Revilo P Oliver

Biography

Revilo Pendleton Oliver was born in 1908 near Corpus Christi, Texas. He attended two years of high school in Illinois. Disliking the severe winters, and once requiring hospitalization "for one of the first mastoidectomies performed as more than a daring experiment", he relocated to California, where he studied Sanskrit. He used Max Müller's handbooks and Monier Williams' grammar, later finding a Hindu missionary to tutor him.

As an adolescent, he found amusement in watching evangelists "pitch the woo at the simple-minded", attending performances of Aimee Semple McPherson and Katherine Tingley. He entered Pomona College in Claremont, California, when he was sixteen.

In 1930, Oliver married Grace Needham. He returned to Illinois, where he attended the University of Illinois and studied under William Abbott Oldfather. His first book was an annotated translation, from the Sanskrit, of Mricchakatika (The Little Clay Cart), published by the University of Illinois in 1938. He received his PhD in 1940. That same year, the University published his Ph.D. thesis: Niccolò Perotti's Translations of the Enchiridion (republished in 1954 as Niccolo Perotti's Version of the Enchiridion of Epictetus, with an Introduction and List of Perotti's Writings).

Oliver began teaching graduate classes. For a number of years he also gave graduate courses in the Renaissance, teaching in the Departments of Spanish and Italian.

During World War II Oliver said that he worked at an unnamed War Department agency from 1942 until the autumn of 1945, writing, "By good luck, I found myself in charge of a rapidly expanding department, and ...responsible for the work of c. 175 persons."

Oliver left Washington, D.C. in 1945. He returned to the University of Illinois as an Assistant Professor, became an Associate Professor in 1947, and Professor in 1953. He published little in the academic press but later became known for politically conservative articles expressing anti-Semitism and white supremacy.

In November 1955, William F. Buckley, a graduate of Yale, founded the National Review, a magazine to express a conservative viewpoint. He worked to increase its respectability, prohibiting publication by anti-Semites or extremists such as Oliver.

In 1958, Oliver joined Robert W. Welch, Jr. as one of the founding members of the conservative, anti-Communist John Birch Society. Oliver wrote frequently for the Birch Society magazine American Opinion. In 1962 Buckley repudiated Welch and the "Birchers", saying they were "far removed from common sense" and urging the G.O.P. to purge itself of Welch's influence.

Oliver attracted attention from his university and the media by his two-part article called "Marxmanship in Dallas" (February 1964), published after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. He said that Lee Harvey Oswald had carried out the murder as part of a Communist conspiracy; and that the Communists wanted to kill Kennedy, whom Oliver described as a puppet who had outlived his usefulness. His comments were reported by the New York Times. In March 1964, the Los Angeles Times reported that Oliver had been reprimanded by the University of Illinois' Board of Trustees for his remarks, but was allowed to keep his position. Oliver testified in the fall of that year before the Warren Commission.

In the 1960s, Oliver broke with American conservatism. Having become convinced that Welch had either tricked him or sold out, he objected to what he called "the Birch hoax." He was "forced to resign" from the Society.

Oliver moved further right, working with William Luther Pierce to form the National Alliance, a white supremacist organization. Pierce later wrote The Turner Diaries, a 1978 novel about a race war and overthrow of the United States government. A significant portion of the Alliance's supporters and members later reformed under the name National Vanguard.

Oliver was an editorial adviser for the Institute for Historical Review, an organization devoted primarily to historical revisionism of World War II and the Holocaust. He was also a regular contributor to Liberty Bell magazine but received no mainstream notice. In a 1989 article, "The Final Secret of Pearl Harbor," that was typical of his style, he wrote,

The author, to protect himself, has had to seem to acquiesce in the current form of the Big Lie about the most loathsome War Criminal of all history. Since it is now fairly well known that the diseased and part Jewish monster called Roosevelt contrived the catastrophic war that was the Suicide of Europe and induced the Japanese to destroy the American fleet that he had put in Pearl Harbor as tempting bait, the revised version now is that the foul anthropoid had to start the war to save mankind (i.e., the Sacred Sheenies) from Aryan civilization.

Oliver retired in 1977. In 1994, suffering from leukemia and severe emphysema, he committed suicide at the age of 86 in Urbana, Illinois. His estate arranged to publish several works posthumously through Historical Review Press and Liberty Bell.

Work

Oliver believed that religion was one of the major weaknesses of his nation and civilization. In a 1990 article, he characterized Christianity as "a spiritual syphilis" that "has rotted the minds of our race and induced paralysis of our will to live."

Pseudonyms

He used the pen names "Ralph Perier" (for The Jews Love Christianity and Religion and Race) and "Paul Knutson" (for Aryan Asses). Oliver is sometimes credited as the author of the Introduction (credited to Willis Carto) to Francis Parker Yockey's Imperium.

As a palindrome

"Revilo P. Oliver" is a palindrome—a phrase that reads the same backwards and forwards. One of his articles was denounced as a fraud because readers thought his palindromic name was suspect. Oliver said his name had been given to first sons in his family for six generations.

Works

Published posthumously: