The Real Ernest Hemingway?

 

by Robert S. Griffin, Ph.D.

On June 20th, 2016, in an post entitled “The Real Ernest Hemingway,” The Occidental Observer reprinted the first few paragraphs of a writing that had appeared in the February, 1979 issue of Instauration, a white interests magazine, along with a link to the complete source.1   In introductory remarks, the TOO post characterized the Instauration material as “a fascinating portrait of an elite American [Hemingway] shortly before the Fall [which I took to mean the demise of white hegemony in this country]—extreme cowardice on race and Jewish issues combined with a veneer of hyper-masculinity.”  The post attracted 33 reader comments.

The prefatory remarks in TOO and the opening paragraphs from the Instauration writing, along with the TOO reader comments, piqued my curiosity, and I followed the link to National Vanguard, a white advocacy web site, where the reprint had first appeared a few days before and read the 1979 Hemingway writing in its entirety.

I found the Instauration material from 37 years ago to be as the TOO post described it, fascinating, and the contemporary response to it in TOO intriguing; and more than that, I found all of it important.  You’re invited to read the full Instauration writing as it appears in National Vanguard for yourself.   However, I’ll try to write this in a way that it makes sense even if you haven’t read what was in Instauration. 

Some background on Instauration:

Instauration was a monthly print magazine—no webzines like this one in those days—with a publishing history lasting from 1975 to 2000.  It was the brainchild of an American, Wilmot Robertson (1915-2000)—Instauration died when he did.

It wasn’t until Robertson was in his mid-fifties that he became active in racial matters with a book he authored in 1972, The Dispossessed Majority.2   The majority referred to in the book’s title are American whites of northern European heritage, who were, according to Robertson, being, well, dispossessed in their own country.  They were being pushed down, shoved aside, and replaced by a coalition of liberals, racial minorities, and, most powerfully, Jews.  While Robertson had no time for these three groups, he had particular contempt for the white American power elite of his day, who, as he saw them, contributed mightily to the demise of their racial brethren by sucking up and caving in and selling out to whites’ adversaries in the process of pursuing their own narrow and selfish personal agendas.  Robertson continued and expanded upon these themes as the editor of Instauration.

Both the TOO and National Vanguard posts were titled “The Real Ernest Hemingway.”  Indeed, there was an indisputably real Ernest Hemingway.  He was born in 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois and he did what he did (most prominently, he wrote both fiction and non-fiction) in places like Paris, Havana, New York City, World War II battlefronts, and Idaho, and he died by a self-inflicted shotgun blast in Ketchum, Idaho on July 2nd, 1961.

Since Hemingway is no longer around to speak for himself, and we can’t check him out first-hand, we’re left with what we can discern about the real Ernest Hemingway, that mortal human being and his merits as a man and as a writer, from what we’re told and shown about him—such as in this 1979 Instauration writing.

And that’s not a simple task.  In a recent article for TOO,3 I referred to people’s tendency to believe whatever someone who is articulate and comes off credible sends their way that aligns with their preconceptions and perceived wants and needs.  Too often, we—and I’m including myself in this characterization—buy what is alleged about someone or something when we shouldn’t.

In my TOO article, I used the term “mediator” to refer to people who in effect stand between us and reality and tell us what’s going on and what it means and what we should think and do about it.   The mediator I used as an example was The New York Times and its coverage of mass killings at an Orlando, Florida gay nightclub in mid-June of 2016.   Here, I’ll be doing pretty much the same thing, only this time the mediator is the Instauration author in 1979 saying (writing) “This is what Ernest Hemingway was like.”

But was he really like that?   That is what we have to decide.  And whatever we decide, what is the significance or implication of that perception of Hemingway for things we care about, such as the wellbeing of white people?

I think it is fair to say that the TOO post, including the reader responses, is favorable to the Instauration take on Hemingway:  yes, this gets at the true Ernest Hemingway, good job; and this portrayal of Hemingway makes a positive contribution to the cause of whites.  I disagree on both counts: this is not the real Hemingway; and it is not good for white people to depict Hemingway in this way.   This writing sets out how I came to that conclusion.

*    *   *

The February, 1979 Instauration issue with the Hemingway writing contained just two names, Robertson’s as the editor and Howard Allen’s as the publisher.4   Only one of the eleven articles in the issue had an author attached, the one with the Hemingway writing: “Inside Out with Cholly Bilderberger.”  “The Real Ernest Hemingway” wasn’t part of the Instauration material; that was the title used in the web site that first reprinted the Instauration Hemingway writing, National Vanguard, and then TOO used this same title for its post.

A review of other issues of Instauration around that time revealed this same pattern—no identified authors except “Inside Out with Cholly Bilderberger.”5 Given the absent of authors’ names except Bilderberger’s, which seemed clearly to be a pen name, I was left with the impression that Instauration was likely a one-man operation, that Robertson wrote and edited everything in the magazine, including the Cholly Bilderberger “Inside Out” feature.  If indeed Robertson wrote everything, that was a lot, around thirty large size pages with small type per issue, month after month after month.  Sampling the articles, Robertson and whoever else might have contributed writings came off to me as bright, informed, and dedicated, and the writing was at a pro level.

So what was this Cholly Bilderberger business?  I decided that it was likely Robertson as a fictionalized character.  I am reminded of a fictional contributing editor to Vanity Fair magazine, Ed Coaster.6  From time to time in Vanity Fair, we learn of the escapades of Mr. Coaster, an aging journalistic anachronism with his old-style typewriter.  We are never told directly that Coaster is a send-up, and we don’t know who writes the Coaster material, and the Coaster episodes involve real people doing ostensibly real things with Mister Coaster.  As readers, we know to take it all with a grain of salt—none of it really happened.  But at the same time, Ed Coaster’s exploits—as do good fiction and satire—reveal truths about the world.

It seems to me Cholly Bilderberger was Wilmot Robertson’s Ed Coaster.   Right off the bat, in the first paragraph in the Hemingway feature, Cholly notes in passing that he was there with Hemingway and Winston Guest hunting in East Africa, and with Hemingway and Leland Hayward at the Ritz in Paris, and with Hemingway and Marlene Dietrich at 21 in New York City, and with Hemingway “playing king to the whole world” in Havana.   This would have been in the 1930s and ‘40s.  All that?  Cholly was at the table with Ernie and Marlene?  Come on.  This was exaggeration for effect.   We’re having fun here.

I had the strong impression that Cholly, whether it was Robertson or someone else, made up all of this February, 1979 “Inside Out” feature, including the remarks attributed to Hemingway, to get across a point he really believed, that while Hemingway was down on liberals and Jews he knuckled under to them in order to look out for himself, and that he was a despicable character personally and a sell-out to what he really believed, including in his writing, and a plague on him and other big shots like him.  Robertson’s Cholly dispatches weren’t to be taken literally (as Ed Coaster’s aren’t now).  I assume he thought everyone knew what he was up to, just playing around, but with a serious intent behind it.

It appeared, however, from reader correspondence in the old Instauration issues that the irony, the joke, got by people; they took Cholly and what he said at face value.  And I have the sense that the readers of TOO and National Vanguard did too.  To the extent that is true, it raises the question, is this evidence that people aren’t processing the factual claims and ideas coming at them well enough?   I hypothesize the answer to that is yes.

In the 1979 Cholly feature, Robertson—I’m assuming it was Robertson—I’m sure meant well, but in getting his message across he trivialized and attributed a low, sarcastic, and crude persona to a major white icon, Hemingway.  Among other things, Cholly has Hemingway saying “Kikes smell different and feel different.”   Ouch.  I don’t think that portrayal of Hemingway serves the cause of white people.  In fact, it serves our adversaries more than it does us.

The Cholly material reinforces the stereotype of Hemingway (and, the put-down, the shallow and disreputable aspirations of a lot of white men): “boozing and womanizing and generally living out the American dreams.”   But that’s Hemingway’s public persona, the one that sold the books and magazine articles.   I’ve read a good deal about Hemingway, and from that, plus what I’ve picked up in his writings, in reality Hemingway was soft, not hard, or better, soft as well as hard, nuanced, complex.  To illustrate, consider the posthumously published The Garden of Eden, which is clearly autobiographical.    Although but a high school graduate, Hemingway was very informed, thoughtful, and perceptive — an intellectual, really.   I remember being taken by a recording of his voice—surprisingly genteel.   He knew literature well and could have been on a college English faculty somewhere.   Boxing, yes; a man’s man, communing with nature, big on courage, yes; possessing the coarseness and immature vulgarity depicted in this Cholly writing, no.   Hemingway was a capon, was he? (Cholly refers to him as that.)  This Cholly writing insults Hemingway.  And frankly, I’m taken by the fact that none of the TOO commenters picked up on this.

Cholly has Hemingway offhandedly dismissing his novel “The Old Man and the Sea,” which more than any other won him the Nobel Prize in Literature as being about “some spic who caught a fish.”   He also has Hemingway flippantly saying about the Jewish character Robert Cohn in his first big book, The Sun Also Rises, “I was actually pretty nice to him.”  That’s not the Hemingway I’ve read about or discerned from his writings.  That’s not the way a serious writer talks about his work.  I can’t believe Hemingway ever said anything like what Cholly put in his mouth.

