Blood and Politics (8 page)

For white supremacists, the years 1968 to 1974 proved to be an interregnum. After energizing a mass constituency based on racial resentments, they watched Wallace voters move into Republican Party ranks. Those Klansmen and other hard-core racists who had been at the core of the American Independent Party, having wasted enormous reserves of time, energy, and money, found themselves politically homeless. After losing the contest over civil rights, these activists, much like defeated armies everywhere, went home to lick their wounds. They became disillusioned, and financial contributions to the remaining troops dried up.

Adding to the situation, the generation that had opposed fighting a war against Hitlerism and then resisted desegregation following the
Brown
decision began to die off. One trenchant obituary, written by a sixty-two-year-old white supremacist, lamented the times: “The relatively small and closed circle of aging patriots, most of them left from the 1930’s is being constantly diminished by death and despair.”
²⁹
The movement that they had created during the decades immediately after World War Two ground to a halt.

No amount of huffing and puffing could reinflate white supremacists during these years. Organizations of all types that had existed on the farthest edge of the conservative movement had the toughest time.
³⁰
Klan groups declined sharply from fifty thousand plus members in 1964 to just twelve hundred white sheets in 1972. Segregationist outfits such as the white Citizens Councils lost members and influence in Congress. The McCarthyite brand of anticommunism stopped selling, and the John Birch Society shriveled—even if it did not die. The Minutemen, which had augmented Birch-style anticommunism with freewheeling paramilitarism, collapsed also, particularly after its founder went to prison.
³¹
Governor George Wallace’s American Independent Party splintered into a dozen pieces, each more ineffectual than the other. As noted earlier, the growth of Willis Carto’s Liberty Lobby slowed. And William Pierce’s National Youth Alliance gained no new ground.

Pierce barely took fifty dollars out of the organization’s proceeds each month. He shuttled from the NYA’s Arlington offices to his wife Patricia’s
home in Fredericksburg. With two strapping teenage sons to feed, the family relied heavily on her income. Few calls and little mail came in the door. The recruitment drive on D.C.-area university campuses had sparkled for a brief moment and then faded. Pierce’s failure to speak at George Washington University undoubtedly still fresh in his mind, he finally dropped the word “youth” from his organization’s name. And on February 26, 1974, he incorporated the National Alliance in the state of Virginia,
³²
grandly claiming that the new outfit would provide a “new superstructure for the movement.”
³³
Otherwise, though, nothing changed. The guiding ideas remained the same. Recruitment practices still aimed at finding a few good men. Even the name of the tabloid,
Attack!
, stayed as before. It continued to augment its usual complaints about Jews and people of color with polemics against conservatives: “Conservatism’s belly-crawling fear of the Enemy (real or imagined), its senile retreat into a largely mythical past, its insistence on séances to call back from the dead all that once was—these were some of the symptoms of a species on its way to extinction.”
³⁴

Name-calling could not help his immediate prognosis, however, and with too little money and too much time on his hands, Pierce started to write a novel.

The liberal consensus begins to unravel, and the New Deal alignments of the past break apart under pressure from the Reagan revolution. In this post–civil rights era the ideas of white domination and all things considered “Aryan” are reified by an ideological movement of vanguardists and mainstreamers, including bank bandits, academics, and a coalition of third-party hopefuls intent on overturning the status quo.

January 1975.
William Pierce published the first installment of
The Turner Diaries
in
Attack!
. The fictional story line starts with a multiracial government, guarded by the so-called Equality Police and oppressing white people—stealing the virtue of white women and reducing white men to powerless obeisance. Money-hungry conservatives, interested only in the bottom line, sell out the alleged interests of white people. And small bands of Aryan resistance fighters are scattered across the political landscape.

