The following is a summary of the February 2009 issue of the St. Croix Review:

Barry MacDonald retells events leading to the Civil War in "Ominous Events Unfold."

In a "Letter to the Editor," Don Lee comments on polls and President Bush's disregard for them.

In "It Was Not Conservatism Which Was Defeated in the November Election," Allan Brownfeld sees the Bush administration as incompetent and big spending; in "Ending Racial Preferences: The Michigan Story," he relates the long struggle of overmatched individuals against the University of Michigan to eliminate racial preferences in admission standards.

Herbert London, in "Racism Revisited," writes that Obama's election is just another step America has taken in overcoming racism; in "Taking from Peter to Pay Paul: International Redistribution," he writes that Obama and the United Nations have plans for billions of tax-payer dollars: welfare for foreign nations; in "Compression at the Mean: The American Way," he shows how Obama's urge to "spread the wealth around," will destroy the incentive for individuals to work hard; in "Israel's Nuclear Umbrella," he believes the promise by Obama to retaliate in kind to a nuclear attack on Israel lacks credibility; in "The Censorship Justification," he takes after a New York Times book reviewer: she is snide, obtuse, and morally blind in her review of Sherry Jones' novel, The Jewel of Medina.

In "The Big Three: Assigning Blame and an Alternative to a Bailout," Mark W. Hendrickson writes that because the UAW is 100 percent responsible for the troubles of the automakers, the UAW should assume complete responsibility; in "Dancing with Fred or Frankenstein: Free Markets, Socialism, and the Bailout," he explains why federal intervention in the economy is destined to fail; in "The Threat Within," he details the moral rot that infects our nation, and he assigns blame; in "The Problem with Monotheism," he urges the faithful to follow the urgings of their faith.

David J. Bean explains how deep the government mismanagement of the economy is in "Some Thoughts on Capital and Money."

In "Losing Our Country?" Joseph S. Fulda says that as the world is becoming freer American workers are facing more competition, but Americans remain the best.

Michael Ledeen, in "Understanding Iran," writes that Iran is an implacable foe that cannot be appeased -- and it probably has nuclear weapons already.

A congressional report, "More Than 650 Scientists Dissent Over Warming Claims," challenges Al Gore.

In "Five Years Ago: The Beginning of the End for Saddam -- and George W. Bush," Paul Kengor reviews the bittersweet events following Saddam's capture.

In "Cultural Wars, Then and Now," Richard J. McGowan discusses the Council of Lyons in 1274. Catholic leaders gathered to decide whether to accept or ban the rediscovered works of Aristotle. The issue was whether reason was compatible with Christian faith. Dr. McGowan sees hope for our modern world in the outcome of this council.

Jigs Gardner, in "The Incomparable Jane Austen," writes of the artist and her time.

In "Shelby Foote," Robert Thornton writes about the popular historian of the Civil War.

Robert M. Thornton

Robert M. Thornton writes from Fort Mitchell, Kentucky.

From what I have read, everyone who watched the Civil War series on television in 1990 was greatly taken by one of the commentators, historian and novelist Shelby Foote. My wife never had much interest in history while she was in school, but she said if she had had Foote as the teacher, she would have loved history -- or, for that matter, any subject he taught.

Why does Foote have this appeal to persons who have hardly ever looked into a history book and are certainly not Civil War buffs? Well, his laid back manner of speaking and a Southern drawl are pleasing to the ear. He carries his learning lightly and speaks as a person does while relaxing and conversing with friends. He never comes across as a preacher or a pedagogue. His knowledge of the men who fought in the Civil War is encyclopedic and he speaks informally about them in the same casual manner you or I might do about members of our family. Also, as Tracy Lee Simmons put it, his breezy, anecdotal and wise on-camera words leavened the mass of facts and images and music; they did much to deflate the sometimes embarrassingly pretentious pronouncements of the other commentators.

I doubt that the producers of the Civil War series used all of the interviews with Foote. If only they would make available the tapes of his commentaries in their entirety. Meanwhile we must make do with the interviews that have appeared in print. Conversations with Shelby Foote was published in 1989 and is made up of interviews with Foote from 1950 to 1987. The December 1991 and January 1992 issues of Crisis printed a long interview of Foote by Tracy Lee Simmons.

Shelby Foote wrote five novels before he began his monumental trilogy The Civil War; a Narrative. Volume 1 appeared in 1958, Volume 2 in 1963, and Volume 3 in 1974, twenty years after he started what was originally to be a brief history of the war. His work was well received, but Shelby Foote did not become a household name. He returned to novel writing and lived in relative obscurity.

Foote's life of quiet seclusion ended in 1990 with Ken Burns' enormously popular television documentary, "The Civil War." Foote watched an early showing in Washington and it was clear to him that Burns had a big hit on his hands. He also saw from the reaction to the eleven-hour program that he "was fixing to become some kind of star. I was wary. But I really didn't know how disruptive it would be." And without intending it, he did become "some kind of star" and the telephone in his house jangled constantly.

Probably most persons would be delighted to have people clamoring after them all the time to be a guest on television talk shows, attend conferences, review books, give interviews, and write articles for magazines. They would welcome the numerous offers that would bring them fortune as well as fame. Not Shelby Foote, however, who recognized the seductiveness of all that was his for the asking. He knew that the mass media would grab hold of him and squeeze him like a sponge if he let them. "I might have ended up on television four hours a day," he declared, "and I'd be a shell after about two weeks of that."

"I have had one absolute standard attitude toward money all of my life," declared Foote, "that is the utter need for spending it as soon as possible so it wouldn't be loaded on my back."

. . . An old jazz musician said a good thing one time. He said what you need to write the blues is no money in the bank and nobody loving you. So I feel an obligation to get rid of the money and alienate people so I won't be either rich or loved.

Some historians looked down their noses at Foote's narrative history of the Civil War because the usual scholarly apparatus was missing. As a novelist, Foote did not want to use footnotes which would shatter the illusion of sharing an experience. But, he insisted, everything he wrote was backed by sound documentary evidence; while acknowledging errors in his books, he noted that he has found many more in the works of some professional historians.

Both the novelist and historian seek the same truth -- not a different truth -- but they go about it in different ways when trying to show the readers how it was. Historians should learn to write well, he insisted, instead of just setting down the facts they have gathered in their research. They should employ the novelist's methods without his license because:

. . . no list of facts will ever give you the truth; it's what you do with those facts that makes them true. And God knows I'm not talking about distortion. I'm talking about what underlies the facts.

Foote also differed from many scholars in that he had no typists, assistants or research persons helping him; he did it all himself, and wrote with a pen, preferring nothing mechanical between him and the paper. He often worked eight and ten hours a day, seven days a week. With such a schedule, it is not surprising that he belongs to no clubs, does not play golf or poker, and has no hobbies. It is not surprising either that he twice expresses thanks to his friends in Memphis who gave him food and drink and had the grace not to demand payment in the form of talk about the Civil War.

Jacques Barzun's questions to aspiring young writers was "Do you want to write or to have written?" I imagine most would respond that the former was their wish, but this might change when they found out how much work was involved. As Thomas Craven wrote sixty years ago:

It is much more comfortable to sit in a cafe with one's girl and talk about art, than to hold one's self to the grinding labor without which no art ever came into being.

Foote would agree wholeheartedly, I believe, and his off-hand "advice" to young writers would discourage those unwilling to labor hard and long at their craft.

Avoid the life of the academy, Foote counsels aspiring writers, because the worst place on God's earth for a creative writer is a college campus. Grants are a bad thing for beginners because they make it too easy. If there is a need to earn a living outside their writing, they should get a physically demanding job (shades of Eric Hoffer) and keep it separate from their creative efforts. The important thing is not getting a college degree, but if you do attend a school, to take the courses that will help you as a writer, (and this does not mean creative writing 101). A writer learns by doing and by reading authors who really know how to do it. Anyone wishing to be a writer must read -- and read some more and keep reading. And he must write and rewrite -- and rewrite again.

Shelby Foote would also agree with what Hendrik Willem van Loon wrote in The Arts over fifty years ago.

