Profound Questions and Answers

Getting Good Men to Run for Office

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels, and Sermons

Lesson: 5-24

Genre: Talk

Track: 5

Dictation Name: RR207H15

Location/Venue:

Year:

Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] I found them very, very receptive, because I think most of them who are not on the left are very much shaken by what they see, they are getting a staggering attack from their faculty members and from their students. I found them exceedingly receptive, except where it was a church group; and then it was nothing but a headache. The worst experience I had was before a group that was supposedly evangelical. Every other experience was very favorable, and I had been unwilling to speak before such a group, because I know from experience what they are like, that the so called evangelical student groups on campuses are as anti Christian as can be, by and large. So there is no real witness on the campuses.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Well, most of these so called evangelical groups on the campuses, and these are ones that claim to be good, Bible believing Christians and so on, and one of the things they are bent on doing is making the Bible palatable to the students. So, they immediately begin by saying: “Well, you can believe in the Bible and in evolution,” and: “We will walk around these passages that are difficult,” and so on and so forth, so they tone down the Bible thoroughly. And their attitude is: “We are going to have our cake and eat it too.” Now you can talk to someone who has decided in favor of the opposition, you know where he stands and he knows where you stand, so there is some possibility of arguing, you are arguing in terms of positions; you can attack his and defend yours. But someone who is supposedly a Christian and yet at the same time is making his peace with modern education and modern politics and everything else, is going to be just angry and resentful and insulting if you tell him that there can be no such peace, that there has to be a division, and such people just become insulted, so that you find that finally when you are through speaking and they listened with just ill-concealed hostility, in the question period they are all shouting at you because they are so angry! You have confronted them with the fact they cannot be a Christian and profess to believe what they do. And this they cannot tolerate.

They want to say that everybody in the university is a good guy, and Washington is full of good, guys, and: “Why do we have to quarrel? We can be socialists and we can be good Christians, and we can believe in evolution and we can be good Christians, because you can still believe the Bible as being the infallible word of God and read evolution into it.” And so on and so forth. These are the people that you cannot deal with; you might as well write them off. As I say, I make it a policy to refuse speaking engagements with such groups, and I took this one just as a favor to someone, and it proved to him I was right.

Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] No.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, Thomas Boston was the Scottish divine who wrote the Fourfold State of Man, the state of innocence, the state of sin, the state of grace, and the state of glory. And it is an excellent description of man in these states. There is a beautiful passage in Boston, I wish I could recall it verbatim, but he speaks of these Christians who profess the faith but have compromised at every point, and he says they are like Sampson with his hair shorn and his power gone, but not knowing it. They stand up and feel that: “I have the faith that will conquer!” They don’t realize they are totally without strength and without God’s support.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Right, and the millions that Christians have spent the last few years studying the enemy and what the enemy is doing. This is silly, documenting it endlessly, reams and reams and reams of stuff. Well, we know what the enemy is going to do, they are going to have total planning, total socialism, total control. Alright. What more do you need to know? Now what are we going to do, that is the question. And fighting them isn’t enough, we have got to start constructing something ourselves. Free schools, Christian schools. Free institutions of various sorts. This is the only way to do it. We have got to start building the institutions of liberty and training people up in it, but if you are going to spend all your time watching what the opposition is doing, you are in for a bad time. I know groups of conservatives, in fact one of the reasons why it was a pleasure to leave Northern California was that almost all but a handful of conservatives there were swallowed up in this sort of thing; their biggest pleasure in life was documenting what the opposition is doing, and if the opposition has done something especially terrible, oh this is wonderful, they are going to be the first to come out with a report on it. And I think their greatest day will come when they can get up and report: “We are the first to tell you, they have taken over Washington! We have got a beat, a scoop on this.” They will be happy then.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Exactly, yes. Well, one more and our time…

