A First Biography of Sam Francis

4,928 words

Joseph Scotchie
Samuel T. Francis and Revolution from the Middle
Shotwell Publishing, 2025

Joseph Scotchie has produced a short, easily digested biography of Samuel T. Francis (1947-2005). It will be especially profitable reading for the many younger people now attracted to white racial defense and the dissident right, but not well-informed about their history. The author appears to have relied largely on published sources, and I have heard surprise expressed at his failure to conduct interviews with some of the people Sam worked most closely with, especially during his last years. Nevertheless, while not a definitive scholarly biography of its subject, we are much better off with this unpretentious recounting of an important and influential life than we were without it.

Sam Francis grew up in Chattanooga and graduated from the private Baylor School, where his classmates voted him the “wittiest” member of the class of 1965. He earned his BA in history at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in 1969 and proceeded to graduate study in English history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I believe he envisaged an academic career for himself during these years, although Scotchie does not discuss this. A number of important figures in the dissident right have been academics manqués for whom no place could be found in the postmodern university. When the Potomac Regime finally collapses, its survivors will no doubt regret having kept such men from teaching university students, where they would have proven far less dangerous to the powerful.

Already harboring self-consciously conservative inclinations, Sam would make the acquaintance of a number of like-minded young men in Chapel Hill who would remain associates for life. Clyde Wilson, six years older than Sam, was already being published in conservative outlets such as Modern Age and National Review when he enrolled to pursue a PhD in History. E. Christian Kopff was a doctoral student in classics. Francis, Wilson and Kopff were the core of a conservative debating society. Learning that they would have to sign a non-discrimination pledge if they used a name containing the word “Carolina,” the young men christened their club the Orange Country Anti-Jacobin League. They would discuss readings from Richard Weaver and James Burnham before adjourning to a nearby bar.

The Chapel Hill gang broke up after the mid-1970s, with Sam going to work for the Heritage Foundation in 1977. Scotchie remarks that in later years Sam endured a certain amount of ribbing from colleagues for having once worked as such a bastion of “establishment conservatism,” but points out that this reflects anachronistic thinking. Heritage was founded with seed money of only a quarter million dollars just four years before Francis arrived there: it was by no means the wealthy behemoth that forced Jason Richwine out in 2013 for knowing something about racial differences. To understand the history of American conservatism properly, one must always bear in mind Eric Hoffer’s famous observation that “every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”

At Heritage, Sam wrote papers critical of the Carter administration’s anti-inflation policies and studied the “Soviet strategy of terror,” which later became the title of his first published monograph. In 1977 a mutual acquaintance introduced him to Louis March, then working as a staffer on Capitol Hill. The two men hit it off on the basis of their shared interests and Southern background. As March later recollected: “we both had forebears who suffered the late unpleasantness, so there were no illusions about big government beneficence!” They met for lunch and leisurely walks at least twice a week: “It was on those walks that we tumbled to the realization that the Washington ‘leadership’ of the conservative movement was woefully out of sync with its grassroots supporters in the heartland.” March recalled Sam’s ability to combine acerbic wit with personal kindness and generosity.

Another friend from those days was Jerry Woodruff, editor of Middle American News, as March also recalls:

Sam, Jerry and I were like three peas in a pod—we’d pile in the car and head out to a party, movie, used bookstore, or some bargain-basement eatery. From time to time, we would visit a firing range. A good Southerner, Sam was at ease with arms. He was a very good shot.

Thomas Fleming, whose importance for Sam’s career Scotchie stresses, was enrolled in the same classics program as Christian Kopff at Chapel Hill in the early 1970s. It appears from Scotchie’s telling, however, that Sam only came into contact with him in 1979 through the intermediary of Clyde Wilson. Fleming and Wilson were founding a magazine called Southern Partisan, and Sam was brought on as a columnist. As Scotchie wryly notes, “Tom and Clyde published two issues before bowing to financial reality.” The magazine would be continued by more solvent but less unreconstructed editors for some decades thereafter.

