Earnest Sevier Cox:
Advocate for the White Ethnostate

2,299 words

There have been calls for the white American ethnostate for a very long time. Its last advocate who made some degree of progress was Earnest Sevier Cox (1880–1966). Cox was born and raised in Tennessee. His family seems to have been somewhat wealthy, and he was supported with financial gifts from his sister at key times. Cox’s early life was unfocused and filled with projects that he began but never finished. As a young man, he decided to become a minister, and studied at Chicago’s Moody Bible College in 1902, but transferred to Vanderbilt University the following year. He preached for three years, but experienced chronic throat pain, so he gave it up. He then studied at the University of Chicago, where he became aware of the country’s racial situation, and he started to advocate for whites.

In 1910, Cox embarked on a five-year journey that brought his life into focus. He explored Africa, Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, and South America. While in Egypt, Cox came to believe that civilizations could thrive as long as their populations were white. He concluded that Egypt had been a great empire as long as it had been white, but that when the great majority of its population had mixed with Nubian blacks, their civilization was doomed. Later infusions of Greek and Roman blood couldn’t reverse their decline. Once a high race mixes with a low race, the damage is irreversible.

Cox might have been right about Egypt. DNA studies on ancient Egyptian mummies show that the genes were whiter than Egyptians are now, but Cox wasn’t as concerned about Egypt as much as the United States. Cox was politically active in the middle of what The Occidental Quarterly‘s George McDaniel has called “’America’s Racialist Moment,’ the period in which the old, romantic ideas that whites held about blacks, either as faithful servants or as potential equals, were cast aside and whites began to see blacks in what many would consider a more realistic light.”

In 1917, America entered the First World War. Cox was commissioned as a Captain in the Field Artillery, and rose to the rank of Major by the end of the war. Although he was commissioned and promoted, Cox’s military career was undistinguished. He was not recommended for front-line service, since his voice was too soft to command troops. He continued his career in the US Army Reserves after the war, and was eventually promoted to Lieutenant Colonel.

After the war, Cox returned to white racial advocacy. He founded Anglo-Saxon clubs and influenced Virginia’s racial laws throughout his life. He would go on to write a number of articles, pamphlets, and books, three of which will be discussed in this article. His most vigorous work was supporting the radical black racial advocate Marcus Garvey, who wanted to resettle American blacks in Liberia. Cox and Garvey were friends and political allies.

Two books and one pamphlet were published that distinguish Cox’s early and later careers in white advocacy. All of them were recently republished by Ostara Publications.

Lincoln’s Negro Policy (1938)

This pamphlet offers compelling evidence that President Lincoln really did wish to resettle American blacks outside of the United States, and he discusses many colonization projects that were explored in Lincoln’s day (and earlier), as well as in the 1930s. Many of the abolitionists are featured in this work. Even abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison supported colonization, although he eventually came to reject it because he felt that deporting the freed blacks would in fact help to support the institution of slavery by getting rid of the troublemakers.

In the end, however, the Civil War and its outcome didn’t leave room for the project of removing blacks. Had it been a Union war aim, the United States would have recovered more quickly and there would be far less political bitterness today. But instead, the Radical Republicans promised all sorts of nonsense about “forty acres and a mule,” and America has been racially unstable ever since.[1]

Many prominent Americans supported the return of blacks to Africa throughout our history, and there were just as many blacks as whites calling for this. It is important to note that Cox published this pamphlet during the time that the “civil rights” movement was making its biggest strides: during the 1930s. He viewed black activists as divided into “amalgamationists” and separatists. He calls attention to the black separatists, and naturally supported them.

White America: The American Racial Problem as Seen in a Worldwide Perspective (1923, revised 1937)

Most of the literature on Cox argues that he didn’t travel abroad with the aim of studying racial issues across the globe. Nevertheless, this is what happened. White America was self-published, and he gained a considerable following as a result of it. Cox starts off by offering historical examples of race-mixing, especially in India and Egypt. He then goes on to discuss the white race in the Far East; there was a Caucasian migration into western China, for instance. He believes that the Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese might have had white blood in Antiquity. (This is a belief I don’t share.) He also describes Latin America’s racially-mixed predicament, and his most serious chapters focus on the American situation.

To study the history of race in America is to study America’s original “for love of Mammon” mistake: the institution of slavery. The first slaves were brought to Jamestown aboard a Dutch ship in 1619. While some Americans, such as the Quakers, implored the King of England to end the practice, on the whole, all of America was fine with Negroes in chains. However, slavery quickly became less profitable in New England:

The New Englander was possessed of that highest human endowment, creative genius, and this led to an industrialism which was to be the material making of America. With the development of shipping and factories the Negro became not only useless, but a burden.[2]

Eventually, slavery caused a destructive war and never-ending unpleasantness afterwards.

Cox also devotes a chapter to South Africa, which was still a British colony at the time. He argues that the use of black labor kept white youngsters and less skilled whites from properly integrating into the economy. At the time, South Africa’s Voortrekker economy – an economy whereby unskilled Afrikaner whites with big families established farms around the country – ended. As a result, there was a growing population of poor, unemployed whites. Cox doesn’t offer a solution to this problem, but Hendrik Verwoerd’s reforms in that land solved the problems of the poor Afrikaaner whites.

Cox argues that despite slavery, America is unique in that it is a society where the white race meets with the colored race, and yet there hasn’t been amalgamation such as there was in Egypt and parts of South America. However, Cox looked at past historical examples and found that Christianity, a conquering army, or some social revolution could cause large-scale mixing. Cox is especially hard on Christianity. One can see that Cox lost his faith when he decided that defending his people was a greater priority.

