Blood and Politics (81 page)

His crimes were included at the time on the FBI’s annual assessment of the threat from terrorists. Also noted in the 1996 data were the Freemen, militia bomb plots in West Virginia and Washington State, and the Phineas Priesthood bank robbers—all crimes and conspiracies that would not have merited inclusion as incidents of domestic terrorism in the period prior to Oklahoma City. When the report for 1997 was published, it noted as “suspected terrorist incidents” the bombing of the Atlanta lesbian nightclub and the women’s health clinic, crimes later attributed to Eric Rudolph.

These were also the first times a clinic bombing or an attack on gay men and lesbians had been included in the FBI’s annual terrorism survey.
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The 1998 report took the crimes against clinics one step farther up and recorded the Birmingham clinic bomb in its survey of definite “terrorist incidents.” No such accounting had been done in 1993, when Dr. Gunn had been shot outside the clinic in Pensacola. The Clinton administration’s Department of Justice had since created a Task Force on Violence Against Abortion Providers, however. It was run out of the department’s Civil Rights Division, the same unit that had prosecuted skinhead violence during the early 1990s.

The existence of the task force notwithstanding, violence against abortion providers continued after Birmingham. Later that year, in October 1998, James Kopp shot and killed assassination style a gynecologist, Dr. Barnett Slepian. Slepian had just returned from synagogue to his home in Amherst, New York, when the sniper bullet came from a
distance through his kitchen window. Kopp then escaped into an international underground that sheltered him for four years.

Similarly, the FBI crackdown on militia and common law court groups could not and did not stop white nationalist shooters, who popped up unannounced almost without interruption. The strategies of leaderless resistance and lone wolf attacks that had gained popularity in the mid-1990s remained in place.

The ferocity of the continuing violence belied the fact that the political space inside white nationalism for organized mayhem and murder had shrunk considerably since the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. Further complicating the situation, the white nationalist movement as a whole had grown stronger. It seemed like a paradox. But it was not the vanguardists that were growing. Instead, it was the mainstreaming wing of the movement that developed increased influence, particularly around issues such as immigration and white southern veneration of the Confederate past. This was particularly evident with the growth of the Council of Conservative Citizens.

February 2, 1999.
Two congressional Democrats introduced a resolution condemning the Council of Conservative Citizens and the racism it propagated.
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Motivated by recent newspaper coverage of Senator Trent Lott’s and Representative Bob Barr’s attendance at council meetings in the past, the resolution was modeled on a similar measure passed in 1994 that condemned a Nation of Islam speaker.
²
It would have had no legislative power, except that of expressing congressional sentiment. Two clauses specifically mentioned the council by name:

Whereas the Council of Conservative Citizens is an outgrowth of the segregationist “White Citizens Council,” commonly known as the White-Collar Klan, which helped to enforce segregation in the 1950s and 1960s;

Whereas the Council of Conservative Citizens promulgates dogma that supports white supremacy and anti-Semitism and maliciously denigrates great American leaders including Abraham Lincoln and Dr. Martin Luther King . . .

The House resolution gathered the support of 138 cosigners, including 9 Republicans. Nevertheless, the Republican House leaders, including Barr, refused to bring the measure to the floor for a vote. And in the Senate, where Lott reigned as majority leader, no companion resolution was even introduced. The imbroglio over congressional leaders and the Council of Conservative Citizens had actually started with media coverage the previous December, in the midst of a debate over whether or not to impeach President Bill Clinton. As chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Barr was among the hard-liners pressing for impeachment.

Barr was first elected to Georgia’s Seventh Congressional District in
the 1994 Republican landslide, and his constituents stretched from Atlanta’s northern suburbs west to the Alabama border.
³
During the 1980s those counties had been saturated with Klan activity and racist violence, and the voters there had elected a string of ultraconservatives in the past, including Larry McDonald, who did double duty as chairman of the John Birch Society.
⁴
Barr opposed gun control, abortion rights, and civil rights legislation. He also had agreed to keynote a Council of Conservative Citizens meeting in South Carolina in June 1998, after being asked by a council member who had a seat on the Republican Party’s National Committee. Candidates for state superintendent of education and a South Carolina state representative also spoke at that meeting.
⁵
But it was Barr’s attendance that caught
The Washington Post
’s notice.

