Blood and Politics (93 page)

The presence of the swastika set proved difficult for the National Alliance. William Pierce had opposed dressing up in fake uniforms and wearing swastika armbands since before he quit the National Socialist White People’s Party. And the National Alliance historically had scowled on those acting like a Nazi caricature. In an e-mail exchange afterward, alliance coordinator Roper complained that “Sieg-Heiling” and “waving swastika flags make[s] my job more difficult and eventual White victory less likely.”
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He was in a bind, torn between two loyalties: the new regime led by Gliebe and the excitement in the streets. It did not take long for Roper to abandon the National Alliance and establish one of the many small organizations populating the national socialist universe.

From that perspective, the march that August was not a memorial. Instead, it turned out to be the first in a series of events leading to the unraveling of the National Alliance. Gliebe was a particularly bad manager. He turned every murmur of dissent within his ranks into a cause for expulsion. Every discharge required him to reshuffle the organization’s leadership structure and hire new staff at headquarters. Revenues from dues fell as membership numbers declined. Rival music distribution outfits siphoned off funds previously monopolized by Resistance Records, which suffered additional problems because its magazine was not published regularly. The pool of ex-members grew.
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A bloc of ex-members associated with Kevin Strom charged Gliebe with both graft and incompetence. They cited his failure to finish routine tasks and his unwillingness to brook criticism. But the capstone problem was money. They charged that Gliebe raised funds for a permanent memorial to Pierce and then did not build it. He wasted money on frivolous projects (including purchase of thousands of boots with swastika-shaped soles from China). The Alaska regional coordinator demanded an audit. “I think it’s important to emphasize that the money spent and squandered by Mr. Gliebe was Dr. Pierce’s SAVINGS,” the Alaskan wrote with the emphasis included. “Much of this money was
donated and entrusted to Dr. Pierce and the rest of us to make a better life for our children. Not to get a first class upgrade for a stripper’s plane ticket. Not for a brand-new luxury SUV with heated leather seats and a power sun-roof.”
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These complaints appeared on several white nationalist websites, turning the organization’s disintegration into a twenty-first-century debacle, broadcast live in cyberspace.

Gliebe’s personal characteristics by themselves were not the only cause of the problems facing the National Alliance after Pierce’s death. The difficulty of anointing an organizational heir had plagued this movement since before George Lincoln Rockwell died at the hands of a disgruntled American Nazi Party member. In this sense Willis Carto’s dispossession by legion-IHR staffers had kept that tradition alive. In a movement where every man is his own führer, differences over strategy and program are exacerbated by personality and power. Robert Miles never found someone to successfully inherit his Mountain Church. Richard Butler appointed and reappointed a string of Aryan Nations personalities, as did Ben Klassen at his Church of the Creator, but none of those selected could do the job. At root, these elder Aryanists never managed to build an infrastructure separate from their personalities.

