CTM: An Interview with Dr. Boyd Cathey

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00:08

Alright, welcome to the first episode of Conversations That Matter, and today I have with me Dr.

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Boyd Cathy, who is, it would take me a while to go through your pedigree here, but among other things, you studied at the

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Catholic University of Navarra in Spain, and I believe you said, you told me you did your dissertation there in Spanish, is that right?

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That's correct. The University of Navarra is located in Pamplona in northern Spain. At the time

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I was there, it was one of only two private universities in Spain, and it had, and it continues to have a very high reputation academically.

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And you also were a Richard... I did my dissertation there, and I wrote it in Spanish, yes. You know what, four languages,

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I think, something like that? I can speak fluently three, if you want to include

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Johnston County, North Carolina, that's four. But I can read,

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I speak French and Spanish, English, I hope, to some degree. I can read most other

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Romance languages, like Italian and Portuguese. So yeah.

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You're a Richard Weaver Fellow, Master's from... I was a Richard Weaver Fellow at the University of Navarra, and that was a great honor and a pleasure.

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It paid my way for my research. And you also studied at the

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University of Virginia as a Jefferson Fellow, and you were the assistant to Russell Kirk. I got a fellowship, a

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Thomas Jefferson Fellowship to study, studied history under the late Merrill Peterson, who was the expert on Thomas Jefferson, along with Dumas Malone, who also was a mentor there.

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After that, I took a year off to work with the conservative writer, author,

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Dr. Russell Kirk. I spent a year with him, working or assisting him on a book on T .S.

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Eliot, and also a second book, The Roots of American Order. So when you came out with this book,

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The Land We Love, with essays from 1983 to the present, I mean, you're talking about things that you know a whole lot about, from your relationship with Kirk, to Eugene Genovese, to Paul Godfrey, I mean, you've just been around the conservative

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Southern paleoconservative tradition for years now. And I like this book quite a bit.

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I wanted to start out with the essay I love the most, I think, and I liked a lot of them, but Paladins of Christian Civilization, your third chapter.

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I mean, this is a study that I have never seen done before on all these European Christians who came to fight for the

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Confederacy. Can you tell me a little bit about that and how you came to this knowledge? Yes, I think most people in the

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United States who are in any way familiar with the war between the states don't understand that it had international ramifications and importance.

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And it was vitally followed by the press and the population in Europe.

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What happened to me was when I went to Spain and then later Switzerland for additional study in theology and philosophy,

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I discovered that the ideas that percolated during the war between the states had caused great turmoil in some ways among European population.

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I discovered, for example, that there were volunteers from most of the major European countries who went and fought in particular for the

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Confederacy. These were volunteers, unlike many of the Irish, who were basically conscripted when they got off the boat to fight in the northern armies.

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I discovered, for example, that there were a thousand or so at least traditionalist

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Catholic volunteers from Spain who entered by way of Mexico across the

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Rio Grande. I discovered that there were a number of Italians from the old

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Kingdom of Naples, for example, which had been defeated by their own set of Yankees.

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The King of Tiedemont unified Italy in 1861 and a number of the veterans of the army of the

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Kingdom of Naples then sailed to New Orleans and formed the Italian Legion, fought heroically for the

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Confederacy. They understood, if you will, analogously that what the

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Confederacy appeared to be fighting for was what they had fought for as traditionalist and traditional

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Catholics in many regards. Of course, it wasn't exclusively Catholic.

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There were also Protestants who came and fought for the Confederacy, but it's a story that has yet to really be told.

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What impressed me was I had some dear friends in Pamplona who were members of the minor lower nobility, if you will.

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One of them recounted to me that his great -great -grandfather had been a soldier, a captain who fought with the traditionalist

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Carlist armies in their own civil wars in 19th century Spain and then had volunteered, had gone to the

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Confederacy and fought there. I was just amazed by the idea that there were people in those countries who kept up and understood analogously what the

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Confederates were fighting for, that they in a sense connected that rationale with their own circumstances and beliefs in Europe.

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It's an amazing story. Now, you estimated at about 2 ,000 from Naples, and that's no small number.

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All the hardship of trying to travel that distance in order to fight. You talk about Johann Haras von

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Bork, General Polk at that, right? Yes, the Prussian. Prussian, yeah. Of course, there was the

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Prince de Polignac, who was one of the most noble families in all of France.

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A relative of his had been the prime minister for the last legitimate Bourbon king,

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Charles X, who was dethroned in 1830. But he had been an expert in artillery, had fought in the

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Crimean War, and volunteered and came to Louisiana, which of course was in many ways very

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French with its traditions, and actually fought at the

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Battle of Mansfield, led one of the wings of Richard Taylor's army that was victorious. And the funny story about General Polignac is that he inherited a division of Texas frontiersmen.

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And so the story goes, they could not pronounce his name, and they called him General Polk at.

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Yeah. But they would have followed him to the gates of hell itself. They were so loyal. And he was the last major general of the

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Confederacy to die. I think he died during World War I. But there are all sorts of stories of these men.

