Sam T. Francis by Phil Eiger Newmann, 2021
1,094 words
Samuel Todd Francis was born April 29, 1947, in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He died February 15, 2005 in the Maryland suburbs of the imperial capital. Francis took his BA from Johns Hopkins University in 1969 and his PhD in modern history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1979.
Although he died at the age of 57, Sam Francis had two highly distinguished careers, one in the mainstream, the other on the margins. From 1977 until 1981, Sam Francis was a policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation.
From 1981 to 1986, he was an aide to North Carolina Senator John East. In 1986, he joined the staff of The Washington Times as an editor and columnist. In 1989 and 1990, he received the Distinguished Writing Award for Editorial Writing from the American Society of Newspaper Editors.
Francis’ break with the mainstream began gradually, as an intellectual parting of the ways. Because of his rejection of the neoconservative takeover of the American Right, Francis was one of the early advocates of “paleoconservatism.” Francis also rejected free market and free trade orthodoxy in favor of economic nationalism and protectionism. He defended Southern identity and race realism against the Right’s rampant embrace of “color-blind” individualism. He realized that you could not found a serious country on one line from the Declaration of Independence, plus a sentence from Martin Luther King. These interests may have estranged Francis from Conservative Inc., but they made him an important influence on two intellectual currents that have only grown since his death: national populism and white identity politics.
In June of 1995, Francis was reprimanded by the Washington Times for a column criticizing the Southern Baptist apology for slavery. Then in September of that year he was fired, based at least in part on a line from his speech at the first American Renaissance conference in 1994:
The civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people, nor is there any reason to believe that the civilization can be successfully transmitted to a different people.
You can buy Greg Johnson’s The Year America Died here.
The firing was, in a way, just a formality. Francis had intellectually broken with mainstream conservatism many years before. It just took them a while to catch up.
Francis’ response to being fired for thoughtcrime was exemplary: he made the system regret it. He threw himself into writing and speaking. He clearly enjoyed his greater freedom to speak the truth on politically incorrect topics, although he always remained cagey about some issues. Francis’ friends also did the right thing, by pulling together to offer the patronage necessary for him to ride out the financial setback of losing his job.
Francis was not just a writer and speaker. He was also a networker and organizer. Francis understood the metapolitical importance of fundamental ideas. Thus he played a leading role in the foundation of the Occidental Quarterly and the National Policy Institute.
I first encountered Sam Francis’ writings in the late 1980s, and as I moved away from juvenile libertarianism, he became an increasingly important influence. I particularly recall his 1993 obituary for former Texas Governor John Connally, which in a few lines crystallized the difference between economic nationalism and open-borders libertarianism so memorably that backsliding became impossible. Sometimes the smallest works have unpredictable influences. I first met Sam in 2001 at a Council of Conservative Citizens event in North Carolina, where Sam Dickson introduced me to both Sam and Jared Taylor. I remember Sam asked me how I understood the psychology of the Left. He smiled wryly when I said “Dostoevsky’s The Devils.” Jared was less amused.
Over the next few years, I saw Sam speak at a number of events, conversed with him a couple of times, and exchanged a few emails. The last time we spoke, I congratulated him on quitting smoking and losing weight, which I took as his resolution to stay with us for the long haul. I had particularly high hopes for the National Policy Institute, which was to be his platform. But a few months later, he was dead. History isn’t made just by great forces like ideas, race, and technology. It also depends on having the right people at the right place at the right time. We lost Sam far too soon.
When Sam died, he received many heartfelt tributes from people who knew him much better than I did. I urge you to seek them out:
I think Jared Taylor best summed up Sam’s significance for our cause:
Samuel Todd Francis was the premier philosopher of white racial consciousness of our time. No one did more to alert whites to the crisis they face, and no one called them more eloquently to action. His intellectual sweep was of course much broader than this — he was an expert on Machiavelli, a James Burnham scholar, a learned critic of H. P. Lovecraft — but it is for his pioneering work in modern race-realist thought that he will be remembered. His work will endure, esteemed by both scholars and activists.
There is no single place on the web where you can find all of Sam Francis’ writings. But if you wish to begin exploring his life and work, I recommend two websites: American Renaissance and the Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation.
If you are looking for an audio introduction to Sam Francis, I recommend Gregory Hood and Chris Roberts, “Principalities and Powers.”
I also urge you to explore these works by and about Sam Francis at Counter-Currents, a list that will grow with each passing year:
By Sam Francis
- “Behind Democracy’s Curtain.”
- “The Buchanan Victory.”
- “Conspiracy.”
- “Enemies of the State.”
- “At the Heart of Darkness.”
- “Impeachable Offenses.”
- “The King Holiday & Its Meaning.”
- “Looking Backward.”
- “Nationalism, True and False.”
- “Principalities & Powers,” Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five, Part Six, Part Seven, Part Eight
- “Sitting on Bayonets.”
- “Suicide of the Right.”
- “Republicans & Real Federalism.”
- “Revolution is in the Air.”
- “The Ruling Class.”
About or relating to Sam Francis
- Beau Albrecht, “The Rising Tide of Anarcho-Tyranny.”
- Peter Bradley, “All the News Fit to Forget.”
- Edmund Connelly, “Sam Francis on the Jewish Question.”
- F. Roger Devlin, “Sam Francis on the Roots of Liberal Hegemony.”
- Robert Hampton, “Melting Crackpot: E. Michael Jones on Sam Francis.”
- Robert Hampton, “Sam Francis and the Prospect of Secession.”
