Blood and Politics (7 page)

After Rockwell’s death, the several dozen remaining members began to splinter. Pierce stayed with the largest faction, and by January 1968 he was a top officer and its ideological guide, but not the nominal chief. He produced written propaganda and taped telephone message recordings, then a new way that groups used for spreading their ideas. Occasionally
curious university students invited him to speak at their campus. At one such event in April 1970, a speech before 450 students in Scranton, Pennsylvania, Pierce made news after proposing that President Nixon should be “dragged out of his office and shot.” His pronouncement caught the eye of the FBI, which already described him as “armed and dangerous” because he carried a handgun while working in the Arlington headquarters.
¹²

Pierce became increasingly disenchanted with the NSWPP. He agreed with its philosophical cornerstone—the entirety of the American political and social order needed to be destroyed in order to create a purely Aryan racial state similar to Hitler’s Germany. But he wanted an organization with a distinctly American persona to start this revolution, and the party of Rockwell seemed unable to escape the uniforms of its origins.
¹³
He formally quit in July 1970, subsequently circulating a discussion document he called a “Prospectus for a National Front.” “Ideology must never be used to establish tactical criteria,” he wrote, and “[we] have to avoid isolating ourselves from the public with programs and images so radical that only a small fraction of one percent will respond.”
¹⁴
In other words, he understood that wearing swastika armbands was a dead end, and he was finally ready to strike out on his own.

William Pierce set his sights on Carto’s National Youth Alliance, which was already embroiled in a multisided factional conflict. The Wallace-era conservatives had abandoned the project, tired of doing battle with both Carto and the young Yockeyites he supported. In the next round of infighting, the Carto loyalists were pushed aside by a band of national socialist types backed by William Pierce. Carto and Pierce each had a different stake in the fight that followed.

For Carto, money occupied the center of this dispute. He charged Pierce’s colleagues with stealing Liberty Lobby’s mailing lists and selling them. And Carto used those same lists and the National Youth Alliance name to prop up a rival organization. His surrogates attacked Pierce’s group and accused it of being agents of some undefined enemy force. Carto presented the Pierce faction with an invoice for forty thousand dollars, claiming the money was owed for rental of Liberty Lobby’s mailing lists. When Pierce didn’t pay up, Carto had him charged with theft.
¹⁵

For Pierce, ideas mattered most in this conflict, and he and his cohorts hunkered down for a long siege. He reincorporated the National Youth Alliance name in the state of Virginia in October 1970, freeing
it from any past encumbrances.
¹⁶
The Pierce people filed a civil suit against Carto for libel.
¹⁷
They also issued a broadside attack against Carto, a two-page letter with eight pages of “exhibits.” They claimed Carto backed a phony National Youth Alliance faction actually controlled by “Zionists.” Most of Pierce’s other allegations involved Carto’s repeated scamming of Liberty Lobby’s donors. One document provided evidence that Liberty Lobby routinely rented and sold its mailing lists, all while telling its members that it did nothing of the kind.
¹⁸

Pierce’s most significant accusation claimed that Carto had bilked his own followers of fifty-five thousand dollars. The evidence proved so overwhelming that future antagonists of Carto within the movement repeated the complaint over the next three decades, whenever they wanted to prove that the Liberty Lobby mogul was actually a scam artist.

The specifics of this particular charge revealed a portion of the corporate maze Carto had created. Apparently, Carto had first made an emergency appeal to Liberty Lobby’s supporters, claiming that the organization could no longer afford to pay rent. Liberty Lobby needed to own its building rather than lease it. As a result, Lobby contributors responded generously. Carto then fooled donors into believing that the office building it already occupied at 300 Independence Avenue SE was indeed purchased by Liberty Lobby and payment made in full. To prove this point, Pierce cited a 1969 issue of Liberty Lobby’s newsletter. In it was a photograph of the Lobby’s chairman, supposedly giving a $55,235.27 check to a bank holding the building’s mortgage. The photo was a fake, according to Pierce, who included exhibits showing that another of Carto’s corporate fronts, Government Educational Foundation—not Liberty Lobby—actually owned the building. Liberty Lobby still paid rent.
¹⁹

Carto’s scheme worked like a game of three-card monte, and only someone like Pierce, whose colleagues had gotten close to the nerve center, could have figured out which corporate pot held the money. Pierce didn’t stop there. One particularly nasty exhibit described Carto as “a short swarthy man of medium build” (“swarthy” being a favorite code for non-Aryan whites). The depiction was meant as a pointed contrast with Pierce, who was six feet four, long-headed, and closer to the Nordic ideal body type at two hundred plus pounds. Pierce went on to reveal five of the pseudonyms Carto employed, including E. L. Anderson, Ph.D.

Obviously, if Carto had actually litigated against Pierce, more secrets would have been spilled in the civil suits than oil from the
Exxon Valdez
. They fought each other to a standstill. Carto dropped the theft charges against Pierce, and Pierce did not pursue the libel complaint. Carto
walked away, his Liberty Lobby money machine still intact. Pierce prevailed in controlling the National Youth Alliance corporate name. Despite this victory, Pierce was forced to admit that Carto’s battering had taken a toll. “Carto’s attacks have been very costly to NYA,” he wrote. “By confusing many NYA supporters with his false accusations, Carto has caused NYA’s income to drop sharply, seriously hampering its work.”
²⁰

In this round of events, both men had started with the hope that they could recruit young people to their cause. Their immediate goals differed. Carto wanted his version of the National Youth Alliance to form a bridge between Wallace-style conservatives and radical white nationalists. In this vision, the Liberty Lobby building near Capitol Hill would engage in a form of white supremacist realpolitik, while Carto’s more ideological enterprises would remain headquartered on the West Coast. Pierce, by contrast, wanted to break completely with all manner of conservatism. He wanted to pull away from mainstream politics and create a separate parallel universe, counterinstitutions uncontaminated by compromise. His concerns were distinctly noncommercial. Pierce aimed at developing talented ideological cadres, not a mailing list of dupes for financial support.

Both men and their respective organizations fell into a lull. After ten years of rapid growth, Liberty Lobby slowed to a standstill. Its influence on Capitol Hill began to wane as the power of hard-core segregationists died out in Congress. And public exposure became one of Carto’s biggest problems. A 1971 article in the conservative weekly magazine
National Review
drew a straight line from Yockey and anti-Semitism to Liberty Lobby, uncovering a set of connections that Carto had tried to keep buried from the beginning of his career. The author described many of Carto’s assets: “He is the man behind such respectable-sounding organizations as Liberty Lobby, United Congressional Appeal, Save Our Schools, Americans for National Security, the
Washington Observer
, the
American Mercury
.” The whole complex, the magazine deduced, had “annual receipts of at least a million dollars.”
National Review
had opposed civil rights legislation and supported segregationists in the 1950s, but it had become the flagship publication of the entire conservative movement. The article effectively placed Liberty Lobby outside its fence.
²¹

Carto responded with a lawsuit against
National Review
, but he could not erase the damage a small bit of truth telling had done. The
magazine’s owners countersued, creating a legal imbroglio that lasted for years, until it was decided in the magazine’s favor.
²²

During the same time period, Pierce’s National Youth Alliance also stalled. Despite its revolutionary rhetoric, it expected to do little more than expand its student membership in and around the District of Columbia. It proposed organizing “Action Units” at six predominantly white universities in the area, and members attempted to sell their tabloid at these campuses and find new recruits. As part of the program, Pierce tried to convince his best student cadres to move to D.C. and work with the national office. But this attempted concentration of forces soon floundered.
²³

An incident at George Washington University caught the essence of the problem. Officially invited to speak by the university’s program board on February 3, 1972, Pierce found fewer than two dozen students attending the event. Shortly after arriving at the podium, he was pelted with raw eggs, and orange smoke from a stink bomb filled the room. No one rose to defend the yolk-smeared national socialist, and the session ended quickly. Shortly thereafter the student newspaper received a phone call claiming credit for the protest. The National Youth Alliance had vowed to battle left-wing peaceniks and curb black student associations. But Pierce seemed unable to do as much as safely mount a public podium.

He responded to the incident much like any other aggrieved American. He sued for tort relief, charging the university with negligence, and asked for $10,000 in actual and $40,000 in punitive damages. A year later he agreed to a settlement from the university, whose lawyers allowed that the amount paid was “more than the $2.50 which Pierce had asked for cleaning his suit” and less than $50,000.
²⁴
Not enough to pay for any injured pride.

The raw eggs confirmed the National Youth Alliance leadership’s frank assessment of the campuses at the time: antiracists and antiwar sentiment dominated the intellectual climate at most universities.
²⁵
In a certain sense, the racists’ analysis on this point rang true. Sentiment mounted against the Vietnam War. Innovative black studies programs gained acceptance. A new growth of feminism took root along with women’s studies programs. And a bold gay rights movement was just over the horizon. The National Youth Alliance’s arguments for the natural superiority of white men had all the academic salience of Ptolemaic astronomy.

Further complicating Pierce’s bid to build an organization of Aryan revolutionaries, the few Wallace-era conservatives left among his membership
acted like a hand brake dragging down a car. They were racists and anti-Semites certainly, but conservative nonetheless, more interested in restoring the past than in overthrowing the current regime. “The NYA membership . . . in that early period,” he later complained, “showed a definite [nonrevolutionary] reactionary streak.”
²⁶

Pierce tried to keep a small spark going nonetheless. The NYA’s tabloid
Attack!
published a set of “Revolutionary Notes” describing various weapons, including which rifles were best for “urban firefights.” It also explained the use of explosives. One piece discussed the efficacy of bombing movie theaters. It coldly argued that bombings were just one “short-term” tactic among others less sanguinary, such as picketing and parades.
²⁷
Despite this incendiary rhetoric, the National Youth Alliance at that time was all talk, with few troops and fewer actual bomb throwers.

Pierce traced his immediate organizational misfortunes to larger waves moving through American history: “The United States government has through slow and (until the last 20 years) nearly imperceptible change . . . been transformed from an organic institution embodying the will and aspirations of a free, White [
sic
] and proud citizenry to a corrupt, unnatural, and degenerate monstrosity.”
²⁸
The pejoratives and the language about organicism set aside, this analysis essentially rang true. During most of the hundred years since slavery had ended, black people had remained essentially citizens in name only, as government had rested solely in the hands of white people. This white republic, where the color of your skin determined whether or not you had voting rights and which set of laws protected your person, had been broken, however, by mass movements for civil rights and federal court action, among other factors.

Although the Goldwater and Wallace campaigns had demonstrated the possibility of a mass racist revival in the post–Jim Crow world, the Nixon presidency acted as a brake on its transformation into an autonomous movement independent of the two-party system. After the 1968 election, Nixon effectively absorbed the Wallace vote within Republican Party ranks, thereby diminishing the chances that Wallaceites would create a permanent bastion outside the party. As noted by journalists Thomas Edsall and Mary Edsall in
Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics
, Nixon slowed the pace of federally mandated school integration and nominated ultraconservative southern judges to the Supreme Court. He also championed “law and order,” while Vice President Spiro Agnew attacked liberals with the same vitriolic lingo previously used by Governor Wallace. But Nixon also implemented programs such as minority set-asides in construction as well as affirmative action at the same time. Much as in his diplomatic
opening to the People’s Republic of China, which angered onetime supporters of a more McCarthyite, anti-communist Nixon, the president co-opted and then defanged any embryonic movement based on white racial resentments outside the Republican Party. After the Watergate scandal forced Nixon to resign in 1974, and the United States effectively lost the Vietnam War, those elements of the far right that had supported both the war and its prosecutor were left (temporarily) adrift.