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The Neapolitans amazed me. And I began to do research on my own and discover that there were descendants of those volunteers who went back to Italy.

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And I had actually went to a cemetery outside of Naples, Civitelli del

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Tronco, it's called. And there are veterans of the war between the states buried there.

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And there is a third national Confederate flag flying in the cemetery. And here, you know, several thousand miles away are several dozen, maybe 100 or so Confederate veterans who spoke

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Italian who fought for the Confederacy buried on what is now Italian soil. I just find it kind of amazing.

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You can look online. There are actually photographs. There are short histories because some of these

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Italian veterans remained in Louisiana and Mississippi and other places, settled down after the war, married and had families.

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And I've actually had correspondence from some members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans who descended from some of these people who still live in those states.

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So it's a story that I think, it's an amazing story, if you will. It is.

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And what strikes me about it, and for those who are listening in here, they did not have a dog in the fight as far as,

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I mean, they didn't own a plantation in the South. They certainly wouldn't be fighting for slavery coming that great distance.

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So what was it that compelled them? I mean, I know you just mentioned they saw parallels in some of their own struggles and traditionalism, but if you could boil it all down, what did they see in the

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Confederacy Well, there is a motto that the traditionalists in Spain had.

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And that motto in Spanish is Dios Patria Fueros Sere, which is God, country, our local rights, and our king.

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Well, obviously, the last part, king, does not apply. But God, country, and our local rights does apply.

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And if you look at what was happening in the South and the intellectual influences that were affecting it prior to the war between the states, there was indeed a

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Tractarian, an analogous Tractarian movement. There was a theological movement that affected generally the whole

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South that made it far more traditional. Louis Hartz called the South before the war, he said it did not experience the same kind of,

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I don't use the word enlightenment, but he said it experienced a reactionary enlightenment. And you find this in the writings of any number of Southerners that, even before the time of the war, people like General James Pettigrew, for example, who went to Europe and actually understood

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European traditions. But it is God, country, and our local rights.

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They understood the idea of federalism because European traditionalists, they are federalists, they believe in a federal idea.

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They are also firm believers in a traditional Christianity. Admittedly, the

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Christianity in the Southern states was mostly Protestant, but they understood the orthodoxy of it all.

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And of course, country. They had a sympathy for the

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South as an extension, if you will, of European civilization.

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And so it was that more than anything else that compelled them, propelled them, if you will, to get on boats and sneak into the

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Confederacy or sneak across the Rio Grande to volunteer for the South. The South was considered cavalier as opposed to Puritans in the

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North. And so that cause motivated them, and you see it in the

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European press. When I was in Europe, I read numerous accounts and many writers, not just in England, but in France and Spain and parts of Italy, even in Germany, and they understood this.

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They saw this, and they were able analogously to find this in their own beliefs and see it in the

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Confederacy. Well, it certainly is an amazing story. I had not heard it, and I'm very glad that you put it in this anthology,

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The Land We Love, The South and Its Heritage, out now. You can go on Amazon and get it.

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Where else can you get it? Is it just Amazon, pretty much? You can get it at Amazon.

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It is available now for the copies that they originally got, they sold out.

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But it is available now from Amazon. It can be gotten before Christmas, but you'll have to hurry probably.

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It's also available through Barnes and Noble, and both Amazon and Barnes and Noble do have marketplace sources where you can find it a little bit cheaper than the normal list price of around $28.

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It's a hardback book. And then, of course, Scrupernong Press, if you look up Scrupernong Press, you can order it directly from the publisher and probably even get it within a few days, because they're rather quick.

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I wanted to get into another topic you talk about, and this is probably one that's more personal for me, but you say in Chapter 5, is the title,

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How the Neoconservatives Destroyed Southern Conservatism. And a little personal aside here,

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I got tired of hearing the term neoconservative, because I looked at it as a pejorative.

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I had even been called a neocon, you know, the short form of it, by people before.

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And I just got sick of it, because I'm like, you're not really making any argument, you're just throwing a word out there. But as I read this essay, things started to click for me.

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And I think I understand now why neoconservatism, because you defined it, is such a problem.

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And you talk about egalitarianism, equality in a negative sense, and then what individualism for southern conservatives meant, and then what it means for neoconservatives.

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So I was hoping maybe you could go into that a little bit, define neoconservatism, maybe give a few names for prominent neoconservatives, and then tell us what the problem with that is.

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Okay. I think we have to start back in the 18th century, and basically the beginnings of what would become the

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United States. And my mentors have been the late

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Mel Bradford, tremendous intellect, and even before him,

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Richard Weaver, who taught for years. He was a North Carolinian, taught at University of Chicago. The emphasis is this nation that we inhabit was a nation founded by families.

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It was founded on the idea of families who came largely from the British Isles, but also from France and Germany, eventually, who came and settled and brought with them their religion, their beliefs, their customs, everything, their songs, their music, their ballads.

