National Review and Martin Luther King, Jr.
If I were a National Review writer, I just wouldn’t say anything at all about the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I’d be afraid that whatever I wrote, someone would want to start talking about articles like Will Herberg’s commentary on King’s Nobel Peace Prize “’Civil Rights’ and Violence: Who Are the Guilty Ones?”, The National Review Sept. 7th, 1965:
For years now, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King and his associates have been deliberately undermining the foundations of internal order in this country. With their rabble-rousing demagoguery, they have been cracking the “cake of custom” that holds us together. With their doctrine of “civil disobedience,” they have been teaching hundreds of thousands of Negroes — particularly the adolescents and the children — that it is perfectly alright to break the law and defy constituted authority if you are a Negro-with-a-grievance; in protest against injustice. And they have done more than talk. They have on occasion after occasion, in almost every part of the country, called out their mobs on the streets, promoted “school strikes,” sit-ins, lie-ins, in explicit violation of the law and in explicit defiance of the public authority. They have taught anarchy and chaos by word and deed — and, no doubt, with the best of intentions — and they have found apt pupils everywhere, with intentions not of the best. Sow the wind, and reap the whirlwind.
But Kyle-Anne Shiver is more courageous than I would be:
By all measures, Martin Luther King Jr. was a true leader. Barack Obama, on the other hand, is just another politician — one who has demonstrated far more regard for the interests of teacher unions than for the children they are paid to serve, far more regard for the pro-abortion lobby than for the future of the black community, and far less good sense than the average person has when it comes to picking a spiritual mentor.
The positions and values of Senator Obama stand mightily against those espoused, and what’s more, practiced, by Martin Luther King Jr. Based on all these considerations, I think it is quite probable that King, were he alive today, would not vote for Barack Obama.
And of course there’s plenty more where that first blockquote came from. Maybe National Review should leave assertions about the Civil Rights movement to conservative outlets that didn’t exist in the 1950s and 60s. Run this stuff in The Weekly Standard.
44 Responses to “National Review and Martin Luther King, Jr.”
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August 22nd, 2008 at 9:35 am
Ms Shiver forgot to mention that Martin Luther King got TONS more pussy than Barack ever will.
August 22nd, 2008 at 9:37 am
I’d like to know if they paid lip service, at least, to the cause of the civil rights movement, even while opposing the tactics (one and the same, yeah, yeah). Somehow I doubt it, but it’d be nice to confirm. The site Matt links to seems a little, shall we say, tendentious.
August 22nd, 2008 at 9:48 am
They opposed civil rights at even the most basic level – including defending segregated school systems, denial of voting rights and giving implicit support to terrorism against civil rights leaders (for example, the numerous murders of civil rights activists aren’t even mentioned, but having a march that was forbidden by the police was some horrific and unprecedented violation of the law to the National Review).
Opinions varied a bit – some of the NR articles of the time do concede that the civil rights cause was somewhat justified but that admission is begrudging at best, but the National Review writers were strongly unified in opposing any and all tactics whatsoever that would have led to any results.
August 22nd, 2008 at 9:48 am
Ah, so Martin Luther King would be a McCain voter. Or perhaps not exercise his right to vote. Thanks for clearing that up, Kyle-Anne.
August 22nd, 2008 at 9:50 am
I’ll always trust Al Sharpton, if only because MLK got the same treatment from the media.
Why are these people allowed to continue publishing?
August 22nd, 2008 at 9:56 am
Did National Review–a notorious place for old-fashioned grammar–really allow someone to use the word “alright” in 1965? That really looks fishy to me. I’m going to see what I can find using Lexis.
August 22nd, 2008 at 9:59 am
Just checked the full-text electronic sources, and I only have access to 1975. Could this be a transcription error? Did he get this from a hard-copy?
Just to be clear, I don’t doubt the content, because we all know that National Review didn’t take kindly to “uppity” black folk.
August 22nd, 2008 at 10:06 am
I can’t believe how the right has taken to using King to represent conservative values. I love the use of teacher’s unions as a symbol that Obama has departed from King’s values, forgetting or probably not knowing that King was in Memphis to call attention to a garbage workers strike which was led by a public sector union
August 22nd, 2008 at 10:09 am
“The central question that emerges … is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not prevail numerically? The sobering answer is Yes – the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race. It is not easy, and it is unpleasant, to adduce statistics evidencing the cultural superiority of White over Negro: but it is a fact that obtrudes, one that cannot be hidden by ever-so-busy egalitarians and anthropologists.” (w. F. Buckley, National Review, August 27, 1957).
