Blood and Politics (17 page)

Wangrud and friends found citations from the infamous
Dred Scott
decision to support the argument that only white people could properly be “citizens”; from Oregon territorial law they plucked sentences stating that only white male inhabitants of that territory could hold political office; and they found old United States statutes stipulating “that no other than a free white person shall be employed in carrying the mail.” This juridical hodgepodge was reprinted as evidence that the United States had been founded as a “white nation” and had lawfully remained such in the years following. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, all imposed by Congress and martial law, were supposedly null and void regarding white people, who were the actual “posterity” of the nation’s founding stock.
¹³

This form of white nationalism placed itself within the everyday vernacular culture of American life. No gun waving punctuated Wangrud’s declarations of sovereignty. He wore no white robes or armbands. And he didn’t live on an Ozark campground for cultists. Among those who shared Wangrud’s beliefs, however, were some with guns. And they included Richard Wayne Snell.

Snell believed that federal agents had tortured and mutilated Gordon
Kahl’s body, and after the shoot-out in Arkansas, Snell became a killer himself. He and his wife, Mary Jo, had moved from their trailer home in Texarkana, Arkansas, to a hilly eighty-acre plot of land near the hamlet of Muse, Oklahoma, just across the state line. Wayne went to auctions, bought government surplus, reworked it, and sold it. He had piles of old machines, motors, and scrap scattered around the property and planned to use them for barter once society collapsed. At least once a week Mary opened a booth at a flea market. They lived in a makeshift house built from Red River Army Depot boxes lined with insulation, without electricity or running water, while Snell was supposedly building them a real home. It was a rough way to live for a couple in their mid-fifties, but after thirty-five years of marriage they were starting over again as survivalists.
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Motivated by an all-consuming passion for guns and Identity theology, which he discovered in 1981, Snell had served Gordon Kahl as a courier while the Posse Comitatus farmer was hiding out in Arkansas. He also joined the Christian-Patriots Defense League and became a frequent visitor at Jim Ellison’s the Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord campground in Arkansas.

In October 1982, Snell was charged with knowingly concealing stolen property, in connection with a CSA robbery. Law enforcement officials dug up guns, dynamite, and silver on his Oklahoma homestead. But his troubles with the law did not end there. When a Texas bank attempted to repossess three vehicles that Snell had used as collateral on a four-thousand-dollar loan, Mary Jo Snell chased the repo man off with a carbine. When he returned a short while later, Wayne Snell met him with a “sub-machine gun.” Although the Snells kept their cars, three felony warrants were issued in Texas.
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That same month, August 1983, CSA members firebombed a gay community church in nearby Springfield, Missouri, and then bombed the Jewish Community Center in Bloomington, Indiana. That November, Snell and another CSA man attempted, but failed, to bomb a natural gas pipeline they believed supplied Chicago.
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The crimes continued when CSA members drove over to Texarkana and robbed a pawnshop. During the robbery Snell shot the proprietor, Bill Stumpp, in the head, neck, and back in rapid succession. As the man fell dead, Snell came out of the shop happy. No blood had splattered on him, and his briefcase was full of gold and jewelry. His compatriot carried out a box of guns.
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The crime spree continued on a road trip to Texarkana when he was pulled over on a routine stop by a black Arkansas state trooper, Louis Bryant. As Bryant approached his van on the driver’s side, Snell rolled
out of the front door and shot the trooper twice, then got back into the van and drove off. The reason: Snell claimed he didn’t want to go to jail on those “bullshit [repo] warrants” from Texas. But he also said that Bryant, who regularly patrolled that strip of highway and was known to local CB enthusiasts as Blue Flasher, should have known better than to stop him “out in the open.” For Snell, it was a clear transgression of God’s law: no black person should rule over a white person, especially where others might see. Snell was captured later that day and wounded in another firefight with law enforcement. While he was in the hospital, Elohim City’s Robert Millar visited Snell and served as his attending pastor.
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Snell later became one of multiple defendants in a seditious conspiracy trial. He was also found guilty of Louis Bryant’s murder and sentenced to life in prison without parole, and to death for killing the pawnshop owner, Bill Stumpp. On April 19, 1995, he was executed by the state of Arkansas, just hours after hundreds died in the bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building.
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Investigators trying to explain Snell’s and the CSA’s long trail of death and destruction should have looked closely at the contents of Snell’s car when he was arrested. Among the tools and paraphernalia police recovered from his van were three hand grenades, a .45-caliber machine gun, and two .22-caliber pistols with silencers. They traced one of the pistols to the pawnshop murder. They also found literature and tapes from the CSA and another Identity church. But the most important title in that collection was a booklet entitled
Essays of a Klansman
, which proved to be a clue to a much-larger development then engulfing the vanguardist wing of the white supremacist movement.
²⁰

