When White Men Knew Their Place

When White Men Knew Their Place

by Douglas Wright

20 January 2004

A review of Taking on the World: Joseph and Stewart Alsop -- Guardians of the American Century by Robert W. Merry

The names Joseph and Stewart Alsop (pronounced "Alsup") are unfamiliar to most White Americans under 50. But from the waning days of the Depression until the Vietnam War, the brothers Alsop stood astride the Anglo-Saxon elite that once ran the United States. Descendants of the tight-knit clan of English Puritans that saw America through the Revolution, they were journalists by profession, though the term "journalist" doesn't quite capture their larger role. They didn't so much report on world events as guide them. They supported U.S. entrance into World War II, and got it. They supported U.S. entrance into Vietnam, and got it. They dined with the luminaries they chronicled. The entire Alsop operation was run from a sturdy platform of Anglo-Saxon dominance, a platform that included the right prep schools, Ivy League colleges, publications like The Saturday Evening Post and The New York Herald Tribune and government posts like the Office of Strategic Services, later the CIA.

As portrayed in Robert W. Merry's dual biography, Taking on the World, the Alsops never once doubted this dominance as they strode to and fro, jetting from Paris to Saigon and pontificating the subtler policy points of the day. It was the given in all their proofs. "But of course. And you are?" Joseph and Stewart Alsop were what Jews are today: in near-complete command of the media, government, business and academic machinery that figures so prominently in our lives and drives us toward our destinies.

That the dominance has disappeared is not lost on anyone. FrontPage's Robert Locke (the man who gave us "the rules" for criticism of Jews) wrote in his essay "The Decline of the WASPs Revisited" that an "ethnarcy" like WASP-dom depends on WASPs being richer and better educated than the rest, and that in a dynamic economy where "Irishmen and Jews" can compete, the WASPs are doomed to fail. Says Locke, "The WASPs may have been willing to maintain a Jewish quota at Yale... but they were not willing to repress non-WASPs hard enough to keep them down forever." To those who would resurrect a stable White society, take note.

Other explanations: Anglos shunned fellow Whites. Nazi defeat undermined public notions of racial superiority. Anglos got lazy. Anglos are emotionally cold and drink too much. And Book VIII of Plato's Republic accurately predicted that a ruling elite would be unable to resist the temptation to cannibalize existing social capital (that is, dude, we're on top, let's just enjoy it!). Locke says too that the Anglo elite was probably the most "enlightened" that ever was, suggesting to me that it planted the seeds of its own demise. I don't reject much of this analysis. Truth be told, our Anglo forebears betrayed White America. They did so by scorning their less-refined racial brethren in favor of the heroic black, and by obsessing about Communist intrigue abroad to the point that they were unable to detect the Jewish infiltration at home. They were comfortable in their Connecticut redoubts, entranced by the more sophisticated and exotic strains of multiracialism and largely oblivious to the Jewish threat.

It wasn't that the Alsops lacked for racial identity. The Alsop clan, Merry writes, "traced its roots mainly through the genealogy of three American families – the Alsops, Robinsons and Roosevelts – stretching back at least 250 years into the New World. The Alsops arrived from England, the Robinsons from Scotland, the Roosevelts from the Netherlands. They all had merged into what became the New World's Anglo-Saxon ascendancy... The English were America's substantial majority in colonial times and later, and most other northern European strains blended readily into this majority." (Evidence to my mind that White ethnic sub-groups can unite when necessary, far from being the "non-existent" group our enemies make us out to be.) Merry quotes Edgar Allan Poe, who was himself a mix of English, Scottish and Irish: "the self-same Saxon current animates the British and American heart."

While a student at Groton, the elder Alsop brother, Joe, "viewed the world through what at the time would have been considered a prism of realism. Though respectful of plantation 'darkies' and their religion, he looked upon them as a kind of exotic people, given to flights of unconcealed superstition." Jews, on the other hand, enthralled the sycophantic and homosexual Joe. As a new Washington correspondent, he "admired Ben Cohen beyond words" and "felt much the same about Felix Frankfurter." Cohen was an administration New Dealer who later ranked high at the State Department, and Frankfurter was the Jewish Supreme Court justice who went on to become a regular at Alsop dinners. Other Alsop Jew buddies included Henry Morgenthau, Treasury Secretary, and Walter Lippman, the influential broadcast gossip.

