Reviews of New Books
By Martin Morse Wooster, Jeffrey Snyder, Bill Kauffman, Seth Farber, R. W. Bradford

CAPTAIN KIRK
by Martin Morse Wooster

The Sword of Imagination: Memoirs of a Half-Century of Literary Conflict
By Russell Kirk (Eerdmans: Grand Rapids), 481 pages, $35

The late Russell Kirk (1918-1994) was a flawed giant of American conservatism. He repeatedly denounced "chirping sectaries," but wasted far too much of his time attacking fellow right-wingers, particularly neoconservatives and libertarians. And Kirk never understood or appreciated capitalism. When he was ten, Kirk explains, he avidly read the three Detroit newspapers every day. "He took a precocious interest in political news, " Kirk writes, "but ignored the financial pages—as, indeed, he has endeavored to ignore them ever since." (Like his heroes, Albert Jay Nock and Henry Adams, Kirk refers to himself in his memoirs in the third person.)

But Kirk’s virtues were far greater than his flaws. Foremost among them was his independence. Though Kirk taught as a visiting professor in scores of places, his home always was Piety Hill in Mecosta, Michigan, home of his grandparents and the place where he felt rooted. Far too many conservatives feel compelled to abandon their heritage and move to New York or Washington to be near wealth or power; to his credit, Kirk resisted that temptation.

Kirk also deserves credit for being one of the few conservatives also able to write excellent fiction. Among his many books are three novels and two collections of short stories. Though Kirk’s novels don’t succeed, his short horror fiction, particularly the stories collected in The Princess of All Lands (1979), are among the best supernatural tales of the twentieth century.

Because Kirk spent most of his life in Mecosta, The Sword of Imagination is a far different book than most political memoirs. There’s surprisingly little about the conservative movement in The Sword of Imagination. The only national political race Kirk participated in was Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign, so he has very little to say about elections, though one of his more interesting chapters describes Kirk’s impressions of famous politicians he knew, including Richard Nixon, Herbert Hoover, and Eugene McCarthy. (Kirk, who voted for McCarthy in 1976, describes him as "the most interestingly complex of all recent aspirants to the presidency.")

Nor does Kirk spend much time discussing his fellow conservatives. Kirk certainly knew most of the leaders of the conservative movement, and many scholars visited Piety Hill, either as guests or as participants in seminars Kirk gave from the late ’70s onwards. But many important right-wing figures of Kirk’s era are scarcely mentioned at all, probably because of feuds that still simmered decades later. "Kirk had little in common with some of the people on National Review’s masthead—on which he declined to have his name appear," he writes. "Not much united National Review’s editors and regular contributors except their detestation of collectivism."

The most serious omission in The Sword of Imagination is the lack of any discussion of why Kirk produced his major late works, such as Eliot and His Age (1971) and The Roots of American Order (1975). Kirk spends more time telling which reviewers liked The Roots of American Order than he does explaining his reasons for writing it. Kirk does, however, spend several important pages discussing the origins of The Conservative Mind (1953).

If The Sword of Imagination is an accurate guide, Kirk’s friends were more important to him than his political beliefs. Some of these friends, such as Thomas Molnar and Ernest van den Haag, are prominent conservative figures, but Kirk’s deepest friendships had little to do with politics. Kirk devotes a chapter to the Scottish aristocrats he met while studying for his doctorate at St. Andrews University in the early 1950s. (Kirk had a fondness for aristocrats, and particularly admired Archduke Otto von Hapsburg, son and heir of the last Austro-Hungarian Emperor.) And Kirk devotes several pages to a description of a hobo named Clifton Wallace, whom Kirk transformed into the hero of his most important short story, "There’s a Long, Long Trail A-Winding."

In his concluding chapter, Kirk notes three major accomplishments in his life: an honorable marriage, a stalwart defense of tradition, and "a life of decent independence, living much as his ancestors did, on their land." But the principal lesson Kirk’s life and work teach is respect for the past. Too many conservatives, particularly young ones, lack that respect, believing conservatism to be a blank slate limned by the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Reading Kirk—and the political philosophers he admired—is a good way to appreciate the great minds of earlier generations.

Kirk’s conservatism is, of course, an incomplete political philosophy, needing the fortification of an appreciation of capitalism and economics. Nor can Kirk’s factionalism be recommended to his intellectual heirs. But The Sword of Imagination demonstrates that conservatism is something more complex than simply the unleashing of market forces.

