By T. John Jamieson
From The American Spectator July 1982, Vol. 15, No. 7, pp. 27-29. Copyright 1982, The Alternative Educational Foundation.
Cited in The San Francisco Examiner, July 4, 1982, page B8 ("A 'royal' Fourth of July") and in The Baltimore Sun, July 5, 1982, page B4 ("A peak at 'Royalist Underground' in America...")
The principal feast of the American civil religion is upon us. True patriots will roast hot dogs and risk dismemberment from the use of firecrackers; even cynical leftists who, during Vietnam, refused to stand for the national anthem at high school assemblies will play Frisbee and light up a joint. Local demagogues will invoke the ghosts of Washington and Jefferson and modestly concede that, in their case at least, "democracy works." A few men and women of intellect and imagination, though inwardly dissenting, will outwardly conform to custom in order not to give offense to relatives, or else they will cultivate their gardens alone. These are Tories, adherents of the politics of throne and altar, feeling no less American and no less patriots for knowing what the civil war of 1775-81 was really about. For them, July is the cruelest month: After Independence Day comes Bastille Day, and then the anniversary of the Czar's murder, to say nothing of the July monarchy.
In their frustration with the current constitutional arrangement, which most of them regard as a necessary evil, these American royalists have created an international historical cult which embraces all forms of the lost cause of legitimism and which champions every dynasty. Some have reconciled themselves to the Whig constitution of 1787, but give free rein to their fantasy outside the national border. Among these are Russell Kirk and Frederick Wilhelmsen. Kirk, who has characterized himself as a Bohemian Tory, advocates the politics of prescription, and, like his mentor T.S. Eliot, believes that nations which have a king should continue to have one. Wilhelmsen, the great Thomist of the University of Dallas, actively involved himself in the movement for the Spanish restoration— except that his candidate was not Juan Carlos, but Francisco Javier of Bourbon-Parma, the Carlist claimant; for his pains, the American professor was dubbed by the old pretender in 1975 a Knight of the Grand Cross of the Proscribed Legitimacy. Dr. Sir Frederick Wilhelmsen continues to lead Carlists, both in Spain and Latin America, whose political aims have not yet been reached.
Most American royalists are Anglophile Jacobites; some, with varying degrees of seriousness, advocate an American throne and would unwrite 1776 altogether. They live vicariously through the study of British and Canadian politics. Mr. Daniel MacGregor of Chicago is the American correspondent of Monarchy Canada, the well-produced magazine of the Monarchist League of Canada. Mr. Jay Stribling of El Paso helped found while in college a Society of St. Charles the Martyr which publicly deplored the regicide as the foundation of twentieth-century totalitarianism and issued buttons bearing the legend, "RESTORE THE MONARCHY." Anglican Catholics, those Non-Jurors of the present, who refuse to swear by the do-it-yourself liturgy and the bisexual priesthood of modern Episcopalianism, have a habit of naming their parishes after such royal saints as Charles and Edward the Confessor and Margaret of Scotland. Somewhere along the way they seem to have heard that James I once said, "No bishops, no king." Since there are bishops (and the Anglican Catholics breed them prodigiously), they infer, there must be a king somewhere. And there used to be a Reverend Wiebe in San Francisco, allegedly Episcopalian, who established a Monarchist League of America whose manifesto advocated the installation of a king in America by A.D. 2000, preferably a cadet of the House of Windsor. Gordon Haff of The Dartmouth Review recently came out of the regalia closet; and elder literary statesman Austin Warren would like to be ruled by a native dynasty either of Jameses or Adamses.
I once knew a protégé of Russell Kirk, a fellow American, who while studying at St. Andrew's University in Scotland became head of the local chapter of the Monarchist League—the international organization, that is, founded by the Marquess of Bristol. I have corresponded with a lady political science professor who is writing a book on the Kaiser and describes herself as a frondeuse, and also with an attorney of Irish descent who is a knight of the Royal Yugoslavian Order of St. John. The American monarchist is not simply an eccentric; he or she is a sophisticated, complex intellectual being whose faculty of moral imagination is extraordinarily well developed and requires more room in which to play than democracy provides. You will no doubt ask, how did the American monarchist get this way?
A literary education may be to blame; Plato, Cicero, and Shakespeare are very hard on democracy, and influenced the Founding Fathers against majoritarian rule as much as the mob politics of 17th- and 18th-century England. For the aesthetically inclined, the world's greatest period of artistic production, the Baroque, chiefly exalts the politics of throne and altar; I found myself thoroughly propagandized recently, at an exhibition of 18th-century Neapolitan art, by an "Allegory of the Origin of the Arms of Bourbon," which showed an enormous azure cartouche borne among the clouds by an angelic host, with one seraph affixing three gold fleurs-de-lys thereto. On a pragmatic basis, one might simply realize that the Reagan victory of 1980 cannot vindicate the democratic system if 51 percent of the electorate believe in flying saucers. Granted, one cannot fool all the people all the time, but what is the consolation in that? Born of such influences and realizations is a conviction at once philosophical, religious, practical, and sentimental in nature.
The American monarchist finds no outlet for this conviction in the real world of affairs; but he would tell you that this sense of participatory void is only the democratic habit of mind, for democracy requires an unwholesome degree of politicization in its citizenry. Nevertheless,, what can he do? He reads Oliver Wiswell and studies genealogical charts; he attends the annual lectures of Dr. Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, who castigates America for ruining Europe with its postwar reconstruction plans based on the Divine Right of Majorities. He spurns the great unwashed and cultivates the valiantly unreconstructed—exiles and emigres. Many of these are proud aristocrats who have preserved their lofty pretensions against all odds; they continue to profess the royal principle. I know of an Austro-Franco-Bavarian baron of sixty-four quarters living in California who is a blanc des blancs of French Royalism. An Italian-American friend of mine whose people have been gentlemen for the last eight centuries recently received the title of count from his personal fons honorum, the exiled King Umberto II. This man is also a Mayflower descendant.
