Blood and Politics (12 page)

By contrast, where the Reagan administration perceived that the rights of white people were compromised, the Justice Department leaped into action. One of Reynolds’s earliest cases before the Supreme Court, for example, was a vain attempt to win charitable status for Bob Jones University.
²¹
Because of the university’s official policies of racial discrimination, the IRS had denied the South Carolina school tax-exempt status. The Reagan administration also cut funding to the Equal
Employment Opportunity Commission, resulting in a sharp reduction in discrimination cases pursued by the agency.
²²

For liberals, divining any significant distinctions between white supremacists and Reaganesque conservatives may seem like an unreal exercise, like counting devils on the head of a pin. For white supremacists, however, these differences were basic to their identity as an autonomous movement. As the year 1981 progressed,
The Spotlight
became increasingly vocal in its criticisms of the Reagan administration.
²³
As a result, many of the conservatives who had once subscribed to the tabloid and enjoyed its anti-Carter diatribes now stopped reading. They could not countenance treating Reagan as an enemy. During the ensuing years
The Spotlight
’s circulation fell by half—from 300,000 to 150,000 in 1984.
²⁴
It was still the newspaper of record for white supremacists, but it now operated on a narrower, more ideological, strip of white turf.

To compound the difficulties this created for Liberty Lobby, the
Washington Post
columnist Jack Anderson published an exposé of Willis Carto and Liberty Lobby in a short-lived magazine he produced in 1981,
The Investigator
. Picking up where a similar article in
National Review
had left off a decade before, these articles described Francis Parker Yockey as “America’s Hitler.” Willis Carto emerged as a secretive racist and anti-Semite pushing his way toward political respectability. Carto sued Anderson for libel, and the exposé became the subject of a long-running legal dispute that wound its way up and down the court system.
²⁵
Other lawsuits plagued Willis Carto during the 1980s, including a libel lawsuit pressed by Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt. Liberty Lobby won against Hunt. But a lawsuit brought by Mel Mermelstein proved infinitely more troublesome for Carto.
²⁶

October 18, 1981.
California Superior Court Judge Thomas T. Johnson took judicial notice “that Jews were gassed to death at the Auschwitz concentration camp” and ruled that the Holocaust was an established historical fact. He then ordered a group calling itself the Institute for Historical Review to pay a person named Mel Mermelstein a total of ninety thousand dollars and issue him an apology for any anguish it had caused.
¹
In that short courtroom declaration, a whole world of historical events spun around.

The defendant, Institute for Historical Review, had popped up during the crest years of white supremacist revival before President Reagan’s election. A marketing operation from the start, it sold a small stock list of books and pamphlets that rewrote the history of World War Two. In these pages Jews were not gassed to death at Auschwitz, and Anne Frank’s diary was a hoax. Indeed, the entire Holocaust was deemed a fraud in which the deliberate murder of Jews was invented for “political and economic” purposes. They also argued that President Roosevelt had wrongly pursued a war against Hitler, with tragic results for the West. These ideas, which had circulated on the fringes for two decades without effect, now sought a larger audience.
²

During the institute’s first conference in 1979, its executive director issued a challenge, a fateful fifty-thousand-dollar reward to anyone who could prove that Jews had been gassed at Auschwitz during World War Two.
³
The offer was a bald attempt to garner publicity and mainstream notice, but it failed. Only Carto’s
Spotlight
and David Duke’s Klan tabloid,
The Crusader
, published articles about the meeting.
⁴
Otherwise, the general media ignored it. Moreover, no one applied for the reward. At a second conference a year later, the director again made
reward offers.
⁵
When it looked once again as if nobody would take his bait, he sent letters to several Holocaust survivors, soliciting their applications.
⁶
Mel Mermelstein bit the hook. A seemingly hapless businessman living in southern California, Mermelstein surprised his antagonists and virtually dragged them into the sea.

