Blood and Politics (6 page)

Large areas of congruence existed between Wallace’s 1968 campaign and Liberty Lobby’s most immediate goals. Yet the matchup was not one-to-one. As Seymour Lipset and Earl Raab point out in
The Politics of Unreason
, Wallace “never developed either a well-constructed conspiracy theory or an ideological racism.” Carto had both. Wallace had not started his career and did not end it as a racist. In the 1960s he followed behind the racist sentiment that already existed. Carto hoped instead to lead it. Wallace was a politician
first
who embraced racism
second
. Carto was an anti-Semite and white supremacist first, last, and always.

In order to set himself apart from all the other racists supporting Wallace, Carto created a separate organization called Youth for Wallace. Conceptually, the idea had potential to mine a definable trend among young whites. One poll found that 25 percent of those voters under twenty-nine years old favored Wallace, five points higher than the percentage of support among older voters. Another survey showed a class line among these young whites, with decidedly more support coming from blue-collar families.
⁵³
They saw themselves opposed to both middle-class white antiwar students and the black freedom movement, as well as to the government, which was forcing them to fight a no-win war. Existing conservative student groups, which usually supported the war policy without question, were not positioned to capture this particular sentiment. Youth for Wallace distributed literature during the campaign, organized on campuses, and sent solicitations through the mail. Membership grew to fifteen thousand on the mailing list.

The 1968 campaign year was the most tumultuous since the Civil War and Reconstruction. The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated in April by a gunman tied to white supremacists. Robert Kennedy, brother of the late President John Kennedy, ran in the Democratic Party primaries as the peace candidate until he too was assassinated the night of the California primary. Urban rebellions, the Vietnam War, and student unrest further put the country’s teeth on edge. That August antiwar demonstrations at the Democratic Party’s convention
degenerated into a Chicago police riot. On election night in November, Republican Richard Nixon became president. But George C. Wallace and the American Independent Party, in a three-way contest, won ten million votes. He carried the South, winning a majority in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas. Although South Carolina, North Carolina, and Tennessee went for Nixon, Wallace received more than 30 percent of the vote in all three states. In Florida, Virginia, and Oklahoma his totals exceeded 20 percent. He also won remarkably high levels of support in the North and Midwest. Altogether, he received 13 percent of the general election total, revealing a stratum in the electorate that white supremacists later sought to capture for themselves.

Wallace’s career as a lightning rod for racist sentiment effectively ended after an assassination attempt in 1972 left him partially paralyzed. After the campaigns, groups as varied as the Klan, the Citizens Councils, and the Birch Society drifted without direction. They had invested time and resources into the Wallace movement, but they came out of it with less influence and power than when they had gone in.

But not Carto; he continued to push on, bridging the defeats suffered by old-line segregationists during the 1960s with the resurgence of a new generation of white supremacists in the mid-1970s. Liberty Lobby ended the 1960s larger and stronger than when the decade began. No longer renting office space in the National Press Club, it had its own (three-story) building within blocks of Capitol Hill. Its temporary advisory board had grown into a full-time staff and regular publication of
Liberty Letter
, an all-purpose periodical with 170,000 subscribers. A special mailing list counted 23,000 donors. A third list contained the names of 230,000 former supporters.
⁵⁴

Carto sought to transform Youth for Wallace into a new organization, the National Youth Alliance, and he succeeded at first. A founding meeting that November at the Army and Navy Club in D.C. drew many of the old officers from the Wallace support group. Carto started raising funds for the new outfit and selecting a different “advisory board,” more radically racist in its orientation. He also hired one of the new organization’s members for a position at Liberty Lobby. In the subsequent months the National Youth Alliance sponsored several regional meetings, including a January 1969 event at Conley’s Motor Hotel in Monroeville, outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It was here that the youth organization first began to unravel.

Several officers in the new group objected to the content and tenor of the meeting and an attendant social at a supporter’s home. They claimed the affair was awash in Nazi heraldry, including women who wore swastika jewelry and men who sang the “Horst Wessel Lied,” a
Nazi Party anthem from the 1930s. The host and emcee promoted a new booklet by Carto’s West Coast enterprise, Noontide Press,
Myth of the Six Million
.
⁵⁵
It argued that the Nazi genocide was a figment of the Jewish imagination. One of the formal presentations was entitled “Plato the Fascist.” During his speech, Carto claimed that the United States was disintegrating from moral turpitude and the degenerate influence of democracy, and he reeled out a scenario by which Liberty Lobby could gain state power.
⁵⁶
But the guts of his talk that night were spent resurrecting the specter of Francis Parker Yockey, detailing their jailhouse meeting and describing the important role that the book
Imperium
possessed.

The dissident officers were more attuned to a Wallace-like conservative racism than to any kind of openly anti-Semitic Yockeyite Hitlerism. They also objected to the direction Carto was taking the organization. A brief seesaw battle for control ensued, but Carto easily vanquished the upstart factionalists.
⁵⁷
A couple of young Liberty Lobby employees incorporated the National Youth Alliance in D.C. and gave Carto formal control of the name and finances.
⁵⁸
An office was opened, and a small staff began accrediting the formation of new chapters and reorganizing program priorities. Standard conservative causes went out. Promoting Yockey came in. A special paperback edition of
Imperium
was published.
⁵⁹
The mathematical sign for inequality, two short parallel lines with a nullifying single crosshatch, became the organization’s logo. “Free men are not equal, Equal Men are not free” was the slogan.

The National Youth Alliance was not yet self-supporting, however, and after one of the officers signed a promissory note, Carto pumped fifty thousand dollars into the outfit. By August 1970 the young Yockeyites had run out of funds again; this time the officers refused to sign another IOU.
⁶⁰
Another fight for control of the corporate identity began. The contest ended differently, however, as William Luther Pierce entered the fray.