Among the various nationalities which have sought refuge on our shores while preserving the "unreconstructed" stance and looking toward eventual restoration and repatriation, the most organized and visible are the Russians. The Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, which has annually held a solemn memorial for Nicholas II on the anniversary of his assassination at Ekaterinburg, has at last canonized him. The Order of Russian Imperial Union, whose president is Mr. Peter Koltypin of Connecticut, hails H.I.H. Grand Duke Wladimir Romanov as Czar; the autocratic Wladimir has even graced its assemblies with his presence. The Order maintains a fund to finance anti-Communist propaganda in the USSR. In New York City may be found the All-Russian Monarchist Front which engages in similar activity. The Hoover Institution at Stanford is reputedly another Czarist center. Any attempt to dismiss the Czarism of the exiles must take into account the fact that, in Russia herself, discontent under the Communist tyranny is crystallizing as a powerful nostalgia for the nineteenth century in general, and for the Czar in particular. There is an emerging cult of the royal martyr.
Many more hidden pockets of American royalism exist than can here be exposed. I suspect that the "patriotic" societies harbor a few monarchists, for I have known several penitent sons of the Revolution; and the aristocratic Cincinnati, composed of descendants of George Washington's officers, though they are devoutly anti-Hanoverian, have Louis XVI for their patron. Any Roman Catholic infallibilist is on principle an adherent of an ecclesiastical monarchy; and the Kennedys, their shabbiness notwithstanding, have filled the psychological vacuum that would otherwise be filled by a royal dynasty. But, by etymology, Tory originally meant an Irish papist.
The premier American royalist organization is the Constantian Society, whose name is derived from the Latin word for constancy, founded twelve years ago by Randall J. Dicks, a Pittsburgh attorney. It publishes The Constantian, has approximately 400 members, and takes for its mission the education of the public on monarchy. Its literature says that "monarchy is an intelligible and honest form of government, and it is our belief that it is better suited and able to serve the common good under future conditions than any other.''
The Whig Burke called the adherents of divine right "exploded fanatics of slavery;" even the Tory Johnson conceded that "a high Tory makes government unintelligible—it is lost in the clouds." But that is the worst that can be said of monarchism. Far worse things may be. said of decadent democracies sinking under the combined weight of demagogy, bureaucracy, and judicial usurpation. Whatever may be said for the relevance of monarchy to universal human nature, the relevance of democracy to most national characters and historical contexts is very little. Yet America confers legitimacy on the world's rulers in terms of its own civil religion in the same self-righteous manner as the Popes once crowned the royal majesties of Europe. In fact, we literally crowned the Communist regime in Hungary in 1978 by yielding the nine-hundred-year-old Crown of St. Stephen to Kadar; it had been kept since World War II in protective custody at Fort Knox, awaiting happier days for Hungary. Its rightful owner, of course, is not Kadar, but rather Archduke Otto von Hapsburg, who today is a representative for Bavaria in the new European Parliament.
Czar Simeon II of the Bulgarians continues to press his claim, and King Michael of Rumania has recently announced his readiness to return to the throne if he is called. With the rise of unrest in these captive nations where the memory of royal rule is still fresh, can American foreign policy refuse to address the potential for restoration? In Greece the king is still talked of. Following the example of Spain, Portugal may be the next European nation to return to monarchy. As the Reagan Administration belabors the distinction between "authoritarian" and "totalitarian" regimes, and as commentators mull over the moral compromise in supporting Fascist dictatorships, the self-defeating futility of seeking to appease Marxist juntas, and the infeasibility of setting up democracies in backward nations, why is there no discussion of monarchy? A worthwhile project for the American monarchist is to raise the historical consciousness of American foreign policy to the level of recognizing foreign monarchies as a valid possibility. He must work to establish three essential facts:
First, all monarchies are constitutional monarchies; and under every constitution sovereignty ultimately rests somewhere. So long as the royal hand is able to intervene in moments of crisis, the specific machinery of administration is not all that important. Our own form of elective monarchy exists in perpetual crisis: Its sovereign dies every four years without issue.
Second, popular elections have no relevance to the issue of restoration or continuation of monarchy, since elections divide people, and the most stable regimes are imposed from above or from outside. The Allies insisted on an election in Italy after World War II, which Umberto would have won if it had been conducted fairly; yet by exposing the royal principle to discussion, the potential hold of the king over his government was thoroughly eroded. Renewing the social contract is not optional: Let those skeptics who say that every tenet of belief must always be open to discussion retire to the philosophy classroom and impose on the world no longer.
Third, new monarchies can be fostered in the same way that the old once were. When a national hero, a liberator, or a patriarch has the support to establish a dynasty, who are the Americans that they should stop him? Such was the father of the late Shah of Iran; and our own George Washington nearly had the crown thrust upon him.
If America could redeem Eastern Europe from its Communist slave-masters through royal restoration, it would be an act of historical penance. Meanwhile, the flame of hereditary legitimacy, the secular form of the apostolic succession, continues to burn, tended by patriots, priests, and professors, who privately confess their belief in the sacramental nature of power.
No, the American monarchist is not Independence Day's Scrooge, yet to the democrats he repeats the ancient curse: "May you have an equal in your house."