August 22nd, 2008 at 10:11 am
Man, I’d like me a slice of the “cake of custom”, though I guess if it can be cracked maybe it’s a bit dry. And I think “Negroes with grievances” would be a great name for a rap group.
August 22nd, 2008 at 10:22 am
There’s no gainsaying the racism of many of the writers at NR in those days, including WFB himself. But it was about the time of the notorious piece excerpted in the parent post, that Garry Wills, Joan Didion, and Renata Adler began to write for the magazine. I don’t know if their hire mitigated anything, but it complicates the picture a little. Whether their employment was a genuine attempt to re-energize the magazine by engaging with moderate liberals, or whether WFB et al merely saw the writing on the wall, and knew that they had to put overt racism behind them or face utter irrelevancy, it’s hard to say.
David: supposedly Brad DeLong got his cites from behind a paywall, the password to which comes with a National Review subscription. Which is a pretty awesome marketing tactic: you have to pay if you want access to the really juicy old stuff. Sort of like at the New Republic, you have to have a paid subscription to post comments to the site (i.e., pay to flame, which most visitors to TNR mainly want to do).
August 22nd, 2008 at 10:35 am
This is a good reminder of what it means to be a conservative. It doesn’t mean to be “anti-government”, or pro small government, or to be in favor of religion or family values or whatever. God knows real conservatives have no consistency on any of these alleged “big ideas.”
What conservatism *means* is to look to the past for answers, or rather, for idols – in America, usually to two or three generations ago. So while there’s no intellectual consistency in the right attacking MLK 45 years ago and embracing him today, while still allegedly standing for the same values, the movement doesn’t have, and never has had, any intellectual or moral consistency.
It can embrace MLK now because he’s far enough in the past to be idolized and because, for a variety of reasons, he *is* idolized in popular culture, and has been for a while now. That’s all there is to it.
To me, thinking of conservatives in these terms has tremendous explanatory power. The real curveball is that they aren’t nostalgic for anything that ever actually existed — really, they’re nostalgic for the past as popular culture understands it. Which is why Reagan was such a potent figure for them: conservatism as an idea or a movement is all about being guided by an every-changing fantasy of an America that never was. Once that was the America of “separate but equal”; now it’s a fantasy of always already successful integration.
Don’t expect conservatives to critique or even engage with the past of their movement. The past for them is purely about fantasy; that’s who they are.
August 22nd, 2008 at 10:41 am
DeLong is a centrist democrat and UC Berkely. Hardly “tendentious.” The National Review archive doesn’t go back to its earliest years, no doubt because its content is even more disgraceful
August 22nd, 2008 at 10:55 am
If Barry Goldwater were alive today, he would not support John McCain for president. Shoot, if Ronald Reagan were alive today, he’d be out stumping for Barack Obama.
Go ahead, prove me wrong.
August 22nd, 2008 at 11:35 am
While NR’s writing in that era is about as deplorable as anything you can find in any outlet from the period (and that’s a strong field), I think it’s patently ridiculous to say that today’s writers for the magazine have therefore lost any right, about a half-century later to write on Civil Rights.
This kind of belief in original sin just doesn’t make sense. The people who wrote those words are pushing up the daisies. Leading lights of the Democratic party (which dominated the ‘Solid South’) said things just as bad in the 50’s and 60’s…should the Democratic Party leave it to other, younger institutions to speak on Civil Rights?
Woodrow Wilson said far worse things as a Democratic President in 1915 while he was segregating the Federal Government. Should Lyndon Johnson have figured, “Aw, shucks, Woodrow so sullied the Presidency a half-century ago that I just should keep my opinions to myself about Civil Rights, and let some other institution take the lead”?
Churchill was right: magnanimity in victory is a pearl of great price. Revel in the fact that the Conservative movement has said to Progressives in no uncertain terms “You were right, we were wrong, our policies then were abhorrent, our policies now are what your policies were then.” Those kinds of victories on such big issues are almost unheard of in politics. We won. The statute of limitations has run out on that one, Matt. No matter what our views, none of us want to be beholden to the half-century old skeletons in our political closets.
August 22nd, 2008 at 11:36 am
Those were “considerations”? Man, the quality of writing at the NR has really declined.
.
August 22nd, 2008 at 11:38 am
“Barack Obama, on the other hand, is just another politician”
Quelle horreur! A politician running for president! What has this world come to?
