Unshakable Books
John Willson
Hillsdale College
The Philadelphia Society, Williamsburg Meeting
November 22, 1996
“Was There A Founding?”
(Permission to quote this speech must be granted by the Author)
(For a short Real Audio excerpt of John Willson’s clarion call for
unshakable books, click here)
Some of you–my friends and colleagues in this society for more than twenty years–know what an honor, what a privilege it is for me to introduce this pathbreaking meeting. Bill Campbell tells me that it is the largest regional meeting in the thirty-two year history of the Philadelphia Society. Without a doubt that is due to the fantastic drawing power of my name. It has nothing to do with Williamsburg, or that we are here to discuss the origins of our republic, or that we have assembled a remarkable group of the most promising young scholars in the country.
Most of you will be glad to know that the title of these remarks does not imply that I am about to rehearse an old debate between Russell Kirk and Harry Jaffa about whether America is “unfounded” or “founded.” That debate is interesting and to a degree even important. But tonight I want to give instead an exhortation, to the scholars we will hear tomorrow, to the Society, to the academy in general. That exhortation is based on the conviction that we are now closer to recovering our past (or at least we have a greater opportunity) than we have been in over seven decades.
Stan Evans told me about two months ago about a conversation he had in Indianapolis with the great Richard Weaver, about 1960. Stan asked him what was most needed to keep the conservative momentum going, after the revival of ideas that Weaver was so instrumental in bringing about. Weaver said, we need “unshakable books.” Unshakable books. Books so compelling and elegant and true that they survive all challenges and the ravages of time. Weaver said this, remember, only about a decade after Lionel Trilling had pronounced the absence of conservative and reactionary ideas in America. Well, now, in 1996 there are no liberal or progressive ideas in America. They were used up in the sixties. To paraphrase Trilling, there are only “pollyannish or tyrannical mental gestures seeking to resemble ideas.”
But this doesn’t mean that it is entirely clear in which direction we are going. Daniel Boone’s biographer (1) recently told a story about the old hunter. A young interviewer asked Boone (when he was an old man) if he had ever been lost. Boone thought for a minute and said, “No, but I was once bewildered for three days.” Old Boone may well have been bewildered about the Founding. During the War for Independence he lost his son Israel in a disastrous and ill-considered attack at the battle of Blue Licks in Kentucky. He was accused of treason, although acquitted in a court-martial. Neither the Commonwealth of Virginia nor the United States Congress sympathized with his debt problems or his applications for land grants. He eventually moved to Spanish territory, pretty ambivalent for a while about the future of his country.
As things were uncertain for Boone looking ahead, they are also complicated and sometimes bewildering for us looking back. I often wish there were more honest bewilderment in my profession.
Here, we have brought together some of the ablest young scholars who are thinking about ideas, especially ideas concerning our Founding. In fact, if Mount Williamsburg were to erupt this weekend and bury the Old Capital, the prospects for recovering that Founding would be dim, indeed.
This program is a first for this increasingly venerable organization; but notice that lest we allow the kids to be home alone, the sessions are chaired by folks of my generation–that is, born after the Great Crash and before December 6, 1941. We have fought against the pagan forces of Leviathan. We have fought against New Dealers and Fair Dealers and no-dealers. We took on the Vital Center and the End of Ideology and have shown that all reports of our death were premature. We have not gone away. We have bequeathed to this new generation unshakable books and the deconstruction of deconstruction, and we charge them to “see then that ye walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise; Redeeming the time, because the days are evil.” (Eph5:15-16)
You must deal with Boomer-books, and the legacy of the Left’s long march through the institutions. On one level you have a task easier than ours: how much of a problem can it be, intellectually to annihilate the Clinton generation and its pathetic offspring, multiculturalism? On the other hand you have almost invincible ignorance to combat. I have found that almost three-quarters of my Hillsdale freshmen have not read the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence. What do suppose is the percentage at Appalachian State, or even William and Mary?
As a teacher, I used to worry about this, but it is actually a bad-news, good news situation. The bad news is that they haven’t read the documents. The good news is that they haven’t read the documents–taught to them by people who think the Revolution was a multicultural event. In a way, the generation following yours is a forest of virgin timber. We have held off the clear cutters of the Left, and have destroyed or rendered obsolete most of their tools. It is your forest to harvest.