When first asked about his attendance, Barr responded that the “accusations are unfounded and deplorable.” Pressed further, Barr claimed that the council material he had been provided prior to speaking gave no indication of racism. If he had known about the group’s real politics, Barr told the press, he would not have attended. Not so, council executive Gordon Baum told the
Post
: “He knew what we were all about before he spoke to us. We don’t invite people and let them walk into the dark on us.” Baum’s counterpoint to Barr had the ring of truth. Another council spokesman seconded Baum by noting that prior to speaking, Barr had listened to a panel chaired by Sam Francis. And by any measure, Sam Francis’s white nationalism was as subtle as an eight-pound hammer pounding on a twelve inch I beam. Other speakers at Charleston included attorney Sam Dickson and Jared Taylor, the
American Renaissance
editor. In the end Barr simply reiterated his denials.
⁶

A similar sequence ensnared Senator Trent Lott. When first asked about his relationship to the council, Lott told the press he had “no first hand knowledge” of the group. Later, when a photo, originally published in the
Citizens Informer
, surfaced showing Lott with council leaders, the senator’s office was pushed into a corner. It continued denying that he knew anything about the council other than its existence as a local grassroots group. And Lott’s spokesman offered a pro forma statement about the council. “This group harbors views which Senator Lott firmly rejects. He has absolutely no involvement with them either now or in the future.”
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Lott’s past support for the council was a matter of the printed record, however, and it was unlikely that he did not know about its core white supremacist beliefs. It is hard not to be familiar with your favorite uncle Arnie’s true politics when you are likely to get a full blast of it over Thanksgiving dinner.

After the House resolution was introduced, the Republican Party chairman was forced to address the issue. “It appears this group does
hold racist views,” he told the press, and the party “rejects and condemns such views forcefully and without hesitation or equivocation.”
⁸
In the aftermath of the statement, one national committeeman did resign from the council.
⁹
On the other hand, Mississippi Republican Governor Kirk Fordice, who had graced several council platforms himself, refused to criticize the group. They had good people with “good ideas,” he said. Finally, after two months of deflection, the Republican leadership decided to quash the Democrats’ first resolution. In its place they introduced a resolution by the party’s lone black congressman, Representative J. C. Watts of Oklahoma. Watts’s resolution condemned racism and bigotry in general, but did not mention the Council of Conservative Citizens specifically. Critics contended that his measure was aimed at keeping the Republican Party leadership off the hook. Nevertheless, three dozen Democrats voted with the Republican majority and passed the Watts resolution.
¹⁰
Critics responded to the vote with contempt. A
New York Times
editorial on the incident hit directly at the Senate majority leader. “The original resolution gave Mr. Lott a new chance to sever his connection with the council and ease doubts about his commitment to fairness as the leader of the Senate. Sadly, he declined.”
¹¹
Poet and novelist Ishmael Reed had said it most succinctly several weeks before: “White racism is suddenly in high fashion in the era of neo-Confederate chic . . .”
¹²

The issue cooled as debate over the question of impeachment heated up, but Barr lost his seat in 2002, after congressional redistricting forced him into a primary fight against a fellow Republican conservative. Lott was entangled in a similar dispute after the 2002 election, when he waxed wistful about Strom Thurmond’s 1948 archsegregationist campaign for president. If only the Dixiecrat had won, Lott said, the country would not have suffered the travails that had followed. It was a bald statement, which conjured up others he had made supporting segregation in the past. The national press restaged the drama regarding his relationship to the council. Finally, the Senate majority leader was forced to step down, seemingly chastened by the response to his remarks.
¹³
As for the Council of Conservative Citizens, the congressional debate didn’t hurt it a bit. These were years of solid expansion.

