The Southern Front
Genovese, Eugene D.
BOOKS IN REVIEW - "The Southern Front" Brooklyn's Man of the South does describe one skirmish in the culture wars I'd have loved to see in person: the day he stood up in front of a Time Warner stockholders' meeting and recited the...
...Throughout this essay Genovese offers Fighting for Liberty and Virtue: Political and Cultural Wars in Eighteenth-Century America by Marvin Olasky Crossway Books 316 pages / $25 REVIEWED BY John R. Dunlap mong the leading English social clubs of the mid-eighteenth century was Medmenham, formerly a Cistercian abbey located in Buckinghamshire on the outskirts of London...
...Unfortunately, the dozen or so answersthat Dissent commissioned are not reproduced here, but after reading Genovese's challenge many readers will go off to the library in search of them...
...stained glass windows depicting the Twelve Apostles in obscene postures...
...Here's mine: I bought a second copy of In the Arena to give my mother for Christmas...
...Bradford, and his The American Spectator • January 1996 69 evident interest in the paleo-conservative journal Chronicles...
...Best known for The Tragedy of American Compassion (1992), an acclaimed criIt Seems We've Been Here Before 70 January 199 6 The American Spectator...
...And academia defines as objective and scientific that which expresses its own prejudices and viewpoint...
...Nonetheless, Genovese is a towering figure among American historians and intellectuals— an iconoclast whose full autobiography one hopes one day to read...
...The true life of most actors is .the one we see on stage or screen...
...I welcome it...
...Even among the dissipated English upper classes, Sir Francis was thought by some to have taken his worship of Voltaire a bit far...
...In recent times he has become interested in the varieties of contemporary American conservatism, about which he has written with occasional sympathy and considerable understanding...
...Academia normally defines as political that which lies beyond its ideological consensus, which is generally though not always accurately perceived as "liberal...
...Not that Genovese is a partisan of free-market economics, or at least of unbridled laissez-faire—far from it...
...some tempting autobiographical apergus, some of them consigned to the footnotes...
...I hope Genovese will forgive me for saying so, but he is precisely the kind of "aristocratic socialist" Marx and Engels dismissed with the back of their hand as long ago as 1848...
...This explains his generous appraisal of the late M.E...
...What an unpleasant read it must have been for all those unctuous, self-congratulatory fools in Dissent's stage army...
...His fascination with the slavocrats has MARK FALCOFF is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute...
...Perhaps sometime soon the professor will turn aside from the history of the American South to produce it...
...Genovese's field is the history of the slave South, which he has explored from the point of view of both masters and slaves...
...For the most part, though, Heston sticks to memories and shop talk, not gossip—if you read celebrity memoirs in search of titillating anecdotes about the rich and perverse, In the Arena will leave you snoozing...
...he wasn't particularly eloquent in conveying his vision...
...They went with the McCarthyite flow in the 195os and go with its leftwing variant today...
...At the time he was an obscure assistant professor at Rutgers University—a confessing Marxist—who made the rather (for then) provocative statement that he "did not fear a Viet Cong victory in Vietnam...
...Again, unlike the stage, there is no film till months after the shooting's done...
...For his troubles he became a major issue in the gubernatorial race in New Jersey, where I was then a graduate student...
...Genovese has lately come to the attention of American conservatives of all tendencies because of his stout-hearted defense of academic freedom, civility, and ordinary decency in American universities...
...Even the august Richard Nixon weighed in on the side of those who called for Genovese's immediate dismissal...
...Governor Richard Hughes stood his ground...
...In 1753, Sir Francis Dashwood —a wellconnected noble destined for such offices as Chancellor of the Exchequer and Postmaster General—acquired the property at Medmenham and rehabbed the ruins of the abbey into a plush cathouse...
...Marvin Olasky, an atheist-turnedCalvinist who now teaches journalism at the University of Texas at Austin, has in recent years applied his Ph.D...
...His view is not that the slave-holders were uniquely evil, but rather that they were "good and decent people who tried to live decently with their slaves...
...Brooklyn's Man of the South does describe one skirmish in the culture wars I'd have loved to see in person: the day he stood up in front of a Time Warner stockholders' meeting and recited the lyrics to rap star Ice-T's "Cop Killer," four-letter words and all, a star turn that led within days to the company's pulling the album...
...By his own admission he remained a supporter of the Soviet Union and its international policies "until there was nothing left to support...
...Throughout his career he has been concerned with Southern conservatism, the role of religion in antebellum society, the slavocratic intelligentsia and literary class, even with Black nationalism...
...In the unlikely prospect of a fascist or communist ascendancy tomorrow, they may be counted on to apply for party cards as soon as it looks like a smart move...
...Yet Burke himself complained that the shabby character of key British leaders was a drag on their public performance, and when the "prodigal son" Ben Franklin finally left London for Philadelphia on the eve of the Revolution, after sixteen years of more or less sycophantic residency among the Americans' overlords, he expressed his disappointment with the Crown in moral terms: "When I consider the extream Coruption prevalent among all Orders of Men in this old rotten State . .. I cannot but apprehend more Mischief than Benefit from a closer Union...
...This volume of his shorter writings—essays, reviews, one polemic and one memoir—helps explain why...
