Blood and Politics (23 page)

Several Americans added to the East of the Rhine atmosphere. A oneman operation called the World Service Film League, for example, distributed a catalog of films including Leni Riefenstahl’s classic on the 1936 Nuremberg Party rally
Triumph of the Will
and Goebbels’s crude agitprop piece
The Eternal Jew
.
²
One Californian had to be told to remove his swastika stickpin before entering the room.
³
During a strategy session, a participant from Cleveland ventured the comment that if accused of being anti-Semitic, “we should just say yes and not be afraid to say it.” That prompted the IHR personality Bradley Smith, who was moderating the discussion, to assert that for the record he was not an anti-Semite.
⁴

To the uninitiated, getting to the conference seemed a bit like entering a pornographic peep show. Six weeks before the event, potential participants had to sign loyalty oaths and submit them along with their two-hundred-dollar registration fees. They swore not to “advocate or
practice . . . repression” of revisionists. “Revisionists” were described as “those who question or deny establishment notions about gas chambers, Hitler, National Socialism and related issues.”
⁵
After passing that test, prepaid registrants then were given a phone number to call when they arrived in the Los Angeles area. Finally, they were directed to the Pacifica Hotel in Culver City. Once attendees surmounted all these hurdles, however, Willis Carto’s friendly German-born wife, Elisabeth, let down her guard and welcomed out-of-town participants as if they were traveling salesmen checking into the home office.
⁶

The secretive conferences and national socialist undertow combined with accents from Central Europe tended to limit the appeal of IHR events on American soil. At one conference during this period the featured speaker was Otto Ernst Remer, an aging former
Wehrmacht
officer who had brutally suppressed an incipient German military revolt in 1944 after an unsuccessful assassination attempt on Hitler.
⁷
Another speaker had been August Klapprott, a German American Bund officer who had been charged with sedition by the Justice Department during World War Two.
⁸

At this meeting, a formal presentation about Abraham Lincoln by a Georgia attorney, Sam Dickson, offered a strong counterpoint to the European obsessions. By Dickson’s account, Lincoln was a dishonest demagogue, cut from the same “leftist” material as Presidents Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt. Lincoln, he said, pursued only sectional interests, rather than national interests. As proof Dickson proffered the fact that Lincoln, while still a freshman congressman, had opposed President Polk’s war against Mexico. Among his other purported crimes, Lincoln had also opposed slavery and supported racial equality from his first days in the Illinois legislature but had mischievously crafted his views according to the political opportunities of the moment.
⁹

In discussing Lincoln, Dickson revealed much about his own beliefs, including his views on slavery. “The Union had existed half slave and half free from its inception,” he argued. “There appears to be no logical reason why it could not have existed in that fashion, given responsible leadership and good will on both sides, until slavery was eliminated by the progress of technology.”
¹⁰
Apparently Dickson did not consider opposition to one human’s holding another as property to be a “logical” reason.

While Dickson’s speech was unremarkable in its content—merely repeating the commonsense white supremacist understanding of the past—Samuel Glasgow Dickson the person was an important figure on his own terms. A dark-haired son of a Presbyterian minister born in Georgia in 1947, he came of age just as the racial customs of his beloved
South were being wrenched out of the nineteenth century. He was polite and clever, and you could hear sweet tea pouring in his long vowels and taste the corn pone in his droll humor. He practiced law from a small office in the Atlanta suburbs and cultivated the company of other white middle-class professionals. He extolled tradition and traditional authority, and he considered white supremacy a natural, biological thing. He didn’t hate anybody, he said, and took occasion to remark on his own Jewish cousins.
¹¹
He believed the Ku Klux Klan gave white people a bad name. Underneath his soft charms, however, Dickson had a hard, even nasty edge. And on questions of race or the Holocaust, he unsheathed a rapier wit.
¹²

He had run for lieutenant governor in Georgia’s 1978 Democratic primaries, at a time when most white supremacists in the South still registered as Democrats. He raised few contributions and received only 72,621 votes, or 11 percent of the primary total.
¹³
Afterward he traded vote chasing for small private meetings of like-minded souls.

