Blood and Politics (69 page)

Nevertheless, it ended this election year more irrelevant than a campus fraternity house during the Berkeley free speech movement. Populists had announced early that they would run fifty candidates for offices ranging from city supervisor to governor. But in one race after another, the party fell down. None of its past presidential candidates made even a guest appearance at a state convention.
²⁶
The Populists’ third party status created a raft of difficulties, particularly with ballot access. These obstacles need not have been insurmountable, except that other problems remained embedded within the larger white nationalist movement, militating against the Populist Party’s success. Years of propaganda had targeted various forms of supposed Jewish control over society. And neither Willis Carto nor William Pierce argued that it was possible to “vote out” the “International Jewish Conspiracy.” If Zionists (Jews) really did indeed control the government, as all believed, then gaining a seat inside occupied territory was a problem, not a solution. By this reasoning, supporting any candidates for office was not a rational option. On the other hand, spending your disposable income on another “assault” rifle, loading up on thousands of rounds of ammunition at a dollar a bullet, buying the latest camouflage fatigues, and joining a militia apparently were considered by many as the next best thing to sanity itself.

Certainly, 1994 had been a watershed year of new developments for white nationalists. A skinhead music enterprise had formed. Militia groups drew thousands of adherents to their cause. And the seed of a genuine white nationalist intelligentsia was planted. David Duke and Pat Buchanan had opened the door to the Republican Party for white-ist politics, and anti-immigrant initiatives had found a home there. A casualty to that success, the Populist Party never again mounted a serious election campaign. Its final moments went unnoticed and uncelebrated. Not so the life of Revilo Oliver, a major figure among white supremacists for four decades who died that year.

November 19, 1994.
Although Revilo Oliver remained unknown outside white supremacist circles, his fingerprints showed up on virtually every far right tendency during the post–World War Two era. His status inside the movement was enhanced by his achievements in the academic world. A professor of classical philology at the University of Illinois at Urbana, he also taught Spanish and Italian and had received both Guggenheim and Fulbright fellowships. Born in 1908, he was a generation older than Carto and Pierce.

Oliver was on the original staff of
National Review
in 1955 but later broke completely with William Buckley and his brand of conservative thought. One of just twelve founding members of the John Birch Society in 1958, he had served on its executive council and as an associate editor of its
American Opinion
magazine. He was considered the person responsible for introducing the idea of a conspiracy by the Illuminati into Birch circles. But he was expelled in 1966 after a speech (as reported in the August 16, 1966,
New York Times
) in which he said: “If only by some miracle all the Bolsheviks or all the Illuminati or all the Jews were vaporized at dawn tomorrow, we should have nothing to worry about.”
¹

He claimed to have advised Willis Carto’s writing of the introduction to
Imperium
, although Carto denied it. Rumors had it that Oliver actually wrote the pages that Carto claimed as his own. He later broke with Carto over the fate of the National Youth Alliance (NYA) in 1969, excoriating Carto for acting with a “vindictive hysteria that seems odd in a person presumably not equipped with a uterus.”
²
Neither his passions nor his vituperative language cooled in the years after. He signed on as an adviser to William Pierce’s faction of the NYA in the 1970s, and
Pierce credited Oliver with the idea of writing a novel as a way to spread Aryan ideas.
The Turner Diaries
was the result.
³

By the end of his life Oliver had written a half dozen books and more than 160 articles for the movement press, including pieces for Wilmot Robertson’s high-toned monthly
Instauration
, but most for an explicitly national socialist bulletin entitled
Liberty Bell.
⁴
Oliver also had provided, upon request, counsel to younger acolytes of the cause and by all accounts was a gracious host when they stopped by to kiss his ring.
⁵

