Blood and Politics (13 page)

Willis Carto (and others) needed to rewrite the history of World War Two: it was central, not peripheral, to their white supremacist project. They all believed a civilization-level change had occurred with the defeat of Hitler. “A German victory would have assured that the life-span of the White world would have been extended for many centuries more than now seems likely,” Carto wrote in 1973 under his pseudonym E. L. Anderson. “Because of our ‘victory,’ the Western world is rapidly sinking into a morass of hopelessness and defeat from which there may be neither
resurgence nor survival.”
²⁷
By placing the word “victory” inside quotation marks in his own text, Carto made it clear that he lamented both the victory itself and its consequences.

Wilmot Robertson also understood the deleterious effect of the Allied victory. Although he tended to trace the supposed dispossession of his white majority to the population loss suffered during the Civil War, he recognized the importance of World War Two’s residual effects. “[A]fter the inventory of Hitler’s racial excesses was published at the close of World War II, all arguments for racial supremacy were placed beyond the pale of permissive thought by the Western intellectual community,”
²⁸
he wrote.

Mainstream historians, although starting from different premises, reached similar conclusions: the fight against racism and fascism in Europe had discredited these ideologies among America’s decision-making elites. “American war propaganda stressed above all else the abhorrence of the West for Hitler’s brand of racism and its utter incompatibility with the democratic faith for which we fought,” wrote C. Vann Woodward in his book
The Strange Career of Jim Crow
. British historian Eric Hobsbawm noted that World War Two “had eliminated National Socialism, fascism, overt Japanese nationalism and much of the right-wing and nationalist sector of the political spectrum from the acceptable political scene.”
²⁹

While wartime propaganda against Nazi Germany’s Nuremberg Laws made it difficult to defend laws that denied voting rights according to race, the defeat of the Axis Powers did not automatically translate into the end of Jim Crow forms of second-class citizenship. That would require the bravery and brilliance of a determined civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s. While fascism may have been defeated during World War Two, communism was still very much alive and kicking during the postwar period. And during the Cold War anticommunism gained complete dominance over the heights of American life. As a result, defense of Jim Crow segregation and opposition to civil rights during the 1950s and 1960s often marched under the banner of anti-communism. White supremacy became the ideology that could not speak its name.

William Pierce put it squarely. “A morality which damns the Germans for attempting to rid themselves of a pernicious infestation,” he wrote, would also “damn any attempt by White Americans to disinfect the cesspool of mongrelization.”
³⁰
The weight of genocide in Europe blocked its repetition in the United States.

Nevertheless, Pierce loathed Holocaust denial as it was practiced by Willis Carto. “There are reckless ‘revisionists’ who assert that no Jews
were killed, solely for being Jews, by the German government,” Pierce scolded. “That is certainly not true.” He claimed to have talked with Nazi veterans who had assured him that they had shot Jews (solely for being Jews). Furthermore, what purpose was served by denying the existence of gas chambers? Jews could have been gassed, Pierce speculated. The Nazis had killed Jews because they were partisans or communists or commissars or just because they were Jews. What was wrong with that? he asked. The Nazis had done only what needed to be done.
³¹

Others were just fooling themselves. “The ‘revisionist,’ the conservative, the right winger, the anti-Semite who cannot face the Holocaust squarely and judge it on the basis of a higher morality,” Pierce wrote, “cannot, for example, cope successfully with the challenges to a White future which are presented by non-White immigration and by a high non-White birthrate.”
³²
One should not deny the industrialized murder of Jews, Pierce’s logic ran, because it may become necessary to repeat it on Jews and “nonwhites” in the future.

