January 2011

On April 30, North Vietnamese army tanks crashed through the gates of the presidential palace in Saigon, emphatically punctuating the end of the nation’s three-decade civil war. Led by the charismatic Ho Chi Minh, the struggle had been launched at the end of World War II as a rebellion against French colonial rule. At first Ho’s rebel group, the Vietminh, had harbored no strong ideological leanings except an overwhelming thirst for independence. Ho even made serious overtures toward obtaining American support. When they failed, though, he turned to China and the Soviet Union, and the results bore out the proverb “Who would sup with the devil must have a long spoon.” What had been a fluid political situation soon froze in the deep chill of the Cold War, and the insurrection turned into a protracted conflict between the communist-backed North and the capitalist-backed South—a proxy fight of the sort that would plague the world for nearly half a century.

The threat was distant but definite, like cannon rumbling beyond the next ridge. Mr. and Mrs. Bigelow were thinking of selling their house. I’d lived in the Bigelows’ neighborhood when I first moved to Olympia, Washington and I knew that their gabled timber-frame house was by far the oldest in town. Built in the mid-1800s by Mr. Bigelow’s grandparents—suffragists, abolitionists, and ardent temperance supporters—it was one of the few Gothic Revival homes left in the Pacific Northwest. Though battered by time and weather, and oddly remodeled in places, it was still by anyone’s reckoning an immensely historic house.

No one understood this better than Mr. and Mrs. Bigelow. For nearly 60 years, they had lived with the family heirlooms, mowed the last two remaining acres of the original Bigelow land claim, and given tours of the house on request. Now they both were in their eighties, and the house and its antique furnishings made up their principal assets.

Like most people who make history, Clark Byers had something else on his mind. When the young sign painter loaded his pickup with ladders and paint buckets one day in 1936 and set out to persuade farmers to let him paint an advertising message on their barns, it would not have occurred to him that he would help define an era in American folk culture. But the thirty-year odyssey that began that day made an unknown tourist attraction world famous, and the slogan “See Rock City” a ubiquitous phrase familiar even to those who have no idea what it means.

This winter, the ongoing battle for control of the Reform party began to strain credulity—not to mention the adage that politics makes strange bed-fellows. In one corner was Donald Trump, who was supported by a former professional wrestler turned governor and was trying to become the first man to be elected president, despite his reaching for a Sani-Wipe after every handshake. His main opposition was the one-time conservative speechwriter and commentator Pat Buchanan, backed by a pair of leftist cult leaders from New York City.

Neither Buchanan nor Trump, of course, had a very good chance of becoming the next president. But the fact that millions of Americans were willing to consider voting for them underscored an unusual dissatisfaction with mainstream politics in a time of general peace and prosperity. Reform-party voters seem to reflect a wide disgust with the whole conduct of our politics and an unease over such specific issues as our rush into the brave new global economy.

One of this century’s profound cultural transformations began in the 1960s, when ecological thought took hold and fostered a new seriousness toward earth stewardship. But what happened then was really a transition. Present-day environmentalism represents an elaboration of core ideas developed far earlier by American conservationists, especially the seminal concepts and plans of the two Presidents Roosevelt and their allies. They prepared the way so that Americans later confronted by increasing threats to earth’s ecosystems could erect a sophisticated superstructure on ramparts already standing.

I know a man who came home from work one evening tired and dispirited. His wife met him at the door and thrust a pair of women’s panties in his face. These she had discovered while changing the matrimonial bed. She’d never seen them before. Had he?

To gaze or even to glance at Dan Weiner’s photographs of corporate America in the 1950s is to face a crisis similar to that of my old friend. It is to stumble on one’s own intimate, carnal, and willfully forgotten past.

Our first position has to be a firm and unequivocating denial. Who are these men in ridiculous hats and suits? Are the glasses the women wear designed to frighten off evil spirits? And why do the children look so old? But just as my friend knew all about those panties, we know all about these pictures.

It has become routine to speak of the fifties as if they were a limited entity, a static interval easily dismissed on the basis of tasteless clothing and a foolish national pride. The values were antiques, the contentment was risible.

Thank you so much for publishing “Sherman’s War.” Victor Davis Hanson’s writing humbles. He seduces us by allowing us first to imagine his home in central California, then to see how it would look were it wiped out by a William Tecumseh Sherman. Here Hanson is just a regular guy, telling a story next to me on a doughnut-stand stool, sipping coffee. Before long I’m transported—which is what all effective writing should do—to another time and prodded to use my noodle to actually think, by God. Finally, he touches the heart through the intellect, a magical trick master writers know and the rest of us envy. To interpret, as Hanson does, is to give a gift.

Anyone who studies how Sherman treated the South and later the Indians finds the same common thread. He had a sort of righteous indignation at any kind of resistance to his goals that translates into a determination to punish the resistor far beyond the laws of human decency followed by later attempts to explain his inexcusable behavior. It’s a shame that Mr. Hanson decided to help him out.

Sherman correctly realized that taking war to the civilians would shorten his campaign, devastate the economy for years to come, and put terror into the hearts of any who sought to leave the Union ever.

Hitler, Mao, and Stalin also recognized that a “civil” war aimed at destruction of non-military targets and terrorizing of civilian populations would bring their opponents to their knees and ensure long-term subjugation of the defeated populace. We do not overlook or praise their atrocities just because they “freed” the economically enslaved proletariat.