Blood and Politics (65 page)

Rabbi Mayer Schiller proved the point. A forty-three-year-old native of Brooklyn and long-time educator, he taught Talmud and coached the hockey team at Yeshiva University High School in Manhattan. At the same time, Schiller pursued a virtual second career as a self-proclaimed “white separatist,” speaking alongside black nationalists and “third way” revolutionaries in England and meeting with Afrikaner neo-Nazis in South Africa. As a featured speaker at a conference of conservative Jews and Christians set by Rabbi Daniel Lapin’s Toward Tradition, Schiller later decried “egalitarianism” and the supposed destruction of the white race, unusual claims at a meeting featuring Ralph Reed and other Republican luminaries. However, at the Atlanta meet Schiller’s speech added little to the mix. If anything, he simply restated an assemblage of racist propositions already familiar to all. He assailed Vatican II Catholicism and lamented William Buckley and
National Review
’s retreat from the segregationist cause. The black-hatted rabbi from New York urged this congregation of unreconstructed southerners to read books about Confederate generals to their children. (Perhaps that is the true definition of “chutzpah.”) His one unique contribution to the weekend was a theory of Western Civilization’s five sources—“Sinai, Bethlehem, Greece, Rome and the Northland”—thus writing Jews, and himself, into this version of whiteness.
⁵

.   .   .

The presence of Schiller and the half dozen other Jews testified to the originality and genius of the conference’s motivating personality, Samuel Jared Taylor, and the particular brand of white nationalism he pursued.
⁶
A handsome, even elegant son of the South, he was born to missionaries and raised in Japan, where he attended public school, rendering American English a virtual second language to him. He graduated from Yale University in 1973 and then continued his education outside the United States, receiving his master’s degree from the Institute for Political Studies in Paris. Later he worked as an international loan officer and then as a consultant for American businesses with interests in Japan.
⁷
A respectable New York publisher, Quill—William Morrow, issued his first book,
Shadows of the Rising Sun: A Critical View of the Japanese Miracle
, in 1983. Taylor worked as
PC
magazine’s West Coast editor in the mid-1980s, at just the moment when Silicon Valley technologies were entering middle-class markets.
⁸
He obviously did not go over to the white side out of a sense of economic disenchantment, and he exhibited nothing of the paranoid style or apocalyptic fever so often attributed to white nationalists. But his beliefs were no less firmly held because he did not conform to the common stereotype of a “hater.”

Taylor began his public foray into the white nationalist arena with a newsletter he edited called
American Renaissance
. The first issue was dated November 1990, one month after Germany’s formal unification and just at the cusp of epochal change. Although the newsletter was about the size of a skinhead zine, ten pages, and was similarly obsessed with race, any resemblance between the two publication types stopped there.
Renaissance
advertised itself to readers as a “literate, undeceived, journal of race, immigration, and the decline of civility.” In tone, topic, and style it most closely resembled
Instauration
magazine, minus Wilmot Robertson’s fixation on Jews.
Renaissance
’s first front page owed a direct debt to Robertson’s concept of white dispossession. “In another half century, if whites continue to cooperate in their own dispossession, this nation will have no core and no identity,” the newsletter opined, as if a transformation from majority to minority status also meant white people would lose their passports.
⁹

Thus Taylor began reasserting a pale-skinned Americanism at precisely the moment that changes in geopolitical alignments had precipitated a transformation of the role nationalism played on the global stage. A nation, Taylor’s newsletter noted, was not simply an undifferentiated “crowd” of people. It must have a common “culture, language, history and aspirations.”
¹⁰
Race was not mentioned directly. That would come
later. But as
American Renaissance
began to appear every month without fail, it began to attract readers. And it was under the rubric of the newsletter project that the Atlanta meeting was being held.