At Pierce’s end, the organization he built turned out to mean less than the people he left behind. The buildings and real estate at the West Virginia headquarters turned into a virtual empty shell, as case-hardened National Alliance cadres scattered across the white nationalist landscape. Over the course of thirty years twenty thousand individuals had enlisted in William Pierce’s outfit and stayed members for an average of seventeen months. At the time of his death almost twenty-five hundred had been paying dues.
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These thousands of activists became William Pierce’s legacy. Schooled in a philosophical outlook and ethos, they continued operating behind the racial divide in American life. Still, several of the most prominent of former National Alliance members lost their way. Kevin Strom, for example, who had been the organization’s voice on many of its radio broadcasts, promised to become the “house intellectual” for one of the alliance’s spin-offs, only to have his career cut short by his arrest and jailing on child pornography charges.
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The death of William Pierce and the bankruptcy of Willis Carto marked an end point in the generational life of the movement, even if it did not mark the actual end. An accounting of activists and leaders across the years revealed that other leaders of the previous generation, both vanguardists and mainstreamers, had also faded into the background during the first moments of the twenty-first century. Louis Beam and Tom Metzger, for example, found their own routes to semiretirement. In years past, their imprecations to violence and mayhem were
made in the public square. Metzger, who had gained notoriety for his cultivation of white power skinheads, continued to operate a small-time propaganda mill. But he eventually left Southern California and moved back to Indiana.
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Beam became a ghostlike figure, absent the Klan-style paramilitaries and underground guerrilla armies that he had promoted. After a contentious divorce from Sheila Toohey in 1997, the woman he had once praised for shooting it out with Mexican authorities, Beam quietly remarried and began raising yet another family. He posted messages on his personal website but otherwise kept himself out of view.
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The jailed Order soldiers who had been Beam’s codefendants at Fort Smith were all but forgotten as individuals, even as the myth associated with Bob Mathews’s Order continued. “There is no mail & no assistance at all,” Bruce Carroll Pierce wrote from jail. “Frankly, it hurts to see mongrel drug dealers, pimps & the ungodly receive more attention.”
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Only David Lane remained a presence outside the walls.
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Of the militia-era personalities, Bo Gritz had shot himself, apparently in response to a divorce petition by his wife, Claudia. He survived—the wound was not life-threatening—but left his Almost Heaven community behind.
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Randy Weaver moved quietly back to Iowa after spending some time in Montana.
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Chris Temple, who had articulated the post–Ruby Ridge shoot-out strategy so clearly at Estes Park, became involved in an extended series of muddy money schemes before going to jail in 2004 after defrauding his investors.
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John Trochmann was reportedly expelled from his own Montana Militia by his brother.
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Other men who figured prominently during the previous decades kept going, even if at a reduced pace. Thom Robb continued to operate his Ku Klux Klan outfit much like a family business, and his children were ready to inherit whatever mailing list and dues payers survived.
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Competing Klan factions rose and fell according to the length of time their leaders stayed out of jail. Pete Peters maintained his Christian Identity ministry from Colorado and continued to attract young families with children to periodic Bible camps. Nevertheless, he increasingly relied on Internet broadcast technology to get out his message, which he began referring to as “Anglo-Israelism.”
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Still other organizations continued to thrive much as they had in the decade before. Kirk Lyons, the peripatetic attorney, reinvented himself as an attorney for Confederate causes large and small and became a leading figure in the Sons of Confederate Veterans.
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The Council of Conservative Citizens prospered after 9/11, pushing anti-immigrant politics throughout the South. A. J. Barker and other luminaries from the Populist Party’s past, including those from the Don Wassall faction, entered the new century ensconced in the council. Jared Taylor continued
publishing
American Renaissance
and holding conferences to promote the scientific side of white nationalism. Other intellectual enterprises such as Mark Weber’s Institute for Historical Review and the new periodical titled
The Occidental Quarterly
found their niche comfortable but not expansive. Don Black’s Stormfront website, with its reflections in German, French, Serbian, and other European languages, remained the preeminent forum for discussions among white nationalists, as well as a purveyor of propaganda, news, and links to other sites. Thousands of activists visited the site every day, and by 2005 the site was claiming a “membership” of forty thousand plus.
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Sam Francis died early that year from a heart attack, and his place in the white nationalist firmament would not be easily filled.
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At this point, white nationalists still did not control a genuine third party apparatus, and ballot access in all the states remained an elusive goal. Without a widely distributed weekly newspaper or monthly magazine to promote their cause, organizations and individuals had turned to cyberspace as their primary communications link with one another. With the Internet, one person selling a carton of music CDs could declare himself king of the white power scene. The tendency to schism, so prevalent in the past, remained unchecked.

