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. ==Bibliography==