Blood and Politics (2 page)

I started writing and speaking about what I had learned and with a few colleagues published several issues of a small-circulation magazine. Soon my own contributions were noticed by others. When a particularly nasty strain of anti-Semitism began mutating through the Midwest, local Jewish community institutions turned to me for information and advice. Farmers in the region also contacted me for help. At a 1983 meeting in Iowa of family farmers, I detailed the variety of conspiracy-besotted groups preying on their ranks. In response, farmers came to me with intimate stories from their own communities about events that had long remained below the national media radar. Journalists from Chicago, Minnesota, and points east began calling, and I became a news source. But it was probably my discovery in 1984 of a former Klan leader at the helm of another, more election-oriented group that pushed me out of the ranks of part-time volunteers and into the ranks of full-time professionals.

It was simply a matter of cross-referencing periodicals. In one publication, entitled
White Patriot
, a man named Bob Weems was pictured leading a Klan event in Mississippi. In the second publication, a Washington, D.C., weekly titled
The Spotlight
, the same person was wearing a coat and tie as chairman of a group calling itself the Populist Party. I wrote up my conclusion: the new party chairman was a veteran Kluxer. And I contacted organizations also working in this field, the National Anti-Klan Network in Atlanta and the Klanwatch Project of the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery. Together, they asked me to write a research monograph exposing this new so-called Populist Party, its Klan chairman, as well as its founder, a former salesman named Willis Carto. The two anti-Klan organizations jointly released my report at a press conference in Washington, D.C., in September 1984.
⁵
What had been an avocation became my vocation.

As the years passed, my research methods became more refined and comprehensive. In addition to cross-referencing a wide variety of printed sources, I watched hundreds of hours of videotapes and listened to audiotapes. I attended trials and collected courtroom documents—criminal indictments, FBI affidavits, bankruptcy filings, and depositions. One year I spent in Atlanta while working at the Center for
Democratic Renewal, attending Klan rallies in small north Georgia communities almost every other weekend. Several men and a couple of women turned to me or my immediate colleagues for help leaving the movement, and they too brought stories of their own. A steady stream of individuals from every corner of the country conveyed information about activities in their communities. Convinced that white supremacists routinely hid the truth from reporters and deliberately misled outsiders, I enlisted several volunteers to quietly attend racist meetings and events. In addition, I did my own straightforward interviews and reporting.

The racists and anti-Semites sometimes wrote about me in their publications. In one I was described as a “bigwig” in the Jewish community; actually I was a “little wig.” A second tabloid decided I was “intense and humorless” and generally tried to discredit me. The descriptions veered ever further from the truth after that, and I soon read that my own ideas had supposedly turned me into an ideological descendant of Joseph Stalin. After writing a monograph published in 1986 by the National Council of Churches on the so-called Christian Identity theology, I received a letter from an imprisoned member of The Order, a group of Aryan bandits. For the most part, he thought I had described his beliefs correctly. Nevertheless, he wrote, “you are responsible for the content & accuracy of your report, & you will receive your just rewards for your lies!” Ampersands and exclamation point were included. Others were less charitable in their predictions of my future, and I took the appropriate steps to protect myself.

At each point I carefully regarded nothing and no one at face value. At a 1988
Kristallnacht
commemoration in Tulsa, for example, I unexpectedly met a retired local college professor active in Holocaust denial circles. We talked together for an hour on the sidelines. He assured me he was interested in scholarly inquiry only. A year later I recognized him parading with skinheads and Klansmen through the streets of a small town in north Georgia. On another occasion I was a guest speaker in Sweden with an English colleague, talking about skinhead neo-Nazis and their white power music bands. In one city, several middle-aged people thanked us for the presentations but politely told us that nothing of that sort had ever happened in their community. After the program’s official end, however, a teenager came up to us and quietly said that one such English band, called Skrewdriver, had just been there the week before and played to a large audience of young people.

The transatlantic traffic in white supremacy drew my attention to the way multiple organizations maintained relationships with their ideological
counterparts in Europe—particularly the United Kingdom and Germany—further evidence that this was a cosmopolitan, not a parochial, movement.

Over time I developed an emotional armor that has helped me continue studying the movement firsthand. After decades of what my anthropologist friends call “participant observation,” its personalities and organizational permutations have became so familiar to me that I sometimes feel as if I know what they are going to do next before they do. This book is the result of those decades of research. Despite my personal engagement, I have taken great care to treat fairly the men and women who populate the following pages. This is their story, not mine.

By dictionary definition, nations are socially constructed groups of people who share a common language, economy, and culture on a common territory. Finding a cohesive notion of national identity is something the United States has struggled with since its beginning. In the present, the dominant view is based on citizenship: if you are a citizen—whatever your race, religion, creed, or place of birth—then you are an American. Political scientists distinguish nations from another type of societal formation: states (often called countries), which are sovereign political entities that establish governments, convene courts, raise armies, and defend their borders. For mainstream Americans, the United States is simply a unitary nation-state, with a federal form of government and a multiracial populace. By contrast, white nationalists turn their skin color into a badge of a distinct national identity, and they exist in a permanent state of self-consciousness about race. They are dedicated to the proposition that those they deem to be “white” own special rights: the right to dominate political institutions, the economy, and culture. They believe that a “whites-only” nation exists in fact, if not in name. And they swear to a duty to create a whites-only nation-state on soil that once was the United States of America.

