1,911 words

A short while ago I wrote about the connections between Willis Carto and the Truth Seeker magazine and its owner Charles Smith, who published the original American edition of Imperium. An equally significant connection there is Frederick C. F. Weiss, who was linked to both the Truth Seeker and the National Renaissance Party (NRP) in New York in the 1950s. Weiss was a longtime friend of Francis Parker Yockey, who sometimes stayed at — or hid out at — Weiss’ farm near Middletown New York, about 60 miles northwest of Manhattan. It was through Weiss that the Truth Seeker’s Charles Smith was introduced to Imperium, and probably to Yockey as well.

In 1958 the FBI interviewed Weiss a few times, since he was reportedly involved with the NRP. To throw them off the trail, he told them that all he knew about the NRP was what he learned from his neighbor up the road, Sandy Griffith — who happened to be an undercover asset of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Rather mischievously, he said Griffith had told him that the real force behind the NRP was Charles Smith, who was funding it with money from Jewish sources.[1] Presumably this was to get the FBI chasing its own tail, since much of its information on Weiss had come from the ADL in the first place,[2] and meantime Griffith himself had been long known to the FBI as a spy and provocateur. Or it’s entirely possible the FBI just ignored it, knowing what they knew about Griffith, and suspecting what they suspected about Weiss!

How Charles Smith reacted to all this is unknown — did he ever hear about it? — but during the next few years he published Imperium, got out of New York, moved to San Diego, retired from the Truth Seeker, and died.

Today, though, I want to talk about a tangential matter pertaining to Weiss. That is his pungent and satirical, yet deadly serious attack on Arnold Toynbee, called Hang On and Pray (included in the volume of Yockey’s collected shorter writings, The World in Flames, more on which further on)..At this point in his life, the septuagenarian Weiss occupied himself mainly with his real estate investments, and in producing small books and pamphlets under his imprint of Le Blanc Publications. These had such titles as Quo Vadis, America?, and Will They Bury Us? Perhaps the most curious and enduring, however, is this pink booklet with a cartoon cover and aforementioned title, here punctuated as Hang On and Pray.

The cover illustration shows a caricature of a naked Arnold Toynbee atop a ladder, dribbling Jackson Pollock splotches onto a canvas. Looking around for it some years ago, I found there were two copies available in New York: one at Low Library at Columbia, and the other at the New York Public Library. The one at the NYPL is an inscribed original: “Compliments of the author / Frederick C. F. Weiss.” That’s the one that I photocopied for myself. I was very impressed that the NYPL decided it was worth cataloguing.

Glancing through it, I thought the small, dense text looked rather like a rant. It appeared Toynbee was simply being mocked and denounced as a One Worlder, a prophet of globalism who was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation.

Somewhat later I learned that the author or authors — Weiss seems to have written this with Yockey, or more likely Yockey wrote most of it and let Weiss publish it semi-anonymously, under Weiss’s Le Blanc imprint — were much in sync with mainstream historians and critics on the matter of Arnold Toynbee. Toynbee had repeatedly been raked over the coals by one critic (Dutch historian Pieter Geyl) as a wide-eyed charlatan, and would soon be ground up by another, Hugh Trevor-Roper, writing in Encounter in 1957.[3]

With this in hand, it was no surprise for me to learn that Toynbee was not taken very seriously by scholars. What Geyl and Trevor-Roper — and Weiss and Yockey — had to say about Toynbee, all rather cruelly, is that Arnold Toynbee was neither a historian nor yet quite a philosopher. What he was, was a name and a face and a pop-culture sage, much as Marshal McLuhan was in his time. Toynbee was the sort of figure whose name every literate person would know, though probably not read, and whose phiz might well show up on the cover of the Saturday Review every year or two.

The pink booklet’s Foreword does not seem to have much to do with Arnold Toynbee, that “philosopher of history” who was still in the process of cranking out his 12 or 13 volumes of something he called A Study of History.

The only hope for the preservation for Western Civilization lies, therefore, neither in “victory” nor in “defeat” but in a stalemate — a long and costly stalemate during the course of which both contestants would progressively disintegrate from within.

Without such a stalemate the Western World is doomed to perpetual slaughter in stupid wars and to inevitable miscegenation with colored races. Civilization will crumble, music will even more revert to that of the jungle, literature will be cast aside, history will be unread, and our cities will decompose as the dark inhabitants stalk the decaying streets.

Well now, that’s very jolly and prophetic. And to think this was published in 1956! But as I say, it doesn’t tell us exactly Toynbee has to do with any of it. So on to the main text, which gets right into it:

The fashionable philosopher of the moment is Toynbee. His effusions are printed everywhere, the fashionable intellectuals quote him, and he quotes them. The great propaganda organs encourage their captive audiences to read him or at least to revere him.

A good beginning, but a few years out of date. The foregoing may have been somewhat true back in 1947, when Time magazine put Toynbee on the cover in a Boris Artzybasheff illustration, with a background of innumerable faceless figures struggling up — or falling down — a cliff, with the hopeful epigraph: Our civilization is not inexorably doomed.

The faceless figures were meant to be civilizations. They struggle and rise, and usually fall. And that cover story inside, doubtless written by Whittaker Chambers (in the 1940s Henry Luce seems to have assigned him all the elusive, impossible subjects) did turn out to have a very topical, newsy angle. Toynbee, it now appeared, had immediate relevance for Americans. There were great geopolitical power shifts going on. Great Britain was backing out of its Empire and its role as policeman of the world, leaving all the horrible mess in the American lap. Just ahead of us lay the Truman Doctrine — the Marshall Plan — the Berlin Airlift — the Cold War — some new war or other — and very likely some nuclear holocaust around the corner.

With that kind of a “hook,” there was little need for the article to provide deep analysis of Toynbee’s theories. That’s just as well, because there was basically only one Great Unifying Theory: civilizations get faced with challenges, and either they accept them and succeed, or else they fail; or in some cases they stop accepting challenges, and just stagnate, becoming a “fossilized” people.

Weiss/Yockey find fault with Toynbee for all manner of things, but the first in line is that he’s a bad Spengler imitator. It is not so much that he’s inferior and derivative, but rather he simply doesn’t really understand what Oswald Spengler’s “cultural morphology” was all about.

His entire system is derived from Spengler; it is at one and the same time a pastiche, a massive plagiarism, a caricature, and a distortion of Spengler. To demonstrate Toynbee’s larcenous relationship to Spengler, we need only to quote Toynbee himself: “What was it that had set in motion . . . those societies that had embarked on the spiritual enterprise called civilization?” . . .

It is quite obvious that the origin of a civilization is of no practical importance. The entire purpose of Spengler’s work was to arrive at the form of our future, in other words to orient ourselves historically, so that we realize unshakably what we can do and what we cannot do, what is to be, and what is not to be.

This last bit is probably the key explication of Spengler: understanding fate and inevitability, which means having knowledge of what can be changed and what cannot be . . . and the wisdom to know the difference. (As we say in Alcoholics Anonymous.)

Although this may not have been Toynbee’s original intention, his revamping of Spengler ended up as something mechanistic: We simply need to find what makes a civilization work, and guide ourselves accordingly. As if! This is scarcely different from Cargo-cultism: imitate what’s worked before — put some airplane-shaped things in the jungle — and civilization will arrive. The belief that everything can be tinkered with, re-engineered, reproduced, re-fabricated, made whole again when it was never whole in the first place, came to dominate Toynbee’s thinking.

Less abstrusely, there are gross factual errors and obvious biases in Toynbee, mostly panderings to the existing power structure. These give the authors the greatest delight.

[Toynbee] asserts for example that Adolph [sic] Hitler and Mussolini both obtained power “by force.”

Toynbee grieves that the Irish nationalists “go on fostering their hatred of England,” but finds it essential that all Europeans find German ascendancy “abhorrent.”

Every word he writes is in support of Zionism and the Washington regime, which two forces presently dominate the Western world. Every idea of Toynbee’s is polemical, and not in the least objective.

Where Washington vacillates, Toynbee vacillates; where Washington is firm, he is unshakeable. He can furnish, at short notice, a convenient historical moral foundation for any policy it may adopt. He has already created, in his “Study of History,” a library of material to justify all the firm, long-range policies of Zionism, the Washington regime, and the United Nations. Thus, he increasingly belabors Western nationalism, Western imperialism, Western racial pride, and Western accomplishments. Just as unceasingly, he praises and justifies the colored revolt against white world supremacy.

There is much to like, much that is still relevant, and lot that is amazingly visionary in this ferocious mid-1950s broadside attack on Arnold Toynbee.

The tragedy is that it was all mostly ineffectual. Because most people, then and now, really didn’t care what this faddish theoretician was offering his opinions about. Yockey and Weiss were beating a dead horse that didn’t know it was dead. The story of How Toynbee Tanked is one of the great comical dramas of twentieth-century historiography.

Notes

[1] FBI interview of FREDERICK WEISS, White Plains, New York, on December 30, 1958. FOIA files online. It appears the FBI were asking if Weiss and the NRP had any connection to the recently-founded National States Rights Party, which was suspected of recent bombing attempts in the South.

[2] Sanford, or “Sandy” Griffith was a former foreign correspondent and sometime intelligence operative. He worked for William Stephenson’s British Security Coordination, out of Rockefeller Center, during the war. H. Keith Thompson exposed Griffith’s links to the ADL in a series of 1954 magazine articles (see my piece on Frederick Weiss from July 31, 2023). Griffith, who was not Jewish himself, bought a house in the country, up the road from Weiss.

[3] Both essays are very entertaining, and mirabile dictu, available online: Pieter Geyl’s “Toynbee the Prophet,” from Journal of the History of Ideas, April 1955; and Hugh Trevor-Roper’s famous piece in Encounter, June 1957. Trevor-Roper kept on dwarf-tossing Toynbee at least until 1989, an obsession I hope to describe at a later date.