Editorial / On Ten Years of Public Service
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
EDITORIAL On Ten Years of Public Service R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. This journal is now ten years old. Mencken believed that ten years was quite long enough at one job, so last month I quit The...
...I had the sense that he regarded all politicians (and the overwhelming majority of university administrators, paid and unpaid) as fools...
...Let me merely go on to testify to the farcical accomplishments of most Third World...
...Until recently I would have given the nod to my brethren in the press box whose markedly contrived estimates of their own worth made such exquisite reading, but increasingly I am aware of another character of comic dimension, the Nixon maniac: that weird character who flushes with wrath or mellows with eulogies at the merest mention of our fallen leader...
...but perhaps I wax extravagant...
...More positively, it called, in his view, for history regarded as the comparative study of events, institutions, cultures, such study to be undertaken with a distinct question or problem in mind that permitted the kinds of answers which could be found in such disciplines as geology, biology, and other sciences...
...Imagine, whenever I am at the cocktail party of, say, some university professors, and the conversation is sepulchered in flummeries about the contemporary white man's burden, all I need do to set off an amusing conflagration is to intone something like, "Well, you'll have to admit that we'd never be in this mess if Mr...
...statesmen, especially those plying their trade in Africa and Latin America...
...Their contributions to our success have been positively selfless, and what a low ingrate I would be not to confess my thanks...
...His search for an answer took him across Asia to China, its Great Wall and its changing political systems...
...Often the liberal brethren ask me to do a no-holds-barred piece for one of their renowned pages...
...q with the Greeks, received masterful statement by St...
...Somewhere at this very hour Coover doubtless is dreaming up new philosophical metaphors—why not a U.S...
...But a fuller explanation for our vitality is that it reflects the vitality existing outside the citadels of reigning orthodoxy: the journals, the foundations, the think tanks, and the universities, still dominated by the egalitarian whim-wham and the self-realization hoax...
...It is a difficult question who provided more sheer rapture—the White House junto, or the fearless defenders of the Constitution...
...we are blighted with them...
...The award will be presented at a ceremony in Mr...
...When writers realize that they can express intelligent ideas without paying obeisance to the conventional claptrap, they write more robustly and think more carefully...
...Apparently, Mr...
...Our pages are lively because our writers work with full confidence that they are free to speak their minds...
...We countered that it took time and care to put out a magazine and that we could not be troubled by the imminent arrival of house guests, a forest fire, pestilence, or whatever it was that they threatened us with...
...I was to be a hot-air monger and procurer of same...
...I saw more of him than anyone save members of his immediate family during the years 1936-43, and I can testify that he and Edmund Burke are, if there is a heaven, close by each other...
...They claimed that my two-day unexpected visit to their summer retreat had lasted long enough...
...Today we are full of saucy vigor, and students of the genus intelligentsia regularly express astonishment that a small journal whose editorial offices are far from the publishing purlieus can actually turn out interesting stuff...
...Finally, I am duty-bound to pay an especial tribute to that gifted and assiduous cast of disparate souls who for month upon month turned our lives into a saturnalia of excitement and mystery...
...Augustine, and succeeded in becoming the master-idea of the social sciences in the 19th and much of the 20th centuries...
...Admittedly, The Alternative has never assumed this supine posture, but then what did we have to lose...
...Of course the House of Representatives is not to be forgotten nor is the Supreme Court, the American Association of University Professors, and other allied subterfuges...
...He didn't say anything, but there was something suggesting itself to me that if I was going to continue reading such tripe, I had best leave it outside his office...
...The reader will also find a much more compact and forthright statement of the differentiations among events, small and large, short and long, and their diverse impacts in Teggart's Theory of History, published half a century ago, than in the tortured, prolix passages which we find in Braudel and others of his French school...
...He was, as I trust I have made evident in this review, a great teacher in all respects...
...There is much earnest talk today about the marvelous diversity of opinion flourishing in the Republic, but the facts put the guffaw on such persiflage...
...Further, I should like to express thanks to the indefatigable efforts over the years of the Chicago Seven, the Students for a Democratic Society, the editors of the New York Review of Books, dozens of very intellectual mass murderers, bombers, arsonists, and political reformers, plus the vast majority of the United States Senate...
...And usually my doubts arc sustained when my erstwhile devil-may-care editor hunkers back—much chastened —to offer up some dubious excuse for rejection...