Mermelstein was born in Hungary and uprooted as a teenager and deported to concentration camps. All of his immediate family perished in this whirlwind of horrors, and he alone survived Auschwitz. Eventually Mermelstein immigrated to the United States, moved to the Los Angeles area, and established a moderately successful business. He also maintained a small museum that memorialized his family and the Holocaust, and he recounted his experiences to schoolchildren in the hopes that such crimes would not be repeated. His personal biography even became the subject of a 1991 television movie.
⁷

Angered by the letter from the Institute for Historical Review, he could not leave it unanswered. On December 18, 1980, he formally applied for the fifty-thousand-dollar reward and proffered as preliminary evidence an affidavit to the fact that he had witnessed the disappearances of his family into Auschwitz’s gas chambers. In response, the institute juggled Mermelstein’s claim while it hoped to draw the famous Austrian Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal into the fray. Failing that, the IHR set conditions for evidence from Mermelstein. It became obvious that the institute had no intention of dealing fairly with the application, and Mermelstein sued it and its principals for breach of contract. During the process of legal discovery, his attorney began prying up the layers of secrecy surrounding the IHR’s actual workings. All of the institute’s correspondence to Mermelstein, for example, had been signed by “Lewis Brandon.” The Brandon in this case turned out to be a veteran of Britain’s white wing named David McCalden who had answered a help wanted ad in
The Spotlight
, moved to sunny California, and eventually become the institute’s founding executive director.
⁸
Even more significant, the lawsuit also revealed the fact that the Institute for Historical Review was a business name for a corporation known as the Legion for the Survival of Freedom, making the legion’s board of directors a party to the case. And the one corporate director that Mermelstein’s attorneys zeroed in on was Elisabeth Carto, Willis’s German-born wife. During one hearing the attorney argued: “Since Willis Carto bought into and took over [the legion], she has been the one director who has maintained continuity. She was the only corporate officer who was in charge to any extent of the operations . . .”
⁹

Both Elisabeth and Willis Carto repeatedly stonewalled and ducked during depositions. In one instance Willis Carto wore sunglasses and an
obviously fake nose and mustache while Mermelstein’s attorneys asked him questions and the camera recorded his every twitch.
¹⁰

The Superior Court’s ruling did not end litigation between Mermelstein and the institute. Over the next dozen years suits and countersuits flew between the parties.
¹¹
Often during these proceedings, the question being asked was whether or not Willis Carto actually controlled the affairs of the Legion for the Survival of Freedom and the IHR. The corporate history of the legion is a story unto itself. It must be told from its first moments in Carto’s hands in order to understand how in the end it brought about his fall.

This chronicle of events began, oddly enough, with the ground-up remains of a once mighty magazine of grand letters, H. L. Mencken’s
American Mercury
. After Mencken died, the publication and its stock of back issues were sold and resold until they landed with Hoyt Matthews, an aging superpatriot in McAllen, Texas. He published the much-diminished periodical under the auspices of a Texas nonprofit corporation, the Legion for the Survival of Freedom. Sometimes working as a volunteer at his side was a young mother named LaVonne Furr, who lived full-time in Louisiana, where her husband, Lewis Brandon Furr, worked as a parish court clerk.
¹²

LaVonne often had the world around her defined by men who requested her assistance. She occasionally helped her husband type up court records, for example, despite having three children to care for. And when she visited her parents in McAllen, her father asked her to help Hoyt Matthews with
American Mercury
. She gladly complied, even accompanying him on a business trip to Washington, D.C. There she briefly met Willis Carto while Carto and Matthews (apparently old acquaintances) chatted in the shadow of the Library of Congress.
¹³

When Matthews died in 1964, he left the magazine and the corporation to his daughter. But she had neither the interest nor the capability of keeping any kind of publishing business going. So she turned around and asked LaVonne Furr to take over the enterprise. Needing help herself, Mrs. Furr sought assistance from Willis Carto, beginning with the need to iron out the Legion for the Survival of Freedom’s corporate status. Since the original incorporators of the legion were not available, Furr and Carto reincorporated the Legion for the Survival of Freedom in Texas in 1966.
¹⁴
For about a year Furr tried to publish
American Mercury
from a Texas address, while Carto helped from his base in southern California. Then Carto offered the Louisiana housewife her first paying
job with the proviso that she move the magazine’s operations to California. With husband, Lewis, in tow, LaVonne Furr moved to Torrance and filled book orders, kept
Mercury
subscriber lists updated, and copy-edited the magazine—all from her dining room table. Carto set the magazine’s direction, made ultimate decisions about prospective articles, and gradually rebuilt it into his own ideological outpost.
¹⁵

