Evelyn Rich emails me April 11, 2016:
Your information about me, my education and my personal relationships is all wrong. I did not graduate from Boston College. I do not have a doctorate in history. I did not “couple” with Jared Taylor. I never “leant my name” to anything. And so on.
Here is Evelyn Rich’s story in her own words. She has a PhD from Boston University in Sociology and African-American Studies (with her dissertation on the ideology of the modern KKK).
In 2014, I posted lengthy excerpts on my website from the 2009 book Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream by Leonard Zeskind, a veteran anti-racism campaigner who nonetheless received some credit for his work from some people on the Alt-Right.
Leonard Zeskind wrote in his 2009 book:
[Jared] Taylor eventually coupled up with Evelyn Rich, who came to the partnership with her own understanding of white supremacy… She earned a doctorate in history from Boston College in 1988. Her dissertation topic: “Ku Klux Klan Ideology: 1954-1988.” 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 conference 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. Rich seemed to have a particularly intense interest in Duke, whose Knights of the Ku Klux Klan loomed large in his 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. 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…
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.
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. 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 [head of IHR] used quotes from Evelyn in the IHR’s promotional material…
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… 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 and 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.”
…Rabbi Mayer Schiller’s convivial presence in a room with men such as Ed Fields, Mark Weber, and Sam Dickson casts doubt on his common sense, but it signaled no change in the liberal mainstream of the Jewish community. Neither did it suggest any swing among conservative or neoconservative Jews, who might have truckloads of grievances with black people but would have little truck with either Holocaust deniers or so-called scientific racists… If Mayer Schiller’s common platform with the Renaissancers created not a ripple of interest among Jews, Jared Taylor’s invitation to the rabbi provoked a continuing wave of controversy among white supremacists. The common refrain: What was Taylor thinking?
Several possibilities were proferred. The first came in the form of a brief review of the conference published in Wilmot Robertson’s Instauration. It noted the presence of Schiller and several other men of Jewish descent on the platform. But the monthly’s usually strident anti-Semitism remained remarkably restrained. A bit of nuance was needed by white activists, the reviewer suggested: “The time-honored strategy of fighting two enemies is to pretend to be the friend of one while zapping the other.” And for this meeting, attacking just the so-called Negroes, while leaving the Jews off the hook, worked quite well. “Maybe after the Negroes are put in their place,” the reviewer speculated, “another conference in a few decades will take on those who purists contend are the real enemy.” By this favorable account, Taylor’s overture toward Schiller was little more than a clever chess move, a tactical decision of little long-term consequence.
Other views were less friendly toward the inclusion of any Jews on the platform, and a debate over Taylor’s motivations and the prospect of ultimate success for the American Renaissance project rankled during the years following the first conference. Some activists accepted at face value Taylor’s inclusion of Jews but objected nonetheless, using terms familiar on the vanguardist side of the movement. There were no “good Jews” and “bad Jews,” they argued, just Jews — who were poison, one and all…
It would be wrong to conclude that Taylor was by any means philo-Semitic. Shortly after September 11, he issued a statement blaming the attacks on American support for Israel and claiming that “if we go to war, it will not be because we are the land of freedom and opportunity, but because we are the best friend and benefactor of Israel.” Nevertheless, a couple of Jews continued attending conferences. And a contingent of young National Alliance cadres in 2002 kept a subterranean murmur of dissent going during the course of the weekend. The anti-Semites chafed at the Jews, and the Aryans-only whisper occasionally broke out into the open during question and answer sessions. One observant young Aryan woman, writing on the internet under the sobriquet the Cat Lady, may have ventured the most insightful parallel. She compared developments within American Renaissance to recent changes of focus by the British National Party. The British Nationalists’ approach was “very appealing,” she wrote. It was a racial nationalist, a socialist party but not “explicitly anti-Semitic.” She also noted that at a side meeting a British representative who had spoken at an American Renaissance meeting had “pointed out that when Hitler was pursuing power, he hardly ever spoke publicly about the Jews either.”
…[Jared] Taylor served, for example, as Weber’s best man at his wedding eight weeks after the conference. Weber’s betrothed, Priscilla Gray, had once worked for Phyllis Schlafly… A priest who had spoken at the American Renaissance conference, Father Tacelli, officiated at the St. James Roman Catholic Church in Falls Church, Virginia. The wedding of a former Schlafly staffer with a former National Alliance cadre should have received notice on somebody’s society page. Taylor’s relationship with Weber extended back to the days when he was still a leading cadre of [William] Pierce’s organization. Weber had received a special mention in Taylor’s acknowledgments for his 1983 book on Japan. Ten years later Taylor continued to think highly of Weber. “Any man of whom Mark Weber speaks highly is a man worth knowing,” Taylor wrote in a 1993 letter to a new American Renaissance subscriber. Then in a remark that might have pleased Taylor’s detractors in white nationalism’s traditionally anti-Semitic ranks, he made an oblique reference to the “frolic” surrounding the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. “The march of folly never rests,” he wrote…
As [Wayne Charles Lutton] became directly involved with the Institute for Historical Review, however, his political life came to resemble binary stars. One named Charles Lutton quietly associated itself with Holocaust revisionism. The other, Wayne Lutton, assumed increasingly important roles in the fight against immigration.
…And he did not challenge directly the facts of the Holocaust itself. Nevertheless, he personally gave a presentation at the IHR’s 1981 conference, joined its editorial board in 1985…
Lutton’s list of accomplishments as an anti-immigrant activist alone merit notice, as does his work with American Renaissance, which eventually included multiple conference presentations and a seat on the board of directors of its parent corporation, New Century Foundation. But Lutton’s attempt to cloud his association with the Institute for Historical Review may reveal more about his ultimate aims than he wanted to show. Perhaps this version of white nationalism hoped to include anti-Semites, while occluding anti-Semitic ideology as a motivating force. Unlike William Pierce’s wing of Aryan vanguardists, and different even from Willis Carto’s attempts to find a mainstream constituency, Jared Taylor, Wayne Lutton and the American Renaissance crew already had a seat on the (far) edge of conservative respectability, and they were apparently loath to lose their perch in a controversy over Jews and Hitler. Over the next several years, American Renaissance became the premier gathering place for intellectuals in the white nationalist movement, firmly supplanting the Institute for Historical Review and all other ventures. The IHR still maintained a unique status in the movement, however, particularly in its role as an international transfer station.