Not that it’s an easy task. Three-quarters of a century ago progressive ideas (almost all of them collectivist and relativist) about the Founding swept through the habitats of elite culture. Charles Beard was one of the apostles (An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution had come out in 1913), and he wanted us to believe that the Founding was, eventually, about greed. Walter Lippmann made a comment that could have saved us a great deal of pain: that, far from creating the Constitution to protect their property, the founders used their “class privileges” to preserve their country.(2) This was apparently too much common sense; it was a generation later that an unshakable book by Forrest McDonald finally laid the forces of neo-marxism to rest.
But, just as failed socialism in recent years has put on a new political disguise (environmentalism), progressives keep grasping at the Founding. Their headings are more likely now to be “race, class, gender” than “the Revolution considered as a social movement,” but the point is the same. “The compelling image of Revolutionary transformation”(3) is still very exciting for a whole new generation of neo-progressives. They believe the Founding was “as radical and as revolutionary as any in history.”(4)
There wasn’t much change, on the whole. I keep looking. Not long ago I discovered that the loyalist Anglican Rector of Trinity Church (which owns Wall Street), Samuel Auchmuty, was part of a notable social event. Fleeing New York, “his critics were amused to see his house immediately taken over by female camp followers of the Regulars for a place of business.”(5) That, I guess, is social change. And George Washington did try to fix wages and prices in areas controlled by the Continental Army, prompting John Witherspoon to criticize him severely on behalf of the Congress. Neither episode lasted long.
I am particularly annoyed when neo-progressives take refuge in the “touched-off” or the “made possible” theory. The Founding “touched off” the anti-slavery movement, for example, or it “made possible” the movements for women’s rights in the 19th century. Aside from the silliness of this argument–everything, it can be said, was “touched off” in the Book of Genesis–do we really need to be reminded that the United States was one of the last civilized countries to abolish slavery? And then only after a war which really was a revolution in certain undebatable ways? Or that every argument ever made by women’s rights movements was written down by Mary Wollstonecraft by 1792; who had nothing whatsoever to do with the American Founding?
In fact, most of what is really important about the American Founding lies in how a potentially harmful revolution was contained. It was not entirely averted, but it was contained and directed to the ends of limited government and the practice of liberties that had long existed in most American provinces. David Hackett Fischer tells this story:
…historian George Bancroft asked a New England townsman why he and his friends took up arms in the Revolution. Had he been inspired by the ideas of John Locke? The old soldier confessed that he had never heard of Locke. Had he been moved by Thomas Paine’s Common Sense? The honest Yankee admitted that he had never read Tom Paine. Had the Declaration of Independence made a difference? The veteran thought not. When asked to explain why he fought in his own words, he answered simply that New Englanders had always managed their own affairs, and Britain tried to stop them, and so the war began.(6)
The old Yankee’s attitude helps to explain why a potential revolution could be contained, but it doesn’t explain how that attitude was converted successfully into a relatively stable republic. We should note here that progressive historians have the same advantage as their political counterparts. In pursuit of what Forrest McDonald has called their “dogmatic, scientific, secular millenialism,” if a program doesn’t work, it hasn’t been tried ardently enough. The “touched-off” historians won’t leave their dreams of social transformation alone until they have gotten grants to study every backcountry settlement, slave cabin, Iroquois longhouse, sailor’s wharf, and household kitchen in revolutionary America.
In contrast, the men and women on these panels this weekend take ideas and the public record seriously. A few liberals learn to do this from experience. Theodore White, reflecting on his confrontation with revolution in Yenan during World War II, said (many years later, in In Search of History), “In the simplest historic terms, [Mao] was not campaigning against Chiang K’ai-shek; he was campaigning against Confucius and two thousand years of ideas he meant to root out and replace with his own.”(7) White was unusual: an intellectually honest progressive, who eventually gave up on his visionary agenda and learned how right John Dickinson was when he said to the federal convention, “Experience must be our only guide. Reason may mislead us.”
Dickinson’s wise counsel brings me to what I really want to say tonight–and I’ll say it briefly. In continuing to take ideas seriously, as they are held by people, and contained in the public record and in the great documents of the Founding, and in its law and literature, we are engaged in a powerful act of recovery. The “experience” to which Dickinson referred was the common experience of his (or by extension any) generation in their solemn deliberations; the tests of history and common sense. “Experience” was the “ubiquitous criterion” of the ages, the “cardinal touchstone of validity.”(8) Dickinson wrote a note to himself for one of his convention speeches: “The best Philosophy is drawn from Experiments, the best Policy from Experience.” The Founders (or most of them) knew they were doing something profound, or they would never have used the phrase, Novus Ordo Seclorum. But they knew that they were doing it in a way that was consistent with older orders, too.
Four elements of their common experience appear in all of the Founders’ debates, writings, and documents: Classical history, especially the history of the Roman Republic (often as it was filtered through Renaissance and Enlightenment authors) The Bible, which they read as history as well as theology English Common Law, which was the repository of natural law as well as of English liberties American colonial history, containing by then lessons from a century and a half of “managing their own affairs”; that so much of their discussion was conducted in this context shows that they were engaged in recovering as well as founding, of protecting liberty much more than inventing it.
They were as serious about what could be learned from the fate of the Amphictionic Council as we should be about their arguments over imitating foreign fashions. They thought that stable and secure and decent governments, devoted to the protection of liberty, must be based on truths of human nature revealed in experience.
It seems to me that our unshakable books should emulate their enterprise. John Adams once said about the American and French revolutions, “Ours was resistance to innovation; theirs was innovation itself.” A flippant comment, certainly; it nevertheless captures an important truth: insofar as it was successful, the American Founding was rooted in ancient truths, it was not attempting to “touch-off” a transfiguration of the world.
Let me finish this exhortation with an example and a suggestion. I have tried for many years to teach the American Founding by inviting my students into the lives of its Philosopher-Statesmen, and then into the rich things they wrote. A teacher cannot do this with Big Books, however unshakable. I have written four Little Books, hoping to prepare students to read with profit the greater works of unshakable scholarship my generation has produced. I have found that even the generally conservative and often religious students at Hillsdale College are infected with what Perry Miller once called “obtuse secularism.” It is hard for them to connect liberty and religion in a way that will help effect a recovery of our past. They want either to put a wall of separation between the two, as the Supreme Court instructs them to, or to believe that the Founders were empowered by the Almighty to proclaim a Christian nation.
That Christianity (and the Bible) was at the heart of the Founding is simply undeniable. The controversy over a resident Bishop consumed at least as much ink as the Stamp Act. The constitutions of the states and the United States are nothing if not written expressions of the Christian view of human nature. In every one of the first twenty years of independent national existence governments at all levels proclaimed days of fasting, prayer, and thanksgiving. The churches (even a majority of Anglican priests) overwhelmingly supported the War for Independence. The definition of liberty preferred by Americans was Biblical: “They shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid.” (Mi4:4) John Adams said in 1818 (and by that time he was a Unitarian) that the revolution was over before the war began–it was a change in the religious sentiments of the American people. So important was the Great Awakening to later events that it is very tempting to parody Mark Twain. He said that Sir Walter Scott caused the Civil War; we might add that George Whitefield preached the American Revolution.
This does not mean that even the most enthusiastic ministers thought that the Founding created a Holy Commonwealth. But it does mean that the deism of Benjamin Rush and Tom Paine dramatically failed to become the faith of the republic, that the ambivalent Unitarian Jefferson was profoundly out of step with his countrymen religiously, and that a crucial part of our act of recovery is to show again the right relation between religion and liberty.
The Rev. Dr. John Witherspoon, President of Princeton, signer of the Declaration, member of Congress, teacher of statesmen, a principal author of the Presbyterian Constitution, has had one biography written about him in the 202 years since his death. That was in 1925. The Rev. Dr. Timothy Dwight, President of Yale, epic poet, chronicler of New England and its “second citizen” (John Adams was its first), has inspired one biography since his death in 1817. That was in 1939. I pray that someone will write these characters into unshakable books.
We don’t have to claim unreasonable things, or to insist that the American Founding was “conservative” in its essence, or that America was Christian at its core, to make our point, and to effect a recovery. There were radicals around, even French-style Jacobins, and they had their followers. There were plenty of “enlightened” deists and Unitarians willing to take Christianity to new heights of progress. But a remarkable generation of Founders–not “inventors,” but Founders–contained them all, and built, and protected institutions based on ideas about liberty and truths about human nature that are as old as God. Do good work this weekend. Advance the cause of recovery.
End of exhortation.
Footnotes
1. John Mack Farragher, at Hillsdale College’s Center for Constructive Alternatives Seminar, “Legends of the American West,” September, 1996.
2. Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (NY: Macmillan, 1923), p.280
3. Ronald Hoffman, in the Preface to The Transforming Hand of Revolution: Reconsidering the American Revolution as a Social Movement, ed. Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert (Charlottesville and London: United States Capitol Historical Society by the University Press of Virginia, 1996).
4. Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1992), p.5.
5. Clifford K. Shipton, New England Life in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995), p.482.
6. David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (NY: Oxford University Press, 1989), p.827.
7. Theodore H. White, In Search of History (NY: Harper & Row, 1978), p.260.
8. Ellis Sandoz, “Philosophical and Religious Dimensions of the American Founding,” Intercollegiate Review, XXX (Spring, 1995), p.29.
The Founders and the Rising Generation
The Founders and the Rising Generation
by T. Kenneth Cribb, Jr.
delivered at
The Philadelphia Society Meeting
Williamsburg, Virginia
November 23, 1996
Alexander Solzhenitsyn once remarked that “A people which no longer remembers, has lost its history and its soul.” That profound insight underscores the centrality of our deliberations this weekend. It is especially haunting when applied to the theme of tonight’s session: the Founders and the rising generations.
It is appropriate that we gather this weekend in Williamsburg, a city where the mist of history surrounds us, to discuss ways in which to recover our historical consciousness. The alarming rate at which historical ignorance–and worse, apathy–are advancing in the ranks of our fellow citizens puts the future of the nation as conceived by the Founders at risk. Indeed, a recent symposium in a highly regarded journal has gone so far as to suggest that the experiment undertaken by our Forefathers in erecting a republican system of limited, representative government is in acute danger of failing due to a “long train of abuses and usurpations”–to use the language of the Declaration–by the courts and by big government. The question explored in the symposium by several distinguished writers in “whether we are reaching the point where conscientious citizens can no longer give moral assent to the existing regime.” That such a question is seriously posed by leading conservative thinkers is a sobering comment on the state of the republic.
How have we come to this pass? Certainly one of the principal reasons is the ever widening gap between the Founding generation and the rising generation. This chasm is a “generation gap” of a different sort than the kind commonly referred to by political pollsters. I mean here something much different than chronological distance–I mean a separation more in consciousness than in time. Today’s high school and college youth exist, in an historical sense, a mere 220 years from the signing of the Declaration–but for most it may we well be 2020. Survey after survey confirms the basic fact that the rising generation is learning next to nothing about American history. What is at stake here is more than a lost acquaintance with names, dates, events, and figures, important as that acquaintance is. More significantly, the rising generation increasingly is being denied the acquisition of an historical consciousness and the cultivation of the discipline of historical memory.
The fact that most citizens today complacently accept the abrogation of power by governments and the courts at the expense of their own sovereignty is not surprising given the dramatic recession of historical understanding and memory among large numbers of Americans now coming of age. What is the significance of historical consciousness and its connection to our present discontents? Wilfred McClay, an historian of distinction here with us this weekend, put the connection this way in a recent, and poetic, address at The Heritage Foundation.
“Historical consciousness,” McClay writes, “is to civilized society what memory is to the individual identity. One cannot say who or what one is–one can’t say one is anyone, or anything, at all–without some selective retention of experience and source of continuity. One cannot learn, use
language, pass on knowledge, raise offspring, or even dwell in society without the aid of
memory….A culture without memory will necessarily be barbarous, no matter how technologically
advanced and sophisticated, because the daily drumbeat of artificial sensations and amplified
events will drown out all other sounds, including the strains of an older music.”
What is it about the men of America’s founding generation that makes them worthy of the memory of the rising generation? For some, the extraordinary extent to which large numbers of our forebears were prepared to sacrifice their fortunes and their very lives to preserve liberty is enough to merit historical distinction and commemoration. For still others, the extraordinary fact about the Founding era was the talent it generated. People seemed to notice from the beginning the shear number of planters and shopkeepers, men of the courts and countinghouses, coming together to fight a war and forge a nation. Silas Deane, a member of the Continental Congress wrote home in 1775 that “Times like these call up Genius, which slept before, and stimulate it in action to a degree, that eclipses what might before have been fixed as a Standard.” And in 1789, David Ramsey of my own South Carolina noted that the heroic events of the war and the succeeding years of constitutional deliberation had “not only required, but created talents. Men, he said, “spoke, wrote, and acted, with an energy far surpassing all expectations, which could be reasonably founded on their previous acquirements. And, indeed, in our own day historian Edmund S. Morgan expressed a similar sentiment when he observed that “if one were to make a list of the great men of American history, by whatever standards one chooses to measure greatness, an astonishingly large proportion would be found whose careers began or culminated in the Revolution. It would be hard to find in all the rest of American history more than two or three men to rank with Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, or John Adams.” When a society wishes to encourage right conduct, the ability of history to throw forward exemplars of right conduct is not to be underestimated.
But when we attempt to unveil these, and other, ways in which the Founders are worthy of a central place in the individual and collective memory, we are met by formidable obstacles. One is the reigning utilitarian approach to history, which is surely one overwhelming reason why such a large historical generation gap currently exists. A utilitarian view of historical studies is not a new problem; since the early decades of this century conservatives have waged a sustained offensive against the progressives and John Dewey, objecting principally to the transformation of the educational mission of one of “social efficiency.” Transmitting the legacy of the Founding Fathers will never be a central concern of historians chiefly occupied with constructing a program directly “relevant” to their students interests, and in concert with their students’ personal and professional goals. The extreme of this view was best expressed thirty years ago by radical educator Edgar Wesley in an infamous essay entitled, “Let’s Abolish History.” In it, Wesley argued that students need a history they can “appreciate.” “No teacher at any grade level,” he confidently asserted, “should teach a course in history as content. To do so is confusing, unnecessary, frustrating, futile, pointless, and as illogical as to teach a course in the World Almanac, the dictionary, or the Encyclopedia. [History should be] utilized and exploited–not studied, learned, or memorized.” Needless to say, such ardent utilitarianism, and even milder expressions of the same view, had proved disastrous for the study of history generally, and the cultivation of an historical appreciation for our American forebears in particular.
A corollary view to the utilitarian approach to history is the scourge of moral relativism which, in the modern academy, cloaks itself in the garb of multiculturalism.
Relativism has stalked the corridors of the academy for years, but the echoes of those footsteps resound as never before. Of the strains of academic relativism, two of the most virulent are relativism as among cultures and relativism as among standards. The transmission of culture depends on the assumption that there is in the body of Western thought truths that are worth preserving through the ages, truths that justify the immense effort and cost of the educational establishment traditionally entrusted with transmitting the culture. but what if there is no truth? Or mores specifically, what if the traditions and institutions of the West, and the moral order that these imply, are neither more nor less valuable than those of other cultures? Well then, concern for transmitting an inherited body of learning does not matter, because the culture of the West itself does not signify.
Once the leveling scythe of relativism has cut the higher achievements of civilization down to size, we are exempted from thinking through such fundamental questions as What is the good? What is just? What deserves the allegiance of duty and of honor? Why do civilizations rise? Why do they fall? For relativism also attacks any notion of standards that proceed from a moral order and that form the basis of right conduct.
Forrest McDonald has observed that the Framers themselves were not strangers to this notion of moral relativism. But, McDonald notes, the Founders “put it to their use, with their understanding that a regime must be suited to the manners and morals of a people if it is to endure.” “They would [however] have been appalled,” he argues further, “at the modern idea that Western civilization is no better than other civilizations, that the heritage of The West is not superior to as well as different from that of The East, that the Judaeo-Christian tradition is not morally superior to as well as different from that of Islam or paganism or tribalism, that one so-called life-style is as good as another. Such thinking, if it can be so described, is a rationalization for being unable to measure up to the duty of living in accordance with and transmitting the higher values.” Political correctness and identity politics are the practical manifestations of this relativistic approach to academic inquiry.
There are of course trends other than utilitarianism and moral relativism which make it difficult to advance the Founders as a group worthy of study, appreciation, and placement in a broader “community of memory.” But I want to turn finally to a brief consideration of some hopeful developments in recent years that can perhaps serve to embolden us in our efforts to close the ever widening consciousness gap between the rising generation and our Founding generation.
