Blood and Politics (5 page)

Among American white supremacists, Yockey’s reputation rested on a six-hundred-page magnum opus entitled
Imperium
, written in 1948 while he lived in Ireland. Only a thousand copies of the first volume and two hundred of the second volume were initially published in England. Carto had read one of these rare early copies by 1955 and was obviously taken by its ideas.
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Borrowing from Oswald Spengler, a turn-of-the-century German philosopher, Yockey treated civilization as a biological organism with a life cycle. Civilizations are born, thrive, stagnate, and die.
Imperium
described in some detail Yockey’s version of how Greek civilization, Nordic mythology, and Teutonic traditions provided the original sources of European strength. Yockey argued further that Western Civilization was one unit, undivided by borders based on language, religion, or economic markets. And in his schema the fate of the “West” depended more on developments in Europe than on the United States. Yockey created a specific lingo to tell these tales. “Culture creators,” by his account, were the highest stratum of a civilization. “Culture distorters” occupied the lowest rung. He believed mestizo and African populations were a virus infecting the culture of the United States. He also counted the “Church-State-Nation-People-Race of the Jew” as the most destructive of “culture distorters.”
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Carto claimed that he differed with Yockey on several points. He believed that Yockey downgraded the significance of “race” as a biological structure in the creation of culture. Like Yockey’s, Carto’s reasoning began with the presumption that a civilization was the product of its culture-bearing stratum. Carto explicitly argued that this stratum was a specific population or racial group. He then extended his syllogism to the conclusion that if nations embodied a specific culture, then nations were composed (only) of a homogeneous racial group.
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For Carto the obverse was also true. Western Civilization had entered a period of decline as a result of a polluted gene pool, he contended. And his prescription for renewal called for cultural and economic autarchy: the isolated development of a racially based civilization, unsullied by any other input. Any “influx of alien ideas, ideals, religions and peoples” might ultimately kill the American (white) culture, Carto wrote while using an assumed name. On this count, he specifically faulted the aftereffects of slavery and non-European immigration into North America.
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What began as a discussion of culture creation ended up with a call for a blood and soil type of nationalism at odds with the ideas of civic
identity that came to the fore after World War Two. Yockey and Carto’s argument that the West should be defended through a program of racial purity placed the ideas of both men outside the intellectual conventions of that time. Carto, however, spent his entire political career trying to find an avenue into the political mainstream. By contrast, Yockey lived and died on the edge of society. Despite this difference, when the two men met in person in June 1960, it was apparent that they shared a great affinity for each other. At the time, Carto still lived in San Francisco, the same city where Yockey was arrested on charges stemming from possession of multiple passports and false identification. Carto rushed to visit Yockey at the jail and twice went to his court hearings. And in the years that followed, Carto repeatedly described these events.

At the jail, a heavy screen stayed between them, but it didn’t prevent Carto from sensing Yockey’s powerful personality. “I knew that I was in the presence of a great force, and I could feel History standing aside me,” Carto wrote after the event.
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At the court prehearings, Carto’s fascination bordered on the homoerotic. “His eyes bespoke great secrets and knowledge and such terrible sadness,” he wrote as if they were intimates in a lifeboat on an unfriendly sea. “As his gaze swept across and then to me,” Carto confessed, “he stopped and for the space of a fractional second, spoke to me with his eyes. In that instant we understood that I would not desert him.”
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Just a few days later Francis Parker Yockey, dressed only in underwear and his knee-high storm trooper–style boots, took a capsule of potassium cyanide that he had somehow obtained and burned his mouth before dying in the jail cell.
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After Yockey’s suicide, Carto secured the rights to
Imperium
and reprinted it as one volume in 1962, using his own imprint, Noontide Press. He wrote an introduction for the book under his own name.
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The Yockey faith, he believed, could “reconquer the Soul of the West.”
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Carto also made an unusually unabashed declaration of white supremacist beliefs in the introduction: “Unbiased anthropologists consider the White race to be the highest evolutionary development of life on this planet.”
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Two years later Carto’s Noontide Press began publishing a twenty-four-page plain paper periodical,
Western Destiny
. It promoted Yockey’s philosophy while discussing topics such as evolutionary biology, classical Rome, and the supposed virtues of the Nordic ideal. Not quite a magazine for theory, neither was it intended for a mass market. Rather, it became a vehicle for ideas then newly percolating among Carto and his ideological peers.

Carto knew that most run-of-the-mill segregationists attracted to Liberty Lobby at that time would find the Yockey faith off-putting, so he kept the two enterprises as separate as possible. Liberty Lobby, after all, was headquartered on the East Coast.
Western Destiny
was published from the West Coast, and Carto often used the name E. L. Anderson when writing in its pages.

“Culture creators,” “culture bearers,” and “culture destroyers” inhabited the new magazine’s pages. One of its first editorials argued, for example, that “tolerance can often be a culture-retarding and culture distorting weakness.”
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Although the magazine’s use of Yockeyisms guaranteed it a relatively small audience, Carto modestly considered
Western Destiny
“the most notable publishing venture in the English-speaking world.”
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He was, after all, both its publisher and one of its editors. It attracted an international readership, including Europeans interested in its discussions of art and politics. Its readers included a young David Duke, who cut his first ideological teeth on its pages.
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And among the Americans associated with the project, several contributing writers became significant personalities on their own terms over the next two decades.
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One of those, a man calling himself Wilmot Robertson, requires special mention here.