- Richard Houck, “Sam Francis’ Beautiful Losers.”
- Spencer J. Quinn reviews Essential Writings on Race
- Gregory Hood, “Francis & the Fire Bird.”
- Margot Metroland reviews Leviathan & Its Enemies (Czech version here)
See also articles tagged Sam Francis.
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14 comments
I made a french translation of Spencer J. Quinn’s article on Samuel Francis’ Essentials Writings on Race. As soon as I will have revised it, I will send it to you shortly.
Thank you!
What, Francis was a Presbyterian? I thought it was de rigueur that all conservative intellectuals be Roman Catholic. Even Andrew Anglin is getting in on the act.
I have trouble finding either racism or white supremacy in the apparently controversial Francis quote you provided, which I’m assuming was the accusation it garnered:
“The civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people, nor is there any reason to believe that the civilization can be successfully transmitted to a different people.”
I’m sure this has been pointed out many times before, but replace “whites” in that sentence with any other race or ethnicity, and the controversy appears to dissolve. I don’t think anyone would be surprised if the Chinese, for instance, viewed their culture as a natural outgrowth from their unique genetic make-up, or believed that it could not be transplanted onto other peoples. That seems like basic anthropology, except that it’s bad form for whites to say it aloud.
It also works in reverse, of course. A dysfunctional culture might emerge from a less-endowed people, but its problems would likely not survive a differently endowed group.
In addition, any intimations of supremacy in this sentence come from outside, from the auditors equating white civilization with superiority. I don’t hear an implicit or explicit hierarchy in that sentence, although it would be logical to infer that anyone who said such a thing was fairly well enamored with Western Civilization.
“any intimations of supremacy in this sentence come from outside, from the auditors equating white civilization with superiority.”
Bingo
Dinesh D’Souza, in his infinite wisdom, would disagree.
I would suggest that someone at CC take out a subscription to Chronicles and then go through the archives basically copying every single Francis essay, and co-archiving them here (I was a subscriber for more than three decades, but threw in the towel last year, after years of increasing disgruntlement with the magazine’s post-Fleming decline; Thomas Fleming was very incoherent where not outright weaselly on race, but he was also exceptionally erudite, and the magazine was at its zenith under his editorship). From the late 80s to his death, Francis was by far my favorite political writer. Literally every major essay he wrote was worth reading; indeed, I never read even a mere syndicated column that I didn’t like, either. Unlike most political writers, very little of his stuff is dated, either. Right now, coincidentally, I’m rereading (for the 4th or 5th time) his collection Beautiful Losers, and all of those essays remain valuable – and even directly relevant to current events. And you can see, here and there in these essays from the 80s and early 90s, adumbrations of his future overt ‘turn’ to racial realism.
I can’t locate the quote, but I believe it was Mr Francis who pointed out that the global success of Whites in the 450 years of our expansion so far outstripped the achievements of other imperial projects, irrevocably altering almost every nation of the planet, was at the same time a humiliation of almost every non-European nation on the planet.
Consequently, the resentment of most of the world towards us, especially since the superiority of so many of White culture’s elements is so obvious. It is by using our own inventions that they have to attempt to take us down.
I had not taken account of both the thoroughness and the expanse of our ancestors’ achievement through the eyes of the non-Whites who, even when they do well in their homelands or lives, still harbor a smoldering resentment towards us.
NiceWhitePeople have no idea. The Obamas do.
The 20th century Russo-Gallic philosopher Alexandre Kojeve, building on Hegel, was definitely on to something in seeing history as driven (I would qualify by adding, “at least in part”) by status resentments and the so-called “struggle [of the marginalized] for recognition”. My long-held suspicion is that whites, being innately, modally, ethically superior to other races, are simply insufficiently aware of – perhaps cannot comprehend – the extent to which both racism and racial envy inform how the Others view us.
Our utopian egalitarian liberals were/are fools of the highest order to have placed whites in a condition of ever-worsening vulnerability to nonwhite power and persecution. Indeed, white liberalism is a world-historical force of civilizational power depletion and self-endangerment (as well as the moral and cultural degradation that conservatives and Christianists more commonly denounce).
Yes, well put.
It was back in 2007 that I discovered James Burnham on liberalism:
“The liberal, and the group, nation or civilization infected by liberal doctrine and values, are morally disarmed before those whom the liberal regards as less well off than himself …Liberalism is the ideology of Western suicide.”
from The Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism.
James Burnham. 1964.
1964…
I don’t call myself conservative, but I often call my opponents “cuckservatives” or “koshervatives” 😉
I do miss him, and I wish he was still here. It’s a shame that his life was cut so short.
At least he didn’t live to see Barack Obama. I can find some solace in that .
Thank you Greg for this. The collection of essays and articles at the end are a treasure trove of priceless insight. Essential Writings on Race is a book I foresee myself reading many more times in the future.
On a related topic …
… a useful book is “The War We Are In,” a collection of essays by James Burnham ranging from the 1950s to the mid 1960s. Lots of insights into the crises of the era (Suez, Cuba, Vietnam), tactics for political warfare, commentary re the big picture of geopolitics and the emerging global way of life, and how it all fits into the ongoing contraction of the West.
A typical passage, referring to the inability of US defense strategists to understand the centrality of unconventional means of warfare to modern conflict:
“Isn’t a weapons system that can defeat the British, Dutch and French armies, can seize Czechoslovakia, China and Cuba, worth spending a few billions on, and perhaps an occasional hour of concentrated thought?”
You can still find copies in used bookstores and online.
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