Early Life
Many biographical facts about Yockey cannot be known with absolute certainty. The majority comes from the accounts of those who knew him and from FBI efforts to gain intelligence in regard to his activities, as recorded by his biographer Kevin Coogan in his book Dreamer of the Day: Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International.
Yockey was born in Chicago, Illinois, but his family returned to their original homestead in Ludington, Michigan during the Great Depression. His parents were anglophiles who raised Yockey to appreciate Europe and high culture. Subsequently, Yockey's mother introduced him to classical music. Young Francis had a prodigious talent for the piano and developed his repertoire to include pieces by Liszt, Beethoven, Chopin, and Haydn. Yockey claimed that his ideas about race were initially the result of a car accident, wherein he was assaulted by several African Americans. As a result of this attack he lost his front teeth and wore dentures for the rest of his short life.
Before becoming a devotee of elitist and anti-materialist Oswald Spengler, he briefly flirted with Marxism. Aside from Spengler, he was heavily influenced by the ideas of German legal scholar Carl Schmitt. Like Spengler, he rejected the strict biological view of race, instead preferring a spiritual conception of race married with Karl Haushofer's idea of geopolitics; but unlike Spengler, who regarded the Nazis as too bourgeois, Yockey believed in German National Socialism, and supported various Fascist and neo-Fascist causes for the remainder of his life, including anti-Semitism.
As a university student in the late 1930s, Yockey had his first political essay published in Social Justice, a periodical distributed by Fr. Charles Coughlin, known as the "radio priest," At the time Coughlin was widely known for his sympathetic view of the anti-Bolshevist policies associated with Adolf Hitler's Germany, Benito Mussolini's Italy, and Gen. Franco's Spain.
Yockey attended at least seven universities. He studied for two years (1934–36) as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, and then transferred to Georgetown's School of Foreign Service. He completed his undergraduate degree at the University of Arizona, and graduated cum laude from the University of Notre Dame Law School in 1941.
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