August 22nd, 2008 at 11:44 am
If you want to read something even funnier from this weirdo, go to Shiver’s blog and scroll down to “Pajamas Prints Damning Memo from The One’s Campaign” – in which she reprints and comments on an obvious parody of an Obama campaign memo on her blog BUT DOESN’T REALIZE IT’S A JOKE. The National Review is scraping the bottom of the barrel for black contributors. For obvious reasons.
August 22nd, 2008 at 11:45 am
The link is
http://www.kyleanneshiver.com/
August 22nd, 2008 at 11:57 am
Those kinds of victories on such big issues are almost unheard of in politics. We won. The statute of limitations has run out on that one, Matt. No matter what our views, none of us want to be beholden to the half-century old skeletons in our political closets.
The statue of limitations would have run out – if the Republican party wasn’t deeply dependent on the white supremacist vote, and The National Review wasn’t itself still complicit in racist politics.
This stuff is fair game because the conservatives do not, for the most part, actually embrace civil rights in any practical sense — they praise MLK as a safe fig leaf, to hide behind while promoting racist policies.
August 22nd, 2008 at 12:13 pm
Churchill was right: magnanimity in victory is a pearl of great price. Revel in the fact that the Conservative movement has said to Progressives in no uncertain terms “You were right, we were wrong, our policies then were abhorrent, our policies now are what your policies were then.”
This is simply false. The conservative movement has never had any kind of reconciliation with its racist past and continues to harbor closet racist sentiments today. The Dems are exempted from needing to do this b/c LBJ pushed civil rights through Congress and the Dems paid a huge political price for it. But as it currently stands, the conservative movement has no grounds appealing to the memory of MLK to criticize modern politicians.
August 22nd, 2008 at 12:44 pm
I know I always listen when mendacious, right wing hacks tell me who long dead civil rights leaders would vote for. I’m sure they’re really clicked into the pulse of the sixties black community. But isn’t it a lovely coincidence that no matter the year, candidate, or office, none of them would ever vote for the Democrat running for it? I wonder how it keeps working out that way.
thesebastards.blogspot.com
August 22nd, 2008 at 1:00 pm
The National Review is scraping the bottom of the barrel for black contributors.
The picture on her “About” page shows a blonde woman. I can understand how one would assume she is black since it’s rather audacious for a white woman to suggest that she knows how MLK would vote and 95% of black people have it wrong. At the website of the historically anti-civil rights National Review no less.
August 22nd, 2008 at 1:02 pm
“This kind of belief in original sin just doesn’t make sense. The people who wrote those words are pushing up the daisies. Leading lights of the Democratic party (which dominated the ‘Solid South’) said things just as bad in the 50’s and 60’s…should the Democratic Party leave it to other, younger institutions to speak on Civil Rights?”
The person who was editor of the magazine throughout all the period we are speaking of, William F. Buckley Jr, (and who indeed personally penned some of the material quoted) remained active in the magazine until his death…………so long ago in the ancient mists of forgotten time – i.e., this past February (6 months ago for those of you keeping track). Buckley’s hand-selected successor as editor, Rich Lowry, (who effectively has never had another job except working for Buckley in his entire life) remains editor today. Many of the people who penned this stuff for National Review are heralded, honored and lauded intellectual ancestors for the right today.
No Democrats are lauding whatever liberal or left “intellectuals” were supporting segregation in the 1950’s (not that there were many of those). Meanwhile, the Right’s currently most honored and storied journal has an exceedingly odious history on the issue.
August 22nd, 2008 at 1:26 pm
“Many of the people who penned this stuff for National Review are heralded, honored and lauded intellectual ancestors for the right today.”
And don’t forget their fawning tribute to Jesse Helms.
Shorter NR: Who cares if he was a racist? He supported the Sandanistas.
August 22nd, 2008 at 1:27 pm
That should, of course, be opposed the Sandanistas.
August 22nd, 2008 at 7:14 pm
Would Kyle-Ann be a graduate of one of those titans of modern education, Messiah College or Regent University by chance?
Perhaps she gleaned her intimate knowledge on how Martin Luther King would have voted from the Black Studies class at Bob Jones University?
I’m pretty sure these are the schools from which The National Review gets all of its new hires these days.
August 22nd, 2008 at 7:46 pm
Someone I know pointed me to this article because she knew I’ve tangled with Ms. Shiver before. Allow me to weigh in.