His views on Christianity are made clear in this section:

As a heritage of past missionary influence, the Negro has the idea drilled into him that there is no difference, save that of skin and hair, between the Negro and the Caucasian. At first the Negro accepted the rule of the white man as the natural right of a highly constituted race over an inferior one; but he gradually came to believe that the white man’s superiority was cultural only, and that he, the Negro, was the natural equal of the white man and that the white man was oppressing him by not recognizing this equality, or, in the opinion of the more ignorant, the black man’s superiority.

In South Africa, as in the United States, the teaching of equality led the Negro to despise the white man and his authority. He became unruly and aggressive and ended, in one country as I the other, a ravisher of the women of white men.[3]

Cox goes on to add, “Constituted authority of the white race has not served to deter the black criminal.”[4] Although nearly a century old, White America could very well describe current events. I can only rejoice that despite decades of “civil rights” propaganda and centuries of Christianity that, on the main, whites in America have resisted – however poorly – the “amalgamationists.”

Teutonic Unity: A Basis for Peace (1951)

Cox’s second and final book is the one that marks the attitude of Cox’s later years. It repackages Madison Grant’s Nordicist ideas to a degree, but instead of repeating Grant’s belief that Germany was only Nordic in the northern, Plattdeutsch-speaking areas of the country, Cox argues that Teutonic blood extends deep into Italy and across all of Western Europe. In Teutonic Unity, Cox insists that the Spaniards and Portuguese still retain the blood of the Teutonic Goths, and their dynamic empire-building after throwing off the Moors was no different from the expansion of the Goths during the end of the Roman Empire in the west. Cox argues that the Teutons and the Slavs have no reason to fight in that the Teuton can move west, developing places like the Americas and Australia, while the Slavs can move east into Asia.

It is important to remember that Cox lived in a time when there was no Teutonic unity at all. In fact, his entire military career was spent in an army whose main enemy was fellow Teutons. Cox was thus very much swimming against the current when he developed his ideas. He argues that the most important factor for world peace is to keep the Northern Europeans from going to war with each other.

Cox likewise explored other ideas related to Teutonic unity. Since becoming a “Right-wing” writer, I’ve found that serious ideas – ideas with staying power, ideas that get memed and repeated – are often first advanced by Rightist thinkers. And even if they don’t develop such ideas first, these thinkers are certainly crucial in developing them into something that will become part of the academic consensus. Cox proposed ideas in 1951 that were later amplified. One example is his theory that the Viking Age began in response to Charlemagne’s attack on the pagan Saxons. Cox developed this idea before its main proponents became established historians.

He also developed his ideas about Christianity. He was possibly the first American white racial advocate who observed that the institution of Christianity doesn’t support the interest of whites. Ben Klassen would take this idea much further and create his own religion from it. Referring to the Germanic hero Herman, who defeated the Romans in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in the year 9, Cox writes:

Herman and Jesus had lived in the same age and generation. When the armies of Caesar had encompassed Palestine, Jesus had said, “Give unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s,” but when the armies of Caesar had entered Germany, Herman had performed no miracle to extract from fish a gift for Caesar, but put Caesar to the sword. That under the example of Jesus his race was subdued and scattered, and that under the example of Herman his race retained freedom and increased in strength . . . It is too late, perhaps, for the Teuton to change his religion. But it is not too late for him to racialize it, like the Jew, for the Jewish core of race is guarded by race instinct and by a racial religion. The Teuton core rests on a racial instinct which is at war with his unracialized religion. This core of the Tueton race, like that of the Jewish is composed of a racial majority and is quite capable of instituting “Mosaic safeguards” of race in the Christian religion, at least in that portion of it under their control.[5]

In Teutonic Unity, Cox is likewise both sympathetic to abolitionist ideas and something of an economic radical. He had nothing but scorn for the upper classes who imported blacks to North America and the West Indies: “There is no epoch in the Teuton’s history more fraught with disaster for his race in the Western World than that interval during which the leaders of the race, for their own gain, engaged in the African slave trade.”[6]

Cox also foresaw the problem that only recently became clearly apparent, Third World immigration: “In Scandinavia and western German lands, the problem of maintaining the Teutonic type is a simple one – keep the alien racial strains from these areas.”[7]

Cox’s ideas have never been refuted. Egypt, India, and mestizo South America have never gotten their acts together. Indeed, all the racially-mixed people I’ve known, including the Korean-American hybrids that populate the military brat set that I’ve seen throughout my career, always fail to launch, never really get it together, tend not to know anything, and don’t ever try to find out. Once the race is mixed, something really is lost.

But most importantly, Cox’s idea of creating a white ethnostate has yet to be tried. Unlike Communism, whose ideas were tried and didn’t work, one instinctively knows that white ethnostates – especially white ethnostates consisting of northern Europeans (i.e. Teutons) – can create the closest thing to heaven on Earth the world has ever seen. The task before us now is to take up Earnest Sevier Cox’s fallen banner and lead our people to paradise.

Notes

[1] Viewed as a whole, William Lloyd Garrison’s career is a study in successful activism, and we would do well to follow the trails he blazed for the far more moral cause of creating a white ethnostate.

[2] Earnest S. Cox, White America: The American Racial Problem as Seen in a Worldwide Perspective (Ostara Publications, 2011), p. 102.

[3] Cox, White America, p. 126.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Earnest S. Cox, Teutonic Unity: A Case for Peace (Ostara Publications, 2011), pp. 39, 119.

[6] Ibid, p. 48.

[7] Ibid, p. 118.