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Free schools, schools that are controlled neither by church nor state.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] No, schools that are not under the church or the state.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] The land of the free is where your money buys it and your money kills it, and a free school is one that you control with your money, and no church keeps it alive and no state keeps it alive, but your tuition check. That is a free school.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, yes. We need free schools. We need free churches. We need also free business that will not say: “I want a government contract.” And today most of our big business is socialist business, and one of the silliest things I have seen lately was all the criticism by conservatives on the airline strike, as though the unions were to blame. Well, just look at the list of board members on these airlines if you want to find a collection of socialists. Somebody told me recently that one of these airlines had a find conservative president, and we were flying on this particular airline, and I picked up their paper and went down the board members; and guess who was one of the first names I saw? Pierre Salinger. Well, in this airline strike those poor machinists, some of them, were not making as much as our Los Angeles garbage men, because the machinists have one color and the garbage men another color, and a lot of conservatives were saying that because these men were union members they were in the wrong, the government should do something about it.

Alright, we need free business; then we need and we are a long ways from it, free private associations, charitable and otherwise, and our charity today is increasingly dependent upon government, and our private associations are dependent upon taxes. Where for example, do many of your religious groups in the poorer sections get their money? From the Federal government. Where does your chamber of commerce get its money? From taxes. The chambers of commerce increasingly depend upon tax support to maintain themselves.

Now you can go down the line in every area of life, and they are socialistic. They are not free agencies any longer, that is why they are not expressing anything that stands for freedom. We need free agriculture, very definitely. Well… Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Isaiah said that when a society reaches a point of corruption, wise men will not serve; and he also characterized such a society as one in which women and children rule over men, and we see that today too, because in most homes the children rule the roost, and in many marriages the women wear the pants. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Well, the characteristic sin of man as he rebels against God is to refuse to meet his responsibility, which is to exercise dominion under God. So that men rebel against God by evading responsibility, but women’s responsibility is to be under dominion, and her rebellion is to assume authority that is not hers; so each is sinning in a particular way. Now when Adam and Eve fell, Adam’s sin was that he wasn’t ready to assume responsibility, but Eve’s was that she wanted to be as God, to assume responsibility, she took the leadership. He should have been exercising authority at that point. And of course you see that today in church life in that in most churches the men are in the minority, they don’t want any responsibility, and the women are in the majority and they are trying to take over the church and tell the pastor exactly what he should do, and that is no joke. That is one of the hardest parts of the ministry today, the fact that many women, the wrong sort, are just trying to run the church.

So you see, each sins in his and her way.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Well, I think the men should be compelled to take their responsibility. Now, one of the ways… you see, our law has progressively gone downhill in this respect. Now it used to be that it was a part of Christian law and order that a man couldn’t walk away from his responsibility, because he was the responsible creature. So what happened if he had an affair and a child was born? He got the child. Well, you can see what that did to anything. It wasn’t the girls responsibility, she wasn’t left stuck with the child. Now, what that kind of law immediately did was two things; first, the girl thought twice about any affair because she was going to lose the child, it belonged to the man; and the man thought twice about it because he couldn’t walk away, he had to take that child to his home and explain it to his wife. You know, that put a damper on things.

Now we put a premium on it you see, because we enable the man to discharge it, to walk away from his responsibilities. So we have created a society in which responsibility has been placed in the wrong area. Now if we had Godly law and order, men would not be permitted to walk away from their responsibilities, and the courts wouldn’t sustain them in it.

Well, that’s just one instance of many.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Well, let me tell you what one of the finest conservatives, political scientists in this country who was teaching at the time at Columbia had to say- he said it would lead to socialism to give women the vote. Why? Because he said: “The great work in our society with women has been this: Women have organized into clubs and associations and various activities, and what have they done? They have taken over the works of mercy in every community, so that they make sure that the human side of things is ministered to. Wherever there is any kind of charity, they are there.” And he said: “Give women the vote and they will want to see through voting the same thing accomplished.” So he said: “We will get socialism very quickly, now that the women are demanding and will soon get the vote.” Now he wrote that about 1920. What has happened to welfare since then?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, right, and you have women’s groups all over the country, trying to get more and more welfare, organized. They are the shock troops of socialism, the women’s clubs, league of women voters, what you will. Name them. They are the shock troops of socialism.

