Counter-Currents
A Robertson Roundup: Remembering Wilmot Robertson (April 16, 1915 – July 8, 2005)
Margot Metroland
July 1976 cover of Instauration
1,181 words
Wilmot Robertson has been a perennial favorite in these pages, and it’s time to provide a list of relevant links and articles published over the years.
The ever-intriguing fact about Robertson is that he thrived for decades as an original, often contrarian, thinker on the racialist Right; yet he remained a man of mystery, known to few. And that was no accident. Look at his bio-blurb from Ventilations:
Wilmot Robertson was born in Philadelphia, back in the days when America was America. He went to an Ivy League college, studied abroad and, after doing his best to keep the United States out of World War II, fought in the North African and Italian campaigns as a combat engineer officer. When the war ended he wasted some precious years in a Madison Avenue advertising agency, then studied physics at Berkeley. Business finally beckoned and he started a small scientific company in the San Francisco Bay Area, accumulating enough funds in the process to take a few years off and put the finishing touches on the manuscript that was eventually published as The Dispossessed Majority. . . [1]
Very Robertson: whimsical and deflective. Like a Who’s Who entry with no verifiable details. There’s the unnamed “Ivy League college,” and the years wasted in a “Madison Avenue advertising agency” (which agency? doing what?). And then that “small scientific company” in Berkeley (what could this be? A consultancy at Lawrence Livermore Labs?). He’s putting us off the scent, because the truth is too risqué.
He wasn’t really Wilmot Robertson, of course; that was just a pseudonym to distract nosy parkers and keep himself and his kinfolk safe. He’d been moving in Rightist circles at least since the late 1930s. Writing his real name on his draft card in 1940, he named as his employer “Social Justice Pub. Corporation” of Royal Oak, Michigan, and his profession was “journalist and editor.” In other words, like Philip Johnson and Francis Parker Yockey, he was writing for Father Coughlin’s newspaper, Social Justice, and “doing his best to keep the United States out of World War II.”
And obviously, there was more to it. His first wife, Betty, was secretary to Lawrence Dennis. In 1944 she was called to Washington to give testimony in the Great Sedition Trial, a Leftist attempt to prosecute Dennis, G. S. Viereck, and assorted others for having been “seditious” anti-war activists. Betty was identified as the wife of Capt. Humphrey Ireland (for such was his name), who was “now in the Army.” A close call, potentially, for Captain Ireland. [2]
In the mid-1960s, still living in Berkeley, Robertson began to contribute to Willis Carto’s Western Destiny magazine. I only saw one piece, and it seemed to be an extract from The Dispossessed Majority, which Robertson had just completed. Carto declined to publish the book but they became good friends. Years later, Robertson asked Carto’s Liberty Lobby for the Western Destiny mailing list, saying he was launching his own similar magazine, to be called Instauration. [3]
Robertson was into his seventies before he ever appeared on the mainstream media radar. And that was because of Instauration, which had become a secret, underground pleasure of the “conservative” cognoscenti. In 1986, Joe Sobran slipped a backhanded compliment into his newspaper column, calling Instauration “an often brilliant magazine, covering a beat nobody else will touch. . .” [4]
Instauration is difficult to describe to the uninitiated. Half of it was/is a serious review of society, politics, and the arts; otherwise, it was a merciless lampoon of Leftist degeneracy and “political correctness,” as people were already saying, circa 1980. A friend from the Stanford Chaparral once breathlessly vouchsafed to me that there was now a “racist humor magazine” being published somewhere. I gasped: “What’s it called?” He didn’t know. It was one of those elusive rumors, like Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four hearing about The Brotherhood. But then Sobran let the cat out of the bag.
The corpus of commentary on The Dispossessed Majority is voluminous, but for my money, the best writing is Robertson’s own “pendant,” Ventilations. This is a little book of short, biting essays that Robertson wrote in the 1970s, right after he published TDM. There is an excruciating account of his many attempts to advertise and distribute the book, meeting little but rejection and shrieks of horror, even from such “conservative” journals of opinion as Human Events and National Review. Bookstores wouldn’t even accept TDM on consignment.
Robertson ventilates on a dozen other topical topics. Writing in the immediate aftermath of Watergate, Robertson has a great time with the ethnic sleaze and scheming that lay behind that two-year media circus. Not that he has kind words for Richard Nixon:
He left his office in a final blaze of mediocrity by boasting of his accomplishments, ignoring his vices and expressing no bitterness towards his enemies. It was the fall of a little man who felt he could beat the system by buying off his opponents. . . In the end he said he forgave his enemies, but his enemies never forgave him. They never forgive. Alger Hiss and Ellsberg had the last laugh — on him and on us.
His dissection of 1970s feminist blather is nothing short of marvelous, and he makes some tasty observations that even Phyllis Schlafly wouldn’t dare get near:
Ms. Friedan and Ms. Steinem, having sprung from a race that has always treated its women like serfs, are now lecturing American women about their rights. While Steinem’s and Friedan’s ancestresses were ostracized each month during their days of “uncleanness,” a custom still observed by many orthodox Jewish families, Northern European women were enjoying liberties which, according to Tacitus, were the envy of the richest and most “liberated” Roman matrons.
Yes, Ventilations is a good place to start if you’re coming fresh to Wilmot Robertson. Or try out some of the links below.