Hemingway was an artist (he drew inspiration from artists outside the realm of writing, including from the French Impressionists), and he was deadly serious about his art.   He sincerely respected the creative act of writing.  He crafted the words he wrote with every ounce of his being.   I think of his ten or more drafts of a paragraph from his memoir “A Moveable Feast,” all of which found their way into print so readers could see Hemingway’s process.  This was very near the end of his life and he was badly damaged and not a one of the drafts was any good.  But it was obvious he had never stopped trying to produce great writing.   The “some spic who caught a fish” slur goes too far for my money.

Even though Hemingway famously professed writing what you know about, Bilderberger (Robertson?) declares he hypocritically stopped doing it himself, that he “retreated from reality.”   That’s poppycock.  I recently read Across the River and Into the Trees, a later, and critically disparaged, novel (I thought it was superb).  It was about a man aging, about mortality, about life now being for all practical purposes in the past tense, about action having been replaced by immobility and inertia, and losing it sexually.  Not what Hemingway knew about?  Not getting at what’s really going on?  Are you kidding me?  Well, yes, you are kidding me, but as Queen Victoria once said, “We are not amused”—or at least I’m not, and I’m suggesting that none of the rest of us should be either.

Hemingway, declares this Instauration writing, didn’t support the famous poet and critic Ezra Pound when Pound was hospitalized/locked up as a fascist nut case for anti-American and anti-Jewish broadcasts he made from Italy during WWII.  Hemingway most certainly did support Pound, and he did it at significant professional risk to himself.   A few years ago, I researched an article that got me into the Pound case.7   Hemingway said things like Pound “couldn’t have been in his right mind” and that he “uttered absolutely idiotic drivel,” but that was clearly to lighten things up and get the authorities to go easy on Pound after he was arrested, and he said it in the context of effusive praise for Pound.   This Bilderberger feature says Hemingway called Pound a traitor.  I never came across that in my investigations.  It would have been out of character for Hemingway flat-out to have called Pound a traitor.

As the Instauration writing asserts, I’m sure Hemingway had negative feelings toward Jews.  From what I’ve read, just about everybody did in those days.  But Hemingway bowed down to them as the writing describes?   Hemingway was a phony and an opportunist and a coward who said one thing out of their presence and another thing to their face?  Hemingway had to go through Jewish-dominated publishing and motion picture industries to get his work to an audience and earn a living.   My conclusion from what I know about Hemingway is that he was a man of personal and professional integrity and that he laid low and kowtowed the very least he had to in order to make his way in the world.  It’s so easy to hold someone to lofty standards when you aren’t the one who has to pay the utilities bill.  In my view, the Instauration depiction of Hemingway crosses the line into the realm of character assassination.

The Instauration piece attributes sophomoric and vulgar banter to Hemingway about the Jewish film producer David Selznick, liberal doyenne Eleanor Roosevelt, and “Juice in New York City” that I can’t bring myself to repeat.  Hemingway?   No.  He was too evolved a person for that.   Putting this kind of mentality in another human being to get a rise out of readers and support your thesis about the “reality” (I’m putting it in quotes) of the American elite is base behavior.

The writer of this Hemingway writing does a hit job on Hemingway.   Hemingway and by association white people generally—Cholly says it: Hemingway came to “stand for all [white] Americans”—come off looking a lot worse than liberals and Jews do here.

Whites’ adversaries realize that ridicule and demonization of exemplary whites—the Founders, every dead white male artist that ever lived, get slave-owner Jackson off the twenty-dollar bill, etc, etc, etc.—is a good way to soften whites up and bring them down as a race   We should be extra cautious about doing that to ourselves.  Taking a sledgehammer to the pedestal of an iconic white American (and unfairly as far as I’m concerned) in order to make a point as was done in the Instauration material is the very thing we don’t need.

Postscript:

I submitted the above article to the editor of The Occidental Observer, Dr. Kevin MacDonald.  He sent it for review to two men who knew Robertson when he was alive and had familiarity with Instauration when it was in publication.  According to them, while I was on to something with my basic contention—Cholly’s writing was likely fictionalized—I was off on a number of my speculations:

Contrary to what I alleged in the article, Robertson had a long history of racial activism prior to writing The Dispossessed Majority in the early ’70s and his work with Instauration.  In the late 1930s, he was active in the America First Committee, most prominently associated with aviator Charles Lindbergh, which opposed U.S. entry in a European war and had a tacit white racial agenda.  Another example, in the mid-1960s he was a contributor under his own name to a white racial publication called “Western Destiny.”

Instauration did not cease operation upon Robertson’s death.  Rather, Robertson voluntarily closed it down because he was concerned about maintaining its quality.  He worried that it would become a parody of itself in the way he believed an earlier, similar magazine had—American Mercury, edited by the legendary journalist, H. L.  Mencken (1880–1956).

Robertson did not write everything in Instauration.  There were contributions from a host of others, I’m not sure of the exact number.  Robertson heavily edited submissions, however, so that stylistic differences among the writers were blurred.  In my review of Instauration issues, Robertson refrained from using author names other than Cholly’s—using one’s name writing for white interests publications is like sticking your head out of the foxhole.  The pattern for writings where author’s identities are protected with which I’m familiar, including with this webzine, is to use pseudonyms; writings aren’t left without any attribution at all.  The stylistic similarities among the writings and the absence of author names other than Cholly’s in the issues I reviewed led me to come to the conclusion that Robertson wrote everything in Instauration. The reviewers have helped me learn that that conclusion was based on a false premise: Cholly was far from alone as a credited Instauration author, including at least one besides Robertson who used his real name.

Robertson did not, as I had surmised, write the Cholly “Inside Out” features.  I still don’t know who Cholly was (the reviewers report he has died), but it wasn’t Robertson.  The reviewers describe Cholly as a socialite and a respected author of both fiction and nonfiction who had lived in Paris, Switzerland, and Palm Beach.  He participated in the European theater in World War II, in the intelligence service, one viewer believes.  The reviewers think it likely that Cholly did in fact know Hemingway.

One reviewer reported that his recollection is that Cholly held Hemingway in contempt, and that Cholly “wrote a good deal of fictional material.”   This reviewer referred to noting “elements of a Cholly ‘tall tale’” in the Hemingway writing.  However, he added that he “suspected Cholly had a basis in fact in some of the material he included in the article.”

Respectful as I am of the reviewers’ comments—they both have superb reputations—what’s my grade on this article?   I’d put myself in the B/B- range—not bad, but still leaving much to be desired.

In my favor, I believe I caught a fabrication in this Cholly writing.   And it does seem that readers, both back then and now, took it literally when they shouldn’t have.

And, something I didn’t go into explicitly in the article, I think this Hemingway writing example reflects a pattern in white racial discourse generally.   We make pronouncements to one another, and indeed they are often thoughtful and articulately expressed.   But except for brief “yes, right” and quick comments and extrapolations from their audience, they pretty much just sit there unattended, unexamined; they don’t receive hard analysis and criticism.  The thesis here, and it should have been articulated better in the article—is that the white racial movement would profit from more rigorous dialogue and debate, and yes, respectful disagreement, than has characterized it up until now.

An example that comes to mind, in this magazine I read the writings reflective of a “New Right” perspective, Alain de Benoist’s for example.  No question, these writings come across as erudite and unimpeachably valid.   But are they really?   Are they truly grounded in reality; are they more that high-sounding words put together well?   Hear me, I’m not saying they aren’t worthy; I’m but raising the issue of whether we put them to the test of hard scrutiny—as we should with all public expressions, including this one—and whether we work with these ideas, offer modifications and alternatives to them.  Do we essentially nod our heads yes and move on?   I have concern that that is basically what we do.  I certainly don’t think we have a corner on this predilection—in fact, we do less of it than our adversaries.    But our standards should be higher than theirs.

What exactly are we debating right now as a white racial movement?  What alternative visions, programs, strategies, tactics, are on our agenda at the present?   Does this Hemingway post and its response tell us something important about ourselves?   I think it does.

All that got my grade up to a soft, not solid, B.  But I’m not an A by a long shot.   The shortcomings in my article preclude that.

The big error in my piece was jumping to the conclusion after a cursory investigation that Robertson authored the Hemingway writing, which I still find highly objectionable.   Doing that, I detracted from the legacy of a true pioneer in the white racial movement.  We would all do well to read Robertson’s book, The Dispossessed Majority (see endnote 3).  Written nearly a half century ago, it contains a remarkably accurate and prescient diagnosis of the underpinnings of the crisis currently facing white people in America. I owed Wilmot Robertson to write about him carefully — full of care — and I didn’t.

Why were there so many places that I was off in my conclusions?

First, I had other things going on in my life that drew my attention and energies, and I was willing to devote just so much time and effort to this Hemingway matter and no more.   The truth of it is that I was re-binge-watching Breaking Bad when I took a break between episodes and checked the TOO site and saw the “Real Hemingway” post and went “What’s this?” and decided to look into it some.  Which I did, but Walter White never left my mind—along with my daughter’s golf game, and this suspicious lesion on the side of my face, it isn’t skin cancer, is it?   Plus I have a pronounced lazy streak—at this very moment, a nap is calling out my name.   That is an explanation, but it isn’t a valid excuse, especially when going public with claims about people as I did in this article.

As a reader, you need to be on the case sifting through what you are getting from someone—me in this writing—who is telling you what is going on in the world.  You and I both need to keep in mind that we are trying to make sense of reality amid all sorts of things going on in our lives, and within the context of personal limitations, and we have to stay humble, tentative, about what we know, or think we know.

I ended the article I originally submitted with the assertion that we should be careful about pulling the rug out from under prominent white personages from the past, Hemingway being one of them.  The two reviewers strongly contradicted my positive views of Hemingway.