The first cause for tempered hope is the proliferation of idea-mediating institutions dedicated to redressing the woeful neglect of our Founding principles among the rising generation. Frank Chodorov, the man who founded ISI as many of you know, once noted that “what was done can be undone if there is a will for it.” That will has been “institutionalized” in the form of organizations like our own ISI, and like Jim Taylor and Ron Robinson’s Young America’s Foundation, Ed Feulner’s Heritage Foundation, Gene Meyer’s Federalist Society, Larry Arnn and Charles Kesler’s Claremont Institute, Father Sirico’s Acton Institute, and many, many other organizations like these now dotting our cultural landscape. Such groups exist to put ideas into action, and serve as vital mediators between an establishment treading heavily on the intellectual tradition of the West, and students wearied of politicization and in search of the historical truth and the roots of their own cultural order. And so an infrastructure now exists that was but a dream even three decades ago. Scholars, books, journals, seminars, reprints, tapes, fellowships, and similar resources are now available in abundance to provide intellectual substance for young minds. The plenitude is so great that the main problem is organizing what is available and bringing it to bear where needed.
But the will that animates institutions like those mentioned above had to come from some source: and for most of them, the direct source has been the intellectual legacy of a broad ranging group of conservative intellectuals who for the most part put aside their differences in emphasis and approach and came together as a movement at a critical moment in our history to strengthen the faltering institutions of the West. This fact is the second reason to be mildly sanguine about our prospects for recovering our past. Because while intellectuals on the Left have for decades been working to tear down the cultural bridge that extends from one generation to the next, thinkers on the Right have been laboring heroically, and I think successfully, to extend that bridge unto the next generation. While after the last great war, the circle of those concerned with the recovery of our patrimony was a small one, it has with every decade been enlarged–creating a kind of concentric development of conservative-leaning scholars that is slowly extending itself outward into the most hostile cultural venues, poised, perhaps, one day to envelop them. One need only recall the names of Kirk, Niemeyer, Weaver, Burnham, Voegelin, Kendall, Meyer, Tonsor, and Strauss; and then consider those who picked-up their mantle, more numerous and diverse, Evans, McDonald, Carey, Liggio, Edward McClellan, Campbell, Kesler; and then consider their students, still more numerous and more diverse.
And, indeed, it is this last group which represents the third reason why I believe we can be reasonably cheered by our prospects for recovering an historical consciousness among the rising generation. For there is now in place in the university classroom a generation of young faculty members who are friendly to at least the broad strokes of the above analysis and are working in the “trenches”–often against serious odds and at risk to their careers–to transmit our Founders’ intellectual, political, and cultural legacy to their students. And the numbers and quality of their graduate students–those who will succeed them–are truly impressive. The most striking testament to the truth of this proposition is this assembly itself. Present in this room is a representative sample of young scholars that prove, I believe, that our hope is not misplaced. This conference is the perfect analogue to the question at hand, senior scholars learning from and refining the energies and insights of the ascending generation; and both together looking to a previous generation–our Founding generation–for the new perspectives on the issues we confront today. This is historical consciousness at work, and we are to commend Stan Evans and Bill Campbell for seeing the need and importance of such an event.
As I mentioned, Stan and Bill have told me that their source of inspiration was a program near and dear to my heart–the ISI Richard M. Weaver and Henry Salvatori Fellowship Programs. This may be the ISI program with the smallest number of participants, but it probably has had the highest multiplier effect and the greatest impact. Both are awarded to promising students intent upon pursuing a career in the academy–with the Salvatori program focusing specifically on young thinkers with a demonstrated interest in the principles of the American Founding. Well over 400 total ISI fellowships have been awarded since 1964, with most of the Fellows now teaching or writing, as well as pursuing careers in politics and public policy. This weekend we have all had the privilege to see first-hand many products of this particular ISI program. ISI Weaver and Salvatori Fellows present please stand. Four of the other young speakers have not held fellowships from ISI, but work with us closely, and are certainly poised to make their mark on the academy and the world of affairs.
It is not inevitable, then, that our collective memory be totally lost. With the human and institutional resources such as the ones just mentioned, we should have good reason to hope that what has been done to sever the historical connection between our Founders and ourselves can be undone, in Chodorov’s phrase, and repaired by this most promising generation with us tonight.
Burke, at the moment of his most bitter parliamentary defeat, still had the confidence in the young to say: “I attest the rising generation.” And why should the rising generation listen to us?