Now, I am not saying that you women should not vote, because since women do have the vote today your vote is important in counteracting this thing. But basically the Biblical conception of society is not atomistic, not individualistic, but in terms of the family, so that the vote is by the family. If there isn’t a man in the household, if the woman is a widower, she should have the vote, she is then functioning as head of the household. But the basic unit should not be the individual but the family, and I do not believe that single men should have the right to vote any more than I believe that men without property should vote in the counties where the property is at stake, why? The single man has no stake in the future, and when you are voting you are voting in terms of the future, and what does the single man who is a drifter care? He is here today, gone tomorrow, he is not concerned about the future, why should he vote? Why should he?

The basic unit in terms of Biblical law is the family, and no one could hold office in Biblical times unless they were married; they were not regarded as a responsible man without that, and I think that is a good principle. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, yes, what has happened is that first we have given the vote to women, so that their natural impulse towards charity is now channeled into voting, so it has a short-range purpose. We have given the vote to people without land to vote taxes against people with land, so that again they are thinking in terms of short range interests, ‘what can I get today.’ We have given the vote to people who are not married, who do not have families, again the short range purpose is in sight. So instead of having the vote as it was intended to when this country was established, be determined by the long range interests of family life, now because it is atomistic it is in terms of the short-range interest, what can I get out of things today; what is in it for me? And as a result you have the kind of situation we have. People are voting their bellies. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] I should say then that those people have no right to vote in the county election; Federal and State, yes, but in a county election where property is at stake they should not vote. Because it makes a difference how you vote on bond issues and the like, and on men for office, if you have no property that can be taxed. This makes all the difference in the world. It is the same principle as saying that atheists have a right to vote in the church, and the Democrats can vote in any Republican meeting and the Republicans in any Democratic meeting. It’s the principle of confusion, of anarchy.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Right.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Women suffrage began of course among these socialists and the radicals of the last century, they were the ones who began the agitation for it, in the name of freeing women, but actually for the purpose of promoting a socialistic world.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, right, and I think it is significant by the way to realize, I just discovered this recently, Karl Marx and the Communist Manifesto, and Frederick Engels in another document both define democracy, that was over a 100 years ago, as communism.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, he speaks of democracy there and equates it with communism. Now, when we speak of the home and the man’s authority, this is not in the Victorian sense, because the Victorian era was not Christian, it was actually very definitely indifferent to Christianity and agnostic. But when you go back for example to the old American homes, go back to the colonial period for example, a woman had a very responsible role. The Yankee ship captains would be gone for example, three years on a trading voyage or on a whaling ship in the China seas or in the South Pacific, and during that time they could be confident that their wife was managing everything, because she was capable, and if the man who took the ship was a trader say in Boston or in New York and had a business there, he left in the confidence that his wife had everything in hand and managed the entire business during his absence. In other words, he was indeed a king, but she was the prime minister, not a flunkey.

In the Victorian home the idea was that the woman was a luxury, and this is not the Biblical idea, she is a helpmeet, but the Victorian idea was that she was to be a luxury. And so they deliberately made the woman a luxury, accentuated in every way her helplessness. For example, the hourglass shape and the corseting that it required made the woman fairly helpless, and that was the idea, she was above any practical purpose. This too was the purpose of the hoop skirt; how can you work with a hoop skirt, you can’t even get near the sink. And this again was the idea, to emphasize that you were absolutely useless, and this is as alien from the Biblical perspective as one can imagine. And in Proverbs 31 when it describes the wife whose price is far above rubies, what it describes is a woman who runs the entire household, the business, the farms, and everything that her husband can become a counselor and sit at the gates, because that is what it meant to sit at the gates, to be a member of the city council or town council, in the confidence that all the enterprises are being beautifully managed by her.

Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Jesus doesn’t fit into these patterns because He is the law giver, and He is the Lord. So because He was very God of very God as well as very man of very man, therefore we cannot expect Him to be exactly like us. But the disciples were all married men, and we know that Paul was a widower because he could not have been on the Sanhedrin otherwise, and he says: “I gave my vote against Stephen” describing his conduct before he was a Christian. But his wife was not living at the time apparently because he speaks of the others travelling from place to place, the apostles as missionaries, with their wives; but he said: ‘I don’t burden any church with the expense of a wife, let alone me, I am supporting myself.’