In all of the arts there is a terrific amount of plain, ordinary routine work. There are no short cuts. If you really want to learn to play the piano or compose a sonata or sculpt a statue or to write decent prose, you simply have to do the same thing over and over again and for hours and hours and day after day and year after year, for an entire lifetime is hardly long enough to give you absolute perfection. (Becoming a artist) means work and then still more work, and the sort of work that would make a coal heaver or ditch digger turn away in disgust. *

"Government price-fixing, once started, has alike no justice and no end. It is an economic folly from which this country has every right to be spared." --Calvin Coolidge

Richard J. McGowan

Richard J. McGowan lectures in the philosophy and religion department at Butler University.

The Islamic world: cartoons provoke riots and death, teachers imprisoned for allowing students to name a teddy bear Muhammad, bombs detonated in markets and on minibuses, rape victims jailed. The Islamic world: leaders of countries reject evidence about the Holocaust and ban the practice of yoga. The Islamic world: irrational behavior in the name of religion.

The Islamic world appears surreal and without historical precedent. However, a person need only look to Western history to observe a culture in the throes of choosing between implosion and world domination, reason and revelation, harmonious thought and religious zealotry. Muslims and the Islamic world face the same situation today that the Christian world faced in the medieval period: How are secular life and religious faith to be reconciled? The question was answered in the 13th century.

The defining event occurred in 1274, namely, the Council of Lyons. The best minds and intellectual champions of various schools of thought, notably Siger de Brabant, Bonaventure, and Thomas Aquinas, were to gather to determine the curriculum at the preeminent center of learning, the University of Paris. Of particular concern was the place of the liberal arts and sciences. Ultimately, more than the curriculum hung in the balance: at stake was the relationship between reason and faith.

The works of Aristotle, little translated before Michael the Scot fastened upon them in 1217, became available through the energy and expertise of William of Moerbeke. William hastened to translate Aristotle for his friend, Thomas Aquinas, the portly Italian friar of the Dominican order.

Greek philosophy had long been available to Muslim thinkers, including Alfarabi, Avicenna, Algazali, and, perhaps greatest of them all, Averroes. Hence, as Aristotle was introduced to the West, Arabic commentators influenced Christian thinkers. Some thinkers accepted the Arabic interpretations while others understood Aristotle's thought in a more original fashion. One scholar put the matter this way:

Two types of Aristotlians arose within the Christian world. There were those (such as Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas) who, being theologians, undertook to harmonize Christian and Aristotlian teachings, while there were others who interpreted Aristotle in a purely philosophic fashion.

The latter thinkers, in whose number stood Siger de Brabant, were called "Latin Averroists." With little regard for the teachings of Christianity, they pursued Aristotle's ideas and followed the interpretation given Aristotle's philosophy by Islamic scholars. As Pieper said of them, "Their questioning of tradition was plainly so radical that they did not dare to state it bluntly -- perhaps not even to themselves."

What the Latin Averroists did not dare state, not even to themselves, was the possibility of a "double truth," a proposition true on the basis of faith but not true from the perspective of philosophy and vice-versa, true for philosophy but false by way of faith. While the Latin Averroists declared loyalty to their Catholic faith, they also acted as though reason might lead to truths contrary to church teaching. When a potential conflict between faith and reason occurred, they were careful to qualify the "truths" reached by reason. To many church leaders, though, the suggestion that reason could lead to a conclusion incompatible with or unsupported by faith was the same as saying that a "double truth" were possible: a conclusion could be true on the basis of philosophy or from faith but not necessarily by reason and faith.

Maurer says that the Latin Averroists:

. . . . claimed allegiance to the Catholic faith, and there is no evidence to doubt their sincerity in this regard. Whenever they taught a doctrine contradicting a tenet of their religion, they were careful not to propose it as true but simply as the conclusion of reason and of philosophy. To their opponents this was tantamount to teaching a double truth, one valid for philosophy and another for religion, and in contradiction to each other.

Maurer emphatically states that the Latin Averroists did not believe anything so preposterous but other scholars suggest, as intimated above, that Latin Averroists did not themselves fully understand where their reasoning must inevitably lead: reason and religion are incompatible.

Christian thinkers were appalled, to understate the case. On the one hand, conservative thinkers, such as the Franciscan John Peckham, thought that all human activity should offer greater glory to God. Natural reason, in whatever form, e.g., philosophy, must serve theology. Indeed, Peckham's ally, the great Franciscan, Bonaventure, who championed the conservative position at Lyons, wrote a little tome on the subject, De Reductione Artium ad Theologiam (On the Reduction of the Arts to Theology). This group distrusted the human activity of reasoning and saw little value in reason apart from its being a servant of faith. Reason must serve faith.

Other Christians were not as mistrustful of philosophy and the capability of reason. Thomas Aqunas, similar to and schooled by Albertus Magnus, sought to show that Christian and Aristotelian teachings were not antithetical. For Thomas, natural knowledge of the world, gained from empirical evidence and the use of reason, did not conflict with knowledge based in faith. Truth gained from reason, and truth gained from revelation owe their origin to the same source: God, source of revealed truths, is the Creator of the natural world. In short, reason and revelation lead to the same place. Not only can they exist independently, they must also exist without conflict -- at least if reason is employed correctly.

Which position should the University of Paris adopt with regard to the curriculum? Allow reason though it might be contrary to religion? Restrict reason on behalf of religion? Act as though reason and religion may be harmonious? The Council of Lyons was convened to decide the questions. Before representatives met that June of 1274, Thomas Aquinas died in March. His death did not deter the two Christian camps from thumping Siger de Brabant's position. Thomas's death, however, meant he was not present to champion his position and ultimately played a role in the outcome. Bonaventure's position won the battle.

The culminating event for the curriculum war occurred in 1277: the impetuous Bishop Etienne Tempier issued a condemnation of 219 propositions. Most of the propositions derived from the Latin Averroist school of thought, though many propositions -- the exact number depends on whether a Franciscan or Dominican does the counting -- came from the pen of Thomas Aquinas.

Bonaventure did not live to see his position triumph. He died during the Council of Lyons and to this day historians speculate that he may have been poisoned. While it is worth noting that modern curriculum wars pale in comparison to the suspected bloodletting in Lyons, it is more worth noting that Bonaventure's victory lasted mere decades. In April 1323, Pope John XXII canonized Thomas Aquinas, two years before the Condemnation of 1277 was itself annulled. Since then, reason, not as opposed to revelation and especially in the form of the liberales artes, had a place at the table in the West. For centuries, we have thought that secular reasoning is not antagonistic to religion and revealed truth.

What does the 13th century teach? The history of the West suggests hope for the Middle East, even if a hope dependent upon leaders in the Islamic world patiently, contemplatively, and peacefully examining the possibility that reason and revelation can coexist. The 13th century also teaches that religion, specifically Catholicism in the person of Thomas Aquinas, is worth celebrating. I will celebrate on January 28, St. Thomas's feast day.

Our world is better for his intellectual courage and civilized engagement with ideas.

Thomas was the one who prepared Europe for the Enlightenment. His work allowed human reason to engage the world in a meaningful manner. It is not that faith and revelation count for nothing, but that human capacity for thought can count for something, too.

And that is a happy thought. *

"History does not entrust the care of freedom to the weak or timid." --Dwight D. Eisenhower

U.S. Senate Minority Report

The contact person for information on this report is Matt Dempsey. He can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., or at (202) 224-9797. For access to the complete report in a PDF format go to www.epw.senate.gov/minority.

These first six paragraphs were written by a staff writer of the Heartland Institute, and are reprinted with permission of the Institute.

[Editor's Note: We need Republican politicians to join the debate, and challenge Al Gore. Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma has confronted global warming hysteria, but he has largely been on his own. Given the following quotes, what justifies Republican silence?]

Over 650 dissenting scientists from around the globe challenged man-made global warming claims made by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and former Vice President Al Gore. This new 231-page U.S. Senate Minority Report -- updated from 2007's groundbreaking report of over 400 scientists who voiced skepticism about the so-called global warming "consensus" -- features the skeptical voices, including many current and former UN IPCC scientists, who have now turned against the UN IPCC. The over 650 dissenting scientists are more than 12 times the number of UN scientists (52) who authored the media-hyped IPCC 2007 Summary for Policymakers.

The chorus of skeptical scientific voices grew louder in 2008 as a steady stream of peer-reviewed studies, analyses, real world data and inconvenient developments challenged the UN and former Vice President Al Gore's claims that the "science is settled" and there is a "consensus." On a range of issues, 2008 proved to be challenging for the promoters of man-made climate fears. Promoters of anthropogenic warming fears endured the following: Global temperatures failing to warm; peer-reviewed studies predicting a continued lack of warming; a failed attempt to revive the discredited "Hockey Stick" theory; inconvenient developments and studies regarding CO2, the sun, clouds, Antarctica, the Arctic, Greenland, Mount Kilimanjaro, hurricanes, extreme storms, floods, ocean acidification, polar bears, lack of atmospheric dust, and the failure of oceans to warm and rise as predicted.

In addition, the following developments further secured 2008 as the year the "consensus" collapsed. Russian scientists "rejected the very idea that carbon dioxide may be responsible for global warming." An American Physical Society editor conceded that a "considerable presence" of scientific skeptics exists. An international team of scientists countered the UN IPCC, declaring: "Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate." India issued a report challenging global warming fears. International scientists demanded the UN IPCC "be called to account and cease its deceptive practices," and a canvass of more than 51,000 Canadian scientists revealed 68 percent disagree that global warming science is "settled."

This new report issued by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee's office of the GOP Ranking Member is the latest evidence of the growing groundswell of scientific opposition challenging significant aspects of the claims of the UN IPCC and Al Gore. Scientific meetings are now being dominated by a growing number of skeptical scientists. The prestigious International Geological Congress, dubbed the geologists' equivalent of the Olympic games, was held in Norway in August 2008, and prominently featured the voices of scientists skeptical of man-made global warming fears.

Even the mainstream media has begun to take notice of the expanding number of scientists serving as "consensus busters." A November 25, 2008, article in Politico noted that a "growing accumulation" of science is challenging warming fears, and added that the "science behind global warming may still be too shaky to warrant cap-and-trade legislation." Canada's Financial Post noted on October 20, 2008, "the number of climate change skeptics is growing rapidly." New York Times environmental reporter Andrew Revkin noted on March 6, 2008:

As we all know, climate science is not a numbers game (there are heaps of signed statements by folks with advanced degrees on all sides of this issue).

In 2007, Washington Post staff writer Juliet Eilperin conceded the obvious, writing that the numbers of climate skeptics "appear to be expanding rather than shrinking."

Skeptical scientists are gaining recognition despite what many say is a bias against them in parts of the scientific community and are facing significant funding disadvantages. Dr. William M. Briggs, a climate statistician who serves on the American Meteorological Society's Probability and Statistics Committee, explained that his colleagues described "absolute horror stories of what happened to them when they tried getting papers published that explored non-consensus views." Briggs, in a March 4, 2008, report, described the behavior as "really outrageous and unethical behavior on the parts of some editors. I was shocked." [Note: An August 2007 report detailed how proponents of man-made global warming fears enjoy a monumental funding advantage over skeptical scientists.

Highlights of Minority Report

"I am a skeptic. . . . Global warming has become a new religion." --Nobel Prize Winner for Physics, Ivar Giaever.

"Since I am no longer affiliated with any organization nor receiving any funding, I can speak quite frankly. . . . As a scientist I remain skeptical. The main basis of the claim that man's release of greenhouse gases is the cause of the warming is based almost entirely upon climate models. We all know the frailty of models concerning the air-surface system." --Atmospheric Scientist Dr. Joanne Simpson, the first woman in the world to receive a Ph.D. in meteorology, and formerly of NASA, who has authored more than 190 studies and has been called "among the most preeminent scientists of the last 100 years."

"Warming fears are the worst scientific scandal in history. . . . When people come to know what the truth is they will feel deceived by science and scientists." -- UN IPCC Japanese Scientist Dr. Kiminori Itoh, an award-winning Ph.D. and an environmental chemist.

"The IPCC has actually become a closed circuit; it doesn't listen to others. It doesn't have open minds. . . . I am really amazed that the Nobel Peace Prize has been given on scientifically incorrect conclusions [authored] by people who are not geologists." --Indian geologist Dr. Arun D. Ahluwalia at Punjab University, and a board member of the UN-supported International Year of the Planet.

"So far, real measurements give no ground for concern about a catastrophic future warming." --Scientist Dr. Jari R. Ahlbeck, a chemical engineer at Abo Akademi University in Finland, author of 200 scientific publications, and former Greenpeace member.

"Anyone who claims that the debate is over and the conclusions are firm has a fundamentally unscientific approach to one of the most momentous issues of our time." --Solar physicist Dr. Pal Brekke, senior advisor to the Norwegian Space Centre in Oslo. Brekke has published more than 40 peer-reviewed scientific articles on the sun and solar interaction with the Earth.

"The models and forecasts of the UN IPCC are incorrect because they only are based on mathematical models and presented results in scenarios that do not include, for example, solar activity." --Victor Manuel Velasco Herrera, a researcher at the Institute of Geophysics of the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

"It is a blatant lie put forth in the media that makes it seem there is only a fringe of scientists who don't buy into anthropogenic global warming." --U.S. Government Atmospheric Scientist Stanley B. Goldenberg of the Hurricane Research Division of NOAA.

"Even doubling or tripling the amount of carbon dioxide will virtually have little impact, as water vapour and water condensed on particles as clouds dominate the worldwide scene and always will." --Geoffrey G. Duffy, a professor in the Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering of the University of Auckland, New Zealand.

"After reading [UN IPCC chairman] Pachauri's asinine comment [comparing skeptics to] Flat Earthers, it's hard to remain quiet." --Climate statistician Dr. William M. Briggs, who specializes in the statistics of forecast evaluation, serves on the American Meteorological Society's Probability and Statistics Committee and is an associate editor of Monthly Weather Review.

"The Kyoto theorists have put the cart before the horse. It is global warming that triggers higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, not the other way round. . . . A large number of critical documents submitted at the 1995 UN conference in Madrid vanished without a trace. As a result, the discussion was one-sided and heavily biased, and the UN declared global warming to be a scientific fact." --Andrei Kapitsa, a Russian geographer and Antarctic ice core researcher.

"Nature's regulatory instrument is water vapor: more carbon dioxide leads to less moisture in the air, keeping the overall GHG content in accord with the necessary balance conditions." --Prominent Hungarian Physicist and environmental researcher Dr. Miklos Zagoni reversed his view of man-made warming and is now a skeptic. Zagoni was once Hungary's most outspoken supporter of the Kyoto Protocol.

"For how many years must the planet cool before we begin to understand that the planet is not warming? For how many years must cooling go on?" --Geologist Dr. David Gee, the chairman of the science committee of the 2008 International Geological Congress who has authored 130 plus peer-reviewed papers, and is currently at Uppsala University in Sweden.

"Gore prompted me to start delving into the science again and I quickly found myself solidly in the skeptic camp. . . . Climate models can at best be useful for explaining climate changes after the fact." --Meteorologist Hajo Smit of Holland, who reversed his belief in man-made warming to become a skeptic, is a former member of the Dutch UN IPCC committee.

"The quantity of CO2 we produce is insignificant in terms of the natural circulation between air, water and soil. . . . I am doing a detailed assessment of the UN IPCC reports and the summaries for policy makers, identifying the way in which the summaries have distorted the science." --South African Nuclear Physicist and Chemical Engineer Dr. Philip Lloyd, a UN IPCC co-coordinating lead author who has authored over 150 refereed publications.

"Many [scientists] are now searching for a way to back out quietly [from promoting warming fears], without having their professional careers ruined." --Atmospheric physicist James A. Peden, formerly of the Space Research and Coordination Center in Pittsburgh.

"All those urging action to curb global warming need to take off the blinders and give some thought to what we should do if we are facing global cooling instead" --Geophysicist Dr. Phil Chapman, an astronautical engineer and former NASA astronaut, who served as staff physicist at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology).

"Creating an ideology pegged to carbon dioxide is a dangerous nonsense. . . . The present alarm on climate change is an instrument of social control, a pretext for major businesses and political battle. It became an ideology, which is concerning." --Environmental Scientist Professor Delgado Domingos of Portugal, the founder of the Numerical Weather Forecast group, has more than 150 published articles.

