Essays

Russell Maguire, The American Mercury, and Racially-Conscious Conservatism

by Andrew Hamilton

RUSSELL MAGUIRE WAS AN ANTI-JEWISH, pro-White, multimillionaire businessman active in American conservative circles in the 1950s and ’60s, primarily through the publication of the well-known American Mercury magazine.

In 1956 Maguire (pictured above) hired future American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell “at a handsome salary” to promote his magazine, just as William F. Buckley of National Review had done the year before. Rockwell had a background in advertising, marketing, and promotion. He did not come out as a Nazi until 1958.

Maguire was one of several wealthy right-wingers Rockwell worked for in rapid succession between 1955 and 1958: William Buckley, Robert Snowden, “a wealthy plantation owner” from Arkansas who headed Americans for Constitutional Action, DeWest Hooker (Rockwell worked with, not for, Hooker), Wallace Allen, an Atlanta, Georgia ad man, and 39-year-old heir Harold N. Arrowsmith of Baltimore, Maryland.

Rockwell praises only two of these men—highly—in his hard-hitting, engaging autobiography This Time the World (1963): Buckley and DeWest Hooker! He is quite contemptuous of the others.

Russell Maguire, in particular, is singled out for withering scorn. Was Rockwell’s unflattering portrayal of Maguire justified?

Maguire, Auto-Ordnance, and the Thompson Submachine Gun

Maguire owned the Auto-Ordnance Co., manufacturer of the famous Thompson Submachine Gun, or “Tommy Gun.” The gun was developed by former Army ordnance officer, Remington Arms Company Chief Engineer, and WWI brigadier general John Taliaferro Thompson. With the backing of Wall Street tycoon Thomas Fortune Ryan, who retained the largest block of stock, Thompson formed the Auto-Ordnance Co. of Bridgeport, Connecticut in 1916.

The young company struggled throughout the 1920s and ’30s. Thompsons, often looted from small town police stations or obtained from unscrupulous dealers, were sometimes used by gangsters. The guns could legally be sold to anyone on the open market, though the company pressured dealers to sell only to law-abiding citizens.

John Dillinger and Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd used Thompsons, as did Al Capone’s mob in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre of 1929. Hollywood movies also made the guns iconic.

Of course, most of the firearms were used by the police, Coast Guard, and other purchasers for legitimate purposes.

Thomas Fortune Ryan’s death in 1928 triggered a decade-long battle between Ryan’s heirs, who wanted to liquidate the privately-held firm, and John Thompson’s son Marcellus, who wanted it to remain in business.

In 1938, Thomas Ryan’s son Walter, A-O’s President, General Manager, Director, and major shareholder, received a cash offer for the family’s holdings from a Wall Street broker. The money would be raised through a public offering underwritten by a financier named (John) Russell Maguire, originally an oilman from Texas.

According to a Web site detailing the background of the company,

“With little investigation, Maguire discovered that Auto-Ordnance was a very poor investment. It had a huge debt, a static inventory and just a few employees. But Maguire reckoned that Marcellus Thompson knew what he was talking about when he predicted that Europe was headed for a war that would create huge profits for arms manufacturers. So Maguire agreed to underwrite the stock offer.”

The convoluted story of how Maguire obtained control of the struggling firm from Thomas Fortune Ryan’s son on the eve of WWII is described here.

“Throughout [WWII], Auto-Ordnance made enormous profits on sales of the various models of the Tommy Gun. By 1944 combined sales of all orders for Thompsons totaled nearly $130,000,000, earning the company a net profit of some $14,845,000. But in February 1944, the Army took delivery of 2,091 Thompsons, its last order. The venerable Tommy Gun had been replaced by the cheap and ugly, but functional M3 and M3A1 Grease Gun.”

Throughout the war, Thompsons were especially popular with specialized troops such as Rangers, Marine Raiders, armored and parachute units.

At war’s end, Auto-Ordnance was downsized to become simply the ordnance division of its parent company, Maguire Industries. The Bridgeport factory was stripped of its gun-making machinery and retrofitted to produce radios, record players, and other consumer goods that were in short supply and high demand. Everything related to Thompson production was crated up and placed into storage.

