William Gayley Simpson

William Gayley Simpson (July 23, 1892 – 1991) was an American White nationalist, mystic, author, Presbyterian clergyman and lecture-circuit speaker. Early in his career he was a Christian left-wing labor activist and was the director for the National Civil Liberties Bureau, the precursor to the American Civil Liberties Union. For several years in the 1920s he lived a severely ascetic Christian life, throwing away all of his belongings, living in a shack he built, and subsisting off donated food. This gained him some amount of notoriety with Christians. He eventually became disillusioned with Christianity and his former politics in the late 1920s. Throughout the 1930s, he lectured criticizing Christianity and instead promoted Nietzschean ideas. He authored a book on these ideas, Toward The Rising Sun, in 1935. Simpson later became a White supremacist and a member of the neo-Nazi group the National Alliance, led by William Luther Pierce. Simpson is most well-known for his 1978 book Which Way Western Man? published by the National Alliance in 1978. Which Way Western Man? claims there is a Jewish plot against White people, calls for violence against Jews, and says that Adolf Hitler was right. Simpson's ideology and works, particularly Which Way Western Man? has had an influence on several white supremacist and neo-Nazi figures. Quotes Today men are afraid to be different—to be so is the unforgivable sin. What I am looking for is the man with long legs able to step from mountain peak to mountain peak. Life is being ground down. Men are asked to stoop to the level of the crippled. Quoted in Jeffers, Frances C. (February 18, 1935). "Bill Simpson Is Back Again". Unity. Vol. CXIV, no. 13. Chicago. p. 251. The sight of the ideal is like lightning flashes from the far horizon; once we have seen it, we can’t forget it. Thereafter we are just secretly waiting, hoping that that star may peep out from behind the clouds again, that seeing it, we may know it for the same star, and know it as our star, and fix our eyes upon it forever. Or again, it is like a maiden of rare beauty standing at the edge of the crowd who casts quick shy glances in our direction to see if there is any hope of our love. If once we really behold her, if once we look deep into her eyes, deep into what most deeply we are, then thereafter are we utterly damned, utterly lost to all ordinary ways of feeling, and thinking, and doing. Quoted in Jeffers (1935), p. 251 But this also must be said: he who does what he sees shall see more; he who fails to do what he sees goes blind. Nothing in the universe is more inexorable than this. If he sees, and does what he sees, every day the way he must go shall become more clear to him. But he who does not give himself to his ideal becomes calloused. It is not only that his eye may grow dull— his whole optic nerve dies. It is like a plant standing in the window and yet so calloused that it cannot tell the difference between light and dark. Quoted in Jeffers (1935), pp. 251–252 Toward The Rising Sun (1935) alt=Red cover|thumb|Cover of his 1935 book, Toward The Rising Sun|upright=.7 What I am about to say is not intended for everybody. I warn you: it is intended only for those who have ears for it. For others, I would say something very different—possibly the direct opposite. And so, if you do not like what I say, if you find it uninteresting, or in part unintelligible, or offensive, or if, having heard my words, you are one who can forget them, then do not let yourself be overmuch disturbed by them. Do forget them. You are certainly not one of those to whom I am speaking. I am really speaking only to those who have ears for what I have to say—who have, as it seems to me, a rare kind of ear for a rare kind of music. p. 35 I am looking for him who has got down to that most unappeasable yearning in his being; to that in him which is such that, so long as everything else comes to him but this comes to him not, then everything that does come to him turns to dust in his hands and ashes in his mouth; to that life in him which is such that once he does find it and does yield himself to it utterly—then, though everything else is taken away from him, though he has to go cold and hungry and alone, though he knows no human being on this earth into whose eyes he can look and find understanding, though everything he has sweated bloody sweat for men bring to what they call failure, and his very life they bring to what they call death, he shall yet be able to go his way softly singing in his heart. To do this is to live; and to fail to do this, no matter how good the reason for the failure may be, is to do what most men do—to die without ever having really lived at all. p. 40 Many of our most capable people are spending their powers on trying to salvage human wreckage, on all sorts of life that can never come to anything, and not even on salvaging it, but only on preserving it, on merely keeping alive by artificial means that which ought to die, and which, if left to nature, would die. p. 72, quoted in Garrison (1935) Again I must caution anyone who sets out to follow his deepest life against being too sure that it can be kept within the limits of conventional morality. Let him not take it for granted that men will think him a saint, or even consider him respectable. p. 102 Yet with just a handful of sticks one can sometimes start quite a fire. It has already so happened on this earth more than once. But where is the handful of sticks? Where are those few who are willing to burn, and to be burnt up, in order that there may be light in this night, and warmth in this coldness? Where is the fuel which at last has made itself dry and hard, fuel which the flame ever loveth, ever longeth to lick with its love, and to make one with itself? Where is the handful of sticks? p. 109 Which Way Western Man? (1978) thumb|First edition cover of Which Way Western Man? published in 1978 by Yeoman Press|alt=Yellow cover with blue text|upright=.7 Page numbers taken from 2nd, 2003 edition. In the case of a country like the United States, if the original stock and its values are to survive, then all aliens, such as Negroes, Jews, and Orientals, will have to be put out and kept out. Immigration will have to be strictly limited to stocks most closely related, by blood and by tradition, to the