"CO2 emissions make absolutely no difference one way or another. . . . Every scientist knows this, but it doesn't pay to say so. . . . Global warming, as a political vehicle, keeps Europeans in the driver's seat, and developing nations walking barefoot." --Dr. Takeda Kunihiko, vice-chancellor of the Institute of Science and Technology Research at Chubu University in Japan.

"The [global warming] scare mongering has its justification in the fact that it is something that generates funds." --Award-winning Paleontologist Dr. Eduardo Tonni, of the Committee for Scientific Research in Buenos Aires and head of the Paleontology Department at the University of La Plata.

"Whatever the weather, it's not being caused by global warming. If anything, the climate may be starting into a cooling period." --Atmospheric scientist Dr. Art V. Douglas is a former Chair of the Atmospheric Sciences Department at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska, and is the author of numerous papers for peer-reviewed publications.

"But there is no falsifiable scientific basis whatever to assert this warming is caused by human-produced greenhouse gasses because current physical theory is too grossly inadequate to establish any cause at all." --Chemist Dr. Patrick Frank, who has authored more than 50 peer-reviewed articles.

"The 'global warming scare' is being used as a political tool to increase government control over American lives, incomes, and decision making. It has no place in society's activities." --Award-Winning NASA Astronaut/Geologist and moonwalker Jack Schmitt, who flew on the Apollo 17 mission, and formerly worked for Norwegian Geological Survey, and for the U.S. Geological Survey.

"Earth has cooled since 1998 in defiance of the predictions by the UN-IPCC. . . . The global temperature for 2007 was the coldest in a decade and the coldest of the millennium . . . which is why 'global warming' is now called 'climate change.'" -- Climatologist Dr. Richard Keen of the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at the University of Colorado.

"I have yet to see credible proof of carbon dioxide driving climate change, yet alone man-made CO2 driving it. The atmospheric hot-spot is missing and the ice core data refute this. When will we collectively awake from this deceptive delusion?" --Dr. G. LeBlanc Smith, a retired Principal Research Scientist with Australia's CSIRO. *

"Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views." --William F. Buckley Jr.

Michael Ledeen

Michael Ledeen is the author of 20 books, including The Iranian Time Bomb: The Mullah Zealots' Quest for Destruction. He has served in the White House as a national security advisor and in the Departments of Defense and State. The following is adapted from a speech delivered at sea in August 2008, aboard the Regent Seven Seas Mariner, during the Hillsdale College "North to Alaska" cruise. Reprinted by permission from Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College.

If you read the news carefully, you will find a notable story about Iran every morning. Nine times out of ten it is hilarious. Today's Iran story is that the head of its armed forces announced that it has a new missile with a range of 300 kilometers or more, manufactured with technology that has never been used before in the history of the world. There is neither a picture of the missile nor any information about the nature of the missile, and, in fact, you can be quite sure that there is no such missile at all.

Just within the last month Iran released a photograph of a missile launch that initially caused great consternation in the West. It showed four missiles being launched, more or less simultaneously, with wonderful contrails behind them. This was supposedly a new intermediate range missile that could hit almost any target in the Middle East, including U.S. military bases. Upon examination, that photograph turned out to be a double phony. First, there was only one missile, and the Iranians replicated it to make it seem as if there were four. Second, the missile was two years old and was not an intermediate range missile at all. A few days later, the Iranians announced that they had a fighter airplane and produced a photo of it. Upon examination, this airplane turned out to be a plastic toy made by Mattel with Iranian markings drawn on it.

So the first thing to understand about Iran is that it is a country where lies and deception are a way of life.

Another important thing to know has to do with the seriousness of Iran as a potential military enemy. In that regard, consider a story that originally appeared in U.S. News & World Report about two years ago. It concerned a joint Special Forces team of five or six Iraqis and five or six Americans that was patrolling the Iran-Iraq border because the Iranians had been smuggling improvised explosive devices and Iran-trained terrorists into Iraq. Off in the distance, this team spotted an Iranian military officer in uniform on Iraqi soil. They went after him and he quickly hopped back onto the Iranian side. As the team continued along the border, they spotted either the same person or another Iranian officer in uniform and again they went after him. This time he didn't move, and when the Americans started talking to him, the Iraqis on the team disappeared and the Americans realized they had been surrounded by 15 or 20 armed Iranian soldiers. The Iranian officer told them to lay down their weapons or they would be shot, but the young captain in charge of the Americans told his men to open fire. Eleven of the Iranians were killed, no American was injured, and the remaining Iranians fled across the border.

This tells us, first, that the Iranians are tricky. They had arranged with the Iraqi Special Forces to turn the Americans over to be held as hostages, and then lured the Americans into an ambush. But it also tells us that they are not really prepared to fight -- which is, in fact, what our forces have found in Iraq. We have captured or killed an enormous number of Iranian intelligence and military officers, and very rarely have they ever offered any serious resistance.

The Terror Connection

The simple facts regarding Iran are easy to understand. We are dealing with a regime that came to power in 1979, when the Iranian revolution overthrew the Shah. Immediately thereafter, Iran declared war against the United States, branding us "The Great Satan." The Iranians have been at war against us for 30 years, and prior to 9/11 the Iranian regime was directly or indirectly responsible for the murder of more Americans than any other country or organization in the world. It also may well be that the Iranian regime was involved in 9/11. In this regard, I call your attention to one of the most forgotten documents in contemporary American history. In the fall of 1998, the American government indicted Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. There is a paragraph in the indictment that reads as follows:

Al Qaeda forged alliances with the National Islamic Front in the Sudan and with the government of Iran and its associated terrorist group, Hezbollah, for the purpose of working together against their perceived common enemies in the West, particularly the United States.

When you read the newspapers nowadays you find every now and then someone saying that there is no real evidence that Iran is supporting Al Qaeda. More often than not, this person immediately goes on to say that Iran would not ever support Al Qaeda because Iran is Shiite and Al Qaeda is Sunni. This is nonsense. The current chairman of the Intelligence Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives was once asked the difference between Sunnis and Shiites, and he didn't know the answer. The difference boils down to a historical disagreement about the proper line of succession to the prophet Mohammed. Sunnis and Shiites have been arguing about this since the Middle Ages, and it has played itself out into a very interesting disagreement over the relationship between mosque and state. In short, Sunnis have long believed that it is legitimate for religious leaders to function in government since Mohammed's successor is known and is with us, whereas Shiites have traditionally believed that the rightful successor to Mohammed is yet to come, and that therefore no religious leader is entitled to sit in a position of secular power. This is why the Ayatollah Sistani, who is the highest ranking and the most esteemed Shiite figure in Iraq, does not go to Parliament. He and other Iraqi Shiite clergy express their opinions about religious, political, and moral issues, but they don't sit in positions of political power.

This Shiite view on religion and politics broke down in Iran, however, with the revolution of 1979. When the Ayatollah Khomeini took over in that revolution, he said that not only was it allowable for religious leaders to govern civil society, but indeed it was now mandatory. Khomeini's most revealing line, spoken on the airplane from France to Iran when he was about to seize power, came in answer to a question about what his rule would mean for Iran. Khomeini said, in effect, that he didn't care at all about Iran. He was leading all of Islam, not Iran, he said, and he would happily sacrifice everyone in Iran if he could accomplish the global triumph of Islam.

So Sunnis and Shiites traditionally have this theological disagreement, but it isn't an unbridgeable chasm, as Khomeini's example shows. And in the history of the Iranian revolution, Sunnis and Shiites have worked mostly together from the very beginning -- indeed, they worked together even before that revolution began.

Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps was created in the early 1970s in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon, and was trained by Yasser Arafat's Al Fatah. Arafat was a super-Sunni who came out of the Muslim Brotherhood. In other words, today's most hardcore armed Shiite organization was trained by hardcore Sunnis. Sunnis and Shiites worked hand-in-glove to create a terrorist alliance that overthrew the Shah, took power in Iran, and has waged war against the U.S. ever since.

The lesson here is that when you hear people saying that Sunnis and Shiites can't work together, you should run, because those people don't know what they are talking about.

Can We Talk?

