Blood and Politics (38 page)

Despite this invocation of history and heroism, Pulaski’s town fathers drew a line between their own reverence for the Confederate past and the unreconstructed white nationalism Beam represented in the future. Civic leaders took several steps to disassociate themselves from Klansmen and Aryan Nations types who had been gathering periodically in the town’s center. They had recently remortared facedown on a brick building a bronze plaque that commemorated the Klan’s founding there in 1866. Faced with the prospect of the rally at hand, the city’s merchants had decided to shutter their businesses on that day and deck the town with orange ribbons as a show of protest.
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This sentiment was expressed in the local press,
The Giles Free Press
. Sam Davis was its hero and could not be legitimately claimed by Aryan types. “Sam remains a revered fellow here-abouts,” the paper said. “He is not equated with hate groups, instead honored as a bonafide hero of the Confederacy who gave his life to protect his friends.”
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Pulaski’s semiofficial mythology distinguished between honoring martyrs who had died defending white supremacy in the past and present-day proponents of the doctrine. For Beam and company, however, the South, the white South, and an Aryan Republic were all one and the same.

“The message from us,” Beam continued, “and the message from Sam to us is, if we had a thousand lives, we would give them all for our people, our heritage, and our culture.”

Beam was a powerful orator. Just as he had captured the Fort Smith jury’s sympathy with his emotional opening remarks about Vietnam, he reached into the guts of the skinheads standing around him. “Will you give those lives for those things that mean something, or will you spend your life in front of a Jewish worship machine called a television?” he screamed. “Will you spend your life there while your children are being molested, while your wives are raped, or will you fight for America? I say, we will fight.

“We will fight,” Beam barked.

“We will fight,” the crowd barked back, their fever growing.

Beam again: “We will fight.”

Again the crowd responded, and again until the fever broke in a final catharsis.

The obligatory march around the town square was anticlimactic, almost a formality. An overinflated Kirk Lyons, who had been Beam’s sedition trial attorney, acted as a legal adviser. Lyons stood next to the parade marshal, dressed in a three-piece brown suit, red power tie, and tan hat; he looked “imperious in a Walter Mittyish sort of way,” according to one observer.
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His appearance that Saturday afternoon in Pulaski was another stop on Lyons’s long trek from survivalist camps to Waco firestorms to National Rifle Association meets back to Confederate flag rallies.

Soon after Beam’s speech, three hundred skinheads and their middle-aged suitors motored over to a remote pasture for a rally. At that point, the public demonstration became part cultural carnival, part political convention, complete with interminable speeches and sideline propaganda booths. As at all skinhead events, there was an aura of impending violence. Guns were prohibited, but many carried knives. Nevertheless, the beer flowed peacefully, an impromptu tattoo parlor operated, and two young couples made wedding vows. While they waited for the bands to start, half the crowd partied and half watched the speakers.

About 7:00 p.m., Pete Peters, the Identity preacher from Colorado, came onto the stage. Peters had more in common with Willis Carto’s mainstreamers than with the movement’s vanguardists. His radio ministry was aimed at new movement recruits, the Joe Six-Packs so disdained by William Pierce. That night outside Pulaski, Peters dressed in cowboy boots, ten-gallon hat, and western-style suit. He warmed up for what should have been his usual forty-five-minute harangue by ridiculing his potential audience and immediately clashed with the crowd.

“I thought in the South you had manners down here,” he complained. “I always heard that the southerner was very mannerly. I tell you something, out in the West, when you’ve got a man speaking, and he spent a lot of money to come out, you don’t have a bunch of loudmouths along the sidelines trying to outdo him talking.” That brought a few jeers and catcalls from the crowd, many of whom clearly weren’t listening anyway.

Then Peters insulted the skinheads: “Now I understand that, tell me if I’m wrong here, skinheads are the SS troops of the right. Is that right? What’s that stand for? Stupid sissies. Does it stand for stupid sissies, or does it stand for strong soldiers?”

At that point a young skinhead rushed the stage, ripped open his shirt, pointed to his knife scars, and started screaming about “niggers.”
Peters was rattled by the less than deferential response and left the stage after a short thirteen minutes. His first sermon to skinheads had been drowned in a sea of beer.

