One day in 1990, Victor Fuentes dove into the ocean from Cuba and swam seven miles to the American naval base on Guantanamo Bay, where he would beg for political asylum. He was, as the now-deceased Peter Schramm would have said, ‘born American, but in the wrong place.’ Fuentes arrived in America in 1991 and started his life over. He became a born-again Christian and a pastor. He would establish Solid Rock Ministries on 40 acres of land outside of Las Vegas with the purpose of healing the addicts and broken lives cast off by “Sin City.”
When some of Harry Jaffa s students decided to mark his 65th birthday back in 1984, Peter Schramm and Tom Silver wrote an introduction to a festschrift in his honor that began as follows: Imagine yourself marooned on a desert island with only ten books to read, but in this case books not of your choosing. Suppose them all to be books written by behavioral political scientists during the past twenty
Through Douglass’s eyes
The relationship between the former slave Frederick Douglass and President Abraham Lincoln provides deep insight into both men. Douglass’s recollection of his first meeting with Lincoln “I shall never forget my first interview with this great man” is a highlight of the 1892 version of Douglass’s autobiography (
The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass). In the Claremont Review of Books celebration of the bicentennial anniversary of Lincoln’s birth in 2009, the late Peter Schramm reviewed Peter Myers’s
The two first met in August 1863, and Douglass was not expecting a friendly encounter. After black soldiers had proven themselves worthy on the battlefield, Douglass had come to Washington to argue that justice demanded equal pay for their efforts. Following a cold reception from Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, Douglass took his case to the White House.