Associate Editor Martin Morse Wooster wrote the entry on Russell Kirk for The Encyclopedia Horrifica. He attended a Piety Hill Seminar in 1989.

DOES AMERICA HAVE TOO MUCH DEMOCRACY?
By Jeffrey R. Snyder

The Road to Mass Democracy: Original Intent and the Seventeenth Amendment
by C.H. Hoebeke (Transaction: New Brunswick), 196 pages, $29.95

C.H. Hoebeke, a historian at the University of South Carolina, has written a very fine, impassioned, and insightful book on the course of a destructive political idea that is only being further entrenched by today’s conservative revolution. By happenstance, Mr. Hoebeke’s work arrives at a time when Colin Powell has declined to run for the presidency, and many Americans are lamenting the possibility that the rigors of running for office are discouraging the best and and most honest Americans from political service. The Road to Mass Democracy lucidly explains how mass democracy has brought us to this pass, and why there is no solution to this problem through further "democratic" reforms.

When the Founders met in 1787 to scrap the Articles of Confederation and write the new Constitution, a principal goal, according to Mr. Hoebeke, was to build institutional barriers to the dangers of democracy. In the period following the end of the War for Independence, these evils had manifested themselves in very popular programs of state confiscation of the Royalist property, and unilateral renunciation of government war debts.

Intended as a restraint upon both the rough-and-tumble democracy of the lower House and "the ambition of the executive," the Senate was conceived as a "great anchor of the government." The institution was expected to withstand interest pressures and act as a restraint upon ill-conceived desires of the people by virtue of the length of a senator’s term and, more importantly, the means of his election. The Constitution provided that senators would be selected by their state legislatures. This indirect method of election insulated senators from popular pressure. It also preserved the authority of state governments within the federal system.

"The theory," as was noted later, "was that the legislature of the state should look all over the state, bound by no consideration of party, restrained by no obligation of any kind except the duty of selecting the wisest, the bravest, and the purest man for senator." The office was to seek the man, the man did not seek the office, and state legislators typically chose among men of good character and probity who were known personally to them. This theory was, of course, the same one embodied in our method of indirect election of the president through an electoral college.

The seeds of the eventual full democratization of senatorial election were sown by the expansion of the franchise, the transformation of the electoral college into a system for merely ratifying the popular vote, and the development of the referendum, the recall and the primary system, each of which played a role in making the state and federal governments more "responsive" to the demands of the people. The final step came in 1913, with ratification of the 17th Amendment to the Constitution, which provided for direct election of senators by the people.

As part of his story, Hoebeke traces the "myth of progressive reform." Reformers continually failed to see that government abuses and excesses—for example, pork- barrel public works projects—weren’t aberrations to be blamed on "special interests," but rather were the inevitable result of a government overly responsive to the shifting whims of the people. The Progressive remedy for these faults was always more direct participation of "the people" in politics, and more restrictions on the authority of representatives. The Progressives never understood, as the Founders did, that there are no "People" who will perfectly express the common interest if only allowed to participate directly in the affairs of government. They did not consider that an electorate is nothing but "special interests."

With passage of the 17th Amendment, the federal government was transformed directly into a mass democracy. Hoebeke debunks the standard justification of the amendment as a means of by-passing the hold that the wealthy "robber barons" of the Gilded Age had over state legislatures. This claim, Hoebeke points out, is disproved by the very rapidity and ease with which the amendment was ratified by the self-same state legislatures supposedly controlled by those interests. "Few amendments have been more quickly ratified," he notes.

The debates over the amendment in the Senate are, as described by Hoebeke, heartbreaking. It very quickly became clear exactly what was going to be lost by passage of the measure. Against the eloquent, principled arguments of the "old guard" senators—towering figures like Elihu Root of New York and Weldon Brinton Heyburn from Idaho, men who understood the principles upon which the Constitution was erected and strove to maintain them—progressives insisted simply that the institution was not "responsive" enough, and that the people wanted this change.