On reflection, however, Peters expressed sympathy for the skins. He saw in their revolt an echo of the youth culture from a generation before. It was a remarkable observation, but colored, as always, through his Identity prism. The skins were a “natural outgrowth of a sick, dying, decaying society, of a race that’s going extinct,” he said. “I met their counterpart, their dialectical counterpart about twenty years ago, those that were on the left. They were the longhairs called the hippies.”

Peters also recognized a concordance between his own white nationalism and theirs. “The skins know that you can’t have a nation of people without a race,” Peters later told his congregation back home in Colorado. “And most people don’t seem to understand that. And the skins are smart enough, are willing to fight for their race and their territory.”
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While that core agreement was enough to initially draw him to Pulaski, Peters’s cowboy Americanism was repulsed by the skins’ Naziesque internationalism. “You know, as you point to these young people out there and say this is our heritage and our people and our culture,” Peters complained, “and yet you see them going ‘Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil.’” The Hitler salute was not part of American culture, Peters argued.
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Actually, Peters decided that both swastikas and Confederate flags symbolized a form of nationalism he didn’t share. His Colorado congregation didn’t imagine a southern white republic. His midwestern and western constituency may have included ethnic Germans, but America, not Europe, was the Promised Land. Besides, Peters’s theology promised eventual victory, not defeat. “When you march around with a Nazi swastika, you carry the flag of a loser. It is stupid to only venerate and exalt losers as heroes,” he reminded his followers. “How can you deny the fact that the South lost . . . You can respect that flag, but when you carry it understand you carry the flag of the side that lost. Robert E. Lee, great general that he was, lost the war.”

It wasn’t solely that the South and Hitler’s Germany had lost their respective wars. Peters believed that secular ideologies could not redeem white people from their national sins: “When you have a society that has the problems of our land today, you’ve got to understand that it goes back to a spiritual problem. You’ve got to read more than the Constitution . . . You’ve got to hear more than
Race and Reason
TV programs. You’ve got to read more than
Mein Kampf
. You’ve got to go to the word of God. You’ve got to go to the spiritual cause of the whole problem.”
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The Pulaski rally and Pete Peters’s unceremonious rejection caught
the currents then swirling through survivalist camps and at cow pasture cross burnings. Skins were tough new additions to the violent wing of the movement, which had been battered by arrests and the Fort Smith conspiracy trail. But they were not simply street fodder for existing
Gruppenführers
. While they certainly respected William Pierce, for example, skins were not yet ready to be disciplined cadres in anybody’s organization. Perhaps Pierce understood that skins would not bend easily to his will at that time. Only later did he intervene in the white power skin scene, make a little money, and recruit a few top cadres.

The conflict at Pulaski was repeated dozens of times. On one occasion a Klan chief planning a protest in Dallas tried to keep the skinheads away from his event. “The day before our rally about twenty of those garish looking suckers showed up at our hotel,” he told a daily newspaper. “My advance man knew I didn’t want anything to do with them and told them not to show up. They didn’t know what we’re all about. They’re just scary.”
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A few skins showed up nonetheless.

Earlier more than one hundred skinheads prepared to join a march in Georgia. This time the same Klan chief tried to coax them into cooperation.
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Shortly before the parade began, he walked over to the parking lot where the skins were gathering. He told the skins that personally he agreed with them. But this was a Klan rally, he said. Chants of “white power” were appropriate; the skins’ more usual “Sieg Heil” shouts were not. Moments later a local Klanswoman in charge of mothering the parade to birth repeated the plea, urging the out-of-town skins to “act white.” With those words the skinheads spontaneously broke into a rhythmic “Sieg Heil” with their stiff right arms popping up in the air in unison. Clearly chagrined, the Klanswoman walked away.

Skinheads were not always at odds with the movement’s existing leaderships, however. Remember that skins had participated harmoniously in the movement’s free speech protest march before the trial in Fort Smith. In 1989 the difficulties stemmed from the skins’ origin in an autonomous youth subculture with its own organizations, leaderships, and ideas.

The skinhead phenomenon arrived in Pulaski from Britain virtually unnoticed, through a self-invented musical subculture of small affinity groups grafted onto a borrowed ideology. After years of incubation it finally burst into public view on daytime television talk shows. On both sides of the Atlantic, the skinhead movement was shaped by the interaction of global electronic communications—records, television, and computers—with local tribes of alienated white youths. In America,
these skinheads were from the first generation born after the civil rights movement.

On the other side of the Atlantic, British skinheads first emerged in the late 1960s, one of several post–World War Two youth cultures to define themselves through fashion and music. These young people were a self-contradictory mix.
¹¹
They listened to Afro-Caribbean music, but attacked Pakistani and East Indian ethnic immigrants as well as homosexuals. They rejected their parents’ social conformism at the same time that they exalted their working-class roots. In fact, the skinhead uniform represented an idealized industrial worker: shaved heads or brush-cut hair, Dr. Martens work boots, short-hemmed blue jeans, and broad suspenders. Their coda emphasized personal toughness and intense group loyalties, manifested in an eagerness to battle both other youths and the authorities.

After that first generation, British skinheads returned in the mid-1970s as two ideological movements, both of which claimed the same subculture origins. One wing associated itself with antifascism and the left. The others identified themselves with a growing movement against nonwhite immigrants. This second group organized themselves through white power music and shops selling Nazi paraphernalia, such as stylized swastika badges. Initially, both antifascists and white power skins listened to the same music, and they often battled each other for control of the dance halls.

Skinhead concerts lacked Leni Riefenstahl’s cinematic finesse but had the emotive force of a Nuremberg rally nonetheless. Center stage a thuggish, sweating lead singer with close-cropped hair and large tattoos snarled lyrics into a microphone, while several dozen men crashed into one another in a rhythmic dance known as slamming. Between songs the slam dancers would often chant, “Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil,” their right arms jerking up in salute, one of the few rhythmic and coordinated movements of an entire concert. The lyrics amounted to cheerless national socialist agitprop: “Hail the New Dawn,” “Boots and Braces,” “Europe Awake,” “Smash the IRA,” “Blood and Honour.” But the crowd often clapped and sang along: “We will fight and die to keep our land.” Hundreds of young men, and a few women, pumped full of rage while drinking beer to the thudding beat, transformed themselves into soldiers of a great white army. Violence was inevitable.
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In the United States, skinheads first appeared out of a schism within the punk rock scene, itself another subculture initially expressed through style and music.
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British punk bands developed an audience in the United States, and homegrown bands, such as the Ramones, began playing clubs in the mid-1970s. Aspects of punk rock later made it to
the edges of the mass market, and some of its particular style was adapted by Hollywood and the fashion industry. In the beginning punks sported wild multicolored hairstyles and nose rings and pierced their skin with safety pins. To stand middle-class values on their head, they often threw beer cans at bands to show appreciation.
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Clapping was too bourgeois. Their core values were nihilism, antiauthoritarianism, and extreme individualism—not patriotism or racial nationalism. Nevertheless, punks sometimes wore Iron Crosses or Naziesque paraphernalia for its shock value, further marginalizing themselves.

Despite the antiestablishment flirtation with Nazi symbols, William Pierce’s National Alliance quickly rejected punk style and music in the 1970s. “Punk rock and ‘Nazi’ rock have a similar appeal to a jaded, Judaized, deracinated youth,” said one
National Vanguard
commentary at that time. “The quasi-military uniforms, the chains, the safety pins . . . have nothing whatever to do with the inherently healthy worldview of National Socialism.”
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Pierce’s quick rejection of punk was in part an accurate assessment of punk’s expressed politics. In part it also reflected his cultural tastes. At the time National Alliance publications regularly promoted classical German music and national socialist romanticism as art. The sculptor Arno Breker, for example, was a favorite. Most significantly, however, Pierce tended to reject alternative youth subcultures of any type. His experience of 1960s left-wing social movements was certainly still uppermost in his mind during the 1980s. Pierce’s sledgehammer aversion to alternative subcultures led him to miss completely the nuances within the punk scene, as well as the opening moments of the white power skinhead phenomenon itself.