not in Virginia, a state Kirk sadly ignored. There, the deep and abiding belief in state sovereignty that once so characterized the South, and the sort of duty-minded gentlemen who fought for it, had not yet taken its last bow. That was thanks to Harry Byrd, who used his vast, self-made fortune not to recline in indolent splendor but to fight for Virginia’s traditional social structure well after such a form of life had been wiped away everywhere else it once had taken hold, from Charleston to the Cotswolds. Well, with the exception of Rhodesia, which was still battling on—thanks in no small part to Harry Byrd.

Byrd’s Background

Who was this man, Byrd, and why was he able to so gamely battle with a presidency so powerful it remade America?

Though born in Winchester, Virginia, he was the descendant of the Byrds of Westover, that famous line amongst the First Families that was so noted for its wealth, polish, and splendor before it flamed out so spectacularly with William Byrd III in the early years of the Revolution.

Popular memory, to the extent it even remembers the family, typically stops there. But William’s wife was able to save enough of the fortune despite his death and bankruptcy to keep the family intact, though not at Westover. Instead, it followed the path of many Virginians in those days, and escaped the worn-out soil of the Tidewater by heading West. Rather than tromping all the way to Kentucky, however, they stopped in Western Virginia—and remember, then there was no West Virginia, for that was not to come until the Civil War—and rebuilt in the hollers, hills, and valleys to the West of the Shenandoah.

There they trundled on for a few generations, and rebuilt the family’s fortunes in the face of poverty and Civil War to the point that Harry’s father, Richard, was a noted state politician in addition to being a lawyer. The town of Winchester in which they lived was noted for its commitment to both the Confederate cause and the general idea of the New South, which consisted of massive investment in the South that would turn those impoverished areas reliant on subsistence agriculture into wealthy industrial areas.1

Byrd was thus a man of both modernity and the halcyon days of Virginia’s past, a living embodiment of what it had once been, and what it could be. His William Byrd ancestors, after all, had been highly influential not just in the governing of Virginia, but in the development of it too, and genteel poverty of the sort he exemplified was the general state of things all across the state, but particularly in Winchester.2

Wilkinson, noting how Byrd was to use this patrician heritage and personal sense of the past throughout his political career, writes, "Gentleman Byrd called to mind the Washingtons, Jeffersons, Lees, and Jacksons whom present-day Virginians had come to revere. He was a direct descendant of William Byrd of Westover... Harry Byrd always carried with him a sense of the past." Hatch, similarly, wrote: "He goes back to the British colonial Cavaliers, men gaily untroubled in the full exercise of their privileges, but bound by hoops of iron to the Spartan discharge of their responsibilities as they saw them."

Such is what Byrd was. He was a man of duty, a gentleman of not just wealth or virtue but power too, despite living in the jet and atomic age. In this, he would have made his William Byrd ancestors proud, particularly the resplendent and powerful William Byrd II.3

And he was far more rooted in Virginia tradition than just being a descendant of one of its famed first families. He also was fully versed in its theory and belief of states’ rights, understanding, as he put it, that “good government flows from separation of powers and that concentration and consolidation of power breeds corrupt and despotic rule." Such is what Virginians had always thought, and is an issue about which they were always right.

Byrd understood this, and his conservatism—unlike that present across much of the rest of the South in those days—was not mere reaction, but rather a cogent philosophy of life and government grounded in self-reliance, limited government, and devotion to an ancestral constitutional order. This is what he would use his powerful Byrd Organization—the state Democratic Party machine—to achieve.

Harry was different than many of his fellow Virginians in that he desired not just to defend his state’s way of life, but to go on the counter-offensive and take that ideology to Washington in an attempt to fight against the times. “I would vastly prefer to take the Virginia philosophy of government to Washington than to bring the current Washington theories to Virginia," he famously remarked. At another point, he told his constituents, "In this worthwhile struggle for the supremacy of sound principle, let us never forget: no cause that is right will ever be lost. The Virginia pattern of government will survive.”

How could one man achieve this in the face of such a merciless, spiteful, omnipresent government? He couldn’t. To achieve it, every state position would have to be filled, and representatives at the state and national level chosen, from amongst the ranks of his acolytes. He would have to ensure that his view of life—one that championed and allowed for what he had done in building a vast fortune in a tradition-oriented state—was the dominant one across the ranks of those who politically mattered. He needed allies, and he needed a political organization that would support him in fighting for his state’s way of life.

It was the Virginia Democratic “Organization” that was to serve this purpose for him. In it, he built a protective bulwark that shielded the state’s finances, institutions, and traditional way of life from Washington’s bureaucratic expansion and all the tyranny wrought by such a malignant cancer growing in the Chesapeake.