It was also in 1979 that Sam completed his doctorate from the University of North Carolina by defending a dissertation on British foreign policy in the age of Louis XIV.

The election of 1980 which brought Ronald Reagan to the presidency also saw the surprise Senate victory of John P. East, a college professor from East Carolina State University in Greenville, North Carolina. Not a professional politician, East was the author of a number of essays on the philosophical founders of the conservative movement: Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver, Frank Meyer, Willmoore Kendall, Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin and Ludwig von Mises. As Scotchie notes, “the Heritage Foundation provided a farm system of young analysts ready to graduate to Capitol Hill as congressional aides.” The new junior Senator went shopping for a staffer who understood foreign policy, could write speeches, and was as rock-ribbed a conservative as himself, and found exactly what he needed in Sam Francis.

Among the first challenges of Sam’s time on Capital Hill was the struggle over Pres. Reagan’s nomination of Mel Bradford to chair the National Endowment for the Humanities. Bradford was a deeply learned literary critic and scholar of America’s founding period, well-known for debating Harry Jaffa on the political concept of equality. Bradford had campaigned for Reagan and enjoyed the support of such figures as Bill Buckley and Russell Kirk. But his candidacy was opposed by the neoconservatives in the Reagan coalition who could not brook his criticisms of Lincoln and earlier support for George Wallace. He was subjected to a whispering campaign which eventually derailed his nomination.

As a member of Sen. East’s staff, Sam was at the center of the unsuccessful effort to fight back in defense of Bradford. This showdown greatly embittered the already existing rift between neoconservatives—famously defined by Irving Kristol as liberals who had been mugged by reality—and more traditional conservatives who had been, in Pat Buchanan’s phrase, “right from the beginning.” The latter would soon assume the name “paleoconservative” to distinguish themselves from their now-ascendent rivals.

Sam began publishing during his time with Sen. East. An important early piece was “Message from MARs: The Social Politics of the New Right,” which called attention to the political importance of Middle American Radicals, a category of voter discovered by sociologist Donald I. Warren that included many Wallace supporters and “Reagan Democrats.” Francis predicted that this group—right-wing on social issues but too dependent on the welfare system to support laissez-faire economic policies—would provide the most favorable basis for effective opposition to the liberal regime. Francis frequently criticized conservatives who focused on ideas without regard for the real constituencies that formed the indispensable basis for successful political change.

Sam was the author of a speech delivered by Sen. East’s senior colleague Jesse Helms on October 3, 1983, in opposition to a federal holiday honoring Martin Luther King, Jr. The speech focused on King’s communist associations (his extensive plagiarisms would not become known until several years later). King’s opposition to the Vietnam War, said Helms, “was not predicated on what King believed to be the best interests of the United States, but on sympathy for the North Vietnamese Communist regime and on an essentially Marxist and anti-American view of US foreign policy.” Many senators knew the charges in the Helms speech were perfectly true, but were unwilling to take the political risk of voting against the King Holiday.

In 1984 Sam produced his first substantial book, Power and History, a study of the political thought of James Burnham (1905-1987). After some years as a disciple of Leon Trotsky, Burnham broke with Marxism altogether in 1941 with publication of The Managerial Revolution. This book’s thesis was that bourgeois capitalism had been superceded neither by proletarian rule nor by a classless society, but by a new ruling elite centered on those possessing expertise in important technologies and the control of mass organizations: the managers. Whether the resulting regime claimed to be socialist (as in the USSR or National Socialist Germany) or preserved the name and some of the appearances of free enterprise (as in Franklin Roosevelt’s United States) was of comparatively little importance.

Burnham was also a student of the Italian school of elite theory, whose main ideas he summarized in his next book The Machiavellians (1943). In contrast to classical political thought, which emphasizes the threefold typology of monarchal, aristocratic, and democratic rule, elite theorists asserted an iron law of oligarchy: in any political regime, including supposedly absolute monarchies and democracies, a closer look will always reveal a small minority of men who command and a majority who obey. Robert Michels, for example, spent years studying the inner workings of European socialist parties, all of which advocated for the spreading of power to the broad masses. What he found was that all such parties were in fact under the command of a very few men. This was not a matter of hypocrisy, as the parties could not otherwise have operated effectively. Their stated ideals made no difference at all; it is simply in the nature of human organization for power to remain the preserve of a small elite.

