William Gayley Simpson
Encyclopedia
Early life
The oldest of three children, he was born July 23rd, 1892, in Elizabeth, New Jersey. He attended Lafayette College and graduated in 1912 with Phi Beta Kappa standing and as valedictorian of his class, proceeding to attend Union Theological Seminary, from which he graduated in 1915, magna cum laude.Career
From the fall of 1918 until the spring of 1919 he was associate director of the National Civil Liberties Bureau, now termed the American Civil Liberties Union. After living in a small religious community for over 10 years, a period of his life he would come to refer to as his "Franciscan" days, Simpson repudiated his previous ChristianChristian
A Christian is a person who adheres to Christianity, an Abrahamic, monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth as recorded in the Canonical gospels and the letters of the New Testament...
moorings and embraced the philosophical worldview of Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a 19th-century German philosopher, poet, composer and classical philologist...
. Simpson believed that the teachings of Jesus
Jesus
Jesus of Nazareth , commonly referred to as Jesus Christ or simply as Jesus or Christ, is the central figure of Christianity...
were completely out of step with nature, and that only a few exceptionally zealous men could ever come close to implementing them. Simpson discussed the importance of distinguishing between subjective religious feeling and "scientific reality." He came to believe that much of human behavior is rooted in the innate biological makeup of individuals and their race, and that one's spirituality comes from within. He came to particularly admire the spiritual and innate temperamental attributes of the Nordic branch of the Caucasian race
Caucasian race
The term Caucasian race has been used to denote the general physical type of some or all of the populations of Europe, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, Western Asia , Central Asia and South Asia...
.
His 1978 book Which Way Western Man? was republished by National Vanguard Books in 2003. In this book, Simpson stated: "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."
A seven-part autobiography of William Simpson titled "One Man's Striving", was originally serialized in 1983 and 1984 issues of National Vanguard magazine, published by the National Alliance. This is a radical right version of Somerset Maugham's "soul voyage" classics such as The Razor's Edge
The Razor's Edge
The Razor’s Edge is a book by W. Somerset Maugham published in 1944. Its epigraph reads, "The sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over; thus the wise say the path to Salvation is hard." taken from a verse in the Katha-Upanishad....
(novel) and Of Human Bondage
Of Human Bondage
Of Human Bondage is a novel by W. Somerset Maugham. It is generally agreed to be his masterpiece and to be strongly autobiographical in nature, although Maugham stated, "This is a novel, not an autobiography, though much in it is autobiographical, more is pure invention." Maugham, who had...
.
In Part 6 of "One Man's Striving", Simpson describes how amidst the darkening international situation of the late 1930s, he came to the conclusion that Christianity is an alien religion for white people, and that they should throw it off and adopt an indigenous religion evolved among their own ancestors: