Weaverville’s ideas had consequences

“Ever since Richard M. Weaver wrote his bracing conservative manifesto in 1948, ‘Ideas Have Consequences,’ the title phrase has been a guiding maxim for the movement.”

— From The New York Times, April 27, 2010

“Weaver found himself, far from his beloved Weaverville, North Carolina, in cruel, heartless, philistine Chicago [teaching at the University of Chicago], where he would do his part to stem what he believed was the descent of America into barbarism….

“Weaver purchased a home in Weaverville for his widowed mother and spent all his summers there, drawing upon the sources of what he believed to be the real and permanent things away from the rarefied atmosphere and urban artificiality…  about which he wrote in ‘Ideas Have Consequences.’

“Disdaining the possibility of getting to Weaverville in a few hours by plane, he always went by train. Before he arrived, his mother would have his garden plowed and ready for him to plant. He would have reminded her to have this done by a horse or mule instead of a tractor.

” ‘There are numberless ways in which  the South disappoints me, [he wrote] but there is something in its sultry languor and in the stubborn humanism of its people… which tells me that for better or worse this is my native land.’ ”

From “Richard M. Weaver, 1910-1963: A Life of the Mind” by Fred Douglas Young (1995)