“Professor Griffin is correct to some extent that the destruction of our heroes is a bad thing for our racial self-worth,” said one reviewer.  “But does Hemingway deserve to be a hero?”  Clearly, he was implying no, he doesn’t.

Said the other reviewer: “As for the quote [Cholly attributes to Hemingway] about The Old Man and the Sea being about some spic who caught a fish, Dr. Griffin is incorrect when he surmises that Hemingway would never say that.   In To Have and Have Not, Hemingway makes derogatory racial remarks about Cubans.  He has a character observe that when the hatch is open, he’s hit with ‘Chink stink.’  If he would say those kinds of things in his novels, it stands to reason that he would say such things privately.

“Hemingway was a truly repulsive person.  He was an Anglo-Saxon who liked Spanish bullfights in which the poor animals are essentially tortured to death.  They are bled to the point of collapse before the matador comes out and finishes them off.

“It is well known and documented that Hemingway gut-shot a bitch and relished watching her death agonies over the next several days.  The story was reported by the respected liberal writer Joy Williams, and it appeared in a guidebook put out by the Key West Chamber of Commerce.  There is every reason to believe the story is true.

“Hemingway commented that he was able to finagle the ‘honor’ of being allowed to torture and kill a German POW [during World War II].

“He went out of his way to humiliate and hurt his friend [the writer] John Dos Passos by springing on him in front of everybody at a dinner where Dos Passos was to give a talk that a very close friend of Dos Passos had been executed in the Spanish Civil War.   It was shocking and sadistic treatment.

“Hemingway’s style of writing was an inevitable and necessary corrective to the overly flowery and effeminate language novelists used in the 19th century and into the 1920s.

“Hemingway was not a great white man.”

My response is that writers can attribute things to characters in their books that do not mirror their own views or behavior.

Also, there are positive ways to look at bullfights and those who take to them.

As for the bitch dog story, maybe so, maybe not so—I lean toward disbelieving it.  The Joy Williams account is evidence to be sure, but because she wrote it and the Key West Chamber of Commerce printed it does not prima facie make it a fact; credibility has to be assessed from the get-go.   Another piece of evidence to consider is that Hemingway doted on a slew of cats.  Cats aren’t dogs, but they are domestic animals.  I’m having major trouble imagining Hemingway shooting a dog in the stomach and relishing in watching her death agonies over a period of a several days.

More, as my recent Orlando article pointed out, a lot of claims by respected liberal writers, as Joy Williams was, aren’t true (I’d say the same thing about respected conservative writers), and it is not because they make things up. Rather, their life experience, outlook, and work and social contexts lead them to write things they assume are so that aren’t.   Hemingway’s politics, which I have written about elsewhere,8 leaned in a libertarian/conservative direction, and he had a gun-toting alpha male image.9  Williams, liberal and a woman, could have been writing about the “other” in the same way liberal writers at The New York Times are when they deal with Donald Trump.

Whether or not Hemingway ever told the story, seriously or in jest, about maiming and then killing a German POW—I’ve never read it—that it actually happened is incredible to me, not the least bit credible.   For the military to have granted the most famous writer/journalist at that time, who was sending back reports on the war to publications in the U.S., the privilege of killing a German POW and to have run the risk of a monumental public relations disaster if the news of it had gotten out is beyond my imagination.  Imagine the uproar if it had been revealed that top military brass were allowing a civilian to, as the reviewer relayed the tale, knee cap and then execute a German soldier, who, before he died, cried out, “What about the Geneva convention?”  Supposedly, Hemingway snarled in reply as he started shooting, “Here’s your Geneva Convention.”  I simply don’t buy it.  Which is certainly not to say that I dismiss all stories of atrocities against German soldiers (one reviewer concluded that I do).  To the contrary, I have documented them in a book I wrote on the late William Pierce.10   My article was about what Ernest Hemingway likely did and didn’t do, only that.

There are other possible, less condemning, motivations to Hemingway’s sharing with an audience that Dos Passos’ friend had been executed than it was Hemingway’s intention to hurt and humiliate Dos Passos.   Shocking and sadistic treatment of close friends does not fit with what I have read about Hemingway.  Insensitive at times, yes; shocking and sadistic, no.

And last, I deem Hemingway a truly great writer; far, far more that an inevitable and necessary corrective.

The issue has been drawn: the two reviewers say Hemingway does not merit being a respected figure in whites’ racial heritage and I say he does.

I contend our adversaries are tearing down our white heroes enough as it is without us piling on ourselves and helping them in their campaign to destroy us.   Especially, we shouldn’t be debunking white heroes unfairly, and that’s what I see happening here to Hemingway.   I don’t pick up that the two reviewers have as big a concern about this phenomenon as I do.

It needs to be underscored that neither the two reviewers nor I are the last word on this matter.  We are but three voices at the table.  Add your voice to this issue of Hemingway’s merits as an exemplary white historical figure, as well as anything else in this article.

Robert S. Griffin is professor emeritus at the University of Vermont.

Endnotes

1.http://www.instaurationonline.com/pdf-files/Instauration-1979-02-February.pdf


The Dispossessed Majority is available online as a PDF. https://ia800500.us.archive.org/23/items/TheDispossessedMajority/WilmotRobertson-DispossessedMajority-Dm.pdf

“The Orlando Shootings: Talk, Reality, and The New York Times,” The Occidental Observer, June 27th, 2016. http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2016/06/the-orlando-shootings-talk-reality-and-the-new-york-times/#more-37606

The February, 1979 issue of Instauration is online. http://instaurationonline.com/?cat=26

The December, 1978 and all of the 1979 issues of Instauration are online.
http://instaurationonline.com/?cat=26


For examples of the Ed Coaster spoofs, see http://connection.ebscohost.com/tag/COASTER%252C%2BEdwin%2BJohn

A book I recall contributing to that investigation into the Pound case that involved Hemingway is E. Fuller Torrey, The Roots of Treason: Ezra Pound and the Secrets of St. Elizabeths (McGraw-Hill, 1984).
See the November, 2007 thought “On Hemingway’s Politics” in my web site, www.robertsgriffin.com.
See the March, 2014 thought “On Ernest Hemingway and Manhood” in my web site, www.robertsgriffin.com.
Robert S. Griffin, The Fame of a Dead Man’s Deeds (Authorhouse, 2001), see pp. 285-290.

https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/
 

Pierce on schooling

 

 Pierce was on a university faculty for three years and still cares a great deal about education. His critique of American schooling reveals much about the way he sees American society in general. In a recent article in Free Speech entitled "The School Problem," he argues that schools have three fundamental missions in a society of the sort he envisions. I believe he primarily has elementary and secondary education in mind in the following quoted material.

 First, schools pass on a people's cultural, intellectual, and spiritual heritage from one generation to the next. By teaching to children the language, literature, history, and traditions of a people--by teaching children about their people's heroes and legends and achievements and mores--the schools help to assure cultural continuity, among other things. And they provide a sense of racial and cultural identity. They enable a child to define himself relative to his people and to the rest of the world.

 Second, schools teach technique; they help children acquire the knowledge and skills needed for them to become productive and self-supporting members of their society, whether those skills are welding, computer programming, accounting, or household management. They teach the child or the young adult techniques which will be useful to him or to society: how to play a musical instrument, how to type, how to repair a motor vehicle, how to fight with and without weapons, how to draw, how to swim, how to raise children, how to grow food, how to build a house.

 And third, schools train and develop character in children, so that they will grow up to be the strongest and most valuable citizens that their genetic inheritance allows. The schools challenge, test, and condition children; they force the child to exercise his will, to discipline himself, to endure discomfort, to make plans and carry them out, to overcome fears, to accept responsibility, to learn the consequences of failure, to be truthful, to act honorably, and generally to

 develop and strengthen those traits of character valued by his society. 1

 Using the achievement of these three missions with white children as the standard of assessment, America's schools just aren't measuring up, Pierce asserts. And why aren't they? Pierce argues that three "isms" are getting in the way: namely, multiculturalism, egalitarianism, and feminism. He says these three ideologies are solidly entrenched in the minds of the powerful "progressive" faction within the education establishment and serve its overall agenda.

 For a long time, of course, the more "progressive" elements--that is, the nuttier elements--in America's educational establishment have been fretting about exposing young people to all of the racist, sexist, homophobic, and elitist influences inherent in the writings of White authors from generations less Politically Correct than our own. These include all the writers whose works American schoolchildren traditionally have read: Homer, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Dickens, Tennyson, and Kipling. They are hateful people when viewed from a Politically Correct perspective. I mean, Homer and Chaucer completely ignored Blacks, as if they didn't exist! And Shakespeare made a number of very insensitive references to Jews. Kipling was an unabashed White supremacist. And they were all elitists: not an egalitarian among them. "Progressive" educators have skirted this problem by censoring the works of White writers before presenting them to students, keeping the more objectionable works out of sight.'

 According to Pierce, multiculturalism, egalitarianism, and feminism operate under a division-of-labor arrangement in our schools, each specializing, as it were, in obstructing the attainment of one of the three fundamental missions of schooling: multiculturalism impedes the transmission of white children's Western, European heritage; egalitarianism undercuts the attainment of the acquisition of knowledge and skills; and feminism undermines the development of character. In "The School Problem," Pierce outlines in turn how the fulfillment of each mission is subverted.