According to A-O’s website:

“On March 15, 1944, a certificate of name change was filed in New York changing the Auto-Ordnance Corporation name to ‘Maguire Industries, Incorporated.’ Auto-Ordnance became known as the Auto-Ordnance Division of Maguire Industries, although gun production was terminated as World War II ended. No Thompson guns were made after 1944.

“A certificate of name change was filed in Connecticut on March 22, 1944 documenting the name change from Auto-Ordnance Corporation to ‘Maguire Industries, Inc.’

“For failure to provide yearly corporate reports for the years 1949 and 1950, Connecticut terminated Maguire Industries, Inc. right to do business in that state on December 14, 1950.

“Maguire Industries, Inc. changed their name to Components Corporation of America and registered the change with New York on March 14, 1961.

“On December 31, 1981, Components Corporation of America was merged with CCA Holding, Inc. with CCA Holding surviving and then renamed itself Components Corporation of America.”

According to Gerald L. K. Smith (quoted below), Russell Maguire died sometime before 1976. It has been difficult to piece together the story of Maguire’s life and political activism. Almost nothing has been written about the man. I don’t even know the dates of his birth or death.

It seems clear that Maguire was a sophisticated, capable man of the kind the White nationalist movement needs. He does not readily fit Rockwell’s simplistic caricature of him. As head of A-O he had to deal extensively with the FBI and other law enforcement agencies, as well as the military, under the auspices of the heavily Jewish Roosevelt Administration.

Early Activism

By 1950 Maguire, dissatisfied with the direction the country was heading, began to become politically active.

John Beaty’s seminal book for the post-WW2 resistance: The Iron Curtain Over America

Maguire financially backed the distribution of the book The Iron Curtain Over America (1951) by John Beaty and supported Merwin K. Hart’s National Economic Council and Allen A. Zoll’s American Patriots, Inc., a group labeled “fascist” (and hence subversive) by the U.S. Attorney General. All of these men were accomplished individuals before being made “unrespectable” because of their political and racial views.

In 1952, Left-wing WASP Senator William Benton (D.-Conn.), co-founder of the Benton & Bowles advertising firm, publisher of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and sponsor of a resolution to expel Joseph McCarthy from the US Senate, was running for reelection. William Buckley and his brother-in-law L. Brent Bozell ran a series of anti-Benton newspaper ads in Connecticut that Benton blamed, in part, for his defeat. Buckley’s and Bozell’s ads were financed by Russell Maguire.

In the late 1950s Maguire donated $75,000 to Billy Graham for producing a film about the virtues of free enterprise.

The American Mercury

His major project, however, was the purchase of the venerable American Mercury magazine founded in 1924 by H.L. Mencken and his Jewish colleague George Jean Nathan with the financial backing of Jewish book publisher Alfred A. Knopf.

By 1950 the money-losing magazine had taken a conservative turn under the ownership of Clendenin J. Ryan, Jr. and the editorship of philo-Semitic, Negrophile author William Bradford Huie. (On Ryan’s colorful background as a spook see here, but note that the article is tagged as having “multiple issues.”) Clendenin Ryan was the grandson of Thomas Fortune Ryan, the original financier of Auto-Ordnance.

Ryan published three issues of the Mercury before selling the journal to editor Huie in February 1951.

Russell Maguire was by this time one of the magazine’s investors. Under Huie, many “Cold War liberal” Jewish authors (essentially, neoconservatives), including Gertrude Himmelfarb (Mrs. Irving Kristol, mother of William Kristol), were commissioned to write for the publication. Many of these Jewish writers continued to appear under Maguire, though in ever-diminishing numbers.

The magazine continued to struggle financially, and Maguire finally purchased it outright in August 1952. At the time, The American Mercury and The Freeman were the two most important right-wing publications of the day. The Mercury‘s circulation was 66,017, according to Time in 1955.

The July 1953 issue of the American Mercury, published early during Maguire’s ownership.

Maguire owned and operated the Mercury until he sold it in January 1961 to the Rev. Gerald B. Winrod, another Jewish bête noire. In 1966 the magazine was acquired by Liberty Lobby’s Willis Carto, who operated it as a quarterly until 1981.

Maguire’s stepdaughter Natasha worked as an executive for the magazine, serving as managing editor from 1954–58. (Maguire married a White Russian.)

Maguire’s American Mercury (1952–1961) evolved into a Reader’s Digest-style monthly carrying extremely short, easy-to-read articles about politics, economics, health, science, and other topics. The articles were pitched to a broad, popular audience of middle-class readers rather than to intellectuals.

As an example, in 1960 there were 12 issues published with 439 articles and 1,970 pages. The February issue contained 41 articles in 162 pp., averaging 4 short pages per article.

Much of the content was free enterprise-, anti-Communist-, and anti-Zionist- oriented. Comparing articles from Huie’s Mercury to those from Maguire’s gives the impression of faster-paced, lighter, but also more militant fare under the latter.

For example, Robert Patterson’s “The Tongs of San Francisco: New Rackets in Old Chinatown” (February 1952), is meatier than anything published by Maguire. The same can be said, in a sense, of Calder Willingham’s “Television: Giant in the Living Room.” However, due to editorial or self-imposed authorial constraints, “Television” ultimately fails to deliver. Huie’s Mercury, hobbled by an enormous burden of familiar conservative social and intellectual taboos (refusal to explore anything verging on the politically incorrect), never lives up to its potential.

Major General Charles A. Willoughby

Major General Charles A. Willoughby, Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s Chief of Intelligence in WWII and Korea, was the Mercury‘s military editor and a frequent contributor. Born in Germany under a different name, he immigrated to the US in 1910 and enlisted in the US Army.

Harold Lord Varney was the magazine’s political editor.

Russell Maguire contributed a monthly feature, “In the Mercury‘s Opinion.”

Anti-Communism was a major theme of the magazine. Anti-Communist Sephardic Jew Ralph de Toledano wrote on the topic, as did famous science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein (“Pravda Means Truth,” Oct. 1960), among others.

Familiar anti-Communist Christian contributors included Carl McIntire, Billy James Hargis, and Bishop Fulton J. Sheen. Billy Graham was featured on the cover of the June 1957 issue, which contained a profile about him.

An anti-Zionist article, “Eichmann and His Bitter Harvest of Hate: Voices of all faiths protest the act of kidnapping” (Sept. 1960), criticized the Mossad’s illegal kidnapping of former German functionary Adolf Eichmann from Argentina to Israel, where he was executed, by using a series of quotations from prominent Jewish individuals and organizations who condemned the action.

However, a boxed editorial statement by the magazine at the end of the article states:

“The Zionists are quick to label any who expose them as ‘hate-mongers.’ They hypocritically prattle in selfrighteous [sic] tones for ‘peace through justice’ and ‘peace through law.’ The Zionists are hoist on their own petard. They have defied every rule of justice laid down by God or man. They have violated every international law on the books.”

Articles about monetary policy by C. H. Douglas, US Rep. and Federal Reserve foe Wright Patman (D.-Tex.), and others appeared.

Diplomatic historian Charles Callan Tansill (Back Door to War: The Roosevelt Foreign Policy 1933- 1941 [1952]) wrote for the Mercury, as did Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Virginius Dabney (“If the South Had Won the War,” February 1956).

Ralph Nader, American Mercury contributor.

Lebanese-American attorney Ralph Nader, before he was famous, contributed “Business Is Deserting America” (March 1960), which Jews and Leftists used against him in the presidential campaign of 2000, insinuating he was anti-Semitic. (Another early sign of political incorrectness: the young Nader published an article in the October 1962 issue of the libertarian magazine The Freeman.)

Under Maguire’s auspices, Jewish power was highlighted but, with the exception of Zionism, only indirectly. Articles frequently mentioned the names of powerful Jews as key players in social affairs, but without identifying them as Jews—a technique Revilo Oliver, a Mercury contributor, resorted to in his early days in the forlorn hope that White readers could somehow divine or guess which individuals were Jews and which were not. Unfortunately, this is an ineffective tactic. It renders meaningless common accusations of “anti-Semitism” against the Mercury.

It was not that the magazine was explicitly anti-Semitic. Rather, the Jews and repressive government agencies knew from violations of privacy rights that Maguire and many of his contributors were de facto anti-Semites, and attacked them viciously for that reason.

As a result, Maguire’s politically and racially harmless magazine (Rockwell correctly called it “non-anti-Semitic”) was, and still is, hyperbolically assailed as an emanation of “the fever swamps of anti-Semitism” and “the nether worlds of National Socialism.” It was routinely pilloried as “extremist,” “Jew-baiting,” “White Supremacist,” and “pro-fascist.”

In 1988, John Judis, founder of Socialist Revolution and author of an admiring biography of William Buckley, histrionically accused Maguire of “endorsing the theory of a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world promulgated by the fraudulent Protocols of Zion.”

White nationalists should perhaps copy the vocabulary of violent invective and hatred routinely spewed by their deadly enemies. Even the wildest, most irresponsible vituperation and lies clearly do not hurt one’s cause. It is a mistake to worry about tone or rhetoric. The more violent and crazy the language, the better. The lowest common denominator triumphs in Jewish-communist cultural warfare.

William Buckley early became the point man for expelling Maguire and the Mercury from his newly-invented “responsible [i.e., irresponsible] conservatism.” The “suggestion” for this first of many Buckley-led Jewish purges originated with conservative Morrie Ryskind, Hollywood screenwriter for the Marx brothers, and China Lobby honcho Alfred Kohlberg, a financial backer of National Review. Both were Jews.

Thus, in 1959 Buckley warned his editors and writers in a memorandum to disassociate themselves from Maguire and the Mercury. Within National Review, ex-Trotskyite James Burnham and ex-Communist Whittaker Chambers applauded Buckley’s action. Outside, US Senator Styles Bridges (R.-N.H.) and conservative radio commentator Fulton Lewis, Jr. obediently detached themselves from their erstwhile publisher. (Lewis had even been featured on the cover of the July 1957 issue of the magazine.)

Did George Lincoln Rockwell & DeWest Hooker Drive Russell Maguire Away From Racially-Conscious Conservatism?

Chapter 9 of George Lincoln Rockwell’s This Time the World contains the Commander’s scathing account of his 1956–57 association with Maguire and lavish praise for apparent millionaire DeWest Hooker. Unfortunately, we have only Rockwell’s account to go by, and so must tread carefully.

Rockwell, who had sold Maguire an article about U.S. follies in Iceland, arranged for an appointment with the millionaire in the latter’s lavish Park Lane apartment in New York City.

George Lincoln Rockwell

Meeting the publisher for the first time, Rockwell “was happy and relieved to find him the opposite of my recent employer in Memphis” (Robert Snowden). Maguire

“was small, intelligent, unassuming and seemed utterly dedicated to the cause of America and the White Race. We talked over the ‘movement,’ as patriotic leaders inevitably do upon meeting, and agreed that what was needed was what he called a ‘hard-core.’ I told him I thought eventually we would need a Nazi Party, and he agreed, but said it would have to be done with extreme secrecy. . . . I went along with that, too.”

Maguire offered to place Rockwell on the payroll in his Fifth Avenue offices “at a handsome salary” to promote the Mercury and, ostensibly, “begin quietly setting up the ‘hard-core’ he wanted.”

Impatient with office politics, Rockwell began “busily searching out and rounding up the talent for Maguire’s ‘hard-core.’ In the process, I came across a man named DeWest Hooker,” who made an enormously favorable impression upon Rockwell. In a key passage he writes,

“I discovered Hooker hated Maguire [emphasis added], for whom I was working. Maguire, he said, was rabid only on one thing, the Mercury, his pet project — and the hell with the cause itself. He told me that Maguire was utterly ruthless financially and would weasel out of any deal he could, if it cost him money. He even claimed that Maguire had tried to hire him, Bill Evans and another man to kill key Jews at $10,000 a head, but that he became so difficult to pin down on the money question, they felt he would never pay. In fact, some of the boys wanted to shoot Maguire instead. Hooker said Maguire would talk forever about his ‘hard-core’, but would never do anything.”

“Hooker,” Rockwell believed, “has the genius which is desperately needed by the dead right-wing, and I felt sure I could get Maguire to back him eventually as a leader. . . . Finally, Maguire agreed to a secret meeting between Hooker, himself, Fred Willis (Maguire’s oldest and best friend), and myself at Maguire’s Park Lane apartment. . . . Hooker put his full faith into the effort . . . Although it irritated him and went against his nature, I even got Hooker worked up to the point where he called Maguire ‘Sir,’ as I did.”

