Blood and Politics (21 page)

Recall that during the 1960s, Willis Carto’s white nationalism centered itself in Europe, with American civilization an extension of European civilization. By these lights, the Founding Fathers were unique only insofar as they continued a European lineage on North American soil. Carto attempted to re-create Eurocentrism and reestablish it as racial nationalism via the American political system, not to carve out a small enclave in the mountains or anywhere else. He claimed to speak in the name of white Americans as a whole (or the antielite popular
strata) against multiracialism, alien, and inferior cultures, internationalism, and the small elite clique that represented these trends.

By contrast, Pierce, Miles, Beam, and Mathews all saw themselves as a small band at odds with the majority of whites.

Miles’s schema also differed from southern nationalism and southern independence movements, and not just because of geographic location. These southern movements projected themselves back in U.S. history to the Confederacy, maintained an unbroken lineage to the past, and regarded the South as a conquered territory. The neo-Confederates claimed the South’s cultural heritage and national and regional distinctiveness. Southern nationalism represents itself as the vehicle for the popular masses in the region (sometimes including blacks, although as second-class citizens), not just a small vanguard called to leave their brethren behind. In this regard, southern nationalism is more like ethnic nationalisms of the former Soviet bloc, with their combinations of historical grievances, martyrdoms, and unrealized (or only briefly realized) national ambitions.

The proposal for a Northwest Republic was not readily accepted by everyone. Several National Socialists from Chicago, for example, opposed “abandoning the industrial heartland to the Jews.” On the other hand, a couple of California National Socialists quickly heeded Miles’s call and moved to The Dalles, Oregon.
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An Illinois state Klan leader followed to Washington State. Others moved into the region as well.
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Miles won wider support after Aryan Nations met in Idaho that summer under the banner of the “Northwest Territorial Imperative.”
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Miles aside, the most trenchant ideas were those of William Pierce. He shared many of Miles’s vanguardist assumptions about ordinary white people, but he took that critique two steps further. “The ills that we see today are not the result of a Jewish conspiracy, they are the culmination of processes that have been at work within our society, within our race for centuries,” he argued. “And I think we can no more cure western civilization by passing new laws or getting new leadership than a 100 year old man can cure his old age by recommending a new diet.” The momentary failure of Mathews’s Order had long-term causes. “The degenerative processes have gone too far and they’ve affected every part of our society.”

If the purpose of Miles’s pure republic was separation from the polyglot United States of America, Pierce was proposing a total separation from everything contemporaneous. “We think in terms of making a new beginning. We think in terms of building a seed that can germinate and
grow and become something new while western civilization” continues to deteriorate. Pierce wanted to plant his seedbed far from the teeming metropoles. He had moved the National Alliance headquarters from Alexandria, Virginia, to remote mountainside acreage in Pocahontas County, West Virginia. He was of course less separated from people of color than he claimed. Brown-skinned people had manufactured his clothes, picked whatever fruit he ate, and helped build his car. He relied on the post office, including its black employees, to transport packages for his National Alliance book business. In 1985 he distributed seventy thousand dollars’ worth of books and pamphlets published by others, not including his own
Turner Diaries
, which itself was selling well. Distributing books was just one part of Pierce’s plan for building an infrastructure in the period after The Order.
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The other was to turn the West Virginia land into a “new living and working environment more conducive to moral and spiritual health than the one we left.”
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Pierce and several families dug wells, constructed homes, laid underground electric utility cables, and built a six-thousand-square-foot two-story combination school and administrative building.

If Pierce’s West Virginia headquarters camp sounds suspiciously like a step back to Jim Ellison’s survivalist CSA commune in the Arkansas Ozarks, to Pierce they were as different as the quality of people who lived on the land. Pierce wanted only an elite breed for his seedbed. They were there to prepare “the way for Higher Man.” Jim Ellison may have sat atop his brood of downtrodden misfits for the greater glory of an Aryan Jesus, but William Pierce was clearing the brush and digging pipeline ditches for the Übermensch.