The Organization

The Duty to Govern

Like his ancestors in colonial days, Harry Byrd was raised to believe that those men of prominence in a community had a duty to involve themselves in politics, particularly at the state level. This belief remained constant throughout his life. In 1910, for example, he said, when just a young man starting out, “We think that men of business ability and enterprise should be elected to the council, men who will do their duty without fear or favor, and men who will be willing to devote time, energy and thought to giving the city a good, clean, healthy and efficient government.” Many years later, he remarked: “Politics is not a separate branch of knowledge. It needs a very deep background of general experience. No man, in my opinion, is qualified to assume political power until he has served a long apprenticeship to private business and has learned its connections with public affairs.”

And so, doing his duty by following in the footsteps of his father,4 as many a Virginia gentleman had done before him, he turned early success in the newspaper and apple business into a part-time political career that let him win renown as a state legislator. Indeed, he rose so quickly that it was when still a young man that he was chosen to be the chairman of the state Democratic party. He was chosen because of his many obvious virtues, as Moger notes:

Because of Byrd’s demonstrated political skill, his personal business success, and his generally likable qualities, all party leaders desired him as state Democratic chairman, and he was chosen to succeed his uncle.

This was to prove an important moment for the young man. Through this leadership position, he was to remake the state Democratic Party in his image and turn it into a “sure political base” that allowed him to fight for Virginia’s unique traditions, culture, and civilization against the vile rise of socialism and bureaucracy for the next five decades.5 He did so by creating the Byrd Organization, something that, like him, was fundamentally different than that which existed elsewhere in the country in his day.6

The Organization’s Origins

Byrd did so by taking over the Martin Organization, the state’s old political machine, and keeping it as intact as possible while gradually replacing its leading men with his men. The beginning of this process can be traced to his taking over the state Democratic Party. Pope, describing this origin of the machine and what it came to be, notes:

The birth of the Byrd Machine is often traced to the day Harry Byrd became chairman of the Democratic Party of Virginia in 1922, a position he used to carefully oversee the flow of money and power. At the time, he was a young state senator from the Shenandoah Valley who had been born with a silver spoon in his mouth-someone with a colonial pedigree and a father who would soon become Speaker of the House of Delegates.

The Byrd Machine was a statewide operation, but it operated as a network of courthouse rings. Sheriffs, judges and clerks of court conspired to hold power by using the mechanics of elections to control outcomes. For these Democratic Party officials, the bad old days of widespread voter participation led to anarchy and violence. They believed that the best way to uphold the principle of democracy was to limit who got to participate. The poll tax was the weapon of choice to control who was allowed to vote and, therefore, who was allowed to win.

This Organization was not a democratic force. It was an aristocratic one not unlike the sort of government that dominated colonial Virginia, and led it so well. As TIME magazine put it in 1958, "The Byrd Machine is an oligarchy, composed of the few, chosen by the few to make decisions for the many. In its oligarchic context, the Byrd organization is an alliance of gentlemen, and a gentleman is known more for his philosophy than by his purse or pedigree."

Meanwhile, Byrd kept those who mattered to the Organization loyal to it by leading it well, and then by governing the state well when called upon to serve in the gubernatorial role.7 He was called upon to serve for the same reasons he was made leader of the state party: he was honest, likeable, trustworthy, and competent. It helped that he was of famous blood, but most important was his unquestioned integrity.8

Particularly, he used his powers as governor to institute his famous “pay as you go” policy for highways—Virginia would stay out of debt by using gas taxes to pay for gradually more road construction rather than using huge state debt sales to fund immediate and rapid highway construction—and by reorganizing the state’s administrative bureaucracy substantially.9 Before him, it was bloated, inefficient, and ineffective. After he brought his businessman’s mind to the matter and slashed it dramatically, it was a far smaller, simpler, and more efficient administrative apparatus that survived.

Remaking the Organization

Governor Byrd had “consolidated nearly one hundred bureaus, boards, and departments, previously independent of the governor, into fourteen departments directly subject to the governor's control. The number of statewide elective officers was reduced from seven to three.” These “revolutionary, but sound”10 reforms had the added benefit of being hailed as “progressive” while also serving as “a device for machine control…[the substance of which] became increasingly conservative” over time.

Byrd was adept at using the media as a tool that, when cultivated correctly, could highlight his reforms and be quite a positive force for his administration.11 Byrd, of course, always kept an eye on how each and every decision he made would affect the organization, and made sure to make the decisions that would strengthen it.12

In all this, Gov. Byrd—the youngest Virginia governor since Jefferson—had learned from earlier attempts in Virginia to reform the Martin Organization. Particularly, he learned the lesson that if Virginia and its mode of government were to change, they would do “slowly, and certainly not at the expense of the ruling class.”13

What Was the Organization?

Harry aimed to align incentives by using tax cuts,14 administrative reforms, state fee structures, and personal patronage to create an “interlocking network of General Assembly members, circuit judges, ‘courthouse ring,’ and machine leaders, dependent upon one another for job security, salaries, and election support.” Heinemann, describing how the Organization worked, writes:

“Control of the courthouse, the assembly, and the network of patronage and fees that sustained the loyalty between commanders and lieutenants remained the key to power, while constitutional limitations restricted the electorate, keeping it small and controllable.”

In other words, the same old system of cronies existed, but now they were aligned with his goals of providing Virginians with honest and competent governance while their traditions were not just maintained but strengthened. As one such crony, John Stewart Battle, put it in his 1949 campaign when asked about the Organization, “it is nothing more or less than a loosely knit group of Virginians who usually think alike, who are interested in the welfare of the commonwealth, who are supremely interested in giving Virginia good government and good public servants, and they usually act together.”

How the Organization Functioned

Much as the courthouse had once been central to the Virginia cursus honorum, it was integral to the Byrd Organization, as it is where those loosely knit Virginians met for political events,15 and was where the right sort of men were anointed.16 Pope, describing the importance of the county court network to the Organization, writes:

The center of power for the machine was the county courthouse, where organization functionaries kept the engine humming along. In election after election, county seats across Southside Virginia and up and down the Shenandoah Valley to the Eastern Shore competed with one another to see who could provide the most lopsided victory to machine candidates. The old Confederate statue guarding the courthouse was a not-so-subtle hint that retrograde forces were at work. Few people held as much power or had as much influence as the local clerk of court, who was welcomed in the back room of the senator’s Washington office and the hotel suites of his lieutenants in Richmond.

Besides being a natural gathering place in an agrarian community, what made the courthouse network so important to Byrd’s machine was part of the bureaucracy that Byrd had restructured earlier in his career: the State Board of Compensation, charged with determining salaries and expense allowances for all locally elected courthouse officials. As much discretion in allowances for expenses and salary standards was allowed, this meant the Compensation Board had considerable leeway to use its powers to push its agenda through the courthouses. Hatch, describing how this worked, wrote:

The upper echelon, including Byrd, would meet at the Commonwealth Club in Richmond or perhaps at Rosemont or in Winchester, and decide who would be the candidates for the state offices. Then E. R. Combs, Chairman of the Compensation Board, would telephone the different courthouses and tell the judge or county executive, ‘It will be so and so for Governor...’

Wilkinson provides a fun example of how this sort of oversight and control worked in practice. He writes:

A visitor to Lawrenceville in the late forties and early fifties might have noticed a small, elderly man passing frequently through the double-screen door of the courthouse. This gentleman was W. Emory Elmore, county clerk in Brunswick since 1920 and a well-known figure to practically everyone in Lawrenceville and the surrounding area. To his fellows he was a genuinely affable and Christian man-interested alike in the community's church life and golf course. His good nature at times overextended itself: when on the putting green, he conceded opponents' shots which even the great Sam Snead would have found difficult. No single man had more respect in Brunswick County than Elmore. When he died in 1955 his townsmen hung his portrait on the wall of the old county courtroom.

Emory Elmore also liked politics. To him politics and Harry Flood Byrd were a way of life-an absorbing hobby and a sacred duty. For twenty-seven years he served as chairman of the county Democratic committee;' for twenty-seven years and more he worked religiously for Byrd and the disciples of his political creed. When E. R. ("Ebbie") Combs went to Richmond to captain the Virginia operations of the Byrd organization, Elmore was a trusted local lieutenant. Even more important, he was known in Brunswick to be a close friend of the Senator himself, one of those allowed in the back room of Byrd's Washington office and Virginia hotel suites. In Brunswick County he had the inside word, was far more "in the know" than any local paper. Small wonder, then, that gubernatorial aspirants came to Brunswick as much as two years before election day to pay their respects to W. Emory Elmore.

Similar sorts of men helped Byrd, both as Governor and Senator, keep control of the legislature on behalf of the Organization. Particularly, the Speaker served much the same role as the Chairman of the Compensation Board, issuing orders and directing the flow of information. As Wilkinson writes: "In the House of Delegates the governor looked to the speaker. This powerful figure controlled the flow of action on the floor, made all committee appointments, referred new bills 'to the proper committee,' and doubled as chairman of the House Committee on Rules...”

The Poll Tax: Limiting the Electorate to Save the State

Aiding Byrd in this was the poll tax.

A central problem of any democracy is the franchise. Byrd and Virginia’s ruling class realized that true conservatism of the sort they epitomized—steady and competent patrician leadership that doesn’t rock the boat—is essentially impossible in a mass democracy, given the sorts of pressures put on the state by hard times.

So, they sought to limit the franchise, and succeeded in doing so.

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As a reminder, you can always listen for free on Spotify or YouTube.

The story then moves to the Shenandoah Valley campaign of 1862, noting how Jackson’s rapid movements and attacks fulfilled Lee’s wishes perfectly, and built Lee’s confidence in Jackson to the point that the two men could work closely together.

The episode next covers Second Manassas, showing how faith in Jackson allowed Lee to divide his army in an attempt to crush Pope. He sent Jackson on a long flank march behind John Pope’s forces, leading to the capture and destruction of Union supplies at Manassas Junction. Jackson then held a strong defensive position while Lee and Longstreet struck Pope’s exposed flank, forcing a Union retreat and giving the Confederates a major victory.

After that, the focus shifts to Lee’s decision to invade Maryland, and how a lost order led to tragedy at Antietam, setting up the next year’s great victory at Chancellorsville, and the World WarI-like butchery at Fredericksburg

Check out our sponsor, the Classical Society, here, and tell them that Will sent you:

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CHAPTERS:

0:00 Lee and Jackson United: The Great Partnership Begins

5:57 Seven Days Setback

9:21 Lee Regroups and Attacks Northward as Pope Threatens Virginia

15:42 Lee’s Great Gamble, Jackson’s Flank March

24:28 Lee, Jackson, and Longstreet at Second Manassas

33:41 Why Lee Invaded Maryland, and Why It Went Wrong

45:48 Antietam: America’s Bloody Day

Sources Referenced in this Episode:

I am an Amazon Affiliate. If you would like to support the show at no added cost to yourself, you can do so by using the links below to order and read the sources I used to create this episode. Thanks!

Armes, Ethel, Stratford Hall: The Great House of the Lees, https://amzn.to/4wxAAfl

Burt, Nathaniel, First Families: The Making of an American Aristocracy, https://amzn.to/4r0KLYG

Cole, Ryan, Light-Horse Harry Lee: The Rise and Fall of a Revolutionary Hero, https://amzn.to/4wiZOy3

Connelly, Thomas L., The Marble Man: Robert E. Lee and His Image in American Idea, https://amzn.to/4ywRf4j

Crocker, H. W., III, Robert E. Lee on Leadership: Executive Lessons in Management, https://amzn.to/4gvXpds

Dabney, Virginius, Virginia: The New Dominion, https://amzn.to/46gVW69

Dowdey, Clifford, Lee: A Biography, https://amzn.to/46lDf14

Fleming, Thomas, A Disease in the Public Mind: A New Understanding of Why We Fought the Civil War, https://amzn.to/4yzbiix

Flood, Charles Bracelen, Lee: The Last Years, https://amzn.to/4gDcA4I

Freeman, Douglas Southall, R. E. Lee: A Biography, https://amzn.to/4gkaqrx

Hendrick, Burton J., The Lees of Virginia, https://amzn.to/4xshjNe

Lee, Cazenove Gardner, Jr., Lee Chronicle: Studies of the Early Generations of the Lees, https://amzn.to/4q7GiTI

Longacre, Edward G., Fitz Lee: A Military Biography of Major General Fitzhugh Lee, https://amzn.to/4xkLNAu

Nagel, Paul C., The Lees of Virginia: Seven Generations of an American Family, https://amzn.to/4wUxkfi

Nichols, James L., General Fitzhugh Lee: A Biography, https://amzn.to/4qeURoz

Royster, Charles, Light-Horse Harry Lee and the Legacy of the American Revolution, https://amzn.to/3TKWspX

Sanborn, Margaret, Robert E. Lee: A Portrait, https://amzn.to/3SA6EkN

Thomas, Emory M., Robert E. Lee: A Biography, https://amzn.to/46qVL8c

Transcript

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Why the idea of “passive income” is popular is obvious: who doesn’t want income without working? Such certainly has its advantages compared to the alternatives. Namely, an income that requires work, or starvation.

But “passive income” is also a term as nebulous as it is nefarious.

Listen to the audio version of this article here:

For one, what is passive? Does managing an investment portfolio of dividend-paying securities count? That doesn’t require digging ditches, but also isn’t really “passive” in the sense that it requires no work. Similarly, being a landlord—or, to put it more politely, “owning rental properties”—is one such path to financial freedom hawked by the pushers of such dreams. But is dealing with a tenant’s refuse after he refused to pay rent for the fourth month in a row, evicting said tenant, and then finding a new tenant with “a good credit score” really passive? Is cleaning up an Airbnb property after a motley assortment of “youthful scholars” trash it really passive?

No. Typically, what is hoped for by such a term is an investment in which one can park cash that requires no work, no continued oversight, and a steady income. That leaves government bonds and some bond/dividend mutual funds and ETFs. You can either get the “risk-free” rate of return from the government, or trust a collection of strivers working in Manhattan to put your money in a place where it’ll produce an income for you.

Those on the quest for the Holy Grail of the Would-be Dissipated could have ignored the blog puff pieces, for this is something the WASP class found two centuries ago, and is what they did. They bought American and British government bonds (this is why the gold standard was so important to them), or invested in trust companies that did the hard work of investing in corporate bonds and equities for them. They could then live lives of leisure that were divorced from work, attention, or reality. As I discussed recently, this ended in disaster for them, as the risk of government bonds is persistent inflation, and the risk of trust companies is that fools or frauds run them into the ground. Both happened to the WASPS, and the calamitous collapse of the Knickerbocker Trust Company and persistent inflation throughout the 20th century are much of the reason they are no longer around as a class.

That leads to the nefarious part of “passive income” as a concept.

Notably, the WASPs were the only “aristocracy” of sorts in the Anglo world that died as a result of their own fecklessness. Admittedly, the British landed elite and colonial elite both died out, as did the Virginia gentry and Southern planters. But they died because they were murdered; in some cases, literally, but more typically, metaphorically. They died because they faced expropriation of various sorts—outright expropriation in the case of the colonial elites like the planters of Southeast Asia and farmers of Rhodesia, death and income tax-driven expropriation in the case of the British landed elite, and invasion followed by tax-justified expropriation during Reconstruction throughout the South—and it was eventually enough to kill them.

In some cases they folded without much of a fight, as in Britain and the plantations of India and Malaysia. In other cases, such as Rhodesia and the Confederacy, they fought like lions.

Regardless, in no case was it their own lack of attention to detail that diminished their patrimonies and powers as a class. Individually, perhaps, but not at any scale.

But the WASPs did. They were inattentive to finance, inattentive to politics, inattentive to inflation, inattentive even to their own money…and so it flowed out of their pockets and into the pockets of others, and all of a sudden they found that they’d have to work to eat at all, much less off silver platters. There were exceptions, namely the Mellons and Goelets, but they were few and far between. Much more typical were those of the sort Fitzgerald describes in books like This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned, frittering away frivolous lives of indolence that could have been great—as shown by sparks of glory, like their service in the Great War and as Rough Riders in the Spanish-American War—if only they had applied themselves.

So, what was the difference between them and those like the Rhodesians and Virginians, men noted for the habit of command and incredible exemplars of the Anglo-Norman spirit of excellence?

The key is the form of wealth they held, and how they held it. The WASPs are a case study in the dangers of abstracted wealth, namely in how detachment from the real leads both to a loss of power and a loss of money.

The other gentries and aristocracies, after all, were landed elites. They might have prudently diversified their wealth by buying equities, urban real estate, bank ownership, mineral rights, and so on, but they were at their core an elite that drew its power, prominence, and position from engrossment of the land. They possessed large estates on which they had either workers to farm it in hand or tenants to farm it and pay rent.

The British system of biannual rents required somewhat less oversight than the Southern and Rhodesian preference of farming land in hand, or renting it to sharecroppers if forced to rent, but was nevertheless a management-intensive exercise. It required constant inspections of farms, close attention to the collection of rents and signing of rental agreements, prudent investment in the farmed properties—everything from tile drainage to make waterlogged land productive to marling overfarmed soil to return it to fertility and productivity, and much more besides. Most of all, it required good relations with one’s tenants and neighbors, great and small alike.

This is what built the habit of command—and command over society—for which British lords, Virginia gentlemen, and Rhodesian farmers were known. If they did a bad job of it, whether growing tobacco or getting the right tenants on the right farms under the right terms, they were liable to first fall into debt and then have to sell their ancestral estates. This was too mortifying to contemplate—the mark of a proper gentleman in such societies was his excellent stewardship over that which he had inherited—and so he forced himself to pay attention to the details of management rather than simply the pleasures of life at the top.

The way in which their properties were held helped force this. Unlike today, large farms were not corporate entities managed by a bland set of bureaucratic managerial elites and stodgy board members. Instead, they were the specific property of a certain man, and over them he was sovereign. If a dissolute fool like Light Horse Harry Lee, he could run them into the ground and lose them. If a prudent steward of wealth like a Grosvenor of England or Carter of Virginia, he could derive much local and national power, prestige, and honor from them…along with much pleasure, of course.

In either case, as the man atop the hill—often literally, given the positioning of great houses—he had to be the one to decide the exception, make decisions, and live with the consequences. He had to develop his own judgement to the point that he could trust it, and then actually do so.

For one, that forced a certain realism. As Charles Sydnor notes in American Revolutionaries in the Making, “A man who could not manage well his own affairs would hardly impress his neighbors as a man who ought to be entrusted with the management of public affairs.” As participation in public life with one’s wealth as the basis of that participation was seen as the point of life to such men, they had good reason to pay close attention to their affairs.

Yet further, the reality that chaos in their area was bound to make their lands less productive—rapine, anarchy, and dysfunction carry a cost, after all—meant that they were forced to participate in local and national affairs so as to prevent that. This is why every Virginian of note was a member of the vestry and a justice of the peace and most served as officers in the colonial militia. It is why the British gentry constantly served in the justice of the peace role, and otherwise administered the affairs of their counties and served in the Army as officers. It is why the House of Lords, not the Commons, produced so much of the pro-worker legislation that staved off revolution in the tense times of Victorian England: they cared about long-term stability, not short-term extraction, and understood that they had a role to play in achieving such. Additionally, the general progression from local to national affairs in the world of the Anglo landed elites had the added benefit that “men learned to administer law and observed the effects of law before they were entrusted with its making.”

Had they simply lived in the cities as detached rentiers and left the management of their estates entirely to stewards—as the feckless French nobles who populated Versailles were infamous for—this would not have been the case. Had they relied purely on abstracted wealth like government bonds and widely distributed equity ownership rather than land for their wealth, this would not have been the case. But because they were landed and made it a point to remain part of the nitty-gritty of country life, it was the case, and they developed the attention to their own affairs and habit of command that meant the tyrannical and bureaucratic state eventually had to kill them, rather than just wait for them to waste away.

This was not the case with the WASPs and their passive income. Some were more attentive than others, but by and large, their wealth was not just premised upon the labor of others—a fact common to all upper classes—but the judgment of others as well. This was disastrous for them, as it atrophied their ability to be men of consequence possessed of good judgment, as any true upper class must be or face extinction. Some manager at some trust company made their decisions for them, or the government did through the interest rates issued on the bonds they bought, and the pleasure vessel that was their lives kept sailing while they whiled away their time upon it…literally, in the case of many of them, like Jack Morgan.

And then the party was over, and all that could have been was wiped away. Suddenly their country was not their own—it had been filled with hordes of migrants they had done little to stop, imported by the bosses of the companies they technically owned but had done little to control. The political system was hostile to them, for the Republicans were incompetent and Democrats were tools of communist tyranny. The demographically transformed population was hostile to them, filled with visions of anarchy and socialism imported from the impoverished lands of Southern, Central, and Eastern Europe. And their money was gone, frittered away on pleasures, whittled away by inflation, or both.

Other plutocratic elites faced much the same situation throughout the 20th century, by the way. As discussed in my favorite academic study, Trajectories of Aristocratic Wealth, 1858–2018: Evidence from Probate, Britain’s plutocrats began the 20th century far wealthier than the old, land-based, Anglo-Norman peers. By the time it ended, despite facing generally favorable taxes and regulations compared to those peers, it was the plutocrats rather than the descendants of William’s Conquerors who were broke.

This is something from which we ought learn. Indeed, it is why I think my friend was so correct to, in his book Leaving A Legacy, push families interested in dynasty to generally eschew investment in highly liquid, highly abstracted financial instruments of the sort that are now typical—broad-market ETFs, and the like—and instead invest in that which requires members of the family to exercise direct, consequence-connected oversight.

A familial portfolio of rental homes, private business interests (owned directly, for the income, not as part of some Private Equity fund handled by others for capital appreciation), farmland, timberland, a small basket of individual stocks, and the like will undoubtedly be much more tiresome and effort-intensive to manage than a Vanguard account with VOO and VYM in it. It takes the kids participating—dealing with tenants, scouting out potential purchases, working with (or as) contractors, and all the rest—to succeed.

It is also more concentrated in given locales, and is thus politically riskier. If your town becomes a hellhole, those rental properties will be unpleasant and unremunerative investments at best. That’s as good an incentive as ever there was to be deeply involved in politics, and ensure your community locks up criminals and doesn’t import Haitians. And that is the point, as I recently argued in my article on Detroit and Neo-Feudalism.

The habit of command does not come from nothing. Nothing comes from nothing, and to believe otherwise is to be racing towards the rocks atop which the Sirens sit. Our world is an increasingly passive one. Passive wealth is the obvious example, but it is true of nearly everything.

As a child, one participates in a highly regulated set of highly curated activities so that such “experiences” help one get into the “right classes” then the “right school”. A select set of majors at the “right school” help one get the “right job” in the “right field”. A “good job” in the right field is a ladder to middling prosperity, divorced from ownership in anything real with which one can provide patronage opportunities to potential allies, or anything more than advice and perhaps cash support to kids. Many of those who trod along this path are now discovering that however good a middle manager for a Fortune 500 company that hates them they might be, it will fire them and there’s little they can do about it, as white men, and even less they can do to then get another such “good job”, much less get one for their sons. Such are the consequences of the passive life, and its track to nowhere.

The alternative is the life of consequence. Going on outdoor adventures with one’s friends instead of endless weeks spent slogging through travel tee ball and spelling bee preparations. Pursuing interests deeply, rather than performatively engaging in the “right” classes and extracurriculars. Finding what one is exceptional at and doing it, rather than trying to compete with the whole world for a bureaucratic post of some sort. Gambling on oneself and accepting the consequences—certain inconvenience, probable derision, likely failure at one attempt or another before eventual success—rather than gambling on the munificence of a company with a DEI policy to a white man who is wired correctly, biologically speaking.

To glorify the passive—passive income in particular—is to glorify the doing of nothing. It is to glorify dissipation-creating pleasure and indolent frivolity, the marks of passivity when it works out. And it rarely works out for long. Believing otherwise is to make the same mistake the WASPs made, the one that led to their demise as a class.

We ought not do that. We ought instead cherish and cultivate the life well lived, the life spent in pursuit of consequence and excellence. We can start by rejecting the idea of passivity to which our world is so attached, and instead find ways to encourage the path less travelled, the one of being sovereign and deciding the exception over whatever little area of life one is able, learning how consequences work and how to manage them for the best without it becoming a devouring obsession.

That is what the gentries about which I write—the British, the Virginians, the colonials—did so well, and why they proved far more resilient than did their Yankee peers of a sort, who found themselves doubly humiliated in their dispossession, for it came as a result of their own faults rather than a tyrannical government reacting fearfully and harshly to their strengths. And this time, we ought to figure out how to win that battle with the monstrous strength that is the rapacious, egalitarian-minded bureaucracy.

So, I know we are due for a paywalled article. That is what this one was supposed to be. however, as I wrote it, I decided it should probably be open to the public, as I do think this mindset shift is important and must be encouraged as widely as is possible. Further, I finally finished a book that gave me some insights for the article coming on Friday, which I will paywall, and which I think you will both like and get a lot out of reading. So, I would of course very much appreciate you becoming a paid subscriber, and apologize for the delay on getting a paid article to you. I hope you understand. Finally, I am all moved in! So the content schedule should be back to normal.

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As a reminder, you can always listen in full, for free, on Spotify or YouTube.

That system began to break down with the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 and the agricultural depression of the 1870s as cheap grain from the United States, carried by rail and steamship, drove down British agricultural prices and rents. At the same time, the Third Reform Act expanded the electorate and weakened the old rural political structure.

As incomes fell, many landowners were burdened by debt, mortgages, and family settlements. Some sold land, houses, art, and other assets; others tried to shift into business, finance, or colonial ventures. The People’s Budget and the Parliament Act then increased taxes and reduced the power of the House of Lords, making the old order even less secure.

World War I accelerated the decline. Many aristocrats served and died in unusually high numbers, and wartime requisitioning damaged or destroyed country houses. After the war, the class remained visible in local life, but it lost national political influence and much of its confidence.

After describing the decline of the class, I articulate what lessons we should draw from its demise.

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Sources Referenced in this Episode:

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The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy, https://link.amazon/B08at3udq

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Aristocrats, https://link.amazon/B0bhdsxet

The Iron Duke, https://link.amazon/B0bWhIY77

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English Landed Society in the Nineteenth Century, https://link.amazon/B0c6eSxVo

European Landed Elites in the 19th Century, https://link.amazon/B0eQ9UGUY

The Conservative Mind, https://link.amazon/B0bDdEBuS

The Serpent and the Stag, https://link.amazon/B03VrFQ8J

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In all the excitement, I’ve had less time to write than I hoped. So, given how much people liked the recent story about General Taylor’s response to the German 48er general, I figured you might enjoy this short story about Ian Fleming and notorious Brutalist architect Erno Goldfinger.

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The Architect So Terrible He Became a Bond Villain

The story is, I suppose, a relatively simple one: a clash of old and new, great and dismal, beautiful and ugly. The post-World War II years were about as calamitous for London, and indeed for Britain generally, as could be imagined. The city had been brutalized by bombs, cruise missiles, and rockets. The Exchequer was empty. The empire was not yet lost, but the Raj was not long for this world, and the remainder was increasingly untenable. The population was discontented on many levels: it was poor, hungry, tired of rationing, tired of war, and generally socialistic.

These were the years in the Wilderness for Britain. It was adrift, without much purpose or much energy. It lacked that great swaggering confidence that had so defined the imperial era, and such was self-evident in everything about life within it. The country houses were being torn down, not built up. Capital was fleeing the country, not entering it. The colonists across the far-flung empire were departing what their ancestors had built or digging in to fight it out, not exploring and building the world anew any longer.

Into this dire and toxic stew of socialistic opinions and tax policies to match was a man who defined the age, in all its drab grimness: Erno Goldfinger.

Born in Hungary, Goldfinger was an architect. Or, at least, what passed for an architect in the years after civilization fell to pieces. You see, he was a “modernist”. A Brutalist, actually. And he despised anything that normal, functional, mentally healthy people would recognize as beauty. What he preferred was the work of notorious modernist architect Le Corbusier, author of Vers une architecture. Indeed, Goldfinger was entranced by the ideas of Le Corbusier’s former mentor, Auguste Perret.

Perret was not an architect in the way that Sir Edwin Lutyens or Sir John Vanbrugh were architects. He had no sense of beauty, nor of dignity and refinement in those horrid structures he raised. Rather, he was an expert in designing reinforced concrete structures.

Goldfinger took Perret’s ideas and ran with them. Instead of building pleasant structures that are pleasing to the eye, flowing with natural beauty and grace, he would design such structures as could only be made with modern materials, namely reinforced concrete. Testing this out in the 1930s, he built 1–3 Willow Road in Hampstead, North London. His own home was 2 Willow Road. Some other poor and gullible souls bought the “houses” on either side of him.

He gradually became famous, such as when, in the immediate postwar period, he was hired to build new offices for the Daily Worker newspaper and the headquarters of the British Communist Party. These were predictably wretched-looking, defining the souls of the architect who designed them and the communists within them quite well.

They also became representative of the horrible drift towards ugliness, socialism, and cost-cutting egalitarianism that was to define Britain in the post-war era. Brutalism, his preferred style, is “efficient” in that it is cheaper to build than pretty architecture (it weathers poorly and quickly falls to pieces, which is why it ends up costing much more in the long run). This was perfect for a London that needed to rebuild from the war, or so the authorities thought.

And so Goldfinger became prominent as a Brutalist architect who could design the so-called “tower blocks” that were to fill rebuilt London with housing. These were to be all structures built of reinforced concrete, without ornament other than off-putting architectural design elements. Like all Brutalist buildings, they disconcert rather than inspire.

Amongst his more famous designs was that of Balfron Tower, a 27-story-tall structure that appears like what one would imagine a vertical gulag might look like. It’s a horrid monstrosity, an eyesore and rotten presence.

In that, it defined the new London that was emerging in the post-war era. Gone were all the splendid things that had characterized life in the before times. Gone was the Season, and its balls, arranged throughout the city palaces of great lords and with debutante appearances before the king. In was Balfron Tower, and the taxes levied to support its construction for the supposed benefit of the public. And Erno Goldfinger was the man who represented all of it.

Into this scene stepped Ian Fleming, of James Bond fame. He was an intelligence officer during the Second World War, and worked in the Admiralty. He worked with all the intelligence groups made famous by the war, formed and led a unit of commandos, and otherwise got up to the sort of escapades that were to so titillate his imagination as to eventually produce Bond, James Bond.

He also lived in London, and was very much a gentleman of the old school: old money, old blood, old taste. And as he moved on from Casino Royale to, eventually, Goldfinger, he needed a new villain for the Bond universe. He landed on the man whom he thought to be destroying London with wretched, ugly buildings: Erno Goldfinger.

According to legend, he settled on the “Auric Goldfinger” name after a discussion on the golf course with Erno’s cousin. What appears to have led to that final choice is that Erno’s architectural career blighted Fleming’s world, and he turned to Bond to correct it.

What had happened was that Erno didn’t just build 2 Willow Road in Hampstead on an empty plot of land. London is full, after all, and that wasn’t realistic. Instead, he bought and destroyed a slew of pretty Victorian-style cottages and homes to build his modernist monstrosity, and Fleming hated it. In that decision, and the destruction to which it led, he saw all that was wrong with Britain: a drift from tradition and taste to the dismal blight of communism and those like Erno who effectively promoted it through that which they created.

So, when he saw the old cottages torn down to make way for the monstrosity, he was enraged. The style was off-putting and ugly. The disruption of the pace of life in the neighborhood, a general area in which he lived, was dastardly. The visual blight was unforgivable.

This led him to name the villain Goldfinger: Bond could vicariously fight that which Fleming—always a reactionary in his political and cultural views—hated, but couldn’t stop.

Predictably, the real Goldfinger was a litigious fellow, and freaked out. He retained counsel and prepared for legal war, threatening to sue Fleming for defamation over the matter.

Fleming was apparently nonplussed, as he didn’t back down to the Brutalist architect. Instead, he doubled down and threatened to rename the character “Goldprick”. Humiliated and chastened by the even worse press that would naturally result, Goldfinger backed off in exchange for a few free copies of the book and Fleming’s publisher paying his legal bills. The villain’s name remained, and now “Goldfinger” is a name synonymous not with architecture, but with evil so obvious as to be cartoonish. Fleming got his revenge for 2 Willow Road and the destruction of old London’s visual beauty, even if he couldn’t recreate that which had been lost.

Meanwhile, he decamped for the former colonies and lived in his famous Goldeneye villa in Jamaica. Here’s what his schedule was like as he did so…one of obvious unconcern with whatever Erno thought of the books, and a life devoid of having to look at that which Erno and those like him created.

Featured image background credit: N19±, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

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