 Pierce says that schools are not even trying to pass on a European, or even American, identity and sense of connectedness to the next generation of white people. The reigning ideology of multiculturalism, says Pierce, pushes for a multi-racial, "diverse" society, in which all cultures are

 equally valuable. Multiculturalists are not about to single out Western traditions for special attention or praise. The result is that no culture is taught in depth, and students come away with a few superficial facts and generalizations about a number of cultures. What white youngsters do manage to learn about their own heritage isn't likely to make them feel very good about it, because despite their rhetoric, multiculturalists have a negative view of the West generally and Euro-American traditions and history in particular. Multiculturalists don't want to encourage the development of racial consciousness and loyalty among white youngsters--among minority youngsters, yes, but among white youngsters most certainly not. In today's schools, white students are deluged by tales of their oppressive and exploitative ancestors—especially the men among them. After year upon year of exposure to this kind of schooling, white children become instilled with a negative and very distorted view of their own people and feelings of guilt.

 Pierce says that some of the charter schools set up for black children do a better job of providing for racial and cultural continuity than the schools white children attend. (Charter schools are public schools which are allowed to operate independently of most outside bureaucratic control.) He tells of a newspaper article which describes black children in such a school dressed in traditional African garb and, with clenched fists, pledging allegiance to their fellow Africans. "If a White school tried with equal fervor to instill a sense of European racial consciousness in its students," Pierce asserts, "the government would be all over the school with subpoenas in a minute." 3

 And then there is egalitarianism--the belief in the essential equality of all individuals and groups--and its impact on the schools. Pierce says that imparting knowledge and technique is what schools do best. But they don't do it nearly as well as they could because their egalitarian "articles of faith" lead them to refuse to recognize distinctions among people and consequently attempt to fit everyone into the same mold. "It used to b e that we weren't afraid to recognize the differences in people," Pierce points out. "We understood that some people would grow up to be welders, construction workers, or farmers; and some would be mathematicians, poets, or rocket scientists. We also understood that shop courses made more sense for boys than girls, and that girls needed home economics courses more than boys did." 4

 In prior times, Pierce points out, we acknowledged the obvious reality that some students were academically more capable than others. He contends that this fact of human existence has been a source of great anguish to the egalitarians, and that they have come up with ways to get around it. What do they do? They water down the curriculum. They

 disparage and downplay the importance of intellectual pursuits. They lower academic standards. They do away with rigorous, objective tests of achievement. Then, with all that in place, every student can succeed--at least as the egalitarians have defined success--and the myth of human equality can be maintained. The egalitarians have been able to perpetuate the comforting but false notion of human equality in their own minds--they desperately want it to be true—as well as in the minds of others. The big problem, however, is that, whether they realize it or not, they have done it at the cost of academic excellence.

 Pierce says that it is a fact that, on average, black students are significantly less capable than whites of handling a traditional curriculum. But no one dares say it--or, for that matter, even speculate about the possibility that there might be racial differences in intellectual functioning—for fear of being called a racist. No matter how much research evidence is marshaled to support the conclusion that blacks as a group have lower intelligence, no matter how much evidence we take in with our own senses, the egalitarians hang onto their belief that the races are exactly the same in this regard and insist that everyone else does too. Pierce says that egalitarians can be counted on to manipulate reality to make it appear that their beliefs are valid. If white children are in a school with large numbers of black children it is safe to bet that the curriculum, academic standards, and assessment mechanisms will have been adjusted to ensure that white performance will be brought back to the level of the black students.

 Pierce argues that along with our refusal to recognize intellectual differences among the races, we also refuse to recognize attitudinal and behavioral differences among them. Blacks on the whole, claims Pierce, have lower self-control and a greater propensity to be disorderly and violent. As the schools have been integrated, Pierce asserts, they have brought these problems with them to the classrooms white students attend. Pierce says it is true blacks change their values and behavior in the direction of white patterns to some extent when they are mixed with whites. But it works the other way too, contends Pierce: whites begin moving toward black norms. White youth educated with blacks can be predicted to be less academically oriented, more disruptive, and more violent than their forebears who did not have the "benefits" of diversity--so Pierce argues.

 Pierce claims that most whites have been so "sensitized" and brainwashed that they have a very hard time dealing with racial realities. They see the problems in urban schools with drugs and gangs and poor attitudes toward schoolwork and yet refuse to acknowledge the racial dimension of the problems. They have bought into the false egalitarian myth of the absence of racial differences in anything other than skin color.

 Although then again, Pierce notes, when white people are looking for safer and better schools for their children, they seek out whiter schools for their children, even if they can't fully admit to themselves that that is what they are doing. So maybe they haven't been totally brainwashed after all.

 And then there is feminism and its impact on educational practice. Pierce informs us that over the past few decades, feminists have gained great influence within the education establishment. "And let me tell you," he proclaims, "if there is any bunch of people in this country with wackier and more destructive ideas than the racial egalitarians, it is the feminists." 5 Pierce says the feminists see traditional educational practice as a male-oriented way of operating, and they are bent on changing things over to bring them in line with a female way of looking at the world and dealing with it.

 Feminists, for example, always have been against competition. They regard competitiveness as a masculine trait, and they try to discourage it in every way they can. They are in league with the racial egalitarians in pushing for an end to the grading of students. Setting precise standards and then grading students numerically according to their performance relative to those standards is anathema to them. They see it as psychologically damaging to the students—especially to those who make low scores. They much prefer a warm and fuzzy approach to evaluating students. Their goal for the classroom is cooperation, as opposed to what they like to refer as "cutthroat" competition. They love committees and work groups and consensus. They want to see the students deal with learning as a group, with the brighter students helping the duller students. They like to see problems talked to death in a group. It's not really stretching their ideas very far to say that whenever the members of a student group disagree about a problem, the feminists would like to see the students vote on the correct answer. They really do have a different view of the nature of reality.

 The feminists also don't like to see a strong emphasis on rules. It destroys creativity, they believe. Rules and details should be relegated to a secondary position, and students should be given the "big picture" instead. They should be able to talk about a subject in broad terms without worrying too much about the details. And the feminists don't much care for an analytical approach to any subject. Analysis is too masculine. 6

 Pierce contends that the effectiveness of feminism's efforts to de-emphasize competition in our schools can be seen in our diminished competitive spirit in this country compared to prior times and in the growing softness and wimpishness of so many young white men. Pierce says it is important to see how everything ties together; since the media are enamored of anything that weakens white people, and feminism does that, it explains why the media have, in Pierce's words, "tried to ram feminist propaganda down our throats." 7

 So there it is: Pierce thinks that multiculturalism prevents the passing on of European culture and identity to the next generation; egalitarianism has wrecked our standards, undermined discipline, and corrupted our curriculum; and feminism has nullified the character-building task of the schools. Pierce acknowledges that this analysis is an oversimplification, but still, he contends, it gets at the heart of the matter if one shares his concern for the fate of European-American children.

 It must be said that Pierce is far from alone in his basic assessment of the ills of American education. A number of outspoken critics on the right share Pierces concerns about the impact of multiculturalism, egalitarianism, and feminism on America's schooling specifically, and about progressive education generally. However, I know of no other analyst who explicitly brings the racial angle to his arguments as Pierce does. And Pierce is the only one I know about who openly expresses his belief that the education that promotes the level of cultural identity and continuity among white people he wants to see can only occur in racially homogeneous schools. Ironically, Pierce puts forth the same arguments in making this case as do a number of African American educators who have long advocated separate schools for black children geared to helping them develop a sense of African and black racial consciousness and pride and commitment. Pierce says that it is indicative of what is going on in America that there are such schools for black children supported with public dollars, but that any attempt to create these very same kind of schools, private or public, for white children is immediately and vigorously condemned as "racist" and "white supremacist" and shut down.

 A North Carolina television news reporter came to West Virginia to interview Pierce. While he was at the property, the reporter asked Pierce to show him an example of the children's books Pierce distributes through his National Vanguard Books catalog. Pierce responded by showing him a copy of an illustrated edition of Aesop's Fables. The reporter flipped through the pages and asked Pierce, "What is this all about?" It turned out that this young reporter had never heard of Aesop or his fables.

 Pierce told the reporter that it was a collection of stories, each with a moral, attributed to the Greek writer Aesop, who lived around 600 B.C.. Recalling that exchange, Pierce says that at first he was surprised at the reporter's unfamiliarity with the Aesop material but now realizes that he shouldn't have been. In recent times neither schools nor parents see any need to introduce white children to the stories of Aesop, or to the Brothers Grimm and the others of that sort, that earlier generations of white children read or had read to them.

 When I was a kid one of the special charms that Aesop's Fables held for me was the knowledge that Alexander the Great had read exactly these same stories when he was a child, more than 2,300 years ago. When I read the fable about the dog in the manger or the one about the shepherd boy who cried "wolf and thought about the lessons these fables taught, it thrilled me to think that every great man in our history, for thousands of years, had read these same stories when he was a child and learned the same lessons.

 But not any longer. These fables are...Eurocentric...and so today they are all "no-nos" for White children--which is why we have a White population in America which is increasingly rootless, cosmopolitan, alienated, and atomized--a White population which is unable to defend its heritage or to oppose those whose aim is to destroy that heritage, because they have no knowledge of their heritage, and who believe that anyone who values that heritage must be a "hater" or a "racist." 8

 When I was in West Virginia, I saw one of the children's books that Pierce distributes on Bob DeMarais' desk and borrowed it to see what kind of books Pierce thought appropriate for young children. It was called Annie and the Wild Animals, and it was written and illustrated by Jan Brett. 9 It was published in 1985 by Houghton Mifflin, a major American publishing house. The book looked to me to be something that could b e used in the early grades in schools or that parents could read to their three-to-six-year-old children in twenty minutes or so--it was mostly pictures. Annie is a little blond girl of four or five who lives in the country and whose cat disappears one winter. With her cat gone, Annie makes a connection with a variety of woodland animals. When spring comes, Annie finds her cat along with a litter of newborn kittens in the woods as all the other animals she has met look on.

