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Samuel Francis
I am saddened to hear of the death of Sam Francis, one of the leading figures of the paleoconservative movement. I began reading Sam’s columns when I started subscribing to Chronicles in 1987, and they were always my chief reason for reading the magazine. I first met him in 1990. I was in Washington for a few days doing some lobbying on Capitol Hill for FAIR, and got together with him one afternoon in a restaurant near the Washington Times where we talked for a couple of hours. As we were saying goodby on the sidewalk, I was thinking about his overweightness and his smoking, and said something like, “You should take better care of yourself. You’re a valuable person.” He smiled a bit at that. My very first impression of him, as I entered the restaurant that day and saw him sitting behind a table waiting for me, was of the stereotype of the small town American, looking through narrowed suspicious eyes at any strangers passing through town.
My second, and more enduring, impression of his personality, derived from conferences and other get togethers during the ’90s when I knew him, and superceding his trademark gloominess, was of a big, rotund baby with red cheeks, happy and at ease when among a group of people he liked, and, as he was described independently by both a male and a female acquaintance, “adorable.” I think Sam wanted what we all want, a sense of community, of feeling at home among kindred spirits. And I think it was the fact that America was becoming less and less of a place where he could have such feelings that motivated his politics. Email entry |