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.^[1] 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 Christian moorings and embraced the philosophical worldview of Friedrich Nietzsche. Simpson believed that the teachings of Jesus 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.

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 (novel) and Of Human Bondage.

In Part 6 of "One Man's Striving", Simpson expresses worldly influence from the darkening international political situation during the late 1930s, when he wrote:

My mind roamed over the darkening international situation. I remembered the remark of my Jewish friend Richard Mayer, to the effect that Judaism and Christianity belonged together. Certainly Christianity, and especially Puritanism, was only a revived and revamped Judaism. Indeed, there were those who perceived in Christianity only the history of Jewish heresy. But I was far less concerned about the bearing of these two religions on each other and their relationship to the future than I was about what had been the historic effect on the European world of having the White people who created it pass under the direction of a religion that had not come out of their own life experience, out of their own unspoiled and unperverted instinct, traditions, and values. Nietzsche had declared, quite correctly, that Christianity was "the revenge of the Jews on the Gentiles": the Gentiles had taken from them their homeland, and the Jews had got even by foisting upon the former their religion. And Blake had perceived, no less correctly, that 'all nations believe the jews' code and worship the jews' god,' and had pronounced in conclusion that 'no greater subjection can be.' Inevitably the question arose: Can the Western White man, especially Nordic Western man, ever fully repossess his own soul until he has thrown off this alien religion?^[2]