Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
November 1989 | Volume 40, Issue 7
Walter Karp, 1934-1989
Text Complexity Grade Level
9
When Walter Karp died suddenly last July after surgery, this magazine lost a delightful and challenging contributor. Readers will remember most recently his series “A Heritage Preserved,” in which he brought his powerful wit and insight to bear on various efforts by museums across the country to retrieve the American past. But Walter’s primary interest was American politics; he was a passionate defender of the Republic as it had been engineered by the Founding Fathers, and he often used their grand and sonorous vocabulary to warn of danger—danger from “usurpers” who would seize powers that rightfully belonged to the people, danger from “oligarchs” willing to scuttle their own party’s candidate rather than upset a status quo that allowed them the use of those purloined powers. He never forgot Madison’s words, “Men love power.” In the wake of the controversy surrounding his most recent book, Liberty under Siege, his daughter, Jane, then a high school senior, interviewed her father. The result suggests the gallantry and the relish with which Walter battled to make himself heard, as well as the love of the American past and its republican wellsprings that animated him all his adult life. You began writing in the 1950s, but you did not initially write about politics. When and how did you begin? When the whole country became political, I became political—which is to say, around the time of the civil rights movement. It broke up a lot of foolish notions people had in their heads that everything was wonderful in the country. Then came the Vietnam War, which many people found unbearable, and so did I. You don’t think about politics until something goes wrong. Unfortunately, political thought begins with disaster. What did your first political articles deal with? I used to like Thomas Jefferson—I still do—but without any real comprehension, in a sort of sentimental way. Nevertheless, the idea that people should govern themselves, that they ought to be independent, that they ought to have a voice in their community affairs, always seemed to be a good thing. So the first things I wrote were in that vein. I had no idea at the time that I was dealing with the most radical ideas known to the country. Aside from Jefferson, what writers and thinkers most influenced you? The other person was the great German-Jewish writer Hannah Arendt. She wrote about politics in a way that was unlike anything I had ever read. Nothing that she wrote made sense. Oddly enough, that is why 1 liked her. Because I hated everything that made sense. I didn’t like liberals because they sounded as if they weren’t liberating anything. I didn’t like the conservatives because they seemed just spiteful