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Their heritage. It was a Christian heritage that they brought to these shores. They brought with them, they came in community.

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Now they came believing in a kind of individualism, but it was what

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Richard Weaver calls communitarian individualism. In other words, it was a belief in communities.

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And each person, each family, I should say, had its own role.

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And that role was determined by, in large measure, its faith and the traditions that it inherited.

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This runs completely against the current view that in one way distinguishes what we call neoconservatism.

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The neoconservatives, if you will, and I'll get to some of them in a minute, believe that America was founded as an idealization, basically on an idea.

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And you hear that a lot. You hear people say, America is an idea. Yeah. Bradford, and more recently

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Barry Allen Shane, who's a professor at Colgate, has done a fantastic study of this.

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Look at the writings of both the founders and the framers of the Constitution. And they don't talk about ideas.

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They talk about family, land, blood, kinship, the inheritance they have received as Englishmen, you know, those basic English rights.

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And as Bradford talks about in his book, Original Intentions, when they wrote the

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Declaration of Independence, where the words, you know, equality, freedom, and equality show up, they're not talking about it here in the

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United States, in the new nation. They're talking about it in reference to England, in other words, they're

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Englishmen and they're protesting that they're not being treated as Englishmen. But they understood fully.

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And Bradford and Professor Shane have gone through, as George Carey at Georgetown did years ago, thousands of letters and correspondence and articles and diaries, et cetera.

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These people were establishing a country which was an extension of Europe. Yes, it was different.

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To quote Richard Weaver again, it was a country of families and states, and these states were composed of communities, communitarian individualism.

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This is what their freedom was all about. This is in contradistinction to the neocon idea, which basically

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I distinguish, and others have done before me better, as a kind of a leftist idea, an inversion of what

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America is all about. Even before the war between the states, if you look at the writings of most

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Americans, including Americans north of the Mason -Dixon line, there is a continuation of the original belief that this nation is founded upon families, and that states come together to make this

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Constitution, each guarding its own traditions, and the traditions of those families and those communities in those states.

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After the war between the states, to some degree before but after, you have this evolving doctrine which now has flourished with what we call neoconservatism, that America is a series of ideas, equality and democracy.

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I think if you go back carefully and look at history, you'll find that those two terms are considered terms of a program.

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They are not terms that the people at the time used positively.

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Yes, they do talk about democratic institutions, but they're not talking about it in the same way that we talk about it today.

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What you've got is neoconservatism, which is, as a philosophy, as a general idea, is a left -wing thing that eventually came from the

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Trotskyite version of Marxism. The neoconservatives,

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I can name some of the people, like Irving Kristol and Norman Podoretz and others, the late

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Charles Krauthammer and others, originally they were what you might call

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Trotskyite Marxists who made the trek from the left to so -called right, but they brought with them these ideas of, across the board, equality and democracy.

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In a sense, they captured the conservative movement, so -called, of the 1950s.

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People like my mentor, Russell Kirk, who abhorred these things, the old

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National Review of the 1950s and early 1960s, they captured these and they recast the conservative movement.

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In a sense, they began to capture Southern thought as well. I mean, there are a lot of Southern political leaders who share these ideas now about democracy and inequality.

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The American nation was not based on equality. It's a simple fact. It's a fact of history.

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When the founders and framers talk about equality, it's equality vis -a -vis the parliament in Westminster in England, basically.

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You know, I mean, you don't talk about equality if you're dealing with a country where each state, for example, had the right, which they guarded jealously, to have an established church.

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I mean, Virginia, for example, had established the Episcopal Church, the Anglican Church, until 1829.

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In North Carolina, for example, you had to be a Christian to hold office as late as 1868. In Massachusetts, the

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Congregational Church was the state church until 1820. Obviously, the

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Constitution had nothing to say about that. The Constitution only talks about the establishment of a national church.

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It leaves untouched the traditions and customs and laws of the individual states that were established.

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And so I think this is a realization about the foundation of our country that we have to understand.

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We've come a long way. And that is very important because what has happened in the last 20 or 30 years, basically the, what

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I call, what we call the neocons, the neoconservatives have to some degree taken over the conservative movement and displaced the older conservative ideas dealing with the founding and with what should be the beliefs expressed by the

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American nation. I think you do a really good job here. This is one of the quotes from your book.

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You say that, what you were just talking about, the philosophies from rationalists, they replace the legacy of kinship and blood and attachment to community and to land and a central religious core that annealed this tradition and continued to make it viable.

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And so in reading that quote, I'm seeing a couple things jump out at me, the land, community and religion and tradition,

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I guess, as well. So a fourth thing there. And you're saying the neocons, these things don't matter as much to them.

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They're more portable with their principles. They would take American principles in their mind and they would go to a foreign country and say, well, they can sprout here and work just as fine in a different religion, different social context.

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And you're saying that's not true. And conservatives never thought that. Am I understanding you? Well, what happened is they've gone back and recast terminology from the 18th and early 19th century to mean something that the individuals who used it and employed it at that time never intended.

