Quote of the Day (Richard Brookhiser, on Sparrows As Great City Birds)

“Pigeons are the iconic city bird but sparrows come close behind. Like pigeons they live not in the curated patches of parks but on the sidewalks and streets. They are streetwalkers, pedestrians, non-stop maintenance men…Why they are so suited to an urban existence I cannot say. Size must help; they were early converts to the tiny-house movement. If you want to see their houses, follow their chirping. That is how I discovered, years ago, that they had colonized the cross-pieces of street lights. Once I started looking up I saw that every tubular hollow end had an insistent denizen. They also like the metal housings of retractable awnings; they live over the door of my favorite restaurant, just below the neon sign, watching the aspiring models come and go.”—Essayist and historian Richard Brookhiser, “City Desk: Bird’s-Eye View,” National Review, Jan. 23, 2017

(The accompanying photo of Richard Brookhiser was taken Dec. 9, 2011, when he was discussing his book James Madison in Charlottesville, Va., by the Miller Center, a non-partisan institute at the University of Virginia focused on the American Presidency.)

Quote of the Day (Richard Brookhiser, on How Lincoln Cleared ‘The Mist’ of His Time)

“Life is all a mist for most of us. We believe a mixture of traditions, lessons, and current opinions: what we have grown up with, what we have been taught, and what we have heard in the street. These are not always the best guides to action….Lincoln, of all men, wanted not to live in a mist. In his worst moods he believed he was damned; at all times his mind taught him (wrongly probably) that he was doomed, predetermined, caught in a mesh of causes. But he always wanted to see, know, and understand. [Law partner William] Herndon noted the comprehensiveness of his curiosity, extending to clocks and omnibuses, but his greatest curiosity was about the great things. He wanted to know what America was, what men were, what God wanted. As he did when he was a boy, he would repeat the lessons of the founding fathers and God the Father until he knew them. What he learned was that all men are created free and equal, and that all men (the people) must understand and defend those truths. Then, because he was a politician, ambitious to lead, he did what he could to clear the mist.”—Historian Richard Brookhiser, Founders' Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln (2014)

Quote of the Day (Richard Brookhiser, on City Newsstands)

“Why would anyone want to use a newsstand? The pleasure of service counts for something. Thousands at your bidding do not speed, but this man behind his counter will, if you give him a dollar. Newsstands made a show of plenitude. Their wares were on display, from broadsheet seriousness to tabloid shout. Newsstands made you feel on top of things, even when you were in motion. Hurrying to an appointment, plunging into a subway, you could tell at a glance, even if you did not spring for a paper, what the headlines were. Just as promoters of plays used to cover the board walls around construction sites with one, two, three, ten, 20 posters, to satisfy the eye on the move, so a scattering of newsstands along your daily commute served the same function.” — Richard Brookhiser, on city newsstands, in “Black and White and Read: All Over,” National Review, June 13, 2016

(Photo of Richard Brookhiser discussing his book James Madison at the Miller Center in Charlottesville, Virginia, December 9, 2011)

Flashback, November 1955: ‘National Review’ Publishes 1st Issue

Appalled by the march of collectivism and atheism around the world and liberalism holding sway at home, a new magazine of conservative opinion, National Review, released its first issue 60 years ago this month, announcing its intentions unapologetically in its publisher’s statement: “It stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.”

The name affixed to the bottom of that piece, William F. Buckley, Jr., was entirely superfluous. The hallmarks of the style that had made the magazine’s founder an enfant terrible of conservatism four years before, in his polemic, God and Man at Yale, were all here, too—notably, puckishness (their opponents made them “just about the hottest thing in town”) and polysyllabic vocabulary (“supererogation”).

It is fascinating to contrast “What Would Eisenhower Do?” a tribute in the magazine’s 60^th anniversary issue to the Republican President at the time of Buckley’s broadside, with how the guiding light of NR felt about him at the time. Ike, according to historian Niall Ferguson, writing in 2015, “understood strategy better than almost anyone in his generation.” 

That kind of talk would have been hotly disputed in the Fifties by Buckley, who, when Ike announced his re-election bid in 1956, dismissed the leader of the successful invasion of Normandy a dozen years before as “undaunted by principle, unchained by any coherent ideas about man and society, uncommitted to any estimate of the nature of potential of the enemy.”

If an institution is, as Ralph Waldo Emerson claimed, “the lengthened shadow of a single man,” then it is entirely apropos to examine NR in the context of its founder. The magazine’s 60^th anniversary issue this month makes this practically a necessity, since it contains even more self-congratulation than other journals of opinion, such as The New Republic and The Nation, have resorted to in the last year or so.

The label given Buckley by Lee Edwards of the Heritage Foundation, “The St. Paul of the Modern American Conservative Movement,” captures the reverence with which Buckley is held on the right.

According to The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America, by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, Buckley brought three qualities to his fledgling movement: “extraordinary self-belief,” a large and necessary source of funds (his father’s oil business), and wit that not only won over conservative friends but disarmed liberal critics.

Like liberal counterparts The Nation and The New Republic, NR functioned as a kind of internal debating society for its movement. Its editor was ready and willing to isolate what he regarded as fringe elements that could damage the movement, including anti-Semites, isolationists, and the John Birch Society. 

