America's Secret Jihad: The Hidden History of Religious Terrorism in the United States (5 page)

In the 1500s various European scholars and adventurers claimed to have discovered the lost tribes: in North America as Native Americans; in Afghanistan as the Pashtuns; in Ethiopia as the Falashas. The foundational tenet of what is now called Christian Identity—that some or all of these tribes mixed with early Europeans, especially Anglo-Saxons—can be found as early as the 1790s. In his book
A Revealed Knowledge of the Prophecies and the Times,
Richard Brothers, a British naval officer, claimed to have received a divine revelation on this and related ideas. The book, and a very minor movement started by Brothers, lost traction after his death in 1824.

A more meticulous and far less mystical articulation of the same idea emerged in 1837, when Scottish linguist John Wilson published research speculating that the British people (he specifically referenced the bloodlines of the British monarchy) were connected to the lost tribe of Ephraim. Publishers reprinted Wilson's book on the subject five times during his lifetime. By the time of his death, another Englishman,
Edward Hine, had popularized a variation on the idea, arguing that white Europeans were the true chosen people of the Bible, that Jesus was an Aryan and not an ethnic Jew, and that European Jews were descendants of Mongolian-Turkish Khazars and had not originated in North Africa and the Middle East. In Victorian England, when the British Empire controlled more than one-quarter of the earth's land mass and the British Navy dominated the world's oceans, this kind of chauvinism gained wide currency. Hine's book became a best seller, selling 250,000 copies. In the 1880s Hine took himself and his ideas to another emerging world power with Anglo-Saxon roots: the United States of America. Hine gained a modest following in the Northeast and Canada, where he toured and gave presentations on his theory, which became known as British Israelism.
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But the religious ideas exported by Wilson and Hine were less anti-Jewish than they were pro-Anglo-Saxon. An unfortunate by-product of timing meant that the religious movement began its geographic spread inside the United States—mostly westward toward California—during the early twentieth century, when America was becoming increasingly xenophobic and hospitable to racism. The nation's second major wave of immigration, which brought millions of southern Italian Catholics and Eastern European Jews through places like Ellis Island, elicited a backlash against the new arrivals, which only intensified in the cauldron of ugly anti-ethnic feelings stirred up by World War I. Anti-Semitism and racism began to manifest themselves in both academic circles and popular culture as a whole.

At the turn of the twentieth century, a number of American community activists, biologists, and social scientists responded to the influx of European immigrants with alarm. Fearing that the newly arriving Americans could not assimilate into the wider culture, and worried that “inferior” races would contaminate America's gene pool or populate American society with generation after generation of imbeciles or criminals, these men and women became the foundation for the modern eugenics movement. Historian Ed Black asserts that the eugenicists hoped that by “identifying so-called ‘defective' family trees and subjecting them to lifelong segregation and sterilization programs they could literally wipe away the reproductive capability of those deemed weak and inferior—the so-called ‘unfit.'”
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Not surprisingly, eugenicists often counted Jews among the “unfit” given their sizable presence among the immigrant population.

In 1926 one of the leading eugenicists of his time, historian Lothrop Stoddard, described two races of Jews. He said that the “aristocratic” Sephardic Jews, who had entered the Mediterranean world, were the genuine Semites and that the Ashkenazic Jews (from Eastern Europe and Russia) were a mixture of diverse bloods, with features that reflected intermarriage with the Hittites. He said that these eastern Jews had migrated into southern Russia, where they had blended with the Khazars, whom Stoddard regarded as a combination of Turkish and Mongoloid peoples. Although Stoddard had no connection with British Israelism, the movement readily adopted the Khazar identity of the Jews as a further way to invalidate their claim to be descendants of the biblical Hebrews.
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According to religious scholar Michael Barkun, this secular strand of anti-Semitic genealogy developed from similar sources as British Israelism but evolved separately as an independent canon of pseudo-anthropological research. The scientific racism of people like Stoddard helped legitimize and reinforce racism against other minorities as well, blacks in particular.