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OK. So when they go back to the Declaration of Independence, they use it as a cudgel to destroy any and every type of difference.

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They even use it as far as feminism and sex and things like that or race, for example.

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I mean, the founders never intended the terms democracy and equality, for example, or even freedom to be used in the same sense.

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I mean, the founders were not the framers were not. People did not believe in authoritarianism, but they believed in a

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Republican structured system, which was basically based on on male household suffrage, individual communities that govern themselves with a certain autonomy, autonomy.

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But the whole point being is the states had rights to do certain things to maintain their own traditions.

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What the neocons have done, if they've gone back and recast and rewritten the history and then they go around the world and they say, well, you have to accept

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American democracy and equality. You go to a Muslim country, for example, which has been practicing the

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Muslim faith for fifteen hundred years with all of its traditions and ideas. And you go in and all of a sudden you tell these people, well, you've got to start voting in an election and let women vote and all this kind of stuff.

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And whether or not it's a good thing or a bad thing is not not the point. The point is that it offends the local, the culture.

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You go to to Russia and you demand that the Russians who have a deep, deep belief against, for example, homosexuality should accept gay rights.

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I mean, you have Americans going around to the rest of the world demanding that they accept beliefs which are totally foreign, but in fact are also foreign to the basic roots of the

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American system. Now, to me, that makes sense in the American nation, a great deal of sense.

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And I think to an Orthodox Christian, that would make sense. I know that we talk about the Imago Dei as being sort of this leveling field, that people are equal in the eyes of God.

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But that's not what we're talking about right now. We're talking about an egalitarian equality, which is something absolutely.

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Yeah, what we're yeah, we are we have equality in the face of God in the sense that God judges us.

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But based on our own capacity as a human being, we're all created not the same.

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Right. We face God in the sense that we equal in the sense that we each have an equal opportunity.

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Right, so do his will and his bidding. But each of us, I use the the the the parable of the talents in St.

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Matthew. You know, St. Matthew has three examples in that parable, the man with one, the man with two and the man or three, the man with five talents.

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OK, and what's fascinating is the man with five talents, who is obviously more wealthy, is the one who complies with our

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Lord's will, whereas the man with one talent fails to do that.

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What that parable, in a sense, is telling us is that we are each judged not on the basis of what the other man does or has, but on the basis of our own particular gifts, which are considered as equal in that in God's sense, in the sense that that we are we are equal to ourselves.

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If you follow what I'm saying, we have our own potential and that potential is ours and ours alone.

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And on that basis, we are judged. And that if you look back in the the the great

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Calvinists like Robert Lewis Dabney or James Henley Thornwell, for example, this is exactly the way they understand it.

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This is not egalitarianism. This is not legislating across the board equality of wealth and status and position, which is antithetical to traditional

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Christianity, whether it be Protestant, Catholic or what have you. I think that's what that's that's what

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I would say. Yeah, that's brilliant. I think most Christians perhaps and I'm speaking more from an evangelical context here, but I'm sure it would go for all traditions of Christianity in this country probably are not familiar with the argument you just made, because we've been here.

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Here's the point. The fact that a man is poor and raises a family but does it well and a man may be a billionaire and squanders his money.

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The the man who who is poor and fulfills his God given grace and gift well.

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Is going to be a better steward of the graces that he received, just as in the parable, the man who had five talents and doubled his talents is far to be praised and has done his duty face to God more so than the man who sat on his.

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That is a parable that contradicts the idea of across the board equality. Each of those men faces

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God. Each of those men has given different gifts. They're not the same gift.

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They're different gifts and they are told use those gifts and you'll be judged accordingly.

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And there's no comparison. You can't you don't compare the man who does who's a brilliant writer with the man who's a brilliant politician with the man who's a bricklayer, the bricklayer.

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If he does his job better than the other two is going to be favored by God more. It's just that simple.

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And this is what our ancestors, both Protestant and Catholic, understood fully and why the modern idea of equality is really, in a sense, a heresy.

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Welcome to part two of my interview with Dr. Boyd Cathy. Today, we will be discussing the

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Southern Poverty Law Center, classic Hollywood and having hope for the future.

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Chapter eight, you talk about and this is I thought this was fascinating, but the

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Southern Poverty Law Center and you did a very extensive, I was actually surprised how extensive, search into Morris Dee and his organization and who he is.

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And this got you more or less blacklisted from publishing in certain sources, you say in the book.

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So I was hoping this was about 15 years ago, excuse me, about 15 years ago, I was commissioned to do a research study on Morris Dees and his group called the

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Southern Poverty Law Center. And my decision to do it, it's a long study, heavily footnoted.

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I decided to use only sources that were, you might call on the left, if you will.

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In other words, I used magazines like The Progressive, Harper's.

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There were a series of about 15 or 16 articles, investigative articles written by newspaper reporters, the

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Montgomery Advertiser, which is not a right wing newspaper by any means. But anyway, these were investigative articles about the operation.