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] It is becoming increasingly difficult to vote, and I think you have experience what many of us have, at many points in the ballot we simply skip over because it is morally impossible to vote, and when that stage is reached all we can do is to hope and pray that there will either be a judgement or a moral reawakening so that the current can be reversed. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] I don’t know, but I do know that there is an increasing cynicism on the part of most people with regard to the men running for office, and justifiably so. Because we find increasingly the same kind of talk coming from every quarter, it is just the last few days that president Johnson said for example that it was time to end the Cold War, it belonged to a past generation, and so we should be at peace with the communists, why fight old quarrels? And almost at the same time, Mr. Nixon was saying that it was high time that we made peace with Red China, that there was no reason for a quarrel with them. Now when you begin to hear the same kind of a song on both sides of the fence, you begin to lose any faith in the political process. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Exactly, we have to work knowing that our labor, because we labor in the Lord, is never in vain. In other words everything we do according to Romans 8:28, the Lord makes to work together for good. But the reverse of that is that everything that everyone does outside of God, God makes to work together for evil, so that we cannot lose. Our effort when it is done in the name of God and in faithfulness to Him adds up to something, so that feeble though our effort seems as against that of the opposition, when we faithfully discharge our duty it is going to add up to something. We don’t know how, but the duties are ours, the results are in the hands of God, and He assures us that they will add up to something.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] I think one of the things that is most instructive in this area is the experience of the Roman empire. When the Empire came along people were ready to see it replace the Republic, because voting had become a farce. Everyone they voted in was exactly like everyone else, and so what was the sense to voting? And of course what happened then with the empire was that everyone who gained position in the empire was just as bad or usually a little worse than someone else before him, and I think on Emperor really revealed the absurdity and the insanity of the whole thing, he was the mad emperor Caligula, and with all these corrupt and degenerate politicians coming around them, and he was as bad as any of them but he was insane, which was an advantage in those days. He played a good joke on the empire. They were applying for one of the highest offices under the emperor, and he named his horse to the office, he thought his horse was the better candidate.

I think one of the most amazing and most wonderful things about the beginnings of this country was this: those men who came over and started building their homes in New England were as helpless as anyone could be. They didn’t have a carpenter in the batch, they didn’t know how to build homes, the homes they built were like the western corrals; have you seen them, when they drive a couple of boards in the ground and then weave the willows, the loose branches among them? That is what they did. They just stuck those branches down between these two stakes they pounded in the ground, and then daubed it with mud to keep the wind from whistling through; and so they were very flimsy homes, they were catching fire and burning to the ground all the time, and this is how they lived for quite a while. And yet in all of that they were keeping diaries and revealing their confidence, that they were building a new civilization, a Christian civilization. And they were keeping a full record, and that is why we know so much about them, because they knew future generations were going to look back and say: “There were the beginnings of a great and marvelous civilization.”

Well, here they faced hostile Indians, all kind of trouble from England, all kinds of sickness, their own utter inability because they were just a group of Christians who were city folk who had never had any experience, even with the English countryside where everything was as neat as a pin. And yet they had that confidence. They knew that in the face of all the frustrations, and time and time again it seemed as though they were going to be wiped out, the French navy heading for them and they were a handful, and the French navy was going to take over and drive out the English, but they had that confidence, that faith; the future was theirs under God because they were working in terms of Him. Well, I think things look so much brighter and easier for us, I think God will hold us guilty if we don’t have the kind of faith they did, and even greater confidence in the future, the future is ours under God.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Oh yes, they were not young.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes. (laughter) Yes, you had a question?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Right, but He did do this, and I am glad you brought up the question. He did not begin His ministry until approximately 30. We are not told what happened in the years between the time He was twelve years of age, the visit to the temple, and the time He begins His ministry and is hailed by John the Baptist. Those years are left a blank. But I think we can almost certainly say what happened, because Joseph is on the scene when they are at the temple, Joseph is no longer on the scene when He has begun His ministry. What has happened? Joseph has died, somewhere along the way. Now what was any eldest son’s responsibility in a home where the father was dead? Well, it was to provide for the family. So I think we can safely assume this fact, that our Lord became head of the household on Joseph’s death, and worked, provided for the family, until the other sons were old enough to assume the responsibility and had married and provided a home for their mother, and then he began His ministry. Because we are told that He at all points kept the law, and this was one of the requirements of the law, so that I think we can safely assume that this is what He did during those years.