stocks by which the country was originally founded. p. 268, quoted by the New Republic Minorities write the law of the land. Minorities of aliens, multitudes of them, grow fat and rule, while the bulk of the people, many of them descendants of those who founded and built the country, who love it and would die for it, are turned into patient, befuddled suckers, who foot the bills to finance their own destruction. p. 544, quoted in Flynn & Gerhardt (1990), p. 106 One of the passages highlighted by neo-Nazi Robert Jay Mathews. It must never be forgotten that the primary test that every people must face is whether it is strong enough to survive. Its fate may well be decided by war, and the issue of a war may hinge simply on how many men it can mass on its side of the struggle. In this light, birth control is seen to be the knife by which civilized White man is cutting his own throat. p. 619, quoted in Tenold (2018), p. 123 But it can hardly be denied that the White man today is in a desperate plight. Catastrophe hangs over us. p. 789, quoted in Lowert (2023), p. 152 Thus the White man has been left not only split and confused but frustrated and even ashamed of himself—ashamed of his mastery, ashamed of his empires, ashamed even of the very ancestors to whom he is supremely indebted for all that he is and for all that he has. He, the White man, sprung from one of the greatest warrior races of history, instead of leaping to assert himself, and to defend himself,and to press firmly for what he needs for his survival and for the realization of the greatness that is in him, sits in a corner, and hesitates, and mopes, and apologizes not only for being what he is but for what his ancestors were, and dutifully tries to put on the mincing manners of the one-worlder and the Christian pacifist, which his would-be subverters enjoin upon him. p. 808, quoted in Tenold (2018), pp. 123–124 The point is to reveal organized Jewry as a world power entrenched in every country of the White man’s world, operating freely across every nation’s frontiers, and engaged in a ruthless war for the destruction of them all. The point is to uncover the animus that must be expected to drive and to direct every lever of Jewish power, whether it be propaganda or, greatest of them all, its money system. p. 871, quoted by the New Republic Let me preface what I am about to say by declaring frankly that I am prepared to accept violence on the part of our people. The Jews' hold on our throat is not going to be relaxed until we break their grip. Hitler felt that he had to take to the streets. All normal approach to his people was barred. Today, we are confronted with much the same situation here. [...] If we are not to be destroyed, then we must fight. I am not naturally a man of violence, but there is one thing from the thought of which I shrink more than from violence or its consequences, and that is the thought that our people may not rise to throw off the death that is being clamped upon them. p. 948, quoted by the New Republic Race consciousness, and discrimination on the basis of race, are absolutely essential to any race’s survival, and to any nation's survival—essential for the homogeneity, the solidarity, and the formidable strength without which no people can long survive. That is why the Jews ate so fiercely for it for themselves, because they mean not only to survive but to become master; and fiercely against it for us, because we are their intended victim, and they wish to emasculate us and to paralyze us to the point where we cannot thwart their determination to put us in chains. Unless we recover our race consciousness, and maintain it, and heighten it, and live by it, we shall die. p. 1068, quoted in Flynn & Gerhardt (1990), p. 106, quoted in Tenold (2018), p. 123 Quotes about Simpson Bill Simpson, as he has come to be known, is an American mystic who, whatever else may be said for or against him, has tried to follow the gleam of truth and inner conviction regardless of consequences. [...] Bill Simpson is not a social worker-nor a social reformer, at least not in any ordinary sense. He is a seeker of truth, and one who would fain follow whithersoever it may lead, no matter at what cost. Introduction by Jerome Davis to Toward The Rising Sun, quoted by The New York Times, reviewing his book Toward The Rising Sun In these chapters Mr. Simpson sets forth in more detail the convictions that have possessed him, or, rather, that possess him now, with a backward glance now and then at those in which he formerly believed. In each of the stages by which he has come to his present convictions he seems to have been as sure as he is now that he had found the ultimate truth, only to have doubts creep in, and presently destroy the entire structure, so that he found himself once more searching for truth and, sooner or later, once more finding it.Mr. Simpson writes with simplicity and clarity of style, as far as mysticism can be clear and simple, but with a great deal of imaginative and emotional power. Doubtless he would be a deeply stirring, moving speaker. But as one reads his life and his book one wonders how it is possible for him still to believe so absolutely in his vision when it has played him false so many times, why he still thinks he can know the truth when so many times he has had to decide that what he had thought to be truth proved to be something else. The New York Times, reviewing his book Toward The Rising Sun Consider William Gayley Simpson's racist tract Which Way, Western Man? Simpson attacks liberal individualism on the grounds that it has promoted rootlessness and undermined ethnic community among whites. He attacks reason, morality, and universalism on the grounds that they deny appeals to affinities of blood and sentiment. Dinesh D'Souza, The End of Racism (1995), p. 397 For these twenty years Bill Simpson has been trying to free himself from every kind of bondage to tradition, convention, property and social responsibility which hinders a man from fulfilling the demand of his own personality and following the gleam which, he believes, is the polar star of a perfectly honest soul. W. E. Garrison, The Christian Century, 1935 External links Category:1892 births Category:1991 deaths Category:Neo-Nazis Category:White supremacists Category:Non-fiction authors from the United States Category:Mystics