The New Clarion

As a historian, I am all too familiar with the dangers of placing too much stock in contemporaneous sources. Present events and actions attract the most attention, leading to a myopic search for explanation. Causation is best determined from afar since the historian has a diverse group of hypotheses from which to choose and can evaluate subsequent events for corroboration. But one cannot fully discount contemporary analysis; it offers up a rich source for facts and, uncommonly, spot-on assessments. With this trepidation, I cautiously read Thomas Woods Jr.’s 2009 book Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse. Woods, an Austrian economist with the Ludwig von Mises Institute, sought to present an alternative to the previous and current administrations’ indictment of the free market on the charge of causing the present economic predicament.

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I just finished reading The Blue Wound, a 1921 novel by Garet Garrett and boy what an enjoyable read. I found a 2008 paperback reprint, 109 pages, at Barnes and Noble. Now I want to get copies of his other writings.

The story is about a writer who goes on a journey to find the man who started World War 1. He meets a man named Mered who takes him around the world of the past and present with a glimpse of the future of 1950 showing how civilizations keep destroying themselves and giving his reasons why. It’s scary how many ideas that were popular then are again so now.

I won’t mention any spoilers here and I recommend this site for a good in-depth review of the book.

Mered’s thought processes are sometimes loaded with juicy mental somersaults as in this paragraph where he explains to the writer about a union meeting of miners deciding whether to go on strike for more money and benefits:

“Again,” said Mered, “listen rather to what they mean than what they say. The question here is whether the state has still the strength to say on what terms half a million shall continue to perform the drudgery of digging coal. Their dilemma is that the coal diggers are politically free. Therefore they cannot be chained to their work. But on no account can they be allowed to stop; nor can they be permitted to name their own terms. Thus you approach involuntary servitude under conditions of political freedom.”

Wow! Sounds like political science professors of today instead of 1921.

I recommend this book.

This is a guest post by Joseph Kellard, a journalist and commentator living in New York. You can visit his blogs at josephkellard.blogspot.com and theamericanindividualist.blogspot.com.

While in 2008 I took a needed break from reading as many often do, this year I’m ratcheting up my reading once again. I’ve always enjoyed reading a few, if not several, books at a time, alternating back and forth between them. Usually, it takes a few months to complete any one book. I’m presently switching back and forth between four non-fiction books, having just completed a fifth. Here are my assessments so far:

Abraham Lincoln by James M. McPherson

With the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday approaching on February 12, I’ve noticed a slew of new books on our 16th president at my local Barnes & Noble. I counted 15 in all! I’ve never been all that interested in reading about Lincoln, and from what I’ve gathered reading about him in Objectivist circles, he seems to be a rather mixed figure. At my job as an editor-reporter at a newspaper on Long Island, the higher-ups have asked us to do some stories on black history month. I decided to take a look at how Lincoln is taught in schools, as well as try to find a Lincoln or Civil War buff and look into what the local library may be doing to commemorate the bicentennial.

So to prepare for this, I decided to pick up a short, 70-page biography on Lincoln, written by James M. McPherson, whose Battle Cry of Freedom I’ve heard is an excellent book about the Civil War. Well, I just completed it tonight. It’s written chronologically, and somewhat encyclopedically: “Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809, in Hardin County, Kentucky, about fifty miles south of Louisville.”

McPherson, however, has an agreeable style that doesn’t bore. He presents Lincoln as a respectable figure who, at least in his early politically career, was pragmatic. But when the most important decisions came—from Fort Sumter to emancipation and particularly when a war-weary North pressured him to compromise and bring “peace”—Lincoln stood his ground on the issue of abolition and reconstruction.

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