With a new corporation and publication in hand, Carto rearranged his publishing miniempire. He stopped producing
Western Destiny
magazine, and made Noontide Press, which had published Yockey’s
Imperium
, an imprint of the legion. With both
American Mercury
and Noontide now under one roof, he used the Legion for the Survival of Freedom as the West Coast base for the more overtly ideological activities that his East Coast–based Liberty Lobby eschewed.
¹⁶

The magazine became edgier and nastier. The Holocaust in particular received a drubbing by
Mercury
contributors. In 1966 it published an article entitled “That Elusive Six Million.”
¹⁷
The following year another article asked, “Was Anne Frank’s Diary a Hoax?”
¹⁸
Still another claimed to be “The Truth About Dachau Concentration Camp.” It recapitulated various anti-Semitic conspiracy theories (the Rothschilds killed Lincoln!), before concluding that three million Jews had smuggled their way from Hong Kong to California and lived happily ever after.
¹⁹
And a pearly white profascist thread wound its way through Carto’s
American Mercury
, reflected in several articles, including an abridged reprint of a piece by Benito Mussolini entitled “Church, State and Sex.”
²⁰

As remarkable as the articles denying the Nazi genocide was one that affirmed the Hitler regime. Published fifteen years before German unification, it argued that the “Deutsche Reich” was still a legal entity and could therefore be resurrected, complete with its 1945 borders incorporating Austria, the Sudetenland, and a third of Poland. The article also claimed that calling Hitler a dictator was “the greatest distortion of truth.” Without the slightest hint of irony it concluded that “the Third Reich under the Fuhrer Adolph Hitler was in the very truest sense a government of the people for the people.”
²¹

Once the legion was running full steam, Carto resigned his formal seat on its board of directors, preferring instead to direct events from behind the scenes as the corporation’s business agent.
²²
With more efficient management,
American Mercury
’s paid circulation base grew from six thousand plus in 1966, to about twelve thousand in 1970, reflecting in part the constituency for hard-core racist and anti-Semitic material. By 1975, when white supremacists and Reagan-era conservatives both began to rebound, paid circulation had reached seventeen thousand plus. As articles apologizing for the Hitler regime appeared more frequently,
paid circulation started to slide back down, and by 1978 only a core group of eight thousand kept subscribing to the magazine.
²³
The circulation’s rise and fall during the mid-1970s should not be read as an indicator of the size or prospects of the white supremacist movement as a whole. Consider that David Duke’s Klan and William Pierce’s National Alliance were considerably stronger and bigger in 1978 than ever before. Support for Liberty Lobby also grew exponentially during this period as well. Rather,
Mercury
’s numbers pointed to a smaller specialty niche for hard-core material exculpating the Nazis’ worst crimes. That November, Carto and LaVonne Furr hired David McCalden as an assistant.

McCalden worked side by side with Mrs. Furr. They filled book orders generated by Noontide Press and made the legion an overall success. McCalden saw what was selling off the Noontide list. It was the Holocaust denial materials.
²⁴
And it was his particular genius that sensed this market’s existence and Carto’s business skills that exploited it.

To capitalize a new project focused on the Holocaust, the legion sold
American Mercury
for twenty-six thousand dollars to one of its contributing editors, who lived in Louisiana.
²⁵
LaVonne and her husband left California and followed
American Mercury
back to Louisiana, helping until that magazine finally ceased publication. Though she retired after this, LaVonne Furr (and her husband, Lewis) remained on the legion’s board of directors for years. With Willis Carto legally serving as business agent at the behest of the board, Mrs. Furr had more formal legal power in the corporation. For the time being she simply did as she was told and signed the minutes of board meetings that Carto made up and sent her.
²⁶
As will become more fully manifest, when she finally resigned her seat, control of the Legion-Institute for Historical Review finally slipped from Carto’s hands. The IHR’s campaign against truth in history, however, stayed the same over time. By its lights the Holocaust remained a hoax.