In contrast with Carto’s general silence about his private life, William Luther Pierce wrote an early autobiographical article about his political journey, and he consented to several long interviews about his personal history. He was born in Atlanta on September 11, 1933, and his youth was marked by hardship and instability. His father, named William Luther Pierce II, died in a car accident when Bill was just eight years old. Thereafter his mother, Marguerite, worked hard to support Bill and a younger brother, and her own childhood story may have influenced the future national socialist leader. Marguerite’s biological father had run off when she was a child, leaving her fatherless, until Marguerite’s mother (Bill’s grandmother) remarried. The new stepfather was a Jewish man from New York who had moved south, and Marguerite had a bitter relationship with him. William Pierce’s story thus begins with his own absent father and his mother’s unhappy tie to a Jewish stepfather.
¹

Marguerite moved about the South with her two young sons in tow. From these travails, William Pierce claimed he learned the virtues of self-discipline and the importance of delaying immediate gratification for a greater goal, values, he said, that became constant themes in his life. He attended a public junior high in Dallas. After Marguerite took a second husband, young Bill was packed off to Allen Military Academy in Bryan, Texas, from 1949 to 1951. At the academy he won a job cleaning the chemistry lab stockroom and prized that opportunity. In contrast with Carto’s fond remembrance of childhood commerce, Pierce’s best memories were of being alone with his books and studies. He particularly enjoyed science fiction and was an excellent student.
²

He attended Rice Institute (later Rice University) and was graduated in 1955, the year Willis Carto began publishing
Right
magazine. Pierce
spent that summer working at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory and started graduate school at the California Institute of Technology in September. During his graduate school career he worked a year at the nearby Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena. He also married Patricia Jones, who later earned her own advanced degrees in mathematics. The newlyweds moved to the University of Colorado at Boulder, where Pierce received a doctorate in physics in 1962, the same year the couple had twin sons. His dissertation topic was unintelligible to the nonphysicist: nuclear dipole and electric quadripole resonance in the gallium arsenide crystal. During this period, after the Soviet Union’s
Sputnik
entry into space, American interest in physics and science increased exponentially. At that point, the goals of the U.S. government and William Pierce’s personal aspirations matched completely.
³

Pierce became an assistant professor of physics at Oregon State University in Corvallis in 1962, settling down to raise his children and teach. Unlike Carto, who had already spent a decade practicing the art of white supremacist politics, Pierce was then still uninterested in making history. “Until I was 30 years old, I had hardly given a thought to politics, to race, or to social questions,” Pierce wrote about himself.
⁴
But that soon changed.

While at Oregon State, he attended a few meetings of the John Birch Society, the same group for which Carto had once worked before setting up Liberty Lobby’s office in D.C. Pierce did not accept the Birchers’ beliefs that everyone and everything, from President Eisenhower to the civil rights movement, traced back to communism and alleged communist conspiracies. Explicit theories of racial determinism were off their agenda. “I quickly found out that the two topics on which I wanted an intelligent discussion—race and Jews—were precisely the two topics Birch Society members were forbidden to discuss,” Pierce wrote later.
⁵

As he studied politics and history on his own, the bookish physics professor step by step exited conventional society and entered the Frankenstein laboratory of white nationalism.

Pierce left Oregon State in June 1965 and a month later started working in Connecticut for Pratt & Whitney Aircraft as a senior research associate physicist. He received a salary of $15,400 a year, a solid middle-class income from the defense industry during a period of military buildup in Vietnam. The Defense Department gave him a security clearance, but he never actually worked on classified projects during his year of full-time employment there, according to FBI documents. His colleagues
described Pierce as a “real loner,” not unusual among research types. But his treatment of subordinates did touch off notice, as he gave only day-to-day instructions and insisted on doing his own machining. His work began to deteriorate during the final months, and when a wildcat strike hit the plant, Pierce tried, but failed, to drive a car through a picket line of a thousand persons.
⁶

During this period Pierce periodically visited American Nazi Party headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, and stayed in regular contact with George Lincoln Rockwell, the mini-führer then in charge. Rockwell, who had attended an Ivy League college and had achieved the rank of lieutenant commander in the navy, personally impressed Pierce. And the party’s ideology, a version of Hitler’s National Socialism, was already at the center of his self-taught belief system. Their brownshirt uniforms and swastika armbands, on the other hand, seemed to Pierce more like Hollywood antics than serious politics.

Pierce took a final vacation from Pratt & Whitney during the last week of May 1966 and came back to work only to formally resign.
⁷
He moved his family to Virginia. In the next years, Pierce’s wife, Patricia, started teaching math at the university level, and for several years she supported her husband’s political habits. (Unlike Elisabeth Carto, however, she did not join in Pierce’s beliefs and later divorced him.)
⁸
Over the decades Pierce showed little emotional commitment to his two sons or multiple wives.
⁹
Only his mother, Marguerite, and his Siamese cats successfully vied with his single-minded devotion to national socialist politics. During these early years, he began a small business selling guns, NS Arms, and registered with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. His inventory included machine guns. The business folded after passage of gun control legislation in 1968.
¹⁰

In 1966 Pierce reached a deal with Rockwell to edit a new publication entitled
National Socialist World
, which served as a voice for an international grouping known as the World Union of National Socialists. The two men published six issues, but still Pierce would not formally join the brownshirts until January 1, 1967, when Rockwell changed the name of his group to the National Socialist White People’s Party (NSWPP). To Pierce, the new name must have represented a switch toward a more sober-minded effort. Eight months later Rockwell was assassinated by a disgruntled member.
¹¹