Nevertheless, white nationalists had exhibited both remarkable resilience and financial strength. Liberty Lobby had raised and spent approximately four million dollars year after year and distributed 150,000 copies of its tabloid every week. The Institute for Historical Review typically spent another $250,000 a year, as did
American Renaissance
after its founding. The white power music industry sold CDs and poured money into a growing subculture. Christian Identity ministers bought broadcast time on AM radio, and militiameisters made money at survivalist expos and gun shows. David Duke spent another two million plus running for office in Louisiana. The movement had received free publicity for one-off leaflet drops and well-planned stunts like the Klan’s border watch events. After 9/11, anti-immigrant politics shoveled money back into the movement like a coal conveyor feeding fuel into a power plant. And the accounting of funds must include the money stolen in bank robberies and spent surreptitiously on movement causes.

Vanguardists had survived police crackdowns, multiple criminal prosecutions, civic opposition, and legal challenges. They had congealed a “culture of resistance,” a term usually reserved for movements of the “left.” By keeping the ideas of national socialism alive, they had also created a usable past for any similar movement in the future.

Mainstreamers redeemed racism and anti-Semitism, resurrecting a set of beliefs that had been otherwise discredited during the post–World War Two era. While these ideas and practices were already present within the civic culture and political mainstream, the movement gave the sentiments and prejudices of ordinary racists a seeming coherence.

In its aggregate form, white nationalism expressed grievances real and imagined, providing a language for prerational thoughts and feelings previously caught in the throats of a stratum of white people. White nationalists had only partially succeeded at creating a movement qualitatively different from the old white supremacist movement out of which it had grown. The transformation of white supremacy into white nationalism, however incomplete, changed the movement’s gestalt. By raising the question of which nation they belonged to, white nationalists created a self-identified group with the rudiments of a distinct ethniclike identity. They vied as a race for cultural and political dominance within the United States and laid the basis for a future claim on a nation-state of their own.

By any measure, the white nationalist movement had possessed significant resources during the previous three decades and used them to great effect. Movement activists had influenced a larger white constituency and set up a visible camp on the far right edge of the Republican Party. They had created a white nationalist opposition to the status quo that
will not
go away in the near future.

Memorial Day weekend, 2004.
Across the country a hard-fought presidential election dominated discussion. Backroom strategists plotted ad campaigns, and phone banks trolled for voters. Debates flared about war and terrorism abroad. State referenda promised to squash the possibility that gay men and lesbians could be legally married. Candidates rallied about the economy, gun rights, and abortion. In Congress, a Republican-dominated caucus opposed its president’s proposal for a codified guest worker program and promoted anti-immigrant solutions to the continuing chaos on the border. For many voters, the fate of the United States hung in the balance.
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They had largely forgotten that a white nationalist movement existed. But at a meeting in a New Orleans hotel ballroom, David Duke had gathered 250 activists from several different organizations for a “unity conference.”
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Duke’s route to this meeting had passed through Louisiana to the former Soviet Union, the Arab Middle East, and a federal penitentiary in Texas. After his ill-fated presidential primary bid in 1992, Duke had again lost a race for the U.S. Senate in 1996 but won a seat on a local Republican Party council in 1997. Two years later he lost a congressional primary.
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As the money and votes in mainstream politics dried up, he wrote
My Awakening
, a seven-hundred-page tome he self-published in 1998.
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As a piece of literature, the book was something akin to
Mein Kampf
. Part memoir and part Aryan primer, it was a commercially successful product he sold while on the speaking circuit.

In 1999 federal authorities began a mail fraud investigation of Duke,
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which he implicitly acknowledged in a fund-raising letter dated October 17, 2000. “Your gifts,” he wrote of the past money he had received, “have given me a decent living . . . and even enabled me to relax
away from the pressure sometimes.”
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Translated into plain talk: donors gave Duke money, and he spent it on everything from groceries to gambling—and not just on the white nationalist struggle, as he had previously pretended. Meanwhile, the federal inquiry continued, and on November 16, 2000, the feds raided Duke’s home and office. The affidavit the authorities filed for the search said that Duke had misused more than two hundred thousand dollars in contributions from his supporters, much of it gambling at local casinos.
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