From the Easy Chair

Remarkable People We Have Known

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 91-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161BW135

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161BW135, Remarkable People We Have Known, from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[ Rushdoony ] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 243, June the fifth, 1991.

This evening Otto Scott and I are, again, going to deal with remarkable people. For my part I am not necessarily going to deal with very fine people. On the previous two occasions when we have dealt with the subject I have considered only very fine, superior people and I shall again. But I am going to start with a man that I think about from time to time in these evil days. He was an Indian on the Indian reservation, a man who called himself a medicine man, but he was not that.

The old time medicine men—who had really disappeared—were herbalists, really. And one elderly Indian whose father and mother and grandmother had all been medicine people on a hunting trip on the reservation showed me different plants and told me of the properties of them. And in one instance he refused to discuss a plant until his son was some distance away because he said this can induce hallucinations. It is a dangerous drug.

The medicine men who were practicing were really men who indulged in various incantations and made a pretense at being medicine men were... were despised by the older ones. The one I am going to talk about was very different. He called himself a medicine man, but he was really a Satanist, I would have to say. He was a very strange person. No one liked him. Everybody respected him because they were afraid of what would happen if they did not.

And he was capable of very strange powers. For example, at a spring roundup when the cattle were being rounded up and the calves branded, someone spotted a rattler on the edge of the roundup area. This man went over, picked up the rattler, chanting and talking to it, hung it around his neck, spoke to it, but its head in his mouth and this was a western diamond back. And when one just comes out of hibernation—as was apparently the case—it is fatal because it has so much concentrated venom. And yet this man was able to do that sort of thing.

As a result people feared him. The interesting thing to me at the time was that with all the strange and demonic powers that the man had, nothing good ever came out of anything he did. He could not function normally. He lived in a log cabin with a dirt floor and the most wretched of conditions. And I think people sometimes gave him meat to eat in order to stay on the good side of him.

At the time I thought it was extremely strange. I could not account for it. I tried in this instance and a number of other instances to come up with a rationale reason why some of the things I witnessed happened. I never could come up with such a reason. And I began to realize how the power of evil is very, very real. Talking with some missionaries with experiences in Africa, I learned, too, that the encountered very obviously demonic supernatural incidents.

Outside of Christendom those things did not occur, because the power of the realm of grace, I believe, drove them out into the outer world, outer realms from civilization. But this kind of thing is reappearing. I have heard of incidents now that take place among young people who cultivate the occult which make clear that the demonic is being pursued relentlessly and with sometimes deadly consequences.

Well, Otto, it will be easy after that to come up with something much more worthwhile, perhaps, but I had to talk about this man. He has been in my mind of late, because of the... some ... some of the things I have heard.

[ Scott ] Well, there are good people and bad. They both make impressions upon us.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] My father, as I think I told you once, was raised in Venezuela and was exiled from Venezuela for taking part in an abortive revolution before World War I. And from time to time he would bring home various Venezuela exiles of dinner. And I recall—and I don't recall the man’s name—he brought home one man doctor something or another who had these glasses that fasten on the...

[ Rushdoony ] Oh, yes...

[ Scott ] ...bridge of your nose.

[ Rushdoony ] Pence nez.

[ Scott ] Yes. I have never been able to pronounce that name. A very scholarly gentle, gentle sort of man. And I remember listening to him talk during the dinner and he had been imprisoned by Juan Vincente Gomez in a prison that was located right on the gulf, right on the water’s edge at {?} which is a tropical port. And the lower dungeons were exposed to the tide and the ocean would come in at the high tide and it would sweep out again. The waves would come in and go out. And he was imprisoned in {?} which were iron manacles. They had sharp points that pressed inward around each ankle. They weighed 40 pounds each so you couldn’t move. And he was in there with another man and the other man asked him to let him have one of his glass {?} which he gave him and the other man broke it and committed suicide with it, cut his veins. And this man was in that dungeon, that cell for five years. He looked as though he belonged in a candy store. He was one of the mildest looking men you have ever seen. And he finally got out.