Pierce serialized the novel with each new issue of the tabloid, while other pages were filled with breezy dissertations on “Jews, the USSR, and Communism” and cheerful articles, such as “Does America Deserve to Live?” As the novel took shape over the next couple of years, it became immensely popular with readers. When the protagonist shot Jewish merchants and the black Equality Police, National Alliance members could fantasize a victorious conclusion to their long travail. While the worldview of white supremacists seemed to outsiders like a vision of madmen, it should be remembered that fantasy has a role in any social movement, and this one was not an exception. The prospect of victory, even novelized victory, was so much sweeter than the real-life abyss they had experienced during the early 1970s.
¹

In 1978, under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald, Pierce published
The Turner Diaries
in its entirety as a two-hundred-page paperback.
²
The book’s success ultimately marked a turnaround in the National Alliance’s. But in the interim Pierce considered the story akin to an ideological morality play.

Pierce told his adventure story, cast into the near future, through the fictive diaries of Earl Turner, a thirty-year-old electrical engineer turned
guerrilla fighter. The imaginary Turner and a few thousand members of an Organization survive a dragnet aimed at violators of a draconian Cohen Act gun control law. They launch an uncoordinated guerrilla war aimed at destabilizing the System. Turner’s four-person “unit” murders and robs unsuspecting Jews and blacks, blows up the FBI headquarters building, and kills a
Washington Post
editorial writer—all in the first fifty pages. They live in clandestine safe houses, manufacture new weapons, and survive by their wits. Other units of the Organization aren’t as lucky, however, and don’t survive. Eventually, guerrilla skirmishes grow into a full-scale war between small enclaves of white people and the disintegrating remains of the multiracial United States government. When the Organization finally gains control of Southern California, it drives the black and Latino population into the desert, kills off all Jews, and terrorizes the remaining white population into submission through the public hanging of white “race traitors.” A nuclear war destroys Israel and China, neutralizes the Soviet Union, and leaves radioactive deserts smoldering in patches across the globe. The Organization imposes a dictatorship on the white enclaves it controls, enabling it gradually to gain a military advantage over the remaining multiracial forces. The racists’ victory in North America ultimately leads to victory in Europe and finally to complete eradication of all the nonwhite populations on the planet. One hundred years after the revolution, we are told, the white race is on an upward spiral of achievement.
³

Pierce repeatedly stops his narrative to lard it with political lessons, often combining the explication of revolutionary elitism with an apologia for ruthless terrorism. He describes the mass murder of innocents as regrettable but unavoidable. If only society hadn’t been so thoroughly infected, Turner reasons, the cleansing process wouldn’t require so much blood. If the masses of white people weren’t such sheep, the Organization’s method of herding wouldn’t be so brutal. In this book’s logic, terrorism also has strategic value. Well-placed bombs and assassinations are intended to provoke a police state response by the government and thereby alienate middle-of-the-road Americans from the System. Then they will be pushed into the ranks of the Aryan army.

The white conservative also takes a noticeable beating from the revolutionary ethos in these pages. Like Pierce’s Turner, a “conservative” character opposes gun control, racial integration, and the Jews. But his individualistic ethos makes him a poor recruit and an easy traitor to the cause. Unlike true Aryan revolutionaries, who supposedly fight for their race rather than for themselves, the conservatives won’t surrender their egotistical search for commercial goods and personal power. The masses of white people are more cowardly and corrupt still, swayed by a false
materialism and consumerism. The white race may reign supreme in
The Turner Diaries
, but a dictatorship by a semimystical elite known as the Order makes and enforces the rules.

White women play a subordinate role in this novel, as might be expected. But while Turner describes “women’s lib” as a “mass psychosis,” Pierce does not simply impose the traditional roles of helpmate and mother on the Aryan women in the book. Instead, some fight side by side with the male warriors, particularly during the period of the guerrilla struggle. Outside the pages of this novel, in magazine articles and elsewhere, Pierce elaborated a unified view of sex and sexuality. And he was unapologetic about linking—nay, chaining—women to racial reproduction. Sex for any other purpose played no role in his worldview.
⁴