Italian elite theory, combined with Burnham’s concept of the managerial class as the elite governing the contemporary world, would become fundamentals of Sam Francis’s own political thinking. The managers and technocrats who rule us today seek above all a passive and compliant subject population unbound by any traditions and at the farthest possible remove from republican self-government. The goal of a realistic right under such circumstances must be the replacement of this deadening and out-of-touch elite with a new one more representative of ordinary Americans from the heartland and their best traditions.

Sam’s book on James Burnham was not widely reviewed. A favorable notice from Joe Sobran in National Review was one honorable exception.

At some not easily specified time in the 1980s and -90s, Sam worked on a book entitled Leviathan and Its Enemies, applying Burnham’s ideas to American twentieth century political history and developing a Burnhamist strategy for Middle American Revolution in far greater detail than Burnham himself ever had. This work was recovered from his computer and published following his death.

In June, 1986, Sen. John East, beset with medical troubles and depression, died by his own hand. Sam did not stay on with his successor, but turned to political journalism. He soon began contributing to the Washington Times, becoming the paper’s deputy editorial page editor in 1987 and receiving a “distinguished writing” award from the American Society of Newspaper Editors for his work there in 1989 and 1990. In 1991 he was given his own syndicated column. His thinking was now reaching a sizeable audience.

It was also in the late 1980s that Sam began contributing to Chronicles. This influential magazine was founded as Chronicles of Culture in 1977 under the editorship of Leopold Tyrmand, a Polish-Jewish novelist, sponsored by the Rockford Institute of Illinois, and originally meant as a right-wing counterpart to the New York Review of Books. Tyrmand’s practice, from what I have heard, was to hire a young assistant editor every fall and replace him upon returning from vacation the following summer. For the 1984-5 season, his assistant was Thomas Fleming. But Tyrmand suffered a fatal heart attack while on vacation in the summer of 1985 and, with the support of the Rockford Institute’s board of directors, Fleming took over the publication. He called in the assistance of his old friends from Chapel Hill, and they largely remade the magazine in their own image. Sam began contributing as early as 1986, and was given a regular column, “Principalities and Powers,” starting in 1989. The association continued until Sam’s death, and some of his most important writing would appear under this rubric.

In the late 1980s, the Cold War was winding down and being replaced by a struggle against the resentful billions of the global south and their “multicultural” allies here at home. Sam began devoting attention to the problem of mass immigration, now much worsened by the Immigration and Control Act of 1986. This blot upon Ronald Reagan’s presidency was meant to combine a one-time amnesty with stricter enforcement of laws against employing illegal aliens. What actually resulted was an amnesty with no enforcement, soon followed by new demands for further amnesties.

The conservative establishment was not solid on this issue. Scotchie reports that Chronicles lost millions in grant money when the magazine came out in favor of restriction in 1989. When Sam asked his Washington Times colleagues what the paper’s position on immigration was, he was told: “It’s bad if the immigrants don’t assimilate, but good if they do; but today’s immigrants will assimilate; therefor there is no immigration problem.” The party line of the time combined Emma Lazarus-style sentimentality with a willingness to appease business interests with cheap foreign labor. Sam realized this was woefully inadequate to confront a danger which, if ignored, would grow into a cauldron of nation-breaking racial competition and hostility.

It is not clear exactly when Sam became personally acquainted with Pat Buchanan. They were certainly aware of one another during the 1980s, but their first common project was an America First political platform published in the December 1991 issue of Chronicles. The piece stressed national sovereignty and a foreign policy under Congressional oversight and directed to the interests of America rather than abstract ideals. They recommended criminalizing all lobbying on behalf of foreign countries and making the right to vote contingent upon the completion of military service. And they took a very clear stand on immigration:

Immigration from other countries and cultures incompatible with and indigestible to the Euro-American cultural core of the United States should be prohibited, border controls should be rigorously enforced, illegal aliens already here should be rounded up and deported, and employers who hire them should be prosecuted and punished.

The piece also emphasized that “the ethic of America First ought to inform the total cultural life of the nation and to be the foundation of our social and cultural identity no less than of our politics.”

As Buchanan prepared to challenge Pres. George H. W. Bush for the Republican nomination, Sam advised him: “Go to New Hampshire and call yourself a patriot, a nationalist, an America Firster, but don’t even use the word ‘conservative.’ It doesn’t mean anything anymore.” Hoffer’s “racket” phase had long since been reached, and most Americans associated the much-abused word “conservative” with fundraising letters rather than “the permanent things.” Moreover, the situation of disenfranchised middle Americans called for an insurgent, not a conservative, strategy. Sam later recalled:

Pat listened, but I can’t say he took my advice. By making his bed with the Republicans, he […] only dilutes and deflects the radicalism of the message he and his Middle American Revolution have to offer. The sooner we hear that message loudly and clearly, without distractions from Conservatism, Inc. and the Stupid Party, the sooner Middle America will be able to speak with an authentic voice.

In August, 1992, Buchanan gave his famous “culture war” address at the Republican National Convention, electrifying the crowd and horrifying the party leadership. Sam commented that the weakest part of the speech was Buchanan’s attempt to scrape together a few reasons to prefer Pres. Bush to challenger Bill Clinton in the general election.

1993 saw the publication of Beautiful Losers: Essays on the Failure of American Conservatism, a collection of some of Sam’s best writing from the decade 1981-91. According to Scotchie, it remained Sam’s only book with the University of Missouri Press due to the scandal occasioned among the press’s faculty advisors by his essay on Martin Luther King, Jr.

Sam’s insistence on speaking forthrightly on the subject of race and racial differences would now come to play an increasing role in his career. American Renaissance, Jared Taylor’s monthly publication addressing racial issues from a white point of view, began publication in 1990, and by May 1994 Taylor felt confident enough to hold a public conference. Sam Francis was among the invited speakers. Of everything he said, the statement which caused the most widespread outrage was as follows:

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.

This is hardly a radical thought and should not be controversial. After all, even a dog pound cannot exist apart from the genetic endowments of dogs. But it would be enough to get him fired from the Washington Times when brought to editor Wes Pruden’s attention fifteen months later.

Sam’s termination was a national news story, but he declined requests for interviews, seemingly experiencing the episode as something of a liberation:

My column has actually gained newspapers since my defenestration at the Times. It’s true I lost my job and my Washington outlet, and that’s a blow, but it’s far from death. In the coming years, the Beltway right may be amazed to discover how little it has to do with the direction in which the country is moving, and I plan to be there when it finds out that no one else is paying much attention to its precious “limits” on what you can say and cannot say.

When Sam got wind that certain well-wishers were planning a protest outside the paper’s editorial offices, he put a stop to it. He was as ready to leave the Times as they were to be rid of him. Sylvia Crutchfield, a tireless fundraiser for right-wing causes, quietly made it possible for Sam to remain in the Washington area, even providing him with personal office space at the Henry Lee House in Alexandria, VA. He remained as busy and prolific as ever.

Sam’s explicitness on race set him apart from some of his longtime colleagues. Before addressing the American Renaissance conference, Scotchie explains:

Sam showed a draft [of his talk] to Tom Fleming. The latter advised against delivering it. Sam had a key position at the Washington Times. Why risk it? Were the knives already out? […] In a talk with this author, Fleming said Sam was essentially going to give his head on a platter to his legion of enemies.

