Blood and Politics (4 page)

An aggressive salesman from the start, Carto began his business life in 1950 with Procter & Gamble. He then worked as a Household Finance Corporation loan officer while living in San Francisco. From 1954 to 1959 he sold printing and coffee machines.
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In November 1958, thirty-two-year-old
Willis Carto married twenty-one-year-old Elisabeth Waltraud Oldemeir. A native of Herford, Germany, she eventually took United States citizenship. They never had children. But she was a constant partner in their multiple endeavors.
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He also turned friends into enemies and litigated against both.

Carto’s first significant enterprise was a monthly bulletin he started in 1955. Entitled
Right: The Journal of Forward-Looking American Nationalism
, it promoted many of the anti-communist, anti-Semitic, and segregationist ideas then circulating on the far right. Editing and publishing under the rubric of a corporation named Liberty and Property, Inc., he developed mailing lists and made appeals for financial support. He became adept at expressing his ideas about race and nationalism in the pages of
Right
—either under his own name or through an oft-used pseudonym, “E. L. Anderson, Ph.D.” Like an apprentice entrepreneur, Carto learned during those years many of the organizational skills that later set him apart from other white supremacists.

At that time he also launched a venture called Joint Council for Repatriation. Historically, “repatriation” was the idea that black people living in the United States could best be free if they moved en masse to Africa. Some abolitionists actively supported it during the period of slavery, and after the Civil War some American blacks did settle the territory that became Liberia. In Carto’s hands, however, repatriation was another thing entirely. And his correspondence from that period shows that he regarded it as a way to avoid desegregation and the assumption of full citizenship rights by black people. Carto sent out his first letter to a colleague on Joint Council stationery in January 1955—seven months after the decision in
Brown v. Topeka Board of Education
.
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But the Joint Council died on the vine, and Carto subsequently tried to hide away his advocacy on this point.

Ultimately, Carto became best known as the chief of a multimillion-dollar outfit in D.C. called Liberty Lobby, the origin of which he dated to 1955.
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At that point, however it existed only in his mind, and it was two more years before he floated this idea with an article in his
Right
bulletin. “Liberty Lobby,” he wrote, would “. . . lock horns with the minority special interest pressure groups.”
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Carto imagined a great struggle, with himself at the center. “To the goal of political power all else must be temporarily sacrificed,” he wrote.
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He shopped the Liberty Lobby idea to both conspiracy-obsessed anti-communists in the North and archsegregationists in the South, promising that it would “complement” their activity rather than supplant it.
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Preparing to focus on building Liberty Lobby, Carto closed down his
Right
bulletin in 1960 and spent the summer working at the John Birch
Society offices in Belmont, Massachusetts.
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A conspiracy-obsessed anti-communist organization with tens of thousands of members, the Birch Society did not share all of Carto’s ideological views, and it did not formally endorse his proposal for creating a Liberty Lobby. But a number of observers believe that Carto left Belmont with a copy of the Birch mailing list secretly in hand, ready to use it for his own fund-raising purposes.

Shortly thereafter, Liberty Lobby opened an office in the National Press Building in Washington, D.C. Carto named himself the corporation’s secretary-treasurer and hired a staff person, who began courting representatives and senators. A periodic newsletter,
Liberty Letter
, touted the operation’s activities. One of its early goals was repeal of reciprocal trade agreements,
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and Liberty Lobby’s nominal chairman, Curtis Dall, testified before the Senate Finance Committee in 1962. An “international cabal” supported free trade, Dall argued, and the “real center and heart” of this cabal was “the political Zionist planners for absolute rule via one world government.”
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Substituting the word “Zionist” when talking about Jews became a hallmark of Liberty Lobby propaganda ever after, as “anti-Zionism” became a convenient cover for anti-Semitism.