Henceforth, what "the people" wanted was quickly to become what the federal government was all about. The business of the House and now the Senate was simply to gauge public appetites, register the desired goodies, and then pursue them through the statute books. Needless to say, this reform did not achieve the benefits its promoters had promised. Money and monied interests became an even greater factor in the election of senators, as it became necessary to raise sufficient funds to wage a popular campaign. The progressive battle cry for continued reforms to stop the "special interests" from manipulating the legislative process continued unabated right up to the present, with little recognition that all of these efforts are, as Hoebeke puts it, merely endeavoring to cure the evils of democracy with more democracy.

Early on, Hoebeke quotes John Adams’s assertion that every variation of government "has been found to be no better than committing the lamb to the custody of the wolf, except that one which is called a balance of power. A simple sovereignty in one, a few, or many has no balance, and therefore no laws." In disenfranchising the states and providing for the direct election of senators, after earlier effecting the popular election of presidents, Americans removed the final constitutional barrier to simple sovereignty by the people—and leapt toward government not by law, but by plebiscite.

Jeffrey Snyder is an attorney practicing in New York City.

THE DUKE OF ALL
By Bill Kauffman

John Wayne: American
by Randy Roberts and James S. Olson (Free Press: New York) 738 pages, $27.50.

Marion Morrison was born in Madison County, Iowa, to a westering family that left the covered bridges for the palm trees of Southern California. His father was an affable if often impecunious pharmacist, his mother was a shrew, and at age 11 Marion traded in his sissy forename for the more formidable "Duke." He thus became the namesake of his faithful pet Airedale.

At Glendale Union High the brainy and brawny Duke was salutatorian, head of the debate squad, a chess whiz, and star of the football team. In this latter capacity he earned a football scholarship to USC. College football didn’t pay as well in the 1920s as it does today, so Duke picked up pocket money as an extra and "glorified furniture mover" at Fox Studios.

A shoulder separation ended his Trojan career, and the prospect of "writing briefs in somebody’s back room for people who aren’t as smart as I am" soured him on his prelaw studies, so the strapping tackle quit USC to work as a property man for a talented martinet named John Ford, whose films would later turn Marion into myth.

His big break came in 1930, when Raoul Walsh cast him in The Big Trail. The film failed, but at least Duke got a new name out of it: director Walsh, a history buff, suggested Anthony Wayne; when that was deemed "too Italian" Duke Morrison became John Wayne.

Wayne served his apprenticeship in the "B" Westerns of the ’30s, in which he looks very much like a USC football lug who stumbled out of a time warp and into chaps. But he was learning. As the actor later recalled, "many of the Western stars of the twenties and thirties were too perfect. They never drank nor smoked. They never wanted to go to bed with a beautiful girl. They never had a fight...I was trying to play a man who gets dirty, who sweats sometimes, who enjoys kissing a gal he likes, who gets angry, who fights clean whenever possible but will fight dirty if he has to. I made the Western hero a roughneck."

A decade of assembly-line westerns prepared Wayne for his breakthrough role as the Ringo Kid in John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939), in which, the authors note, "the basic screen persona of John Wayne" is established: "a lean, tough loner, impatient with small talk and small matters, willing to implement justice and protect the weak." The languidly confident walk; the halting speech, with its oddly spaced and pregnant pauses; and two of the most expressive eyes on celluloid: it all comes together in Stagecoach and the classics that were to follow: Red River, Fort Apache, The Searchers, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, True Grit, and The Shootist.

Roberts and Olson describe the standard Wayne character as "the outsider, a man of few words, vaguely distrusted by marshals and other representatives of authority but affectionately regarded by average Americans. He is armed and alone, ready to defend the defenseless but not to join any established community. Above all else, he prizes his independence. In a crisis he can be counted on by decent people—his Winchester will always be on the side of justice—but during all other times he simply wants to be left alone."

Duke wanted to be left alone in 1941. While Jimmy Stewart was leading B-24 raids, Wayne was bedding Marlene Dietrich and out-drinking Ward Bond. "He would become a ‘superpatriot’ for the rest of his life," wrote his estranged third wife, "trying to atone for staying at home" during World War II.

Wayne’s guilt over not serving later drove him toward a cartoonish jingoism that would reach its nadir in The Green Berets (1968). "I think The Green Berets will help re-elect LBJ because it shows that the war in Vietnam is necessary," he told Variety in 1967. Memorable and iconic when inhabiting men of the West, Wayne was a dreadful parody when he turned to agitprop. He even weighed down Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie with lumpish Cold War allegory in his sprawling mess The Alamo (1960).