I read Chronicles from 1997 until after Sam’s death, and I well remember how Sam’s racial views contrasted with those of the other editors and contributors. Sam called for whites to organize on the explicit basis of race and pursue their collective interests without apology. Tom Fleming preferred to accuse anyone who demonstrated knowledge of or interest in race of being a “biological determinist.” This was, of course, a straw man. All informed racialists know that racial differences are statistical in character, not determinative. Moreover, racial identity politics has very little to do with the theoretical question of how much human behavior is explicable by biology. Fleming even took a couple of rhetorical pokes at American Renaissance before Sam asked him to desist. Other Chronicles writers were not above dismissing the importance of “skin color,” an infallible sign of cluelessness in racial matters. Sam’s racialism continued to be tolerated, however, as it almost certainly would not have been from a newer or younger contributor. Moreover, reader surveys revealed that a large percentage of the magazine’s audience subscribed mainly in order to read Sam. They needed him more than he needed them.

One expression of this rift was the involvement of many at Chronicles with the League of the South, a southern nationalist organization that, at least in its early days, tended to shy away from race. Sam was invited to join but preferred to involve himself with the Council of Conservative Citizens, a continuation of the old Citizens’ Councils which had unsuccessfully resisted school integration and “civil rights.” His racial explicitness was welcome there. He became the editor of the organization’s monthly publication The Citizen’s Informer and presided over meetings of the National Capital Region chapter.

Perhaps Sam’s most important statement on race is the essay “Roots of the White Man,” published in the November and December 1996 issues of American Renaissance. It was written in response to Jared Taylor’s argument that Western culture gives “priorities to considerations of fairness over the exercise of pure power.” Sam did not disagree, but thought Taylor came too close to identifying the white man’s distinctive character with its modern liberal expressions. Looking back farther into history, to the days of the earliest Indo-Europeans or Aryans, he found our ancestors to be marked especially by three traits: belief in a cosmic order, a restless dynamism, and greater individuation that the other races of mankind.

Early Aryan thought reflects a conviction of the existence of an objective order of things independent of the beliefs or wishes of men, and even of gods. This mental background certainly contributed to later European achievements in science and philosophy. It also bore ethical implications. Recognition of an objective cosmic order “implies that human action has consequences—that you cannot do whatever you please and expect nothing to come of it—and that no matter what you do you will not be able to avoid your Fate.” Yet Aryan myth affirms the value of life and struggle even as it accepts the inevitability of death and other limits upon human ambition.

Furthermore, Aryan man is marked by a restless Faustian dynamism “clear enough in their earliest and most obvious habit of invading other people’s territories and conquering them.” Later this expressed itself in a more general love of travel, maritime exploration, colonization and discovery, the drive to uncover the secret workings of nature. Aryan man’s descendants

have cured diseases, shrunk distances, raised cities out of jungles and deserts, constructed technologies that replace and transcend human strength, restored lost languages, recovered forgotten histories, stared into the heart of distant galaxies, and reached into the recesses of the atom. No other people has even dreamed of these achievements.

This dynamism, in Francis’s view, explains the relative resistance of European man to despotism and enslavement. The typical Aryan political form is a broad aristocratic republic of arms-bearing citizens in which everyone is free to state his opinion, and rulers are constrained by the need to maintain the consent of those they rule. Aryan man “resists and rebels against any effort to induce the passivity that allows despotism to flourish.”

Aryan man is also marked by a greater degree of individuation that the other races of mankind. This is true even in their bodily traits, but more importantly in the variety of character reflected in their myths and literature. Such individuation should be distinguished from modern “individualism” which justifies the neglect or even betrayal of the larger social formations of which each individual is a part.

Western man today suffers from the excess or misapplication of his traditional virtues. He has succumbed, e.g., to the belief that his values are universal and that his outlook and achievements can be extended to the entire human race. Hence modern liberal enthusiasm for “exporting democracy” and inviting immigration from the entire world. We should respect the right of non-Aryan people to live according to their own very different traditions, but also insist on their exclusion from our territories.

If America’s political right was not ready for such racial explicitness, there were growing signs in the 1990s of a new willingness at least to reconsider the prudence of allowing mass immigration. In 1992, National Review published Peter Brimelow’s “Rethinking Immigration,” later expanded into the book Alien Nation (1995) and brought out by a mainstream New York publisher. In 1999, Brimelow would establish the website VDare.com, which carried Sam’s columns.