One incident from those early years illustrates much about Carto’s personality and his relentless attempt to hide his political views. Looking like a mild-mannered model of middle-class probity in coat and tie, Carto walked into the Giant Super Store on Annapolis Road in Glen-ridge, Maryland, with two accomplices. Once inside the three split up, and each walked to a different section of the store. The thirty-six-year-old Carto grabbed a shopping cart and pushed it through the luggage section, stopping only to open suitcases, insert a fold-over four-inch printed card in each, and snap them shut again before he moved on. Continuing in the book section, Carto sensed that he was being watched. Grabbing his empty basket, he pushed to the front of the store and started to leave. But his path was quickly blocked by first one man and then several others.
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A small crowd watched as he was stopped and forcibly detained. Store detectives directed him to a stockroom, where he was handcuffed. The once properly dressed faux shopper now looked madly disheveled. By his own account, Carto “refused to cooperate in any way” and was treated like a “common criminal.”
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From his wallet the detectives took the remaining copies of the four-inch cards.

“Always buy your Communist products from Super Giant” was printed across the front in red ink, beside a hammer and sickle. A quotation from FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover and a list of household products were on the inside. At the time the United States and Soviet Union were locked
in geopolitical combat stretching across the globe. The Western bloc and the Eastern bloc glared at each other over the Berlin Wall, which had just been built the year before. The Cuban missile crisis threatened to turn into a nuclear war. American “advisers” were starting to ship out to Vietnam. And Willis Carto was worried about Polish hams, Czech cut glass, and Yugoslav wooden bowls on the shelves at a local market.
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In the context of the Cold War, Carto’s anti-communist card passing seems bizarre, almost cartoonlike. But it was real. He was taken to a local police station, fingerprinted, and booked on a charge of disorderly conduct.
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Two months later he was convicted before a magistrate judge and fined ten dollars.
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Carto subsequently filed a civil suit against Giant Food, charging that he had been called a “communist” and a “Nazi” while being arrested and been “exposed to public hatred, contempt and ridicule.” For each of twelve claims, he asked twenty-five thousand dollars, a total of three hundred thousand dollars.
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While the arrest itself did not expose much about the personality and politics of Willis Carto, his lawsuit ultimately revealed more about his personality and actual politics than he could have possibly wanted.

In civil cases of this sort, one of the first legal steps is known as discovery, a court-sanctioned investigation of the plaintiff by the defendant and vice versa, often taken in the form of oral depositions and written interrogatories. By charging that he had been defamed when called a “Nazi,” Carto opened a door to questions about his own political beliefs, and Giant Food responded to each of his claims with a set of interrogatories: Where did the plaintiff go to school? Where did the plaintiff work? Describe all political affiliations. Has the plaintiff made political speeches? Where? Has the plaintiff written political articles? Please identify. Have you ever used any name other than Willis A. Carto? Questions he repeatedly tried to avoid, according to case records, but was eventually required to answer.
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Despite his multiple evasions, when the suit came to trial, the jury apparently had enough information to make a decision. Carto lost on all counts. Afterward the judge felt constrained to comment on the speciousness of his claims. “It seems to me, ladies and gentlemen,” the Honorable Harrison Winter told the jury, “that only a very benevolent government would make available your services . . . for some four and a half trial days, and the services of the clerk of this court, the services of the court reporter, the services of the deputy marshal . . . my court crier and the services of myself for a case so utterly frivolous and devoid of merit.”
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This would not be the last judge annoyed with Willis Carto, his lawsuits, and his multiple courtroom equivocations. Nor would this be
the final time that Carto entrapped himself with a device of his own construction.

Carto faced a dilemma during the early 1960s. He wanted to do more than just talk before congressional committees and surreptitiously distribute propaganda. He sought direct political power within the system of electoral politics. Yet neither the Democrats nor the Republicans fitted his needs. He considered creating a third party but decided against it. A new party would require huge sums of money, he reasoned, and encounter untold difficulties winning ballot status in many states. Worse, it would be ignored by conservative leaders. So he opted for joining the Republicans—but with a twist. Liberty Lobby would try to create its own faction inside the Republican Party, a disciplined “party within a party,” as he described it. A short-lived organization calling itself United Republicans of America soon operated under Liberty Lobby’s tent.