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And what I found was that the operation of the Southern Poverty Law Center was a was a money machine.

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In other words, they would rake in millions and millions of dollars. In fact, I think they sit now on what, a couple of hundred million dollars.

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And the work they did to support efforts at social justice, et cetera, were very minuscule.

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Increasingly, they became a what they an anti -hate machine. They would label anybody that they did not like.

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And usually this was people who were conservative, who did not share their socially liberal and left wing views.

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They would find a label for them, call them racist or a Nazi or a fascist or a Holocaust denier or whatever.

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Anyway, when I wrote the article, it came out and it was picked up by a number of different groups.

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Sam Francis, the late Dr. Sam Francis, had one hundred thousand copies made. It was published by a magazine called

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Culture Wars. And what happened was because the article had had such a an effect, it began to cause different organizations that had been using some of Morris Dease's information, his publications, to cancel subscriptions.

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And he began to lose business. And he, in turn, attacked me as a hate monger, neoconfederate, right wing extremist, all these different things.

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And I it did hurt. I mean, obviously, at that time, it was a very difficult cross to bear.

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But it was fascinating. I think I may have recounted in an update article that I did, which

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I also included in the book, that what happened after that was there's a group called

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Skinheads of America. And they complained that I was on Morris Dease's list of 40 men to watch.

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And they said, Dr. Cathy doesn't deserve to be on that list. He's not done anything hateful.

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I thought that was funny. In other words, I did not merit. I had done anything really hateful to be on that list of hate mongers.

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But in recent years, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the SPLC, has has extended its reach and begun to attack even more moderate and centrist conservative types.

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And I think they've lost a lot of stature that they once had. They're still cited by some of the mainstream media.

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But it was for me, it was kind of like crossing the Rubicon, if you will, because once you get through that kind of critique and the kind of opprobrium that was cast on me, you know, in a sense, it was liberating.

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I got through it. I didn't lose any friends. My supervisor, the deputy secretary at the

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Department of Cultural Resources, where I work, came to me and told me that he had faith and confidence in me, that I had done my work for 30 years, that he had never seen anything like what they were talking about.

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He was interviewed by the local newspaper because they were interested. And he said, Dr. Cathy does his work, what he does on the outside is his business.

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But I've never seen anything like what the SPLC describes. You know, he's a you know, he's a he's a team player at work.

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He does his job. And I've never seen this kind of hate mongering that you described. So I got through it.

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I didn't lose any friends. I did understand that very likely if I ever wanted to go back to academia to teach, that wouldn't be a possibility because of those headlines.

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But you are brave. It's not an excuse. Go ahead. I'm sorry. No, you're brave. I just I'm looking at this and just the extent to which you researched.

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I mean, I would get the book just for that one essay. It's it's excellent. I mean, talk about a takedown of the

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Southern Poverty Law Center. And of course, they're the organization now, since you've published this, that are they're going after Christian ministries.

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I think Family Research Council was on their list and, you know, organizations.

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They've yeah, they've they've attacked a number of different groups and they've even inspired certain people on the far left to violence.

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The problem now, well, the problem then was their research was shoddy. I had a friend, an academic tell me, he said,

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Boyd, you should write them and give them the right information about you. And I said, well, that would give them too much credit.

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But they did this little bio and they had me seeing all these. Well, for instance, they had me studying with Andrew Lytle, the great

36:29

Southern professor who I think taught at Yale for a while. And it was, you know, they they got it incorrect.

36:35

It was Russell Kirk, not Andrew Lytle. They had other, you know, different things that were wrong.

36:42

So with all the money they're pulling in, they can't even do a good research hit piece on you. No, I should have done the rewritten the the the hate piece and sent it to him and said, if you're going to attack me, at least attack me for the right thing.

36:56

Yeah, man. Well, I thought that's not fun. It's not fun to go through these things.

37:01

But, you know, you either run and hide or you defend yourself.

37:06

And I decided I was going to defend myself. And as I say, I did not lose any friend because of it.

37:20

Most of your essays in here are about defending monuments, the history of the Confederacy of North Carolina in particular.

37:28

You talk about figures of North Carolina and Confederate history and essays about them. You have books and movies.

37:34

So, I mean, there's so we can't cover it all, obviously. But you have been involved in Sons of Confederate Veterans for how many years now?

37:42

About. Thirty five years, thirty five, thirty six, maybe.

37:48

Let's see. Nineteen eighty two thereabouts. So you've seen I mean, this whole you sort of came into it right when the attacks were starting, the modern form of them, at least.

37:59

And so you are in a perfect position to view this whole anti -monument debacle, anti -flag debacle and and see it from a kind of a bird's eye view.

38:11

Why don't you tell our listeners a little bit about that? I mean, you don't have to go into great detail, but what's changed from when you first got into this in the early 80s to now with the tone?

38:22

Well, I can give you two examples, kind of impressionistic examples from from television.

38:31

In the mid -1980s, there were two crime mystery programs, sort of one was

38:40

Murder, She Wrote, the other was Matlock. And I enjoy watching both of them. And Matlock takes place in Atlanta, Georgia.

