Standing athwart history ...

In the Summer issue of the Claremont Review of Books, Michael Uhlmann writes about William F. Buckley and the rise of the conservative movement. He notes that where one stood on the Hiss case became a crucial question in the early days of National Review:

As to the cause itself, National Review provided its readers with a continuing stream of evidence, not otherwise easily available, on the aggressive motives and tactics of Soviet foreign policy. Readers also learned that the Cold War could not be properly understood without addressing its moral dimension. The indispensable guide on that point, the Ur-text as it were, was Witness, the compelling testament of Whittaker Chambers, whom Buckley induced for a time to serve as a contributing editor. By attending carefully to that great book and the controversy that caused it to be written, one could discover the fatal fault lines of the contemporary liberal establishment. Even more, perhaps, than Chambers himself, Buckley drew the lesson in stark relief: An establishment that could not bring itself to acknowledge the moral fault and legal guilt of Alger Hiss was an establishment that could not be counted on to stand up against Soviet imperialism when the crunch came. The permutations of that proposition, which worked themselves out in a hundred implicit and explicit ways in National Review's editorial policy, became the magazine's raison d'être. If membership in the conservative cause had been determined by an entrance exam, the leading question would have been where one stood on the Hiss case. On this, as on many other matters, philosophical understanding preceded and defined the order of battle.

How come no one knows who Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers were anymore? Well, maybe the students of the guy who holds the Alger Hiss Chair of Social Studies at Bard College have heard of him, but they probably think he's someone who was important in "social studies"' -- and so he was, come to think of it, but not in the way they think. And, yes, probably most professors of history (or at least of American history) have some acquaintance with the Hiss/Chambers affair, but why do I have the feeling (unprovable in the absence of public opinion polling on the matter) that the average "man on the street" would have no idea who Alger Hiss was, that the average college-educated "man on the street" would think maybe he's that guy who wrote those inspirational rags-to-riches stories, and that the average gradate student in literature "man on the street" would think maybe he's that poet who, according to Stephen Dedalus, called the sea "our mighty mother" (but come to think of it, rather less of them would know who Stephen Dedalus is than one might think). And how come librarians don't know Stalin's first name? And how come my twenty-three-year-old cousin gave me a blank stare when I mentioned the historical significance of the date 1939? And how come if you ask the average college graduate what was the trial of the twentieth century in America, they'll say "O.J." and if you ask the average high school student what was the trial of the twentieth century, they'll say "Jacko"? And how come everybody knows who the Backstreet Boys are (or were) and nobody knows who the Scotsboro Boys were? Don't get me wrong -- there are embarrassing lacunae in my own historical knowledge, but I'm neither proud of them nor unconcerned about them.

My little incoherent rant has now run far afield of the original quotation. Let me bring it back to National Review by suggesting that their new motto should be "Standing athwart history, shouting 'Pay attention, for God's sake!'"