August 17, 2006
Happy Birthday, Virginia Dare!
At the top of the page you'll see
link that says
Why VDARE.COM / The White Doe? It gives some of the
reasons why
Peter Brimelow decided to name this site after
Virginia Dare, the first English child to be born in the
New World, who was born on August 18, 1587 – 429 years
ago today.
"Today, Virginia Dare
seems to be vanishing from
American education too. But she was a fixture for
earlier generations. Even
Franklin D. Roosevelt felt free to
give a speech commemorating the
350th anniversary of her birth. At one point, I
planned to pay homage by bestowing her name on the
heroine of a projected fictional concluding chapter in
Alien Nation, about the flight of the last white
family in
Los Angeles. It seemed . . . symmetrical.
"I was dissuaded."
We've been
meaning to do more on the subject of Virginia Dare,
since it seems to annoy and confuse our critics. In
2002, Tamar Jacoby
wrote an attack on immigration reformers in
Commentary. Here's what she said about Virginia
Dare, and
our reply at the time:
[Jacoby:]
Virginia Dare is thought to have eventually married
into a local Indian tribe, or to have been killed by
it—almost equally unfortunate possibilities in the minds
of VDARE's writers, who make no secret of their concern
about the way America's
original Anglo-Saxon stock is being transformed by
immigration.
[Us:]
If VDARE.com did champion what
David Hackett Fisher called
“Albion’s
Seed” in
this way, it would, after all, merely make us the
Commentary
magazine of the “Anglo-Saxon” minority. But in
fact we have posted nothing to justify this description.
If Tamar had read our "Why
VDARE.com/ The White Doe"
– which she clearly has not, because she misreports the
Virginia Dare story – she would have seen that we
satirize the miscegenation canard by posting a picture
of Heather Locklear. The case against current
immigration policy is a very broad one; it is all too
typical for New York intellectuals to read into it only
their own
ethnocentric
preoccupations].
I probably should have said more
about this when we answered Jacoby's Commentary's
attack on VDARE.COM. When she says "almost equally
unfortunate possibilities in the minds of VDARE's
writers," she's probably confusing VDARE.COM's
editorial collective with the John Wayne character,
Ethan Edwards, in
The Searchers, who really hates Indians,
and thinks that his niece,
after years of living with the Comanche, may be
better off dead.
In fact some of my best friends are
Indians. And no one in my family has been
kidnapped or pointlessly slaughtered by Indians
since
1885, so I've
gotten over it.
But really, though all we have is
legends, we're talking about a girl who hasn't been seen
alive since she was three. Why wouldn't we be
horrified at the idea of a girl being kidnapped at the
age of three from a civilized family and raised by an
Indian tribe? Why wasn't Tamar Jacoby horrified by that?
Virginia Dare was also mentioned in
a
Deutschebank Economic report that we discussed here,
[PDF]
but the author, Mieczyslaw Karczmar [Pronounced roughly
Mee-etch-i-slav Kartch-mar], made so many of the same
mistakes that Tamar Jacoby did, that I assume he was
just, er, scalping her story.
"VDare
is named after Virginia Dare, the first English child
born in America who was kidnapped as an infant and never
seen again."
Once again, we don't know; the
whole colony just vanished as if it had never been.
In 2003, Garrison Keillor mentioned
Virginia Dare on NPR (click
here for audio). [Garrison
Keillor Says Happy Birthday, V. Dare!]
Keillor insisted on calling the
Indians "Native Americans," which many people,
including some
Indians, find annoying. That means that he misses
the main point about Virginia Dare: that she was the
first
Native American - as the term American was
understood until recently.
Indians were not the founders of
the American nation. They did their
warrior-like best to
prevent it from being founded.
Today, it seems that there are
people who want that American nation
to end. That is, they want Americans, both colonial
stock and the immigrants who subsequently assimilated
with them, to be a
minority in America. And that's what Virginia Dare
is the symbol of—the beginning, and possibly the end of
the historical American nation.
That end doesn't have to happen.
Americans can get control of their destiny if they'll
fight back. All that's need is the right spirit.
Ethan Edwards, in The Searchers,
was a driven man, and it almost destroyed him. But
whenever anyone suggested that he might surrender, or
give up the search, he just kept saying
"That'll be the day!"
So if you see a protester
carrying a sign saying "We are indigenous! The
only owners of this continent!" remember that you're
indigenous, too - and say, in your best John
Wayne voice: "That'll be the day!"
Previous Virginia Dare
Pieces, and External Links
Emotion At Reason
(Nick Gillespie, editor at
Reason magazine, doesn't get it.)
The New World, Virginia
Dare, And The Historical American Nation
(Steve Sailer explains
what Hollywood did to
Pocahontas; and to the colonists who would be the
heroes of the movie if Hollywood weren't so PC.)
Boy Scout Version of the Indian
Legend:
The White Deer named Virginia Dare
The Virginia Dare food company's
explanation of why they picked her:
Virginia Dare, A Legendary Symbol Of Purity
Fort Raleigh National Historic Site: this is
where Roosevelt saw the play, The Lost Colony,
still performed there every year.
The Lost Colony": A Cure
for Depression? (The National Park service's
take on its play)
A
statue of Virginia Dare, in the
Elizabethan Gardens on the North Carolina Coast.
Marcus Epstein atop a fortunate coincidence.