38:49

And in the courtroom, there is a a Georgia state flag always. And at that time, the

38:56

Georgia state flag combined the symbol of Georgia. I think it's the the seal of the state with the

39:04

Confederate battle flag. So that is present in every episode. In Murder, She Wrote, some of the early episodes, she travels to Virginia and Texas.

39:14

And in Virginia, I remember one particular episode. There is a giant portrait of Robert E.

39:22

Lee behind the judge and then maybe Jackson and Jefferson Davis or some other.

39:28

And then there's the Virginia flag and the Confederate battle flag. And this is in the 1980s.

39:35

Wow. OK, these are all these are all prominent prime time. I think both of them may have been on CBS.

39:42

I know Murder, She Wrote was lasted on into the 1990s with Angela Lansbury.

39:48

Who, by the way, I've been in correspondence with. I collect autographs. But anyway, it's an interesting story in and of itself,

39:57

I'm sure. I collect autographs from all sorts of people. I've even got one from Clint Eastwood. But anyway, that's a long story.

40:04

What's fascinating is that in that period, at least, these particular symbols were not seen like they are seen today.

40:14

And as I tell people, I've not changed my view. I mean, I always understood that those symbols were to some degree controversial for some people, but they were accepted as part of our national history.

40:29

Not everything that everybody believes is going to be the same.

40:35

Not every symbol that that we see is going to be accepted and received in the same form or fashion.

40:41

I might see a monument to John Brown, for example, and I might say, well,

40:48

I'm not exactly a fan of John Brown and the abolitionists, but that's part of our history.

40:56

By the same token, over at the campus of the University of North Carolina, the most heated debates right now are over the monument to what is called

41:07

Silent Sam, a monument to the University of North Carolina students who fought for the

41:13

Confederacy. It's a veterans' monument. There's a Vietnam veterans' monument on the

41:19

Capitol Square. I'm sure there are people, a lot of people, who oppose the Vietnam War, but I don't see them going over, at least not yet, that may happen, but I don't see it happening yet, going over to the veterans' monument and saying, well, we should take that monument down because Vietnam was a disgrace.

41:38

It was an imperialist war, white oppressors, colonialists, part of Asia.

41:46

All of these monuments represent our history, the good, the bad, and the ugly, again, to quote

41:51

Penn Eastwood. And so what I have been concerned about is a frenzied ideological attack upon our history, the symbols of our history.

42:04

And that has taken the most prominent place, if you will, in the attacks on Confederate monuments.

42:15

And I've often said that that's just the first step because you've also got attacks on monuments to Christopher Columbus, to Junipero Serra in California, the

42:25

Franciscan who, or I think he may have been a Capuchin or Franciscan, who helped settle the missions in California.

42:31

You've got attacks on George Washington because either they were slaveholders or because they were white or because they were sexist or whatever.

42:43

The problem is that we, by destroying these monuments, by expelling them from their places, from hiding them away, we narrow our historical knowledge.

42:55

We skew it. We pervert it. These symbols, even if we do not share exactly what some of the people who are honored by them represent, they do continue to offer us perspective on our history, a variety, a broadness of our history.

43:15

And to try to do away with them is to pervert that history.

43:21

It is ideological. And the more we read of it, the more we understand that the movement, we understand that it is a madness, if you will, a lunacy that will not stop until it is perverted, the very idea of what

43:36

America is all about. You have to do that. You have to really rewrite the history.

43:43

You have to completely undo the history. And when you say lunacy, the image that came to my head was the young man at Silent Sam when they finally did rip it down.

43:53

He's kicking this statue with shouting, angry face, red, hot, anger.

43:58

And I think you captured it well with that word. I mean, there's something about that that just says, you're not thinking correctly here.

44:07

This is a statue. And you're going to town. You're probably hurting your foot. Kicking this.

44:13

Well, there was an interview recently with a lady, a girl or lady, whatever, who's a student there.

44:21

And she said, I can't sleep. I can't eat. I can't even take my exams because this statue threatens me.

44:29

That's amazing. And I thought about that. How does the statue threaten this person?

44:36

Obviously not physically, but for what she has been told and taught and come to believe are things that this statue represents.

44:49

In other words, slavery. And the problem is there's no contextualization.

44:56

There's no understanding of the historicity involved here. There is no desire, if you will, on the part of the professors of these poor students to give them a broader range of understanding.

45:10

I mean, you can go to any country in Europe or in the

45:17

United States. You can find statues. Let me give you another example. When the communists took over Russia, they named renamed a bunch of cities and streets, but they also left up statues to Peter the

45:31

Great and to some of their national heroes because they understood that they could perhaps try to contextualize what was going on.

45:43

There are statues that remain now in different countries that perhaps we might not like what they symbolize.

45:53

As I said, I might not particularly care for a statue to John Brown or maybe some other national figure, but it is part of my history.