July 4, 1983

Comrades in Marx and Mongrelism . . .

. . . I don’t believe in public marches or parades as my own publication and advice to klan leaders has been documented for years . . . You see, I truly believe that Nechayev was correct. The most effective propaganda is that of the deed. My good friend in Marion prison, the Puerto Rican patriot Raphael Miranda and I agreed upon many things and disagreed on many other things but on that point, we both agreed . . . Parades and public meetings are for the guerrilla theatre facets of resistance. I spent six years at Marion because I believe that action recruits far better than posturing.

You couldn’t have told a Cossack from an SR had you been alive during the real revolution in Russia. You still can’t.

L’Chaim . . . next life that is!

    
(signed)

    
Robert E. Miles

    
Cohoctah, Mi. 48816

In this one-page letter to a small circulation antiracist periodical,
¹
the venerable Klansman Robert Miles alternately mocked and threatened its recipients, revealed a keen grasp of history and his own operating strategy, and made short shrift of a factual error in reporting. It was classic Miles at his nasty and sarcastic best. Public events such as demonstrations and meetings acted out a “guerrilla theatre,” not real drama.
His “propaganda of the deed,” on the other hand, translated into a transparent reference to terror and violence. And Robert Miles knew the insides of both political theater and political violence more intimately than most. During the mid-1980s he served as high priest to bands of vanguardist armed robbers and Aryan killers, in the same way that William Pierce stood as their godfather.

In addition, the letter contained revealing references to the author’s personal background. Robert Edward Miles was born in Connecticut in 1925, just one year before Willis Carto. He spent several youthful years, however, in New York City, among highly politicized anti-communist Russian émigrés. As a result, Miles knew Russian ideological permutations—from peasant revolutionaries and Bolsheviks to anarchists—better than most history professors. Hence his esoteric mention of Nechayev, an obscure nineteenth-century terrorist. Cossacks may have been well known for their freewheeling and repressive czarist paramilitaries, but who besides assiduous students of twentieth-century Russian history would know that “SRs” stood for Social Revolutionaries, a peasant party at odds with both the czar and the Bolsheviks? Miles’s childhood experiences made him a special case.
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He had finagled a way into the New York National Guard at age thirteen and trained at Fort Dix. In 1941, at age sixteen, he became a radio operator for the Free French army while stationed in Britain. As soon as age permitted, he joined the U.S. Navy and fought in the Pacific theater, much like Carto. After the war, he later claimed, he worked for British intelligence, monitoring clandestine shipments of arms from New York to Palestine.
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With a penchant for poetry and mythmaking, as well as secrecy and information gathering, his character could have jumped off the page of a le Carré novel. Rumors flew among white supremacists that his long career as a public anti-communist covered for a secret life in the British MI6.
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And he certainly spent years as a solid member of the establishment: as a Michigan executive for an insurance company, the editor of a newsletter for safety engineers, and the finance chairman of the Michigan Republican Party.
⁵

Miles left the Republican fold when Alabama Governor George Wallace ran for president on a third party ticket in 1968, and Wallace’s inner circle felt glad to have a man of such high caliber aboard.
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Miles also joined Robert Shelton’s old-line segregationist United Klans of America during the same period. Just as his intelligence and talents had lifted him to the top of Wallace’s Michigan operation, the following year, 1969, he became state leader of the United Klans and a national officer
shortly after that.
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These were solid credentials in what Miles regarded later as political theater.

