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The Tragic Life of a Spenglerian Visionary
Dreamer of the Day:
Francis Parker Yockey and the
Postwar Fascist International
Kevin Coogan
New York: Autonomedia, 1999
$16.95 US pbk
644pp.
Reviewed by Theodore J. O’Keefe
The American writer Francis Parker Yockey has long enjoyed cult status on the
authoritarian fringe of the American far right. That the first serious attempt at a
study of his life and influence, Kevin Coogan’s Dreamer of the Day, is the work of a
left-anarchist is less surprising considering that Yockey’s thought and activity
often defied left-right conventions. Coogan has researched this book extensively and
intensively, ferreting out numerous elusive facts and long-forgotten rumors about his
subject. The merit of Dreamer of the Day, however, is weakened by a division of
emphasis signaled in its subtitle, Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist
International.
Yockey’s mystique has rested in his chief work, Imperium, and in his mysterious death
in 1960. Coogan dispels much of the murk surrounding Yockey’s death, in a San
Francisco jail where he was being held for passport fraud, by demonstrating that it was
almost certainly suicide. His treatment of Yockey’s 1948 historico-political
manifesto is less definitive, for Coogan has avoided a systematic descriptive and
analytical treatment of Imperium, by far the most substantial of Yockey’s
accomplishments. Instead, he has chosen to trace Yockey’s shadowy and
inconsequential efforts at revolutionary organizing, and to illuminate various of
Imperium’s ideas through their (often tenuous) affinities to the thought and
activities of a tenebrous group he calls “the postwar fascist international.”
Coogan has done a passable job in researching the verifiable facts of Yockey’s
origins in solid, middle-class German stock. Born in 1917 in Chicago, Yockey was
gifted with a powerful, analytical intellect and a strong artistic sensibility; to his
credit the author breaks with a common practice among politically hostile biographers by
not trying to minimize his subject’s abilities. Coogan industriously uncovers
Yockey’s vagabond college years, during which he studied at half a dozen colleges and
universities, and records his intensifying involvement in writing and speaking for
anti-Communist and anti-interventionist causes during the years just before America’s
entry into the Second World War. The author devotes similar pains to investigating
Yockey’s unsuccessful wartime stint in the army, which ended with his medical
discharge due to a psychiatric problem (Coogan presents evidence that Yockey faked it),
then trails his subject through stopgap jobs in the mid-1940s as a government attorney,
including a minor role in the prosecution of second-rank “war criminals” in
Germany. It must be noted that for most of these episodes, as well as for many
others in Yockey’s life, Coogan is overly trustful of the FBI interrogation and
informant reports that his subject’s intrigues evoked in the last decade of his
life.
Unquestionably, as Coogan shows, Yockey’s discovery of Oswald Spengler’s Decline
of the West while an undergraduate at the University of Michigan in the mid 1930s was his
great epiphany. Spengler’s theory of historical culture-civilizations -- unique
phenomena of the spirit, monadic in their isolation from one another, each moving
ineluctably toward its doom -- which the German author illuminated with a host of
brilliant insights and intercultural comparisons in music, economics, mathematics,
philosophy, city life, art, technology, literature, the natural sciences, and religiosity,
to name a few, did more than dazzle and instruct its young reader: it recruited him.
In a sense Yockey’s life after reading Spengler was only a prologue to his retreat in
1947 to Brittas Bay in Wicklow on the Irish Sea, where he poured out the more than six
hundred pages of Imperium in under six months, as his life thereafter is arguably only a
postscript to that book. Besides embracing the schema of “the philosopher of
history,” Imperium channels other influences, including Spengler’s adamantine
political musings in The Hour of Decision and "Prussianism and Socialism," Carl
Schmitt’s authoritarian theories of law and politics, and the geopolitical doctrines
of Karl Haushofer and his predecessors. The book’s title and imperative stem
from the Spenglerian challenge to seize the moment at which each culture is destined
either to perish or else to leave behind the vernal blooming of its youth, and, repelling
enemies from without and within, cross over to an age of Authority and Duty (Yockey’s
proneness to initial capitals is unmatched by any author in English since Carlyle).
In reflection of Yockey’s anguish at the ruin of Europe, anno 1947, and his defiance
at the still formally intact coalition of the Western “plutocrats” and the
Eastern Bolsheviks, including the Jews who played a prominent role in both camps, Imperium
is dedicated to “the Hero of the Second World War,” unquestionably Adolf
Hitler.