The council’s relationship with
American Renaissance
had provided the organization with a new set of intellectuals and leadership. It now boasted six field offices, chapters in twenty-three states, and an advisory board of sixty stalwarts. It also claimed fifteen thousand members, including
more than twenty Mississippi state legislators.
¹⁴
A meeting in North Carolina in November 1997 had attracted three hundred activists, twice the number who had attended similar meetings at the beginning of the decade. Winston-Salem’s mayor-elect welcomed this crowd. A. J. Barker emceed the event in his capacity as a Council of Conservative Citizens state chairman, his stint as a Populist Party leader now well behind him. A panel of five attorneys talked about “civil rights and southern heritage,” and another panel of preachers set out to save Christian civilization. Sam Francis and Jared Taylor took their now-permanent places on the council’s podium. Kirk Lyons announced his latest organizational offspring, the Southern Legal Resource Center, and introduced five of the corporation’s directors to the crowd. He claimed that fifty lawyers in eleven states had affiliated with his efforts. The crowd applauded Lyons when he said, “[T]he group we work best with is the Council of Conservative Citizens . . . because you are willing to put it on the line. You are willing to get out in the streets . . . You are willing to see your name in the paper and not shrink from your duties as Christians, as Southerners and as citizens.”
¹⁵

That year the council also added a discussion bulletin to its list of publications. In this forty-four-page booklet, a new voice in council circles, Robert DeMarais, argued the case against conservatism. Like five of the bulletin’s six contributors, DeMarais held a Ph.D. from an accredited university. His inclusion was noteworthy, nevertheless, because of his staff position with William Pierce’s National Alliance, where he served as “Marketing Manager for National Vanguard Books.” DeMarais’s article did not include any explicit anti-Semitism, but his presence among the bulletin’s short list of authors served as a sign welcoming the National Alliance cadre into the ranks of the Council of Conservative Citizens. In a second edition of the bulletin, published in 1998, three of the five authors proposed that their movement’s strategy should aim at breaking up the United States, through either the secession of states or the creation of white republics. Here the old Aryan Nations argument for enclave nationalism had migrated over from the vanguardist to the mainstreamer’s side of the street. Only Sam Francis, rearticulating his thesis from a previous debate on the subject, argued persuasively for keeping the United States whole. But he also called once again for an explicit white nation and unchallenged racial dominance.
¹⁶

At the same time, the council in Louisiana claimed victory when a Confederate banner was displayed by government edict. In one Alabama instance, members rallied against immigration. In another, they opposed a Birmingham sales tax. In a third, they continued to press for flying the Confederate flag atop the state capitol. The flag remained an
organizing focus in South Carolina and Georgia as well. The council’s leadership also made a foray north, holding a public meeting in Queens, New York, and later a Christmas party in a Manhattan East Village restaurant.
¹⁷

In September 1998, a delegation went to France and attended a Front National event. At the time, the Front National had hundreds of locally elected officials,
¹⁸
attracted millions of voters, and maintained a strong presence in European politics. Known mostly for anti-immigrant politics, the front’s chief, Jean-Marie Le Pen, also flirted around the edges of Holocaust revisionism and anti-Semitism. In the first round of multiple presidential elections, Le Pen usually drew between 10 and 20 percent of the vote. The Front National “festival” in Paris that year attracted tens of thousands, as well as sympathetic activists from Britain, Germany, South Africa, and Spain. During the fest, Jared Taylor, Sam Dickson, and Council of Conservative Citizens president Tom Dover met privately with Le Pen. As Taylor translated, Dover formally presented the Front National chief with a Confederate battle flag. “This flag represents an early blow to the hegemony of the United States,” Taylor said in a supposedly humorous tone. Le Pen responded by saying, “We are sympathetic to the Confederate cause.” The council’s tabloid,
Citizens Informer
, reported on the exchange as if their leaders had met with the ghost of General Nathan Bedford Forrest rather than the absolutely corporeal Jean-Marie Le Pen.
¹⁹