He was imprisoned there by Juan Vincente Gomez who was at that time the dictator of Venezuela who was maintained in office by the oil companies, especially by the Royal Dutch Shell which had the sole monopoly at that time in the country. And it was one of those things that made my father a life long enemy of the Royal Dutch Shell and the big international oil companies.

But I remember as a boy—and I don’t recall now how old I was. I was quite young. I would say maybe eight or nine. I never forgot the story because it was told so calmly in such an even tone.

And he got out and he said that came eventually to New York. He was a very wealthy man. And he had absolutely no ... no hope left in life, nothing to live for. And he said some American friends decided to take him to a football game. He had never been to an American football game. They took him to a football game and, of course, he said they had blankets and they had a flask of whiskey, brandy or whatever. And he said they introduced him to a woman, rather attractive, who was in her late 20s. And he chatted with her and discovered that she was in the same frame of mind. So he said they got married. That was the strangest turn that I remember even when I was only a boy of eight or nine being startled by the total turn which this story took.

And I never saw him again. My father never brought him home again, but I never forgot the story. And it was obvious that after the marriage he had apparently had found life worth living because there he was at the table and he was smiling and apparently well adjusted and so forth.

It is interesting, because I thought about it when you were talking about the Indian medicine man that Jan Vincente Gomez was a very, very evil man.

I have just been reading a part of an... of an essay, so-called essay by Lance Morrow in the latest Time magazine on the question of evil. And it is filled with long windy sentences and very little point. Hitler seems to be his epitome of evil on earth. Now we had ... we have Pol Pot. We have Mau Tse Tung. We have Stalin. All of whom killed a great many more people than Hitler, but, of course, not the same kind of people.

Juan Vincente Gomez was not very well known because the people he murdered were not fashionable people. They didn't attract the intellectuals of the world and the lot... no books have been written about them. But he was half Indian and half Negro. He was widely credited with telepathic powers. He could look at men and read them. Nobody ever lied to Juan Vincente Gomez and got away with it.

He slept in a different room every night. One night he had a nephew go into a different room. He told him which room to go to and assassins broke in and killed his nephew by mistake. And he died in bed with uncounted horrors behind him.

So this is a world under a curse. And I think that is what most people forget.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. It was several years back you told me not about this man, but about the prison and Gomez. And I subsequently read an article about the prison which still stands.

[ Scott ] No, they tore it down.

[ Rushdoony ] Oh, well, at the time of this article...

[ Scott ] Yes. They since tore it down.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] But Gomez was dead for three days before the celebrated it.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes, I... it may have been an old bound volume, of the Geographic, but I did read an article somewhere about that prison. And I remembered it because of your story.

Well, I would like to go on now to a number of anonymous people, people who when I was a boy were very common and I could name a number of them if I so chose. The family was once much more concerned about caring for its own than it is now. We are beginning to see signs of a revival of the family caring for its own. But it was very common place that when a father or a mother died or if both of them died, they would ask the oldest girl or the oldest boy to take over, look after the rest, see them through school and if there were a surviving parent to take care of them to their dying day. And many, many people used to do that.

I know that Dorothy’s aunt who is in her 90s was one such person. I know that I went to school with a young man, high school, who had a ... both is parents die when he was, I think, in about the eighth grade. Nowadays they would all have been carted off to some home and parceled out. But he took care of his brothers, three brothers he had. Went through high school, helped them get on their own and then went on to college and finally became a dentist.

I have known of many people like that, for example, one man was in entrusted by his dying parents with the care of his brothers and sisters. So he stayed on the farm, saw them through college and then married and settled down. He was as intelligent as any of those who went on to university if not more so, a very remarkable man. But he did his duty.

A very beautiful woman, whom I have known for many, many years was entrusted by her dying mother with the care of the father who was ailing. The father died recently, about 100 or 101. And I think for about the past 10 years, helpless. But she cared for him. Never thought there was anything unusual in what she did or that she had sacrificed herself. Things were not seen that way. The family was so important that one did those things as a Christian duty.

Such people—and I have known a number—were full of joy and peace, no self pity. I know one girl who was once one of the most vivacious and bubbly girls that I knew when I was in school who cared for a son, as spastic, and he is now in his 40s and she does it and enjoys life and doesn't feel sorry for herself and is are remarkable woman.

Now I think a great many instances of people like that could probably be cited by some of our listeners, but there was a remarkable generation of people who saw such family duties as a part of life and never for a moment indulged in self pity. And when I see what people today feel sorry about and are filled with self pity feeling life has dealt them a raw hand, I think back on people such as I have mentioned and many others and I know we have lost something.

[ Scott ] Not entirely. I know a couple who have taken care of the aged father well into his 90s and are now taking care of his widow. And also are taking care of four foster children.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And running a ranch. And you know them, too. And they don't feel sorry for themselves. They enjoy life and they are very active. And it is interesting. You ... there is a ... a sort of official let’s be sorry for ourselves fashion in the country. You know, you keep hearing sob stories all the time. I have forgotten who it was that told me when I was a boy that the nut houses are filled with people that have the same troubles as everybody else.

And I think of Joe Wright who was a seaman I knew in World War II. Joe sailed tankers, the same as I did. And we were sailing out of Galveston which he took a different ship. He was in the black gang. He was an oiler. And the Galveston is a very strange port as you probably know. They built a big canal from the city down to the gulf and there was a turnaround and you would go down this canal and then you would hit the gulf and go out into deep water. It was an artificial seaport, in other words.

He was on a T 2 tanker and the Germans were in the gulf at the time with submarines. They weren’t wasting torpedoes on anything like a tanker. they would surface and shoot you with their deck cannon. And they surfaced and shot the ship that Joe was on and, of course, it went up into flames. And he was in the engine room when it was hit which is the last place in the world where you would expect to survive. And he said they flipped a coin down there. They sent a wiper up first against his will and then the others flipped a coin to see who would go next and the fellow who won stayed and the others got a chance. They climbed up the inside ... one of the inside ventilators. And the... the deck was in flames, a sea of flames. There were flames in the water all around them. There was a little wind and every once in a while there would be a bare spot that would appear and the idea was to jump onto the bare spot and then over the rail and swim under the waves... under the flames and then hope that you could make it out into clean water alive.

Well, they all went before Joe did. He was the last to go. He was the only one that made it on the whole ship, the only man that survived and he was... he had some burns, but not too bad, not surprisingly enough some on his hands and his face. And I went to the hospital to see him and he described the whole thing to me and I said, “Well, all right. When do you think you will get out?”

And he said, “Well, probably a couple of weeks they tell me.”

I have forgotten what they did at the time for those kind of injuries. And I said, “What are you going to do?”

Well, he said, “I will have to ship, because my... my shore time is already used up. It was used up when I got on to this vessel.” So he said, “The day I get out I have to ship again.”

I said, “Are you going to ship tankers, Joe?”

He said, “Oh, yes.”

And he did. And he was very calm about it and there was no melodramatics. I always wonder. The play rights who have everybody going through all these things went ... do they ever see anything? Do they ever actually come up against people who have actually been in terrible situations because most of the time they are voiceless. They have nothing to say. A modern... I remember the San Francisco earthquake when they went over to people, “How do you feel?”

Well how do you suppose the felt. They felt apprehensive. So what? I mean, what did they see? That is really the story and what did they do?

Well, I remember Joe, though, as an example of quiet courage.

[ Rushdoony ] You are right that there are many people such as I described doing things in a different way. John Upton of our staff, of course, right now is bringing over orphans from Romania who are in one way or another handicapped. And there are no lack of wonderful people ready to take these children into their homes.

One that was featured repeatedly on television whom he brought over the blind girl Anna.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] Is now happily located with a family in Michigan, a very attractive couple. I have seen their picture on television who have three or four other such children and are providing them with a wonderful home.

[ Scott ] What a paradox.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] That in a country that has had 26 million abortions there are people willing to do this.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. We are seeing a polarization in our culture between the kinds of people we have. No vast realm of gray, but black and white.

[ Scott ] Getting more sharp.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Yes.