In his highly influential work
The Rising Tide of Color,
Stoddard claimed that the black man's “most outstanding quality is his animal vitality.” Blacks were “the quickest of the breeders,” but they lacked “constructive originality,” and had it not been for the intervention of other races, “the negro would have remained a savage.” But while their “ineptitude” helped keep their populations in check, outside interventions by more cultivated races since the 1800s meant that blacks were “assured to multiply prodigiously” in the next few decades. The danger to white civilization came not from their growing numbers but because blacks could be easily manipulated by other (nonwhite) races and because of the potential for “crossbreeding.” Stoddard asserted that “black blood, once entering human stock, seems never really bred out again.”
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These ideas would become a direct influence on the intellectual development of Christian Identity in the 1940s. By the 1960s, according to Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, “the Khazar ancestry of the Jews was a firm article of faith” for white supremacists.
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In the meantime, eugenicists' ideas indirectly impacted the evolution of British Israelism in the United States by providing intellectual cover to deeply held prejudices with a long pedigree in certain segments of American society. By the 1920s these prejudices were becoming more and more widespread. During World War I, African Americans began to migrate to northern cities in large numbers to escape Jim Crow and to take readily available factory work. This migration stoked latent racial antagonism in the North. World War I also left a residue of xenophobia and jingoism directed at America's immigrant population, including Jews. This combination of racism and nativism found its outlet in what historians refer to as the first Klan revival or the Second Klan, which began in 1915.

“The Klan looks forward to the day when the Negro problem will have been solved on some much saner basis than miscegenation, and when every State will enforce laws making any sex relations between a white and a colored person a crime,” said Hiram Evans, leader of the national Ku Klux Klan from 1922 through 1939. Echoing the work of Stoddard and others, he added:

The Jew is a more complex problem. His abilities are great, he contributes much to any country where he lives. This is particularly true of the Western Jew, those of the stocks we have known so long. Their separation from us is more religious than racial. When freed from persecution these Jews have shown a tendency to disintegrate and amalgamate. We may hope that shortly, in the free atmosphere of America, Jews of this class will cease to be a problem. Quite different are the Eastern Jews of recent immigration, the Jews known as the Askhenasim. It is interesting to note that anthropologists now tell us that these are not true Jews, but only Judaized Mongols-Chazars. These, unlike the true Hebrew, show a divergence from the American type so great that there seems little hope of their assimilation.
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That the evolution from British Israelism to Anglo-Israelism and the acculturation of Hine's ideas into the North American context coincided with the first major Klan revival carried important implications for what became known as Christian Identity. Many trace
the growing interest in the KKK to America's first major motion picture blockbuster, D.W. Griffith's film
Birth of a Nation.
The movie reinforced, in the nation's popular imagination, a nostalgic and positive image of the post–Civil War South, lionizing the Ku Klux Klan as noble guardians of domestic order and the dignity of white women. The movie focused its bias against blacks, but anti-Semitism played a crucial role in the Klan's reemergence as well. When, in 1915, the governor of Georgia commuted the death sentence of Leo Frank, a Jewish industrialist convicted for supposedly murdering Mary Phagan, one of his factory workers, a mob of twenty-five men forcibly removed Frank from prison and lynched him. This group, the Knights of Mary Phagan, became the foundation for the new Klan, which, under the leadership of former Confederate colonel William Simmons, held a symbolic cross-burning ceremony in 1915 that officially started the Klan revival in Stone Mountain, Georgia.

Thus began a surge in KKK activity that is almost unimaginable to modern sensibilities. At its peak, during the 1920s, the KKK enjoyed an estimated membership of up to 8 million, with franchises in most states, appealing to both urban and rural Americans concerned about the changing social and economic dynamics in the nation.

Becoming one of the largest fraternal organizations in the country, the Klan began to formalize its activities in ways reminiscent of groups like the Freemasons and the Knights of Pythias. It revamped the Reconstruction-era Klan hierarchy with a system of official ranks. The Imperial (or Grand) Wizard ran a multiregional Klan group, Grand Dragons ran state franchises, and Grand Giants ran county subgroups, or Klaverns. To these the Klan added the position of a Kleagle, or recruiter. It modeled its procedures and guidelines on established fraternal groups, making sure to use the letters
Kl
when appropriating such conventions. Its national rules and regulations could be found in a Klonstitution; its official meetings became Klonvocations; and each separate Klavern had its own Kloran, which set forth meeting procedures and rituals.

