Rowing Upstream

Samuel T. Francis and Revolution from the Middle, by Joseph Scotchie

Shotwell Publishing

https://shotwellpublishing.com/samuel-t-francis-and-revolution-from-the-middle/

There are many ways one can go about social activism. 

There is a centrist model. This way imvolves working through and within the current system. One can play the game of prevailing politics, holding a finger in the wind, tiptoeing around certain controversial topics, gauging your audience, steering toward the middle of the road so as not to appear radical or extreme. 

One hundred eighty degrees from that is another way. That is to plunge forward boldly, taking a stand for unvarnished truth, forsaking major degrees of prudence and caution, while making conscious decisions to suffer the inevitable consequences for such dauntlessness. 

Sam Francis chose Option Number Two. 

The prophetic Francis and his life, books, newsletters, columns, times, and friendships are chronicled in a new biography of the man published by Shotwell Publishing and authored by Joseph Scotchie, Samuel T. Francis and Revolution from the Middle.

Scotchie covers Francis’s upbringing in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and his higher education in the early seventies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. There Sam and friends formed a debate and discussion group they named the “Carolina Conservative Club,” soon renamed the “Orange County Anti-Jacobin League” due to their refusal to adhere to the university’s ridiculous policy that any student group with “Carolina” in their name had to sign a non-discrimination pledge. (Lest anyone think that self-hate among Southerners was a recent phenomena.)

But the bulk of the biography covers the fascinating career and antics of Francis. A son of the Confederacy and the American Revolution, Sam loved his people and his land dearly. It was this love that motivated him to take the many stands he did. 

Sam was unafraid of taking on the formidable task of defending unpopular positions that meant a great deal to him – the Confederate flag, the Jefferson-Hemmings accusations, the dominant influence of European man in the American founding… It was navigating these journalistic rough seas that made it seem as though Sam was consistently rowing upstream. 

Being a student of American history, Sam was under no illusion about any supposed benevolence from Uncle Sam toward his kind. Sam’s patriotism eschewed government worship and dependence for something pure and real. In his writings, he detailed the frameworks and commonalities of a true civilization: religion, language, culture, history, music, literature, manners, morals, and folk tales. 

Sam ran in paleoconservative circles. Yet, unlike many of his contemporaries, he was not ready to advocate for secession or breakup of the union. He still believed there was a chance to take back the country in which he grew up through a revolution from the MARS (“Middle American Radicals”), a neglected contingent of traditional Southerners, Midwest conservatives, and rural, middle-class anti-establishmentarians who could finally be persuaded to throw off the chains of what Sam coined “anarcho-tyranny.” 

Sam preached that the triumph of the managerial state under which we still suffer today was completed in 1932 with the election of Franklin Roosevelt. Since then, that state has been clutching the levers of power and controlling the masses through the heavy-handed use of pursestrings (the economy, bureaucracy, welfare payments, unemployment and other government checks, corporations, public education) and heartstrings (culture, entertainment, false patriotism and the military). 

At the same time, the left staged a coup to bypass the executive and legislative branches and the peoples’ will by taking over the judiciary and educational centers. 

Scotchie writes that Francis “became fascinated with power…”

He was also intrigued at how the managerial elites could control the minds and actions of entire populations. Television programs, Sam once complained, use soundtracks instructing a passive audience when to laugh, when to clap, when to moan, when to sigh.

Since the advent of 24-hour “news,” party mouthpieces such as CNN and Fox News have exercised control over the populace’s minds and actions with a perpetual, incessant stream of modern-day soundtracks. They tell the people about the latest Middle East boogeyman, when to rattle the sabers of the next war for the common man's children to wage, what inevitable “frontrunner” to get behind, which candidates are cool, which ones are “electable,” and which ones are nuts.

The results of all this, Sam reported, was a deadened, dependent, submissive populace and the end of republican living. 

Because of his audacity for truth, Francis was caught up in “respectable” conservatism’s defenestrations of the eighties and nineties. The Purge included Sam at The Washington Times, Mel Bradford from the Reagan administration, and Joe Sobran at National Review.

Later in his career, Sam turned up the heat on advocating for an enhanced racial consciousness among American whites, with the expected mortified gyrations from the usual suspects in the media and pop culture, who cheerlead for this very maneuver when practiced by every other ethnic group. 

Sam was putting into print concerns of the white working class that had theretofore been reserved for banter over beers in backyard sheds. 

Such truisms were delivered with more polish and nuance by Sam’s good friend, Pat Buchanan. But Sam allowed his impishness to overcome his discretion, to the detriment of his effectiveness. 

One of Sam's last columns before his untimely death was a blistering assessment of George W. Bush's pie-in-sky second inaugural address in January 2005. True to form, Sam was not afraid to expose the sophomoric and completely unrealistic ideas of Pax Americana, universal democracy, and “ending tyranny in our world.”

In the world of power politics, Sam was more of a behind-the-scenes player to heavyweights. He was especially instrumental in the three presidential campaigns of Pat Buchanan. And it was a Buchanan platform that Donald Trump has twice ridden into the White House.

Excoriated by both the left and Conservatism, Inc., but beloved by his friends and those who actually knew him, Sam’s brilliance, boldness, and influence will live on into the second quarter of the 21st Century and beyond.