Put yourself in the place of an undergraduate of keen mind and superior preparation, a student who likes to read and dispute and flex the muscles of his mind. What does the Left offer him? Turgid Marxists tracts. The straight jacket of the closed system. The politically correct jargon of a welter of splintered interest groups. A false compassion that is but thinly disguised lust for power in
the people’s name, but notably without the people’s participation.
And what do the conservators of the great tradition offer him? They offer a rich and various story that Russell Kirk called a tale of four cities. Jerusalem, of the one God and his Incarnation; and Athens, the birthplace of democracy and of that school of philosophy to which all other philosophical inquiries are a series of footnotes; and Rome of the stern republican fathers of the rule of law; and London, the mother of parliaments and of the chartered rights of Englishmen; and this weekend our young scholars have recommended to our attention our own Philadelphia, where just over two hundred years ago our Founding Fathers taught that self government could be preserved from the eventual corruption of power, by dividing power against itself.
And you offer not just analysis, but allegiance born of a love of the truths that our founding tradition embodies. That which has made your lives rich, you wish to share freely with those students whose life of the mind is before them. You offer them your hands, to boost them onto the shoulders of the giants of the West. And from there they will see farther than any of us.
Let us believe with the faith that abided in Burke, that the best of the new generation will clasp your proffered hands–and that they themselves, in good time, will offer theirs to those who follow.
Chuck Baldwin on Patrick Henry
PATRICK HENRY TODAY: “GIVE ME SECURITY, ANYTHING BUT DEATH”
By Pastor Chuck Baldwin
January 4, 2006
Patrick Henry (1736-1799) was one of America’s greatest Founding Fathers. In fact, he was the most famous orator of the American Revolution. He was admitted to the bar in 1760, served as a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses, the Virginia Patriotic Convention, the First Continental Congress, the Virginia Legislature, and the Virginia Ratification Convention, and was Virginia’s first Governor.
Patrick Henry’s fiery speech delivered on March 23, 1775 in St. John’s Church in Richmond, Virginia was the catalyst for the heroic stand taken by American patriots at Lexington and Concord, where America’s fight for independence began. Perhaps no man was more influential in sounding the clarion call for freedom than Patrick Henry.
In his famous speech, Henry shouted, “What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!”
Compare the spirit of Patrick Henry with the spirit of modern day conservatives. What do we hear from them? What is their clarion call?
The battle-cry (or should I say, surrender-cry) of the modern day conservative is, “Give me security, anything but death!” Yes, it seems that to most conservatives today, life and peace are willingly purchased with the price of chains and slavery! Just look at how eager and willing they are to accept abridgements and usurpations of our constitutional liberties.
All over America, conservatives, including Christian conservatives, defend President Bush’s decisions to abuse the power of his office and ignore the rule of law by spying on Americans without warrants and ignoring the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution and procedures of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). They defend him as he unabashedly calls for greater power and promises to continue to ignore basic liberties. Such conduct is both unconscionable and unforgivable!
That America is “at war” is no excuse for President Bush (or any president) to violate his oath of office and trample the rights and freedoms of the American people! And anyone who thinks otherwise doesn’t understand the first thing about America!
Since when did conservatives forget their history and heritage? When did they decide that security was more valuable than liberty? When did they lose their love for freedom and loyalty to our Constitution? When? When George W. Bush became president. That’s when.
Ever since Bush was elected, conservatives have been capitulating and compromising basic American values to the point that they have become slaves! Yes, slaves. Slaves to the Republican Party! Slaves to George W. Bush! Slaves to security! Slaves to their own ambitions and comforts!
America has always stood for liberty! All nations promise security, but America has only promised freedom. A bird in a cage is secure, but it is not free. George W. Bush wants to put America in a cage. And, unfortunately, most conservatives seem fine with that.
Shame on us! Shame on us conservatives! We sully the memories and stain the honor of our forebears!
Listen again to the words of America’s founders. Hear again their cries for freedom. Hear George Washington when he said, “The thing that separates the American Christian from every other person on earth is the fact that he would rather die on his feet than live on his knees.”
Hear Samuel Adams when he declared, “If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home and leave us in peace. We seek not your council, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.”
Listen to Benjamin Franklin when he said, “They that would give up essential liberty for a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
Hear Patrick Henry one more time, “Give me liberty, or give me death!”
There is more to life than living! There is more to being an American than being secure! Patrick Henry understood that.