Whatever philosophical face Pierce painted on his retreat up the misty West Virginia mountainsides, his post-Order plan was for himself only. He was not trying to create an Appalachian substitute for the Pacific Northwest.

The most complete alternative to the Northwest Republic and all its vanguardist permutations came from the mainstreamers. David Duke was directly critical. “Is this the way American civilization will topple, as more and more whites flip off their TV sets, quit their jobs, trash their word processors and desert the suburbs in favor of weapons and revolution?” his tabloid asked of Mathews’s example.
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Duke’s answer was negative. “The best way we can fight,” he wrote, “is through nonviolent political action.”
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Willis Carto and Liberty Lobby virtually pretended The Order and its crimes had not happened. At the same moment Bob Mathews was plundering bank cars, Willis Carto was busy starting a “third” political party.

April 21, 1984.
At Mount Nebo State Park in northwestern Arkansas, the casual tourist can camp or rent a lodge, fish or go swimming, hike through the Ozark Mountains, or drive to Russellville and shop for antiques.
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The beauty of the environment belied the violence that had taken place in the surroundings. Not far from here Gordon Kahl had died, Richard Wayne Snell had killed a black highway patrolman, and James Ellison plotted mayhem atop his gunpowder Dogpatch. Robert Mathews’s war against ZOG was still raging half a continent away.

Here three hundred gray-haired Christian patriots gathered quietly in the main lodge and listened to a small roster of speakers on this Easter weekend. They tacked a twelve-foot-tall American flag to the wall and sang an off-key, but vigorous, version of “America the Beautiful.”
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The emcee, a former American Nazi Party captain turned Ku Klux Klansman turned Christian Identity minister in a dark business suit and red power tie, brought three preliminary speakers to the platform.
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The first offered a prayer. The second, a woman dressed in a pioneer period costume, talked about old-fashioned values such as self-reliance and patriotism. The third, one of the shooters from the murders in Greensboro back in 1979, blasted communism and communists.
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Finally, the emcee introduced the principal speaker for the day, Robert Weems, who turned the audience to the business at hand, testing the waters for a new organization calling itself the Populist Party.

A thickset six-footer speaking with a southern accent and gas station grammar, Weems bounced back and forth across the room and waved his arms windmill style. He sweated his way through a sixty-minute soliloquy on the slings and arrows white people had endured since being dethroned in post–World War Two America. Weems had given up his
post as Mississippi state chaplain for the Invisible Empire (but not his penchant for wearing white robes)
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and signed up with Willis Carto and Liberty Lobby. In contrast with Klan members who had joined The Order, he was a mainstreamer, an accomplished propagandist, and a dedicated organizer.

At Mount Nebo, Weems echoed the same theme around which David Duke had rallied his Klan in the 1970s: the supposed racial and cultural dispossession of white Christians. But Weems added economic-based complaints to his talk. In fact, he married the issues that had marked the Klan’s growth to those matters on which Posse Comitatus types had focused: the Federal Reserve money system, taxes, and the Constitution. This grand theory he called populism, using the same vocabulary Willis Carto minted soon after President Reagan had taken office.
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The actual underlying ideology bore little resemblance to the populism of William Jennings Bryan. Indeed, the ideas expressed that day were virtually identical to those once expounded by Carto under the banner of “conservatism.”

Many of the elderly people in the audience undoubtedly regarded themselves as conservatives. Their past reference points were Senator Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign and Governor George Wallace’s 1968 and 1972 ventures. Weems needed all his considerable rhetorical skills to convince this crowd of graying patriots to identify themselves as “populists” rather than as “conservatives.” To help facilitate the process, he cleverly identified himself as a disillusioned conservative (rather than as a former Klan chaplain). And he spent most of his speech focused on the relationship between conservatives and populists.
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First, he created a grand schema of (white) American history and divided the Founding Fathers into two distinct groups: populists and conservatives. They had taken turns governing the country, he told the assembly. Weems spent little time explaining the supposed differences between these two historical camps because his main point was that they all had been patriotic, loyal men. That was important. Something terrible had happened to change that dynamic of white racial loyalty, he explained.

It had occurred in 1913, Weems told the crowd, when “the international bankers took over the country” and established the Federal Reserve System. That was it. Then followed a list of ill effects marking decline: Jewish immigration from eastern Europe, World War One, and American involvement in the League of Nations. Weems claimed there was a brief respite when the Klan reemerged in the 1920s and during Calvin Coolidge’s conservative administration. Franklin Delano Roosevelt had been a disaster.

Weems’s history lesson had a moral. By his clock, the dispossession of white people hadn’t taken place all at once, but one step at a time. It was the same way “the Chosen took over Hollywood,” he said, using a snide euphemism for Jews. At first they made a lot of patriotic films. Then they started “bobbing noses, changing names, and joining churches,” he roared as the audience came alive with laughter. “Then in the 1960s,” he emphasized, “they let it all hang out.”

Once Weems got his audience to agree that the white world had been turned upside down, it remained for him to convince these Christian patriots that the only way they could be redeemed was through a movement of “populists” rather than “conservatives.” So after establishing the consanguinity of conservatism and populism, he drew the sharpest possible criticism of the contemporary conservative movement. The latter had been taken over by “kosher conservatives,” he argued, who were guilty of supporting the state of Israel and acceding to Jewish domination in general. One problem with conservatives was that they “assume the government is loyal.” But the government was not loyal, Weems argued; it was treasonous. Although he never used the words “Zionist Occupied” that day, Weems’s argument differed little from Bob Mathews’s conclusion that the government was in the hands of his racial enemies. “They’ve put us on the subversives list,” Weems exclaimed in utter amazement.
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After telling the crowd that he had voted for Ronald Reagan in 1980, he asked, “We spent fifty years trying to elect a conservative, and what have we got?” Weems’s disappointments with the Reagan administration fell into three categories that day.

First, they “don’t take on the international bankers and the Federal Reserve; they think that’s part of our glorious capitalist heritage,” he argued. Second, “they don’t take on the Zionists at all because they are The Chosen and our Number One ally in the Middle East.” And finally, they don’t “take any stand for the white race and its preservation either.”

The assembly needed a new political party to represent true Americans, he said. “Since the George Wallace movement,” Weems reminded the Mount Nebo audience, “there hasn’t been a viable patriotic right-wing third party in the United States.” Now that Willis Carto was gearing up the Populist Party, he argued, there was a chance for success. The “Populist Party has potential right now because it’s backed up by the Liberty Lobby and the
Spotlight
newspaper, which has a paid mail circulation of 150,000,” he told the crowd. And over most of the next decade the Populist Party served as an extension of Liberty Lobby, much as Youth for Wallace once had, complete with fights over money and political control.
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.   .   .

In 1984, talk about “populism” was much in the air. Democrats such as Congressman Vin Weber from Minnesota used the term to describe a program of rehashed New Deal liberalism. The right-wing fund-raiser Richard Viguerie wrote a book on “conservative populism” that equated populism with a strong uncompromising opposition to communism.
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Carto used the same label, originally manifested as a movement of farmers who opposed the gold standard and pressed for a policy of easy money for debtors, to call for a return to the gold standard (which would tighten the money supply). Populist movements of the past had sometimes fought to protect and extend the system of white supremacy, and the icon of southern populism in the 1890s Tom Watson had ended his career as a raving anti-Semite and racist.
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Populism, it turned out, was an elastic term devoid of any actual ideological or defined content. Instead, it was more of a political style than anything else, an antielite style, according to Michael Kazin in his book on the topic,
The Populist Persuasion: An American History
.
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