For the reader of a certain age and sensibilities, Imperium can seem a philosopher’s
stone, encompassing all of human history, glittering with hard insights into politics (not
to mention the Jewish taboo) one could never get from one’s political science class
or the National Review, and concluding with a mighty trumpet call for the resurgence of
the West. Yet the book was singularly incapable of rousing a Caesarist revolution
that would cleanse Europe of its capitalist counting houses and repel “the Mongols in
the Kremlin.” The couple of hundred copies of Imperium published in 1948 and
Yockey’s attempts to buttonhole various Euro-fascists such as Oswald Mosley could not
transcend the books’s theoretical limitations and its author’s own impolitic
personality. Above all, however, Yockey’s rejection of any possibility
that America could play Rome to Europe’s Greece bumped up against a Soviet threat
that seemed increasingly urgent.
From here on Coogan bifurcates Dreamer of the Day into involved, but not always firmly
supported accounts of Yockey’s obscure and ineffectual efforts to implement
Imperium’s program, and into probing the “fascist international,” the
author’s name for a congeries of theorists and activists whose thought, Coogan
believes, mirrors various of Yockey’s ideas. This is something of a bad bargain
for the reader interested in Yockey’s life, his ideas, or his influence. In
place of a measured account of any of these, Coogan recounts his subject’s endless
rendezvous, usually with nonentities and often observed obliquely or obscurely through
unverifiable sources. A more judicious author might have supplied more focus and
analysis than Coogan does to the tensions inherent in Yockey’s courting of hard-core
American anti-Communists (he seems even to have written a speech, refulgent with
Yockeyisms, for Senator Joseph McCarthy, which, alas, the senator never delivered), and in
his attempts to cultivate the Soviet Union, recently purged of its Jewish influences,
against an America that showed no signs of freeing itself from the “Culture
Distorter.” Aside from these efforts (which may well have included borderline
espionage activity in concert with Soviet bloc secret services), it would probably have
sufficed to observe that Yockey, badly misreading the spirit of the age, had strived to
realize his dream of revolutionary Caesarism in not only an America, but also a Europe, in
which pragmatism, materialism, and optimism easily trumped Yockey’s heroic cultural
pessimism and self-sacrificing idealism.
Long stretches of Dreamer of the Day are devoted to surveying a variegated plenitude of
mostly European thinkers, many of them former Italian Fascisti or German authoritarians,
National Socialists or not, who claimed to reject what they saw as Hitler’s reductive
racialism, especially his aversion to Slavic Russia, and were often ready to make common
cause with non-Westerners, from the Soviets to Nasser to Castro, against the enervating
American influence. Here the author can be instructive and occasionally diverting,
but his treatment of political and philosophical ideas paralleling those of his subject is
often misleading or irrelevant, in terms of actual influence in either direction. A
positive review of Imperium from the pen of the fascist esoteric Julius Evola or former SS
officer and propagandist Johann von Leers suffices to send Coogan off on chapter-long
vagaries on Atlantis and the Hypoboreans or the far-flung (and seemingly far-fetched)
archeological expeditions of the SS Ahnenerbe, which are often followed by histories of
political efforts with only the most tangential connection to Yockey.
Worse, the author has let his enthusiasm for such distracting diversions seduce him into
unwarranted speculations on what he calls the Order, “a new kind of Knights Templar
designed to successfully function sub rosa” (p. 320). Coogan provides no
substantiation for the existence of this corps d’élite of fascist adepts, which he
elsewhere imagines to have been linked in the 1940s and ‘50s by “a devil’s
pact” to Eisenhower’s CIA chief, Allen Dulles. Coogan’s attempts to
link Yockey to the Order are no more effective than his dabblings in the mystical
interests of its members. Coogan’s opinion that “By tapping into methods
used in the occult and Traditional world, Evola developed extremely powerful MKULTRA-like
thought-control techniques” (p. 336) will raise eyebrows among his more phlegmatic
readers, some of whom may also wonder why there is no reference to a source for it on one
of the several score of pages of reference notes included in this book.
In the strictest interpretation, Dreamer of the Day is neither a proper biography nor a
history of ideas nor a reliable account of the anti-bourgeois right in either Europe or
America during the 1950s. A two-hundred-page biography that is more focused, more
critical of its sources, more judicious in weighing Yockey’s actual effect as a
thinker, an organizer, and a revolutionary is still called for. For all its defects,
however, Dreamer of the Day has its uses, as an introduction to a past current of thought
and (attempted) action in defense of the West that fairly glitters beside the turgid and
predictable efforts of North American “conservatives” over the past half
century. Coogan is often an engaging writer, with for the most part an objectivity,
a sense of humor, and a genuine interest in the doings of his subjects rare among leftists
depicting rightists (and vice versa). Despite his lapses, Coogan has been for the
most part quite up to the task of depicting a swarm of characters far more diverse and
interesting than any comparable collection of leftists or “movement”
conservatives. When all is thought and written, it’s hard to damn an author who
(discoursing on the polymorphous sexuality of the American propagandist for Germany
Sylvester Viereck) can produce a line like, “From his youth onwards he also had a
fondness for orgies.”
Theodore J. O'Keefe is editor of the Journal of Historical Review