46:02

And it is incumbent upon me to understand that history, to erase it, to expel it, to expunge it, to exile it, narrows my historical focus.

46:15

It narrows my knowledge. Ideologically, it turns me into a person who lacks perspective.

46:24

And in the end, by destroying my history, I destroy my nation. You talk a little bit in here about movies and books and things that you like, and you had a whole chapter very in -depth on Randolph Scott, which

46:54

I thought, you know, I'm young, well, compared to some people, right? I'm 29. Randolph Scott was long gone before I came around, but I watched some old

47:03

Westerns. In fact, even last night, I was watching Red River with John Wayne. I'm sure you've seen that.

47:09

As I was grading some papers, I turned that on. And there is something about some of these old classic

47:14

Western films that encourages the soul, and it gets us to think about ideals that are beyond us.

47:21

And I just don't see that with modern movies and cinema and all the rest of it.

47:27

And so you actually have a couple chapters in here on different movies, surveying them.

47:33

You even have one on pro -Southern films. A lot of them I have not seen. Do you watch these often?

47:39

Or, I mean, have you just over time? Did you kind of collect these? Because I know you're kind of a movie collector, right?

47:47

Yeah, I have to admit, I got started with my father years ago when

47:54

I was probably 10 or 12, probably. We would go into town on a

48:00

Saturday sometimes and go to the old Ambassador Theater in Raleigh, which no longer stands. And my mother and sister would go shopping or whatever women do.

48:11

And Dad and I would go see a Western or double feature sometimes. And I can recall vividly going to see a movie with Randolph Scott and Joel McRae, two of my favorite actors,

48:25

Ride to High Country. And in reflecting back over it in recent years,

48:32

Sam Peckinpah directed the movie. He directed a number of others, but arguably this

48:37

Ride to High Country may be his best. It's also his deepest and most philosophical because it talks about the change in America, in particular on the frontier.

48:51

But it is emblematic of the change that was going on in the United States. These two old cowpokes both seen their better days.

48:59

One was an ex -martial and they're commissioned to go up and pick up some gold at this little mining community.

49:08

And Randolph Scott decides, well, maybe I could just take this gold myself, you know, tries to convince

49:15

Joel McRae to go along with him. And Joel McRae says, nope. And then Scott turns to him and says, well, what goal if you're not going to what kind of objective do you have in life?

49:25

Don't you want to be rich? And Joel McRae turns to him and says, my goal, all

49:32

I want to do is enter my house justified. And that's the motto of the movie, doing one's duty before God, before the nation, before his family.

49:48

And as they ride down, of course, they're beset by some robbers. Scott has gone on the lamb because he tried to take the gold.

49:58

He wasn't successful. McRae is beset by these bandits. And Scott hears of it and he runs up to join him in the battle.

50:11

And is this a spoiler alert? Is this going to give away the movie? Not completely.

50:18

But anyway, he says, partner, I'm back. And McRae says to him, heck,

50:25

I always knew you were. I always knew you were going to come back. And then he says, partner, let's meet him like we did in the good old day.

50:32

So they go out and meet him, et cetera, et cetera. Anyway, I kept thinking about that.

50:38

And I kept thinking about these themes. There's a number of themes that John Ford, who was in love with the idea, the old idea of America and did some wonderful movies.

50:53

John Wayne was one of his primary actors. One of the movies he directed, again, a

50:59

Western called Wagon Master. Didn't have a major start, had a little hair. Harry Carey and Ben Johnson, who

51:06

Ben Johnson, of course, did make it later as an award winner. But it's a story of a group of Christian pilgrims.

51:14

Probably they may have been Mormons, but it's not identified. And they're looking for the promised land. And they guide them to this valley, this promised valley.

51:25

And the movie is just completely infused with this whole idea of the search for the promised land, for for God's blessing.

51:35

And it's again, it's emblematic and symbolic of John Ford's idea of what America is all about.

51:41

The ideals of honesty, of hard work, and in particular, above all, family.

51:48

Family annealed in the grace of the good Lord, which these people are. The movie came out about 1950.

51:54

And again, it is a wonderful symbol of what a lot of these old Westerns emphasize, that that is good over evil.

52:05

Conquering the frontier is what is conquering oneself and those passions that beset us.

52:13

And you see this in a number of the great actors. Wayne, of course, exemplifies it in a number of his movies.

52:20

You look at something like The Searchers, where he's the lonely man off on the quest.

52:27

And the quest is not just for his nieces, but for himself, for finding himself.

52:34

He's taken an oath to confederacy. And he says at the first, I'm not going to take any more oaths. I took an oath to God and confederacy.

52:40

That's it. Randolph Scott, who throughout his history, my dad knew the

52:48

Scott family. They were in Charlotte. And when Randolph Scott died, I did an article, an essay in appreciation for him that somehow managed to find its way to his wife,

52:58

Patricia Stillman Scott. And we became good friends until her death. We exchanged numerous letters and photographs of our pets.

53:07

She was a cat person. I was a dog person. We would exchange. And she recounted to me a story.

