Blood and Politics
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Authors: Leonard Zeskind
Tags: #History, #United States, #General, #Social Science, #Discrimination & Race Relations
Blood and Politics
A N D
politics
The History of the White Nationalist Movement
from the Margins to the Mainstream
Leonard Zeskind
Farrar Straus Giroux • New York
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2009 by Leonard Zeskind
All rights reserved
Distributed in Canada by Douglas & McIntyre Ltd.
Printed in the United States of America
First edition, 2009
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Zeskind, Leonard.
Blood and politics : the history of the white nationalist movement from the margins to the mainstream / Leonard Zeskind.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-374-10903-5 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-374-10903-6 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. White supremacy movements—United States—History.
2. Nationalism—United States—History. 3. Whites—Race identity—United States. 4. Whites—United States—Politics and government. 5. Racism—United States—History. 6. United States—Race relations. 7. United States—Ethnic relations. 8. United States—Politics and government—1945–1989. 9. United States—Politics and government—1989– I. Title.
E184.A1Z47 2009
305.800973—dc22
2008046131
Designed by Debbie Glasserman
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
For Carol
1. The Apprenticeship of Willis Carto
2. William Pierce, National Socialism, and the National Youth Alliance
PART ONE
EMERGENCE, GROWTH, AND CONSOLIDATION, 1974–1986
3. The Turner Diaries and Resurgence
4. David Duke and a New Klan Emerge
5. The Election of 1980: The Klan and Ronald Reagan
7. Survivalism Meets a Subcultural “Christian Identity”
8. Nation and Race: Aryan Nations, Nehemiah Township, and Gordon Kahl
9. Christian Patriots After Gordon Kahl
10. Birth of the First Underground
11. Enclave Nationalism and The Order
12. Origin of the Populist Party and the Break with Reaganism
13. Europeans and Southerners at the Institute for Historical Review
PART TWO
MAINSTREAMERS AND BALLOTS TAKE THE LEAD, 1987–1989
14. White Riot in Forsyth County on King Day
15. David Duke, the Democratic Party Candidate
16. Crackdown and Indictment at Fort Smith
18. Seditious Conspiracy Goes to Trial
19. Pete Peters’s Family-Style Bible Camp for Identity Believers
20. Elections 1988: David Duke and Pat Robertson Out on the Hustings
21. Populist Party Meets in Chicago After David Duke Wins a Legislator’s Seat
22. Skinhead International in Tennessee
PART THREE
THE END OF ANTICOMMUNISM, 1990–1991
23. German Unification and the Reemergence of Nationalism
24. The First Persian Gulf War and the Realignment of the Far Right
25. The Collapse of the Soviet Union and the Transformation of White Supremacy
PART FOUR
THE MOVEMENT MATURES, 1992–1993
27. The Duke Campaign(s) and the Louisiana Electorate
28. Pat Buchanan Runs Through the Republican Presidential Primaries
29. The Populist Party Goes with Bo Gritz
30. The FBI Aims for Randy Weaver on Ruby Ridge
31. After the Shoot-out, the Militia
32. Clinton’s First Year and the Culture War
33. Inferno at Waco and Randy Weaver Wins at Trial
34. A Suicide in North Carolina and the Birth of Resistance Records
35. Willis Carto Loses Control of the Institute for Historical Review
PART FIVE
AGAINST THE NEW WORLD ORDER, 1994–1996
36. The Common Law Courts, Partners to the Militia
37. Birth of American Renaissance
38. Holocaust Denial: To the Moscow Station
39. Elections 1994: An Anti-immigrant Voting Bloc Emerges
40. The Bell Curve: Legitimizing Scientific Racism
41. The Oklahoma City Bomb and Its Immediate Aftermath
42. The Second Underground Collapses
43. (Re)Birth of the Council of Conservative Citizens
44.
The Washington Times
Fires Sam Francis
45. Elections 1996: Pat Buchanan Roils the Republicans
PART SIX
MAINSTREAMERS AND VANGUARDISTS AT CENTURY’S END, 1997–2001
47. Resistance Records: Buying and Selling in the Cyberworld
48. After the Oklahoma City Bomber(s) Are Tried, the Violence Continues
49. The United States Congress and the Council of Conservative Citizens
50. National Alliance Remakes Resistance Records
51. Liberty Lobby in Bankruptcy Court
53. Elections 2000: The Neo-Confederate Resurgence
54. Pat Buchanan and the Reform Party
55. The Liberty Lobby Fortress Crumbles
PART SEVEN
PROLEGOMENA TO THE FUTURE, 2001–2004
57. The Anti-immigrant Movement Blossoms
58. Willis Carto and William Pierce Leave the Main Stage
As the last century ended and the year 2000 began, my hometown newspaper,
The Kansas City Star
, asked me to write a short guest opinion piece predicting the course of the new century. It was part of a journalistic time capsule, an editor said, and would likely be read a hundred years hence. The same had been done by the newspaper’s forebearers on January 1, 1901, when men considered “prominent” in Kansas City wrote short pieces about the future. A bit nervous about prognosticating in general, particularly in fewer than five hundred words, I asked the editor to send, as a guide, copies of the articles written one hundred years prior.
