Frederick Charles Ferdinand Weiss is one of the more elusive figures of the mid-twentieth-century American Right. The smudgy late-1940s snapshot I’ve scanned here — Fred on a Yorkville doorstep — and then duotoned in an attempt to make it presentable seems to be the only portrait available. That may be symbolic.
60 or more years ago, Fred sometimes popped up in Drew Pearson’s political-gossip columns, usually named alongside H. Keith Thompson and “Ulick Varange” (alias Francis Yockey or Frank Healy), in a purported triumvirate of intellectuals and activists affiliated with the new Socialist Reich Party (SRP) in West Germany in the early 1950s. (more…)