As the Wallace campaign apparatus disintegrated in 1970, and Klan numbers declined alongside it, Miles left the open stage for the clandestine world of “action” just below. He was soon arrested for the August 1971 bombing of five school buses used for racial integration in Lansing, Michigan, and for conspiracy to tar and feather a high school principal in a nearby town. Worse, many of his erstwhile Klan comrades quickly deserted him. Both Miles and his wife, Dorothy, turned bitter.
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“Robert gave up a $17,000 a year position in the insurance industry,” she wrote in 1972, “to fight for people whom [
sic
] he felt were ignored by, and left out of, the social system as it was operating. He stood up [and] fought at every level.” His sacrifices went unrecognized, even spat upon, by his old comrades, some of whom were now running away from their former advocacy of violence.

“To the people inside the old United Klans, who have been so busy trying to destroy everything that my husband built, may the Lord forgive you for none of us ever will,” she complained. “The traitors, left within the UKA, have worked unceasingly to destroy what is left of that fraternal group in Michigan.”
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Miles always remembered that experience, and it helped mold much of his strategic thought during the 1980s. After conviction, Miles served six years in Marion, Illinois, one of the federal system’s toughest penitentiaries, and he undoubtedly learned much about clandestine organizational strategies during that time. He never again confused the world of public politics with the underground of racist violence. To those outside his movement, the personality of Robert Miles should be an instant reminder that a successful insurance executive can bomb and burn as easily as any unemployed blue-collar caricature of a racist.

When Miles went to prison, membership in the various Klan factions had sunk to its postwar low of twelve hundred. When he was released in 1979, total membership levels had increased tenfold—thanks in part to Duke’s strategy of high-profile publicity, which actually benefited all the Klan groups. Miles became a nonsectarian Klansman for all seasons (although he now stayed away from Shelton’s UKA). He naturally assumed a role at the top of the Klan pyramid, commanding by force of personality as well as strategic vision. His intellect made him sure-footed where others faltered. His personal integrity and honor dwarfed the perpetual backstabbing of those around him. He opened his arms to all. Looking past individual weaknesses of his comrades, he extolled what he thought to be their virtues.

He began by analyzing the Klan’s various historical incarnations. Miles’s rendition was not aimed at creating a political machine like Duke’s. Rather, Miles wanted to break with Duke’s legacy and turn the cross wheel once again. He planned on creating a different type of organization, more akin to the night-riding counterrevolutionaries of the First Era Klan who had attacked Freedmen and Reconstruction governments after the Civil War. Miles virtually ignored the Klan of the 1920s and scarcely mentioned the Third Era from the 1960s.
¹⁰

“The Fourth Era correctly can be termed the ‘Television Era,’” he wrote in a 1983 assessment of Duke’s Klan. “It used television to grow and television used it to profit . . . Personal appearances on television, before the press and in the radio forums, became the raison d’etre of the Order and its total program . . . It worked.

“The Fourth Era was an excellent supersalesman,” he continued. “Unfortunately, it was not able to deliver the product which it had so competently sold.”
¹¹

In Miles’s mind, Duke’s Knights had revolutionary
potential
but had been stopped short by a dependence on television and the media. Miles believed a revolutionary consciousness had begun to develop among a stratum of white people, but the Klan that had developed during that period had not been, in fact, a competent
revolutionary
organization.

Ever faithful to the arcana of Ku Kluxery, even when he was reinventing it, Miles decided his new era order should be represented by “33/5” in numerology. The letter
K
was 11, being the eleventh letter of the alphabet; 33 then representing KKK, with the 5 being the Fifth Era. Miles must have recognized the bit of theater attached to his numeric signature. This numeric sign became one way of indicating adherence to a strategy aimed at the so-called Zionist Occupied Government and its supposed lackeys.
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