...Therein lay the tragedy that has made them, individually and as a class, the most arresting of Americans...
...This is, evidently, a very treacherous field from an ideological point of view, since it brings Genovese into direct confrontation with the "abolitionist" bias that has informed American historiography for more than a hundred years...
...On judicial activism: "Why have a Constitution at all, if a majority of an appointed Supreme Court—the organ of state least accountable to public opinion—can make the Constitution say whatever it wishes...
...On the other hand, I doubt I'll get a traffic ticket very soon...
...It first appeared in the "democratic socialist" journal Dissent, and asks very pointedly, "What did you know [about Soviet Communism], and when did you know it...
...Does anybody with an IO in excess of 85 really want to hear anything Marlon Bran-do has to say, other than his lines...
...If, on the other hand, you want to know what it was like to work with, say, William Wyler, Charlton Heston is your man: He was abstracted, digging inside himself for the scene till he got to the root of it, then giving it to the actors...
...In this they were doomed to fail, "for at the bottom," he continues, "their relations with their slaves rested on injustice and violence...
...He was willing to let the scene, and the movie, become what it would become...
...On the Declaration of Independence: "Demonstrably, the signers did not understand the Declaration to mean what modern egalitarians claim it means...
...The countless opportunists and careerists who dominate the historical associations call themselves liberals as a matter of political convenience...
...Genovese is also the most readable of American historians...
...The Southern Front: History and Politics in the Cultural War by Eugene D. Genovese University ofMissouri Press 320 pages / $29.95 REVIEWED BY Mark Falcoff It must be frilly thirty years now since my attention was first drawn to the phenomenon of Eugene Genovese...
...Besides, the eighteenth century in England is also the age of Johnson and Fielding, of clear-sighted moralists like John Brown and James Burgh, of William Pitt and the lofty Edmund Burke...
...Of course, one can hardly expect less when one writes passages like these: Anything that comes with a cri de coeur for the poor, the oppressed, and the downtrodden passes muster and may be expected to be greeted with hosannas, no matter how absurd the arguments and blundering the scholarship...
...In fact, what attracts him to the Southern brand of American conservatism is precisely his view that over the years it has "resisted bourgeois society, its atomistic culture, and its marketplace morality...
...On the theological quarrel over slavery in the run-up to the civil war: "The God-fearing southern people turned to the Bible to justify slavery, and the Bible did not disappoint them...
...it's their offstage lives that have no meaning, save to those whose lives mean even less...
...Of the "emerging global marketplace" he writes: "Animality and filth, like everything else, have become commodities, which people are called upon to tolerate as expressions of freedom and feel free to buy as much as they wish...
...On Western civilization: "Contrary to current lying, [it] has been distinguished not by racism, imperialism, and the denigration of women, which have disfigured all civilizations, but by its extraordinary and partially successful movements of opposition to those enormities...
...Not that Dashwood perfectly epitomized the London of that era...
...training to a kind of public service with a string of historical surveys useful to an understanding of American political culture...
...In fact, I'm pretty sure he had no preconceived idea of the whole film...
...They begin the story of a young Sicilian-American from Brooklyn who joined the Communist movement at age 15, but was expelled from the party at age 2o...
...Dubbed "monks" or "Franciscans," club members enjoyed their revels in the rebuilt abbey under JOHN R. DUNLAP teaches English at Santa Clara University...
...Professor Genovese went on to become one of the most important historians in the United States, if not the most important of his generation...
...I rarely have much use for Hollywood biographies and autobiographies (not that there's any great difference between the two genres, outside of the ghostwriter's choice of pronouns...
...Perhaps the most interesting selection in the book is an essay entitled "The Question...
...That's a rave...
...his Republican challenger lost...
...I'm proud of what I did," he writes, "though now I'll surely never be offered another film by Warners, nor get a good review from Time...
...But In the Arena is an exception...
...He refers to the American civil war as "the War of Southern Independence...
...It's a real book, perhaps the most readable memoir by a movie star since David Niven's The Moon's a Balloon, and in our present age of Low-Fat Celebrity Reading Product, such efforts deserve an extra helping of praise...
...Praised by his American friend Benjamin Franklin as "a humane, liberal reformer," Sir Francis was in any event a reliable caterer to the libertine tastes of the worthies who flocked from London to join his "Hell-Fire Club," among whom were various cabinet ministers and members of Parliament...
...Here was Genovese insisting that the moral responsibility for Stalinism falls not just on bona fide members of the Communist Party (like himself) but on liberals, "democratic socialists," "radical democrats," and others—those who "could usually be counted upon to support, 'critically,' of course, the essentials of our political line on world and national affairs...
...taken Genovese along some interesting highways and by-ways, and we are offered a fairly broad sample in the essays in this book...
...Evidently he and his wife, the historian Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, have had quite a time of it at the various places they have taught, at one of which they were even (falsely) accused of forcing graduate students to do their laundry...
...On the subject of liberal Protestant theologians: "As an atheist, when I read much Protestant theology and religious history today, I have the warm feeling that I am in the company of nonbelievers...
...He didn't try to charm...
...If this is a Marxist, one feels like shouting, then we really must have more of them...
...It should be enough to recall that a slaveholder wrote it, and that slaveholders signed it...
Vol. 29 • January 1996 • No. 1