“We presented a complete plan for a slow, secret Nazi build-up under Hooker throughout the U.S.A. using the personnel and leaders already so well known to Hooker, a front group with an ‘almost’ Nazi flavor and — financing by Maguire. Eventually, we felt that most of the other rich men would help, if they could see something first. Maguire seemed entranced with everything we presented. Hooker wanted to give him the complete list of ADL and other Jewish agents, plus the evaluations of all right-wing leaders, but I had suggested holding off until we got some kind of commitment. This tactic got results.

“‘All right!’ said Maguire, with the air of a man suddenly decided on an immense step. ‘I’ll back it! The country doesn’t have five years left! We’ve simply got to do it! I’ll put in a thousand dollars for the first year!'”

Rockwell states that he, Hooker, and Willis were aghast, filled with righteous indignation over this paltry offer. How niggardly!

Yet, if DeWest Hooker was a multimillionaire as Rockwell claimed, why couldn’t he cough up the dough himself? Besides being fabulously wealthy, “Hooker was a Nazi! He was not a ‘patriot’ or a ‘right-winger’ or a ‘conservative,’ but a fighting, tough, all-out-Nazi”—the “nearest thing to a Nazi since the Bund.”

It is difficult to know what to make of Rockwell’s story in terms of its reliability. It is possible that Maguire said things, or made commitments, he later regretted.

After the meeting, Rockwell and Hooker went to the library of Hooker’s club (Cornell), around the corner. Hooker “admitted that I had had more success than anybody so far with Maguire, just by getting on the payroll and arranging the meeting. Maguire, he pointed out, usually refused to see more than one person at a time, to avoid witnesses.”

It would have been extremely imprudent for Russell Maguire to secretly finance a militant, “hard-core” organization promoted to him by two newcomers he hardly knew. Completely outlandish is the claim that he had attempted to hire Hooker and other dubious characters “to kill key Jews at $10,000 a head.”

Maguire was continually worried that Jews, and probably the government, were trying to frame him. His wariness was justified. An article in the January 1960 issue of The American Mercury noted:

“Up to the present the vengeance of the world conquerors has been swift and effective. No other U. S. racial minority has its own secret police organization operating on a nationwide basis to spy and report on other American citizens, as does the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, a federally tax-exempt, multi-million dollar operation conducted solely in behalf of the largest American fraternal order for Jews only.”

Think about it in today’s terms. Even militant activists sternly warn their followers to assume that anyone promoting violence is a plant working for the Jews or government. As an example, radio host Hal Turner, who did advocate violence, turned out to be a highly-paid informant.

The situation was essentially the same in 1956, and knowledgeable men like Maguire knew it. They had no more room for maneuver than we do. They were not Jews who could blithely engage in illegal gunrunning for Israel, Communism, domestic terrorism, widespread surveillance of racial enemies, and the suppression of speech and association by American citizens.

There is no big mystery about why we’re teetering on the brink of biological and cultural extinction. A highly-sophisticated, pervasive apparatus of mass propaganda and repression, fueled by hatred, has made even token resistance to genocide impossible for more than half a century. Only controlled opposition like Buckley’s “succeeds.”

Cold Feet

At any rate, Maguire got cold feet. Perhaps it dawned on him that his collaborators had different plans than he did. His response seems more or less consistent with such a view. Or possibly he was a “coward” as Rockwell contends. It is impossible to know.

But sometime between Maguire’s purchase of the Mercury in late 1952, when Jewish Cold War liberals began slipping away from the magazine, and Buckley’s Jewish-instigated edict of 1959, the ADL had drawn a bead on Maguire, and he knew it. In his 1960 autobiography, Rockwell noted that “recently the New York papers blasted [Maguire] at the instigation of the ADL for being ‘anti-Semitic.’”

In a private meeting in the Mercury‘s offices described by Rockwell — casting Maguire, unsurprisingly, in an unflattering light — Rockwell tendered his resignation from the magazine, and it was accepted. Maguire did subsequently buy and publish two additional articles by Rockwell.

At the end of his chapter about Russell Maguire and DeWest Hooker, Rockwell devotes 4 pages to half-defiantly and half-defensively justifying his behavior:

“Many right-wingers are sincerely concerned, I know, about my battles with men such as Maguire, Snowden, et al. and my revelations of what they really are. ‘They are doing good,’ I am told, ‘why not let them go about their business their own way. They are helping. Don’t hurt them.’