Immediately after publication, Pierce began a targeted advertising campaign. He purchased ads in
Shotgun News
and other gun publications, as well as
Soldier of Fortune
, a slick monthly magazine for mercenaries.
⁵
National Alliance cadres and independent vendors sold the novel at local gun shows, where thousands gathered like stamp collectors at a philatelic convention. Other white supremacist groups bought the novel in bulk and sold it from their own mail-order catalogs. Some purchasers turned around and bought other literature off the National Alliance list, which included Hitler-era Nazi reprints, as well as Anglo-Saxon literary classics such as
Beowulf
. A second edition of
The Turner Diaries
followed soon after the first printing sold out.
⁶

The book developed a life of its own over the next twenty years. A reported five hundred thousand copies were sold. In 1996 publishing rights were purchased by a small mainstream press.
⁷
The novel imbued the ideas of white racial nationalism and terrorism with a romanticized sense of adventure. It became the inspiration for a band of white racists building a guerrilla army during the 1980s. And an ex-army gunner turned drifter carried it around in his pocket before being charged with blowing up the Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995. Although gun rights were prominent in the story’s beginning, this was manifestly not a “militia” book. The militia movement, when it did appear in the mid-1990s, was open and public in its gun carrying. The fighters in this novel belong to secret organizations with tight leadership structures. Clandestinity is the lesson here, even more than the necessity of maintaining your very own .50-caliber machine gun in tip-top shape.

The immediate success of Pierce’s novel paralleled an uptick in the National Alliance’s prospects. It added a few new highly effective cadres to the hard-core outfit Pierce had been building. “One thing decided
during this period was that if we could not be a large organization, we would, at least, be an elite organization,” he wrote. “We stuck to the straight and narrow path, and we gradually began to pick up the sort of people we wanted.”
⁸
Pierce looked for people he regarded as intelligent and capable of working for long periods of time without becoming disheartened. And they did more than just sell copies of
The Turner Diaries
through the mail. Members distributed literature at an Oktoberfest celebration in Baltimore, on street corners in Alabama, door to door in Philadelphia, and among high school students in Chicago—all venues that produced new members. A few dedicated cadres purposely joined other organizations on the far right, such as the John Birch Society, and recruited activists attracted by the National Alliance’s ideological consistency and relative sophistication. The increased membership resulted in increased revenues, which were quickly converted into more literature, increased staff, a new computer system, and other projects.
⁹

Several Carto-related enterprises also grew during these years.
¹⁰
Liberty Lobby transformed 25,000 readers of its monthly newsletter into 150,000 paid subscribers for a weekly tabloid entitled
The Spotlight
, known at its beginning as
The National Spotlight
. The first edition appeared on September 17, 1975.
¹¹
Neither Carto’s name nor any of his pseudonyms were printed on the masthead, but repeated evidence in court testified to his firm control over the publication. The tabloid became Liberty Lobby’s most significant organizational advance since moving to Washington, D.C. It claimed the mantle of muckraking journalism and made money at the same time. Through its pages Liberty Lobby sold everything from vitamin tablets and silver coins to survival-ist handbooks and religious tracts. Before the Internet made all things available everywhere,
The Spotlight
’s classifieds and display advertisements became the one place that local propaganda groups found a national market. Carto and Liberty Lobby obviously relished the prospect of using the tabloid to gain hegemony over all the movement’s different factions.
¹²

It did indeed become the movement’s most widely circulated publication. The muckraking claims, however, rested heavily on the only slightly veiled contention that Jews controlled the mainstream media. “Your newspapers, wire services, radio and television networks are controlled by big multinational business organizations and certain ‘minority’ pressure groups,” the first editorial read.
¹³
Apparently Carto’s readers thought much the same.
The Spotlight
rode the right-wing revival to ever larger numbers, and by 1980 paid circulation had reached more than three hundred thousand. Adding to its impact, 410 radio stations broadcast Liberty Lobby’s daily program.
¹⁴
To keep all the gears turning, Carto
now controlled a D.C. staff of forty working in a three-story building near Capitol Hill.