Each had been penned by a religious, civic, political, or economic captain of the city. A great hopefulness pervaded their expectations of scientific and industrial advances. In this regard, these city fathers (and they were all fathers) reflected the optimistic spirit of the age. Edward Bellamy’s
Looking Backward
was then immensely popular, for example, as one of almost fifty utopian novels published during that period.
1
One of the most fascinating aspects of these turn-of-the-century opinion pieces is that several predicted a happy future in explicitly racist terms. Not that they didn’t worry about challenges to white supremacy’s permanence. The city’s “leading lawyer” feared that “the yellow peril threatens the world with untold disaster.” One preacher fretted that the Fourteenth Amendment, which constitutionally guaranteed the rights of citizenship to black people, had been a “capital blunder.” But a more prominent Baptist minister prophesied a noble century to come, including the end of war and the uplift of the poor, all under “the growing supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon.”
2
In this regard also, the city’s sires reflected the spirit of the nation’s elites at that time. University deans
then taught that humanity could be improved through eugenics, the supposed science of selective “up breeding.”
3
The Supreme Court had recently ruled that “separate” was equal, and newspapers uncritically published accounts steeped in these and related ideas.
The twentieth century did not end as it had begun. Science and technology, as predicted, did reach new heights. They split the atom, took us to the moon, and created a global cyberspace communications system. They could have also provided food to every hungry soul on the planet—but they didn’t. Instead, scientific advances fed an unending series of wars, genocides, and man-made disasters. And the ethic of Aryan supremacy, so prevalent a hundred years earlier, (temporarily) buried itself beneath the mountains of human ash produced by Hitler’s crematories. After World War Two, Europeans ceded legal sovereignty over Africa, Asia, and Latin America to their noticeably more darkly hued (former) subjects, even as the strains of four centuries of colonial exploitation were not erased. And in Kansas City, the newspaper-for-the-future included opinions by four women and three persons of color, including the city’s first black mayor.
My contribution to that time capsule stemmed directly from the subject under consideration here. I predicted a mid-twenty-first century conflict within the United States as white people became a minority in a nation of minorities and were no longer able to preserve a system of white privilege through majority-rule winner-take-all democracy. As the century wore on, I wrote, white nationalists would push toward instituting new forms of racial apartheid and other antidemocratic measures. The outcome in the year 2100, I argued, would depend on what we learned today about white supremacy and white nationalism.
4
This book does not pretend to predict prospective events, but it is not simply an account of the past either. While it is a history focused on the last decades of the twentieth century and the first years of the twenty-first, it is my intention that it serve as part of a prolegomenon to the future discussion of racial egalitarianism and democracy. My hope is that it will provide the reader a view of the contemporary white nationalist movement that is both comprehensive and instructive. Though it takes into account organizations, individuals, and events such as the Ku Klux Klan, David Duke, and the Oklahoma City bombing—things ascribed more to memory at this point than daily life—the objective is to demonstrate that this movement, driven by a vision well within the mainsprings of American life, is already self-consciously pitching itself toward the future. Perhaps when white nationalism’s next iteration emerges, our country will better understand it.
. . .
My own route to this book spans more than a quarter of a century. In the late 1970s, when I first began studying the subject, I worked in steel fabrication shops reading blueprints and welding together beer truck drop frames, parts for rock quarry conveyor systems, and pieces of car plant assembly lines. As a grassroots activist, who traced my own involvements back to anti–Vietnam War protests and support for black freedom movements, I was both surprised and concerned by a renewal of Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi violence in the South. I had once believed “the Klan” to be a thing of the past. But I was wrong. Assaults in Mississippi in 1978, shots aimed at civil rights leaders in Alabama, and the murder of five communists in North Carolina in 1979 were the most overt proof. When a coalition of religious, civil rights, and leftist organizations called for a march to protest racist violence in Greensboro on February 1, 1980—the twentieth anniversary of the historic lunch counter sit-ins—I took time off from my job and drove south from Kansas City. More than ten thousand paraded that day, in an uplifting and inspiring demonstration of human solidarity.
Convinced by the history of the early civil rights movement that small groups of determined individuals could influence and change the world around them, I believed that racists could turn the wheels of history as well as antiracists could. If I believed that losing a day’s pay to march against Klan violence could help repair the world, I also began to see how white supremacists holding meetings, distributing literature, and shooting at people could tear that same world apart. During those years I thought less about immediate government and public policy toward the racist upsurge and more about the cumulative impact it was having on civil society, the voluntary institutions upon which this country’s cultural and social life is founded. Like a chain of unfiltered smokestacks, white supremacists were poisoning the political atmosphere, as well as spilling blood upon the earth. It has been these concerns that have remained with me over the decades since.
With the eager curiosity of an initiate, I began by investigating this problem in depth. I read racist and anti-Semitic booklets and periodicals, kept newspaper clippings, and began a primitive filing system. When events allowed, I attended meetings and rallies—a survivalist expo where guns mixed with religion, a small Klan rally populated by men wearing swastikas, and a Posse Comitatus gathering where Aryan organizers drew in distraught farmers. Sometimes I would stand to the side and formally take notes and photos. Sometimes I would just blend
in. Often I would strike up a conversation and get to know the person next to me. At one tax protest event, an engaging Arizonan attended and played the bagpipes. Shortly thereafter I discovered that he was a state leader in Aryan Nations, one of the most violence-prone groups. It became obvious to me that many of these racists and anti-Semites were otherwise just ordinary folks.
