Blood and Politics (18 page)

As high priest of his own Mountain Church, Miles weaved together Klan factions from the South with small uniformed neo-Nazi groups from the Midwest and the growing Aryan Nations powerhouse in the West. Each spring and fall, nationally known movement personalities along with 100 to 150 rank and filers gathered for a weekend fest at Miles’s Michigan farmstead. Second-tier leaders from California to North Carolina shared meals and got to know one another. They listened to an interminable roster of speakers. Some simply bragged of small achievements, such as opening a storefront in southwestern
Chicago. A few presented self-conscious accounts of the movement’s weaknesses and proposed remedies for future action. One or two criticized their comrades who still supported President Reagan, particularly mentioning those who supported the anti-communist contra crusade in Central America. But all speakers were politely applauded by the assembly, and each was praised by Miles, who served as master of ceremonies.
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Miles’s farmstead was not the only locus of factional fellowship. At a less organizationally diverse, more Klan-oriented event in Georgia each Labor Day weekend, a smaller number of speakers pounded a podium before the nighttime cross burning. And the Aryan Nations camp in Idaho became a third regular location for this cross-organizational pollination. There Richard Butler presided over three days of meetings each July. Unlike the Georgia and Michigan gatherings, participants often included wives and children alongside the overwhelmingly male congregants. Hour upon hour was spent sitting in assembly, listening to speeches that varied by place of origin, if not by topic. The real business was often conducted in small groups outside the meetings. Although Miles’s Aryan Nations title was only “ambassador-at-large,” it was his strategic vision that animated the proceedings. He began referring to a Fifth Era “Order,” and his vision of a secret army began to take more complete shape.
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Here Louis Beam proved invaluable.

If William Pierce served as the vanguardists’ godfather and Robert Miles as their high priest, then Louis Beam was their commander in chief.
¹⁵
Picture Napoleon with a soft Texas drawl: five feet seven inches, a small build, mottled skin, black hair, and brown eyes with “Born to Lose” tattooed across his upper left forearm.
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Born in 1946 and raised in the east Texas town of Lufkin, Louis Beam joined the army at age nineteen and served as a helicopter gunner in Vietnam. He claimed “1,000 hours combat flying time: 12 confirmed, 39 probable kills.”
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Like tens of thousands of young American volunteers, he hated losing the war and remained a proud anti-communist. “A bloody joke it was although we American G.I.’s didn’t realize that fact until May 1, 1975, when communist troops rolled into Saigon . . . After all the blood, the sweat, the heat, the death and dying—nothing.”
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Like millions of others, he quickly concluded that the heroism of frontline soldiers in Southeast Asia had been undermined at home. Beam took his analysis
one step further. He decided that it was not just failed policies (or the determination of the Vietnamese opposition) that had lost the war. A secret conspiracy had been at work.
¹⁹

Returning home to Texas in 1969, before the war’s end, he enlisted in the old-style United Klans of America, the same Klan organization that Miles was then leading in Michigan. The two first met in 1971.
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Beam later claimed he had joined the Klan because of the “current political and social conditions and a desire to taste the blood of my enemy.”
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This mix of faux rationalism and savage emotion became Beam’s characteristic calling card.

Beam boasted that he was suspected of, but never convicted in connection with, several high-profile offenses, including blowing up a left-wing radio station’s transmitting tower, shooting up a communist organization’s offices in Texas, and attacking Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping during a state visit to Houston.
²²
The incidents all were related in some fashion to the Vietnam War or the fight against communism.

Attracted by David Duke’s revolutionary ideas, Beam left the old-style Klan and joined the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan at its height in the 1970s. He eventually became its Texas state leader. While Duke primped for the television cameras and primed himself for electioneering, Beam trained a local paramilitary calling itself the Texas Emergency Reserve. It started harassing immigrant Vietnamese fishermen in Galveston Bay and was stopped only after a lawsuit was brought by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Beam resigned from the Knights but continued to refer to himself as a Klansman.
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In 1982, after his second wife filed for divorce and won custody of their two-year-old daughter, Beam grabbed the child and fled north to Richard Butler’s Aryan Nations camp in Idaho. (He subsequently worked out a more favorable custody arrangement.)
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From Idaho he published a collection of short essays analyzing the Klan’s history, strengths, and weaknesses. Beam’s line of argument was cogent and bloodcurdling at the same time. Unlike much movement writing, which employs liberal doses of euphemism and code language, Beam was brutal and direct.
Essays of a Klansman
, the booklet found in Richard Snell’s car, became a classic statement of the emerging underground. In contrast with Miles, whose call for a new-era Order in the 1980s was based on a critique of the “television” Klan prominent in the 1970s, Beam took his analysis back a step farther, to the 1960s.

“Had the so-called ‘civil rights’ movement of the 1960’s been a movement propagated, controlled and led by blacks,” Beam was certain, “there can be no doubt that this . . . would have been stopped by the Ku
Klux Klan.”
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His white supremacist assumptions, after all, axiomatically precluded black people from winning the battle by way of their own courage, intelligence, and political savvy.

It had been whites, he argued, not blacks, who had defeated his Klan brethren on the fields of southern segregation. These traitorous whites, Beam believed, had been either cynical careerists or misguided followers of the obviously false doctrine of equality and brotherhood. In both instances they had been directed by the real manipulators of events, the Jews. His rationale for the defeat on civil rights was identical to the reasons he believed Americans had lost in Vietnam. And it shared the same outlines of the argument that David Duke and others had made about the lost battle to defend Jim Crow in the 1960s. But instead of a political machine, Beam wanted war.
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Like Miles, he believed the terms of engagement needed to be changed. Violence needed to be redirected away from everyday black people on the street. At one point, after praising the bloody bombing of black churches in Mississippi, he implicitly conceded it had been a strategic mistake: “Victory is not won by removing the enemy’s pawns.” If instead “the culture distorters and destroyers [had] suffered [they] might have considered it too expensive . . . to have continued.”
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(An interesting side note here: The term “culture distorters” was not a euphemism common in Klan or Aryan Nations circles at the time. It was, by contrast, common coinage among Yockey admirers, including Willis Carto. Carto would never openly advocate the bloodbath Beam was seeking to encourage, but both obviously went to the same reservoir for ideas.)

To further his argument about switching targets, Beam published a “point system” in his
Essays
that awarded “Aryan warriors” only one one-thousandth of a point for killing an ordinary black person, but a full point for the murder of policy makers. Government officials and Jews were his preferred targets, not because he “hated” them more than black people but because he considered them ultimately more powerful.
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Compared with David Duke, who expressed the same ideas in a less bloodthirsty form and wrapped his program in a facetious concern for “majority” rights, Beam had a simple, straightforward goal: “a Racial Nation of and by ourselves.”
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In this way, Beam broke with the strategy of white supremacists in the 1950s and 1960s. “We do not advocate . . . segregation,” he wrote. “That was a temporary political measure that’s time is long past.” Nor did he want to carve out a small whites-only island on a multiracial continent. “Our Order intends to take part in the Physical and Racial Purification of ALL [emphasis in original] those countries which have
traditionally been considered White Lands in Modern Times,” Beam’s compatriot John C. Calhoun wrote, meaning North America, Europe, South Africa, and Australia. “We intend to purge this entire land area of EVERY [emphasis in original] non-White person, gene, idea and influence.”
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A more forthright call for ethnic cleansing and genocide would be hard to find in any of the white supremacist tracts published after World War Two.

The partnership then emerging between Robert Miles and Louis Beam did not require them to agree on the exact location of any future whites-only landmass. It was based first on a common vanguardism. While Miles counseled his kinsmen to “pull away” from mainstream institutions and create their own alternative counterculture, Beam directly addressed the weakness behind the vanguardist strength. “The vast majority of the White Race will,” he wrote, “oppose the Klan and any other racial movement.”
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This one statement undergirded the entire vanguardist project and most differentiated Miles, Beam, and godfather Pierce on one side from Carto’s competing mainstreaming mission on the other.

