The Roots of American Order

By Joseph Fallon
Volume 6, Number 2 (Winter 1995-1996)
Issue theme: "Affirmative action for immigrants?"

'Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.' So wrote George Orwell in his novel Nineteen Eighty-four. This maxim describes the practice of the proponents of multiculturalism and Third World immigration who through their current influence over the U.S. educational establishment seek to deconstruct the American nation by first denying such a nation ever existed.

That America is a historic nation with a specifically designed culture, however, is brilliantly documented in two books America's British Culture by Russell Kirk, and The Racial Origins of the Founders of America Extracted and Abridged from the Works of Madison Grant and Ales Hrdlicka by R. Peterson.

In the opening paragraph of America's British Culture the late author, educator and conservative intellectual, Russell Kirk, writes what everyone educated before the 1970s should know '...if somehow the British elements could be eliminated from all the cultural patterns of the United States - Americans would be left with no coherent culture in public or in private life.'

In his book Professor Kirk examines each of the four cultural pillars on which the American nation was built and on which its continued survival depends the English language, English common law, British representative government, and British mores, i.e., moral habits, beliefs, conventions and customs. At the end of his book, Professor Kirk provides a 'Chronology Until the Beginning of the Twentieth Century' outlining the genesis and growth of America's British culture.

In America's British Culture, Russell Kirk establishes that America possesses a specific national culture that is essentially British as modified by the American wilderness. In defending this culture,