...I should very much like to throw in the International Association of Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists, and Novelists, and the Chamber of Commerce...
...Occasionally, he flattens me by claiming that I failed to write in the style he is accustomed to in The Alternative...
...Coover's honor to be held at the Women's Christian Temperance Union drinking fountain on the west portico of the Monroe County Courthouse in Bloomington, Indiana...
...I have the same address, the same associates, and the same bartender as before—so much for change or personal growth as the modern educationists say...
...that, and a profound dedication to a life of good works...
...timeless figures like Senator George S. McGovern, Miss Jane Fonda, and less celebrated believers in the Big Foot mystery...
...I never saw my friend's parents again, nor have I ever had to seek honest employment...
...I think, though, that he despised liberals— the kind I was, I fear, when first I began to study and work under him—more than outandout radicals...
...His brilliant insights and conceptual uncoverings are as relevant today—and as badly needed—as when he first published them...
...Those who find themselves impressed by the recent renascence of evolutionary sociology, associated with the names of Talcott Parsons, Robert Bellah, and Gerhard Lenski, among others, owe it to themselves to read Teggart's chapters on the subject in his Theory of History...
...Socialism in any and all its forms, he used to assure me, was only absolute political power extended through handouts into every corner and crevice of society...
...He had a genuine hatred of war and the military, believing them to be the most destructive forces, historically, upon civil society, especially family and local community...
...Most fledgling editors auspicate their journals after a brassy overture of bloodcurdling declamations against the establishment aired pan passu with dozens of fruitful visits to Chase Manhattan and other citadels of the capitalist tyranny...
...I have in mind, naturally, the heroes, the villains, and the supporting cast of Watergate, the most fabulous tale since the Old Testament...
...Perhaps a few personal notes on this remarkable mind are in order, by way of conclusion...
...Unfortunately, their piquancy issues from their lunacy...
...What the Annales group in Paris today criticizes as l'histoire ivenementielle was dealt with critically by Teggart as early as 1910 in a fascinating article in the American Historical Review, and at greater length in the two works contained in this volume...
...What is more, I should like to express my gratitude to those great Americans who have studiously and triumphantly ignored us: eminences of the sixties such as Mr...
...He was not, however ideologically inclined, much less politically absorbed...
...I take such episodes as evidence of the censorship now practiced in America, a (continued on page 44) 4 The American Spectator November 1977 lades of such distinguished historians as Paxson, Shotwell, and Robinson...
...Clark Kerr...
...but never do we heave out a manuscript for its dangerous ideas, unless those ideas are anti-democratic or downright foolish...
...Nixon were still President...
...What of a Supreme Court Justice with incurable flatulence?—but he dreams in obscurity...
...The sad truth is that any writer who makes bold to say as much hazards calumny, loss of income, banishment from the campus Chatauqua circuit, and worse...
...The Public Burning is momentous in its failure...
...For Teggart this called for eschewal of unilinear narrative, single time-frame, and the artificial forcing of the diverse and plural into the unitary...
...True, we do patrol our printed fields for grammatical weeds...
...radicals need not apply...
...When we founded The Alternative we had only a couple thousand dollars in the bank, and I was furiously pasting down galleys in the summer cottage of a friend while he held off his enraged parents and their eviction notice...
...rather, they are the very people who recently were freedom's champions, the intellectuals...
...more specifically, abandoning the conventional format of the writing of history—which he declared a form of art, like any narrative "story," irrespective of its claimed objectivity or its grounding in documents and observations—and using the empirical materials of history in ways akin to the operations of scientists...
...Technically flawed, intellectually unserviceable, stupefyingly boring, it is prodigiously worthy of the 1977 Harold Robbins Award for the worst book of the year...
...Teggart's own effort at a scientific study of historical materials resulted in his notable Rome and China, a work that deals in comparative fashion, working from hypotheses to be tested, with the successive assaults upon and then invasions of Rome by the barbarian peoples...
...As his Theory of History in this volume demonstrates, he was at home in the history of ideas in Western civilization...
...And, bearing in mind Coover's flapbrought the science, rather than the Thucydides-formed art, of history into being...
...Teggart's passion was making a science of history...
...Nixon has induced these queer and contradictory feelings for years, but I gather ineffable satisfaction from the growing realization that I will have these eccentrics with me for the rest of my life...
...With the wampum they extract they hire a gang of Madison Avenue smoothies and a stable of aging litterateurs whose cheeky reputations and Martha's Vineyard villas rest securely on their published lamentations over American philistinism and general ghastliness...