Moreover, Pierce lost little time before using the court decision to tweak his archrival about the decision in the
Mermelstein
case. The Institute for Historical Review “has been made to look very foolish,” Pierce’s
National Vanguard
commented.
³³

Despite Pierce’s objections and the financial losses incurred by Willis Carto’s extreme litigiousness, the IHR began to prosper and grow. It published a quarterly journal and a monthly newsletter. An editorial board of advisers, many of them with Ph.D.’s after their names, signed up. One of the mainstays was an engineering professor from Northwestern University, Arthur Butz, whose book
The Hoax of the Twentieth Century
set the tone during the early years.
³⁴
The IHR purchased mailing lists of university-affiliated historians and solicited their support. It also began to produce an extensive literature based on a flat earth version of history.

Its conferences remained relatively modest affairs. After the first one in 1979, the meets drew anywhere from 100 to 150 attendees, and the IHR became a coat-and-tie center for the movement’s professional intelligentsia. Its ideas took root in every type of white supremacist organization. Klan groups and uniformed Hollywood-style Nazis alike sold its pamphlets. So-called Christian patriots and gun-happy survivalists believed the Holocaust was a hoax. The IHR not only carved a distinctive niche within white supremacist circles, but became part of the interstitial glue that turned disparate organizations into a unitary movement.

As the first years of the 1980s progressed, the movement as a whole slowly continued to gain ground. The Klan groups, which had been the
most visible element of the initial resurgence in the 1970s, were joined by a plethora of new organizations taking on differing forms. And some of those completely eschewed the trappings of middle-class mainstream society and opted instead for an alternative lifestyle based on guns and religion.

September 25, 1982.
Survivalist gear of every kind filled the exhibition room in Kansas City’s downtown convention center. Both a display of a model bomb shelter and a booth of dehydrated foods drew curiosity seekers, while serious shoppers thumbed through explosives and gun manuals. Publishers of glossy survival magazines pushed sales next to low-rent newsletter vendors. High-tech biochemical warfare suits hung behind tables displaying the latest in laser-sighted weapons. If you wanted to prepare for impending shortages, you could buy Harvest Pak Low Moisture Survival Foods. If you wanted to remachine your legal semiautomatic into an illegal fully automatic assault rifle, the blueprints were available. If you needed to dress up the weapon with flash suppressors, folding stocks, and thirty-shot banana clips, specialists sold you the parts right there. If you just wanted to dress up, you could pick from the array of camouflage hats, shirts, pants, and jackets.
¹

The Self-Reliance and Survival Expo advertised itself in the daily newspaper and on radio and television as if it were the latest version of a recreational vehicle show. Surviving nuclear war and social chaos appeared as if it might provide the next big entrepreneurial opportunity. The signs proliferated across the popular culture.

“Country folks will survive,” sang country and western musician Hank Williams, Jr., in a popular anthem to fishing, hunting, living in the woods, and avoiding the dangers of urban living. Rambo had just made his first big-screen appearance. Pulp novels, magazines, and comic books all exalted a new type of warrior, a working-class man at odds with enemies abroad as well as traitorous elites at home. Most often, the new heroes’ values, like Rambo’s, were paramilitary and survivalist, rather than official West Point militarist.
²

The new trend was most marked at gun and knife shows, which had long been cultural bellwethers, particularly in the Midwest and South. At these shows, proud collectors once displayed antique weapons mounted on polished walnut panels and dealers sold bolt-action 30-06s for deer season. Now a new breed seemingly intent on hunting humans traded weapons as if they were preparing for a communist invasion. Large-format illustrations of Civil War rifles appeared in the same exhibit as booklets on revenge killing. Hunter orange was out; brown fatigues were in. Young rootless vendors, living out of their trucks, followed a circuit selling “self-defense” weapons rigged only for murder.
³

While “survivalism” appeared to have reached the level of the mass market, the market itself was not yet fully developed. Buying a couple of Rambo movie tickets or listening to Hank Jr. on the radio was not the same as plunking down $758 for a seven-month supply of freeze-dried foods. And even paying $200 cash for a blue-steel Mini-14 assault rifle required less time and commitment than actually training with it in the woods. As an epiphenomenon, survivalism, particularly paramilitary-style survivalism, was much like the antibusing movement a few years before. Led by angry white men, the dispossessed majority of Wilmot Robertson’s imagination, it provided a pool of potential recruits for the resurgent white supremacist cause.

