Revilo P. Oliver

Revilo Pendleton Oliver (July 7, 1908 – August 20, 1994) was an American professor of Classical philology, Spanish, and Italian at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He was a founding member of the John Birch Society in 1958, where he published in its magazine, American Opinion, before resigning in 1966. He was a polemicist for right-wing, white supremacist and antisemitic causes. He later advised the Holocaust denial group the Institute for Historical Review.

Oliver attracted national notoriety in the 1960s when he published an article after the President John F. Kennedy assassination, alleging that Lee Harvey Oswald was part of a Soviet conspiracy against the United States. He was called to testify before the Warren Commission investigating the murder.

Life and career Early life

Revilo Pendleton Oliver was born July 7, 1908, in Iowa Park, Texas, to Revilo P. Oliver and Flora R. Long. "Revilo P. Oliver" is a palindrome—a phrase that reads the same backwards and forwards. Oliver wrote that his name had been, in his family, "the burden of the eldest or only son for six generations". Colleagues at the University of Illinois later joked that "his first name is his last name spelled backward because he doesn’t know if he’s coming or going".

He was raised and experienced his early education in California and Louisiana, before his family relocated to Illinois, where he attended high school for two years. With his family, he then moved to California, where aged 16 he entered Pomona College in Claremont.

Academia In 1930, Oliver married Grace Needham.

He received Fulbright and Guggenheim fellowships. 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. He said he read 11 languages. as an assistant professor, became an associate professor in 1947, and professor in 1953. He retired in 1977 from the University of Illinois as a professor emeritus. Oliver also wrote for The American Mercury.

In 1958, Oliver joined as a founding member of Robert W. Welch Jr.'s John Birch Society, an anti-communist organization. He was a member of its national board and associate editor of its magazine, American Opinion. When Buckley repudiated Welch and the John Birch Society, the repudiation drove a wedge in Buckley's friendship with Oliver. He also criticized Kennedy, writing that his "memory will be cherished with distaste". Oliver testified in the fall of that year before the Warren Commission.

White supremacy In a Boston rally on July 2, 1966, Oliver embarrassed Welch by proclaiming at a speech that: "If only by some miracle all the Bolsheviks or all the Illuminati or all the Jews were vaporized at dawn tomorrow, we should have nothing to worry about". Oliver mentored William Luther Pierce, founder of the National Alliance and author of The Turner Diaries. The John Franklin Letters was cited by Pierce – given the book to read by Oliver – as his most direct inspiration for The Turner Diaries. Oliver also mentored the neo-Nazi activist Kevin Alfred Strom. "Oliver's writings on Jews and race-mixing became an important part of neo-Nazi culture in the early twenty-first century," according to Andrew S. Winston of the University of Guelph.

In 1978, Oliver became an editorial adviser for the Institute for Historical Review, an organization devoted primarily to Holocaust denial. He was also a regular contributor to Liberty Bell, an explicitly National Socialist magazine operated by George P. Dietz. He perhaps wrote more for Liberty Bell than any other periodical. He also wrote for the white supremacist magazine Instauration. He used the pen names "Ralph Perier" (for The Jews Love Christianity and Religion and Race) and "Paul Knutson" (for Aryan Asses). Oliver claimed to have advised the Introduction (credited to Willis Carto) to the Noontide Press edition of Francis Parker Yockey's Imperium. Carto denied this.

Although originally a proponent that Christianity is essential to Western civilization, Oliver became convinced that Christianity, by promoting universality and brotherhood rather than racial survival, was itself a Jewish product and part of the conspiracy. Oliver repeatedly criticized Christianity in Liberty Bell as "Jewish superstition", calling it a "Jewish invention", "cancer", and a "mental virus". This drew critical responses from Donald V. Clerkin, a Christian contributor, who wrote an essay defending Christianity from a racist point of view. Oliver wrote a rebuttal, and only further intensified his attacks on Christianity in the periodical from then on. Damon T. Berry, in his book Blood and Faith: Christianity and American White Nationalism devotes a chapter to Oliver, concluding that "Oliver hated both conservativism and Christianity ... because they equally represented to him an ideological poison that was alien to the best instincts of the white race to defend its existence."

Later years and death On August 20, 1994, suffering from leukemia and severe emphysema, he died at the age of 86 in Urbana, Illinois.

Lawyer Sam Dickson held a memorial service in honor of him; attending were many of his associates, including David Duke. They declared themselves Oliver's "spiritual children", Oliver having never had any biological children.

Following his death, the neo-Nazi Kevin Alfred Strom, one of his associates, became the archivist of Oliver's far-right writings, and maintains a website for them.

His estate arranged to publish several works posthumously through Historical Review Press and Liberty Bell Publications, as well as to attend to the needs of his wife Grace in her declining years.