Blood and Politics (66 page)

Rabbi Mayer Schiller’s convivial presence in a room with men such as Ed Fields, Mark Weber, and Sam Dickson casts doubt on his common sense, but it signaled no change in the liberal mainstream of the Jewish community. Neither did it suggest any swing among conservative or neoconservative Jews, who might have truckloads of grievances with black people but would have little truck with either Holocaust deniers or so-called scientific racists. That said, Schiller’s behavior is not without precedent. In every age and in every land there have been a few Jews
who sought a separate peace with anti-Semites. If Mayer Schiller’s common platform with the Renaissancers created not a ripple of interest among Jews, Jared Taylor’s invitation to the rabbi provoked a continuing wave of controversy among white supremacists. The common refrain: What was Taylor thinking?

Several possibilities were proffered. The first came in the form of a brief review of the conference published in Wilmot Robertson’s
Instauration
. It noted the presence of Schiller and several other men of Jewish descent on the platform. But the monthly’s usually strident anti-Semitism remained remarkably restrained. A bit of nuance was needed by white activists, the reviewer suggested: “The time-honored strategy of fighting two enemies is to pretend to be the friend of one while zapping the other.” And for this meeting, attacking just the so-called Negroes, while leaving the Jews off the hook, worked quite well. “Maybe after the Negroes are put in their place,” the reviewer speculated, “another conference in a few decades will take on those who purists contend are the real enemy.”
²⁸
By this favorable account, Taylor’s overture toward Schiller was little more than a clever chess move, a tactical decision of little long-term consequence.

Other views were less friendly toward the inclusion of any Jews on the platform, and a debate over Taylor’s motivations and the prospect of ultimate success for the
American Renaissance
project rankled during the years following the first conference. Some activists accepted at face value Taylor’s inclusion of Jews but objected nonetheless, using terms familiar on the vanguardist side of the movement. There were no “good Jews” and “bad Jews,” they argued, just Jews—who were poison, one and all. Another faction thought Taylor’s tactics were wrong, but they weren’t sure of his motivation.
American Renaissance
was “more or less racial,” but it avoided the “Jewish Question like the plague,” wrote another activist. “I often wonder where their minds are really at, and whether they just think they are clever by putting up the PC front.”
²⁹

These questions continued to roil
American Renaissance
supporters well into the future. It would be wrong to conclude that Taylor was by any means philo-Semitic. Shortly after September 11, he issued a statement blaming the attacks on American support for Israel and claiming that “if we go to war, it will not be because we are the land of freedom and opportunity, but because we are the best friend and benefactor of Israel.”
³⁰
Nevertheless, a couple of Jews continued attending conferences. And a contingent of young National Alliance cadres in 2002 kept a subterranean murmur of dissent going during the course of the weekend.
³¹
The anti-Semites chafed at the Jews, and the Aryans-only whisper occasionally broke out into the open during question and answer
sessions. One observant young Aryan woman, writing on the Internet under the sobriquet the Cat Lady, may have ventured the most insightful parallel. She compared developments within
American Renaissance
to recent changes of focus by the British National Party. The British Nationalists’ approach was “very appealing,” she wrote. It was a racial nationalist, a socialist party but not “explicitly anti-Semitic.” She also noted that at a side meeting a British representative who had spoken at an
American Renaissance
meeting had “pointed out that when Hitler was pursuing power, he hardly ever spoke publicly about the Jews either.”
³²
While the Cat Lady and the Brit may get failing grades as students of history, his remarks and her assessment—whether true or false—of Taylor’s full intentions are useful when considering
American Renaissance
’s import and strategy.

For its part, Liberty Lobby and
The Spotlight
ignored
American Renaissance
’s weekend meeting during 1994. In the three months that followed,
The Spotlight
gave a full page to promoting a conference on “states’ rights” sponsored by a Christian Identity tabloid. It spent pages attacking the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. And almost every week it exposed the United Nations and other supposed threats to American sovereignty. When
The Spotlight
did cover Taylor, it folded a critique into its ongoing faction fight with Mark Weber’s Institute for Historical Review. Taylor and Weber,
The Spotlight
argued, were “enigmatic” figures. It claimed to have heard accounts of Taylor’s wife receiving a friendly phone call from the Anti-Defamation League, one of the largest of bogeys in Liberty Lobby’s pantheon of enemies. (Given that Evelyn Rich had a history of working with such groups, such a call was not impossible.)
The Spotlight
also claimed that Jared Taylor and Mark Weber were longtime friends, and in one tabloid edition it wrote about their first meeting in Ghana in the 1970s, as if the event were somehow a cover story for more undefined but nevertheless nefarious doings.
³³

Minus an implication that their meeting was connected to any secret company, the friendship between Taylor and Weber was hardly news. Taylor served, for example, as Weber’s best man at his wedding eight weeks after the conference.
³⁴
Weber’s betrothed, Priscilla Gray, had once worked for Phyllis Schlafly, an iconic figure on the far right who had led the opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s. Gray had also served on staff for Buchanan’s presidential campaign in the previous election cycle.
³⁵
A priest who had spoken at the
American Renaissance
conference, Father Tacelli, officiated at the St. James Roman Catholic Church in Falls Church, Virginia.
³⁶
The wedding of a former Schlafly staffer with a former National Alliance cadre should have received notice on somebody’s society page. Taylor’s relationship with
Weber extended back to the days when he was still a leading cadre of Pierce’s organization. Weber had received a special mention in Taylor’s acknowledgments for his 1983 book on Japan. Ten years later Taylor continued to think highly of Weber. “Any man of whom Mark Weber speaks highly is a men [
sic
] worth knowing,” Taylor wrote in a 1993 letter to a new
American Renaissance
subscriber. Then in a remark that might have pleased Taylor’s detractors in white nationalism’s traditionally anti-Semitic ranks, he made an oblique reference to the “frolic” surrounding the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. “The march of folly never rests,” he wrote.
³⁷

Perhaps Taylor’s abstinence on the “Jewish question” was not about Jews at all. Just as anti-Semitism is often more about explaining world events than about a personal fear or phobia, so perhaps Taylor’s thoughts about Rabbi Schiller or Jews in general were not germane to the
American Renaissance
project. Taylor’s lack of overt anti-Semitism may have been about constructing a white nationalist movement freed from the conspiracy mongering that often accompanies belief that an international Jewish cabal runs the world. If he was quietly sympathetic to the claims of Holocaust revisionism but kept it off the agenda at the Atlanta conference nonetheless, perhaps he was not alone in that regard.

Consider the case of Wayne Charles Lutton, then a rising figure among the anti-immigrant intelligentsia. By almost every account that weekend, immigration from countries such as Mexico was threatening white majority hegemony. One speaker argued that “our immigration policy . . . is in fact turning America into a non-white country, dispossessing white America and its culture.”
³⁸
Lutton’s talk was of similar measure, but with a focus on legal and legislative changes since the end of World War Two.
³⁹

The author of dozens of reviews and essays as well as coauthor of several small books, Lutton lacked natural gravitas. Nevertheless, his balding, bespectacled presence, framed by a salt-and-pepper beard, projected a scholarly mien. At home in Michigan, he enjoyed classical music concerts, read widely, and carried on an active correspondence with other intellectuals.
⁴⁰

Like most of the other conference speakers, Lutton, born in 1949 in Illinois, was part of the postwar boomer generation. While others of his age gravitated toward cultural rebellion and antiwar protest, Lutton’s youth was taken with Christian fundamentalism and fervid anticommunism. Well educated, he received a bachelor’s degree from Bradley University in Peoria and a doctorate in history from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. His dissertation topic: Allied and Axis military strategy during World War Two.
⁴¹

While still in graduate school, he found a megaphone for his views on the far right.
Christian Crusade Weekly
published a two-part article by Lutton on Soviet naval power. And in July 1975, Representative Larry McDonald, a Democrat from Georgia and then chairman of the John Birch Society, read the essay into the
Congressional Record
.
⁴²
During the same period, Lutton also published in
American Mercury
, by then firmly within Carto’s institutional empire. Both
Mercury
articles touched on Jewish-related topics. A review of Arthur Koestler’s
The Thirteenth Tribe
noted that Koestler’s claim that European Jews were descendants of a tenth-century kingdom in the Caucasus was a “devastating blow to international Zionism.” An article in 1978 on the “Arab boycott” was similarly pointed.
⁴³

Although
American Mercury
under Carto was marred by the same politics that later informed the Institute for Historical Review, it was not solely identified with Holocaust denial, and Lutton used his own name when writing for it. As he became directly involved with the Institute for Historical Review, however, his political life came to resemble binary stars. One named Charles Lutton quietly associated itself with Holocaust revisionism. The other, Wayne Lutton, assumed increasingly important roles in the fight against immigration. While his anti-immigrant persona was well known and highly visible, for reasons unknown he kept the other personality secret.
⁴⁴

Wayne Lutton eventually landed at the Social Contract Press in Petoskey, Michigan, publisher of a small-circulation journal. During the Reagan years, he regularly wrote book reviews for William Buckley’s
National Review
, did articles on AIDS for Christian right publications, and won recognition as an expert on population and immigration. He coauthored
The Immigration Time Bomb
for the American Immigration Control Foundation in 1985 and
The Immigration Invasion
for the Social Contract Press in 1994. The onetime Democratic presidential aspirant Senator Eugene McCarthy thought enough of the second book to write a two-page foreword. “I recommend study of the immigration issue and of this thoughtful book to all Americans.”
⁴⁵

During the same period that Wayne Lutton was gaining a solid reputation at the center of the conservative movement and respect from Capitol Hill insiders, his alter ego, Charles Lutton, careened out to the edges of the universe at the Institute for Historical Review. This persona first wrote for the IHR’s
Journal
in 1980 and continued writing book reviews and small essays for the institute into the 1990s. His usual beat was Axis military strategy, much like his dissertation topic. And he did not challenge directly the facts of the Holocaust itself. Nevertheless, he personally gave a presentation at the IHR’s 1981 conference, joined its
editorial advisory board in 1985, and, when one of its perennial personnel disputes emerged, interceded on the staff’s behalf with Willis Carto (to no avail).
⁴⁶

In each instance, he used the name Charles Lutton, in an apparent effort to hold up a veil between the identity of the mainstream conservative and the Holocaust-obsessed activist. Sometimes, however, that veil slipped. A tape of his talk at the 1981 conference on “Axis Involvement with Arab Nationalists” was advertised in a catalog as the work of Charles Lutton, but the tape itself is imprinted with a label bearing the name Charles Sutton. (The voice on the tape of this IHR “Charles Lutton-Sutton” is exactly the same as that of Wayne Lutton on tapes sold by
American Renaissance
.)
⁴⁷
Sometimes the veil fell to the ground altogether. For example, a 1991 letter written by the Institute for Historical Review’s staff editor on its letterhead ends with a paragraph describing Lutton:
“One last thing: today I talked with Dr. Wayne Lutton, who received his Ph.D. in 20th-century European History from Southern Illinois. Wayne is an old friend, an ardent Revisionist, and a great guy”
(author’s emphasis).
⁴⁸

The fictional split in personas disappeared entirely, however, in a pair of letters Wayne Lutton wrote to a colleague. In one, dated March 7, 1992, he chatted about a book manuscript deadline, and his plans to attend a concert by the Dresden State Orchestra and gave instructions to call only after 9:30 p.m. Over the signature of Wayne Lutton he also wrote,
“If you have the Winter JHR, you will have seen the long review essay on the literature of Pearl Harbor written by Charles Lutton
. . . ” The ellipses in the original obviously meant to convey a wink and a nod. In a second letter, dated October 1, 1992, over the same signature, he was more explicit:
“Wish I were going to the IHR Confab this year (I gave a paper at one ten years ago, tho not as ‘Wayne’ Lutton)
.”
⁴⁹