53:14

She lived out at Indian Springs, which Randolph Scott had purchased this land. Out in the desert that fortunately for him had oil on it.

53:24

Wow. Made him into made him into a millionaire. And she told me one night she called me up. And of course, for I was different.

53:30

So sometimes she'd get her times mixed up. And she said, Boyd, I got my real estate guy told me that I named the star.

53:39

This Hollywood star wanted to buy our home up on Copley Place in Beverly Hills. She said,

53:44

I don't live there much. And she said, you know, Randy, Randy Scott, we spent $700 ,000 in 1947 to build that house.

53:52

And it's worth millions today. And that that woman, she offered me $13 million. And I told her,

53:59

I'm not letting that whore live in the house that Randolph Scott and I live in. Oh, wow.

54:06

You know, it's it's it's fascinating. It's fascinating to see this because it is part of the change in America.

54:18

It is it in microcosm. The the Western is a kind of it's the only real genre in movies that that Americans have produced independently of anybody else.

54:33

And it represents the well, there's a there's a there's a great example.

54:38

The man who shot Liberty Valance, John Ford's Western with both Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne.

54:46

And in the end, when Jimmy Stewart recounts the story, that his fame is all based on a myth.

54:53

That he's not the man who shot the famous outlaw. It was actually John Wayne. Yeah. And the news reporters are there because he's a

55:01

U .S. senator. And he's, you know, famous now. And basically, he tells them, my life is based on this story.

55:08

It's a myth. And the Western man looks at him and says, Sir, this is the West. When fiction becomes fact, print.

55:19

When the legend becomes fact, I think it says print the legend. Legend becomes fact. Yeah. When legend becomes fact, print the legend.

55:26

Of course, Lee Marvin was the outlaw, one of his best outlaw roles in that movie.

55:32

Oh, yeah. Lee Marvin, yeah, played Liberty Valance in that movie. But again, it's the idea that the myths that we live on, the reality of them motivates us.

55:45

And it's the realities of our beliefs, our families, the land we love, which is the title of this book.

55:53

That's right. And it's all part of what makes us who we are, remembering who we are.

56:02

We lose that memory. We lose that hope. Then what are we?

56:08

That's right. There's a phrase in the book that I quote from my dissertation topic in Spain.

56:17

And he said, I've seen people, but I've never seen a man who did not have a family, who did not have a piece of land, who did not have a job, who did not have a community and a place, a nationality, a language.

56:32

If you've got such a man, then he is going to be subject to the first demagogue and dictator who comes around.

56:40

T .S. Eliot, if you will not have God and he's a very jealous God, then you must pay your respects to Mr.

56:46

Hitler and Mr. Stalin. And that's where we're headed. I want to kind of wind down this discussion with a couple, you have two essays actually in here.

57:05

One is on what's right around the corner, which is Christmas and your vigil of the nativity and reflections on the hope that came to us.

57:13

And then you close the whole entire book with reflections on the future.

57:19

All the Hollywood movies, all the ideological instruction in our colleges and schools, all the political posturing by on the make spineless politicians will not in the end stand against he who created us.

57:33

You talk about having faith in divine providence. I'm going to pick your brain a little bit on this.

57:38

I know you're Roman Catholic. It's interesting to me when I was reading some of this. You don't talk about having faith in the

57:44

Roman Catholic Church, which I thought you might talk about that. But you talk about having faith in Christ and in God.

57:50

And I was hoping maybe you could flesh it out for us. What does that faith look like? Because we need hope right now. We are all given gift, a gift or gifts by God.

58:02

We are offered the gift of grace. And what we do with it, of course, determines how our lives are lived and what accomplishments we may make in this life.

58:20

And I think what is important to remember, you know, yes, I am I am Catholic, but having been born and lived in the

58:29

South and with a number of Protestant ancestors whom I greatly respect and have absorbed much from them,

58:38

I also have a deep appreciation for the traditions that I've inherited, which are not

58:44

Catholic. The last phrase in the book that I use, the

58:49

Spanish writer Miguel de Unamuno's phrase that memory, which we have, gives us hope.

58:59

But when hope fades, then memory arises again. We remember our past.

59:07

That, in turn, gives us hope. And even when hope fades anew, the memory will arise and that memory will give us hope again.

59:19

There is, to again, quote, quote, Elliot, there is no loss cause because there's no actual gain cause.

59:26

We have. The master of the universe himself who promised us.

59:33

He did not promise us we would exceed, succeed here below that we would reestablish the city of God on Earth necessarily.

59:43

We might. But history is strange. It plays tricks on us.

59:49

Our particular position, our particular role is each one in his own sphere, in his own life, with his family, with his friends, with whatever he does with the gift that he has been given is to do our duty.

01:00:04

Nothing less to do our duty, whatever that duty may be. To make, yes, make this life better, but also to ensure that the next generation and the generation beyond that have the wherewithal and the ability to continue to receive those gifts, because in the end, we know that God will triumph.