The Ayatollah Khomeini installed a regime in Iran which is best described as Islamofascist. It has followed, in every major detail, the model laid down by Hitler and Mussolini in the 1920s and '30s. It is a single party regime, and a dictator makes all the key decisions. There are today endless articles in the press about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the current president of Iran, but Iranian presidents come and go. The successor to the Ayatollah Khomeini, Ali Khamenei, has the title of Supreme Leader. He is the only person who really matters in Iran. He makes all the crucial decisions. The Revolutionary Guard Corps reports directly to him. Furthermore, if you watch Leni Riefenstahl's infamous 1935 film Triumph of the Will, about a National Socialist Party day in Nuremberg, full of "Sieg Heils" and programmed events, you'll see the similarity to rallies today in Tehran where tens of thousands of people gather to chant "Death to America." And like the Nazis, the Iranians mean it.

My favorite response to people who say, "Why don't we just sit down and talk with the Iranians?" is to remind them of the movie Goldfinger. There's a wonderful scene in the middle of the movie when Sean Connery as James Bond is spread-eagled on a sheet of gold, a laser beam is cutting through the gold sheet and about to slice him in half, and Gert Frobe as Goldfinger is standing up on a balcony looking down at him. Bond looks up and asks, "What is this, Goldfinger? Do you expect me to talk?" And Goldfinger replies, "No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die." That's exactly the Iranian attitude.

In fact, we have been talking to the Iranians, almost non-stop, for 30 years. There isn't an American president from Jimmy Carter to the present who has not authorized negotiations with Iran. The classic case occurred during the Clinton administration. We ended all kinds of sanctions against Iran, let all kinds of Iranians into the U.S. for the first time since the 1970s, had sporting matches with the Iranians, hosted Iranian cultural events, and unfroze Iranian bank accounts. Then President Clinton and Secretary of State Albright started publicly apologizing to Iran for this and that. But when all was said and done, Ali Khamenei reminded everyone that Iran is in a state of war with the U.S., and that was the end of negotiations. This is what has happened every single time we have tried talking to or appeasing Iran.

Einstein's definition of a madman is somebody who keeps doing the same thing over and over while hoping for different results. Only a madman can believe that negotiating with the Iranians will produce some result different from what we've had now for 30 years, including very recently under the current administration. But many continue to believe it.

There is a striking tendency among people in modern Western governments not to recognize the existence of evil in the world. My professional career has largely been spent studying evil. My Ph.D. is in Modern European History, and I studied fascism. Before that I was research assistant for a historian named George Mosse, who wrote books on National Socialism. People from my generation studied these things because we were trying desperately to understand how men like Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin came to power, and why nobody saw it coming and understood what was at stake. Why was there the humiliation of Munich and then the Nazi invasion of Poland before an appeasement government in Britain fell and Winston Churchill came to power? Why did it require Pearl Harbor for the U.S. to enter World War II? Could we get to the point where we understood these evil regimes so well that when the next one came along we would see it coming and stop it in its tracks? But over the past 30 years we have seen the same situation play out with Iran, and still we dream of negotiation.

In Natan Sharansky's useful formulation, if you want to know how a country will behave internationally, look at the way it treats its own people. The Iranian regime treats its people with total contempt. Consider its treatment of women. Although you will never hear the American women's rights movement complain about it, women in Iran are officially worth half a man. It is in Iran's Constitution. If a woman who is pregnant with a male fetus gets killed in an automobile accident, Sharia law requires the guilty party in the other car to pay a full fine for the fetus and only half that fine for the woman. This carries through every aspect of Iranian society. Women can't own or dispose of property. If a woman's husband dies, the family of the husband disposes of his estate. That's the contempt that awaits us if the Iranians have their way. In fact, they view the entire non-Muslim world as worth even less than Muslim women.

An Implacable Foe

The U.S. has much to learn about operating in the Middle East. Consider our history with Iraq. We went to war in 1991 to drive Iraq out of Kuwait. Nobody in the Middle East thought that we had assembled a coalition of 500,000 soldiers just for that reason. They took it for granted that we were going to destroy Saddam Hussein, remove his regime, and replace it with something more civilized. That was true even of the Saudis. People who were at the highest levels of the first Bush administration have told me that Saudi Arabia was begging us to go to Baghdad even though publicly they were saying that we should stop at the borders of Kuwait. Yet stop we did. Even worse, President Bush the elder said how wonderful it would be if the Shiites and the Kurds would rise up against Saddam and liberate the country themselves. The Kurds and Shiites took this as an open invitation and a promise of American support if they did that. So they rose up, we didn't lift a finger for them, and they were massacred. In light of this, it was less than smart for American policy makers to believe in 2003, when we went into Iraq for the second time, that most Iraqis would trust us.

Look also at recent American policy toward Iran. Since 2001, Iran has been identified as part of the "axis of evil" and branded as the world's greatest sponsor of international terrorism. The Soviets always used to say, "If you say A, you have to do B." That is, if you accept certain kinds of information, that drives you to act. But we have not acted against the Iranian regime, even though, as luck would have it, Iran is tailor-made for the same political strategy that toppled the Soviet empire. If you stop to consider that we brought down that empire with the active support of maybe five or ten percent of its people, how could we possibly fail to bring down the regime in Iran -- a country where we know from the regime's own polls that upwards of 70 percent of the people want an end to their government? But the Iranians, too, have been living in that part of the world and have seen American promises come to nothing. The Iranian people are waiting to see some kind of real action by the U.S. to support them against Khamenei, Ahmadinejad, and the Revolutionary Guard Corps, because they know that the same thing will happen to them that happened to the Iraqi Kurds and Shiites if we are not there actively supporting them. Nor do I mean with ground troops. We should support democratic revolution in Iran.

The bottom line is that Iran is our principal enemy in the Middle East, and perhaps in the entire world. It is also a terribly vulnerable regime, and it knows that -- which is why it makes up stories about airplanes and missiles that it doesn't have. As for the question of nuclear weapons it seems hard to imagine that Iran, does not already have them. Iranians are not stupid, and they have been at this for a minimum of 20 years in a world where almost all of the major components needed for a nuclear weapon -- not to mention old nuclear weapons -- are for sale. A lot of these components are for sale in nearby Pakistan. And if the Iranians do have a weapon, it is impossible to imagine that, at a moment of crisis, they will not use it. The point is, we have an implacable enemy that has no intention of negotiating a settlement with us. They want us dead or dominated, just as our enemies did in the 1930s and '40s. You can't make deals with a regime like that.

Our choices with regard to Iran are to challenge them directly and win this war now, to do so only after they kill a lot more of us in some kind of attack, or to surrender. There is no painless way out, and the longer we wait, the greater the pain is going to be. *

"We owe respect to the living; to the dead we owe only truth." --Voltaire

Joseph S. Fulda

Joseph Fulda is a freelance writer living in New York City. He is the author of Eight Steps Towards Libertarianism.

Paul Krugman in "Losing Our Country" (New York Times, June 10, 2005) poignantly reminds us that in bygone days "working families could expect steadily rising living standards and a reasonable degree of economic security." Today, he writes:

. . . year-to-year fluctuations in the incomes of working families are far larger than they were a generation ago. All it takes is a bit of bad luck in employment or health to plunge a family that seems solidly middle-class into poverty.

Meanwhile, he points out, "The wealthy have done very well indeed."

I do not wish to dispute any of these facts, for to do so would be to minimize the pain of middle America. But whereas Krugman takes a pass on "Why is this happening?" I want to say a few words on just that question. In an essay in Two Cheers for Capitalism, a book by lrving Kristol dating to the 1970s, the author remarked that there were three principal causes of world hunger: China, the U.S.S.R., and India. These socialist regimes took out much of the world's arable land from production and kept effectively idle most of the world's population. Today, this is no longer true. Today, the United States is no longer assured as captive a market in a large part of the world, nor are its workers free from competition from the majority of the Earth's inhabitants. As China, the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and India are becoming freer and freer (with the notable exception of Russia herself) -- admittedly with plenty of growing room -- American workers and American products face some real competition from most of the world's population -- previously in such a state of bondage as to pose no competitive threat. Put another way, Krugman's "rise in inequality" masks the much more global trend toward equality. People in India, China, Eastern Europe, and parts of the former Soviet Union can now at least aspire toward entry into the middle class, once an impossible dream. What the United States must do is not complain that the world is freer and therefore far more competitive, but make itself more competitive by arresting its progressive slippage on the indices of economic freedom. Barring these once-impoverished (and still-impoverished) nations from competing with us would be bad for American consumers and bad for the world at large. Rather than begrudging others their livelihood, we must seek to become more competitive ourselves if we are to remain comfortable.