Biographers Roberts and Olson have done a fine workmanlike job, though they ought not to have recapitulated so many moldy movie reviews. (Imagine reading Vincent Canby in the year 2040.) John Wayne: American is spiced with the odd facts and amusing Hollywoodisms that are essential to the star bio. For instance:

—Duke had an unerring knack for guessing ladies’ dress sizes.

—George Wallace asked him to be his running mate in 1968, but Duke declined, opting for Nixon and Wallis (Hal, who produced True Grit).

—Jack Warner said of the slam-bang director of Wayne’s first big picture: "To Raoul Walsh a tender love scene is burning down a whorehouse."

Like the men he played, Duke lived pretty much as he wished, except for an excruciatingly painful death. The details of his trio of mesalliances—all with Hispanic women—make for a dispiriting read, but the authors insist "over the course of his life, Duke would walk out on three marriages, but he never failed a friend."

His favorite actress, Maureen O’Hara, said as he lay dying, "John Wayne is not just an actor and a very fine actor. John Wayne is the United States of America." No, John Wayne was California: always moving, never stopping, drunk on booze and possibilities, a boon companion, unfaithful to his wives and neglectful of his children but sincerely regretting it—yet at the same time creating and inhabiting the single most enduring and resonant screen presence in the history of American films.

Associate Editor Bill Kauffman is the author of Every Man A King, Country Towns Of New York, and America First!

WITCH-HUNTING
by Seth Farber

Satan’s Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch-Hunt
By Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker (Basic Books: New York) 288 pages, $25

Judged as a work of scholarship and investigative reporting, this meticulous and riveting book by Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker on America’s satanic child abuse scare is superb. In their more ambitious attempt to analyze the causes of our modern witch-hunt, however, the authors resort, unconvincingly, to crudely blaming sexist society.

In the introductory chapters the authors identify some of the developments in the 1970s that laid the foundation for the witch-hunt of the 1980s. The feminist movement brought incest and other forms of sexual abuse into public discourse. The therapeutic approach to sexual crimes replaced the criminal approach, which undermined the protections of due process and endowed therapists with an inordinate degree of power, which they shamelessly abused as the authors demonstrate. Gradually, a childhood sex-abuse industry was created that directed lots of money from government agencies to social workers and psychologists, and provided an incentive for inventing new techniques of interviewing children that effectively implanted false memories of abuse in young minds.

A salient feature of the modern witch-hunts, like the witch-hunts of previous eras, was that individuals were convicted in the absence of genuine evidence of guilt. Although children’s revelations seemed to indicate wrongdoing, the authors note that judges and juries were almost never given the opportunity to hear from the accusers directly. "Videotaped interviews...show that when children were allowed to speak freely, either they had nothing to say about abuse or they denied that it ever happened to them." After examining hundreds of transcripts, the authors conclude "there is not one spontaneous disclosure of abuse.... In case after ritual-abuse case...cassettes are filled with the voices of adults urging children to recover repressed memories, leading them, bribing and threatening them, in order to obtain confirmation of preconceived notions about the guilt of the accused."

The real perpetrators of evil were not demonic child abusers but therapists carving out lucrative careers, policemen who deferred to the therapists’ authority, journalists seeking headlines, and well-meaning parents who—trusting the guidance of the experts—implanted in their own children false memories of abuse. Throughout the 1980s, the authors note, only a handful of dissidents in the mental health profession and in the press raised their voices in protest against these trends.

It is in their concluding chapter that the authors are at their weakest. Though it was the federal government that subsidized the witch-hunts of the 1980s, readers are warned that the federal bureaucracy must be the main instrument of reform. Furthermore, we are told that "patriarchy" and sexual inequality engendered the child abuse panic. This is absurd. If ritual sex abuse was "a symbolic focus for women’s anger over gender inequality at work and at home" why were almost half the defendants women? And why were most of the targets teachers in schools and day care centers—institutions that enabled women to escape from the "patriarchal family"? And why did this panic occur in a decade when the cultural and economic disparities between men and women were being sharply reduced?

Despite their enthrallment to certain conventionalisms of political correctness, the authors have provided a valuable warning against state-licensed mental health experts who, under the guise of behavioral science, acted as catalysts of the collective psychosis in the 1980s.

Seth Farber is a psychologist and the author of Madness, Heresy and the Rumor of Angels: the Revolt Against the Mental Health System.