“I maintain that they are only giving the appearance of helping. They are the ones who are actually hurting. . . .

“No, America, it is not wicked to expose and attack Maguire and his ilk.”

He goes on to say that it was his “naked purpose” to drive the right-wing together by exploiting the goodwill or naïveté of patriots like Maguire by whatever means were necessary. This position is, in fact, very Hitler-like.

I have problems with it, however. Russell Maguire was anti-Jewish—the criterion by which one determines if someone is at least in the right ballpark. The White race will not survive if White nationalists can’t get this one simple thing right.

Yet Rockwell lavishly praised William F. Buckley and the National Review crowd (among whom, he acknowledged, were several Jews)—deadly enemies of our race and human freedom from the very beginning.

He also retained unbounded faith in J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, with whom he remained in constant contact, informing the agency about his followers and other matters. He was every bit as worried as Russell Maguire that he might be framed for something he did not do. Biographer Schmaltz calls him “paranoid,” which he was not, but notes that his love for the FBI was not a two-way affair like he assumed.

On top of this, he states that

“DeWest Hooker is now working in Italy with a bottling company. He is disgusted and discouraged. His experiences with Maguire and the others . . . have driven him back to the arms of the Jews and their money. We can’t afford this, Americans! . . . Hooker is one of the men who could have led fighting young men, as I am, in a fight to save America! The ‘nice’ people who back up such ‘wake up America’ ‘patriots’ as Maguire drove a great White leader into the arms of the Jew money-masters!”

Maguire “drove” the wealthy, “fighting, tough, all-out Nazi” Hooker “back into the arms of the Jews and their money”? Besides being false, this doesn’t even make sense.

Rockwell’s bile against Russell Maguire, especially in light of his truckling to Buckley and the FBI, is completely unwarranted. Nor do I think that his faith in DeWest Hooker was well-placed. These are not small errors in judgment.

Gerald L. K. Smith’s Meeting With Maguire

Gerald L. K. Smith rose to national prominence as a top aide to Gov. Huey P. Long (D.-La.), and subsequently won renown as an anti-Jewish crusader and publisher of the magazine The Cross and the Flag.

After Smith’s death in 1976 his widow edited personal recollections he’d jotted down over the years into a book, Besieged Patriot: Autobiographical episodes exposing Communism, Traitorism and Zionism from the life of Gerald L. K. Smith (Eureka Springs, Ark.: Christian Nationalist Crusade, 1978). The book contains a short section on Russell Maguire (pp. 309–10).

Smith states that he possessed bound volumes of The American Mercury published during Maguire’s tenure. “They are historic and dynamic because they contain articles which practically no one outside of myself had the courage to publish.”

Maguire, an admirer of Smith’s, invited the latter to his suite at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel when Smith was in town, evidently in the late 1950s or early 1960s, shortly before his disposal of the Mercury in 1961.

“He expressed his great admiration for me and expressed his desire to cooperate with me, but I could see that he was very nervous. He seemed to think that if he happened to be identified with me in the public press that it would ruin him. I realized that this man was suffering from one of the most frustrating circumstances that a man can experience; namely, to know the truth and love the truth, and still be afraid to espouse it completely and openly. He knew the Jewish question, but he was frightened to death of the Jews.”

According to Smith, Maguire disappeared from the American scene after being threatened by a potential blackmailer—a blackmailer who, though unnamed by Smith, and probably unknown to him, sounds suspiciously familiar.

“One day Mr. Maguire was called on by an enigmatic character who exploited Mr. Maguire’s intense concern for the destiny of America. He tricked Mr. Maguire into saying some extreme things, and then later threatened to blackmail him and tell the world what Mr. Maguire had tried to hire him to do. The report doubtless would have been false, but inasmuch as the individual who threatened the blackmail came when Mr. Maguire had no witnesses to the conference, it created a great concern. Mr. Maguire disappeared from the public scene and moved to a Caribbean island, and later died in obscurity.” [Emphasis added]

The date fits. Russell Maguire vanished from the political scene with the sale of the Mercury in January 1961.

A Final Thought

For nearly a century, White revolution of necessity has remained a state of mind—the absolute rejection of evil, genocide, communism.

The failure of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of now-forgotten rebels to turn the tide is not the appropriate criterion of judgment. In genocidal, totalitarian states, it is the existential act of psychological and spiritual rebellion that counts.

