Recent links of note:
“‘The Whiskey Rebellion’ Review: A Young Nation, Suddenly Tested”
Stephen Brumwell, The Wall Street Journal
In 1794, around five years into his presidency, George Washington marched at the head of a 13,000-strong federal militia to the Pennsylvania frontier, with the intent to suppress a widespread rebellion against the first excise tax on domestic produce, the so-called whiskey tax. The only active U.S. president to ever take to the field as commander-in-chief, Washington was keenly aware of the campaign’s similarities to his time fighting in the woods of Pennsylvania against the French under General Edward Braddock in 1755. The Whiskey Rebellion was the “gravest domestic challenge” Washington faced during his two-term presidency, writes the Washington scholar Stephen Brumwell for The Wall Street Journal’s review of Brady J. Crytzer’s new book, The Whiskey Rebellion: A Distilled History of an American Crisis. Tarring and feathering federal tax collectors, the rebels saw the legislation as an undue burden and violation of their rights. Initially reluctant to respond with force, Washington was ultimately convinced by Alexander Hamilton to do so as a show of federal power. Upon seeing Washington’s approaching force, the rebels disbanded in fear. Though over 150 were arrested in what Crytzer describes as “the largest law enforcement action in American history,” Washington pardoned those convicted of treason, wary of sowing disunion in the frontier during the infancy of the federal government.
“A Poet’s Politics”
Adam Kirsch, City Journal
The poetry of W. H. Auden (1907–73) evolves in a remarkable way, reflecting the changing generational sentiments of the interwar, wartime, and post-war decades of the mid-twentieth century. In a recent piece for City Journal, Adam Kirsch reflects on Auden’s legacy upon the release of a new edition of his poetry, the two-volume Complete Works of W. H. Auden: Poems, edited by Edward Mendelson. Volume I covers his works from 1927 to 1939, a time when the poet was associated with the literary Left, as seen through his works on the Spanish Civil War, such as his monumental occasional poem, “Spain” (1937). Auden became a spokesman for his generation, who felt a connection to his writings on the great buildup of an “ambient sense of dread” during the interwar years, as Kirsch describes. Though not popular in England since the seventeenth-century, the genre of the occasional poem, writes Kirsch, served Auden well, as such poetry flourished during moments of political (and, by the twentieth century, ideological) conflict. The masterpiece “September 1, 1939” depicts the moment when the dreaded destruction finally arrived, and its accompanying emotions caused Auden to retire from his role as generational spokesman to the relative quietude of an apolitical life in America. The poetry of Volume II spans this period, from 1940 until his death in 1973, during which Auden became captivated by the orthodoxy of the Anglican Church and its “more humane alternative to the ferocious ideologies of the twentieth century.”
“Worried about Chinese influence, the US agrees to rejoin Unesco”
Tom Seymour, The Art Newspaper
The central complaint regarding UNESCO since the 1980s has been its ongoing politicization of cultural heritage. In fact, the United States left the organization in 1984, only to rejoin almost twenty years later in 2003. Eight years later, such complaints led to the withdrawal of U.S. funding under Obama and of U.S. membership in 2017 under Trump. Tom Seymour reports for The Art Newspaper, however, that after pledging $619 million in “membership fees” to the organization, the United States is set to rejoin this July. The reason, according to Biden’s officials, is to combat China’s growing influence. As the organization’s top donor over the past decade, the CCP uses UNESCO as a political puppet, its deputy-director being a high-ranking Party official. UNESCO has welcomed such politicization, likely with the tacit expectation that U.S. countermeasures will bring a much-needed cash infusion. The United States specifically withdrew its funding and membership as a result of the organization’s anti-Israel stance, which contradicts the UN’s pledge to neutrality in interstate conflicts. It seems as if UNESCO’s politicization has opened a Pandora’s box, first by welcoming a Palestinian agenda, then CCP influence and its dictates on issues such as freedom of speech and press, and now, potentially, the ideology of the Biden administration.