Science for Segregation: Race, Law, and the Case against Brown v. Board of Education

3. Radical Right Underground

Radical Right Underground Cox was the link between the racialist thought of the 1920s and the racialist thought of the 1950s. In 1951, Earnest Sevier Cox published Teutonic Unity. Like White America, the book was self-published. Unlike White America, Cox did not offer Teutonic Unity for sale but distributed it at his own expense to government officials as well as historians “in the nations of the Teutonic broodland and in the several nations formed during the Teutonic migrations.”1 One person who received the books was Dr. Johann von Leers, an expatriate Nazi living in Argentina. “I have participated in the ideological indoctrination of Hitler’s bodyguard SS, to which I belonged,” wrote von Leers to Cox, “and now I find with surprise that more or less all what was the central idea of our thinking and indoctrination I find again the book of an American writer.” von Leers offered to translate Cox’s book into German so it could be read in that country, for “neither the Russian rule in the East nor the Jewish democracy backed by the Church in Western Germany have a future.”2 von Leers had worked directly under Joseph Goebbels editing the antiSemitic Wille und Weg and writing twenty-seven books criticizing the Jews. After the war, he had escaped to Argentina and continued to publish Der Weg, which remained faithful to the most anti-Semitic aspects of Nazi ideology. Soon after this he immigrated to Egypt, converted to Islam, and continued to churn out anti-Semitic propaganda for Gamal Nasser. In the words of historian Kurt Tauber, von Leers was “[i]n the very front rank of those for whom the catastrophe of 1945 and the unspeakable vulgarity and savagery of the Hitler regime held absolutely no lesson at all.”3 The same might be said about the figures I discuss in this chapter, many of whom followed the racial ideology of Nazi regime rather closely. Two things about Teutonic Unity impressed von Leers. First were Cox’s familiar Nordicist arguments that the basis of all civilization was 3 43 Nordic (or, in Cox’s term, Teutonic). Cox decried the “fratricidal wars” of the twentieth century that pitted Teuton against Teuton and called for peace among Teutons and an alliance with the Slavs of the East. “Each should recognize that in their Nordic blood they have ancient blood ties, the one with the other,” he wrote, and advised that an alliance would guarantee that “for . . . the present time nor in any predictable future will these great races be endangered, save one from the other.”4 The second praiseworthy aspect of Cox’s work, according to von Leers, was Cox’s argument concerning Christianity. Cox argued that Christianity was a “Judaic religion” and basically intolerant of other faiths, especially the Nordic pagan faiths. This meant, for Cox, that Christianity, like Judaism and Islam, was a “gangster religion.” Cox firmly rejected the notion that the Nordic pagans needed Christianity as a basis for a moral code. “Nor will we debase our own race in the eyes of posterity nor give to mankind a belief that Saxons knew not a distinction between right and wrong until they had been brought under Jewish religious instruction. For this reason alone we would reject the Ten Commandments as a code.”5 Additionally, because it rejected any empirical finding that conflicted with the Bible, Christianity was responsible for halting scientific knowledge and progress “as science began to question the validity of much that had been proclaimed as knowledge revealed by God to the Jews.”6 Teutonic Unity and its favorable reception by von Leers indicated the continuity in Cox’s ideological beliefs across the great divide of the Second World War. Cox’s call for Negro repatriation continued after the war as well, despite the death of Theodore Bilbo, the congressional sponsor for repatriation. In 1949, to Cox’s surprise, he found a repatriation bill had been introduced by Senator William Langer of North Dakota. Throughout the 1950s, Cox would work with Langer and a number of black nationalist groups to pass a repatriation bill.7 What had changed after the war was Cox’s standing as the elder statesman of the racialist right wing in the United States. The greater lights of the 1920s, Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard, had passed away before the end of the war, leaving Cox as the most prominent surviving American Nordicist from the twenties. As such, he became a...