Nathaniel Weyl | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | July 20, 1910 |
| Died | April 13, 2005(2005-04-13) (aged 94) |
| Nationality | American |
| Citizenship | American |
| Alma mater | Columbia University (undergraduate),London School of Economics (postgraduate) |
| Years active | 1933-2003 |
| Employer(s) | U.S. Government:Agricultural Adjustment Administration,Federal Reserve Board,Board of Economic Warfare |
| Political party | Socialist Party USA,CPUSA |
| Spouse(s) | Sylvia Castleton Weyl (first), Marcelle Weyl (second) |
| Children | Jonathan Weyl, Walter Weyl |
| Parent(s) | Bertha Nevin (née Poole),Walter Edward Weyl |
Nathaniel Weyl (July 20, 1910 – April 13, 2005) was an American economist and author who wrote on a variety of social issues. A member of theCommunist Party of the United States from 1933 until 1939, after leaving the party he became a conservative and avowed anti-communist. In 1952 he played a minor role in theAlger Hiss case.
Weyl was born inNew York City, the only child of Bertha Nevin (née Poole) andWalter Edward Weyl, a founder ofThe New Republic and a prominentprogressive. His father was from aGerman Jewish family, and his mother, originally fromChicago, was from a Christian background.[1]
Weyl received his Bachelor of Science Degree fromColumbia College of Columbia University in 1931. There, he joined the Social Problems Club and "created theMorningside Heights branch of theSP, which covered Columbia,Barnard, andUnion Theological Seminary ... soon ... the largest branch in the Party." He did postgraduate work at theLondon School of Economics, where instructors includedFriederich Hayek on the right andHarold Laski on the left. He returned to Columbia for doctoral studies in economics in 1932 and became a leader of the "Communist-controlled"National Student Union. Edmund Stevens, like Weyl, was an editor ofStudent Review and convinced him to join theCommunist Party.[2]
Weyl described his position in the party in a manner that may indicate pre-positioning for underground work:
I was made a Member At Large (MAL) of the Party. This meant that I was not to express views which identified me as a Communist, not frequently to attend rallies or associate with known Communists, that I would not be a member of any unit, and would have to stay away from CP headquarters.[2]
In 1933, he received an offer fromThomas Blaisdell to join theAgricultural Adjustment Administration as an economist. He joined theWare group, a covert cell of Communists inWashington, DC. Some members of the Ware group engaged in espionage for theSoviet Union. Weyl described his Ware Group participation otherwise: "I was one of its less enthusiastic members."[2] Also, he summarized its early activities (during his membership) as follows:
During the time I was a member, the secret Ware cell of the Communist Party did nothing at its meetings except engage in reverential discussion of Marxism–Leninism and of the world situation as perceived by the Comintern. ... Nothing that we were doing was secret from a national security standpoint. ... It did not occur to me that the Ware cell might be lured into the crime of espionage.[2]
Weyl described what could be interpreted as Ware's efforts to corral him into espionage and his own effort to extract himself from the group:
Ware wanted me to try to get into the Foreign Service and be attached to the staff ofWilliam Bullitt, our first Ambassador to the Soviet Union. ... I didn't think there was anything illegal about membership in the Ware unit, but nevertheless it was duplicitous. I decided I must choose between being a government official and being a Communist.I made the wrong choice. I told Hal Ware that the Moscow idea was out and that I wanted to leave Washington and resign from government. He said: absolutely not. I forced his hand by committing an appalling breach of security. I showed up at a cell meeting with the girl I was having an affair with, a young lady who was not a Communist Party member and who had known nothing about the group. Ware withdrew his objections and I resigned from AAA.[2]
Weyl spent 1934 and 1935 in New York, married Sylvia Castleton (whose mother, "Beatrice Carlin Stilwell, had been in and around the leadership of the CPUSA since its founding days"), and moved to Texas. Weyl worked with an oil company. His wife became "Organizational Secretary of the Texas–Oklahoma District of the CPUSA." In 1937, they returned to New York City, where Weyl worked as a financial reporter for theNew York Post. In 1938, they wrote a book on Mexico, published by Oxford University Press. ForEugene Dennis, they helped prepare a draft program for aPopular Front organization inBrazil that the party intended to create to concern itself with Latin America. Dennis told them that the draft "would have to be submitted to the Comintern in Moscow." Weyl noted, "For us this was a sharp reminder of the fact that the American Party was merely a branch of a Soviet organization." The couple left the party in 1939, disheartened after the recent Hitler-StalinPact.[2]
After leaving the Communist party, Weyl contacted Paul Porter, an old Socialist Party friend and began to write a weekly column for Porter'sKenosha Labor. He considered joining forces with a new friend,Lewis Corey, as "we believed that American radicals must build some sort of new consensus, repudiating most of Marxist philosophy and economics, reaffirming democratic processes, and confronting the Soviet–Nazi bloc as an enemy." However, they disagreed on approach, Corey advocating formation of a new party, Weyl advocating "a loose political organization to work within the Democratic Party and influence it." Their alliance fell apart as the Weyls moved to Washington.[2]
There, Weyl accepted a post as head of the Latin American research unit at theFederal Reserve Board and later moved to theBoard of Economic Warfare. He served overseas in the Army for two years duringWorld War II. After the war, he became a journalist and author and earned an income from investments.