Well, I would like to go on now to a minister I knew in the 30s, the reverend Clyde Smith. He was a remarkable man and I was very partial to him and he was thoroughly good to me. Now the curious thing about Clyde Smith was that he was something of a modernist. And yet he felt the happiest among men who had an orthodox faith. He would admit candidly that there is a lot I can’t believe. But I respect the people who believe. And so he was especially helpful to orthodox men. He was a man who had a very curious historical interest in Jose Rosale, the great hero of Philippine independence in the era of the Spaniards. And he delighted in opportunities to give a lecture on Jose Rosale.

Well, one of the things that I liked about Clyde Smith, before he came to California, much earlier, he had been a pastor in a rather wealthy congregation in the Chicago area. And the time had come for a new and a larger building and the pledges were taken by members and brought in and one of the very wealthiest men in the church, which was made up of wealthy men had given a check for 5000 and Clyde Smith took and returned the check to the man and said, “I can’t accept it.”

And the man said, “Why?”

Because, he said, “I think it is insulting to God. This is like putting a plate in the penny for you and I think it is contemptible.”

Well, the man cussed him out thoroughly, told him to get out and Clyde Smith said, “Not before I tell you what your responsibilities are under God. And you are going to listen to me.” And so he ticked him off in no uncertain terms and said, “You are not going to treat Jesus Christ and his Church with contempt. And that 5000 check was contemptuous whether you knew it or not. You were simply being a part of it because you are in the church as a matter of public relations.”

And he said it was a stormy afternoon, but before it was over the man was a Christian, a thoroughly changed man who wrote out a huge check and thanked Clyde Smith and he said he was his best friend thereafter.

[ Scott ] You write that story and have it published. It will be picked up by every minister in the United States.

We had a family friend and neighbor named David Cassidy. And Mr. Cassidy was a major in World War I and was an executive in the Burland Printing Company in New York which later became involved in a rather spectacular scandal, but Dave was in New York, Irish politician. Although he was in the printing business, he used his political contacts to get contracts and business. And a very good friend, a member of Tammany hall which he called the wigwam. And when I went back to New York after being away for three years as a runaway, I wanted to get back... I wanted to get a job in New York journalism, but my country experience wasn’t very impressive.

Mr. Cassidy put me through several different tests. He didn’t say they were tests. He just asked me if I was willing to do anything, any work at all. And I said yes I was. So he sent me to the paper handlers union. And they have an office or one of their offices was in Park Row in the very top, almost the attic sort of a... of a large office building. You got to the end of the elevator. You went up a flight of stairs. Then you went into a little foyer where there was a man behind a cage, a regular old fashioned union style.

And I said, “Mr. Cassidy sent me.”

And he said, “Ok, go on in.”

And there was a bunch of tables and men playing cards and so forth. And I was dispatched to the docks and on the docks they had the paper handlers union take the big roles of newsprint that come off the vessel. These longshoremen take it off the vessel and put it on the dock. The paper handlers come with the hand truck and balance one of these roles on a hand truck and wheel it into a warehouse and stack it up against the wall. They weigh about 2200 to 2600 pounds each.

So balancing those on a hand truck was a fairly delicate matter. If you did the wrong thing they would pick you up with a knife and fork and, you know, that would be the end of you. But I wobbled my way through for an hour or so while the foreman watched me and finally the foreman said, “Hey, kid, that is enough.” He said, “Go sit down. We will get a horse. Hey, Joe...”

And Joe came over and had biceps as large as my thighs and he said, “Pick up the hand truck and go on and so forth.”

So I appeared very day for two or three days after that at more or less the same routine and then I got a call from Mr. Cassidy. And Mr. Cassidy said, “I have another job for you, something maybe a little bit better.”

The second job was in a press room working as a fly boy. They don’t have them anymore, I am sure. But in those days a big rotary press would put out newsprint every 51... every 50th would have, say, a little projection so that you could keep the count. You would have a little lead metal table. You would put a piece of string on the metal table. You would pick up the newspapers from the print, from the press and take it over and stack them in 100s or 150 or whatever, tie them, carry them over, stack then against the wall, fly back to the table, put a piece of string back on the table and catch the next one before it fell off the press. That was what they call flying. And you did that for eight hours beginning at four in the afternoon and ending at midnight and your second day shift began one minute after midnight until eight in the morning. So you did it for 16 hours.

