Roger D. McGrath

Latest by Roger D. McGrath in Chronicles

• Cultural Revolutions

  June 2012

  Man of Honor

  Ralph Walker Willis was a fireman, the author of five books, including My Life as a Jarhead (1999), and a contributor to Chronicles, but most of all he was a Marine.

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• View

  May 2012

  Same Border, Different America

  For the last several years Texas farmers and ranchers whose lands butt up against the Rio Grande have complained about cross-border raids by thugs of Mexican drug cartels. “It’s a war. Make no mistake about it,” said Texas Agriculture Commissioner Todd Staples. “And it’s happening on American soil.”

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• Columns

  April 2012

  The Tuskegee Airmen

  If you think political correctness is a recent phenomenon in America, then the longtime promulgation and perpetuation of distortions and falsehoods concerning the Tuskegee Airmen should disabuse you of such a notion.

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• Columns

  February 2012

  Divine Wind

  Suicidal ground attacks had been a common Japanese tactic since Guadalcanal, but the first such aerial attacks were not employed until the Battle for Leyte Gulf in October 1944. By March 1945 kamikaze attacks had become a basic component of Japanese strategy.

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• Columns

  December 2011

  Bombing the West Coast

  The Battle of Los Angeles was preceded by ten Japanese submarine attacks on American ships off the California coast and one attack on an oil field. The attacks left the coastal population apprehensive, if not unnerved.

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• Columns

  October 2011

  The Betsy Ross of California

  Gov. Jerry Brown recently signed legislation requiring public schools to teach students about the contributions of “lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans.”

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• Columns

  August 2011

  James Arness

  Early in June, James Arness died. Everyone thinks of him as Matt Dillon, the brave and incorruptible town marshal of Dodge City in the television series Gunsmoke. I think of him as the father of one of my childhood friends and as one of the last actors in Hollywood to have fought in World War II.

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• Reviews

  July 2011

  New Tricks

  Steve Farron has written not only a comprehensive and exhaustive study of the subject but a brilliantly insightful critique of the whole ugly and unconstitutional process of discriminating against whites.

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• Columns

  June 2011

  Chuck Older

  Recently, a younger acquaintance of mine, an actor on stage and screen, mentioned with disgust the circus-like atmosphere that pervaded the trial of O.J. Simpson for the murder of his ex-wife.

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• View

  May 2011

  Suicide by (Legal) Immigration

  I was fortunate to grow up before the Immigration Act of 1965 began an incremental and insidious change in the ethnic composition of America. I had friends whose parents were immigrants.

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• Columns

  March 2011

  Jumpin' Jim Gavin

  Like most kids I loved reading about Americans who rose from nothing to greatness. When I got to college and encountered my first left-wing history professor, I learned that Horatio Alger characters were pure myth—except I had already read and heard about dozens of them.

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• Columns

  January 2011

  The Fighting Marine: Gene Tunney

  Though he beat Jack Demp­sey decisively the two times they met in the ring, was undefeated as a heavyweight, and retired as heavyweight champion, Gene Tunney is often forgotten when today’s era of fight fans or others discuss the greatest heavyweights.

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• View

  November 2010

  Celebrity Politicians, Savvy Sergeants

  “We need another Reagan.” I’ve heard that too many times to count. Don’t get me wrong: I think another Reagan would be a good start—but only a start.

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• Columns

  November 2010

  Dan Daly

  A friend recently sent me an e-mail with a link to YouTube. A click took me to a tribute to Col. Bob Howard, broadcast by NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams upon Howard’s death just before Christmas 2009.

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• Columns

  September 2010

  The Man Who Won the Revolution

  Every history textbook has a paragraph or more devoted to Crispus Attucks, who, besides being half black and half Indian and one of those killed in the Boston Massacre, was of little historical significance. Nearly everything else said about him is a matter of speculation.

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• Columns

  July 2010

  Red Cloud's War

  The Oglala Sioux chief Red Cloud is generally portrayed as someone who chewed up the U.S. Army in battle after battle. He was, in the words of one author, “the first and only Indian leader in the West to win a war with the United States.”

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• American Proscenium

  July 2010

  Arizona's Got Sand

  On October 26, 1881, a gunfight erupted in a vacant lot on Fremont Street in Tombstone, Arizona, that would go down in history as the Shootout at the OK Corral.

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• News

  June 2010

  Double Down: Illegal Aliens and Crime

  For too long now I have heard that illegal immigrants are not criminals and that they have come to America only to work. Not really. Whether or not they want to work, they have already committed a crime by illegally entering the United States.

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• Columns

  May 2010

  Lucky Lindy

  Nearly everyone knows that in 1927 Charles Lindbergh made the first nonstop solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean, lifting off from a field on Long Island and touching down in Paris 33 hours and 3,600 miles later.

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• Columns

  March 2010

  The White Man's Burden

  The havoc wreaked by the Haitian earthquake reminded me of Rudyard Kip­ling’s poem “The White Man’s Burden,” originally published in McClure’s Magazine in 1899.

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