Blood and Politics (82 page)

The meeting was one more sign that the borderline between the white nationalist movement and social and political convention was not fixed, and it had shifted significantly to the white side during the past decade. Further, the influence of the house intellectuals at
American Renaissance
pushed the organization’s rank and file away from its sole preoccupation with refighting the Civil War and the battles of the civil rights era over to including a focus on twenty-first-century issues.

At national conferences and state meetings, on sidewalk picket lines and in the pages of its propaganda, the council contended that immigrants spread disease, committed crimes, lowered wages, and otherwise added to the dreaded “multicultural” (meaning multiracial) future. To help local activists, the
Citizens Informer
published an article on “The Nuts and Bolts of Immigration Reform Rallies.” Paint your placards with white oil-based paint so that they would withstand any rainfall and use bold black letters, ran the advice. For photographs of themselves, “participants should squeeze together for a tight shot.” Some of the suggested slogans had a post-9/11 theme, “Al Quaida Loves Open Borders”; others didn’t: “Immigration Is a Cancer Now Swim Back” and “2 Million Illegals Voted Nov. 2000.” Timing is everything, the article explained,
and described how the St. Louis chapter had picked Cinco de Mayo as an attention-getting protest date.
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In addition, these protest events helped create local constituencies for more draconian public policies and the legislators to implement them. Councillors were long embedded as writers and editors for anti-immigrant periodicals and in leadership positions across the complex of so-called immigration reform organizations. And when the battle lines shifted to the ballot box, members of the council helped lead the way.
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At the same time, the council was butting up against the limit of mainstream respectability. The vanguardists at the National Alliance were also growing stronger with every passing month during this period. The internal dynamics of the movement were changing. And the best new recruits were highly educated and young.

April 26, 1999.
A dozen young women in Irish ethnic costumes danced traditional jigs. A Scots pipe and drum corps performed, as did a long line of teenage girls in Ukrainian folk outfits who danced to the delight of the audience. A Slovak folksinger and an ensemble in costume sang and danced their way into the hearts of the crowd. And when dinner was finished and the performances were over, the Stan Mejac Orchestra played music for any of the 335 attendees who wished to dance. At thirty-five dollars a couple, the European-American Cultural Society event at the German Central hall in Parma, Ohio, was a good time at a fair price. The event sold out two weeks before the show, and it made a little profit that year.
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The success was due to the hard work of a local unit of the National Alliance, which produced the show, pocketed the proceeds, and created a broader and more sympathetic organizational periphery, thanks to the Alliance’s local leader, Erich Gliebe.

Then in his mid-thirties, Gliebe was a first-generation American, steeped in the traditions of his father’s native Germany. During World War Two, his father had fought on the eastern front for the Wehrmacht and after the war had immigrated to the white ethnic enclaves surrounding Cleveland, where he settled down and raised a family. As a youth Erich learned both the German language and folk dancing, and his father’s wartime experiences became an integral part of his own personal history. When other students learned about the Holocaust at school, young Erich was told at home that it did not happen. After graduating from high school in 1981, he turned to boxing.
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By his own account, boxing embodied the “manly” virtues he considered most important. A six-foot-four middleweight with a long reach and a powerful punch, he unabashedly adopted Aryan Barbarian as his moniker. First as
an amateur with eighteen wins in twenty fights, and then as a professional who said he was undefeated in eight fights, Gliebe claimed discipline and hard work were as important as any natural abilities. He even concocted a racist theory about boxers: black boxers had “faster muscle twitch” and thicker skulls than whites, but white boxers had more “heart.”
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Gliebe also worked as a tool and die maker, a skilled craft much undervalued by those unfamiliar with its rigors. In his spare time, he volunteered endless hours for the National Alliance, which he had joined in 1990. He soon became its premier recruiter and was later considered by Pierce to be the organization’s “most effective” member. A members’ bulletin noted that Gliebe had bought an exhibit table at every gun show in his area, sold copies of
The Turner Diaries
, and solicited members. He became the “unit leader” in Cleveland, building it into the largest single local in the alliance, and then the regional coordinator for Ohio and parts of the surrounding states.
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In addition to holding yearly European-American Cultural Society festivals, Gliebe recruited out of the white power skinhead scene in the Great Lakes region. In the process, his Cleveland unit also became a must stop for several speakers traveling the National Alliance circuit. On three different occasions, Gliebe organized speaking events for David Irving, the British historical writer who made a profession out of denying Hitler’s worst crimes.
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David Duke spoke to a crowd of two hundred in 1997.
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These events helped build and sustain a cultural and ideological milieu bigger than any
Bierstube
drink fest and more real than a cybersite forum. As a result, the National Alliance not only recruited new members for itself but came to dominate the white nationalist scene in Cleveland and to exert influence across the movement.

During this period, while Liberty Lobby was sliding into bankruptcy and prosecutors indicted militiamen, law enforcement left the National Alliance relatively unscathed. Even a court-ordered judgment of eighty-five thousand dollars against William Pierce did not slow the organization down. The judgment stemmed from an earlier lawsuit brought by the Southern Poverty Law Center against Ben Klassen’s Church of the Creator. As noted earlier, one of Klassen’s “reverends” had murdered a black sailor and the church had been held liable. As part of an effort to avoid payment, Klassen had quickly sold a piece of land to Pierce at below market value. Pierce then turned around and sold the parcel at a nifty profit, and a North Carolina judge ordered him to turn the profit over to the sailor’s estate. After losing the court battle and an appeal, Pierce paid the judgment and continued operating, almost as if nothing had happened.
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The accretion of members and resources continued apace, perhaps picking up speed and momentum.

