Beatnik Phrenology

A leading right-wing intellectual, still cited by the race obsessives, had some thoughts on low IQ beatniks.

Beatniks in San Franciso, 1958 — Bettmann / Contributor

In yesterday’s post, I quoted Willmoore Kendall’s endorsement of Nathaniel Weyl’s The Negro in American Civilization (1959), a deeply racist book arguing for the biological incapacity of Black Americans. I didn’t go into Weyl in any depth for reasons of space but want to say a few words about him because he was widely influential on the right, and is still a cited authority in a book that has currency, Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s The Bell Curve.

Nathaniel Weyl (1910-2005) was the son of one of the founding editors of The New Republic and had a political trajectory not uncommon to his generation. He was a communist in the 1930s and ran in the same circles as Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers (although Weyl claimed he never spied for the Soviet Union). In the McCarthy era he became something of a professional anti-communist who earned his keep by denouncing one time allies.

An economist by training, he started dabble in race science in the 1950s. The cast of his mind can be caught in a letter he wrote in 1964: “I have everything against bright Jewish girls sleeping with Negro dope pushers, criminals, bums and dopes on the theory that they are nobly furthering the sacred cause of race equality.” He wrote often in journals like Mankind Quarterly, a eugenicist publication whose writers beside Weyl are much cited in The Bell Curve.

He was a strong supporter of Apartheid South Africa and white ruled Rhodesia. I want to quote two passages from a 1967 piece he wrote on “The Intelligence of White Rhodesians.”

Weyl wrote:

Thus, white Rhodesians are an elite element within the English-speaking world in terms of psychometric intelligence. This finding is reinforced by visual impressions. Salisbury whites appear larger, healthier, more vigorous, alert and bright than London whites. Beatniks, transvestites and obvious homosexuals are conspicuously absent.

About the supposed genetic superiority of white Rhodesia to England he wrote:

Small, emergent nations such as Rhodesia may be sensitive barometers of the brain drain from older and more decadent ones. The IQ enrichment of the former is a harbinger of the IQ impoverishment of the latter. Obviously, punitive taxation of the successful, the imposition of economic hardship on young professionals, the underpayment of the creative elites and the over-payment of the subnormal and the mediocre will encourage some gifted people to emigrate and others to have small families while stimulating the exuberant reproduction of the intellectually under-endowed. Social planning of this sort has the dual advantage of eliminating nonconformists, malcontents and trouble-makers, and of reducing mean IQs to levels at which the population can readily be managed by its socialist rulers. Given this state of affairs, the emergence of overseas white elite communities, such as that of Rhodesia, should come as no surprise.

I don’t want to belabour the obvious, but we are not dealing with a scientific mind here.

Yet Weyl was much admired by the National Review circle of the 1950s and 1960s, not just by Kendall but also by William F. Buckley. The much-admired economist Gordon Tullock reviewed one of Weyl’s race science books for National Review. Tullock has criticisms of the book but it was mixed with praise. Tullock wrote, “I do no think this is a good book but if I were to name a better one in the field I would be unable to do so.”

It’s worth remembering that freakizoids like Weyl, eager to apply calipers to beatniks, were very much mainstream on the American right.

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