...I doubt American history has ever witnessed a period less congenial to unfettered thought, save during time of war...
...Hence the great emphasis in The Processes of History (the second of the two works in this volume) upon the necessary formulation of guiding problems and tentative hypotheses, upon the kinds of forces involved in the rise of political kingdoms and their conflicts with kinship systems (the historical struggle between family and state was a kind of paradigm in Teggart's comparative-institutional studies), and upon the great significance of migrations and invasions in creating the conditions under which old, rigid systems of thought were dissolved, making possible the rise of new ones...
...q The American Spectator January 1978 37...
...He feared the New Deal and its centralizing, monopolizing impact upon American society, and voted resolutely against FDR...
...This is not the way we did it at The Alternative...
...Coover will receive Robbins' complete works in handsome, pre-owned, paperbound volumes...
...In my own Social Change and History, dedicated to Teggart, I have, I think successfully, brought out the true presuppositions and assumptions of our social evolutionists, so-called, but my book would not have been possible without Teggart's powerful, but long-neglected, critical insights...
...I know from personal experience that our encouragement of free expression is impossible for most so-called liberals to understand...
...Behind us lies a decade of voluptuous joy, for which I am profoundly indebted to thousands of discriminating readers and hundreds of independent-minded writers...
...I am glad to say that I quit cold-turkey within the year...
...The first time I ever visited him in his office I had my week's Nation and New Republic in hand...
...This is not to say the Republic lacks piquant ideas...
...Today's enemies of free thought are not the populo minuto...
...ALIA of Good Works Of course, launching opinions was one of the chief reasons for our founding...
...Whole armies of hacks would have to be exterminated before readers would turn to him...
...Consequently, we publish libertarians, conservatives, neo-conservatives, even liberals...
...His special interest was the idea of progress, and I believe his course on the subject (commencing in 1919 in his own newly-created department) was the first in this country...
...Doubtless some of this astonishment would abate if they were informed that Indiana is now served by an excellent telephone company, and has even gained access to the modern aeroplane—jets...
...As winner of the coveted Harold Robbins Award for Worst Book of the Year, Mr...
...Explain that patterning in time over the whole Eurasian continent, he used to say, and you will have at long last THE WORST BOOK OF THE YEAR (continued from page 4) loathing are not such alluring literary props...
...but this notwithstanding, he was among the very first at Berkeley to recognize the threat Hitler posed to Western freedom, and he used to rage at the Chamberlains and Daladiers in Europe for not sensing immediately what Hitler was actually about...
...One of his obsessing interests was the far-flung eruptions, all in the sixth century B.C., of the religions associated with the names of Zoroaster in Persia, Lao-tze and Confucius in China, Mahavira (founder of Jainism) and Buddha in India, the prophets Ezekiel and Second Isaiah in Judea, Thales in Ionia, and Pythagoras in southern Italy...
...The Fates had fetched me to one of the oldest professions known to man...
...Theory of History is an absorbing treatment of the theoretical foundations of conventional history on the one hand and, on the other, of the study of social change in the social sciences...
...Senator undone by bushy nose hair...
...He voted regularly, but it was to vote against, not for, someone...
...Teggart was much more than the comparative historian...
...Always I am doubtful that they really know what they are getting into...
...The more prosperous of them eschew lamentation and resort to outright threats...
...Oh yes, he liked what I brought to him of Mencken...
...Mencken believed that ten years was quite long enough at one job, so last month I quit The Alternative and moved on to The American Spectator...
...The magazine was sent to the printer only after the job was completed...
...I say this despite what I now hear of the fifties: adecade whose horrors make the skin crawl and the blood boil...
...Radical though he was in the areas of theory and method in history and the social sciences, he was a full-blown conservative in ideological-political matters...
...Past Robbins Laureates Theodore White, Peter Schrag, and Lillian Hellman head the list of invited dignitaries...
...Finally, Teggart was, to my knowledge, the first to recognize that under the pretentious terminology of "social evolution" and "social development" in the 19th and 20th centuries lay nothing in fact derived from the scientific-biological study of evolution, but rather spin-offs of the idea, the philosophy, of progress that had begun doodle about Communism, I should like very much to have the award presented to him by Andrei Sakharov, if only we could spring him from The Phantom's maw...
Vol. 11 • November 1977 • No. 1