While editing the newsletter, Taylor also finished writing a second book,
Paved with Good Intentions: The Failure of Race Relations in Contemporary America
. Like his book on Japan,
Paved
was published by a well-regarded house, Carroll & Graf, and received mainstream attention.
The Wall Street Journal
published a gushing review that concluded: “Mr. Taylor’s book is easily the most comprehensive indictment of the race-conscious civil rights policies of the past three decades.”
¹¹
Peter Brimelow, a senior editor at
Forbes
magazine, was even more forcefully favorable in
National Review
. Racism against black people had disappeared, Brimelow argued, only to be replaced by racism against whites.
¹²

Brimelow later lamented that the fact that “this book did not transform public debate on this topic is a signal condemnation of American intellectual life.”
¹³
Other reviews were less sympathetic, and a few were scathing. Taylor appeared on Pat Buchanan’s
Crossfire
television program during the book’s initial promotion cycle. The attention focused on Taylor turned him into a figure on the edge of conservative discourse, with a place in American literary life that the positive review he received in Willis Carto’s
Spotlight
could not alone have engendered.

Paved
was written as if from the vantage point of a disappointed liberal. It began with a feint toward Gunnar Myrdal’s classic formulation of race as an American dilemma and acknowledged the centuries of oppression of Native Americans and exploitation of African slaves. “No one would argue that America is free of racism. A nation that enslaved blacks, freed them only after a terrible war, disenfranchised them, segregated them, lynched them—such a nation cannot entirely free itself from its past.” But sixteen pages into the text he declared the problem essentially solved, at least as far as the prejudices and practices of white people were concerned: “Though America is by no means perfect, racism is no longer central to its national character.” Three hundred and fifty pages of anecdotes and analysis later, it was overwhelmingly evident that Taylor believed that centuries of white supremacy had been replaced in a single generation by “white guilt” and “reverse racism.” After passage of the Voting Rights Act and other civil rights laws in the 1960s, he decided, any remaining problems of race lay with the inadequacies of black people.

Taylor eventually coupled up with Evelyn Rich, who came to the partnership with her own understanding of white supremacy.
¹⁴
Born in Scotland, Rich began her university education in England and received her bachelor’s degree from Lafayette College in Pennsylvania. She
earned a doctorate in history from Boston College in 1988. Her dissertation topic: “Ku Klux Klan Ideology: 1954–1988.”
¹⁵
While doing research, Rich had formally interviewed many of the white supremacist movement’s leading figures, attended semipublic events such as Institute for Historical Review conferences and Bob Miles’s fests, and been privy to a number of meetings, including a one-to-one visit between David Duke and William Pierce.
¹⁶
Rich seemed to have a particularly intense interest in Duke, whose Knights of the Ku Klux Klan loomed large in her dissertation.

On each of these occasions, she would tape her interviews and take extensive notes and then share notes and transcripts, along with her observations and analyses, with several civic organizations that monitored racist and anti-Semitic activities.
¹⁷
To the anti-Klan groups, she reported with a scholar’s precision on the ideological arcana of each organization she encountered. With the scalding sarcasm of late-night television comics, she recounted several bouts of movement infighting. And with an apparently anti-racist perspective, she detailed the failures of the individuals she met. Of one activist she wrote: “[He] seems to be on the fringe of just about everything, but at the center of nothing. He is a 3rd degree Mason, a former communist party member and presently a member of NAAWP.” This particular individual, she noted, was “very impatient and keen to get in on some ‘action.’”
¹⁸

Rich grasped the subject of her inquiry like few others, including the national socialist character of Duke’s ideas in the 1970s and the role anti-Semitism played in transforming a backward-looking Klan movement into a revolutionary vanguard. When her dissertation was completed in 1988, Rich understood that after conservative racists publicly tarred themselves with the brush of anti-Semitism, their claims to mainstream respectability were compromised.

Eventually Rich’s interview transcripts became part of the library archives at Tulane University in Louisiana, and when David Duke ran for governor in 1991, Rich lent her name to the anti-Duke opposition. Particularly revealing segments of her audiotapes were broadcast as part of anti-Duke radio commercials. Nevertheless, Rich continued to keep her reports to the anti-Klanners quiet.
¹⁹