Just a few months before this conference in California, Dickson had sponsored an event in Atlanta designed to “promote a feeling of fraternity and solidarity throughout the English-speaking world.” Guest speakers from Canada, Australia, and South Africa discussed such topics as “International Finance and the Assault on Individual Freedom and National Sovereignty.”

When asked if he had convened this international fete in Georgia, Dickson replied that he was just the local contact for it. “I didn’t personally convene it,” he said. Yet his signature was at the bottom of a letter that began, “You are invited to attend a unique and extraordinary gathering,” and then listed the meeting’s time, place, speakers, and topics.
¹⁴
“Inviting” but not “convening” the meeting? It is a revisionist thing. The average reader wouldn’t necessarily understand.

As for revisionism and the Holocaust, Dickson averred that Hitler “was a disaster for European history and for the European white man.”
¹⁵
He was equally assured Jews had been persecuted during World War Two. But “to the extent to which six million of them were killed, is something I do not know.” It was obvious to Dickson why certain people kept talking about it, however: “to intimidate, psychologically bully people of European extraction, to create in us a sense that we are an especially guilty people.”
¹⁶
On this point, Dickson’s own ideas matched perfectly with those undergirding the Institute for Historical Review.

A contingent of southerners joined Dickson and the Europeans at this conference. The most veteran of this group was Ed Fields, or more precisely Dr. Ed Fields, as he preferred to be called. Fields had started his career after World War Two as a member of a Naziesque group in the
Southeast known as the Columbians. He had also managed to get a degree in chiropractics from a college in Iowa. Fields claimed to have been one of the founders of the National States Rights Party in 1958 and served as editor of its publication, the
Thunderbolt
.
¹⁷
By the time of the conference in Los Angeles, Fields was living in the Atlanta suburb of Marietta, and his publication was a low-circulation
Der Stürmer
–like tabloid with lurid headlines. Although he made repeated stabs at creating his own groups—a Klan faction here, a “third party” there—Fields never mastered the art of winning a mass following. Permanently consigned to the middle ranks of movement leaders, he maintained a fiefdom of followers in north Georgia, and his red head and flushed face were oft seen bobbing in Klan street parades.
¹⁸

Other attending southerners included David Duke, who was looking for new opportunities to reenter the limelight after his six-year absence from the Klan. Alongside Duke came James K. Warner, a onetime American Nazi Party national secretary who had joined Duke’s Klan in the 1970s but was now running an international book distribution enterprise from a New Orleans suburb.
¹⁹
Another Georgian, Martin O’Toole, set up a conference display for
Instauration
, the high-toned monthly magazine edited by the
Dispossessed Majority
author Wilmot Robertson. An activist for all seasons, O’Toole at that time ran a business service that included
Instauration
among its customers.
²⁰

The southerners babbled like mockingbirds on a telephone wire. They debated among themselves about the role religious cultism might play in the building of mass movements. They differed on the tactical efficacy of excoriating Jews versus attacking black people, all while drinking and talking too long. During one such session, James K. Warner proclaimed that Sam Dickson’s real name was Humphrey Ireland. (Ireland, as noted earlier, used the pseudonym Wilmot Robertson.)
²¹

Although Dickson, the middle-aged attorney, and Ireland, the elderly reclusive author, were two different people, their views were similar on a number of key points. Germany after World War Two and the South after the Civil War each was a “victim of inflammatory lies about atrocities,” Dickson proffered in his speech.
²²
By Ireland-Robertson’s understanding, the beginning of “white dispossession” should be traced back to the Civil War. Remembering that Holocaust denial had the goal of removing from white supremacists the moral burden of the Holocaust, linking the fate of the Confederacy with that of Nazi Germany seemed natural to men like Dickson and Robertson.