 I could see why Pierce would favor Annie and the Wild Animals. A little white girl, embedded in a natural world, not a concrete-and-steel

 world. Annie's was a calm world, not a jangly world. Annie directly encounters life; she wasn't living a media-infused, Sesame Street/video game/Disney film existence. And there was a timelessness to the story: it could have taken place yesterday or twenty years ago or a hundred years ago. It wasn't about the hip-hop, bang-bang-bang, go-go-go world of today. It is how Pierce--unrealistically, some would say--thinks white children ought to live.

 In a radio broadcast back called "Brainwashing in America," Pierce spoke to the issue of university education. 10 He told his audience that he had been a university professor during the turbulent 1960s. This was a time marked by the powerful emergence of the so-called counterculture, with its hostility to authority, friendliness to drugs and recreational sex, and encouragement to people to do whatever felt good to them at the moment These were also the years of the civil rights revolution--Pierce says blacks were "demonstrating and generally raising hell"--and the anti-Vietnam war movement.

 Pierce told his listeners that he divided his colleagues on the faculty into four categories on the basis of how they related to all that was happening on campus in those years.

 First, Pierce said, there were the "Trendies." These were the unthinking liberals--in contrast to the second group, the more reflective, doctrinaire liberals and radical leftists (I'll call them "Lefties"). The Trendies were disposed to believe whatever was fashionable, said Pierce. They were the ones who held a moistened forefinger up to the breeze of propaganda coming from their television screens and orating colleagues, and adjusted their views accordingly.

 Then, the third of Pierce's categories, there were the Jews, who, noted Pierce, are more numerous on college campuses than in the general population. The Jews were "up to their necks in civil rights activities," Pierce pointed out—organizing committees to hire more non-white faculty members and recruit non-white students, demanding that the university trustees get rid of their investments in South Africa, and marching and demonstrating and writing letters to the editor and opinion pieces. Jews were also very active in the anti-war movement because, claimed Pierce, unlike World War II, they didn't see their interests being served in Vietnam. And Jews were very prominent among those pushing

 countercultural values—personal license, disrespect for social convention, and the rest. These values subverted morality and order in white society, and the prospect of that turn of events has great appeal to Jews, said Pierce.

 As a result of the activities of the Lefties, the Trendies, and the Jews, Pierce alleged, there was a lowering of hiring and student recruitment

 standards, a lowering of academic standards, and the subordination of the educational mission of the university to a leftist political agenda. Later on, Pierce said, the feminists and gay rights activists got on board and the university became the bastion of Political Correctness (he always capitalizes that term) that it is today.

 Pierce doesn't have a name for the fourth category of faculty with whom he worked at the university, but based on how he describes them, I'll give them a label--"Timids." The Timids were the faculty members who weren't taken in by what was going on—they knew what was up--but they were not willing to express their views openly or to oppose the confirmed Lefties, the trendy liberals, and the vocal Jews (with the first and third categories often being the same people). Pierce said the Timids would say one thing privately and another thing publicly. Pierce said he thinks that these faculty were unduly afraid of the consequences to themselves of taking on the Lefties, Trendies, and Jews and ended up acting in dishonest--and to Pierce's way of thinking, dishonorable--ways.

 Pierce acknowledges that the Timids did have some reason to be concerned about their welfare if they spoke up. Their careers could have been affected if they went up against certain people—tenure and promotions decisions could go against them, salary increases could b e denied, and prime teaching assignments could be given to someone else. And too, Pierce reported, there was some physical intimidation--tire-slashing, disruptions of classes, threats of violence, those kinds of things. And then of course there was the disdain and ridicule that would have been directed at the Timids if they had spoken up or failed to go along with what the Lefties, Trendies, and Jews wanted done.

 As I was listening to the tape of Pierce's broadcast, I thought of one other possible reason for the silence of the Timids. To the degree that Pierce is right, that many people on the right stayed silent and inactive during the 1960s, it could have been that they simply didn't want to live with not being liked and approved and accepted by those on the left. I have observed an interesting difference between those on the political right and political left. Characteristically, those on the right, for whatever reason, want to be liked and approved by those on the left. In contrast, those on the left could not care less whether those on the right like them or approve of what they say or do. They don't give two seconds to worrying about what somebody on the right is going to think of them before saying or doing something. If that is true, the prospect of being confronted by the disapproval, disagreement, or cold shoulder from their liberal and leftist colleagues may well be enough to keep conservative and rightist faculty members silent, inactive, and acquiescent, or even lead them actively to support goings-on which are contrary to their beliefs.

 Whatever the reason for it, faculty who opposed the corruption of the university didn't speak out or display any measure of solidarity in those years, said Pierce. He contended that if they had been bolder and had stood together they would have been able to prevail in many instances. Especially they would have prevailed if the Trendies had been rooted enough as people to do more than align themselves with whatever happened to be in the wind at the moment. But the Timids sat tight and the Trendies went along with what was fashionable, and the result has been the tyranny of political correctness in American higher education. Pierce said the modern university has become "an enemy asset." 11 But honesty and courage at the right time, he asserted, thirty years ago when all of this was catching hold, could have prevented what he views as a great tragedy.

 Pierce expressed intense disdain for modern-day academics who oppose what is going on in the university but won't fight against it, employing the strongest language when describing them I have heard from him. "They are lickspittles [servile flatterers, toadies] and hypocrites, liars and wimps, without the slightest trace of manliness, honor, or self-respect," he declared. "They teach doctrines which they know are false. They grovel at the feet of the Jews and other minorities in order to keep their jobs. They present the worst possible example to young people. It is pitiful to behold, truly disgusting." 12

 In the "Brainwashing in America" broadcast, Pierce reported that, in an address to the faculty, the president of Rutgers University pointed out that on the average blacks possibly may not have the genetic qualities to meet the same standards set for white students. Pierce said the media picked it up and there were calls for the president's head. But instead of the Rutgers president defending what he said and backing it up with evidence, he began groveling and apologizing, whining and begging, and going on about how he hadn't really meant what he said. "Truly pathetic," snarled Pierce.

 Pierce says that traditionally universities have had two purposes. The first has been--and, to his mind, still should be--to train scholars: mathematicians, chemists, historians, philosophers, and so on. The second purpose has been to instill in a leadership elite of young people a sense of commitment to their civilization so that they could maintain and add to it. "The civilization that our universities were a part of was unmistakably and unapologetically Western," he argues, "which is to say, European--or, if you prefer, White." 13

 Pierce says that one can still get a technical education in an American university, by which he means in fields such as engineering and medicine.

 What isn't available now, however, according to him, is the kind of liberal education he favors, one that transmits knowledge about our Western heritage and invokes a sense of responsibility to contribute to the survival and improvement of our culture and our race. Pierce says today's universities are in the business of indoctrinating students with a party line that is anti-white, anti-European, and anti-Western. He believes

 universities have become weapons to destroy white European culture. In post-secondary education, Shakespeare and Milton are out and contemporary black writers (Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou) and pop culture courses ("The Gangster Film") are in. Students raised on television and permissiveness and most likely not among the elite academically--these days, mediocre high school students fill up colleges eager to take their tuition money--too often choose the fun courses, the trendy courses, the trivial courses, instead of the serious, demanding ones.

 Pierce particularly decries the state of history and literature in modern universities. These are the subjects where the "Red Guards," as he calls them, have most left their mark. He says he knows why that is the case.

 History is an inherently racist subject...because, in the first place, it involves the study of what peoples and individuals have actually done, not what the theorists of democracy and equality would like to have us believe they have done. History gives us continuing proof of the fact that there is no equality in the world. It is the record of heroic accomplishment and outstanding virtue on the part of some, contrasted with the chronic ineptitude and appalling iniquity on the part of others. In the second place, it provides the indispensable basis for a sense of peoplehood, a sense of rootedness, a sense of racial identity. It is not something you want to spread around when you are trying to reduce a population to a mass of rootless, cosmopolitan, interchangeable human atoms....

 And literature... well, that's at least as dangerous as history. Who can read the Iliad without his blood beginning to race and without feeling a connection to those ancient people and events? Who cannot be moved by the same spirit that moved Homer? And that spirit has nothing to do with the sickly spirit of democracy and equality. And then there's Shakespeare! There was never a man who observed the human condition with truer eye than he....The great danger in literature--in real literature, in great literature--for the democrats and the egalitarians is that it helps us to understand ourselves in the context of our people. It helps us to complete

 ourselves and become whole. It extends our horizons, helps us see the big picture. It gives us ideals, models--and those ideals, in our literature, are not egalitarian ideals. Nor are the models Politically Correct: in fact, they are much more likely to be heroes than democrats. 14

 Over the past quarter century, Pierce in his various publications--Attack!, National Vanguard, and Free Speech--has given over much space to articles devoted to the history to the white race. Examples include "The Celts: Their Origins and Pre-History," "Leonidas and the Spartan Ethos," "Sven Hedin: Last of the Vikings," and "Denis Kearney and the Struggle for a White America." (Kearney was an organizer of white workers in California in the 1870s.) Pierce has also printed pieces on writers and artists with a strong white racial consciousness such as Knut Hamsun, Arno Breker, Aldous Huxley, and Rudyard Kipling. 15 Many other examples could be cited--political leaders, inventors, military figures, explorers, and so forth, both well-known and obscure, whom Pierce views as being important in the journey taken thus far by the white race and useful as guides and as inspiration for white people now living as they (he hopes) carry on the race's upward advance.