Of course the occultists and others have all kinds of nonsense at this point about the hidden years of Jesus, and supposedly he was in Tibet and in India learning from secret masters and so on and so forth, all of which is the most fantastic kind of rubbish. We can I think, fairly safely assume that because Joseph is not on the scene He kept the law, which meant that He provided for His mother, His brothers and sisters, until one of them married and provided a home for Mary. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Very good question. Now the New Testament has very little of that, the New Testament by and large is very plain spoken so that anyone can read and understand. The books of the prophets have a great deal of this symbolic presentation, which to the modern mind is often very difficult. Now of course you have some of this in the parables. The reason for it is this; first of all this was a natural mode of expression then. We have different ways of expressing ourselves at different times, and we have different symbols and expressions whereby we shortcut a great many things, for example if you tell somebody: “Get off my back.” They know immediately what you mean, but if you were to say the same thing without that expression, you would have to say it with a great many other words. Now, ‘get off my back’ if you translate that literally for example into say Japanese or Chinese would be very difficult for anyone to understand. And so it would be with a great many expressions, and anyone who has ever been among the people as I have who come into this country as immigrants and have learned English, you realize how many expressions we use that way, and how bewildering they are to any foreigner; he is continually misunderstanding things completely because our speech is so idiomatic, and we use all these expressions day after day without realizing that if they are translated into another language they are incomprehensible.

Now, these idioms and expressions are especially heavily used by the prophets. This made the prophets most understandable in their day, so that, say for the Hebrews of Zechariahs time, the easiest part of scripture to understand was the prophets, it was so idiomatic. But for us because we are hundreds and hundreds of years away from them, the idioms are strange to us, and so we have to study them in order to comprehend them. Does that help explain it?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Well…

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, well no, if you read over and over again, little by little this does become comprehensible because it becomes your language. Now, for a time, for example, when the King James Bible was first translated all these idioms became a part of the English language. Now we have been drifting away for over a century from these Biblical expressions and idioms, and so they are no longer familiar to us, but if say you had talked to someone in England in the year 1670 or 1650, they would have had no trouble understanding, because these idioms had become a part of their language.

There is an illustration I sometimes used, I am told it is not the most dignified one but it always tickles me, some years ago when I was in college I was invited by some friends to go to San Francisco Opera house for a concert and to sit in their box, and at the time I was introduced, another guest who was there, and her name was Mrs. Stevenson I recall. And she was told my name and she had quite a bit of difficulty pronouncing it and remembering it, it sounded very foreign to her and she was sitting next to me. So, she began to be a little fidgety as the concert went on, it was mostly Bach and she was not too partial to Bach, which I am. So she was a little restless, so she apologized to me and said: “I’ve got ants in my pants tonight.” Then she thought that: “Maybe this is a foreign student, and maybe he doesn’t realize what I’ve said,” so she started to explain to me that it wasn’t to be taken literally, that it was an expression, and the more she explained the more ridiculous it got, and I kept a straight face because I was enjoying it, and everybody started to laugh before she got too far along with it; but it got to be fantastic, because how was she going to explain that to someone, say, whom she presumed to be foreign? Now that’s the way it is with a lot of our expressions, and a lot of expressions in the Hebrew.