Robertson underscored the fact that in Hitler’s Germany “theories of race superiority” had been “state doctrine.” At the same time, he also questioned the claim that the Third Reich had been the first government
of this kind in history. As evidence, he pointed to the Confederate States of America and a speech by its vice president, Alexander Hamilton Stephens, in 1861. Stephens averred that “the negro [
sic
] is not equal to the white man, that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural condition. This, our new government [the Confederacy] is the first in the history of the world based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”
²³

“The decline of the Majority began with the political and military struggle between the North and South,” Robertson wrote.
²⁴
He constructed an elaborate sequence of events to demonstrate this idea. Prior to the Civil War, he argued, almost all whites were of “Northern European descent” (the kind he valued most). During the war, however, 610,000 were killed, and the Anglo-Saxon population fell sharply as a result. The remaining white population was unable to reproduce itself in adequate number. Further, he claimed, “the war’s dysgenic effect fell more heavily on the South.”
²⁵
As a result, when the railroads plowed west and industrialization intensified in the decades after the Civil War, the number of Anglo-Saxons available to fuel this economic development was insufficient.

Thus began, he wrote, “the importation of vast numbers of white immigrants of disparate races and cultures.”
²⁶
Among the white immigrants that Robertson lamented were Catholics who refused to adopt his Protestant norm. These southern Italians, Slavs, and even some Irish he designated as “white minorities.” They could assimilate and become completely white in his mind, but there were other immigrants from Europe who could not. The most unabsorbable of white minorities, in his taxonomy, were the Jews. They had a special place in his schema, in part because he believed they dominated the country.
²⁷

In Robertson’s view, the decline of Anglo-Saxon hegemony after the Civil War had been followed by a pre–World War Two attack by scholars who argued that race was a socially created category rather than a scientific or biological fact, and he cited the work before the war of anthropologists such as Franz Boas in this regard. Hitler’s defeat then added to this change in intellectual climate.
²⁸

By tying the fate of Nazi Germany to the Confederacy and then to a grand theory of majority dispossession, Robertson helped anchor Holocaust denial to the entire white supremacist enterprise. By 1986 that relationship had become relatively fixed. It no longer simply served a niche market for books and materials, as it had at its founding. While the Institute for Historical Research never approximated its grand vision of itself as a center for historical research, it nevertheless could be considered the closest thing to a think tank that white supremacists had at
that time. Here a small number of ideologues sought mass influence without the annoyances of mass participation. And in the absence of a natural constituency, the institute provided a place for movement intellectuals and middle-class professionals to meet and exchange ideas in a secure environment. At the same time, many of its publications and ideas trickled down the movement’s ranks, so that by the mid-1980s Klansmen, Aryan warriors, Posse Comitatus sovereigns, and Populist Party members knew that the Holocaust was a hoax invented by the Jews to trick white society.

Regardless of its relatively insular character, Carto had long hoped that the institute would help change history’s verdict on World War Two, as well as find new customers and supporters for his ideas. To pursue those goals, he endorsed a shift in the IHR’s tactics, which emphasized first and foremost a libertarian and free speech approach. Rather than simply proclaim that the Holocaust was a hoax, institute staff now argued that all points of view on the subject should be heard, including the view that Hitler didn’t do it. This new strategy was extended into a “radio project,” whereby the IHR attempted to get on talk radio shows. The watchwords became “First Amendment” and “freedom of speech.” The
IHR Newsletter
eagerly reported on the number of programs the institute had managed to get on and recounted in glorious detail if it suckered a rabbi or other Jewish representative to debate it on the airwaves.
²⁹
The IHR also tried promoting itself to Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam, and Arthur Butz, the engineering professor and author of
The Hoax of the Twentieth Century
, who had presented at the institute’s first conference, was consequently invited to speak at a 1985 Nation of Islam convocation in Chicago.
³⁰