 I don't know whether Pierce is familiar with it, but his approach to white racial studies links him to a new academic trend in universities known as whiteness studies—although his focus on what he considers to b e the exemplary aspects of the white experience contrasts with that of the other practitioners in this field. Scholars in the field of whiteness studies fall into one of two camps: those who concern themselves with the culture of "white trash"; and those whose goal is to "problematize" whiteness, that is to say, examine it either as a means of purging it of its most negative qualities—racism, for example--or of eliminating it as an individual or group identity.

 An example of the first camp is a book called White Trash. 16 This volume includes an interview by Northwestern University professor Laura Kipnis of one Jennifer Reeder, who revels in her "white trash" identity. Says Reeder, "I am busty, and I am loud, and I love bad taste. I am bad taste." The book also contains essays on slasher movies, Elvis worship, hillbilly lore, and country music. In the second camp are scholars such as historian Noel Ignatiev. Ignatiev edits a journal called Race Traitor whose motto is "treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity." He says that studying whiteness is merely a necessary stage en route to what he terms "the abolition of whiteness." "There is no such thing as white culture," Ignatiev maintains. "Without the privileges attached to it, the white race

 would not exist, and white skin would have no more social significance than big feet." 17

 Examples of whiteness studies are springing up around the country. Students at Macalaster College in St. Paul, Minnesota enroll in a course called "Race, Race Privilege, and Whiteness," in which they interview their classmates about their experiences of racism and whiteness. Duke University Press has published a collection of essays entitled Displacing Whiteness. n In New Jersey, the Center for the Study of White American Culture devotes its efforts to helping "white Americans participate in building a multi-racial society." 19

 Whiteness studies is not without its detractors, however. David Roediger, the author of the book, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness, worries that white culture will unduly come in for attention and affirmation. "Whiteness," says Roediger, "describes, from Little Big Horn to Simi Valley, not a culture but precisely the absence of culture. It is the empty and therefore terrifying attempt to build an identity based on what one isn't and on whom one can hold back." 20 Professor of African American studies at Columbia University Michael Eric Dyson, whose next book will be partly devoted to whiteness, says, "There's a suspicion among African-Americans that whiteness studies is a sneaky form of narcissism. At the very moment when African-American studies and Asian-American studies and so on are really coming into their own, you have whiteness studies shifting the focus and maybe the resources back to white people and their perspective." 21 And then there is the concern of Margaret Talbot, the author of a New York Times Magazine article on whiteness studies. Talbot says in her Times piece that one unsettling question to be answered about the field is what social good it serves to heighten Caucasian awareness if in doing so you run the risk of swelling Caucasian pride. 2 2

The Fame of a Dead Man's Deeds:

 An Up-Close Portrait of White Nationalist William Pierce

 by Robert S. Griffin

REARING HONORABLE WHITE CHILDREN - How to insulate your children from a poisonous world?

Writing The Fame of a Dead Man’s Deeds brought me into contact with three hundred or more racially conscious white people, some followers of Pierce and some not. I met them at meetings and online, and some who had read the book contacted me. Since I work in the field of education, I particularly took note of their approach to parenting and educating their children. I published my first article with a racial theme in the October 2001 issue of American Renaissance magazine reporting what I was learning about these parents. I called it "Rearing Honorable White Children": 

During the past several years, while working on a book about white nationalist William Pierce, I became acquainted with a number of white couples that are rearing their children in a racially conscious manner. I have noticed a pattern in the way these parents bring up children, and I believe their approach would interest those who align themselves with the views expressed in American Renaissance.

What links these parents is a conviction that they are bringing up their children in hostile territory. As they see it, their kind has been hammered relentlessly in the culture wars waged in this country for decades against whites. Their heritage-Western history and traditions-has been denigrated, their race linked to oppression and racism, and their racial consciousness, pride, and commitment  demonized. The shallowness and egoism of modern life run counter to their values of dignity, discipline, and responsibility.

These parents have a legitimate concern. One illustration: Just after interviewing a ·racially conscious couple who spoke of their worries about the influence of popular music and the youth culture, I found an article in Talk magazine about rap music impresario, Dr. Dre (real name, Andre Young). "Dre," the article reported, "watched from the stage of a concert as blacks and whites chanted the lyrics in a single voice and moved to the music as one. He has seen the races become a single happy entity as surely as if they had been on turntables and run through a mixer. The music is what blends the races together as decades of preaching never did." Rap music does bring black outlooks and values to young white people. Indeed, it does blend the races, as does pop music generally.

Clearly, to Talk magazine as well as most others in America, this is a good thing, but for whites who want to maintain their racial and cultural identity, what happened at that concert was not a good thing at all. They will do everything they can to keep their children out of Dr. Dre's audience.
Greg and Kathryn, as I will call this couple, have concluded that the best way for them to deal with a society that runs counter to what they most treasure is to withdraw from it. Morris Berman in his recent book The Twilight of American Culture writes about what he calls the "monastic option." Professor Berman tells of monks who lived in the disintegrating landscape of the Roman Empire and saw themselves as strangers in a strange land. What the culture saw as worthwhile, they saw as stupid and destructive. As the lights of their own culture faded, they turned their backs on what was taking its place and took upon themselves the task of preserving the treasures of Greco-Roman civilization.

Although the parents I have met would not use the term "monastic option," this essentially describes what they are doing. They are distancing themselves and their children from the dominant culture and trying to preserve their race and its heritage. How do they insulate their children from a poisonous world?

Through their basic approach to parenting, and through their stance toward the media, schooling, and their children's relations with peers. They believe to be effective as parents they must be authoritarian. They are not lenient or indulgent. They don't hold to the currently fashionable idea that children are basically good, and that a parent's job is to support a child's inclinations. They see all human beings as having the potential for both good and bad, and their view is that, ideally, parents and society should share the job of ensuring that children realize their positive potential.

These parents know that children are strongly influenced by the forces that surround them: principal among them, the mass media, the peer group, and the school. Since they disdain the direction in which these forces push their children, they want to be the most powerful force in their children's lives, and to protect them from what will hurt them. They are hands-on parents, who do not tum their children over to the influences of others.

As these parents see it, the major task of childhood is to pave the way to a responsible and productive adulthood, and they don't hesitate to direct that process. They assert power and control. They set standards and limits. They demand the development of sound judgment and proper behavior, and they exemplify it in the way they conduct their own lives. They transmit their fundamental values and what they consider to be the overall purpose of their children's lives, which is to carry on and enhance the best of their heritage and race.

These parents teach their children that they are not isolated beings but rather a continuous part of what their people represent and have accomplished over the course of history, and that they are responsible to their people as a whole, not just to themselves and their own happiness and well-being.

Although they are the authorities in their children's lives, these parents are not harsh or cold. They can be stern, but they are affirming and loving. They teach appreciation of one's place in the larger scheme of things, but also promote individuality and self-direction. They exercise firm parental direction and control, but also encourage curiosity and creativity. They promote maturity, but also protect innocence and playfulness. They encourage hardness, toughness, and gentleness and compassion.

These parents think the media-television, movies, popular music, video games-promote everything they don't want for their children: baseness, vulgarity, multi-racialism, egalitarianism, cosmopolitanism, materialism, rudeness, passivity and vicariousness.

Perhaps there is a History or Discovery Channel program parents and children watch together, or a classic film; but no Nickelodeon, no MTV, no Disney films (or at least no recent Disney films-the old ones, when Walt was still around, are OK), no mind-infecting video games, and no Internet-surfing.

The first contact I had with parents of this sort was in Germany: Frank and his wife Hanna. They invited me to dinner at their home with their two boys, Marius age thirteen, and Dirk, sixteen. After dinner, we all went into the living room. Contrary to my expectation, the boys didn't immediately head for their rooms or out the door.

Dirk sat ready to converse with the adults. Marius picked up a book and began reading. Later, after the boys excused themselves, I mentioned to Frank that I had noticed that the children didn't sit in front of the television or play a video game.

"Oh, I forbid those things," Frank responded. "Forbid"-that is not a word I expect to hear these days. "But you have to offer them other things to do," he quickly added. "We read together and play chess, and we cross-country ski, and the boys and I work in my workshop in the basement." Since that time, I have witnessed the same no-media pattern in the United States. "Our television has a numerical code for activating the set so the kids cannot simply switch it on or off," reports Keith, a parent of three. "We put a cap on television time. There are some decent programs, but even in those cases we mute out the advertisements. We have chosen not to buy video games. We filter everything that comes in-music, radio, everything. 

 We believe it is a parent's responsibility to do this. Raised right, children will make the right-and for us, that means the racially responsible- choices." Ken and Elizabeth live in New Hampshire and have four children ranging in age from five to thirteen. This New Hampshire family has, in effect, seceded from the mass culture. There is a television set in the home, but I have never seen it on except a few times when the family watched a classic old film. I have not heard any popular music. I asked ten-year old Helen whether she ever wanted to watch television, go to one of the big movies showing in the theaters, or buy a popular music CD. She responded to the effect that those things are low and not worth her time.

