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 hile
the death of a close friend tears a hole in a man's
life, the death of a man like Sam Francis tears a hole
in an entire movement. In both cases, it's a wound that
won't heal easily or soon.
I first met Sam in 1979 at his desk at the Heritage
Foundation in Washington, D.C., where he worked as a
policy analyst on security and terrorism. I could never
have dreamed that one day, after some 26 years of friendship,
I would have the dreadful task to write an obituary
for him in Middle American News - a paper whose
founding was inspired, at least in part, by Sam's own
writings on politics.
Sam had been influenced by sociologist Donald Warren's
studies of Middle American Radicals - or "MARs,"
in Warren's coinage - who provided the constituency
for the anti-establishment political insurgency of candidates
like George Wallace, Ross Perot, and Patrick Buchanan,
and who were the reservoir from which the "Reagan
Democrats" emerged, giving the GOP its landslide
presidential victories in 1980 and 1984.
In his introduction to Revolution From the Middle,
Sam described the "long march of the MARs":
Middle American Radicals are essentially middle-income,
white, often ethnic voters who see themselves as an
exploited and dispossessed group, excluded from meaningful
political participation, threatened by the tax and
trade policies of the government, victimized by its
tolerance of crime, immigration and social deviance,
and ignored or ridiculed by the major cultural institutions
of the media and education.
Sam came to regard the MARs as the representatives,
if not in fact the vanguard, of the core population
group providing America its essential history, culture,
and identity. By integrating Warren's MARs analysis
into the theory of elites as formulated by James Burnham,
Vilfredo Pareto and others of the "Machiavellian"
school of political thinkers, Sam created a potent new
intellectual framework for understanding, and responding
to, contemporary political events. (Sam's first book,
Power and History: The Political Thought of James
Burnham, is essential reading to understand the
totality of Sam's political thinking.)
Armed with a Burnhamite analysis of elite behavior,
Sam advocated that traditional conservatism must adopt
a posture of political insurgency, rather than one of
defense. In "Winning the Culture War," one
of the more important essays in Revolution From the
Middle, Sam explained that the dominant social and
political elites in the U.S. today "not only do
nothing to conserve what most of us regard as our traditional
way of life, but actually seek its destruction, or are
indifferent to its survival. If our culture is going
to be conserved, we need to dethrone the dominant authorities
that threaten it."
Through his understanding of elite behavior and his
advocacy of the just interests of his own people and
culture, Sam was able to reveal the political and historical
meaning behind the surface of political events. That
is one reason why his columns, essays and speeches enjoyed
such immense popularity. He provided unique insights
unavailable elsewhere, and gave the fight over race,
immigration, and multiculturalism a political dimension
others often missed. Sam did not argue the pros and
cons about issues, preferring instead to show readers
the real — usually anti-white — political
and financial motivations behind the elites and interest
groups manipulating those issues. He knew, for example,
that the drive for "diversity" is simply the
abstract rationalization used by America's corporate
elites to cloak their appetite for cheap labor from
non-Western countries.
Sam's knowledge and understanding of history and politics
was encyclopedic. A voracious reader, Sam's intellectual
curiosity was insatiable, and, as all his dinner partners
know, he could discuss a vast array of subjects knowledgeably
and comfortably. Those who knew him were impressed by
an erudition Sam himself never flaunted. When he wrote
or spoke, he did so not to impress, but to exchange
information, to arrive at truth and understanding.
Although his enemies routinely denounced him with the
usual cuss words, from "white supremacist"
and "white racist" to "bigot," Sam
was steadfast in the storm, even when the going got
rough and his neoconservative enemies engineered his
firing from the Washington Times.
He survived the blow, and found other means to distribute
his column. He never betrayed his principles for a job,
never apologized for telling the truth, and never for
a moment congratulated himself for his virtues.
Sam was devotedly loyal to his friends, a quality some
of them did not share. After Sam had been denounced
in the press as "racist," the frightened editors
of the formerly courageous New American of the
John Birch Society quietly dropped Sam's name from the
masthead where he had been listed as a contributor.
At the time of his death, he had begun work on a new
book, very tentatively titled, "Conservatism and
Race," which he described to friends as the first
attempt to weld conservative political theory with an
understanding of the role of race in the development
of culture. It would have been an important and immensely
valuable contribution to political theory; but, alas,
it was not to be.
His passing leaves a terrible, black void, one that
to his friends feels like an abyss. But we can take
some solace knowing Sam lived his political life richly,
as he wanted, fighting courageously for the cause and
people he deeply believed in, no matter what the risks
were to his otherwise promising career in mainstream
conservatism.
In his office, Sam displayed a framed print of his favorite
quotation from Nietzsche, which I had given him. It's
from The Gay Science, section 283 of book four,
which might provide a fitting epitaph. It reads, in
part:
I welcome all signs that a more virile, warlike age
is about to begin, which will restore honor to courage
above all. For this age shall prepare the way for
one yet higher, and it shall gather the strength that
this higher age will require one day — the age
that will carry heroism into the search for knowledge
and that will wage wars for the sake of ideas and
their consequences. To this end we now need many preparatory
courageous human beings ... — human beings who
know how to be silent, lonely, resolute, and content
and constant in invisible activities; ... human beings
distinguished as much by cheerfulness, patience, unpretentiousness,
and contempt for all great vanities as by magnanimity
in victory and forbearance regarding the small vanities
of the vanquished; ... human beings ... accustomed
to command with assurance but instantly ready to obey
when that is called for — equally proud, equally
serving their own cause in both cases, more endangered
human beings, more fruitful human beings, happier
beings! For believe me: the secret for harvesting
from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest
enjoyment is — to live dangerously!
For additional tributes
from some of Sam's many friends see the
American Renaissance website and the Chronicles
Magazine site.
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