And you did double shift and you put in 40 hours a week. And I flew for that place. The printed {?} which was in {?} which was Mussolini’s organ in the United States and it was the... the printing company was located in Hell’s Kitchen in the Italian district and when I got off sometimes at midnight I remember that you would go from about 12th avenue or so. You might hear a voice saying, “Hey, have you got a match?”

And your best thing was to keep walking. The next block there were street walkers and then a couple of blocks after that there was the New Yorker and the hotel bar at the New Yorker where they charged 15 cents for a glass of beer to keep the rabble out.

Well I did that for several months and then I got another call from Mr. Cassidy and the third time around he sent me to the United Features Syndicate which as the writing arm of the United Press and I got through that and I went to work where I wanted to go. But first I had to be proven. And I remember that about the time I went to work for United Press I felt that I was going to get a pretty good salary and so forth. So I had lunch with Mr. Cassidy. I asked him to lend me some money. And he did. He lent me, I don’t remember, a couple of hundred dollars or whatever it was.

And several months after that I accumulated enough money to pay him back and I invited him to lunch in the same place that he had taken me, which was a rather fancy place. And he was very pleased and he came. We had nice conversation. We had lunch and I took the money out and gave it to him and said, “Thank you very much.”

He said, “What is this?”

I said, “It is the money you lent me.”

He said, “I don’t want that.” And he pushed it back toward me.

And I said, “Well what will I do?”

He said, “Pass it on.” And it was like a big light dawning. It was the first time I realized that you are supposed to pass it on. I have never forgot it. Never forgot Mr. Cassidy.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, I am going to deal now with a wasted life. I will only refer to this man who has been dead perhaps 40 years or more except by his nickname, woof, woof.

[ Scott ] Great name.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. He was a very brilliant man and a perpetual student. Early in the century he had received a bequest from a relative that would enable him to live comfortably as long as he was a student. So when he died the funds were to go to a charity. And he decided, therefore, not only to complete his studies in the graduate work he had planned, to go on studying and live on this income.

Well, then along came World War I and the inflation of the 20s and things never returned to what they were in the early years of this century when 20 dollars a month was a good paycheck of a working man, only it wasn’t in check form. It was one 20 dollar gold piece.

So woof, woof found that after about 20 years or 30 years as a student, in fact, more, he no longer was making as much, but he hated to give up, so he reduced his lifestyle. He had never married and he continued going from one department to another taking all their courses and then making the rounds again if any new courses were given.

I recall a math professor who was also a dean as I also... as I recall it, telling another professor whom I knew that he was getting a new course and he dreaded the presence of woof, woof, because he said, “That man knows more math than the whole department.”

He was called woof, woof because he would, in a sense, bark and growl at the people, very withdrawn.

The curious fact is that with time his limited way of life became a habit to woof, woof. He lived meagerly. In fact, he accumulated a number of checks, because, like me, he became a reader, that is a grader or examination papers. He enjoyed doing that.

[ Scott ] This was all at Berkeley.

[ Rushdoony ] All at Berkeley. And he would put the checks in a dresser drawer and forget about them. So the president of the university had to go and beg him to cash the checks because it was messing up their books.

[ Scott ] The university was in charge of the funds.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ... because...

[ Rushdoony ] No, no. His pay as a reader.

[ Scott ] Oh, his pay as a reader.

[ Rushdoony ] Not his income from the...

[ Scott ] Oh, I see.

[ Rushdoony ] From the trust.

[ Scott ] I see...

[ Rushdoony ] I would talk to woof, woof occasionally and it he liked to he could be very kindly and courteous, had a remarkable mind. And that is why I have always felt badly when I recall woof, woof because here was a remarkable but wasted mind. Totally wasted.

[ Scott ] Welfare.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Welfare ruined him.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Isn’t that interesting? You run into very interesting people.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] I ran into an editor in a small newspaper in Virginia, George Bartley Lockhart. Mr. Lockhart was very courteous, called you mister and he gave me a lesson in editing once. He would always ask you to make changes in your copy and he was very tactful. He would say that he liked this and that and he would get you to feeling pretty good and then he would say that there is a section here which perhaps you could strengthen. If you... if you don’t mind, would you look at it again, see what you could do with it?