"It is inconceivable to us," Ken told me, "that people actually sit in front of the television-videos included-hour upon hour, letting this degrading material into their homes. Something either inspires the soul or destroys it. For music, we listen to classical music. Our children read good books, play chess and backgammon, draw, paint, and sew. We take hikes as a family, go on picnics, cycle, and go to museums and concerts. We do things together in order to cement our bonds as a family." Just as significant is what the children don't do in this home: they don't concern themselves with the persona and career of a pop musician; they don't press their parents for cash for the latest video game; they don't get preoccupied with the plot of a Fox television show; they don't stew over the fate of a professional sports team; and they don't chatter on about a summer blockbuster film.

As far as I can tell, these parents have successfully embargoed the mass media. Before meeting people like this, I would have said that whatever the merits of getting the popular media out of the lives of children, as a practical matter it is impossible. Now I think if parents are committed, it is possible to keep Hollywood, pop music, television, and web sites out of your children's lives.
Another pattern I see in racially conscious white parents is homeschooling. Typically, these parents educate their children at home. If they don't, it is because of circumstance and they hope to in the future.

Elizabeth, the New Hampshire parent, interrupted a career in investments to take over the education of her four children. "There is nothing more important I could be doing with my life than what I am doing now," she explains.

I asked her what she wants most for her children. "Honor," she immediately answered. "I want them to live an honorable life." "Your honor means everything," Ken, who was sitting nearby, added. "Today, too few people understand that." "There is an old concept of wanting more for your children than you yourself had," Elizabeth told me. "And part of that is you want them to have a better education than you did, or at least as good.

With today's schools, that isn't going to happen. Standards have been lowered. Kids aren't being pushed in school. When Ken and I were going through school, you would fail if you didn't do your work. But now everyone passes. There is a leveling going on in the schools. They operate so that no one is lower and no one is higher.

The gifted children aren't really encouraged to excel. The students don't spend enough time reading, and they aren't taught to think and analyze." "The worse kind of child abuse is to deny a child a decent education," Ken added. "One of the strengths of this country was our public-school system, but not now. We've lost something terribly important. Today's graduates couldn't compete with the graduates of the tum of the last century. And I think the integration of the schools and immigration patterns since the 1960s have had something to do with that. Our schools are reflecting the needs and styles of a new clientele, and people like us are paying the price for it.

"You aren't going to understand what is going on in education if you don't take race into account-the direction Federal programs take, the problems with city schools, what content is stressed, testing, whatever you are talking about. The schools are providing what amounts to an education for menials, not a great people.

"We point out more things to our children than the schools would. The schools are producing clones, everybody the same. A superior educational system promotes difference, not sameness.
This whole egalitarian push that is the current fashion works against the advancement of the race. It is anti-selection. It keeps everybody at the level of the mediocre." "The problem from a racial standpoint," Elizabeth offered, "is that we aren't, as we once were, with ou own. I want my kids to be in a stable environment, not one where there are various factions.

Kids need stability. We used to have pride in our race and our heritage. We were proud of our forefathers. Now, if a white child says he is proud of his lines, proud of his race, he is considered a racist." "Before, Washington and Jefferson were our heroes," Ken added.

"Now, our idols are being wiped out and replaced by people like Martin Luther King. If you want to bring down a people, you rewrite its history and teach that to its children. You cut off children's roots so they have nothing to tie into. They have abolished the study of Latin in the schools. Knowledge of Latin is essential to an educated person, and it is part of our racial and cultural roots. Over eighty percent of English words are derived from Latin. The Latin language has greatly influenced the development of the West. We make sure our children study Latin. There has been more than just a dumbing down in the schools. There has been a twisting down. The story of our race is being twisted. It is being perverted." I talked to James, their thirteen-year-old about what he is reading.

He said he is learning about Alexander the Great, whom he really admires-"He made history. I want to do that." He told me he recently read Quo Vadis, Thomas Jefferson and His World, a book about John Paul Jones, some books about explorers, the Hobbit series, Alice in Wonderland, Arundel, by the historical novelist Kenneth Roberts, and some of the writings of Dostoevsky, Chekhov and Joseph C. Lincoln. He recommended that I read Roberts' book, The Northwest Passage, and gave me his copy to take with me. What I gather from James is that he is on a quest: he is reaching out to learn; he is studying things. So many other youngsters his age go to class and do assignments, but do not actually study anything.

"We teach our children about their heritage," says Ken, "the heritage of Western man. We give them the best that our civilization has produced. The public schools aren't doing that. We don't get into every culture and subculture, because we don't think those things are important in a primary sense. The schools impose doctrinaire opinions about the irrelevance of race. They push a concept of the role of women that in our view is unnatural. They promote internationalism. Schools are brainwashing white children to feel guilty about their heritage and tum away from it. Our children's heritage includes Homer, Plato, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, and Beethoven. They have every right to be overwhelmingly proud of their people, but schools are molding them into raceless, historyless, malleable citizens of the world." It is true that teachers believe they have a responsibility to teach students new truths in the face of reactionary forces. This view is best articulated by the teaching profession's most revered figure, John Dewey, who wrote, "Children must be conditioned, through gradual indoctrination, to reject the thought processes transmitted by their parents and churches, so that they may be prepared for the new world social order." Although Ken and Elizabeth are Catholic, they would not consider sending their children to parochial schools. 

Although Ken and Elizabeth are Catholic, they would not consider sending their children to parochial schools. In their view, Catholic schools reflect the same race-less view of man as public schools do, but within a religious aura that demands even more acquiescence.

Moreover, whatever their kind, schools are where children congregate, all day, every day, year after year, and that has a big impact on them. School is where teenagers, especially, come to see themselves as a. tribe apart, separate from their parents, from the larger culture, from the past and the future. The youth culture stresses what is happening now, with us, with our age group. The peer group has become so central, so consuming, that the writer Judith Harris argues in her book The Nurture Assumption that, now, culture is being transmitted to a greater extent by peers than by parents and teachers. According to Mrs. Harris, the members of the older generation who most influence cultural transmission are those who have the attention of the peer group: product marketers and celebrities.

Ken and Elizabeth believe children are like sponges: absorbent and easily shaped. They want their children to have friends their own ages, but they chart directions and impose controls. They approve and disapprove of activities and associations. They want to know, at every moment, where their children are, whom they are with, and what they are doing. They screen the families their children associate with.

Elizabeth says her son James has become naturally selective in his friends: "He says there are a lot of children he has no interest in.

He has nothing in common with them. He likes history and math, and all they want to talk about are CDs and sports." For people like Ken and Elizabeth, physical activity tends to be things like boating and hiking and swimming, or perhaps tennis or golf. They believe interscholastic athletics, professional sports, television networks, and athletic shoe manufacturers make something trivial appear vitally important. One parent described physical activity for his children: "The great outdoors-hiking and camping and climbing. With us, there is no emphasis on organized sports." Elizabeth points out that there is no need to get along with everyone. "Unless you want to be a life insurance salesman," remarks Ken. "We want our children to make friends/' he continues, "but we want them to do it morally and honestly and with integrity, and without losing their souls, which could easily happen. Life can be very unforgiving. Getting in with the wrong people can ruin someone's life forever. That is why we set up protected environments and train our children from the beginning on correct socialization, correct interaction, correct activities, so that when we are no longer there they can be proud of themselves and carry on their heritage and their race." As time went along, I noticed that the two girls in the New Hampshire family, ten-year-old Helen and eight-year-old Suzanna, always wore dresses. Ken explains that it underscores what he and his wife believe to be natural and healthy differences between boys and girls. "We teach our girls that the most important thing they can possibly do is be a good mother. We believe that the careers being pushed on girls by the feminists and the schools and the entertainment industry are a dead end. For our boys, we promote the manly virtues: responsibility, courage, hard work, and leadership." The last time I visited the New Hampshire family I spent a good amount of time with Helen. She has the bearing of a twelve or thirteen-year-old and I had to keep reminding myself that she is only ten. She showed me some stories she had written, along with the illustrations she had drawn to accompany them, and I read aloud from her stories. She told me of the impressive list of books she had read and was reading, and of her love for horses. Throughout our time together, Helen was steady-eyed, positive, considerate, confident, unthreatened, respectful, self-expressive, and interested in me-and just ten years old.

At one point, I asked the question adults invariably ask: "I know it's a long time off, Helen, but have you thought about college and what you want to do when you are older?" It has been my experience that most girls these days aspire to college and a career such as a pilot, lawyer, or business executive. Not Helen. She matter-of-factly replied, "No, I don't want to go to college. I want to train and board horses. I want a family." James intends to be a mathematician, he says, and perhaps take over his father's business providing actuarial advice to insurance companies. Like Helen, James seems older than other children his age. He has the bearing of fifteen-year-old. My contact with Helen and James, as well as other children in similar families, has made me wonder whether today's parents, schools, the media, and their peers keep children unduly immature.