This white nationalist movement of the twenty-first century grows out of the white supremacist movement of the 1970s and 1980s, a transformation that this book documents. White supremacy is a multisided phenomenon, and a host of scholars have tackled the subject. In a seminal comparison of South Africa and the United States, the historian George M. Frederickson defined it as “the attitudes, ideologies and politics associated with the rise of blatant forms of white or European dominance over ‘nonwhite’ populations.” In colonial America the practices of domination actually came into existence before the ideas that justified them, but as the vignette that opened this preface demonstrates, white
supremacy as a political, economic, and ideological structure became so completely ingrained that it was virtually invisible to most white people. It was the way they lived, and they lived it largely without comment—except at those moments when it was most obviously challenged. At times of crisis, such as the Civil War and Reconstruction, or the arrival of large numbers of black people in the North and Midwest and out of the South during World War One, white supremacist movements emerged to oppose any change and recapture the status quo ante. After World War Two, during the 1950s and 1960s, a white supremacist movement tried to stop the civil rights revolution, but that attempt largely failed. It would be a mistake to conclude that the changes wrought in those years completely ended the economic, political, and social privileges that accrue to white people, and a debate remains among people of goodwill over the nature and extent of racial equality. The point here is that the dynamics of the 1960s caused white supremacists in the 1970s and 1980s to conclude that their ideological forebears had lost that battle over civil rights. As a consequence, they built a movement around the idea of white dispossession, the notion that the country that they believed had once been the sole property of white people was no longer only theirs. It is important to note that this sense of loss by a segment of white people is not rooted in any particular policy aimed at promoting equal opportunity, such as affirmative action or school busing. This sentiment does not rise and fall in accordance with business cycles and is not contingent on the actual prosperity levels of this particular population. Rather, many different factors contribute to the rise and fall of the white nationalist movement, and these causes will be discussed throughout the following pages.

The ideas underlying the white supremacist movement are manifestly false. Jews do not run the United States or the world. Black people are not inherently inferior to white people, or anybody else. The economic life and culture of United States have never been exclusively white or European. Nor are the privileges and power accruing to white people God-given or genetically driven. At the same time, political power has rested exclusively in white hands during much of this country’s life, and this kernel of truth resides at the heart of the white supremacist mythology.

While some white nationalists might still wish to rule over people of color in ways reminiscent of Jim Crow segregation, most do not wish to return to the past. Instead, growing parts of the movement want to carve out a new territory free entirely of black people, Jews, and a host of others they regard as undesirable. If they must burn the entire house down in order to rebuild it from the basement up, they will. If they are able to
capture the existing organs of state power and use them for some form of ethnic cleansing, then that will be the path taken. If the current generation has to wait until mid-century for their ideological progeny to plant the flag of an Aryans-only republic, then that will be their choice. Even if they do not reach their final goals, they can push the country into an abyss along the way.

A secondary thread in this discussion reaches over to a related, but distinct, phenomenon sometimes known as the Christian right. It would be impossible to treat both movements comprehensively in one book. But it is necessary here to trace those points at which the two converge, and it is my argument that white nationalists share many of the obsessions that motivate religious and cultural traditionalists. They both believe that feminists, gay men, and lesbians are destroying the (white) nuclear family. And they share the notion (with many outside their immediate ranks) that middle-class white people—men in particular—are actually victims in contemporary society, without adequate political representation. “Christian nationalism,” by definition, contends that the United States is or ought to be a Christian nation. As a result, it relegates Jews and other non-Christians to a secondary status. Although a strain of white nationalism has developed without an explicit anti-Semitic conspiracy theory at its root, the focus on Jews is a primary tenet of most forms of white nationalism. And it is the ideology of anti-Semitism—with its belief that Jews act as an alien ruling class that needs to be overthrown—that transforms ordinary racists into would-be revolutionaries.

But this is not a story of paranoids or uneducated backwoodsmen with tobacco juice dripping down their chins, the “extremists” of popular imagination. As a movement white nationalists look like a demographic slice of white America: mostly blue collar and working middle class with a small number of wealthy individuals. Doctors, lawyers, and Ph.D.’s are among the leaders. Almost all the leaders and most of the activists are men, but women play a distinctive part in the movement, not totally unlike the traditional role assigned to them by cultural conservatives in the larger society. The internal dynamics of this movement are much like that of other political movements: some individuals join already fully convinced ideologically; others learn (and accept or reject) the movement’s ideas only after becoming active in it. Rank-and-file members read a common set of periodicals and now subscribe to a similar set of cyberspace forums. Organizations and individuals quarrel over money, strategy, and power. But activists and leadership alike have pollinated
across organizational lines, creating a single, if not seamless, whole. They employ significant resources in pursuit of their goals. And they look forward with hope and aspirations for the future.

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, thirty thousand men and women form its hard-core populace, and another two hundred thousand plus form a periphery of measurable supporters, giving money and attending meetings.
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The movement has reached into every geographic corner of the country, although the areas of greatest influence lie outside the more liberal corridors of the Northeast. They have spawned at various times violent criminal gangs, sophisticated election campaigns, churches that worship an Aryan Jesus, and skinheads steeped in Norse mythologies.

Sometimes these different groups act together like the muscles and nerves of a well-coordinated athlete, and at other moments their synapses seem to be in complete collapse. Treating the movement as a comprehensive whole, a viewpoint rarely taken, enables the reader to understand the total dynamic that drives this organism and to draw the connections between its various parts. To appreciate fully the significance of the white power music subculture, for example, it is necessary to see its interaction with other parts of the movement. To grapple with the import of various electioneering efforts, the reader needs to know about the countervailing tendencies pulling at it from
within
the movement. At times activists relate to each other only through their common opposition to outside enemies. But at other times they develop a collective self-consciousness and assess and reassess their own strengths and weaknesses. As a consequence, this book spends some extra time describing the internal life of the movement—its squabbles and strategic differences—in addition to the crimes and campaigns that constitute its more formal life. “The movement” as a single entity, then, is the protagonist of this book. At the same time, it is necessary to understand the main factions that cleave its members.