At some point Evelyn Rich must have dropped any scholarly distance she had from white nationalists. She attended the Atlanta meeting that May in 1994 alongside Jared Taylor, quietly tending to their first child while he carried on the conference. Rumors swirled around the room about “Taylor’s wife.” One held that the couple had met at an Institute for Historical Review conference in California; if true, that meant Taylor, despite keeping Holocaust revisionism off the agenda, had more
than a passing acquaintance with its claims.
²⁰
True or not, Rich’s antipathy to David Duke was well known; it was also rumored that she had suggested the once and future candidate be excluded. None of the rumors suggested that just a few years earlier she had been making notes on meetings such as these and sharing her observations with the movement’s opposition. Soon, however, Mark Weber used quotes from Evelyn in the IHR’s promotional material, although the spelling of her name varied from time to time. On one brochure, “Dr. Evelyn
F
itch” described revisionists as “Intelligent, rational, objective people.”
²¹
On another, the author of that same quote was “Dr. Evelyn
R
ich.”
²²
Despite this declaration of support for IHR personalities, Rich’s actual sympathies remained a subject of some speculation.
²³

American Renaissance
’s debut conference marked the beginnings of a more mature, less adolescent white nationalist movement: open, not furtive, self-assured rather than boastful, and smart rather than sophomoric. Its proceedings were semipublic, followed by a press conference and the sale of audio- and videotapes of the presentations, a stark contrast when compared to the secretive cadres-only sessions William Pierce’s National Alliance convened. This forum also differed from other events that were relatively accessible, such as Willis Carto’s Liberty Lobby conventions. There speakers were less scholarly, and self-conscious debate was eschewed in favor of celebratory hoopla. In addition, the
American Renaissance
conference differed from other supposedly academic-styled outfits, such as the Institute for Historical Review, which focused on events two generations past, whereas Renaissancers talked about present conditions and the future. Nevertheless, whether the conference was open or closed, rewriting the past or predicting the future, the unique aspect of Jared Taylor’s project was his deliberate inclusion of Jews among those to be considered dispossessed and white. Jews were not on everybody’s list of favorite conference invitees.

As previously noted, whiteness is an arbitrary, socially constructed category, invented at the dawn of colonization. White skin had been codified into custom and law, and it marked a set of prerogatives that need not be earned or merited. It was, as has been frequently observed, the first form of affirmative action.
²⁴
While skin color appears to have a biological or zoological significance akin to the difference between blue jays
and cardinals, it is actually more like the divine right of kings, a social construct the definition of which is subject to human action and constant change. Initially the property of only Anglo-Saxons, whiteness was denied to the first Irish immigrants and then granted in the nineteenth century. Italian, Polish, and Jewish immigrants went through a similar transformation.
²⁵
Early in the twentieth century, racists and anti-Semites of all stripes worried about the supposedly dysgenic effect of Jews entering the country. Scientists had, after all, tested the dark-haired, Yiddish-speaking newcomers and proved that they had low IQs and carried rare, incurable diseases. It was thought to be in their Jewish genes. In time, as whiteness was transformed yet again, Jews too became white, even as their non-Christian status continued to set them apart in the larger American society.
²⁶

Despite changes in the postwar universe, Jews existed as not quite white aliens in the smaller world of white supremacists. For national socialists and Aryanists, Jews were wholly of another race, a biological breed apart. And a Christian Identity tenet asserted that Jews were inherently Satanic—either through their descent from the mating of Eve with Satan or through a slightly less penetrating inheritance of racial mongrelization. Wilmot Robertson’s influential
Dispossessed Majority
had cast Jews as a particularly pernicious “unassimilable” white minority, a classification mixing Aryan-style anthropology and genetics. A less caustic but still anti-Semitic mythology contended that Jews were not eligible for the rights of natural sovereign citizenship, as the United States was constitutionally a “Christian republic.” In each of these instances, and in all the permutations in between, a Jewish conspiracy ran either the media, the Federal Reserve banks, the federal government, communism, capitalism, or all of the above. The Jews’ best trick was supposedly inventing the Holocaust, which burdened Europeans with guilt and won support for Israel. As discussed previously, these Jewish conspiracy theories provided a grand explanation for world events as well as for the particulars of white dispossession. And as Evelyn Rich correctly noted in her doctoral dissertation, it was this explicit anti-Semitism that gave white supremacists their revolutionary ideology.
²⁷