As they had during Reconstruction, many KKK members sought a veneer of biblical legitimacy to justify their ideas. Each Klavern had its own chaplain (called a Kludd), and each recruit was asked to confirm his religious bona fides as a (Protestant) Christian. But
the KKK's preferred passage of scripture, Romans 12, put the lie to its pretense of piety. Romans 12, the “foundation of the Invisible Empire” according to luminaries such as William Simmons, implores Jews and gentiles alike to “live peaceably with all men” in a spirit of “brotherly love,” to avoid revenge, and to feed one's enemies.
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This is hardly a sincere foundation for a group associated with many of the 559 lynchings of African Americans that occurred from 1920 to 1929. The FBI rightfully called the KKK's pretense of religion a “false front” and “bait.”
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A genuine religious movement would not have lost members by the millions, in a precipitous fashion, as a result of the Great Depression. And while it directed violence at blacks, the Second Klan noticeably did not attack Jewish targets in large numbers after 1915.

At its core, the Klan remained a reactionary, ethno-chauvinist terrorist group, bent on preserving white supremacy. Over time, it became significant to any discussion of domestic, religious terrorism because elite members of the Ku Klux Klan often became the most zealous, if often covert, proponents of Christian Identity. The Second Klan's significance in the evolution of Anglo-Israelism is more representative than substantive: It shows how open 1920s and 1930s America was to anti-Semitism and racism. It was in that environment that two men popularized Anglo-Israelism and imbued it with concepts of anti-Semitism and racism that continue to resonate in Christian Identity theology. Howard Rand, a New England lawyer, coined the term
Christian Identity.
In Michael Barkun's excellent study of the origins of Christian Identity,
Religion and the Racist Right,
he describes Rand as the “the critical bridging figure between mainstream British Israelism and its subsequent American variant, Christian Identity.” An “extraordinary organizer,” Rand “single-mindedly . . . created a national movement,” traveling, in one estimation, “eighteen thousand miles through the South; twelve thousand miles through the Middle West; and fifty thousand miles during eight months in the West” on behalf of his organization, the Anglo-Saxon Federation. Barkun also notes that while Rand “completed the consolidation” of Christian Identity in the United States, he also opened it to “right-wing and anti-Semitic influences that were to be amplified in postwar years.”
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Just as if not more important to the development of those influences was William J. Cameron, a member of the Anglo-Saxon Federation but more importantly a writer, editor, and publisher for automobile tycoon Henry Ford's periodical the
Dearborn Independent.
Cameron used the pulpit of that paper, which boasted a circulation, at its peak, of seven hundred thousand, to promote virulently anti-Semitic messages. More than anything, Cameron focused his attention on an alleged international Jewish conspiracy to undermine the common good. Cameron promoted the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion,
a hoax supposedly documenting just such a Jewish cabal, which has been read and believed by millions.
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Cameron assembled his collective anti-Semitic works into a four-volume set, known as
The International Jew,
and groups like the NSRP continued to market it to white supremacists decades after Cameron began propagandizing in the 1920s.

Although KKK membership dissipated in the economic crisis of the Great Depression, the idea that Jews were in some way responsible for that calamity gained a noteworthy following inside the United States, including among a circle of preachers taking advantage of the growing popularity and availability of radio. These men shifted in their stereotypes, at times playing on the age-old prejudices that Jews ran the world's financial institutions and at other times conversely claiming that Jews were active supporters of communism. Among the most prominent was Catholic radio preacher Father Charles Edward Coughlin, who once said, “By their failure to use the press, the radio and the banking house, where they stand so prominently, to fight communism as vigorously as they fight Nazism, the Jews invite the charge of being supporters of communism.”
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Father Coughlin, it should be noted, reached an audience so large that in some weeks he received 1 million different pieces of fan mail. For all his anticommunism, Coughlin was an economic populist and supporter of Louisiana governor Huey P. Long's Share Our Wealth program.
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It was there that he influenced a young aide to Long, Gerald L.K. Smith, an ordained minister since 1916 in the Disciples of Christ.
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