Counter-Currents
Earnest Sevier Cox:
Advocate for the White Ethnostate
Morris van de Camp
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.
15 comments
I’m an orthodox Jew living in Israel and I love this article
Christianity has failed the western white man (because it’s a weird mold of monotheism and paganism which is absurd)
A return to the Noahide code is in order
Has Christianity failed the Western white man or Judeo-Christianity failed him? They are effectively two distinct religions. How has a symbiosis of monotheism and paganism failed anyone? Examples please.
I wonder whether it’s worth differentiating between Christianity and Judeo-Christianity. Christianity is rooted in Abrahamic tradition and thought. Personally I think a return to paganism is in order. Obviously this need not involve burning people in wicker cages and such, but something like Klassen’s theology, or a kind of pantheism with an element of ancestor reverence would be very healthy IMO.
This is a great article which I enjoyed very much. I admit to never having heard of Mr Cox before this.
I very much appreciate your opinion. I grew up in a very rural area of the United States were we still had somewhat of a hallowed and sacred reverence for our ancestors that was entwined with a very primitive form of Christianity as opposed to traditional. My grandfather could tell me stories of our individual ancestors going back to the days of Daniel Boone, whom some of them knew. He could take me to the “sacred groves” where they were buried. Burial, a very Caucasian tradition that was passed down from pre-Christian times to the present. I have no qualms with any of Cox’s statements about Christianity; I do disagree with him that Jesus was somehow supposed to be a defender of the Jews from the Romans and failed because of his spiritual teachings. According to Christianity, Jesus was not the racial hero the Jews were looking for but a universal teacher and the incarnate Son of God, so that argument, comparing Herman and Jesus doesn’t hold because the two are not comparable in the historic sense of who they were, one having a religious“world mission” and the other a natural hero and warrior.
I would just like to know the failure of Christianity on it’s being a blend of “paganism and monotheism” has ruined European man. If anything this symbiosis made it stronger for Europe throughout millennia. The fact that it did blend so well. Many people in the “new right” will disagree with me, as opposed to the older right. Ezra Pound praises the Church for it’s anti-usury laws. G K. Chesterton lauds paganism and says he would rather have a good pagan chum anytime than a modern progressive. The ideal today is not perfect, but the “old right”, men like Franco and Mussolini, said they would defend the Church. The reason Hitler censored the books by Ludendorff and Rosenberg was most likely because they were “anti-Christian” and politically would spread disunity amongst the German people. Politically, I think the continual aggression toward historic Christianity is a step backwards for the right and a distraction from globalism. Only an attack on Christianity in it’s globalizing contributions are important.
Aristotle, Plato and Pythagoras had access to writings from the so-called, monotheistic religions. They in turn were upheld and reverenced by the Church. Greek and Egyptian religions and philosophy had very distinct monotheistic attributes to them at times (Akhenaton for instance, who is celebrated in Freemasonry for his “monotheism”).
I personally think Christianity has succeeded for the white man in that it was able to incorporate his festivals, holidays and to some extent ancestor worship that took the form of the Saints, prayers for the dead, etc.. De Coulanges taught that the vital religion of the Greeks was not the plethora of silly gods that came much later. But it was the ancient religion of the sacred fire, the hearth and the home, which was based around a kind of Spirit of their ancestors. I agree that has to be vital to any religious purpose and fulfillment. Any religion, including modern, technological Christianity, that does not have a place for ancestral laudation is very unnatural. And religion must coexist with our own nature and biology or it is based on false premises, the house on the sand.
Thanks Jay for your reply. One of the most comprehensive and thoughtful responses I’ve received.
I hear what you’re saying about your upbringing in a traditional, rural environment. I had similar a similar childhood in Australia, growing up in an area where my forebears lived since convict times (many were convicts themselves). We – and others in the district – knew who our common ancestors were, long before Ancestry or WikiTree were a thing. I think this aspect of our community united us, despite our personal or philosophical differences, to a degree that might be hard for kids growing up in cities today to understand.
On Christianity, we (Western people) have lived with it and shaped it for over a thousand years. It has absorbed many of our better ideas. It’d be amazing if, after all this time, we didn’t feel some attachment to it. But while that’s all true, I don’t think it’s fundamentals are very healthy. It requires a belief in the supernatural. It preaches the virtue of the meek and humble – and promises salvation in the afterlife for those who behave in this life; a philosophy fit for slaves.
My own religious views don’t sit neatly inside any orthodoxy. I like scientific pantheism for its awe of the natural world as revealed through science, but find its lack of ritual and community a bit dry. Paganism has ritual and celebrates natural seasons and cycles, which I can relate to. It adopts gods and goddesses, sometimes as archetypes for values – but sometimes also as literal beings, which is getting too close to sky-fairy thinking for my tastes, I’m afraid. In addition, paganism is missing the ‘mission’, or motivating purpose that some kinds of Christianity have provided in the past. I think the idea of the Divine inherent in nature and within our better selves is true on some deep level, so I’m finding James O’Meara’s articles on Neville Goddard interesting as well. While not overtly religious, the community work promoted by Casa Pound is brilliant because it provides a motivating purpose – service to the tribe. Lastly, and to bring the circle back to where we started, none of the above emphasise ancestor veneration which is a shame. In Japan, you see these very beautiful stone shrines built to honour the ancestors. There a quite a few set in old gardens up in the mountains. You can’t stand in one of these gardens on a misty day and not appreciate the connection to the past the Japanese feel.
Thanks again for your reply and your thoughts.
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I take some issue with the idea that all which is good and noble about Ancient India is a consequence of European invasion, and by corollary that the variety of its present failures can ultimately be traced back to ill-advised admixture with the savage natives.
The philosophical, literary, and scientific treasures of the land, apart from the Vedas, originated towards the tail end of a long period of admixture (which affected everyone given the male-mediated nature of the invasion) and more usually after the establishment of a still-extant endogamy (by which point all the admixture that was to happen had happened).
And, for at least the past few centuries, the Southern and Bengali Brahmins have had a monopoly on technical and literary accomplishment rather than the palest Sindhis or Kashmiris. Moreover, the south was, even in old times, the center of industry and commercial progress (consider, for example, that the rather legendary Damascus steel used a steel alloy discovered in the south around the 6th century BC).
None of this is to refute the various policies implied by the points in this article, or suggest that all races at all times have the same propensity towards accomplishment and thus that any disparity is the result only of some stochastic and cyclical process rather than anything transcendent or immutable.
Nonetheless, the theoretical substance here is a little simplistic. The children of great men can desecrate their patrimony without the aid of admixture and so it can be that noble societies fall into squalor left to their own devices.
Two shillposts in response to this interesting man. Evidently nothing scares the enemy like rational racial nationalism, especially when black and white nationalism show signs of healthy cooperation.
Great article. I wonder if Cox had any contact with Thomas Nelson Page? They had similar ideas on race, it seems, and were contemporaries for a time. I wrote about TNP at CC here:
https://counter-currents.com/2017/04/a-review-of-the-negro-the-southerners-problem/
https://counter-currents.com/2017/04/remember-thomas-nelson-page/
It might be more accurate to say the genes were more caucasoid than Egyptians now. White means European caucasoid. All whites are caucasoid, not all caucasoids are white.
Excellent piece. I’ve seen this guy quoted all my life. The tragedy with Cox is that he didn’t have enough similarly minded people around him to serve as a sounding board. This makes certain opinions stand out as provocatively eccentric, when really they weren’t.
I never understand why counter-currents does not even try to countersignal overt white supremacy.
This man believed whites were superior to non-whites and wished to see whites “expand” into non-white lands. He felt that whites were naturally fit to rule black ppl.
I am not even making a moral argument against this. It is bad, if only for pragmatic reasons. It is a pragmatic nightmare. And if you do not call this out, you cannot complain when Jennifer Rubin writes articles arguing that there is, in reality, little difference between a “white nationalist” and a “white supremacist.”
@Sutter:
I’m not sure how long you’ve been in the Pro-White Movement, and just to be clear, I’m relatively new myself (January 2012 was when my Awakening happened), but if you’ve been in it long enough, you’ll eventually realize that terms like “White Nationalist” and “White Advocate” really are all about a sanitized image as opposed to an honest moral or philosophical disagreement with the core tenants of White Supremacy. The only major difference is that White Nationalists want separation from non-whites, whereas old school White Supremacists, who don’t exist anymore, wanted to lord it over non-whites.
So yeah, the Jennifer Rubins and David Frenches of the world are correct to use White Nationalism and White Supremacy synonymously. What we have to do in response is morally own the facts and the truth, which are on our side. Personally, I like to lead with the fact that Whites are under attack, and therefore, we have the right to use any means necessary to defend ourselves. However, its also important to own the fact that Whites are biologically and spiritually superior to non-whites, because otherwise, our people will never have any reason to think that Whites and non-whites don’t have equal levels of potential. We must plant the seed of doubt in our people that non-whites can ever be anything more than what they are in the real world. Non-whites do not, in fact, have the potential to create Wakanda no matter how many trillions are spent on education and anti-poverty programs. Those trillions of dollars should be spent on making Whites better, not on futilely attempting to raise up non-whites to our level.
I would highly recommend recalibrating the way you see this fight. We are promoting a radically different morality and worldview. Naturally, that makes us a small minority. For now.
I would put my position closer to Sutter’s than DP84’s. I am a European chauvinist, and believe that European culture is superior to all others. This is a bio-cultural reality, which has its ultimate foundation in genetics and race. The European race, Meds, Nords, Celts & Slavs, all taken together.
But am I, the individual white man, with all my vices and flaws, superior to any given Asian or black man? I would say not. And this is the problem, insofar as our ruling elites will import new workers on the grounds that they are just as good & productive, on average, as the folks they are replacing. They have no love of their own racial kin.
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And as for the Teutonism of Cox, it strikes me as historically myopic, despite a certain affinity with Spengler’s notion of the Gothic West.
My bracketed remark did not appear —>
Political action must be guided by a love for one’s own, by duty to ancestors and future progeny alike. Political obligation is temporal in nature and determined by blood.. It does not extend to far away & unrelated peoples, and yet it reaches deep into the past.
Keep digging up these fascinating historical gems for the rest of us man, I cannot get enough of them!
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