And it was only until you got back to the type writer you realized that you would have to rewrite the whole damn thing. But he made you feel very good.

And I recall occasionally he would insert something, but very minor, and he would always ask your permission. One day he asked my permission to put something in, some phrase or another and I said, “Oh, go right ahead.” I said, “Why... why ask?”

Well, he said, “If every... everyone has a style in their speech and in their writing.” And he said, “a natural rhythm.” And, he said, “if somebody inserts a foreign phrase,” he said, “that is sort of like a little flat wheel. And if enough foreign phrases are inserted by other hands,” he said, “after a while they ... the copy will not ride any longer. I will be bumpy and the reader will not know what happened, but something is wrong subliminally. So now you know what is wrong with business writing which many people take part in it and so forth.”’

But the thing that I remember Mr. Lockhart most for was that he ... he had another side. He could be very severe and I went into his office on one occasion. The door, of course, was always open and he had his back to me, to the door. He had his telephone was on the windowsill behind him and he swung around in his chair and he was on the phone and he was very angry with somebody. I forgot what he said, but there was no mistaking the way that phone went... the tone of voice and the way that he slammed the phone down. And then he swung around in the chair and I braced myself for an angry face and in that swing his expression completely changed and he turned a completely calm face to me and said, “What can I do for you?”

I never saw such perfect control in my life. I had never realized that it was possible. And it was a great lesson.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, when I was on the Indian reservation I came to know very well Sunday school missionary who covered the whole state of Nevada. He would go from one isolated ranch to another to little mining camps, to sleepy towns that had been once great mining camps and were now on the way to being a ghost town. And where there were enough people for the service or leave material at an isolated ranch house for them to teach their children.

He had a state wide influence politically as a result, living in Carson City, the capital. He knew what was going on. And the politicians in Carson City detested him.

[ Scott ] Why?

[ Rushdoony ] Because every shady deal they pulled in the state capital Adam Shriver knew about. His wife stayed there all the time. And as he would travel and people would ask him what is happening Carson City, he would tell them. And he could make or break some people when it came time to run for office.

But Adam began in the days, oh, years and years earlier before the Model T and then with the Model T carrying a sleeping bag, sleeping wherever he could and he had some interesting experiences.

For example he went once to this newly established mining camp and he stopped at a bar and asked if there were a place I town with a piano and room enough for a service. He would like to have a service the next morning. This was a Saturday evening. And the bartender pointed him across the street. These were all jerrybuilt places. And when he went across these street and knocked and was ushered in, he knew immediately he was in a house of prostitution. All the girls presented themselves at once. And he calmly introduced himself as the reverend Adam Shriver. He understood they had a piano and he wanted to hold a service the next morning.

And the woman who ran the house was tickled by the whole idea so she said yes. And, of course, every miner had to come to see how this preacher performed in such a setting. And Adam knew they would.

So he had almost every person who was not in the shaft right there crowded into that little house and standing in the doorway to hear him. And he gained a lot of respect from that incident and began to hold services regularly in that town with some remarkable results.

He had a picture. It was very interesting. It was from one mining camp and this went back before World War I and it showed a wash tub on top of a frame of posts with holes punched in it and another wash tub at the bottom to catch the water. It was the only place in this mining camp in an area where the annual rainfall was two inches.

A man would go up into the mountains to a spring and bring the water down. And the first shower was 20 dollars. Now before the war that was big money.

[ Scott ] Yes. It was week’s pay.

[ Rushdoony ] And a month’s pay in the cities like San Francisco and most of California. And then the water in the tub below was picked up and put into buckets to be reused for the second shower which was 19.50. The third was 19 and so on to the last shower which was 50 cents and then they began again with fresh water.

[ Scott ] Hard times.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. I always was tickled by that photograph he took.

[ Scott ] Well I have one individual that I ran into in recent years, Leopold Tiermond.

[ Rushdoony ] Oh, yes.