As for the high compensation of the top people in all areas of life here at home, one can say that while the ordinary worker now has much more competition, the very best are still typically American. Dick Grasso, for example, about whose successful efforts to reopen the NYSE in just six days after September 11, 2001, one commentator remarked:

. . . the vile terrorist enemy has failed utterly in its effort to cripple the U.S., and the American model of free-market capitalism is alive and well. This is America's bull market, but surely Dick Grasso deserves credit as one of its key drivers.

Had the stock exchange remained closed for two or three months, had anyone else been in charge, the ensuing panic and drain on U.S. confidence might well have led to more foreign misadventures, more incursions on Americans' civil liberties with no real increase in security, and the like. A hundred million dollars is a very small price to pay for the confidence of the nation. And by what reasoning would these funds have otherwise been distributed to the middle class? Most Americans at the very top of the income pyramid have sorely earned their compensation, if less dramatically than Richard Grasso. Their good fortune does not come at the expense of those less fortunate. Rather, as we have indicated, those less fortunate are facing pressure from those still more unfortunate. *

"Government is instituted for the common good; for the protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness of the people; and not for profit, honor, or private interest of any one man, family, or class of men." --John Adams

David J. Bean

David J. Bean is a freelance writer living in California.

There is much in the media these days about the government adding capital to the accounts of banks and other companies from the $700+ billion bailout money and subsequent authorizations. Is this really what they are doing? Most economists agree that a nation's wealth is only the goods and services that it produces and that to produce wealth you need land, capital and labor. One of Webster's dictionary definitions states that capital is "accumulated goods devoted to the production of other goods." In short, capital is previous production, saved.

Take out a dollar bill and look at it. It is not just a piece of paper; it is legal tender. But, it is only an IOU for current or future production! It is a government promise that you can trade that IOU now or in the future for an equivalent value good or service. In short, long-range federal debt is a lien on future production. At one time the dollar also had a commodity value that it could be converted to, like silver or gold. No more though. Today no country in the world backs its currency with anything except faith.

So, when the government claims it is adding to the capital of a company by giving that company fiat money that adds to the federal debt, it is doing no such thing. Every dollar they hand out is a lien on current or future production. What the government is doing is adding to the national debt that is, in total, a lien on future production. Some economists think that since the annual increase in federal debt is not a large percentage of our yearly production, that it is not too worrisome. But remember; it has to be paid by the amount of production in excess of our own consumption. And that debt is getting so burdensome that the only way it can ever be paid off is through a very heavy bout of inflation. Of course inflation is ultimately just a repudiation of debt manifested by an increase in prices. That means that for any debt paid off in the future the receiver will not be getting the same purchasing value that was loaned originally.

The economic situation within our country can be visualized by considering it like a fox hunt. Our productive capability is the horse, the horse's rider is the government and the national debt is the fox. Thirty years ago the gap between the horse and rider and the fox was fairly narrow but for the last number of years the gap has been widening dramatically. Visualize the government whipping the horse to catch up (passing out fiat money), the horse doing his very best to produce (speed) but the fox widening the gap and gradually disappearing on the horizon. Finally, when the gap gets so large that the fox can't even be seen and identified, the horse gives up and collapses. The government is left with a dead horse.

Pouring more fiat money into the economy is not likely to fix our problems; it only adds to the total of future production that must be produced in excess of what we produce for our own needs. For the past decades we have been consuming more goods and services each year than are being produced (deficit spending). The only way we can come out of this slump is by increasing production, and flooding the economy with more dollars won't do it.

Of course the government is aware of this but it doesn't know any new tricks to try. So, it is using the tools it has used in the past to get production going again. But our past productive efforts have been largely financed by credit, and a sound credit system is based on a fair return. Today, loaners are not confident that they will be lending to a person or company that will be able to pay it back. Nor with the potential inflation, investors are not confident that they will be receiving money in return that is worth anything close to present value. The Federal Reserve has a dilemma; the deflation going on right now calls for a reduction in the interest rates; the inflation potential caused by the huge influx of fiat dollars calls for an increase in interest rates. Since deflation panics politicians, the emphasis today is on that aspect, but looming in the future is a gigantic inflation era.

The root cause of the present dilemma was that the Federal Reserve kept the discount rate too low for far too long, producing a flood of fiat dollars that were so plentiful that they were put to work in very risky ways. This was discussed in previous St. Croix Review articles (June, Oct, & Dec.) at length and was described as " the wrong cure." The correct cure is now going to be very, very painful, but until the government can assure investors that we have a sound dollar (which is the Fed's basic charter), and that lenders have a good chance of receiving a fair return, nothing good will happen and productivity will stagnate. *

"There is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust." --James Madison

Gentlemen:

I hear from those on the right that President Bush is to be commended for ignoring the polls. Reagan was also famous for indicating that polls would not play a major role in his decision-making. This is supposed to represent courage and strong convictions.

I think this is wrong. Politics is always about building and maintaining consensus. The most important function of the presidency is not simply to exercise presidential power, but to use the "bully pulpit" to persuade the electorate of the wisdom of national policies. This is particularly true of those who are critics. It is of paramount importance that our leaders make the effort to bring along those who disagree, or when that fails, at least to make forceful arguments in support of national policies.

President Bush has failed at this. For whatever reason, he has not devoted sufficient attention to convincing the country that his policies are the right ones. His courage in ignoring the polls is the courage to do the "right thing" despite public rejection. This is certainly admirable, but policies without public support are soon doomed to failure.

"Finger in the wind" behavior is clearly cowardly, but it is not wise or good to ignore public opinion.

The difference is subtle. Polls should not be used in a craven attempt to determine what policies will get an officeholder re-elected. Polls can and should be used to guide leaders in choosing policies that have hope of public support. They are good modulators of a principled policy, but not a substitute for a principled direction.

Ultimately, it is the ideas that last. Great leaders push ideas and use their leadership positions to put them into practice and broaden their appeal. When the leaders are gone, the ideas live on.

President Bush may have made some difficult and courageous choices during his presidency, but his failure to effectively sell his policies will weigh heavily on his legacy.

--Don Lee

"All men having power ought to be distrusted to a certain degree." --James Madison

Barry MacDonald

[My source for this article is a biography from the series, American Statesmen: Charles Sumner, by Moorfield Storey. Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1900.]

First the Missouri Compromise was replaced by the Kansas-Nebraska Bill in 1854. In December 1853 the situation was dispiriting for the Free-Soilers, as both parties, Democrats and Whigs, decided that slavery should not even be discussed. The Democrat, pro-slavery party controlled both houses of Congress, the presidency, and the judiciary and was thus able to make, execute, and interpret the law. President Franklin Pierce assured the country that peace would prevail.

For three decades the Missouri Compromise had restricted slavery south and west of latitude 3630', but no longer. Previously Congress regulated the institutions of the territories, and Congress prescribed the conditions under which a territory might become a state, but henceforth the residents themselves would determine their own conduct, including whether to accept slavery in the territories. Under the Missouri Compromise slavery could not have entered Nebraska, but now residents of the territory could take matters into their own hands.

Under the Kansas-Nebraska bill slavery could be planted anywhere but in the existing free states.

Charles Sumner, one of the very few anti-slavery senators, in a speech to the Senate said:

Slavery, which at the beginning was a sectional institution, with no foothold anywhere on the national territory, is now exalted as national, and all our broad domain is threatened by its blighting shadow.

In a another speech, after the Kansas-Nebraska bill passed the Senate and became law, Sumner said:

Ah, Sir, senators vainly expect peace. Not in this way can peace come. In passing such a bill as is now threatened, you scatter from this dark midnight hour no seeds of harmony and good will, but broadcast through the land dragon's teeth, which haply may not spring up in a direful crop of armed men, yet I am assured, sir, will fructify in civil strife and feud. . . .

Sir, it is the best bill on which Congress ever acted, for it annuls all past compromises with slavery and makes any future compromises impossible. Thus it puts Freedom and Slavery face to face, and bids them grapple. Who can doubt the result? It opens wide the door of the future, when at last there will really be a North and the slave power will be broken . . . . Everywhere within the sphere of Congress the great Northern Hammer will descend to smite the wrong, and the irresistible cry will break forth, "No more Slave States!"

It is interesting to note that according to the Indian commissioner in an official report, in November 1853, there were three white men in the Nebraska territory. According to General Houston, by treaty with the Indians, whites were then excluded from Kansas and there was not a white man in the territory.

On May 24th, 1854, an event occurred that created new tension. Anthony Burns was seized as a fugitive slave in Boston and taken to the courthouse. Abolitionists gathered and attacked the courthouse, killing a guard but failing to free Burns. It was thought that Charles Sumner's speech quoted above had inspired the abolitionists, and he was warned to be watchful of his safety.

Through the streets of Boston between files of soldiers and a silent crowd Anthony Burns was taken back to slavery. It was believed the spectacle made many new abolitionists.

The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 was much resented in the North because it imposed the responsibility on local law enforcement officers anywhere in the several states to assist slave hunters in the task of capturing and returning escaped slaves. People who detested slavery were forced either to defy a federal law or to break with their own consciences.

A petition was introduced in the Senate for the repeal of Fugitive Slave Law on June 26, 1854, and a debate was joined. Charles Sumner was asked by Senator Butler of South Carolina, in light of the law: "Will this honorable senator tell me that he will do it?" Sumner replied, "Is thy servant a dog, that he should do this thing? . . . The senator asked me if I would help to reduce a fellow man to bondage. I answered him."

Butler replied:

Then you would not obey the Constitution. Sir, standing here before this tribunal, where you swore to support it, you rise and tell me that you regard it the office of a dog to enforce it. You stand in my presence as a coequal senator, and tell me that it is a dog's office to execute the Constitution of the United States.

Because of his willingness to stand against the slave partisans Senator Sumner was seen as a leader in the anti-slavery movement and he received much abuse. Senator Clay of Alabama had this to say of Sumner:

. . . a sneaking, sinuous, snake-like poltroon. . . . If we cannot restrain or prevent this eternal warfare upon the feelings and rights of Southern gentlemen, we may rob the serpent of his fangs, we can paralyze his influence, by placing him in that nadir of social degradation which he merits.

In the North, Senator Sumner won respect as a man "that ain't a-feared."

The efforts to repeal the Fugitive Slave Law failed in the Congress, but there were changes in the offing. The Northern states acted. The Wisconsin Supreme Court declared the law unconstitutional. Vermont and Massachusetts required a writ of habeas corpus and trial by jury before a slave could be returned. Similar actions undertaken by the Northern states were intended to nullify the Fugitive Slave Law and were called "personal liberty bills."

Another development in 1854 was the collapse of the Whig party and its replacement with the Republican Party founded in opposition to slaveholders. The emergence of the Republican Party is a worthy story in itself, but it is enough now to note that from the beginning Republicans valued freedom.

In passing the Kansas-Nebraska bill the pro-slavery party counted on emigration from Missouri to populate the territory with pro-slavery voters, but they had aroused a spirit of resistance. Emigration Aid Societies were begun in Northern states and Northern immigrants came in greater numbers than expected. All the efforts of the slavery interest were put in jeopardy by a legal and energetic movement of settlers into Kansas.

In response associations were formed in Missouri and other slave states to expel the Northerners. They asserted the right to bring slaves with them into Kansas. They would use force to make Kansas a slave state.

Andrew H. Reeder became the first governor of Kansas in October, 1854. He was a pro-slavery Democrat from Pennsylvania. On November 29 a delegate was elected to Congress; on March 30, 1855, the territorial legislature was elected -- in both elections armed residents from Missouri drove the settlers from the polls, and more than half the votes cast were illegal.

These facts were well known and admitted by Governor Reeder himself, but nevertheless he certified the legality of the proceedings. Because Governor Reeder had certified the results, the President of the United States had an excuse for not acting.

The fraudulent legislature met on July 2, 1855, to adopt for Kansas the complete body of law then existed in Missouri, including the laws favoring slavery.

The Free-Soilers of Kansas met at Lawrence and resolved to send delegates to a constitutional convention for Kansas. The convention met on October 23 at Topeka, prohibited slavery, and forbade the settlement of free colored people. The "Topeka constitution" was to be ratified by a vote of the Kansans on December 15. A petition was sent to Congress for the admission of Kansas as a state with the Topeka constitution.

Thus Congress was presented with the choice of either accepting the government created by the Missourians or the Kansans, and there were in operation two rival governments vying for control of the Kansas territory.

Events intervened before the ratification of the Topeka constitution. The rescue of a prisoner from a pro-slavery sheriff induced Governor Shannon, who had replaced Governor Reeder, to call for troops. A force of Missourians crossed the border and assumed the posture of Kansas militia, encamped near Lawrence. War seemed imminent when Governor Shannon backed down, made a treaty with the Kansans, and ordered the Missourians to withdraw.

The Topeka constitution was then ratified, and the pro-slavery men did not vote. On the same day, U.S. Senator Atchison from Missouri, who was a leader of the pro-slavers, appealed to the South to send men and money to Kansas. He said:

Twelve months will not elapse before war -- civil war of the fiercest kind -- will be upon us. We are arming and preparing for it.

State elections were held on January 15, 1856, under the Topeka constitution, and there was strife and bloodshed. Another invasion from Missouri was anticipated and the free state leaders telegraphed President Pierce for protection. The President sent a message to Congress on January 24 in which he blamed the Northern Emigrant Aid Societies for the struggle. While acknowledging that the behavior of the Missourians was "illegal and reprehensible," he wrote that Governor Reeder's certification of the first election (though half the votes were illegal) was binding, and he was therefore left powerless to interfere. He wrote that he would employ all the force at his disposal to put down any resistance to federal or territorial laws, and protect the people of Kansas, but he would do so only if the territorial authorities, those elected by fraud and violence, not those elected under the Topeka constitution, requested such assistance. He would respond to requests from the slave-holders.

On March 12, 1856, debate began in the U.S. Senate on what to do with Kansas. The majority reported a bill, read by Democrat Stephen A. Douglas that recognized the slave-holding government as legitimate. Senator Douglas followed the President in blaming the Emigrant Aid Societies. Senator Charles Sumner presented a rival bill that admitted Kansas under the Topeka constitution.

Senator Douglas engaged in bitter rhetoric calling Senator Trumbull a "traitor," and stating that "black Republicans" wanted an amalgamation of the white and colored races.

In Kansas armed incursions from Missouri continued. An officer made a report that:

There are probably five to seven hundred armed men on the pro-slavery side organized into companies. . . . For the last two or three days these men have been stationed between Lawrence and Lecompton, stopping and disarming all free state men, making some prisoners, and in many cases pressing the horses of free state settlers into service.

On May 21, Lawrence was attacked, the presses and machinery of two newspapers were destroyed, the Free State Hotel and other dwellings burned, the stores looted.

On May 19 Senator Sumner made a speech titled "The Crime Against Kansas" to the Senate. He addressed Senator Butler, comparing him to Don Quixote:

The senator from South Carolina has read many books of chivalry, and believes himself a chivalrous knight, with sentiments of honor and courage. Of course he has chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows, and who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight: I mean the harlot Slavery. . . . The frenzy of Don Quixote in behalf of his wench Dulcinea del Toboso is all surpassed. . . . If the slave states cannot enjoy what, in mockery of the great fathers of the Republic, he misnames Equality under the Constitution -- in other words, the full power in the national territories to compel fellow men to unpaid toil, to separate husband and wife, and to sell little children at the auction block -- then, sir, the chivalric senator will conduct the State of South Carolina out of the Union! Heroic knight! Exalted senator! A second Moses come for a second exodus! . . .

Senator Sumner addresses Senator Douglas:

The senator dreams that he can subdue the North. He disclaims the open threat, but his conduct implies it. How little that senator knows himself of the strength of the cause which he persecutes! He is but mortal man; against him is immortal principle. With finite power he wrestles with the infinite, and he must fall. Against him are stronger battalions than any marshaled by mortal arm -- the inborn, ineradicable, invincible sentiments of the human heart; against him is Nature with all her subtle forces; against him is God. Let him try to subdue these. . . .