Do not fail to note that comments aren’t permitted at the National Review, nor at Kyle-Anne’s website. So let’s get one thing straight: Kyle-Anne isn’t brave, just brazen. (As if the world needed another Coultergeist.)
However, if you’re like me & feel it’s important that grotesqueries such as Ms. Shiver be confronted publicly, you can do so at American Thinker. I know it’ll never change her mind; she has altogether closed her accounts with reality. But I consider it serving the public good to visit such cloistered enclaves as American Thinker and pipe in another point of view now and again. I’ve personally found it quite cathartic at times, too.
Who knows? You might even find some other troglodyte you’d rather adopt.
August 22nd, 2008 at 9:50 pm
Shorter Kyle-Ann: I cannot inform you what King’s views on abortion or teacher’s unions were, or what he thought of ministers like Reverend Wright who existed in King’s time. But I do know that I would not vote for Obama; therefore neither would King do so.
August 23rd, 2008 at 7:27 am
I squandered a small part of my life reading Kyle-Anne’s home page bio.
She is definitely white and blonde, if her picture is accurate, but mysteriously refuses to divulge her educational background. She got her unique name by splicing her given name ‘Kyle’ with ‘Anne’ because Saint Anne is the mother of the “blessed-among-all-women” Virgin Mary, dontchaknow. (Surprise, she’s a religious nutbar who converted to Scalia-brand Catholicism when she was 30.)
Apparently she was finally driven over the edge by 9/11 into becoming an O’Reilly ‘culture warrior’ fighting against all that smacks of evil liberalism, since history shows it was our liberal policies in the Middle East of supporting dictators, replacing elected governments with Shahs, and supplying arms to religious maniacs that caused that tragedy in NYC seven years ago.
Here’s the bright ending paragraph of her personal hagiography:
Onward, Christian Soldiers while I flick my Bic!
Of course, she can speak for all Christians, even the dead ones — she’s got forty long years of ‘discipleship.’
August 23rd, 2008 at 9:49 am
This seems unfair. All magazines of long-standing will have some inappropriate opinions in the archives. Did you run an exhaustive search of the Atlantic’s archives before publishing articles that might be inconsistent with something the magazine ran in the 1950s? Did you think you were somehow bound by such decades-old editorial views?
August 23rd, 2008 at 12:41 pm
Marie:
The Atlantic doesn’t have an official perspective; the National Review is the organ of a certain kind of conservative view, when that organ today says to blacks and liberals, why can’t you be like MLK who was X and Y it does pay to look back and say what those people or the institution they are a part of was saying about MLK–and it isn’t pretty.
August 23rd, 2008 at 8:43 pm
8 years earlier, the National Review was rooting for the Southern racists:
WHY THE SOUTH MUST PREVAIL”, National Review 4 (August 24 1957), p. 149:
The central question that emerges — and it is not a parliamentary question or a question that is answered by merely consulting a catalogue of the rights of American citizens, born Equal — is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas where it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes — the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race….
SOURCE:Gordon H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America: Since 1945, page 185
August 23rd, 2008 at 11:53 pm
National Review now claims to speak for Martin Luther King, a man they wanted locked up? This post sums up the shameless gall of these creeps:
First Church of Free Speech
I see the neo-Nazi -er, National Review has run an article in which they claim that if he were alive today, Martin Luther King wouldn’t vote for Barack Obama. For a magazine as dedicated to white supremacy and fascism as National Review has been since the squalid rag was founded to pretend to know or care what Martin Luther King would have wanted is shameless. How shameless? Imagine if Fred “God Hates Fags” Phelps and his church had claimed to speak for Matthew Shepherd, or if neo-Nazis (or old Nazis) had claimed to speak for Anne Frank. Add them together, then cube it.
Here are some vintage quotes from National Review and its founder, William Buckley:
and
This last one was written after King was assassinated:
Talk about chutzpah!
August 24th, 2008 at 12:36 am
If only Kyle Anne had been born to hear Dr. King speak she could have understood his message. Hillary was lucky she got to talk to Dr. King as a young college student. But some people will do anything to make a buck even disgrace Dr. King if necessary. Those of us who lived to hear his speeches know the answers and those who spread lies for money will do as Kyle Anne is doing. I do feel bad for the youth who listen to lies and believe them. But that’s what adults are doing now and as long as they get paid they will say and do anything.
August 24th, 2008 at 3:37 pm
God these guys are incredible, so the question must be asked, “Why does the National Review hate America?”
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