The Ethnostate:
By Wilmot Robertson:
- A Case for Optimism (excerpt from Robertson’s The Ethnostate)
- Obituary for Martin Heidegger (from Instauration)
Podcasts:
- Kevin MacDonald on Wilmot Robertson
- Sam Dickson and Mark Weber join Fróði Midjord on Guide to Kulchur to discuss Wilmot Robertson
Articles about Instauration:
- Peter Bradley, “Profound Insight for Troubled Times,” Part I, Part II
- Margot Metroland, “Wilmot Robertson and the Oppressed Majority”
A note about online sources: Instauration issues, with index, have been scanned and uploaded to a number of websites. The Internet Archive appears to have a complete set (look for “Instauration Magazine”), but it isn’t really string-searchable. Both the archives of Instauration Online and Big Lies are alternative sites with a search function.
Reviews and essays about Robertson’s books:
- Spencer J. Quinn reviews The Ethnostate
- F. Roger Devlin, “On Wilmot Robertson” (French version here)
- Peter Bradley, “Four Hundred Years Together: Wilmot Robertson on ‘The Negroes’”
- Peter Bradley, “Wilmot Robertson on Conservatism“
- Peter Bradley, “Wilmot Robertson on Francis Parker Yockey“
Articles peripheral to Wilmot Robertson and his writings:
- Andrew Hamilton, “Remembering Richard Nixon”
- Margot Metroland, “Revilo P. Oliver and Francis Parker Yockey“
- Margot Metroland, “They Sometimes Called Him Al: Remembering Willis Allison Carto“
- Douglas Olson, “Why We Can’t Wait”
See also articles tagged Wilmot Robertson.
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Notes
[1] Wilmot Robertson, Ventilations (Cape Canaveral, Florida: Howard Allen), 1982. Last revised edition. Available at the Internet Archive here.
[2] “Dennis Is Free on Bail,” Berkshire Eagle, January 25, 1944.
[3] The correspondence between Robertson and Carto is quite entertaining.
[4] Joseph Sobran, New York City Tribune. May 13, 1986
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13 comments
What a great article! I had recently discovered Instauration and have been reading the back issues. Robertson (or Ireland) is a fascinating man and I wish I knew more about him. Now I do.
I sometimes wonder if he met men and corresponded with men like Yockey, H. Keith Thompson and Lincoln Rockwell.
Do you know if Instauration ever held any private conferences or get togethers? Any idea about the circulation of the newsletter?
Of course, everyone wants to know who Cholly Bilderberg was.
Thank you so much for this synopsis and the links. I don’t think I’ve ever heard the kmac on Wilmot Robinson podcast. The trump Nixon parallels are apparent.
Ot, I don’t know if the maestro reads these comments, but has dr Johnson ever read Ravelstein by Saul bellow? It’s a fictionalized account of bellows friendship with Allan bloom. It’s very heavy on philosophy and neocon perspectives. I think he would enjoy it greatly and it might provide fodder for a critical review, especially perhaps in conjunction with Blooms book Closing of the American mind. I would love to hear his reflections.
That sounds really interesting. You seem very smart!
One thing I notice reading Instauration magazine, back issues of which can be found online, is that much of the material and concepts discussed on the various altright websites were already discussed in detail way back in Instauration. It’s slightly depressing actually because one would like to feel some progress is being made, that some awakening is eminent, but we’ve been in the same echo chamber all the way back. Probably even before that.
While Steinem’s and Friedan’s ancestresses were ostracized each month during their days of “uncleanness,” a custom still observed by many orthodox Jewish families, Northern European women were enjoying liberties which, according to Tacitus, were the envy of the richest and most “liberated” Roman matrons.
Northern Europeans were the real feminists!
I don’t understand his point. It’s like he’s boasting that Swedes are more progressive than Jews. How are low white birth rates and high rates of single motherhood boons for the white race?
To say nothing of the fact that such “liberties” are quite impossible for maternal, risk-averse, dependent beings to enjoy.
I thought this came through in the longwinded review I did on ‘Mrs. America’ some weeks back. The neuroses that Jewesses suffered from simply did not affect north-Europeans. If you are a woman here it never occurs to you that you not equal to a man.
Crazy, asiatic notion.
I have a hardcover copy of The Dispossessed Majority. Highly recommended.
Further proof Robertson was a great man: he launched Instauration at age 60 and kept it going until he was 85.
It was that Sobran mention that actually got me to go to my nearest university library to try to figure out how to get a subscription to Instauration. Once I got that subscription, my first issue came with a brochure containing a list of books published by “Howard Allen” Publishers (anyone know if they’re still around?). One was TDM. I ordered it along with Ventilations, and I think some other books whose titles I have now forgotten (I think one was The Crowd, by Gustave Le Bon). I cannot recall when I obtained my copy of The Ethnostate. Once TDM arrived, I literally could not put it down until I had finished it, despite having other grad school work.
Someday, if the Ethnostate becomes reality, TDM will be properly recognized as one of the seminal works by any American in the 20th century.
“Howard Allen” was the dba WR established in Cape Canaveral when he was living in Florida and North Carolina.
I suggest you get a first edition of TDM as it was changed extensively through the years.
My edition was from the mid-80s. It seemed very up-to-the-minute when I read it that first time. Was the first edition better? How?
I touched on this in a longer piece on WR a few years ago. (See “Wilmot Robertson and the Oppressed Majority,” linked above.) He wrote and rewrote TDM through most of the 1960s, and the 1972 first edition reflects that. I find it a bit saltier than the later editions, though it’s more of a period piece, being focused on 1960s concerns and the early Nixon White House.
Congrats on the grad school work!
Before the internet, Instauration was the only lifeline many of us had. It was the only proof, delivered once a month by the reliable US Post Office, that there were others out there that knew the truth about race, proditors and jews. When it folded, it was like a kick in the gut. And yes, if you read the back issues now, it seems as if we have made no progress whatsoever, and the situation is now more bleak than ever.
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