He returns to Senator Butler:

Were the whole history of South Carolina blotted out of existence, from its very beginning down to the day of the last election of the Senator to his present seat on this floor, civilization might lose -- I do not say how little, but surely less than it has already gained by the example of Kansas, in that valiant struggle against oppression, and in the development of a new science of emigration. . . . Ah, sir, I tell the senator that Kansas, welcomed as a free State, "a ministering angel shall be" to the Republic when South Carolina, in the cloak of darkness which she hugs, "lies howling."

Many Senators condemned the Senator's comments. Mason of Virginia said:

I am constrained to hear here depravity, vice in its most odious form uncoiled in this presence, exhibiting its loathsome deformities in accusation and vilification against the quarter of the country from which I come; and I must listen to it because it is a necessity of my position, under a common government, to recognize as an equal politically one whom to see elsewhere is to shun and despise.

To the vituperation of Senator Douglas, Sumner replied:

. . . no person with the upright form of a man can be allowed, with out violation of all decency, to switch out from his tongue the perpetual stench of offensive personality. Sir, that is not a proper weapon of debate, at least on this floor. The noisome, squat, and nameless animal to which I now refer is not the proper model for an American senator. Will the senator from Illinois take notice?

On May 22 the Senate adjourned early. Sumner remained at his desk writing letters. Preston S. Brooks, a representative of South Carolina and the son of Senator Butler's cousin approached Sumner and said:

I have read your speech twice over carefully. It is a libel on South Carolina and on Mr. Butler, who is a relative of mine.

Then he struck Sumner with repeated blows on the head using a heavy gutta-percha cane. Sumner struggled to his feet, wrenching from the floor the desk that was bolted down. He stood briefly but fell unconscious under the continuing strokes until Brooks' cane broke.

Senator Toombs of Georgia witnessed and approved the assault:

They were very rapid, and as hard as he could hit. They were hard licks, and very effective.

Brooks said of his actions in the House of Representatives:

I went to work very deliberately, as I am charged -- and this is admitted -- and speculated somewhat as to whether I should employ a horsewhip or a cowhide; but knowing that the senator was my superior in strength, it occurred to me that he might wrest it from my hand, and then -- for I never attempt anything I do not perform -- I might have been compelled to do that which I would have regretted the balance of my natural life.

Senator Sumner's head was bruised and gashed. He lost a lot of blood. His thick hair may have saved his skull from fracturing. He regained consciousness and his head was sewed up. He was taken to his lodgings and expressed a desire to rejoin the debate as soon as he was able. Though the attack did not kill him, it left him debilitated for many years.

A committee was formed in the Senate to decide what to do about the assault. The committee was made up entirely of Sumner's opponents. The conclusion was that the Senate could not arrest a member of the House, and could not try and punish him -- the House would have to deal with the matter.

In the House a committee was appointed, made up of three Northern Republicans and two Southern Democrats. The majority recommended the expulsion of Brooks, and the minority claimed that the House had no jurisdiction over the assault "alleged to have been committed."

Brooks was tried in the Circuit Court of the District and was fined three hundred dollars.

The resolution to expel Brooks did not gain the two-thirds votes necessary, but a resolution censuring him did pass. Brooks resigned from the House and returned to South Carolina on July 14. A vote was held and he was reelected to the House, receiving all but six votes cast from his fellow South Carolinians. On August 1 he again took the oath to uphold the Constitution as a member of the House.

In October his constituents gave him a public dinner, "in testimony of their complete endorsement of his congressional course." Jefferson Davis, the secretary of war, wrote of his "high regard and esteem" for Brooks, and of his:

. . . sympathy with the feeling which prompted the sons of Carolina to welcome the return of a brother who has been the subject of vilification, misrepresentation, and persecution because he resented a libelous assault upon the reputation of their mother.

Students at the University of Virginia voted to send Brooks a cane with "a heavy gold head, which will be suitably inscribed, and also bear upon it a device of the human head badly cracked and broken." The Richmond Enquirer wrote:

In the main, the press of the South applauds the conduct of Mr. Brooks without condition or limitation. Our approbation, at least, is entire and unreserved; we consider the act good in conception, better in execution, and best of all in the consequence. . . . It was a proper act, done at the proper time and in the proper place.

In the North the resolve to oppose slavery hardened. The brutal nature of the assault brought home the dehumanizing effects of slavery on both master and slave. The essential barbarism of slavery was made clear in an instant, and the nature of "Southern chivalry" exposed.

*****

The retelling of American history is intended to show that partisan divisions have been much worse than they are now. The legacy of slavery, including the Jim Crow laws, has been terrible. But the old south is gone, and brave Republicans and Democrats have played their parts in seeing it off.

It is a good question whether Republicans still value freedom as they once did. Where did Republican vigor go? *

"We cannot afford to differ on the question of honesty if we expect our republic permanently to endure. Honesty is not so much a credit as an absolute prerequisite to efficient service to the public. Unless a man is honest, we have no right to keep him in public life; it matters not how brilliant his capacity." --Theodore Roosevelt

The following is a summary of the December 2008 issue of the St. Croix Review:

In the editorial, "Without Faith, Savages," Angus MacDonald hopes that something other than self-indulgence and making money will define our culture.

Herbert London, in "I Lost My Country," runs through the many American traditions that may dissolve as a result of the election of Barack Obama; in "The American Socialist Republic (?)," he describes our slide into dependence on government; in "Nuclear Disarmament for the Gang of Four," he writes about the growing and dangerous momentum to disarm; in "Exceptionalism vs. Universalism," he shows how Barack Obama and his followers disbelieve in American and her unique qualities, but do believe a mush of multicultrualism.

Allan Brownfeld, in "What Would the Founding Fathers Think about the Explosive Growth of Government Power?" he blames Presidents, Congress, and the American people; in "Re-examining Booker T. Washington: Black America's Prophetic Leader," he shows what made Washington a giant of his time and an excellent role model for today: his philosophy of thrift, industry, and self-help.

Mark Hendrickson, in "We're Broke," writes that financial institutions and big government have created a "mountain" of leverage and debt that will collapse. He writes that we have a choice before us: Whether to return to free markets or move towards socialism. In "Economic Nonsense" he points out the economic fallacies in an article by Alan Blinder, Princeton Professor of Economics, who endorses Barack Obama; in "Blaming the Free Market," he identifies who is to blame for our financial mess: government intervention and improper regulation; "in Thoughts on 'the Big Bailout,'" he expresses skepticism about the $700 billion rescue plan; in "A Bailout for Detroit," he shows how a "loan" to the Big Three automakers could not be repaid, and would go to the unions with $70 an hour labor legacy costs, at the expense of American taxpayers who earn much less.

In "It Was the Wrong Cure -- But Now?" David Bean believes that, among contributing factors, too low interest rates caused our financial problems. He critiques Fed and Treasury Department policy, and sees a fundamental evolution towards socialism.

Tracy C. Miller, in "Rising Food Prices: Who Is to Blame?" points out how government mandates and subsidies for corn ethanol are harming consumers in the U.S. and around the world.

In "A Path to Healthcare Serfdom," Gary Gillespie points out the dangers of socialized medical care, and stresses the need to preserve choice and freedom.

In "Remembering Solzhenitsyn with Dr. Thomas Sutherland," Thomas Martin relates how Dr. Sutherland and Terry Anderson, who were kidnapped and kept prisoners chained to a wall for more than seventy months by Islamic Jihad in Beirut, read the writing of Solzhenitsyn. Thomas Martin shows how great writing overcomes differences of time and place to speak to the deepest of meanings.

Paul Kengor has composed a tribute to the great Russian in "Witness: Solzhenitsyn vs. Evil."

In "The Faith of George Washington," Gary Scott Smith offers evidence of Washington's character and his belief.

Robert L. Wichterman, in "Manners and Morals," sees a lessening of respect, dignity, deportment, and civility in America. He connects the weakening of manners to a loss of morals and Judeo-Christian values.

In "A 900-Year-Old Response to a Contemporary Debate," Craig Payne uses the reasoning of Anselm of Canterbury to refute the evangelistic efforts of the new atheists.

Jigs Garner, in "Writers for Conservatives: 18 -- Bruce Catton and the Meaning of the Civil War," surveys the writings on the American Civil War, and he explains why he thinks Bruce Catton's is the best.

In "Markets Don't Clear -- It Just Ain't So!" Joseph Fulda uses the ancient Jordanian "rose red city" and desert horsemen to teach a lesson on free markets.