The Alsops found themselves at odds with Sen. Joe McCarthy, who they saw as a paranoid provocateur who attacked old-line Anglo-Saxons. They were skeptical of "conservative, isolationist" Republicans like Ohio Senator Bob Taft. And the brothers Alsop couldn't get enough o' them civil rights. Upon a visit to the aftermath of the Watts riots in Los Angles, Stewart Alsop remarked that "I began to understand the depth of bitterness of the young men of Watts, and the width of the gulf that separates these young men from the secure and comfortable life that most white Americans live." Stewart took pleasure in mocking a Klansman named Raymond Cranford, quoting him as saying that "I got a daughter, she's nineteen years old. I love my daughter, but if I find her with a nigger, I'll take my gun and I'll blow her brains right out of her head." One wonders what Stewart Alsop's reaction would be upon discovering a black buck on top of his daughter.

It's not as if the Alsops were completely drunk on social matters. They objected to forced busing. Stewart Alsop recognized that a George Wallace supporter couldn't afford to live in the suburbs and had to contend with inner-city crime. "When Wallace vowed that American wives would be able to go to the supermakret without physical fears when he became president, wrote Stewart, 'that empty promise means a lot to the Wallace man.'" Stewart once rebuked the Times' Anthony Lewis for comparing U.S. military action in Vietnam to Nazi Germany, writing that Lewis was silent on the Israelis' use of deep-penetration bombing to establish conquered territory. "I do not recall that you denounced (that) as a crime worthy of the Nazis," he wrote. Whilst recovering from cancer treatments in a hospital later in life, hours spent watching television left him "struck by the prevailing rules of the air: 'ethnics' are okay, Jews are okay, blacks are very okay, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants are bunch of bigoted boobies,'" he wrote, as quoted by Merry.

Merry begins the book's epilogue with a lengthy quote from Theodore Roosevelt, the one in which he declares that, bottom-lined for honesty, non-White immigration to the U.S. will prove disastrous. "But," Merry writes, "a day would come when the old elite could not longer speak with such confidence and authority... The very idea that an American majority would seek to impose arbitrarily its own mores and manners upon minority groups within the society would become so controversial as to deter any politician from even thinking the thoughts Theodore Roosevelt has so proudly proclaimed... Thought it remains little remarked upon, this transformation represents perhaps the most profound development in American society in the past century... The Alsops were acutely conscious of the disintegration of the old order and the ramifications of sea change."

Their consciousness, however, did not lead to preventive action. Both Joe and Stewart Alsop, in varying degrees, shrugged their shoulders at White dispossession. "I cannot understand what is happening to America an longer, perhaps because I have finally become an old codger, frozen in the viewpoints of the past," Joe wrote to Isaiah Berlin, the Jewish writer. Imagine George Will asking John Podhoretz, "What's happening to this country, John?" The Alsops took their ethnic dominance for granted. Quite unlike Jews, they did not think in terms of having racial enemies, domestic or otherwise. It was that mindset that created the slack Jews were all too quick to grab. Their ascension took place on a clean geographic slate: Indians were killed off by stronger White men, and blacks never figured prominently. They didn't have the stomach for the strong "nativism" of their relative Teddy Roosevelt. Such stuff wasn't "gentlemanly." Which it may not be, but I get the sense that "gentlemanly" does not always win the day, especially in predicaments such as the one we now find ourselves in.

Do Anglos have a particular weakness for Jews? One theme of the Jew-lead war on Iraq made itself depressingly clear: the Coalition of the Willing to Bend Over was really just two countries, the United States and Britain. The papers' daily array of photos, meant to moisten my eyes and hasten me to the yellow ribbon store, seem almost evenly split. "British" soldier here, "American" soldier there, skin black, sometimes White, helmet on and gun in hand, cradling an Iraqi child or looking fierce with his mirrored sunglasses on. Both Britain and the United States have a pathetic history of obsequy to Jewry. Both were instrumental in the creation of the Hate State (Balfour, Truman). Both have governments choked with slithering kikes: we boast Wolfowitz and company, while Britain's got the Jew Jack Straw. Both have shown murmurings of understanding on Jews (British pogroms and their expulsion by various monarchs, whispered American opposition to Jews that all but disappeared by the 1960s). But both eventually buckled and spread their legs for the long, greasy hook nose. Like mother, like son.

The Alsop lives, and the times in which they lived, provide some useful insights into today's White plight. It's important to recognize that the Alsops were hereditary elites, however deserved or undeserved such stations may be. They weren't common Whites, and in fact, often disdained common Whites. I am no denier of class difference within races, and especially within the White race. While it's silly to expect that tractor-pull Whites will become fast friends with Tanglewood Whites, we will have to set aside taste differences and unite against a common foe. I believe that talented White elites can play a role in the Repossession: as leaders, as thinkers, as writers and as speakers, the ones who will change minds and provide inspiration. Right now, too many have too much short-term status to lose to stand up for their race. Perhaps tougher men will play a more important role. One thing is certain: reclaiming White destiny will require a pan-racial loyalty the squeamish Alsops never displayed.

DOUGLAS WRIGHT