In this, it was generally agreed, he was largely successful, though he was slow to acknowledge the moral necessity of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s until it had achieved its greatest successes.

Buckley, fighting a perception voiced by Columbia University’s Lionel Trilling that conservatism could only be expressed in “in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas,” recruited a host of thinkers from various strands of the movement: ex-Marxists or ex-leftists (such as Whittaker Chambers, William Schlamm, John Dos Passos, Frank Meyer and James Burnham), Catholics (L. Brent Bozell, Harry V. Jaffa and Garry Wills), and libertarians (by his own description, Buckley can be considered a charter member). In turn, the magazine influenced a host of politicians (Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich were regular readers).

A figure of astonishing energy, Buckley propagated the conservative faith in more than 50 books, 6,000 newspaper columns totaling some 4.5 million words, editing NR for 35 years, appearing on his own TV show, Firing Line, running for mayor of New York City in 1965, lecturing on college campuses, and founding Young Americans for Freedom at his Connecticut estate in 1960.

But being in the shadow of such a magnetic figure was a mixed blessing for both his son and a protégé.

In the case of the latter, Richard Brookhiser had been groomed for years to succeed Buckley as editor when, without warning, the conservative literary lion sent him a letter informing him of a change of plans. 

It was one of the quirks of a figure known for never uttering a word out of place on Firing Line that not only could he not deliver bad news to employees face to face but that he also (as in this case) flew out of the country so that the magazine’s publisher would do so in his stead. 

Buckley had an infinitely more complicated relationship with his only son, Christopher, who, in his memoir Losing Mum and Pup, described the death of both his parents in a single year. 

William not only locked horns with his son over the latter’s agnosticism and much of his writing (about his Christopher’s satire Boomsday: "This one didn't work for me. Sorry."), but excluded from his will Christopher’s out-of-wedlock son.  

“I spent, whether consciously or unconsciously, most of my career trying to be something other than William F. Buckley’s son,” Christopher remarked in an interview with Alexandra Wolfe of The Wall Street Journal earlier this month. “But it may just be that…the book that may remain in print 50 years from now is the one about being William F. Buckley’s son.”

What would Buckley think of the state of conservatism today? Unlike the younger, more neo-con, Rupert Murdoch-financed Weekly Standard, NR has held its nose at Donald Trump, and there is a strong possibility Buckley would have loathed the billionaire as a lowlife. 

On the other hand, the 60^th anniversary edition of the magazine included a tribute to Buckley from Rush Limbaugh, who has helped dig the fetid hole in which much of contemporary conservatism finds itself.

Quote of the Day (Richard Brookhiser, on Rural Winters)

“If you live in the woods for a few winters you learn how beautiful that season is.  When the trees are leafless you can appreciate their bark and their bending.  Spring, summer, and fall are fashion shows; winter is a parade of nudes.  Creatures without roots are also worth studying.  Birds sing less but they are seen more; animals leave tracks like sociologists' flow charts. It’s a hard sell to the public though. The warmest parka is no match for the USVI. So the resort sails over the cliff, hoping to touch down briefly on Valentine’s Day.”— Richard Brookhiser, “Country Life: Closing Time,” National Review, January 26, 2015

Well, there’s more suburban New Jersey than the deep rural life that Brookhiser is celebrating (sort of) in this quote, but you catch the drift—so to speak.

Quote of the Day (Richard Brookhiser, on Humor at the Constitutional Convention—or Lack of It)

“A good joke always distracted [New York delegate Gouverneur] Morris. The one story about him that everyone knows is about a humorous bet. At the Constitutional Convention, Alexander Hamilton, a fellow delegate, offered to buy Morris dinner if he would go up to George Washington, president of the Convention, hero of the Revolution, and father of his country, slap him on the shoulder, and say, ‘My dear General, I am glad to see you looking so well.’ Morris slapped his slap and won his dinner, but said afterward that the look Washington gave him had been the worst moment of his life.”— Richard Brookhiser, “The Forgotten Founding Father,” City Journal, Spring 2002

Okay, even Jay Leno, David Letterman, and Jimmy Fallon would have a hard time loosening up ol’ George. But he was the indispensable presence at the Constitutional Convention, which, in Philadelphia on this date in 1787, after four months of debates, concluded with its 55 remaining delegates (some had dropped out, in opposition to the final product, already) signing the Constitution of the United States.

Gouverneur Morris, the convention’s wordsmith, wrote the clauses that would be cited for generations to come, and the Virginia delegate James Madison became known as the Father of the Constitution for the original plan that the delegates haggled over. 

But it was George Washington—so dignified, alas, that he was humorless, as poor Morris found out—who was the one everyone else framed the document around. He might not have wanted the job, but everyone knew that he would become the first President of the republic under this new plan to replace the Articles of Confederation. Would the new government be strong enough under him? The delegates debated, pondered—then voted accordingly.

I don’t think we need to be too upset about the lack of humor at the original proceedings, do you? The last 225 years have brought more than its share of levity from our nation’s representatives, even if they did so inadvertently. As Will Rogers remarked: “Things are terribly dull now. We won’t have any more serious comedy until Congress meets.”