You have to know the idiom, and we have gotten away from the idiom and that is our problem. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, some of the new translations are really masterpieces of confusion, so they can come up with almost anything. To get back to this, once you see it, it is very clear, isn’t it? Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Translation, yes. Yes, the Berkeley version was translated first the New Testament in the late forties, and the Old Testament in the 50’s, and then the combined edition put out at that time. I would say the Berkeley version is the only or almost the only trustworthy modern translation; and it is useful to use with the Old Testament. Most of the notes they have on the bottom of each page I think are trifling and worthless, but the actual translating of the Old Testament is very well done, and while it isn’t the one to use day by day because it lacks the beauty of the King James, at many points it will help clarify the meaning for you. So that it is an invaluable help to have. The translations were made by very conservative scholars under the direction of Dr. (Garret Berkhile?) Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] No, no. The excuse is given that the necessity for translations is because so many new manuscripts have been turned up. Now I have mentioned this before and I think it is worth going into again and again, the new manuscripts generally represent waste-basket manuscripts. In other words, in the middle ages and earlier when scholars worked at copying the Bible, and this went back to the time of the scribes in the Old Testament, they copied it word for word, and then when they finished they read it back and forth to make sure it was identical, then they checked it letter by letter so that it would be identical; the same number of words, the same number of letters, the same reading. If there was a defect they threw that manuscript in the waste basket, they didn’t burn it because this was important material, velum or parchment or whatever the case may be; and when they were short they would go to these wastebasket manuscripts, wash them, and reuse them.

Now, in many an old monastery, some of these old manuscript copies have survived, and this is what they are going to, obvious errors, for supposedly new readings.

Then there is another issue at stake: which is the authoritative manuscript? Now the received text is the one that has always been used in the past, and the only question was: ‘how should a word be translated?’ not, ‘what is the word in the original?’ But now they deny that the received text is the authoritative one, and again without any reason, just because they want to have new readings. So that the translations today are marked by novelty and are very untrustworthy. I must say though that even the translators of the Berkeley version while they are very conservative, still are not that conservative that they depend exclusively on the received text, so that would be my quarrel even with them. I would say that the King James gives you the best manuscripts for its sources.

Now, even with the received text there are problems in translation. The major problem is in the translation of names, of plants, and animals; and here is where you have a lot of translations that we will never perhaps know the exact meaning of. For example, in the King James you have the dragon referred to, and you have the unicorn, and you had several other animals. What were they? You have also references to the hare, HARE, we think of it as a kind of rabbit but it apparently wasn’t, and the coney which may have been a badger or some such thing. In other words, there were species of animals that have since disappeared, for which their names that appear once or twice in the Bible and we don’t know a thing about them. They guessed by the context and gave it a name in the English, but they didn’t really know what they were.

Now on some we have found out, we have found that some refer to the jackals, others to the alligators or crocodiles and so on, but we are still guessing at the meaning of a great many. But this doesn’t affect the meaning of scripture; it is just a question mark as to the identity of certain animals and some plants.

Names change also, for example we meet with ‘gall’ in the New Testament, when they offered our Lord wine mixed with gall? As soon as He got the taste He refused it? Does anyone know what gall is?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] No, no connection. Gall is opium. Opium. This was an attempt on the part of the soldiers to be humane. “Let’s relieve His suffering.” And Christ refused it.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, well, it was soured wine so it was vinegary wine, and the purpose, this was wine that had spoiled and was a cheap drink which the lowest ranked soldiers used, and it was also used by people to clear their head; it had such a sharp taste when you took a swallow of that you came too in a hurry. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, the history of the west has never been properly written, as a free country we had a healthy progress after the forming of the constitution, but subversive forces were very early at work from Europe and from within. After the civil war there was an attempt on the part of the radical reconstructionists to turn this into a totalitarian state. Reconstruction was a step in that direction. It was totalitarian law for the south, and an attempt to remake the entire country beginning with the south, and many of the men who were most important in it were clearly socialists, one of them was a Marxist who had come over from Europe, and hadn’t been here too long, and still spoke with a strong foreign accent, and yet he became a senator and quite important. These men were set back in this plan by President Andrew Johnson and President Hayes. Nevertheless they began then, having failed in the South to work in the West, and the West was largely taken over by very powerful men who established working in conjunction with many of these radical republicans in the east, huge Baronial estates. So that the West was owned by, many states, a handful of men. And any attempt on the part of small settlers to move in was met with murder. They did not want homesteaders, they did not want the small people.