The author who used the nom de plume Wilmot Robertson was actually named Humphrey Ireland. An erudite and well-bred character about ten years older than Carto, he publicly described himself as a native of Pennsylvania with a long American pedigree, dating back before the Civil War. To friends and associates, Robertson claimed to have attended Yale University before World War Two, lived briefly in Germany during the 1930s, and then dodged American wartime repression of Hitler sympathizers.
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Robertson’s
Western Destiny
contributions usually treated cultural issues and the fine arts. Carto’s constant huckstering annoyed Robertson, however, and he eventually pursued his own separate path.

In 1972, Robertson self-published a six-hundred-page tome entitled
The Dispossessed Majority
. Part nineteenth-century anthropology, part scientific racism, the text was accessible to anyone with a quality high school education. Unlike the dense Spenglerian lingo of Yockey’s
Imperium
, this book could actually be read and understood by activists. Robertson’s argument was unabashed in its simplicity: “Minority participation in politics and in every other sector of American life has now increased to where it can be said that the Majority is no longer the racial Establishment of the United States.”
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Further, he argued, “the idea of innate racial equality had become so firmly established in modern education and in the communications media
that no one could question it.”
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The contradictory character of Robertson’s claims should not be lost. In his schema, the idea of white supremacy had once provided the rationale for slaveowning, colonialism, and empire. In the context of the 1960s, this same ideological construct described the loss of positions of dominance, in part because of changes wrought by a transformation in accepted ideas about “innate racial equality.” Indeed, in the white supremacist mind-set, political power had always been an all-or-nothing contest between the races. And during the last half of the twentieth century, it was a battle they believed they were losing.

Western Destiny
devoted itself to questions related to this seeming loss of privilege and position. Carto’s editorial partner in this project was Roger Pearson,
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a British expatriate who had become a devotee of Aryanism while living on the Indian subcontinent. By training an anthropologist, Pearson held several different university positions over the years. From 1956 to 1963 he was best known as the publisher of
Northern World
, a magazine that emphasized eugenics, a set of ideas particularly unpopular in the years immediately following World War Two. It claimed that selective breeding can improve the human gene pool, and thus humanity, and other faux scientific claims. While publishing the newsletter
Right
, Carto had done double duty as a junior editor on Pearson’s project. And their partnership extended to the new Yockeyite magazine.
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The joint venture fell apart in 1966, and
Western Destiny
ceased publication. It turned out to be the least hostile political divorce among Carto’s many such separations. The lack of publicly expressed venom by Carto may have been a result of Pearson’s own independent standing and prestige. After his career diverged from Carto’s, Pearson too made a mark among a second generation of so-called scientific racists. He stayed in the United States and continued to promote both scientific racism and anti-Semitism.
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But he left the Yockey cult in favor of a career as a professional anti-communist. In 1978 he became chairman of the World Anti-Communist League, an international conglomeration of South Korean intelligence assets, European far right groups, Latin American death squads, and their North American masters.
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He was eventually dismissed from that position. During the same period Pearson also served at the Heritage Foundation as editor of
Policy Review
, the conservative think tank’s flagship periodical. For these services to the causes of anti-communism and conservative respectability, Pearson later won a letter of support from President Ronald Reagan: “Your substantial
contributions to promoting and upholding those ideals and principles that we value at home and abroad are greatly appreciated.”

For Carto, the years after
Western Destiny
included his own growth into a major figure among white supremacists. And after Governor George Wallace’s presidential bids, Carto emerged as a godfather to the generation of white supremacist activism that followed.

The story of George Wallace has been told multiple times. He began his political career as a relatively moderate Democrat in the Alabama House of Representatives but soon became famous as a vitriolic defender of the segregated South. His 1963 inaugural address included invocations to Confederates Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis, the “Great Anglo-Saxon Southland,” and the Christian faith. In words that defined him long after his death, Wallace proclaimed: “In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod the earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny . . . and I say . . . segregation today . . . segregation tomorrow . . . segregation forever.”
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He gained national attention when he stood in a schoolhouse door in a symbolic attempt to block court-ordered integration at the University of Alabama. Acting under Wallace as Alabama’s Democratic governor, his state authorities spied on, beat, and jailed civil rights activists. He allowed Klan groups a murderous free rein and paid little attention to their many victims. His closest advisers were hard-core racists and (anti-Semitic) conspiracy theorists, and his chief speechwriter was a former Klansman. When Wallace launched a bid for president during the 1964 Democratic Party primaries, he surprised poll watchers by receiving a third of the primary votes in Wisconsin, Indiana, and Maryland—all states outside his southern base.
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Carto and Liberty Lobby supported Wallace instinctively. Liberty Lobby produced a pro-Wallace pamphlet in 1965,
Stand Up for America: The Story of George C. Wallace
, and mailed out 175,000 copies to its own supporters. Another 150,000 copies belonged to Wallace’s campaign, which regularly distributed the Liberty Lobby publication on its own.
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When Wallace’s speechwriter convened a meeting of racist and far right leaders in 1966 to jump-start a 1968 bid, Carto was invited and sent a representative.
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Wallace decided to run a third party presidential campaign outside both the Republican and Democratic parties in 1968. He named his third party the American Independent Party, but never called a national convention or took other serious steps to build a party apparatus free of
his campaign. Instead, his most trusted lieutenants ran a top-down operation from headquarters in Montgomery. Nevertheless, outside the Alabama home base, far right groups provided much of the campaign’s muscle. Paramilitary outfits such as the Minutemen in the Midwest and the Klan in the South found themselves Wallace allies. Larger groups such as the John Birch Society worked in tandem with smaller sects. Segregationists rubbed elbows with men from the national socialist world. Within this milieu, Liberty Lobby blipped on the screen much like any other group.
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