[ Scott ] Leopold Tiermond was on the staff of the New Yorker and he began to his essays began to appear there fairly regularly and it is an unusual name and it stuck in my mind. And finally he had enough essays to make a book. And he called the book The Rosa M. Luxembourg Contraceptive Cooperative.

[ Rushdoony ] I remember it vividly.

[ Scott ] Because that was the name of a birth control clinic in Warsaw. Now reading the essays individually as they appeared in the publication in a magazine, you wouldn’t be aware of what he was really doing, but when they were put together he drew a very subtle, but nevertheless, definite parallel between the commissars in Warsaw and the so called New York intellectuals. And they were, in fact, the same kind of people. And Raoul Fleishmann at that time owned the New Yorker. He has since sold it, but he was the sole owner. He never interfered with any of the editorial, but he always looked at the galleys. He was interested in what publication would do. And the editor, Sean, had signed a contract to serialize Tiermond’s essays. And it paid him and that was a big coup. Only John Hersey before that been serialized in the New Yorker and this was a tremendous thing. He was going to make Leopold, Leopold in this country. There as no question about it. He had, by the way, been a very famous novelist in Poland.

He was a Jew. He had been in prison by the Nazis and had survived and was then imprisoned by the Communists and survived. And he got out of Poland, got to Paris, came to the United States at the ...under the auspices of the state department. He was a very little man physically, a very big man in other ways. He was a great jazz aficionado which many Europeans are, especially in Warsaw and Paris. He asked to be taken to New Orleans. He fell in love with New Orleans and he fell in love with the United States. So he landed in New York and he was in the New Yorker and he was on the verge of this great American success when Raoul Fleischman stopped the publication of his essays in book form totally.

And he said, “Well, of course,” he said, “with an insult like that,” he said, “I resigned.” But he said, “The strange thing was,” he said, “in the free America was that suddenly all doors closed.” All the doors in New York closed. And it was at that point that John Howard of Rockford Institute called upon him and Leopold told him the story and Howard said, “What can I do for you?”

And he said, “You could give me a platform.”

So Howard funded what they call the chronicles of culture and it began, by the way, with a .... an outline that I provided. I suggested that it be on ordinary newsprint, that it would be very austere, aimed at an academic audience with a minimum of illustrations, in fact, none. And that it devote itself mainly to dissecting what was coming out of the liberal camp in the name of literature, to beware of this and to ride that and so forth and so on. And that was the form in which it first appeared.

And Leopold, as you probably know, died of a heart attack two or three or four years ago. I have forgotten now how many. He was on the way to turning Chronicles into an international intellectual publication of considerable merit. He had a remarkable grasp of the written English language, although he had very heavily accented English because Polish into English is very difficult. And he had a terrible temper, which that, I suppose, goes with the trade. He showed me the first few chapters of a novel and it was in the straight Polish style. It was a novel in which nothing happened, nothing. Nothing happened the first chapter. Well, you forgive him that, but nothing happened in the second either. And it was obvious that nothing was ever going to happen. It was just going to go on this way.

And I said, “Leopold, this is impossible.”

Well, I thought he was going to strike me. But he was a wonderful example of great courage.

I asked him at one point how he happened to allow himself to get caught in Warsaw by the war, because I said I was certainly a long way from the war in New York at the time and I knew it was going to happen. We all knew it was going to happen. I bet 100 dollars it would happen. On September the first, two months earlier.

Oh, he said, “I knew it was going to happen, too.”

Well, I said, he said, I said, “Where were you?” I said, “Well, why did you go to Warsaw?”

He said, “To see my father.” He said, “I knew there was going to be war and I wasn’t sure if he or I would survive it.” So he wanted to see him.

Hard to forget a man like that.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, our time is nearly up and there were a couple of other things that I wanted to cover, but perhaps on some future occasion we can return to this basic subject of memorable and remarkable people.

We have more of them around than we recognize and often they are not well known, but are very superior, very remarkable people.

Well thank you all for listening and God bless you.

[ Voice ] Authorized by the Chalcedon Foundation. Archived by the Mount Olive Tape Library. Digitized by ChristRules.com.