Now, in this process there was open warfare and very often the law was owned, lock stock and barrel by these huge outfits who shot and killed ruthlessly. So that very often some of these people, homesteaders, little farmers, had to take the law into their own hands to defend themselves, it was life or death. But even then they fought a losing battle. Most of your cowhands by the way, since they worked for these big outfits were hoodlums, paid killers.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Some of the settlers did, yes. And it was simply an attempt to establish some kind of law and order. So the idea of them going out and lynching or killing after a lot of drinking in town was nonsense. That may have happened very often when it was the land barons with their hoodlums, together with law enforcement men taking care of some of these settlers.

The United States was well on its way to being taken over throughout the west, in fact it had been, and being turned into vast land and estates owned by powerful men in the east, when God struck. There was a disastrous winter in the 80’s which virtually wiped out every last one of these land barons. The cattle died by the tens of thousands, everywhere. One old Indian who had been a cow hand at the time, told me that in one place in Nevada when the snow melted there was a mountain, a huge mountain of dead cattle. To escape the drifting snows they had climbed, one on top of another, hundreds upon hundreds, until finally the last one was on top of this mountain, trying to get out of the drifting snow. One of the most dramatic pictures ever painted in the west was painted by an artist who came west to work at a ranch. How many of you have seen it? Charley Russell’s picture of the last cow, half starved with the coyotes standing around it in a circle in the driving snow, waiting for it to drop. It is a very powerful and vivid painting. Well, that winter wiped them out. So it was the hand of God that saved us there. Otherwise from the mid-west to the Sierra Nevada’s the United States would have been owned by a handful of very powerful and dangerous Easterners.

Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Very little on that, no, it is an interesting thing there is very little available on it. And yet it was one of the most dramatic things in the history of the west.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] I would say the way to go about finding it is to read for example on the history of ranching, anything you can get on it, on Charley Russell’s life, because he painted a number of pictures and you will get some information on it as background to the pictures, but it is very hard to find much about that.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] It is either… I don’t know, the material on it is either not used or it has gradually disappeared, I really don’t know, but it was quite a dramatic thing because it changed the entire complexion of those states. Many of those states have never come back, cattle-wise, because they were very heavily overgrazed. They have never grazed as many cows now as they did in the 70’s.

[Audience Member] …?... Do you have any stories from the Indians? …?...

[Rushdoony] From, I heard stories of that hard winter in the 80’s from the Indians, and I also read about it in various books.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] It was throughout the Midwest, the inner mountain area and the far west. It was very widespread, and it was fearful in its destruction.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, this great blizzard, this hard winter was just total in its destruction. I am still going to try to remember to bring that picture of Charley Russell’s on the last cow, the last of a herd of 5,000.

[Audience Member] Waiting for a Chinook.

[Rushdoony] Waiting for a Chinook, that’s the name of the painting, this half starved cow, the circle of coyotes sitting around it, and this was in response to the owners of the ranch in the east who wired out to know how many of their cattle, 5,000, were still alive, and this was the only one. Charley Russell painted its picture.

[Audience Member] Where is the best reading on that winter?

[Rushdoony] There just isn’t anything, that is the sad thing. You only encounter it occasionally here and there in another work and then in passing, but it is one of the most dramatic aspects of our American history.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Oh yes. There are a number of events like that that have changed American history that you can only describe as acts of God. For example, when the Pilgrims and the Puritans landed in New England, New England had had the previous winter a deadly epidemic that had virtually wiped out the Indians. If this had not been the case, they would have been wiped out themselves after landing because the Indians would have been so strong, militant and hostile that there wouldn’t have been a survivor. But they landed in an area that was virtually deserted because that epidemic had been there the previous winter. And you can go through American history and you can find a number of such dramatic events. Now a few of those from the early years were written up by an attorney a few years ago, Timothy J. Campbell, I have forgotten the title of his book, but it is well worth reading. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Mhmm. Yes?

[Audience Member] Well, in the late 1880 in California there was a terrible drought in Southern California, and it was followed by a flood that was so severe that it took people a month to come down from the north. My husband’s father was an early Californian, and we heard him tell how they had to drive the cattle over the cliff (?) because they cut out the ones they felt they could feed and save, and the rest were just driven over a cliff, in the branch area, and what followed was a terrible flood year that they called a (?) storm that comes approximately every 50 years. (?)

[Rushdoony] It could have been the aftermath of the hard winter throughout the west. I am going to try if I my family will remind me to look for that picture, Waiting for a Chinook, and bring it next week…

[New Tape] Another thing that I promised was to show you a copy of a picture: Waiting for a Chinook. And before I show you the picture I will read the description of it: “The winter of 1886-1887 will long be remembered as the worst in the recorded history of the west. During that awful winter bitter history was made when great herds perished to the last steer. Charley Russell was wintering at the ’08 ranch, Bar R brand in Montana when the storm broke. When its devastating effects were realized, the foreman sat down to write the absentee owner a letter, while the young cow puncher sat at the kitchen table drawing a water color, post card sized. When he handed it to the foreman he said: “Put that in your letter.” The foreman looked at the little drawing and replied: “He don’t need a letter, this will tell the story.” The little sketch showed the last Bar R steer of the once vast herd that only a warm wined Chinook could have saved. It was so realistic that the owner, knowing that he was broke, got drunk on the bad news.”

Russell later painted a full scale picture of it, and this is it: Waiting for a Chinook. The last of 5,000. An emaciated steer surrounded by wolves who are waiting for him to drop, knowing it is going to be any time.

That was when history was changed. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] First of all, they are assuming that the great evil is material poverty when the great evil is spiritual apostasy from God. So their whole perspective is wrong. Second, why are these people poor? Why? In a very great percentage of the cases it is because they refuse to work, they don’t want to be anything else than welfare recipients.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] So that… no they are not going to believe, you see, because this is basically a spiritual matter. People either believe that the world owes them a living, or else they believe that they are stewards unto God. And if they refuse to believe they are stewards unto God, they believe that the world owes them a living, and therefore how dare we let anyone go without that living.

Do you have that material now?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Well, we have… yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes, he will continue a bishop but without a diocese, so that bishop Pike continues a bishop and is associated with the center at Santa Barbara. Yes?

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] First of all, to say that our answer is not political does not mean that we do nothing politically. Second, economically we have passed the point of no return, we are going to go through some form of economic judgement, clearly. And of course the trouble with many conservatives is that they want an easy answer; they want some candidate to come along who will rescue us from all this without any price. But consider what would happen if we elected to Washington a man who is committed to a course of real reform? One of the first things he would have to do is to balance the budget. This would cause a depression, because we are so geared to Federal spending that it is Federal spending, not Wall Street, that makes the economy tick. So that he would immediately lose control of Congress by balancing the budget; they would want more inflation so that they would get back onto the gravy train. He would then have to put us back on the gold standard. Well, this would be so radical a step for a sick economy that he wouldn’t last, he would be impeached, he would lose control of Congress, it would be an impossibility. So that while we have got to make progress politically we know the answer is not political, that we hope we will be far enough along so at the right time we can step in, but certainly right now we have got to face the fact that disaster is ahead economically.

[Audience Member] Well, I have heard this (?) but it always seems they are saying: “Well you are being fatalistic, and you are saying what (?)” which isn’t I think our point of view …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Audience Member] …?...

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, and the Bible makes it very clear to us that it is our duty to do what God requires of us, not to ask: “Will it produce anything?” but to do it because it is required of us. If we are only going to work because we are sure of success there is not much we can do in this world because there is not much we can be sure of. We don’t look at our children and say: “I am going to be sure how these turn out, so I am going to go ahead and do something for them, but this one I don’t know. This little baby looks like it might be a flop, so let’s stop worrying about it.” You don’t work that way. And those who say they are only going to work for a sure thing, if you deny that they are going to win, are the ones who are ridiculous. They are destined for trouble because they are operating unrealistically.

Well, our time is up and we stand dismissed.