In addition, Miles and Beam shared a common assessment of parade politics and a candid agreement on the necessity of creating a clandestine apparatus. “There should be no doubt that all means short of armed conflict have been exhausted,” Beam wrote in his
Essays
. Even his critique of the Duke era echoed with the same insights motivating Miles: “Political involvement—either openly or sub rosa—is an excellent means for exposing our view to the public and recruitment of new members.” But he reminded those about to run for office that electioneering was only a supplement to the main objective: utterly destroying their enemies.
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In 1983 Louis Beam and Robert Miles started jointly publishing the
Inter-Klan Newsletter & Survival Alert
, a small circulation bulletin initially produced at Butler’s Idaho campground. At that point, both men also bore the title of Aryan Nations ambassador-at-large in addition to whatever other memberships they claimed. Distinct affiliations with particular organizations meant less than their common association with other vanguardists. In these pages, the term “Klan” was often substituted for the word “Order,” and both words came to mean any clandestine organization of white supremacists. Here they promoted strategies they believed would protect a developing underground from penetration from without and perfidy from within.

Miles remembered being betrayed from within and had watched his Michigan Klan go down the drain after his conviction. That Michigan
Klan had been organized much like a traditional business, with lines of authority running from the top down. A small number of officers knew and controlled the entire operation below them. When a few leaders decided to cooperate with the authorities, they effectively could and did turn over the entire enterprise to the police. Miles wanted a structure that would continue to stand, even if one or another of its supports did collapse. He proposed a web.

While this web would not prevent individuals or even small groups from betraying those around them, Miles and Beam argued that it could minimize damage to the movement as a whole. No one person or organization would be indispensable. “We conceive of the Order to be a WEB, instead of a chain,” Miles wrote. “In any web, each intersecting point is tied to many other points. In a chain type organization, one link is suspended by only the one above it. Let one link fail, and the function of the entire chain fails. Let one strand, on the contrary with a Web, break and the function of the web is unimpaired.”
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Here was a new theory of organization. In this web the sins of fractiousness and egoism turned into virtues. Instead of trying to get all the members of the Klan; Aryan Nations; National Alliance; and the Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord to amalgamate and follow one führer only, each organization itself formed a strand in the web. Further, as individuals drifted from one faction to another, the web as a whole stayed strong. A decline in Klan membership in the early 1980s, for example, was complemented by the growth of the new hybrid paramilitaries.

In the first issue of the
Inter-Klan Newsletter
, Beam published a short essay to expand the point. Traditional forms of organization inevitably lead to failure, he wrote. Instead of choosing a chain as his metaphor, as Miles did, Beam invoked the pyramid. It was as simple as a chart in a corporate boardroom. “The orthodox scheme of organization is diagrammatically represented by the pyramid, with the mass at the bottom and the leader at the top.” It was a schema for disaster: “an infiltrator can destroy anything which is beneath him in the pyramid of organization.”

Such concerns are not urgent if all you are doing is burning crosses in cow pastures on Saturday night, but if you plan to assassinate your enemies, rob armored cars, and bomb synagogues, then the stakes are much higher. “This [traditional] structure [is] . . . extremely dangerous for the participants when it is utilized as a resistance movement,” Beam instructed.
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Beam then analyzed cell-type organizations used by communist undergrounds. In these, small groups of people worked together but were known only to one another. Other small groups worked independently,
and the participants of one cell remained unknown to the personnel of another. Thus an enemy infiltrator could possibly betray one cell but couldn’t break up the entire underground. While this cell structure was an improvement over the traditional pyramid, Beam decided it also had weaknesses. The problem was it required a central command to give direction to all the cells, and their new vision of vanguardism did not support one single leadership.