James strikes me as a proud and independent young man. I mentioned to him that my students at the university assume that since he hasn't been part of a school-based group he lacks social skills. "That's ridiculous," he quickly and forcefully replied. "If you're congenial you can get along with anyone." I found myself trying to remember the last time I heard a thirteen-year-old use the word "congenial." Keith, the father of three, describes his overall perspective on being a parent in a way that seems to speak for all of the racially conscious parents I have encountered. He says he _and his wife are meeting what they consider to be their fundamental responsibility to rear children properly. They cannot count on the rest of society- schools, media, politicians, churches, journalists, intellectuals, any of them-to help them. They are doing everything they can to pass on to their children, in his words, "racial idealism, the difference between right and wrong, personal responsibility, and strength of character-all the things our ancestors cherished and passed on to their children. We teach our children they belong to a great race of people. We teach them they should learn their own history, heritage, and culture before studying the ways of others. We teach them that their genetic inheritance and traditions must be protected and preserved and extended, and that they have a personal responsibility to do this." 39

Robert S. Griffin
Living White Writings on Race, 2000-2005

Racially Conscious White Americans Talk About Race

This book is made up of personal statements about race from seventeen racially conscious white Americans. By racially conscious I mean that, for them, the fact that they are white—other terms, European American, Euro—is more than an incidental, insignificant, or peripheral aspect of their being. Their racial identity is central to how they view themselves and conduct their lives. The people you will meet come from virtually every part of the country. None of them knew any of the others when this project began (I introduced several to one or two of the others after I had gathered the material for the book). 

What you will read is drawn from an audiotape-recorded conversation I had with each of these individuals separately (in one case it was a couple). Conversation is a more accurate term than interview for what went on between them and me. I didn’t have an interview protocol that I used with everyone. There was nothing so formal as that. Instead, I was guided by a list of topics and themes I wanted to explore with each person. I edited myself out of the transcription of each tape so that it was just a statement, or personal account, from the person I talked with. I gave each statement a title and wrote a brief preface to introduce the speaker. After transcribing nine of the tapes myself, I suddenly lost virtually all my hearing and could no longer hear the voices on the tapes. I am appreciative of Katrina Gibson’s excellent work transcribing the last seven tapes, as well as for her editorial assistance. 

The words in this book are the speakers’. I did some editing for length and to avoid repetition and maintain continuity, but I was careful not to alter, soften, or censor anything someone said. As much as possible, I want you to experience these individuals as I did, and reading back over the statements, I think you will. 

This book grows out of another book I authored, The Fame of a Dead Man’s Deeds: An Up-Close Portrait of White Nationalist William Pierce, which was published in 2000. William Pierce, who died in July of 2002, was a prominent figure in the white nationalist (another term, white racialist) movement. He was the founder and chairman of the National Alliance, which has around two thousand members and is headquartered on Pierce’s 340-acre property in rural West Virginia. Pierce is best known as the author of the widely read—a half million readers—underground novel, The Turner Diaries, which describes the racially motivated terrorist acts of a band of white American revolutionaries against a corrupt federal government and its supporters. 

In the process of researching the Pierce book in the late 1990s, I met a number of white racialists, some followers of Pierce and some not. After the book was published, other racially aware whites contacted me, and I met still others at various meetings and through the Internet. What has struck me about the three hundred or more people I have encountered over the past five years, and I include the leaders of the movement in this characterization, is how invisible and silent they are in the public arena. To be sure, we have a generalized image of people of this sort and what they believe: ignorant, violence-prone KKK members, menacing skinheads, and low-life or deranged thugs doing their “perp walks” after committing a heinous hate crime against minorities. The vast majority of the white nationalists I have met do not fit these stereotypes, but how would average Americans know that? These people aren’t on the television news shows speaking for themselves. They don’t make movies. They don’t publish books and articles. Politicians don’t articulate their perspective and advocate their positions. Journalists and intellectuals don’t write about them unless it is to belittle them. They aren’t on university and college faculties, and schools make no attempt to consider them objectively. 

What has also struck me about the people I have met is that, at least in my view, they have something to say that would contribute to the public dialogue and debate. I believe this society and culture would benefit from hearing what they think about race. Which is not to say that I consider them to be right about everything. I do offer, however, that, in the main, white racialists are serious and thoughtful and sincere, and they are trying to live just and honorable lives. If you find this to be true of the people in this book, know that they aren’t exceptional. They are typical. 

Denis Ruiz, whom I met in late 2000, sparked the idea of writing this book. Denis, a rather shy and reserved computer programmer from the Philadelphia area, had read the Pierce book in its original e-book format and offered to help me clean up its many typos and misprints for the print version of the book that was published in 2001. After the editing task was completed, Denis and I stayed in contact, communicating just about every day by phone or e-mail. I found him to be a remarkably bright and reflective and decent human being. Denis became a highly valued colleague and friend. He gave me direction and support in both my professional and personal life. 

In the spring of 2002, I decided that I wanted others to know the person I had come to know. I would write a book that introduced Denis and some of the other racially aware white people I had met or would seek out. I didn’t want this book to be about leaders of the white nationalist movement such as Pierce but rather everyday people like Dennis. Mainstream America wasn’t hearing from them and I thought that it should have that chance. Denis was my first interview, or conversation, and I took it from there. I started contacting people and asking them whether they would be interested in being in the book (not one person said no) and if they knew of anyone they could recommend to me. The monthly newsletter American Renaissance generously put a full-page notice in one of its issues that I was seeking people. The word spread that I was writing this book. Every day for months I received inquiries from people who wanted to be interviewed. 

In selecting those to include, I looked for people of various ages and walks of life and regions of the country, and both men and women. Some of them have asked me not to use their real names because they are worried about retaliation for expressing their beliefs, that they might lose their jobs or their children might be harassed. If they left it up to me to use their real name or not, in every case I chose not to. I didn’t want anyone to pay a price for supporting my work and doing what I think is the right and responsibility of us all: to speak out on the issues of the day. I have placed an asterisk next to a name the first time it is mentioned if it is a pseudonym.

As much as anything, this book is about what is allowed into the public discourse in America and what is excluded from it. In that light, the publishing history of both the Pierce book and this one bears recounting. My literary agent was enthused about the merits and commercial prospects of the Pierce book. However, fifteen major publishing houses he submitted the manuscript to all passed on it saying that while the book was a meritorious effort there simply was no market for it. Nobody would be interested in buying it, they told him. I suspected that the real reason for the turndowns had much more to do with the content of the book than with its sales potential. The real problem with the manuscript, I speculated, was the unfiltered reports of Pierce’s criticisms of blacks and, especially, the Jewish influence on American culture and foreign policy, which made it very unpalatable to editors and publishing houses. 

I think publishers should be free to publish whatever they want for whatever reason they choose. At the same time, I believe that no individuals and groups, whether it’s blacks or Jews or anyone else, should be free of critique and criticism. Critique and criticism are crucially necessary to a free and democratic society. I also believe the American public needs to be aware that certain topics and arguments are not reflected in the mainstream media. That is crucially important because so much of what we know, or think we know, is not derived from our direct experience but from mediated contact with reality. We haven’t seen or heard it ourselves. Someone has shown it to us and told us about it, whether in a book or an article, or on television or in a movie, or in a classroom. 

Whatever the real reason for the publisher turndowns of the Pierce book, I was left with a manuscript that I thought was worthy of being made available to the reading public. There had been an earlier manuscript of mine, about education, that hadn’t gotten published and that I believed had been blocked because of its ideas rather than its quality, and I wasn’t going to let that happen again if I could help it. A colleague told me about an Internet company that, for no charge, made manuscripts available through its web site in electronic book— e-book—format. So very late one evening, alone in my office at the university, I followed the instructions on this company’s web site and submitted a computer file of the Pierce manuscript. And as it turned out, despite all the dire predictions from editors, the Pierce book has sold extremely well in both e-book and print form. 

I decided to make another run at commercial publishers with this Sheaf book, as I eventually came to call it. I clung to the hope that I could get the imprimatur of a major New York publishing house, a spot on the shelves of Borders or Barnes & Noble, and perhaps even a review in The New York Times. So I wrote up a “pitch” letter for my agent to send along with sample sections from the book to editors to try to induce their interest. After reading what I had put together, my agent begged off from representing the manuscript. He said that the concept and samples were very good indeed, but that this manuscript would be “a very tough sell.” I contacted a few publishing houses on my own and they responded that this was excellent material, but they couldn’t risk publishing anything like this. They said that whether or not the people in the book are in fact racists and anti-Semites, they would certainly be accused of being just that, and the publishing company would be attacked for getting behind this material, and they didn’t want to go through that hassle. And besides, there undoubtedly would be major problems with distribution, as bookstore chains would be pressured not to put it on their shelves. 

I had been through this racist and anti-Semite business with the Pierce book, so I was somewhat prepared for it. Both of those epithets, as well as the rest of the litany—hater, bigot, Nazi, extremist—were relentlessly applied to Pierce. And since I was the author of a book about him and thereby associated with him, I got a taste of name-calling attacks myself in articles and interviews and when I was the subject of radio talk shows. I have come to the conclusion that these slurs are used to demonize, marginalize, and intimidate people and set them up for punishment. In my case, these smears put the focus on me, whether I had impure thoughts and what ought to be done with me, and distracted attention from the substance of what I was writing and the legitimacy of the motives and tactics of the people who were attacking me. By the time I had finished the Sheaf book, I wasn’t about to run scared or kowtow to anyone who tried to silence me or the people I write about. If this country stands for anything it is freedom of conscience and the open discussion of ideas. And if this country demands anything from each of us it is to do what we do what we think is right, and I think publishing this book is the right thing to do. 

So I have self-published this Sheaf book through an Internet publisher as I did the Pierce book. It gives you the chance to determine for yourself whether the people in this book have anything worthwhile to say, and whether what they say has any implications for what you believe and the way you live your life.

from: One Sheaf, One Vine Racially Conscious White Americans Talk About Race 

by: Robert S. Griffin