In part, the new openness to restrictionism was due to a growing realization of the electoral consequences of immigration. In 2000, George W. Bush lost the popular vote and barely squeaked by in the electoral college not due to any lack of “minority outreach”—he even gave speeches in Spanish—but because he failed to win more than a miserable 54% of white vote. Sam agreed with Steve Sailer that the key to electoral success was “majority inreach,” i.e., mobilizing greater numbers of disaffected white voters. The Republican party’s seemingly limitless ability to betray its overwhelmingly white constituency he likened to a girl refusing to dance with “the fella what brung her” (as an old rule of dating etiquette put it).

Sam’s response to the September 11 attacks was bitter:

The blunt truth is that the United States has been at war for at least a decade, since we launched a war against Iraq even though Iraq had done nothing to harm the United States. For ten years we have maintained economic sanctions on Iraq that have led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians. […] The terrorists attacked us because they were paying us back for what we started.

In 2001, Sam was present at the founding of the Charles Martel Society by William Regnery II and was appointed book review editor of the Society’s flagship journal The Occidental Quarterly. It became an important outlet for long-form essays related to the defense of the West and the race which created it.

In 2002, David Frum published “Unpatriotic Conservatives,” an attack on right wing opponents of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Sam responded as follows:

The paleos in general are disaffected not from the country itself but from the determination of the US government to wage unnecessary wars that either border on the unjust or go well over the line of injustice, wars that are unprovoked and not clearly in the interests of the nation, and wars that, even if victorious, may lead to so many entanglements, complications, injustices and costs (human, economic, diplomatic, technological) that they are better avoided regardless of their moral character. What most paleos have written about the Iraq war has been along these lines—lines that are perfectly consistent with and indeed reflect a serious patriotism, as opposed to the kind of sophomoric chauvinism that demands blind obedience to whatever wars the government launches.

When a smooth-talking Senator named Barack Obama entered the public consciousness with a speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention, Sam produced a typically prescient essay on the reasons for his popular appeal and the disappointment which would inevitably follow. Obama’s leading trait was

his racial ambiguity, [which] enables him to be both black and non-racial, white and multiracial, at the same time. When he wants to be black, he can be and is. But he can also be white or not racial at all, which is useful when he’s presenting himself as “above” race and appealing to the white voters he’ll need if he’s going to be elected. Moreover, while openly racial candidates like Sharpton or Jesse Jackson helped instigate white racial consciousness—if they can be black, why can’t whites be white?—Obama works against it: If he’s neither white nor black, why should you be white?

Sam understood both the white longing for a “postracial” era and the impossibility of such a time ever dawning.

In late January, 2005, Sam fell ill. Forced to drive himself to the hospital through heavy snow, he underwent a long operation for an aortic aneurysm. This left him in such a weakened state that doctors were afraid to move him at all for over two weeks. When they finally made an attempt to have him sit upright, his heart gave way and he died age 57.

Tributes poured in, of which Scotchie highlights those by Tom Fleming, Jared Taylor, and Pat Buchanan. Sam’s sister and nephew, who made the funeral arrangements, said they had not previously been aware how widely admired their kinsman was.

The greatest tribute to Sam came, however, some ten years after his death. During his last years, after the faltering of Pat Buchanan’s 2000 campaign, the donor-driven Republican Party leadership successfully conspired to prevent any dissent from neoliberalism—i.e., the twin policies of shipping jobs overseas and bringing new foreign labor in to compete for whatever remained—from interfering with the process of anointing new presidential candidates. Observers at VDare noted that the issues of immigration and jobs for Americans were akin to a crown lying in the gutter, available to the first man with enough sense to ignore the party leadership and pick it up. Nobody, however, anticipated that this man would turn out to be the loud-mouthed celebrity businessman Donald Trump. Being an outsider and neither understanding or caring about the unwritten rules of Republican politics, Trump simply announced he was going to build a wall on the Mexican border and bring manufacturing back to the US. He instantly shot to the top of the presidential polls, from which position no amount of elite ridicule could dislodge him. It was a perfect vindication of the populist strategy Sam had long advocated, and it is a pity he did not live to see it.