You cannot expect people to achieve the impossible, but you can demand that they do what they are obligated to do—and certainly that they refrain from trafficking with the enemy, betraying their fellows, or otherwise doing harm.

Applying these standards, I regard anti-Jewish Whites like Maguire as winners whether or not, from some Olympian perspective, they can be viewed with the benefit of perfect hindsight as smart or dumb, adept or “inept.” In my view, they all “succeeded” because they rebelled when others would not.

It is the enemies of mankind like William F. Buckley, Jr. and J. Edgar Hoover who deserve the severest opprobrium; Russell Maguire does not.

(originally published at Counter-Currents)

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Who+dares+wings
Who+dares+wings
31 July, 2015 11:31 pm

This is a fascinating history lesson. I applaud Andrew Hamilton for unearthing these obscure and practically all forgotten facts about post-war right wing pioneers like Russell McGuire whose son I knew of growing up in Seattle in the ’60s. He lived on the Thompson sub-machine gun inheritance his father left him in an exclusive gated community a few blocks from my family’s home. Andrew Hamilton’s opinions on the people he writes about are obviously well informed and cogent. If there was a Pulitzer Prize for journalists of his persuasion and sagacity I would nominate him for it. Thank you!

ernie1241
ernie1241
10 May, 2016 1:36 pm

Some facts which were left out of your article on Maguire: 1. He was a financial contributor to the largest postwar fascist organization in the U.S. — James Madole’s, National Renaissance Party. 2. On April 18, 1957 Maguire was named as head of the Constitution Party. Maguire was the keynote speaker at the Party’s 1957 convention in San Francisco. He discussed the evils of Jewish “international bankers” and their efforts to subvert America. 3. In October 1957, Maguire personally contacted the then-Secretary of Defense, Neil McElroy to report what he considered “subversion” within our CIA and other agencies. The Defense Department referred the matter to the FBI and the Bureau instructed its New York City office to interview Maguire. Here is the summary which the Special Agent in Charge of… Read more »

ernie1241
ernie1241
Reply to  ernie1241
13 May, 2016 4:07 pm

Since the author of this article states that he does not even know when Maguire was born or died, that information is as follows:

John Russell Maguire aka J. Russell Maguire aka Russell Maguire
093-10-9884; b: 07-27-1897 (Meriden CT); d: 11-10-66 (NYC)

Anthony Collins
Anthony Collins
14 May, 2016 3:01 am

I think there’s a category error in Andrew Hamilton’s article towards the end, when he effectively conflates integrity with winning. Unfortunately, these things aren’t coupled together: virtue does not equal victory. But I fully agree with Hamilton that we should respect men of integrity — even when they are unsuccessful — and that we should despise those who collaborate with the system — regardless of how “successful” they are.

If there is such a thing as justice, we will one day look up to the latter, not as the great and mighty, but as corpses dangling from lamp posts. As Henri Rochefort elegantly explained the title of his newspaper, La Lanterne, a lantern serves to illuminate honest men and to hang malefactors.

Peter Stephens
Peter Stephens
6 July, 2020 7:41 pm

It is interesting to me, after all this time to read about Maguire! I dated his daughter, Marina in the mid 50s, I was 19 or 20, and went, not only to their home a number of times for dinner, 3 servants, but to dinner and the theater in New York, as their guest. I had no idea that he was a hard core right winger. Marina at 16, had a Blue Cadillac Eldorado Convertable! They lived on a large estate, Greenwich, on the Water, Long Island Sound, in Byrum! Mr and Mrs Maquire were always very cordial to me. Mrs Maguire, was a Russian, member of the Tsars Family. A Cousin. She escaped! She was very subtle in her making sure I used proper manners at the dinner table!… Read more »

William White Williams • Chairman, National Alliance
William White Williams • Chairman, National Alliance
Reply to  Peter Stephens
9 July, 2020 12:14 pm

Excellent memory, Peter, under another thoroughly researched, excellent article by Mr. Hamilton. So much is coming to light now about the earlier decades of American racial nationalism thanks to the Internet.

We have many rare, early issues preserved of The Rockwell Report, American Mercury, and other patriotic magazines — some complete collections — in our William Luther Pierce Memorial Library and Research Center for our future researchers.