At the Kansas City Expo, a table for a group calling itself the Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord demonstrated the case in point. Two men in fatigues stood at an exhibition display with only a couple of books and spare parts for assault rifles on it. A self-published manual gave 175 pages of practical advice on buying and shooting guns, knife fighting, home defense, and nuclear bomb shelters. “A double-edged knife is designed for killing,” the text helpfully suggested. “If you believe you will use your knife as a weapon, we suggest you select a double-edged blade.”
⁴

The books were for sale, but the gear was just for display. The two men were actually marketing a paramilitary training course taught back at their compound deep in the recesses of the Ozark Mountains. They had built an elaborate collection of wooden and stone structures called Silhouette City. For a fee, white (Christian) men could shoot machine guns at pop-up figures, knock down doors, and battle around mock buildings while tires burned to simulate urban riots. Lessons included knife fighting and hand-to-hand combat too. In Kansas City that day the Covenant group, also known as the CSA, tried to ladle some of the commercial gravy into its own small boat, just as it had been doing at gun shows around the Midwest.
⁵

The CSA was one of the new breed of organizations that sprang up in
the late 1970s and early 1980s. Instead of white robes its members wore camouflage fatigues as their uniform of choice. Unlike Klansmen who paraded down Main Street or national socialists with their spit-in-your-face swastika armbands, at this moment the CSA stayed largely out of the public eye. Electing candidates, effecting public policy, pursuing economic gain, or protecting their enlightened self-interest all were irrelevant to Covenant followers. Living in a tract house, sending their children to public school, and holding down jobs were to be avoided. There was the Beast system on one side, they believed, and the Kingdom of God on the other. They lived in the latter. Here guns and survivalism met race and religion.

Their theology was a nondenominational system known as “Christian Identity.” According to this doctrine, northern European whites and their North American offspring are the racial descendants of the tribes of biblical Israel. People of color are sometimes referred to as “pre-Adamic,” created by God before Adam and thus without souls, although an even more pejorative term, “mud people,” was used as well. Jews are regarded as either the direct embodiment of Satan himself or simply Satanic in nature. And Jesus was an Aryan.
⁶

While these ideas might at first sound preposterous, it is helpful to recall that generations of Christians have found in their Bible justifications for racism and anti-Semitism. It was the church that burned Jews at the stake during the Spanish Inquisition. English-speaking slaveholders read Genesis and claimed that Africans were the descendants of Ham, an accursed race bound by God to be “hewers of wood.” In the Gideon (King James) edition John 8:44, they read John to claim that Jesus says of the Jews: “Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do.” The anti-Semitic sap that Identity adherents drew from the Christian tree had risen and fallen for almost two millennia before the CSA set up camp.
⁷

So too had beliefs that the end of the world was near, and eschatology—doctrines about the End Times and Final Judgment—remained central to fundamentalist Christianity. In this context, Identity Christians contended that they would live through all manner of evil until the End of Days, when they would be the “Sword of the Lord.” By this canon, they were the ultimate survivalists.
⁸

In keeping with the notion that they were descended from biblical Israel, the CSA’s leaders called their Ozark encampment Zarephath-Horeb. Heavily wooded low mountains and a lake surrounded their 224 acres. Only one road led into the camp from the Missouri village of Pontiac, and on the other side the camp abutted Bull Shoals Lake and the Arkansas state border. At any given time, approximately seventy to
ninety people, including thirty to forty children, lived in three small clusters of group homes and single family dwellings. The camp featured freshwater wells, barns and ponds for livestock, a combination schoolhouse and church building, a machine shop, a radio room, and storage sheds. For a time some of the men ran a failed logging business. Others engaged in subsistence agriculture or salvaged scrap. The state government, hated as it was, provided welfare or food stamps to the indigent. And a select few worked the lathe, milling machine, and drill presses
⁹
in the machine shop.
¹⁰