Archive of Nicholas Stix’ Work for Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture

My Chronicles Archive: Please Support WEJB/NSU! By Nicholas Stix

From 1992-1999, I freelanced for Chronicles magazine, among many other publications—dailies, weeklies, monthlies, quarterlies, publishing my own occasional magazine (A Different Drummer)—delivering papers at conferences (philosophy, aesthetics, politics, remedial ed), publishing poetry, and teaching five-to-seven days per week at colleges, and even in people’s living rooms, and yet I was always broke.

Yeah, I had a lot of energy back then. I covered my bedroom doors with rejection notices using push pins.

Chronicles was the most brilliantly written representative of “paleo-conservatism,” a notion that seems to have been retired, in favor of the “Dissident Right,” in recent years. “Paleo-conservatism” was for a generation or so the main intellectual alternative on the Right to neo-conservatism.

In 1999, Chronicles Editor-in-Chief Thomas Fleming purged me, in what was apparently a proxy war, when Ted Pappas left after carrying the drunken Fleming for ten years. Unbeknownst to me, Ted had apparently been my “rabbi.”

Years ago, Chronicles set up a barebones archive, but one could only access back issues and articles through subscribing. A number of years later, Ron Unz graciously set up such an archive through his vast complex at Unz.com/Unz.org (Unz.org seems to have been swallowed up by Unz.com, and it has become much more difficult to find work that was archived at Unz.org).

However, not all of my work at Chronicles could be found under my name, because three of my essays had been published in the “Cultural Revolutions” section at the front of the book, whose entries were not itemized in the monthly table of contents, nor were they even given titles. Thus, I had to go through many issues to find and copy those essays.

(The CR essays also only paid $50 piece, as opposed to my articles listed in the table of contents, which fetched $150-200 each. My final article, a profile of Mayor Rudy Giuliani, whom I described as a liberal Republican and a liar of presidential proportions, would have fetcherd me $150, for which I worked approximately 150 hours. Fleming refused to publish it, or pay me one thin dime for it. But I’m sure he considers himself “a man of honor.” All those paleos and “Dissident Right” and “racial realist” editors do. The Boss used to mock me: “You work for a dollar an hour.”)

In the meantime, Chronicles has vastly improved its archive, and by pooling its results with those of Unz.com, I was able to compile a comprehensive, linked listing.


Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture: Nicholas Stix Archive

“The Armies of Lower Manhattan”;

“Virulent Propaganda”;

“Legalized Racism in New York”;

“Are College Students Today Scholars or Clients?”;

“Black English”;

“Kwanzaa’s Black-and-White World”;

“Read the First National Exposé of ‘Broken Windows Policing’s’ Fakestats;

“Letter from New York City: The War on White Teachers”;

“The Black Nationalism of George S. Schuyler”;

“CUNY’s Hostos Community College, and the ‘Hispanic Nation’”;

“On Bilingual Education”;

“Who’ll Stop the Rain?”; and

“The Asphalt League of Public Higher Education.”