When Oliver died in 1994, Atlanta attorney Sam Dickson mailed out personal invitations to a memorial symposium in Urbana.
⁶
Not quite a funeral service, it was a bit more than just another talk fest. Several dozen souls gathered at a lodge to honor Revilo Pendleton Oliver. Dickson emceed the event, and at his request, the small assembly sang Sibelius’s hymnlike
Finlandia.
They gave a standing ovation to his widow, Grace, as she sat in a wheelchair. One speaker after another rose and said they all were Oliver’s “spiritual children” (even if he had produced no “biological” offspring). They remembered a genius that knew everything about everything—not just the Sanskrit and classical Greek of his profession. One, a fellow philologist from Oklahoma, reminded mourners of Oliver’s creative use of pejoratives such as “slimy sheenies” to describe Jews and others. Dickson’s colleague Martin O’Toole argued that militia-style conspiracy mongering would not solve the race problem and then sat down. National Alliance member Kevin Strom testified to the inspirational power of Oliver’s personality. Strom, a figure of Pierce’s organization, became the keeper of Oliver’s movement writings, establishing a website for that exclusive purpose.
⁷

Memory and memorials for Oliver aside, the most noteworthy aspect of this event was Sam Dickson’s public apology to David Duke and Duke’s own peroration on genetics and scientific racism. At his spot on the agenda, Dickson denounced “race traitors” such as former Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, who had crafted the initial
Brown
decision in 1954, and former President Jimmy Carter. “People are only remembered by the nation or race they served,” Dickson argued. “Liberals will be forgotten.” Racially conscious white people would look badly upon those who had broken ranks, he said. And in a phrasing that dripped with sarcasm and contempt he claimed that “no teary eyed little mulattos” will grieve for President Carter. On the other hand, he asserted that “if our race or civilization survives there will surely be monuments to Revilo P. Oliver.” The Atlanta attorney worked himself into such a lather that his polite mask of discreetness slipped. “We look forward to the collapse of our rotten society” were his exact words.
⁸

Then, as if the memorial symposium had thrust upon him the need
for absolution, Dickson apologized forthrightly to David Duke. First, he praised Duke for being “widely recognized as the leading spokesman for our cause.” Second, Dickson confessed that he had been at some undisclosed moment “too scathing” in his criticism of Duke. (Returning to his usual practice of understatement, Dickson also said he had made “uncharitable remarks” about the man who had once worn a swastika on his shirtsleeve and a white robe upon his back.) Nevertheless, Dickson believed Duke’s response had been “broad-minded.” Finally, Dickson was now “proud to be friends” with Duke, who had stayed true to the cause. Moreover, Duke’s Louisiana campaigns had proved that “there is a chance for a change.”
⁹
And that after all was what this small band of souls wanted even more than the chance to remember Revilo Pendleton Oliver’s extraordinary genius.

For his part, Duke used the occasion to reprise many of the themes at the
American Renaissance
conference he had been excluded from six months before. “Optimism of our inevitable victory is in our genes,” Duke claimed. So was everything else. Intelligence, ethics, personal politics, a penchant for technology, and even “what we are doing in this room,” Duke listed as genetically determined. Genetic science had been unfairly “suppressed” after World War Two, he said, and for decades fundamental human characteristics had been falsely ascribed to “environment.” But now “heredity” was making a comeback. Those who had argued that the “black intelligence deficit” was due to environmental factors—or even fifty-fifty environment and heredity—were being proved wrong. It was “all heredity,” he said, even black “mating habits.” For Duke the term was shorthand for the supposed inability of black families to stay whole with fathers who cared for their young. No touch of irony rang in the voice of this divorced father of two. No memory intruded of the black woman who raised him while his mother lay in a drunken stupor and his father flitted across the globe on business.
¹⁰

Without missing a beat, Duke claimed that the “scientific community is moving in our direction . . . The ideas of
The Bell Curve
can’t be suppressed anymore.”
¹¹

The significance of
The Bell Curve
, published in October 1994 and exalted by David Duke at the Oliver memorial, should not be overstated. This eight-hundred-page text by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, linking social standing and IQ measurements to heredity and genetics, was not the first in its field. As Stefan Kuhl demonstrated in his 1994 book
The Nazi Connection
,
¹²
eugenics had been a project of American elites long before Hitler claimed to improve Germany by getting rid
of its Jews. Neither was Simon & Schuster the only reputable house publishing pages that claimed biology is destiny (and that genetics is biology). Pursuit of the Human Genome Project and deciphering DNA code had opened the door to a wholly new scientific arena, and the good, the bad, and the ugly had walked through.

Among those searching for biological sources of social behavior were National Cancer Institute scientists. They claimed to have found a “gay gene,” a chromosomal imprint that caused homosexuality in men. Some gay rights advocates embraced the findings as proof that homosexuality was neither “sinful” nor a “choice,” contrary to what Christian right ideologues asserted.
¹³
On a less genetic but more biological note, other scientists believed they had found a link between chemical imbalances in the neurological system and an individual’s tendency toward criminal behavior and violence. When President George H. W. Bush announced the formation of a Federal Violence Initiative in 1991 to conduct further studies on the subject, however, the project ignited fears that the federal government was (once again) supporting punitive measures aimed at black youth under the guise of science, and the project was nominally killed. An article on the federal controversy, published in the prestigious
New Yorker
magazine less than six months after
The Bell Curve
first appeared, noted that “a vestigial feature of the American liberal mind” was “its undiscerning fear of the words ‘genetic’ and ‘biological,’ and its wholesale hostility to Darwinian explanations of behavior.” Get over it, the reporter, Robert Wright, seemed to be saying. “It turns out, believe it or not,” he opined, “that comparing violent inner-city males to monkeys isn’t necessarily racist, or even necessarily right wing.”
¹⁴
At a time when “nature” seemed to be retaking ground once lost in its debate with “nurture,”
The Bell Curve
could have scored the final winning points. That did not prove to be the case, however.

Almost as soon as the book was released,
Newsweek
reported that it was based on a “deeply angry” perspective, that its “blunt declaration” of the intellectual inferiority of black people was “explosive,” and that it “panders to white resentment.” The reporter mustered opposing arguments, which challenged the book on its own scientific grounds.
¹⁵
Similarly critical newspaper reportage and opinion pieces gave the book, dense with data and charts, a respectable hearing but ensured that few beyond those already committed would automatically embrace its claims. A year later came a more accessible collection of essays,
The Bell Curve Debate
, challenging the claims—scientific, moral, and political—made by Herrnstein and Murray. Perhaps the most damning piece of evidence in that folio was a reprint of the entry for “The Negro” from the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
’s 1911 edition, written by a Cornell University professor
who also served then as the chief statistician for the U.S. Census Bureau. Replete with claims that growth of the “Negro” brain was “arrested,” the entry concluded that “the mental constitution of the Negro is very similar to that of a child, normally good-natured and cheerful, but subject to sudden fits of emotion and passion during which he is capable of performing acts of singular atrocity, impressionable, vain, but often exhibiting in the capacity of servant a dog-like fidelity . . .”
¹⁶
When we remember that this encyclopedia article once provided the baseline of information for schoolchildren of every hue and creed, perhaps the contemporary vestigial fears of racial liberals are better understood.

The Bell Curve
was a grand commercial triumph, spending fifteen weeks on the bestseller list and selling three hundred thousand copies in hardcover.
¹⁷
But books don’t change history; people do. No epochs turned over with the reintroduction of racial science into mainstream discourse in 1994. The success of
The Bell Curve
was not of the same order as events—the Soviet bloc’s collapse and German unification—that ended the postwar period. Nor was Herrnstein and Murray’s massive accumulation of data anything like the bravery and determination of those willing to fight Jim Crow and change the American racial order. Simply put, reading
The Bell Curve
by itself could not change the way most Americans thought about racial equality. In fact, two years after its first appearance, a National Opinion Survey found the percentage of white Americans willing to ascribe the existence of racial inequality to black people’s inborn ability to learn continued to drop—in this count to under 10 percent.
¹⁸