Carto’s group was like a flea on this elephant until the ascent of Senator Barry Goldwater (R-AZ) in 1964. This became Liberty Lobby’s first big chance to find new supporters. Although Goldwater lost badly to President Lyndon Johnson that year, he carried five states in the Deep South, states that had previously voted Democrat. The election was a portent of white voting patterns to come. To further its own goals, Liberty Lobby published truckloads of pro-Goldwater literature during the campaign. A
Labor for Goldwater
leaflet argued that white trade unionists should vote for the Republican candidate because he “opposes forcing your local [trade union] to take Negroes as members.”
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The Lobby also produced a tabloid-style biography highly critical of President Johnson. It sold fourteen million copies, and Carto was ecstatic.

“Although many Conservative organizations have expanded their activities since LBJ, none has done so as dramatically as the Liberty Lobby,” he crowed. Carto’s mailing list grew geometrically. At the start of the 1964 presidential election year,
Liberty Letter
had 17,000 paid subscribers. By November subscriptions had increased almost fivefold to 60,000. Six months after that it doubled again to 125,000.
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During this same period a major civil rights bill, with fair employment and public access provisions, was passed in Congress. The Voting Rights Act was passed a year later. Both pieces of legislation represented a significant defeat for segregationists and other conservatives. Liberty Lobby’s good fortune in the midst of these setbacks provides an early lesson in a seeming contradiction. A defeat for mainline conservatives can often translate into organizational success for their more radical cousins. Hoping to use these achievements as a platform for the future,
Liberty Lobby published a program after the election titled
The Conservative Victory Plan
. When read five decades later, the
Plan
seems eerily prophetic. It describes how white conservative voters would desert the Democratic Party. “A rising tide of Negro voters will eradicate the Conservatives of one of the two parties in the South, leaving all the Conservatives in one party,” it argued in 1965.
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“A factor pushing the Republican Party into being the natural vehicle for the expression of ‘White Rights’ is the inevitable movement of the Democratic Party in the South toward becoming an all-Black party.”
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Although couched in the language of “conservative” politics at the time, the
Plan
promoted many of the themes that Liberty Lobby later gave fuller expression under the banners of “populism” and “America first nationalism.” It urged opposition to free trade; it implored conservatives to abandon their hostile attitudes toward trade unions. It also advocated support of “responsible Negro nationalism” and “an end to centuries of racial strife through mutual recognition of the need for racial separation.”
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In essence, it was a call to reverse the
Brown
decision and restore Jim Crow segregation, an idea with murderous proponents in the South at the time.

Despite Liberty Lobby’s manifest organizational success, the D.C.-based shop could not fulfill all of Carto’s political needs. As a result, he created a separate set of institutions on the West Coast less to pursue immediate practical political tasks than to carry on long-term ideological battles.

Despite his expressed support for conservative ideas that aimed at restoring the status quo ante, Carto’s heart belonged to the
revolutionary
political philosophy enunciated by Francis Parker Yockey and its advocacy of a new racial order. Yockey was an unusual character by any standard. A figure from the postwar anti-Semitic netherworld, he had graduated cum laude from Notre Dame Law School in 1941. He opposed American military involvement in World War Two, then seemingly reversed himself and enlisted in the army. A year later he went AWOL and was eventually discharged from the service with a medical disability for dementia praecox, an archaic psychiatric diagnosis for schizophrenia. After the war he managed to get a job writing briefs for American prosecutors at war crime trials in Wiesbaden but was dismissed after only eleven months. Yockey then spent the next fifteen years living in Europe, working with the remnants of Hitler’s party in
Germany, meeting with Arab nationalists, and fancying the creation of a European-wide “liberation front.”
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