Pierce kept a graph in his office, charting membership levels month by month. Late in 1998 he noticed a sharp spike upward that continued long into the following year. Searching for a reason behind the new and noticeable expansion, he ruled out several possible causes. It wasn’t the onset of American bombing missions against Serbia, he decided, nor was it the current impeachment campaign against President Clinton. Nevertheless, he did believe that the Clinton administration was having a “salubrious effect on the recruiting climate.” Neither did Pierce contend that any specific National Alliance activities were the cause. The organization was doing much the same as it had been in recent years, he noted.

In fact, the principal activity at the National Alliance headquarters remained mass media propaganda. Having slowed and then halted production of its slick high-cost, high-tone magazine
National Vanguard
, Pierce and staff instead started broadcasting a weekly radio program around 1991, buying time on local AM and FM stations, as well as on shortwave.
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For those already committed to the cause, the radio communiqués provided regular commentary on world and national events. In both tone and argumentation, however, these messages were aimed at sympathetic listeners outside the organization’s ranks. The national office also sold tapes of these broadcasts, along with a growing catalog of books and pamphlets. The alliance republished the commentaries again as part of a monthly periodical Pierce called
Free Speech.
The tapes and the publications were also available on the organization’s Internet websites. Although he was sure that new people were listening to the radio broadcasts and reading the material, Pierce was reluctant to attribute the alliance’s growth to this cause.

Instead, he decided that a change in political atmospherics was responsible. “People’s hatred for the government has risen faster during the past year than their fear of the government,” he wrote in a members-only bulletin.
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This was an odd assessment for Pierce to make. The National Alliance did not fancy itself as a broad-based or ideologically diffuse organization, and it did not set out to capture new members on the basis of mass (white) sentiment. In addition, according to its own dogma, its attitude toward federal and local governments had always been secondary, derived from its approach to the more central and defining issues of race and the Jews. No one joined the National Alliance without understanding that the organization focused on Jews as Enemy Number One. If a prospective member wanted simply to join an “antigovernment” outfit, there were several score of those. Certainly, many groups that presented an antigovernment face to the public were at their core racist and anti-Semitic, John Trochmann’s Militia of Montana and the Montana Freemen among them. But it was these militia-style
and common law groups that were then suffering the most damage from the FBI. Neither increased “antigovernment” sentiment nor decreased “fear” caused the upward trend.

A more accurate assessment of the growth Pierce noticed during this period, by contrast, begins with a consideration of the by-product created by law enforcement’s crackdown on militia and common law groups. Drained of members and money, these groups no longer competed with the National Alliance for new recruits. Ku Klux Klan groups during this period were also in eclipse, suffering from a never-ending battle of small dragons fighting among themselves for a decreasing piece of the white nationalist turf. On the explicitly national socialist side of the street, Aryan Nations had never fully recovered after Fort Smith, and Richard Butler was growing increasingly infirm. Tom Metzger continued to do business and maintain a presence, years after losing his house and everything else in the Portland civil case. But his White Aryan Resistance no longer operated as anything more than a personal soapbox. Skinheads, erstwhile Klansmen, and serious national socialists had few organizational options if they wanted to join a fully operational outfit with local chapters and a national structure. Among the narrow range of choices, Pierce’s National Alliance stood the tallest and strongest.

Ironically, the National Alliance’s visibility rested in part on mainstream media, as Pierce stopped boycotting journalists looking for a story. Magazines and newspapers anxious to uncover the truth about the onetime physics professor now featured him. Network television news crews interviewed him on the grounds of the headquarters complex. Pierce participated in talk radio programs via telephone hookup, like any author trying to sell books.
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He endured ridicule and criticism on these shows, but the extended airplay also gave him an audience. Very few of those listening to these syndicated programs liked what Pierce said. Among those who did, however, were National Alliance recruits. Mainstream media visibility often conferred a definable respectability upon any organization it touched, regardless of its politics. And Pierce reaped the benefits.

Increased activity by rank-and-file units, like Gliebe’s in Cleveland, also contributed to this growth period. The National Alliance had previously been constituted as a constellation of individual members around William Pierce. While units or chapters existed in a few geographic areas, they tended to be less essential. Most lacked both capable leaders and the kind of internal social environment that sustained long-term membership. Although a few exceptions existed, most units simply had meetings and distributed propaganda. After the organization’s size reached critical mass in a number of locales, the increased numbers translated
into a change in the quality of chapter life. Now units were able to sustain projects of their own. As noted, Cleveland promoted the most creative and substantial enterprises. Other areas proved themselves quite capable of spreading the message. In Fort Pierce, Florida, members distributed two thousand leaflets in three hours. A similar effort in Pittsburgh netted some (negative) mainstream media coverage, thus giving the alliance a two-for-one media hit. The Sacramento unit traveled to Reno, Nevada, and set up an exhibition table at one of the area’s largest gun shows. And in several states, members participated in anti-NATO activities, as American bombing in Yugoslavia generated politically variegated protests. Other parts of the organization ventured into a more cultural and social realm. Maryland units, one in Baltimore and the other in Hagerstown, held a joint picnic. In North Carolina, the region sponsored a Confederate Memorial Day celebration.
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To this mix of factors—declining competition, increased media attention, and greater levels of internal socialization—add the changes at headquarters. The larger membership financed an increased number of paid staff working in central administration in West Virginia. In the process, the complex itself was slowly transformed. Unlike Richard Butler, whose Aryan Nations plot in Idaho remained essentially unchanged for twenty years, Pierce continually added buildings and upgraded his compound’s infrastructure. At the same time, the middle management grew in both numbers and organizational skill.
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