In 1952, Weyl testified before theSenate Internal Security Committee that he had been a member of the Ware group, and thatAlger Hiss had attended meetings as well.[3][4] It was the only eyewitness corroboration ofWhittaker Chambers's testimony that Alger Hiss was a Communist.[5] However, it came two years after Hiss had been convicted of perjury, and Weyl never explained his failure to come forward as a witness in the Hiss trials.[6]
Also in 1952, Weyl attended a loyalty board meeting in support ofMary Dublin Keyserling. Keyserling was accused of communist ties, in part through alleged connections to Weyl. Weyl spoke against this.[7]
Weyl writings included studies of communism, especially in Latin America; espionage and internal security in the United States; racial, ethnic and class analyses of societies; and the roles of political and intellectual elites. Some of his writing has been published ineugenics journals and has espoused such views as blaming modern revolutionary movements on the "envy of non-achievers against creative minorities."[8]Two of Weyl's books,Treason (1950) andRed Star Over Cuba (1961), received some critical interest and discussion in their times.[9]Red Star Over Cuba postulates thatFidel Castro was a covert Communist before theCuban Revolution and had been recruited by the Soviets while he was a teenager. The theory has not been widely accepted.[10]
Weyl wrote for theNational Review from the 1960s through the 1970s.[11]
Weyl visited Rhodesia in 1966. During this visit, Weyl received IQ data from the Rhodesian government. Learning of Rhodesian government reports indicating a large number of white Rhodesian individuals having unusually high IQs, Weyl concluded in a journal article inIntelligence that high taxes and other economic hardships in "socialist Britain" were causing a brain drain to Rhodesia. This work was later cited in the 1994 bookThe Bell Curve byCharles Murray.[12]
Following the release ofRed Star Over Cuba, Weyl andJohn Martino, an activist against Castro, also actively promoted the story thatLee Harvey Oswald had been inCuba prior to his attempt on the life ofJohn F. Kennedy, where he enjoyed contact with Cuban intelligence and Castro. Martino admitted that the story was fabricated shortly before dying, in 1975.
Weyl's 1979 bookKarl Marx - Racist contains a summary and critique of Marx's views on race and the role of Jews in modern capitalism, and a discussion of later refutations of Marx's economic views. At the same time, Weyl himself supported white minority-rule regimes in southern Africa against "communist terrorists" likeNelson Mandela, preferring the whites ofRhodesia,South Africa, andPortuguese colonial rule.[13] Thinking that the struggle of Communist liberation movements was essentially destroyed by 1970, he publishedTraitor's End and intended the book to be the white anti-Communists' celebration of the supposed destruction of the black majority's liberation movements.[13]
In his book “The Jew in American Politics” (1968, New Rochelle, N.Y., Arlington House) Nathaniel Weyl supported the control of Israel by Jews from the West, especially USA. This is on the claim that, otherwise, an underdeveloped race of Jews from Morocco, Middle East and Africa, who are, according to him, ethnically Arabs, will control the country.
Weyl was also an apologist forsegregation at home. A supporter of racialist theories againstmiscegenation, Weyl wrote for theMankind Quarterly for whichRobert Gayre dubbed him a modern proponent of the anthropological ideas of the 19th-centuryeugenicist SirFrancis Galton.[14] However, Weyl, unlike others in the magazine, allowed that marriage between races might be permissible in select instances.[14] He had been writing for the magazine as early as 1960.[11]
Weyl reportedly moderated his conservative views later in his life, and he supportedBill Clinton andJohn Kerry.[citation needed] He died inOjai, California. Surviving him were sons Jonathan and Walter Weyl, stepdaughters, Georgianne Cowan (Charles Bernstein) and Jeanne Cowan (Barney Hass), three grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. His first wife, Sylvia Castleton, and second wife, Marcelle, had both died previously.[15]
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